Modernist artists believed in their assured place - of the artist, his or her necessary significance within the culture. However this has been brought into question.
So what is the cure for insignificance? Paranoia I would submit. Paranoia, one might say, is the ambition to go on believing in ambition and one's multivarious ambitions. Some psychiatrists maintain that paranoia is the professional person’s madness of choice.
For les ecrivains the self-cure for insignificance is paranoia, and Paranoid Modernists writers are marked, above all, by a sense of what is unbearable about modern life for much of the writing of the modernist period has a manifesto-like quality, and the manifesto – the address to the enemy – in the words of the excellent Adam Philips, is the paranoid genre par excellence.
So what is the cure for insignificance? Paranoia I would submit. Paranoia, one might say, is the ambition to go on believing in ambition and one's multivarious ambitions. Some psychiatrists maintain that paranoia is the professional person’s madness of choice.
For les ecrivains the self-cure for insignificance is paranoia, and Paranoid Modernists writers are marked, above all, by a sense of what is unbearable about modern life for much of the writing of the modernist period has a manifesto-like quality, and the manifesto – the address to the enemy – in the words of the excellent Adam Philips, is the paranoid genre par excellence.
No comments:
Post a Comment