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Hi Giles, Iım not sure, really. It depends on what you set up as ³modernism² doesnıt it and how you define the avant-garde, Daveıs got his take of small places. Iıd say they were large places which weıve now come to recognise. Though I think there are important issues surrounding what we permit to be avant. So often itıs determined by textual practice, but content/subject/object can be avant, a voice can be avant, especially if it represents something that weıve never heard before. Innovation isnıt purely textual, is it. I mean to say, perhaps the single greatest innovation of the last decade is the democratisation of the arts through the internet. We realise that it isnıt about a few ³chosen² people controlling as Dave rightly indicates, but about means of production, and access to audience or readership. Itıs too early to write more fully or cogently on this. The economy of the arts has shifted and the policing has moved from the critic/owner to the consumer. The plurality of modernism isnıt one of cultural sequences in wealth distribution, and itıs arguable whether certain societies are more advanced than others. I donıt know of an accurate measure of that. ;-) Very best Chris Chris Hamilton-Emery | Publishing Director | Salt Publishing Ltd PO Box 937 | Great Wilbraham | Cambridge | CB1 5JX | +44 (0)1223 882220 101 Ways to Make Poems Sell available now! Click below to read more! http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/sgrw/1844711161.htm The information contained in this e-mail is confidential. It is intended only for the stated addressee(s) and access to it by any other person is unauthorised. If you are not an addressee, you must not disclose, copy, circulate or in any other way use or rely on information contained in this e-mail. Such unauthorised use may be unlawful. If you have received this mail in error, please inform us immediately at [log in to unmask] and delete it and all copies from your system. From: Giles Goodland <[log in to unmask]> Reply-To: [log in to unmask] Date: Sun, 7 May 2006 16:40:14 EDT To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Modernism Hi Chris Your point reminds me of some discussions I was having years ago in a cultural theory discussion group, I think we had been reading Peter Burger's book on the Avant-Garde, and we floated around the idea that the modernist 'moment' was one that came to all cultures eventually, at a certain stage of development, eg in the West concurrent with the upheavals that led to the Russian Revolution, in Latin America with Magic Realism coming at a stage of political struggle that ended with so many defeated revolutions, it seems a bit deterministic now, but I think it must be true that as a middle class faced a more literate and intelligent working class (as the western bourgeoisie did at the end of the Nineteenth century) it started to question itself and its culture more. Are we seeing a similar change now as the late nineteenth century change to mass literacy, in which access to the media (as incarnated in the internet) widens culturally and around the world? Such a cultural change would take the form of an explosion of the 'established' popular media, such as TV and newspapers, just as old modernism broke up the novel, poetry, etc. Just a thought. Giles