Title: 100 Years of 100 Things: Modernism [music]

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we continue our WNYC Centennial Series, A 100 Years of a 100 things. Things number 56 and 57 will be about ways in which philosophy and the arts have interacted with political and social and economic conditions over time. Specifically, our topic today is A 100 Years of Modernism and Post-Modernism. Then next week we'll revisit one classic modernist novel. It'll be 100 years of The Great Gatsby, which was published in 1925. Spoiler alert. One of the reasons we're doing this, there are some important parallels we'll discuss in both these segments between the world of the 1920s, when the aesthetic of modernism was in full flower, to today's world of the 2020s, which is, again, why we're choosing these topics. Our guest for today is Victoria Rosner, dean of the Gallatin School at NYU, and author of the books Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life, and Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life. Dean Rosner, thanks so much for joining our 100 Years of 100 Things Series. Welcome to WNYC.

Victoria Rosner: Thank you so much, Brian. It is great to be here with you.

Brian Lehrer: Where did the term modernism come from and what did it refer to, like modern compared to what at the time?

Victoria Rosner: Well, you might be surprised to hear that the term modernism really has nothing to do with the period that we are talking about today, which is the early 20th century. Modernism was first used, according to the OED by Jonathan Swift in 1737. It just refers to present or recent times. That's, I think, part of a little bit of the confusion of the term because we certainly have the idea that what is modern is what is now. That changes as we go forward.

Brian Lehrer: Well, certain, there is a difference between modern referring to the "modern era or modernist era" that we're going to talk about, and the word contemporary, which refers to now at any given moment. I think the title of your book, Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life, gives us a great lens onto the big picture of American society 100 years ago. Again, we'll tie it to some of the big picture facets of American life today as we go. It was the coming of the machine age in technology, which very much revolutionized the nature of employment for millions of Americans, but you argued that that also affected the way people thought about and organized their domestic lives.

Victoria Rosner: Absolutely. When people think about the origins of modernism, they think about these enormous forces. World War I, the 1918 flu pandemic, the rise of urbanization, but I'm particularly interested in the home as a crucible for modernism, both in terms of the transformation of moral standards and just really in the practices of everyday life. I can give you a couple of examples.

Brian Lehrer: Please.

Victoria Rosner: In terms of the changing in morality that's part of modernism, we're coming out of a 19th century context in which, I think the standards by today's vision would be considered quite prudish. Women who are artists, for instance, are not allowed to look at nude models to do their paintings. They're also not allowed to vote, and dress is extremely modest in this context. Virginia Woolf, who's one of the major figures of modernism tells a great story. She is in her living room with her sister Vanessa Bell, who is a fantastic painter in her own right. Their friend Lytton Strachey, who we now know as a great biographer and social critic walks into the room. He points at Vanessa Bell's dress. He sees some stain on it, not quite sure what it is, and he says, "Is that semen?" Everyone in the room goes crazy. You can't say the word semen in polite company. It's so far beyond the pale that people don't even know how to take it on. That rapid transition in social standards and what is permissible, perhaps especially between the sexes is really central to home life and to modernism and to these big changes that we're talking about.

Brian Lehrer: That's a good thing, the example that you just gave. I know you're very interested in history in the context of feminism, or feminism in the context of history, so how do you judge it?

Victoria Rosner: How do I judge Lytton Strachey's--

Brian Lehrer: Yes, the examples of, I guess, moving away from Victorian morality that you were giving.

Victoria Rosner: Well, I mean as a woman myself, I'm pretty pleased that the advent of modernism brought about the expansion of women's rights. At the time that this little anecdote happened, women didn't have the right to vote. They were just coming into the right to own property. I have to say, speaking personally, I think it worked out for me. I certainly wouldn't have been allowed to receive an education living at that time.

Brian Lehrer: No less become a dean at a major university.

Victoria Rosner: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: Can we start to bring the arts into the conversation here? The term modernism is associated often with new genres of art, and architecture, and music, and literature that were breaking out 100 years ago, seen as experimental and rejecting old aesthetic conventions as well as the moral and domestic ones. We've been talking about abstract painting, music that rejected conventional chords and scales. We can get into literature and architecture too. In general, how would you begin to describe how what we call modern art reflected what was going on in society 100 years ago?

Victoria Rosner: It's a great question. I think one of the things you're pointing to that is so important to notice about modernism is its tremendously expansive range. It's quite unusual to have an aesthetic project that does span all the arts in the way that you're talking about. I think it's fascinating to try and pick out ideas that move across music, and dance, and art, and architecture.

One of them we might point to is abstraction. Right? This new idea that it is not the responsibility of art to have fidelity to reality, that instead, art can reflect interior life, the artist's imagination, that it can emphasize form. It's post-memetic. A great example of this is Malevich's Black Square, which is just a picture of a black square on white ground. On the one hand, you had lots of critics saying, "Oh, my five year old child could make that." Why is this art? Why do we think this doesn't demonstrate any virtuosity? On the other hand, it's a revolutionary statement, especially in the context of Soviet history. Right? It represents a new beginning. There's a reason why the Bolshevik leadership outlawed the avant-garde in the Soviet Union in response to work like that.

Surrealism is another great example. Surrealism is an offshoot of modernism that was interested in exploring the irrational. Dreams, insanity, a real refute to the machine age, and logic, and rationality. That's moving across literature, visual art, architecture, other forms as well.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and Black Square was 1915, just before the Russian Revolution. Interestingly, coming out of Russia. Do you think communications technology plays a role in this conversation at all? Like the hook to this entire centennial series is the birth of WNYC a 100 years ago. That was in the context of the birth of radio in general. I don't know if it comes up in your work on modernism and domestic life, but radio was the first technology that let people be part of a live mass audience without leaving their homes. At once it connected people to the outside world, and at the same time it gave people an excuse to isolate themselves because they didn't need to go to a theater or other in-person gathering. Look how technology has evolved from there to today, with social media both connecting and isolating people to an extreme. Maybe I'm overthinking this, but anything on the origins of that, or is asking about radio and modernism a stretch?

Victoria Rosner: No, not at all. I actually think the technologies of communication are one of the most important aspects of modernism. It's not just radio that's on the rise at this time. It's also the invention of the telephone, the tape recorder. Great advances in photography. The invention of motion pictures. On the one hand, as you said, these are amazing technologies for connecting people, but on the other hand, they also carry a certain potential for alienation. Think about the first time that you hear a human voice coming not out of a person's mouth, but out of a Black Box. Right?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Victoria Rosner: We believe that our voices are expressions of our spirits and our souls. What does it mean to realize that that can through a mechanical process be taken away from us and moved thousands of miles away?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, you're right.

Victoria Rosner: It's both ontologically threatening and tremendously exciting at the same time.

Brian Lehrer: Right, and good to add the telephone to that topic. We certainly could do 100 years of the telephone as its own segment in this series. I'd also like to ask you about modernism with regard to the public mood in this country. This is one of those things that will definitely tie to today optimism versus pessimism. We can think of modern art, the modernism era 100 years ago, with its experimentation and interest in trying really new things in the arts as a very optimistic movement. Let's try new things and forge a better future, a new way.

I was reading the Britannica, Entry on Modernism, and it describes modernism as an expression of the pessimism in society after the disillusionment with technology, and with institutions that flowed in the '20s from the horrors of World War I, and the exploitation of labor as the industrial era took root. Also, all the death and illness in the Spanish flu, that pandemic. Can you talk about modern art and modernist thinking as living somewhere on the optimism pessimism spectrum?

Victoria Rosner: It's almost impossible to separate those things because I think that in modernism, you find both that enormous exuberance about human potential. One of the things that's considered a defining experience of modernity is the experience of speed. I mean before the invention of the internal combustion engine, which is part of this period as well, people could only go as fast as like the carriages that might carry them, and all of a sudden there's this ability to propel your body through space at tremendous speeds. On airplanes and cars and trains. That is thrilling. On the other hand, you mentioned World War I, and one of the first uses of airplanes and of that kind of speed is for aerial bombardment. There's just this dualism that I think is irreducible, that inheres in almost every part of the inventiveness that modernism responds to. It's amazing and it's terrifying at the same time.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. It's such an overarching theme of this whole 100-year series because when you draw that line from 1924 to today, and you go through the decades, and you wind up where we are, it's really the advent of the machine age, if we want to call it that, or the age of speed, as you were just calling calling it, and how society, meaning capitalism, meaning domestic life, meaning democracy, and fascism, and Nazism, and Stalinism, everything interacted with that have interacted with that over 100 years and are still today. We could talk about AI theoretically at the end of this segment.

The trend toward abstract art, I was thinking about this link with abstraction began before World War I. By the very early 1900s, Picasso's Cubism was starting to fracture straight on representational art. Last month I saw the Orphism Show at the Guggenheim. That was mostly from the years just before World War I, involving completely abstract painting, and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, which was a scandal at that time, 1913. I got the impression at the Guggenheim that the abstraction of Orphism was born of an excitement around new technologies and liberation from old ways of thinking. Would it be right to say that abstraction or modernism didn't always equal pessimism?

Victoria Rosner: Oh, absolutely, it would. We often go back in Modernist Studies to 1910 as this moment of tremendous optimism about what modernism represented. To mention Woolf again, she has a great essay about modernism where she says that in 1910 human character changed, which is ridiculous but I think also a fantastically expansive statement about what felt possible at that moment. That was the year of one of the post-Impressionist exhibitions in London. Bringing Cézanne, and Matisse, and Picasso, and Gauguin, and Van Gogh to the English speaking public for the first time, and it was scandalous. People were really almost frightened by the new art, but people were also very excited about what it portended for the future.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners-- oh, go ahead. Did you want to finish before what I'm saying?

Victoria Rosner: No, no, I was just going to say absolutely to the optimism of it.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a few phone calls on our 100 Years of Modernism, the Rise and the Fall, which we'll get to artists. Call in anyone who thinks about or has questions about how machine age culture, and politics, and economics from 100 years ago through today affects our homes, our psychologies, our artistic expressions. It's a lot for one segment on a radio show, but we're being ambitious in general in our 100 Years of 100 Things segment. Enter where you wish. 212-433-WNYC 212-433-9692. Call or text with our guest today, Victoria Rosner, dean of the Gallatin School at NYU, and author of the books Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life, and Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. If you want in on this.

To stay in the 1920s, it was also a time of Gilded Age concentration of wealth and the development of a mega rich class of corporate titans. The Great Gatsby, which we'll focus on next week deals with that. We sometimes say Robber Barons for some of those people from 100 years ago. There's a big parallel with today, and the rise of the super super rich, and their influence on politics. Musk, and Bezos, and Bloomberg, and Buffett. Pick your one. Do you see parallels there worth discussing?

Victoria Rosner: Well, one of the things that I was thinking about that we haven't really talked about so far is modern architecture. My book title that you mentioned, Machines for Living, that's a quote from the architect Le Corbusier who said a house is a machine for living in. I'm really interested in the impact of mechanization on the home. It's also the growing wealth and patronage that is enabled by industrialization, and by capitalism that allows for the creation of some of the great monuments of modern architecture because that work needs patrons to support it. Those are some of the icons of modernism that really are still part of the New York City skyline. In many cases, they are corporate towers, and they're part of our everyday landscape pieces of modernism.

Brian Lehrer: Do you want to talk about the mechanization of the home in the context of women's roles over time, which is, I think, one of the things that you write about.

Victoria Rosner: Well, One of the things that is, I think really astonishing about mechanization in the home in this period is the ambition to take the structures of factory labor, which at this time has a lot to do with motion science and efficiency, and assembly lines for production, and to translate those ways of working into the home and specifically into the kitchen. In a very short period of time, first of all, there are these big changes in the capacity of the homes in terms of technology.

In 1902, only 8% of homes in the US got electricity from power stations. By 1948, that number was 78%. From 8% to 78%. Once you've got electricity, you've got appliances. The capacity of the kitchen, the reliance on servants for middle and upper class households, all of this works towards the revisioning of the kitchen as a factory for the housewife. Women signed up for the challenge of learning how to bring efficiency science to homemaking. There's a wonderful funny novel called Cheaper by the Dozen that you may have read when you were young.

Brian Lehrer: I've read that.

Victoria Rosner: Yes. Remember, it's about a couple who had initially [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Family with 12 kids.

Victoria Rosner: 12 kids and they decide to raise them efficiently in groups, and it works out okay, actually. I wouldn't really want to try to do it.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, in the context of that book, it works out okay. There was a lot of comedy in that book, and it was, I think, sweet in a lot of ways. I wonder if somebody was writing about the same family today if they'd have different kinds of lens on it. When you talk about electricity in the kitchen, it's funny, when you talked about the mechanization of the home, the first thing that popped into my mind was the vacuum cleaner, which is not specifically a kitchen appliance. Is there one big revolutionary one that you would cite that is in the kitchen?

Victoria Rosner: Well, I think refrigeration was an enormous, enormous change that was enabled by electricity so that people actually could have food storage. For me, I also really think about the advent of indoor plumbing. Again, this is something that in the modern period really went from zero to being pretty common. It transforms your experience of everyday life. It gives you new relationships to your body, to cleanliness, the ability to have running water in your home, hygiene and health. All of this is redefining what we think of as the human condition. That is really the big question for modernism. What modernism is trying to explore and define.

Brian Lehrer: Getting back to the Gilded Age and the oligarchs a little bit and the Robber Barons, I'm curious if you see the arts responding in any way today that echoes how they responded to 1920s Inequality and Gilded Age politics.

Victoria Rosner: Well, that's such an interesting question. I think one thing that I would say is that, you're going to be talking about the Great Gatsby next week and there is this tension between, on the one hand, this fascination with the trappings of wealth, and wanting to represent that and show that to the world. The people wanting to understand how the very rich live, and on the other hand, the criticism of it, the understanding that one family's wealth in some ways requires the subjugation of many, many other people who are at work producing the labor, and the capital that makes that lifestyle possible. I think that duality of fascination and criticism is as alive today as it was in the '20s.

Brian Lehrer: Really interesting. Listener writes in a text message, "Thank you for discussing this fascinating topic. I wonder what your thoughts are on the concept of angst, and how it might interact with modernism in the early 20th century as well as now." Certainly, Freud was another figure from 100 years ago who gets mentioned in histories of modernism. I don't know if that's exactly what the listener has in mind by angst, but maybe you know.

Victoria Rosner: Well, I think it's a wonderful, wonderful point to bring up. I think Freud really did-- he was a great descriptor of angst in the early 20th century. I think there's a lot of criticism of Freud now, but we have to think about his assertion that there is unconscious life. That we have unconscious life, and it's unconscious life perhaps that is causing our angst and causing us to do things that are not in our best interests. This whole idea that there is a counterforce that lives inside each one of us, and that is working against us in some way is a spiritually a terrifying idea. The modernists were not in any way strangers to angst. They certainly wanted to give voice to the despair that was part of the modern condition. You might also look at an iconic poem of modernism like T.S. Eliot's, The Waste Land. If that isn't a cry of angst, I don't know what is. It starts out, "April is the cruelest month," and only an angst-ridden person would step outside in April and think, "Oh, this is awful.

Brian Lehrer: We will continue in a minute. In fact, we'll continue for the rest of the hour with Victoria Rosner, Dean of the Gallatin School at NYU, and author of the books Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life, and Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life. It's our 100 Years of 100 Things series as we talk about 100 years of modernism in the arts and society in general. We will bring that arc even more explicitly into the present as we continue. Our lines are full. We'll take some of your calls. You can also keep texting us at 212-433-WNYC.

[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We're in thing number 56 in our 100 Years of 100 Things series. It's 100 years of modernism with a lens, which we will get to the other part of shortly. The Rise and Fall of Modernism and The Rise of Post-Modernism. Where did modernism go? Jeanine in Flatbush, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jeanine.

Jeanine: Hi. I've been studying modern art for a few years now, and I'm always really fascinated with how political each movement was, like landscapes, the modern nudes, still lifes. My professor often asked us to think of what is work, and what is leisure, and who got to do what. That's what I've been diving into recently, the question of work.

Brian Lehrer: Dean Rosner, you want to weigh in on that?

Victoria Rosner: Sure. For me, that question in part takes us back to the earlier topic of feminism and women's roles in the home because, of course, one of the problems with taking the techniques of factory labor and moving them into the home is that women didn't have shift work. Women were on 24 hours a day. It broke down there. Also, I think, stepping back more broadly, thinking about labor, there was this idea of, "Can we try and use efficiency? Can we try and use mechanization to limit labor, and create more space for leisure? What would that look like? What would we do with that leisure time?" There's a wonderful, I think, 1923 novel by Aldous Huxley called Brave New World that takes this principle to the utmost. People just have a few hours of work to do every day. Basic stuff, nothing that really troubles them, but what they're doing with their leisure time is garbage. Just trivial. They're taking drugs a lot of the time, or they're just watching stupid movies called Feelies. Huxley was quite disappointed in what people did with their leisure time. Once you get it, what do you do with it?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, it's a dystopian novel, Brave New World, and very prescient. We could re-Brave New world with a 2025 lens very easily.

Victoria Rosner: Oh, yes. I think about it all the time.

Brian Lehrer: Judah in Jackson Heights, you're on WNYC with NYU Gallatin division Dean Victoria Rosner and historian of modernism. Judah, hi.

Judah: [unintelligible 00:27:53], and I'm a Gallatin grad.

Victoria Rosner: Oh, fantastic.

Judah: Yes, there you go. I guess my question bookends the two parts of modernism. One is, I wonder if you could speak a little bit to the technological sublime that emerges, but also allows people to think about the working day in a different way. I guess in art or literature, that manifests itself in something like Ulysses, which is like the marking off of the day in a very specific and internalized way, but also thinking about it within the urban space. Then on the second part of it is thinking about, like, Paul Preciado has that book called Pornotopia, which is about Playboy, and the way that the disappearance of labor that you've been talking-- I mean, really, it's just kind of hiding the labor, and the feminization of labor in the domestic sphere gets hidden, and allows for the idealized idea of the bachelor, the playboy in the post-war period. I'm wondering how you see different stages of thinking about both the working day and also about labor as being segmented and gendered within the domestic sphere.

Victoria Rosner: Oh, wow. There's so much in that, and I love all of it. Let me see if I can just make a few comments.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, pick a piece.

Victoria Rosner: I'm really glad that you called attention to the kind of technology of time that we see happening in modernism. James Joyce's novel Ulysses from '22 is a great example of it. It's one day in the life of Leopold Bloom as he walks through the city of Dublin, and there's no traditional plot in any sense. Modernism gets rid of all that right away. It's really just the arc of the day that gives some shape and form to Bloom's experience. We see a similar fascination with time in, for instance, a movie like Fritz Lang's Metropolis, or in Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway, in which London's Big Ben is tolling insistently throughout the novel. In all of these cases, there's a voice telling us that the framework of time is absolutely subjective, but it is also something outside of the mind that imposes a structure and an order on all of us. How does the individual respond to that? How does the individual live in time? I hope that feels responsive.

Brian Lehrer: Sure it is.

Victoria Rosner: Then I've actually worked on the idea of the Bachelor Pad. I don't know if you know Joel Sanders work on this, but one of the things I love about the Bachelor Pad is that it uses technology as a kind of prosthetic extension for the bachelor's sexuality. The bachelor walks into his "pad," and the record player starts playing automatically, and maybe some like seductive scent fills the air and the Murphy bed comes down from the wall, and he's all set to go. It's one of these ways in which there's a fantasy that modern technology can extend human capacity to fulfill desire, including sexual desire.

Brian Lehrer: Judah, thank you. Eric in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Eric.

Eric: Hi, how are you? Well, I've been listening to your very interesting broadcast, and no one, you or your guest have mentioned the 1913 Armory show, which had an incredible impact on New York arts culture, maybe United States, less so. I think modernism had more of an impact in Europe and it was imported to America, but [clears throat] after the war, why were people going to Europe? Well, because they felt America was a cultural wasteland, was only interested in money and technology.

Brian Lehrer: Sure. I'm going to leave it there for time, but Eric makes the point that modernism, at least in the arts, was a particularly European phenomenon imported here to some degree in places like New York that might have the sophistication "to receive it." Here's another text. Dean Rosner, a listener writes, "Please highlight the importance of women in American modernism. Women collectors, cultural visionaries, social entrepreneurs, founders of MoMA, Abby Rockefeller, Lillie Bliss, Mary Sullivan, Gertrude Whitney, and Juliana Force, Hilla Rebay, for the Guggenheim, or Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, and Jean Toomer in Black Literary Modernism. Here's how this ends. Listener writes, "Women are what makes American modernism distinct from European modernism." It relates to that caller. Quick thought?

Victoria Rosner: I'm so glad that you're bringing up the American context a little bit more. We haven't had a chance to talk at all, for instance, about the Harlem Renaissance, and the incredible women writers and artists who were part of that extraordinary movement in New York City.

Brian Lehrer: Just to say we're going to do a whole separate segment on 100 Years of the Harlem Renaissance. Go ahead. [chuckles]

Victoria Rosner: [laughs] I think that [clears throat] in the origins of modernist criticism, it really was seen as like a man's world. There was this great saying about the men of 1914, but it's been a while since then that the men of 1914 have been seconded by the women of 1928. This fantastic range of women modernists, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Djuna Barnes, K. Boyle, H.D., Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore. We could absolutely tell the story of American modernism through women if we wanted to, and the patrons as well. We see that, of course, also happening in Europe with Sylvia Beach, with Peggy Guggenheim. The patrons made one of Mies van der Rohe's most important icons of modern architecture possible, a woman client, the Farnsworth House.

Brian Lehrer: Our last caller, who I think is going to help us put a pin in this whole topic is Diane in Brewster. You're on WNYC. Hi, Diane.

Diane: Hello. What an amazing show. Thank you, Brian, and your guest is stunning. I can't wait to get the book. My daughter is also a graduate of Gallatin.

Victoria Rosner: Oh, I love to hear it. [chuckles]

Diane: Yes, a wonderful school. I wanted to say, what parallels do you see or do you bring to light in your book about, I guess I wouldn't say regression because I don't know the term properly, but where people contract away from progress, where people shun the modern and fear it. Of course, this was expressed in every way with the literature and the arts in terms of words used, but what other movements? Of course, you had the Amish and that sort of thing, but I thought maybe you could mention the ways in which people have rejected modernity, and fear it, and flee from it, and cleave to one another. [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: In politics, even, Make America Great Again is a culturally nostalgic political movement. Dean Rosner, go ahead.

Victoria Rosner: I think, actually, every one of the examples we've been talking about in the hour could be turned around to show tremendous fear and anxiety about the change. We haven't, I think, gotten into the numbers on this. Perhaps the most significant background for the rise of modernism is really the mass death coming out of World War I, and followed very closely by the flu pandemic. 40 million dead in the war and another 50 in the pandemic-

Brian Lehrer: The pandemic was first.

Victoria Rosner: -and most of them, young people.

Brian Lehrer: No, the war was first, I'm sorry.

Victoria Rosner: That's okay. [chuckles] To say that it's the despair, and the fear, and the anxiety, that is perhaps the deepest part of the rise of modernism. Yes, there's this idea that art has to respond to these frightening changes and to this terrible destruction, but also, is art enough? I mentioned the start of the Waste Land, at the very end of it, Eliot says he's been constellating the whole early 20th century. He says, "These fragments, I have shored against my ruins." I always think about that line, that that's all poetry can be, a few fragments in a landscape of ruin, and we hold on to those fragments.

Brian Lehrer: In our last minute, the modernist movement in the arts did fade or die and gave way to what we call post-modernism. Despite all the parallels with today's culture that would seem to suggest continuation of it, so what changed?

Victoria Rosner: Well, I have to pushback on you a little bit, Brian, if you don't mind.

Brian Lehrer: Please.

Victoria Rosner: A lot of critics now tend to see post-modernism as more of a kind of offshoot of modernism than an actual total repudiation-

Brian Lehrer: Rejection.

Victoria Rosner: -of it. It's almost as though post-modernism is a subset and it makes some great points. Modernism had tremendous moral seriousness about itself. It was also fantastically elite. It was incredibly difficult to interpret. In some ways, the reason that I have a job as an English professor is because people don't want to read James Joyce's Ulysses on their own. It needs an explainer. Postmodernism came along and said, "Look, do we have to take ourselves quite so seriously?"

Brian Lehrer: Say, and take little slices less complex ones.

Victoria Rosner: [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: We have to leave it there.

Victoria Rosner: Oop, okay, sorry.

Brian Lehrer: Unfortunately, pop art will be the last word. 100 Years of 100 Things. Thing 56-

Victoria Rosner: Great rejoinder of modernism.

Brian Lehrer: -100 Years of Modernism with Victoria Rosner, Dean of the Gallatin School at NYU, and author of books including Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life. Thing 57 coming next week, the modernist novel The Great Gatsby, a 100 years of that. Dean Rosner, this was spectacular. Thank you so much.

Victoria Rosner: Thank you so much. Great to talk to you.

 

 

Copyright © 2025 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.