The Mental Life of Modernism: Why Poetry, Painting, and Music Changed at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

by Samuel Jay Keyser

Overview

An argument that Modernism is a cognitive phenomenon rather than a cultural one.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, poetry, music, and painting all underwent a sea change. Poetry abandoned rhyme and meter; music ceased to be tonally centered; and painting no longer aimed at faithful representation. These artistic developments have been attributed to cultural factors ranging from the Industrial Revolution and the technical innovation of photography to Freudian psychoanalysis. In this book, Samuel Jay Keyser argues that the stylistic innovations of Western modernism reflect not a cultural shift but a cognitive one. Behind modernism is the same cognitive phenomenon that led to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century: the brain coming up against its natural limitations.

Keyser argues that the transformation in poetry, music, and painting (the so-called sister arts) is the result of the abandonment of a natural aesthetic based on a set of rules shared between artist and audience, and that this is virtually the same cognitive shift that occurred when scientists abandoned the mechanical philosophy of the Galilean revolution. The cultural explanations for Modernism may still be relevant, but they are epiphenomenal rather than causal. Artists felt that traditional forms of art had been exhausted, and they began to resort to private formats—Easter eggs with hidden and often inaccessible meaning. Keyser proposes that when artists discarded their natural rule-governed aesthetic, it marked a cognitive shift; general intelligence took over from hardwired proclivity. Artists used a different part of the brain to create, and audiences were forced to play catch up.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262043496
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	03/03/2020
Series:	The MIT Press
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Samuel Jay Keyser is Peter de Florez Emeritus Professor in MIT's Department of Linguistics and Philosophy and Special Assistant to the Chancellor. Head of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy from 1977 to 1998, he also held the positions of Director of the Center for Cognitive Science and Associate Provost.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xi

1 Introduction 1

2 Christopher, Impossible Rules, and the Mental Life of Modernism 11

3 Private Format as Easter Eggs 17

4 The Need for Rules 29

5 "Meaning isn't everything … but it is something, dammit" 31

6 "Certain Conditions of Form and Organisation": The Rules of Meter and Rhyme 41

7 Rules of Tonal Music: Grouping, Tonal, and Metrical 69

8 The Rules of Mimetic Art 77

9 The Twentieth Century Abandons the Rules: The Age of the Private Format 97

10 Recursion: A Shared Format? 133

11 The End of-isms 149

12 What Does It Mean? 167

Appendix A From Igor Stravinsky, The Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons 181

Appendix B Noam Chomsky, Personal Communication, October 19, 2017 183

Notes 187

References 209

Index 219

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

In this brilliant book, the inimitable Jay Keyser—linguist, poet, musician, editor, educator—explains the greatest transformation in the history of Western art forms. Drawing on his lifelong erudition in cognitive science and the humanities, Keyser shows how the traditional sources of aesthetic pleasure—rhyme and meter in poetry, melody and rhythm in music, lifelike representation in painting—gave way to abstraction and puzzle-solving. This book sheds new light on individual works of art, on cultural history, and on the human mind. The Mental Life of Modernism should be required reading for humanists and scientists alike.

—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University; author of How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate