josé ortega y gasset the dehumanization of art

The problem, as he saw it however, came down to the fact that artists were deliberately going to greater and greater extremes in trying to make this understanding more and more difficult. He doesn't denigrate this movement, he only takes note of it as being more and more 'art only for artists.' And by artists, he doesn't mean only those who create, but all those who understand. By dehumanization, Gasset meant art's veering away from human forms or the depiction of real objects into a reality of the artist's own making. He wrote specifically of painting but at the time, his words could have applied to several art disciplines. He blamed what he called the 'dehumanization' of art as the culprit in this change. This article is reprinted here for educational purposes, with the permission of the author who retains copyright to this work.But as early as 1925, Gasset was already longing for the turn-of-the-century goodoledays as he took note of the fact that, even then, the 'art circle' was moving significantly further and further from the center of the larger circle of human society, becoming less and less important in the overall scheme of things. You can find the original, along with a link to a modernism/postmodernism comparison, at her website: Melba Cuddy-Keane, Professor of English at the University of Toronto, for graciously allowing us to reproduce this page. James Gindin, Harvest of a Quiet Eye: The Novel of Compassion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971). Alan Friedman, The Turn of the Novel (London: Oxford University Press, 1966).ĥ. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, (Harmondsworth New York: Penguin, 1976). John Fletcher and Malcolm Bradbury, “The Introverted Novel,” Modernism 1890-1930, eds. Helen Weyl (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948). José Ortega Y Gasset, “Notes on the Novel,” The Dehumanization of Art and Notes on the Novel, trans. Dyson (London: Oxford University Press, 1972).

Alan Friedman, “The Novel,” The Twentieth-Century Mind: History, Ideas, and Literature in Britain, 1: 1900-1918, ed. fiction negotiates with experience of readerġ.sense of history or social process rather than metaphysical truth.denial of formal, moral, or theological absolutes.endlessness ongoing flux of experience.private self as generative source of fictions.

How does the nature of the modernist novel “flip,” depending on the form to which it is being compared?) Victorian / Edwardian EIL 4.3 Spenser, Gawain, and Arthurian ContextĬomparison of Victorian and Modern Novel CharacteristicsĮarly comparisons between the Victorian novel and the modernist novel set up the following binaries: (Also compare the later binary oppositions posited between the modernism and postmodernism.

José ortega y gasset the dehumanization of art