Modernism and the Attack on Sentiment

Early twentieth-century modernism was an apparently decisive break with the eighteenth-century tradition of sentiment. An attack on sentimentality was one of the few threads uniting the internal variety of modernisms and even now it takes an exercise in historical sympathy to appreciate the sentimentalist tradition. Yet the modernist generation also continued the transformation of sentiment into an implicit criterion of true feeling, a development which even now largely escapes recognition whether in the common language of feeling or in the specialist practice of literary criticism. This failure of recognition also has its origin in modernism since, in some cases, the vehemence of the hostility to sentiment, often tinged with snobbery and implicitly gendered, tended to throw the baby of feeling out with the bathwater of sentimentality and projected sentimentalism onto others rather than acknowledging its internal dialectic. Bertolt Brecht, approached through James Joyce, illuminates the consequences of this. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.