StudentShare
Contact Us
Sign In / Sign Up for FREE
Search
Go to advanced search...
Free

Modernity in Everyday Life - Essay Example

Cite this document
Summary
From the paper "Modernity in Everyday Life" it is clear that the modern is an area of study that has attracted scholars from various fields of research. The fact that it affects every aspect of a person’s life and is essentially a study of the present is what makes it all the more interesting…
Download free paper File format: .doc, available for editing
GRAB THE BEST PAPER92% of users find it useful
Modernity in Everyday Life
Read Text Preview

Extract of sample "Modernity in Everyday Life"

? Modernity in everyday life number Modernity in everyday life Modernity as a phenomenon and a movement is a much discussed and much studied topic. The complexity of the subject and the range of effects that the subject has on the everyday lives of people make it an extremely important and challenging area of study. The importance of an analysis of modernity also lies in the implications that it has for a world that has gone through a century that saw two of the most devastating wars that the world has ever seen. An analysis of modernity as it affects the lives of ordinary people needs to be start with an analysis of the works of literature that led to the beginning of a study of modernity. This paper shall analyse modernity through the works of Charles Baudelaire and Karl Marx, two thinkers who were deeply concerned with what constitutes the modern and what did not. Their ideas regarding the modern revamped ideas of tradition and modernity and also other ideas that were prevalent and dominated the fields of art, literature and other aspects of the daily lives of people. Marx’s definition of the commodity in his work, Capital and especially in “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof” gives one an understanding of the way in which modern life operates. The intricate maze of manipulations that lead to a devaluation of the force of labor that is behind the commodities that we see in the world is part of the modern world. Unearthing the fallacies that are given rise to by capitalist economies so as to keep the real nature of the order of things under wraps, Marx seeks to create in workers a consciousness of their work and a consciousness of their work as the driving force behind the production of commodities. Marx critiques the forms of economy that impoverish the worker and keep him or her out of the perception that people have regarding a commodity even though it is the worker who is directly responsible for the production of it. Modernity for Marx thus lay in the recognition of the past and effecting a break from it. This break begins with an awareness of the oppressive nature of the past and a desire to break away from such oppressive structures. The importance of this theory lies in its revolutionary understanding of modernity and its possibilities. Marx seeks to remedy the disconnect between the commodity and the labor that produces it by exposing the “mystical character of commodities” (Marx) that are a result of the techniques that are employed by capitalist economies to keep the workers at the lowest rung of the hierarchy. For Baudelaire, a poet who wrote about the development of the city and the characteristics of it, the modern was always an interesting aspect of art. In The Painter of Modern Life, he talks of the need to capture the essence of the modern and the beauty of it. Castigating artists who merely imitate the conventions of the past, Baudelaire locates true art in the articulation of the present. This is what he refers to as the ‘modern’. The artist that he talks of is great according to him as a result of his commitment to representing the beauty of the modern. This according to Baudelaire is a painstaking process as the extraction of beauty from a scene for a person who is present at the scene is a difficult process. Talking of the art of the end of the nineteenth century that he feels is disappointing as a result of its tendency to imitate models of the Renaissance and other periods of history, Baudelaire remarks upon the living quality of art that can be captured only through representations of the modern. The modern, in turn is the living scene of the present form which good art can be produced through an extraction of the beauty of the present. The impulses that drive the artist should be geared towards capturing the modern. The modern, thus, for Baudelaire, is not a monolithic entity that is ahistorical but something that changes from time to time. What is modern for a certain age would not be so for another. The modern of the age of the Renaissance would not be modern for his own times, he feels. The changing character of the modern is an important aspect of the theory that Baudelaire lays down. Modernity is thus a characteristic of every age that needs to be extracted for the production of art and beauty in art. Such definitions of art are not divorced from the daily lives of people. Conceptions of the modern and modernity affect the lives of people in profound ways. What is considered modern affects the social and economic behavior of people to a great extent. What people perceive as artistic affects every aspect of their life, including what they listen to, what they wear and what words they use in their daily conversations with other people. Modernity has a crucial role in shaping culture and the very language that one speaks. Language is not only modified by culture, culture also modifies language. The very modes of articulation between people are affected by what is modern or what is perceived to be modern, by a particular age. Artistic creations affect the understanding of everyday life in a manner that is similar to the mirroring of reality that is considered to be a traditional function of art. The everyday life of a person is described in terms that make it sound to be full of life and enchanting moments that are filled with opportunities to capture fleeting articles of beauty. The importance of beauty cannot be overemphasized in the works of Baudelaire and other fin-de-siecle poets who believed that the purpose of art was the creation of beauty and not the social functions that writers like Charles Dickens and George Eliot associated with it. The break from realism that Baudelaire seeks to effect in his poetry is evident in the tenets that he lays down for the creation of art, which he feels has to capture the beauty of an age. The modern, for Baudelaire, in the lives of people has to be the beauty that needs to be distilled from the mundane and that which is not beautiful. He seeks to capture the eternal as opposed to the ephemeral from the daily lives of people. The capture of the eternal, however, according to Baudelaire does not come with a capture of what has already come to be accepted as the eternal but what is present in modern society as the modern. The artist is the person who is able to perform this task of seeing the beauty in the modern as opposed to the common man who on most occasions is unable to perceive the very sights that he sees. To understand the modern, one needs to accept the new and make an effort to understand it. The modern, because of its break from the past, can be difficult to understand, but it is this very quality which makes it accessible to the good artist who is then able to put together its beauty like a child does when it receives new information. A child-like curiosity is thus needed for the understanding of the modern (Baudelaire). The modern is an area of study that has attracted scholars from various fields of research. The fact that it affects every aspect of a person’s life and is essentially a study of the present is what makes it all the more interesting. Works Cited Baudelaire, Charles. “The Painter of Modern Life”. Modernism och postmodernism. http://www.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/pm/baudelaire-painter.htm Accessed on 6th February, 2012. Marx, Karl. “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof”. Capital, Volume One. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm Accessed on 6th February, 2012. Read More
Cite this document
  • APA
  • MLA
  • CHICAGO
(“Modernity in Everyday Life Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words”, n.d.)
Retrieved from https://studentshare.org/literature/1442215-modernity-the-concept-of-everyday-life
(Modernity in Everyday Life Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 Words)
https://studentshare.org/literature/1442215-modernity-the-concept-of-everyday-life.
“Modernity in Everyday Life Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 Words”, n.d. https://studentshare.org/literature/1442215-modernity-the-concept-of-everyday-life.
  • Cited: 0 times

CHECK THESE SAMPLES OF Modernity in Everyday Life

Industrialization and Modernity in the Structures of Our Lives

If one is speaking with Marshall Berman, modernity is described as “a mode of vital experience—experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life's possibilities and perils—that is shared by men and women all over the world today.... modernity as a movement growing out of the industrial revolution is often described as a collection of studies into the social processes that order the world we live in while remaining in a constant state of flux....
10 Pages (2500 words) Essay

Bauhaus and Modernism

The essay "Bauhaus and Modernism" explores the Bauhaus and its influence on the Modernism.... In the humming windowless hallway leading to his office, he stops in front of a metal box full of chilled metal cylinders.... He inserts several polished silver disks.... hellip; In just about any town today, it is possible for a man to climb out of a shining metal vehicle after spending hours moving box by box through the traffic on the multi-columned roadway....
14 Pages (3500 words) Essay

How women of the Middle East integrate fashion trends with their culture and Muslim religion

98) supports this point, stressing that fashionable clothing such as the veil “allows for a high degree of creativity on the part of individuals in the construction of their identities and the presentation of such identities in everyday life.... Culture and everyday life.... Faces of the State: Secularism and Public life in Turkey.... One of the consequences of modernity and the entailing developments such as globalization, geographical mobility, empowerment and democracy is that societies across the globe could no longer exist in isolation....
2 Pages (500 words) Outline

Classicism vs Modernism in the Plays of T.S Eliot

Alfred Prufrock is a theatrical portrayal of the decay of the Romantic self amid a foul modernity.... This paper investigates classicism and modernism through the plays of Eliot.... That critical plays establish the artistic norms for the New Criticism, and his newsletter Criterion was part of the main mediators of preference all over the 1920s and 1930s....
12 Pages (3000 words) Research Paper

Terms Modernism and Postmodernism

hellip; This paper will majorly focused on modernism and postmodernism relating it to the theory of Post-Colonialism, belonging and language and representation of rural and urban life.... The post-colonialism and representation of rural and urban life will be used to distinguished modernism from the previous age.... In academic studies, modernism is a philosophical movement or is a particular perspective of looking at the universe and examining the activities of daily life....
17 Pages (4250 words) Essay

Modern Spaces - Our Understanding of Space as Affected by Modernism

Scholars define modernity as the relationship between a space in which to live and material architecture or as “a condition of living imposed upon individuals by the socioeconomic process of modernisation” (Heynen 1999, p.... Thus, modernity should be understood as a conceptual framework of individual expression as well as a reflection of society as a whole.... In the architectural context, modernity is the “dialectical relationship ....
11 Pages (2750 words) Case Study

An Understanding of Modernity

The paper 'An Understanding of modernity' presents technology which was growing exponentially, transforming the way the world worked.... An understanding of modernity makes it possible to explore how it is expressed by Gustave Courbet, Claude Monet, and Eduoard Manet.... Scholars define modernity as “a condition of living imposed upon individuals by the socioeconomic process of modernization” (Heynen 1999, p.... Thus, modernity can be understood as a conceptual framework of individual expression at the same time that it can be considered a reflection of society as a whole....
10 Pages (2500 words) Case Study

Post Modernism Miasma

As the paper "Post Modernism Miasma" outlines, architectural modernism presented itself as a form of an international style with prescribed rules and procedures that took effect in the post WWI era and would later become pervasive in the reconstruction of Europe in the aftermath of World War II.... hellip; Architectural modernism sought to create new building and design forms that were based on a universally accepted architectural vocabulary, whereby buildings and house developments would adhere to some prescribed rules....
10 Pages (2500 words) Term Paper
sponsored ads
We use cookies to create the best experience for you. Keep on browsing if you are OK with that, or find out how to manage cookies.
Contact Us