Coda: Towards Modernism

The exploration of an aesthetic of fragmentation present at the margins of nineteenth-century mimesis reappears in modernist practices, indicating an unacknowledged form of continuity rather than a radical rupture from the past. The fleetingly hybrid text of the nineteenth-century sensorium becomes a lost trace that is overlooked by critics when they privilege the centrality of more material and tangible media (painting, photography, and, later, cinema) at the expense of their precursors in time-bound ephemeral forms of everyday practices. The ephemeral origin of painting in performance is highlighted in the Futurist proclamation that ‘the gesture for us will no longer be a fixed moment of universal dynamism: it will be decisively the dynamic sensation made eternal’, in parallel with the experimentations of the Bauhaus milieu, such as Kandinsky’s Yellow Sound project. In this Coda I shall reconsider the meta-literary inspiration of T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land to highlight the attention to several media, including the pre-cinematic spectacle and the montage-effect made of nineteenth-century print-culture artifacts that function as correlatives of the aesthetic dynamism of his poetics.