What DID happen to Modernism? Bill Marx weighs in for the Arts Fuse  in response to Robert Boyers’ review of Gabriel Josipovici‘s What Ever Happened to Modernism? in The New Republic.

Modernism itself is no easy subject to define, which both reviewers point out in their articles, and the book is certainly polemical. Two new books of essays help draw some of the lines: whereas Boyers uses David Shields’ Reality Hunger to describe an almost unconscious and unintentional revolt against “bourgeois realism,” Marx counters with what he sees as a measured, though still unintentional, example of Modernist sensibility in Milan Kundera’s Encounter.

In short, none of Josipovici, Boyers, or Marx pulls any punches. With the fate of literature in the balance, who could think to do such a thing, anyway? Where do you stand?