Topic Clusters
Exploration: Modernist Manifestos*
Manifestos, named as such by their authors, caught on at the end of the nineteenth century, and we certainly are not done with them yet. If Emerson’s Nature was, or turned out to be, a Transcendentalist manifesto, and if Howells, James, and Mark Twain said much in championing Realist values, none of these writers referred to any set of their own observations as a “manifesto,” for the word, as they knew it, carried implications of radical political action, not aesthetic innovation or experiment. Manifestos were for hungry people at the barricades, not for comfortable folk in reading rooms and salons. Times have certainly changed, and a contemporary student negotiating an accumulation of Modernist and Postmodernist manifestos has cause to wonder what she is looking at: moral ardor? marketing and hype? fad and fashion? or some genuine dawning of a new era?
1. Just for fun, try typing the following phrases into your browser and see what happens: “restaurant manifesto,” “spa manifesto,” “massage manifesto,” “fashion manifesto.” Think of some other similar phrases and try them too, to see how the term is being exploited now in a globalized market of services and luxuries.
2. Thanks to the print revolution of the later nineteenth century and the electronic media revolution that we are experiencing now, it is possible for just about anyone to write and set forth a manifesto of some sort—and also for nobody to read it. Prowl the Internet a bit and see if you can locate some ostensibly-serious manifestos for contemporary movements that you have never heard of. If everybody writes, now, and nobody reads, what might be the consequences for the manifesto as an agent of change, and as a cultural act?
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