Word: modernistically
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...Night and Morning (1938), Clarke turned to the raging forge of his own mind. Hot in the smithy of Irish poetry, he began a new mode heavily influenced by modernist poets. His elongated narrative lines turned to the crisp, dry style of poets like Auden--nouns are used as verbs, sentences are elipsed and inverted. In the very earliest of these poems, Clarke subtly reveals a kind of tormented agnosticism, as in this poem about the crucifixion of Christ: An open mind disturbs the soul, And in disdain I turn my back Upon the sun that makes a show...
...classical work. It derives its dramatic power from the potency of its dialogue, the emotive force of its actors, and the austerity of Bergman's camerawork with its insistent focusing on the torn faces of the protagonists. The Middle of the World, on the other hand, is a thoroughly modernist work, straining its story through a sieve of images, metaphors, and formalistic devices which, while establishing the film as a more ambitious production, dilute its intensity and deflate its broader social significance...
...time Adriana tells Paul suddenly one day that she is going to leave him, because she's frustrated by his inability to see through to the "real" her, we are neither prepared nor surprised--nor interested, for that matter. Perhaps Tanner and his experiment with modernist formalism has succeeded too well. In approximating life in all its bleak, discontinuous reality, he has made a film that, like most of life itself, is boring. From the perch of his director's seat he surveys the ennui-stricken masses who pour into the movie theaters, hungering for an insight into the chaos...
Wolfe became famous and even popular, but he never fared well with the modernist New York-based critical old guard. He was saying in all his pieces that the things those critics cared about weren't really important, that he knew what was really going on in America. He wrote about high-school kids customizing cars in California--they were the cutting edge of art, not the stuffed-shirts back East. Even when he dealt with the modern art scene, he treated it as an amusing cultural phenomenon, an elaborate set of strange conventions rather than as a serious endeavor...
...mass audience, the old regionalist's pronouncements were oracular. He was, after all, a reformed modernist: up to 1918 he had painted "lifeless symbolist and cubist pictures," full of "my aesthetic drivelings and morbid self-concerns." He had studied in Paris, the Antichrist's lair. So he could be believed. The rhetoric never altered; he was too ancient a drummer for that. The circumstances of his career did, and violently. For a brief time, the decade ending in 1939, he-with John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood-bestrode and dominated the taste of America. His emergence, however...