The philosopher Lukacs sees nineteenth-century capitalism resulting in a growing fragmentation in life.
He believes that literature and culture undergo a corresponding tendency toward fragmentation and loss of totality. As the nineteenth century proceeds, the bourgeoisie, now firmly in power, becomes a reactionary, rather than a revolutionary, class, and its literature consequently begins to decline in quality. For example, Lukacs characterizes the transition from realism to naturalism in European literature (epitomized by the movement from Honore de Balzac to Emile Zola in France) as a process of decay, naturalism being a distortion and deterioration of realism into abstraction.
But Lukacs's harshest criticism is reserved for modernist literature.
In essence, he believes that the formal fragmentation of modernist texts participates in the process of reification that is itself central to the fragmentation of social life under capitalism. Lukacs sees in the dazzling verbal constructions of modernist writers a reflection of this process.
He believes that literature and culture undergo a corresponding tendency toward fragmentation and loss of totality. As the nineteenth century proceeds, the bourgeoisie, now firmly in power, becomes a reactionary, rather than a revolutionary, class, and its literature consequently begins to decline in quality. For example, Lukacs characterizes the transition from realism to naturalism in European literature (epitomized by the movement from Honore de Balzac to Emile Zola in France) as a process of decay, naturalism being a distortion and deterioration of realism into abstraction.
But Lukacs's harshest criticism is reserved for modernist literature.
In essence, he believes that the formal fragmentation of modernist texts participates in the process of reification that is itself central to the fragmentation of social life under capitalism. Lukacs sees in the dazzling verbal constructions of modernist writers a reflection of this process.
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