História, cultura e modernidade: uma leitura de Viena-Fin-de-Siècle

Abstract

The author analyses Schorske's method of writing history and his dialectical interpretation of the history of art as inspired by the Frankfurt school. In this book on Viena, he studies a meeting point of history, culture, politics and psychological expression. Schorske sees the relations between art and society as an ambiguous and complex one in which art is at the same time a way of expressing society's historicity and a form of transcending it. Schorke grasps the genesis of modernity from Vienese society's contradictions in the second half od the 19th century, when artists and intellectuals searching for new forms of expression, tried to proclaim their independence from history and came to redefine art's role. Schorske chose as his main theme the long and painful process of overthrowal of conformist aestheticism and the emergence of an artistic vanguard movement.