SOURCE: "What Was Modernism?" in Hudson Review, Vol. 31, No. 1, Spring, 1978, pp. 19-33.

In the following essay, Adams enumerates reasons for the inadequacy of "Modernism" as a critical-historical term.

"The past serves only as a means of knowing the present. But the present eludes me. What, after all, is the present?"

—Henri Foçillon, quoted by George Kubler: The Shape of Time

Since the ironic reservations and self-questioning cautions that surround the topic of "the modern" are potentially infinite, it's best to start with a blunt and vigorous citation from Mrs. Woolf, who tells us flatly that on or about December, 1910, human nature changed radically. I think she's right. Within five years either way of that date a great sequence of new and different works appeared in Western culture, striking the tonic chords of modernism. Ten years before that fulcrum of December, 1910, modernism is not yet; ten years after...