Modernism

Some traditional descriptions of Modernism:

1) Modernism . . . "defines a specific form of artistic production, serving as an umbrella term for a melange of artistic schools and style which first arose in late-nineteenth-century Europe and America.  Characterized by such features as aesthetic self-consciousness, stylistic fragmentation, and a questioning of representation, modernist texts bore a highly ambivalent and often critical relationship to the process of modernization."
    (Rita Felski. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P., 1995. pp. 12-13.)

2) Modernism "is the art consequent on the disestablishing of communal reality and conventional notions of causality, on the destruction of traditional notions of wholeness of the individual character, on the linguistic chaos that ensues when public notions of language have been discredited and when all realities have become subjective fictions."
    (Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds. Modernism:  1890-1930.  Harmondsworth; New York : Penguin, 1976.  p. 27. )

3) Modernism in its theological sense named "the adoption of the new critical view of the Bible" and a more secular understanding of history. The history of the word in this sense in the nineteenth century is unclear, but by the early Victorian period "modernism" was used "as synonymous with general intellectual radicalism; the theological sense of the term did not become widespread until the condemnation of the movement . . . [by] Pope Pius X (8 Sept. 1907).
    (David J. De Laura, "‘The Ache of Modernism' in Hardy's Later Novels," ELH 34 [1967])

Some more recent accounts of Modernism:

Race "Linguistic mimicry and racial masquerade were . . . strategies without which modernism could not have arisen."
    (Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism, Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1994.)

Gender  "[T]he literary phenomenon ordinarily called ‘modernism' is itself—though no doubt overdetermined—for men as much as for women a product of the sexual battle  . . . as are the linguistic experiments usually attributed to the revolutionary poetics of the so-called avant-garde."
    (Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century.  Vol. 1.  New Haven: Yale U. P., 1988. xii)

National Origin  "It seems undeniable that it was the English provincials and their traditions which contributed most to the crucially provincial tradition we now know as modernism"
    (Robert Crawford. Devolving English Literature.  New York, Oxford U. P., 1992.  p. 217.)

Modernization is usually taken to denote the complex constellation of socioeconomic phenomena which originated in the context of Western development but which have since manifested themselves around the globe in various forms: scientific and technological innovation, the industrialization of production, rapid urbanization, an ever expanding capitalist market, the development of the nation state, and so on.

The French term modernité, while also concerned with a distinctly modern sense of dislocation and ambiguity, locates it in the more general experience of the aestheticization of everyday life, as exemplified in the ephemeral and transitory qualities of an urban culture shaped by the imperatives of fashion, consumerism, and constant innovation.

Modernity is often used as an overarching periodizing term to denote an historical era which may encompass any of the above qualities.
    (Above three descriptions from Felski, The Gender of Modernity,  12-13.)

Modern:  Of or pertaining to the present and recent times; originating in the current age or period.
    (first recorded usage 1585) (Oxford Universal Dictionary)

Primitivism

Primitive:

1. Of or belonging to the first age, period or stage; earliest, original.
2. Having the quality or style of that which is early or ancient.
3.Original as opposed to derivative; primary as opposed to secondary.
4. Of colors = primary.
5. Biology, anatomy: Applied to a part or structure in the first or a very early stage of formation or growth (whether temporary and subsequently disappearing or developing into the fully formed structure); primitive streak or trace: the faint streak which constitutes the earliest trace of the embryo in the fertilized ovum.
    (Oxford English Dictionary)

Primitivism: "When we say ‘primitive' today, we generally designate certain social formations within relatively isolated areas of Africa, Oceania, South America, and other areas of the world--social formations characterized perhaps most clearly by the absence of tools and technology widely available elsewhere. Such societies have been the traditional objects of ethnographic research and have thus been represented in the West according to available ethnographic categories." (Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive, U. of Chicago P, 1990).

 ". . . the needs of the present determine the value and nature of the primitive."
    (Torgovnick)
 

Kinds of Primitivism:

• Chronological primitivism denotes the belief that ancient or prehistoric times were superior to modern times; the notion of the "noble savage." Or, I would say, that they were inferior; e.g., Darwins' and, later, Freud's "primal horde."]
• Cultural primitivism is the romanticization of non-Western peoples, usually idealizing their instincts, sexuality, and their proclivity to the natural.
• Spiritual primitivism appeals to the dark-irrational mystic powers and to Dionysian ecstasy.
• Aesthetic primitivism is based on the assimilation of non-European art forms.