Crisis of Enlightenment Rationality in High Modernism: A Case Study in Literature, Philosophy and Art

Abstract

The main objective of the research is to explore the contingency of Enlightenment-constituted rationality. It drives home the fact that reasonable is not reasonableabsolute rather it is contingent to unreason. The failure of this recognition by Enlightenmentphilosophiesultimately leads the entire Enlightenment project at crisis in the latter modernist phase. This fact has been explored taking particularly three disciplines of knowledge: literature, philosophy and art from the two periods– Enlightenment and High Modernism for comparison and contrast. The first chapter puts forth the proposition of the research and introduces the general ideas over both cults of reasonand unreason that almost go parallel in the Western intellectual tradition; the second exhibits how reason takes precedence over the tradition of unreason in Enlightenment period; the third shows how it works in reverse in High Modernist phase; the fourthconcludes the research restating the proposition advanced in the first chapter.