The impossible modernity

The book "The Impossible Modernity" - Robert Lyman: The book "The Impossible Modernity" discusses writings of the German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and the Anglo-American poet and critic T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) to study the relationship between the literary and historical form during the modern era. The book focuses especially on how both resist the narrative forms established by 19th-century academic historians, and instead turn to traditional literary styles — lyricism, satire, storytelling, and metaphor — to reimagine the forms that historical representation may take. It traces Robert S. Lyman the tense relationship between poetry and history, starting from Aristotle's "Poetics," up to Nietzsche's "Thoughts in Non-Time," and defines the coordinates of the historical intellectual problem inherited by Eliot and Benjamin, and offers an analysis of how they dealt with this legacy in their main works.