Munch’s The Scream deconstructs the aesthetic of expression it embodies

Evidence

Edward Munch’s painting The Scream is, of course, a canonical expression of the great modernist thematics of alienation, anomie, solitude, social fragmentation, and isolation, a virtually programmatic emblem of what used to be called the age of anxiety. It will here be read as an embodiment not merely of the expression of that kind of affect but, even more, as a virtual deconstruction of the very aesthetic of expression itself, which seems to have dominated much of what we call high modernism but to have vanished away — for both practical and theoretical reasons — in the world of the postmodern. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 62

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the modernist thematics of expression/affect — the baseline against which ‘waning of affect’ is a fall.
• XREF: Connects to the reading purpose: this is the diagnostic contrast for periodizing style — modernism as the age of expression, postmodernism as its vanishing.