Modernist Predicament and Communicative Rationality——Revisiting Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio

Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio tells stories of a group of hollow and alienated grotesques in an ugly and provincial town. The novel presents and diagnoses the shocking condition of the town affected by western industrial civilization and enlightened rationality. Those grotesques hungers for expressing themselves and communicating with others but fails. They behave as aphasics, soliloquists or someone who are unable to articulate resulting from crisis of modernity. Reading of the novel inspires us that it is a communicative reason that can solve modernist crisis and transform the world into a more humane, just, and egalitarian society.