Modernism Lecture Review

Flashcards covering key vocabulary and concepts from a lecture on Modernism in literature.

Neoclassicism

Dominates literary production for centuries leading up to the Romantic period, with roots in the Classical period (writings of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Sophocles).

Romanticism

A period stressing the freedom of the artist to be highly imaginative, emotional, and/or spontaneous; asserts the worth of the individual person, the goodness of humanity, and the glory of communication with nature.

Modernism

A literary and cultural international movement flourishing in the first decades of the 20th century, reflecting a sense of cultural crisis and marked by experimentation and the realization that knowledge is not absolute.

Italian Futurism

A modernist movement that began in 1909.

Imagism

A modernist movement that took place from 1912-1917.

Modernism

A movement recognized not only in literature but also in the sciences, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, painting, music, sculpture, and architecture.

Anti-Romantic

Meaning is no longer in the act of art but in the art itself; meaning is subjective and no longer needs to be present.

Modernism

Built on a sense of lost community and civilization and embodied a series of contradictions and paradoxes, embracing multiple features of modern sensibility, including revolution and conservatism, and increasing dominance of technology.

Modernism

Arises from a sharp and biting sense of loss on ontological grounding, is a response to a sense of social breakdown and WWI, sees the world as fragmented, unrelated in its pieces, and questions the purpose of art because it perceives the world as falling apart.

Fragmentation

A consequence of productive insecurity originated in Modernism.

Fauvism

Supremacy of colour over form and has interest in the primitive and the magical.

Cubism

Fragmentation of objects into abstract geometric forms.

Abstract painting

Attention to line, colour, shape as subjects of painting.

Vorticism

Incorporating the idea of motion and change.

Free verse

Flexibility of line length, alliteration and assonance, no traditional metre or rhyme scheme, and use of visual images in distinct lines.

Stream of consciousness

Aims to provide a textual equivalent to the stream of a fictional character’s consciousness and creates the impression that the reader is eavesdropping on the flow of conscious experience in the character’s mind.

Interior monologue

Presents characters’ thought streams exclusively in the form of silent inner speech, as a stream of verbalised thoughts.

Ford-ism

Forced human beings to abide by 'clock time', which meant that traditional cycles of seasons and daylight were lost.

Realism

Reality was dominant over subjective and truth is objective.

Modernism

response to modernity, which is always with us.