Define Modernism is your own words

Modernism was a literary movement, especially around the 1900s. Modernism is literature's attempt to invent forms that inherited understandings of reality, the self, time, society, language, and truth no longer seemed sure, stable or sufficient.

3 historical pressures in modernism

WW1 - The enormous death and destruction of the war made people question morality, heroism, and progress as a whole.

Industrialization - Factories, technology, automobiles, large cities, and changing workplaces transformed everyday life, leaving people feeling isolated or disconnected from reality.

New ideas about human behavior - New science made it way into Modernist writers’ thinking, and they began to add characters’ inner thoughts, memories, fears, and desires.

What is purposeful difficulty?

Modernist writers intentionally made their writing difficult or confusing to reflect the confusion and complexity of modern life.

4 Modernist Features

Subjectivity - Perception, memory, dream, fear, and consciousness become central

Unstable Reality - Reality may appear dreamlike, contradictory, or dependent on perspective

Experimentation - Artists reshape narration, time, voice, order, genre, and style

Unreliable perspective - Narrators mya misunderstand, contradict themselves, or possess only party of the truth.

Distinguish subjectivity, alienation, fragmentation, ambiguity, and unstalbe reality.

Subjectivity - Personal

Alienation - Alone

Fragmentation - Broken

Ambiguity - Uncertain meaning

Unstable reality - uncertain truth

Explain how perspective, time, structure, or language can make the reader experience instability

Modernist writers make readers feel uncertain or disoriented, just like the characters through purposeful reader experiences.

Explain the divided self and why self-knowledge may be unreliable.

Divided Self - A person may have conflicting thoughts, feelings, or identities within themselves.

Unreliable Self-Knowledge - People may not fully understand their own motives, feelings, or actions, so what they believe about themselves may not be completely true.

The key idea in Modernism is that you can’t always trust yourself to full know yourself.

Compare Realism and Modernism through a precise question than a checklist.

Realism vs. Modernism: Ask - “Can reality be clearly understood?”

Describe deliberate choices that would make an ordinary scenario recognizably modernist

Take an ordinary event and make it feel uncertain, fragmented, or subjective.