Modernist Literature and Aesthetics: Comprehensive Lecture Notes
Modernism: Definitions and Etymology
Dictionary Definition: Modernism is defined by the Collins Cobuild Dictionary as "the ideas and methods of modern art, especially when they are contrasted with earlier ideas and methods."
Etymological Roots:
The term is rooted in the word "modern."
Originates from the medieval Latin word modernus.
Since the $16^{th}$ century, it has been used to refer to the contemporary period, as opposed to medieval and ancient times.
Modernist vs. Modern: Modernist is a more specific term usually applied to art. It refers to a specific mode of art produced during a distinct period with unique aesthetic characteristics.
Contextual Background: The Early $20^{th}$ Century as an Age of Innovations
Historical Shift: By the beginning of the $20^{th}$ century, traditional societal, religious, and cultural stabilities were weakening, and the pace of change was accelerating (Norton Anthology of English Literature, $8^{th}$ edition, $2294$).
Broad Factors Influencing Modernism:
Political and economic instability.
New ideas and theoretical frameworks (Freud, Jung, Einstein, Communism, Fascism).
Significant social changes.
Artistic innovations.
New perspectives in literary criticism.
Political and Economic Instability ($1899-1945$)
Major Conflicts:
$1899-1902$: The Boer War in South Africa.
$1914-1918$: World War I (The Great War). Significant literary output includes War Poetry such as John McCrae’s "In Flanders Fields" ($1915$).
$1916$: The Easter Rising in Ireland.
$1936-1938$: The Spanish Civil War.
$1939-1945$: World War II.
Economic Impacts: International economic depression following the stock market crash in $1929$.
New Ideas, Theories, and Social Changes
Foundations of Modern Skepticism: The theories of Marx, Darwin, and Nietzsche undermined traditional religious beliefs.
Psychology and Science:
The new psychology introduced by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.
Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
Political Ideologies: The rise of Communism versus Fascism.
Technological Developments:
Photography, electricity, phonograph, cinema, radio, and television.
The automobile (Henry Ford).
$1912$: Sinking of the Titanic.
$1919$: The first transatlantic flight.
These events marked the end of the steam power era and the beginning of the modern era.
Societal Shifts:
Expansion of the reading class.
Changes in sexual and social mores.
In the US: Prohibition, the rise of the Mafia, the Jazz Age (popularized by F. Scott Fitzgerald), and the Harlem Renaissance (featuring black artists like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston).
Refugees: European artists fleeing to the US to escape the Nazi threat.
Artistic and Critical Innovations
Artistic Goal: Modernists attempted to express the "bewildering but exciting complexity of the rapidly changing world" (P. Faulkner, A Modernist Reader, $1986$).
Visual Art Example: Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase ($1913$).
Literary Criticism: Most Modernist literary figures were also critics. Small literary magazines played a crucial role in responding to and stimulating artistic changes.
Challenging Previous Aesthetics: Romanticism and Realism
Against Romantic Organicism:
Romanticism (Wordsworth) viewed poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquillity."
Modernism (T.S. Eliot) emphasizes "conscious and original craftsmanship." Eliot argued in Tradition and the Individual Talent ($1919$) that the "emotion of art is impersonal" and that a poet's personal life is not the source of artistic value.
Against Realist Aesthetics:
Modernists criticized the ideological and aesthetic conservatism of Realism.
The Bloomsbury Group (Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey) sought to escape Victorian conventionalism (e.g., Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, $1918$).
Laura Riding and Robert Graves criticized the lack of technical ingenuity in Victorian poetry in A Survey of Modernist Poetry ($1927$).
Readerly vs. Writerly Texts (Roland Barthes, S/Z, $1970$):
Lisible (Readerly): Traditional writing where the reader is passive and expectations of coherence are satisfied.
Scriptible (Writerly): Modernist writing that refuses formal/referential coherence and demands active participation from the reader. Meaning-making is an interactive, inconclusive, and interminable process.
Defining Modernist Aesthetics: Thematic and Stylistic Innovations
Thematic Innovations:
Pessimism, disillusionment, and spiritual/existential problems.
Mysticism and intellectual depth.
A tension between renewal and tradition (references to the Classics).
Industrialization and urbanization.
Metafiction: Fiction whose major concern is the nature of fiction itself (e.g., Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man).
Stylistic Experimentation:
Technical ingenuity and construction using fragments.
Reaction against mass production and consumption.
Subjective consciousness of the focalizer.
Stream-of-consciousness technique.
Demise of the conventional plot (replacing linearity with circularity or unresolved endings).
The Mythical Method.
Use of colloquial and dialect speech.
Increased form awareness with fewer metrical constraints.
Key Modernist Concepts and Movements
Modernism as a Cover-Term: Includes Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism, Vorticism (British response to Futurism), Expressionism, Symbolism, and Imagism.
Surrealism: Focuses on the subconscious, dreams, and intuition presented without conscious control.
Imagism: An Anglo-Saxon movement emphasizing concrete, sharp, and precise images. T.E. Hulme called for "hard, dry images," and Ezra Pound defined the image as an "intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."
Detailed Study: T.S. Eliot and The Waste Land ($1922$)
Biographical Context: Born in St. Louis, Missouri ($1888-1965$). Moved to Europe in $1914$, befriended Ezra Pound, became editor of The Criterion, and later worked for Faber & Faber. Converted to Anglicanism and became a British citizen in $1927$. Won the Nobel Prize in $1948$.
Style and Structure:
Dedicated to Ezra Pound as "il miglior fabbro" (the better craftsman).
Pound pruned the poem from approximately $1000$ lines to $434$ lines, obliterating Eliot's iambic hexameter.
Described as a "sprawling chaotic poem" with a plurality of voices and numerous allusions.
Modeled after other art forms: musical, cinematic, and dramatic.
Content and Themes:
Paradox of death-in-life and life-in-death.
Vocability of pessimism and alienation post-WWI.
Depicts the breakdown of social, communal, and cultural relationships.
Intertextuality and The Mythical Method:
Uses vegetation myths (rebirth in spring) and the legend of The Fisher King (impotence and infertility).
Classical allusions like Tiresias (blind, prophetic, dual-gendered).
Eastern philosophy: the Upanishads and Buddhist/Hindi invocations of peace.
The Mythical Method (defined by Eliot in $1923$ in "Ulysses, Order, and Myth") provides a way of giving shape and significance to the "immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history."
Modernist Fiction: William Faulkner
Biography ($1897-1962$): Nobel Prize winner in $1950$. Known for a "Southern ambiance" combined with Modernist sensibility and experimentation with narrative chronology.
"Barn Burning" ($1938$):
Genre: Short story focused on court proceedings and their aftermath.
Realist Features: Regionalism (white sharecroppers in the American South), regional language, and affinities with the Bildungsroman.
Modernist Features: Focus on the subjective consciousness of Sarty (the focalizer), existential dilemma (family loyalty vs. morality), and occasional stream-of-consciousness/italicized interior monologue passages.
Modernist Fiction: Ernest Hemingway
Biography ($1899-1961$): Nobel Prize winner in $1954$. Representative of the "Lost Generation."
Principle of the Iceberg: Hemingway’s prose omits things known to the writer so the reader feels them; "seven-eighths of it is under water for every part that shows."
"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" ($1936/1938$):
Structure: Fragmented narrative; $5$ scenes with flashbacks to the protagonist's life.
Themes: Pessimism, disillusionment, and alienation. Physical decay (gangrene) symbolizes professional failure and self-destruction.
Technique: Flashbacks use longer, more emotional sentences compared to the harsh, present-tense utterances.
Modernist Fiction: James Joyce
Biography ($1882-1941$): Irish writer who rejected Catholicism. Set all works in Dublin while living in exile (Paris, Zurich).
Ulysses ($1922$):
Setting: Dublin on Bloomsday, $16$ June $1904$.
Structure: $3$ parts ($18$ episodes): Telemachia (Stephen Dedalus), Wanderings of Ulysses (Leopold Bloom), Nostos (Molly Bloom).
Mythical Method: Juxtaposes Homer’s Odyssey with Bloom’s anti-heroic life. Leopold Bloom parallels Odysseus, Molly parallels Penelope, and Stephen parallels Telemachus.
Episode $13$ ("Nausicaa"): Illustrates the shift from a heterodiegetic narrator to Bloom’s stream of consciousness.
Episode $18$ ("Penelope"/"Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy"): Consists of $8$ long unpunctuated sentences representing sustained stream of consciousness. It has no beginning, middle, or end. Molly is contrasted with the chaste Penelope through her frank and adulterous thoughts.
Modernist Poetry Analysis
William Butler Yeats ($1865-1939$):
Shifted from Romanticism to Modernism. Influence of Ezra Pound led to more colloquial diction.
"The Second Coming" ($1921$): Apocalyptic poem based on Yeats's view of history in $2000$-year cycles ("gyres"). Uses free verse with heavy repetition. Stanza $1$ describes impending chaos; Stanza $2$ interprets it as the annunciation of a new, potentially monstrous, era.
W.H. Auden ($1907-1973$):
"Musée des Beaux Arts" ($1940$): An ekphrastic poem (literary representation of visual art) drawing on Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. It explores the place of suffering in life and the alienation of modern man as life continues oblivious to individual suffering.
e. e. cummings ($1894-1962$):
"In Just-" ($1923$): Celebrates spring with innovative typography, new word combinations (e.g., "mud-luscious"), and use of enjambment.
"l(a" ($1958$): A figure poem whose shape resembles a giant "I" and represents loneliness through the image of a single falling leaf. It pushes formal experimentation to the limit with mid-word enjambments and single-character lines.
Questions & Discussion
Response to Langston Hughes’ "I, Too" ($1945$): A comment posted in $2008$ by John Lawrence Opate (Nairobi, Kenya) links the poem’s prophecy of equality to the rise of Senator Barack Obama, calling it a "dream come true."
Oral Assignment Questions:
What are the Modernist features of the fiction and poetry on the reading list?
What strategies of Realist literature are found in these texts, and what makes them Modernist rather than Realist?
Identify specific Modernist characteristics in Faulkner, Hemingway, and Joyce.
Modernist Reading List
Introductory Texts: "The Twentieth Century and After" (NEL $1009-1036$); "American Literature $1914-1945$" (NAL $2$ $618-644$).
Assigned Fiction: Ulysses (Chapter $18$ "Penelope") by James Joyce; "Barn Burning" by William Faulkner; "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" by Ernest Hemingway.
Assigned Poetry: "The Second Coming" by W.B. Yeats; "Musée des Beaux Arts" by W. H. Auden; "In Just-" and "l(a" by e. e. cummings.
Additional Reading: "Modernist Manifestos" (NAL $2$ $735-736$); Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" and "A Retrospect"; "I, too" by Langston Hughes; The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (lines $1-18$).