Modernism Lecture Review

Neoclassicism

• Dominated literary production for centuries leading up to the Romantic period.
• Roots in the Classical period (Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Sophocles).
• Literature is orderly, logical, and fact-based.
• Authors are detached and unemotional.
• Seen in Realism (late 19th century), depicting life as it was believed to be without sensational projections.

Romanticism

• A period during which many of Aristotle’s notions can be found.
• Stresses the freedom of the artist to be highly imaginative, emotional, and spontaneous.
• The artist no longer needed to achieve mimesis of anything (such as a “Form” or ideal).
• Asserts the worth of the individual person, the goodness of humanity, and the glory of communication with nature.
• Sensibility and imagination are valued over reason and intellect.
• Passion and instinct are life’s law.
• The Romantic individual seeks freedom and runs away from imposed constraints.
• Instinct and passion lead to exaggerated enthusiasm or deep pessimism.
• In the latter case, the Romantic seeks escape through travel or suicide.
• Stylistically:
  • Exotic locations (sea, wilderness, distant past).
  • Larger-than-life characters (heroic or evil, imaginary, stereotypical).
  • Fantasy plots, action-based prose.
  • Positive and uplifting tone, clear moral ends.
  • Mythologizing of the past.

Modernism: Definition

• A literary and cultural international movement that flourished in the first decades of the 20th century.
• Cannot be ascribed to a single meaning.
• Can be applied to content, form, or both.
• Reflects a sense of cultural crisis that was both exciting and disquieting.
• Opened up new human possibilities while questioning previously accepted means of grounding and evaluating new ideas.
• Marked by experimentation, particularly manipulation of form, and the realization that knowledge is not absolute.
• Roughly 1910 – mid-1940s.
• An aesthetic movement coupled with a historical time period, recording a radical break with the past.
• Multi-national and multi-disciplinary (culture, philosophy, science, literature, art).
• A reaction to world affairs bleeds into all created/produced during the era.
• Literary movement involves a major and self-conscious break with the American and European literary tradition.

Dates

• 1909: First “Manifesto” of Italian Futurism
• 1910: Death of Edward VII; Post-impressionist exhibition in London
• 1913: Russian Cubo-futurism; English Verticism
• 1916-20: Dada
• 1912-17: Imagism
• T.S. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent
• 1922: T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; J. Joyce’s Ulysses; Death of M. Proust

Modernism as a Movement

• Recognized in literature, sciences, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, painting, music, sculpture, and architecture.

Characteristics

• Anti-Romantic (meaning is in the art itself).
• Subjective meaning, no need to see ourselves in art.
• Deliberate break from the past (style, form, content, historical location).
• Alienation from society, loneliness.
• Procrastination, inability to act.
• Agonized recollection of the past, creating personal myths.
• Fear of death and constant awareness of death.
• Inability to express or feel “real” love.
• Ironic: attenuated emotion yet excitement about the future that never materializes.
• World as a wasteland.
• Inability to see self reflected in the surrounding world and others.

General Features

• Built on a sense of lost community and civilization.
• Embodied contradictions and paradoxes.
• Revolution and conservatism.
• Loss of a sense of tradition, lamented in reactionary conservatism, celebrated as liberation.
• Increasing dominance of technology, condemned and embraced as progress.

The Writer

• The writer in the Modern period will reflect these ideas through his works.
• Locate meaning from the viewpoint of the individual.
• Use narrators within the fiction, experiencing events from a personal perspective.
• Use many voices and contrasts of perspective.
• Eliminate the omniscient narrator.
• Move time into the interior: psychological or symbolic time rather than historical reality.
• Use time complexly as a structuring device (movement backwards or forwards).
• Art always attempts to re-present reality.
• What changes is our understanding of what constitutes reality, and how that reality can best be re-presented, presented to the mind and sense most faithfully and fully.
• Represent typical themes:
  • Question of the reality of experience itself.
  • The search for a ground of meaning in a world without God.
  • Critique of traditional values.
  • Loss of meaning and hope.
  • Exploration of how to face this loss.
• Show the surface disorder of the world/society yet imply an underlying unity.
• Depict how characters can be honorable and dignified in a world lacking both.

Purpose of Modernist Writing

• Complete a search or undertake a search to be educated by it for self-understanding in the context of the world/society.
• Simple search for meaning.
• Make meaning out of experience to make living purposeful.
• Modern characters are generally on a quest to recompense and recreate themselves.
• They do not understand a world of rationality and morality but see a world of loose morality and transitory pleasures.
• Modern characters exhibit a little ambition or motivation or regard for the consequences of their actions.

Generalized Modernism

• Arises from a sharp and biting sense of loss on ontological grounding.
• A response to a sense of social breakdown.
• A reaction to WWI.
• Sees the world as fragmented, unrelated in its pieces.
• Perceives the connective threads of existence as missing.
• Is ironic but not unfeeling.
• Questions the purpose of art because it perceives the world as falling apart.

Consequences

• Productive insecurity originated.
• Aesthetics of experimentation.
• Fragmentation.
• Ambiguity.
• Nihilism.
• Variety of theories.
• Diversity of practices.

Thematic Features

• Intentional distortion of shapes.
• Focus on form rather than meaning.
• Breaking down of limitation of space and time.
• Breakdown of social norms and cultural values.
• Dislocation of meaning and sense from its normal context.
• Valorization of the despairing individual in the face of an unmanageable future.
• Disillusionment.
• Rejection of history and the substitution of a mythical past.
• Need to reflect the complexity of modern urban life.
• Importance of the unconscious mind.
• Interest in the primitive and non-western cultures.
• Impossibility of an absolute interpretation of reality.
• Overwhelming technological changes.

Painting

• Fauvism – Matisse
  • Supremacy of color over form
  • Interest in the primitive and the magical
• Cubism – Picasso, Braque
  • Fragmentation of objects into abstract geometric forms
• Abstract painting – Kandinsky
  • Attention to line, colour, shape as subjects of painting
• Vorticism – Wyndham Lewis
  • Incorporating the idea of motion and change

Music

• Stravinsky, Schoenberg
• Dissonance/distorted music effects
• Rejection of rules of harmony and composition
• Serial system of composition

Formal Features of Poetry

• Open form
• Use of free verse
• Juxtaposition of ideas rather than consequential exposition
• Intertextuality
• Use of allusions and multiple association of words
• Borrowings from other cultures and languages
• Unconventional use of metaphor
• Importance given to sound to convey “the music of ideas.”

Free Verse

• Use of the poetic line.
• Flexibility of line length.
• Massive use of alliteration and assonance.
• No use of traditional meter.
• No regular rhyme scheme.
• Use of visual images in distinct lines.

Modernist Poets

• W.B. Yeats
• Ezra Pound
• T.S. Eliot

Modernist Novelists

• J. Joyce
• V. Woolf
• D.H. Lawrence
• J. Conrad
• E.M. Forster

Formal Features of Narrative

• Experimental nature
• Lack of traditional chronological narrative (discontinuous narrative)
• Break of narrative frames (fragmentation)
• Moving from one level of narrative to another
• A number of different narrators (multiple narrative points of view)
• Self-reflexive about the act of writing and the nature of literature (meta-narrative)
• Use of interior monologue technique
• Use of the stream of consciousness technique
• Focus on a character's consciousness and subconscious

Stream of Consciousness

• Aims to provide a textual equivalent to the stream of a fictional character’s consciousness
• Creates the impression that the reader is eavesdropping on the flow of conscious experience in the character’s mind
• Comes in a variety of stylistic forms
• Narrated stream of consciousness often composed of different sentence types including psycho-narration and free indirect style
• Characterized by associative (and at times dissociative) leaps in syntax and punctuation

Interior Monologue

• A particular kind of stream of consciousness writing
• Also called quoted stream of consciousness, presents characters’ thought streams exclusively in the form of silent inner speech, as a stream of verbalized thoughts
• Represents characters speaking silently to themselves and quotes their inner speech, often without speech marks
• Is presented in the first person and in the present tense and employs deictic words
• Also attempts to mimic the unstructured free flow of thought
• Can be found in the context of third-person narration and dialogue

Industrialization

• Forced human beings to abide by