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