Modernism

Culture and Modernism

Artists felt that traditional art forms could no longer express the modern psychological state of dislocation, alienation, anxiety.

The events that took place during these tumultuous times had a deep and wide-ranging impact on aesthetic sensibility.

• Many historians have described the period between the two World Wars as a “traumatic coming of age.”
• In a post-Industrial Revolution era, America had moved from an agrarian nation to an urban nation.
• The lives of these Americans were radically different from those of their parents.

Between World Wars

• Women were given the right to vote in 1920.
• Hemlines raised; Margaret Sanger introduces the idea of birth control.
• Karl Marx’s ideas flourish; the Bolshevik Revolution overthrows Russia’s czarist government and establishes the Soviet Union.
• Writers begin to explore these new ideas.

Social Norms

Modernism is a literary and cultural international movement which flourished in the first decades of the 20th century. It reflects a sense of cultural crisis which was both exciting and disquieting, in that it opened up a whole new vista of human possibilities. Modernism is marked by experimentation, particularly manipulation of form, and by the realization that knowledge is not absolute.

What is Modernism?

Modernism as a movement can be recognized not only in literature but also in

• The sciences
• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Anthropology
• Painting
• Music
• Sculpture
• Architecture

• WWI
• Urbanization
• Industrialization
• Immigration
• Technological Evolution
• Growth of Modern Science
• Influence of Austrian Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
• Influence of German Karl Marx (1818-1883)

Causes of the Modernist Temper

• from country to city
• from farm to factory
• from native born to new citizen
• introduction to “mass” culture (pop culture)
• continual movement
• split between science and the literary tradition (“science vs. letters”)

SHIFTS IN THE MODERN NATION

The Subject Matter of Modernism

Alienation Existentialism Primitivism

“You are all a lost generation.” -Gertrude Stein(quoted by Ernest Hemingway as an epigraph to his 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises)

Alienation

During the Modern period, many young Americans felt like outsiders within their own culture. It was difficult for them to come to terms with the unnecessary suffering and enormous loss of life caused by war. Many artists were also troubled by the racism and sexism that was prevalent in American culture. This helps explain why many Modernists experimented with their own styles, rather than tap into the traditional literary forms of their culture. The pervasive sense of alienation that many writers felt led them to leave the U.S. and live in “voluntary exile” in England and Europe. Often referred to as “expatriates,” writers as diverse as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, and Sherwood Anderson spent years living abroad. In fact, some of them never returned home to the U.S.

Existentialists believe that the individual has the sole responsibility for giving his/her own life meaning and living life passionately and sincerely, in spite of many obstacles and distractions including despair, angst, absurdity, boredom, and death.

Many modernists rejected traditional philosophical and religious systems of belief in favor of Existentialism, which suggests a meaningless, chaotic, Godless world.

Existentialism

The “primitive” was appealing because it seemed to represent a world unaffected by the constraints of modernity.

Modernists were inspired by Native American and African American art. The obsession with so-called “primitive” material and attitudes was fueled by an exploding interest in Freudian and Jungian psychology. Both Freud and Jung discussed “hidden,” subconscious motives, and the “primitive” appeared to offer a setting to explore their theories of psychology and sexuality.

Primitivism

Modernism in literature

The Modern Period in American Literature 1915-1945

• Influenced by Walt Whitman’s free verse
• Prose poetry of British writer Oscar Wilde
• British writer Robert Browning’s subversion of the poetic self
• Emily Dickinson’s compression
• English Symbolist writers, especially Arthur Symons

Roots of Modernism

1912-17 Imagism. Tradition and individual Talent by TS Eliot

1913: Russian Cubo-futurism English Verticism

1910: Post-impressionist exhibition in London

1909: First “Manifesto” of Italian Futurism

1922: TS Eliot’s The Waste Land J. Joyce’s Ulysses Death of M.Proust

1916-20: Dada

A few dates

Subject Matter

Style

The phrase “make it new,” attributed to Ezra Pound, became a rallying cry for writers who participated in this cultural movement

Literary Modernism’s most significant feature is: Experimentation

The Style of Literary Modernism.

• Literary forms are innovative and, often, challenging.

• Writers were willing to disrupt traditional notions of order, sequence and unity. They risked a certain amount of incoherence for the sake of experimentation.

• Instead of predictable rhymes and forms, Modern poetry is sometimes chaotic, as if to mirror the randomness of modern life and to challenge the reader’s notion of order.

• Sense of alienation in literature: The character belongs to a “lost generation” (Gertrude Stein)

• The character suffers from a “dissociation of sensibility”—separation of thought from feeling (T. S. Eliot)
• The character has “a Dream deferred” (Langston Hughes).

Stream of consciousness

is a technique that some Modern writers use to portray the inner workings of a character’s mind. Writers catalog or describe the character’s thoughts, impressions, emotions, and ideas in rapid succession and without any interpretation or explanation by an outside narrator. Writers who employ this style believe that it more accurately represents the confused and sometimes random jumps of the human mind.

• Intentional distortion of shapes
• Focus on form rather than meaning
• Breakdown of social norms and cultural values
• Dislocation of meaning and sense from its normal context
• 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

Modernist Thematic features

• Characters are heroic in the face of a future they can’t control.
• Demonstrates the uncertainty felt by individuals living in this era.
• Examples include Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, Lt. Henry in A Farewell to Arms

Valorization of the Individual

• Life in the city differs from life on the farm; writers began to explore city life.

• Conflicts begin to

Urbanscapes

• Experimental nature
• Lack of traditional chronological narrative (discontinuous narrative)
• 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 the stream of consciousness technique
• Focus on a character's consciousness and subconscious

Formal features of narrative

• Open form
• Use of free verse (flexibility of line length, massive use of alliteration and assonance, no use of traditional metre, no regular rhyme scheme)
• 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”

Formal features of poetry

INFLUENCES OF FREUD AND MARX

• Writers concerned themselves with the inner being more than the social being and looked for ways to incorporate these new views into their writing.

• Marxism instructed even non-Marxist artists that the individual was being lost in a mass society.

• Both Marx and Freud seemed to espouse a kind of determinism that seemed able to explain the terrible things that were happening in the 20th century.

• Some modern writers believed that art should celebrate the working classes, attack capitalism, and forward revolutionary goals, while others believed that literature should be independent and non-political.

Intertextuality is a relationship between two or more texts that quote from one another, allude to one another, or otherwise connect.

Intertextuality

Narrative moves back and forth through time.Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying

Discontinuous Narrative

Two images that are otherwise not commonly brought together appear side by side or structurally close together, thereby forcing the reader to stop and reconsider the meaning of the text through the contrasting images, ideas, motifs, etc.For example, “He was slouched alertly” is a juxtaposition.

Juxtaposition

The modernists were highly conscious that they were being modern—that they were “making it new”—and this consciousness is manifest in the modernists’ radical use of a kind of formlessness.

• Collapsed plots
• Fragmentary techniques
• Shifts in perspective, voice, and tone
• Stream-of-consciousness point of view
• Associative techniques

TECHNIQUES IN MODERNIST WORKS

• It will seem to begin arbitrarily, to advance without explanation, and to end without resolution, consisting of vivid segments juxtaposed without cushioning or integrating transitions.

• It will suggest rather than assert, making use of symbols and images instead of statements.

• The reader must participate in the making of the poem or story by digging the coherent structure out that, on its surface, it seems to lack. Therefore, the search for meaning, even if it does not succeed, becomes meaningful in itself.

• Its rhetoric will be understated, ironic.

COLLAPSED PLOTS

• Compared with earlier writing, modernist literature is notable for what it omits—the explanations, interpretations, connections, summaries, and distancing that provide continuity, perspective, and security in traditional literature.

• The idea of order, sequence, and unity in works of art is sometimes abandoned because they are now considered by writers as only expressions of a desire for coherence rather than actual reflections of reality. The long work will be an assemblage of fragments, the short work a carefully realized fragment. Some modernist literature registers more as a collage. This fragmentation in literature was meant to reflect the reality of the flux and fragmentation of one’s life.

• Fragments will be drawn from diverse areas of experience. Vignettes of contemporary life, chunks of popular culture, dream imagery, and symbolism drawn from the author’s private repertory of life experiences are also important. A work built from these various levels and kinds of material may move across time and space, shift from the public to the personal, and open literature as a field for every sort of concern.

FRAGMENTARY TECHNIQUES

• The inclusion of all sorts of material previously deemed “unliterary” in works of high seriousness involved the use of language that would also previously have been thought improper, including representations of the speech of the uneducated and the inarticulate, the colloquial, slangy, and the popular. The traditional educated literary voice, conveying truth and culture, lost its authority.

• Prose writers strove for directness, compression, and vividness. They were sparing of words. The average novel became quite a bit shorter than it had been in the nineteenth century.

• Modern fiction tends to be written in the first person or to limit the reader to one character’s point of view on the action. This limitation accorded with the modernist sense that “truth” does not exist objectively but is the product of a personal interaction with reality. The selected point of view was often that of a naïve or marginal person—a child or an outsider—to convey better the reality of confusion rather than the myth of certainty.

SHIFTS IN PERSPECTIVE, VOICE, AND TONE

• A literary practice that attempts to depict the mental and emotional reactions of characters to external events, rather than the events themselves, through the practice of reproducing the unedited, continuous sequence of thoughts that run through a person’s head, most usually without punctuation or literary interference.

• The writers of the stream-of-consciousness novel seem to share certain common assumptions:
• that the significant existence of human beings is to be found in their mental-emotional processes and not in the outside world,
• that this mental-emotional life is disjointed and illogical, and
• that a pattern of free psychological association rather than of logical relation determines the shifting sequence of thought and feeling

STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS

• The present day stream-of-consciousness novel is a product of Freudian psychology with its structure of subliminal levels.
• 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 free indirect style
• characterized by associative (and at times dissociative) leaps in syntax and punctuation

• 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 verbalised 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

Interior monologue

• Modernists sometimes used a collection of seemingly random impressions and literary, historical, philosophical, or religious allusions with which readers are expected to make the connections on their own.

• This reference to details of the past was a way of reminding readers of the old, lost coherence.

• T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is arguably the greatest example of this allusive manner of writing; it includes a variety of Buddhist, Christian, Greek, Judaic, German and occult references, among others.

ASSOCIATIVE TECHNIQUES

• The lost generation
• Imagism
• The Harlem Renaissance

Literary movements

• T.S. Eliot
• Robert Frost
• E. E. Cummings

Modernist poets

Ezra Pound, H.D. [Hilda Doolittle], Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams

• Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective.
• To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
• As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.

Imagism

• Includes an eclectic group of English and American poets working between 1912 and 1917 including Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and William Carlos Williams.
• It was a reaction against a prevailing cultural romanticism which encouraged social optimism concerning the ultimate perfectibility of humankind and which led, in turn, to art that imagists believed was soft and weakly expressive.
• The imagists aimed to strip away poetry’s tendency toward dense wordiness and sentimentality and to crystallize poetic meaning in clear, neatly juxtaposed images.
• Ezra Pound defines the image in almost photographic terms as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. . . . It is the presentation of such a “complex” instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.”
• Early influences on the imagists included the symbolist poets, classical Greek and Roman poetry, and Chinese and Japanese verse forms, in particular the haiku, or hokku.

African American writers produced a tremendous amount of literary work.

The Harlem Renaissance refers to the period just after WWI to the Depression when African American writers produced a tremendous amount of literary work.

• They express disillusionment with America and its promises.
• Their disappointment was fueled by the continued racial strife and outbursts of prejudice and violence.
• Main writers: Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright

During the 1920s, Harlem – an area in upper Manhattan, New York - became the national center of African American culture: theater, music, dance, and literature.

Harlem Renaissance

Modernist writers

• The Lost Generation: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Gertrude Stein...
• Novelists: J, Joyce, V. Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, J. Conrad, E.M. Forster, K.Mansfield

• Poets: T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Robert Frost, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Emily Dickinson

Due to the richness of the art and literature produced during this time, it is sometimes referred to as the Twentieth Century Renaissance.

Modernism underscored the abstract, unconventional, largely uncertain ethic brought on by rapidly changing technology and dramatic cultural shifts.

In conclusion, Modernism was a massive movement that included a broad range of authors, styles, and themes.

It was a revolt against the conservative values of Realism.