20th century and after

20th century and after

First mass produced car

Einstein's theory of relativity

Freud's Interpretation of Dreams

World War II

World War I

Max Planck's quantum theory

Women's right to vote

Independence of India

20th century events

1900

1900

1939

1913

1905

1947

1914

1918 / 1928

First mass produced car

Einstein's theory of relativity

Freud's Interpretation of Dreams

World War II

World War I

Max Planck's quantum theory

Women's right to vote

Independence of India

20th century events

Blind reaction task

Download the document. Compare both texts based on these criteria:

• Narrator (who is narrating and how?)
• Plot (what's happening or what is going to be told?)
• Structure: how is the text organized? Is it?
• Language: how is it? what does it evoke?

• Spread of electricity, proliferation of cinema and radio, development of pharmaceuticals
• Scientific revolution
• Role of women
• Postwar dissillusionment, postwar decolonization
• Dissolution of the Empire, ongoing search of identity
• Ireland's struggle for independence

Into modernism

• Rejection to Victorianism: notions of the artist and his duties. Alienation of the modern artist.
• Growth of public education and mass literate population.
• Rapid pace of social and technological change: wars, migrations, expansion of the cities, mixing of cultures.
• Emergence of powerful concepts in psychology, anthropology, philosophy and the visual arts.
• Rationality, self, personal development
• Culture, religion, myth
• Christianity (Nietzsche)

T.S. Eliot

Poetry

• Poetic revolution of the imagists: hard, clear, precise images.
• Influenced by the French impressionist, postimpressionist, and cubist painters' radical reexamination of the nature of reality.

• T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land), Ezra Pound
• William Butler Yeats
• The New Apocalypse movement
• W.H. Auden
• The Movement
• Philip Larkin
• Innovations in postcolonial writers
• Derek Walcott
• Wole Soyinka

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance. which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big that in what is commonly thought small.

Fiction

Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (1925-1932)

• High modernism through the 1920s
• Reaction against modernism in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s
• Period after the collapse of the British Empire (countercultural revolution of the 60s): assertion of various realisms: urban, proletarian, provincial English (e.g., northern), regional (e.g., Scottish and Irish), immigrant, postcolonial, feminist, gay

Three main subperiods

James Joyce Ulysses (1920)

Enter the character's minds, as if it were on their behalf.

Free indirect style

Some innovations

Interior flow of thought becomes the main modernist access to " character."

Stream of consciousness

Norton Anthology of British Literature, Volume II

They boldly ventured into this general shaking of belief in the novel's founding assumptions—that the world, things, and selves were knowable, that language was areliably revelatory instrument, that the author's story gave history meaning and moral shape, that narratives should fall into ethically instructive beginnings, middles, and endings.And so the modernist novel turned resolutely inward, its concern being now with consciousness—a flow of reflections, momentary impressions, disjunctive bits of recall and halfmemory, simultaneously revealing both the past and the way the past is repressed.

Samuel BeckettWaiting for Godot (1940)

Drama

Trends and types

• Realism and myth - influenced by Freud and Jung's works
• Women's portrayal and roles
• Political theatre and war
• Realism as a direct observation of human behaviour, social realism
• George Bernard Shaw
• Avant-garde theatre
• Absurdist, dadaist, surrealist, symbolist, expressionist
• Samuel Beckett

Post-colonial writing

• Wole Soyinka (Nobel Prize)
• Nadine Gordimer
• Derek Walcott
• J.M. Coetzee
• Salman Rushdie

Writers from Britain's former colonies published influential and innovative novels, plays, and poems, hybridizing their local traditions and varieties of English with those of the empire.

Does literature/art improve over time?

Some novelists

• Early period: Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad
• Henry James (USA)
• D.H. Lawrence
• Virginia Woolf
• James Joyce (IR)
• Katherine Mansfield (NZ)