Modernism

## Definition

A **wide range** of experimental and avant-garde trends in literature and the arts in a variety of evolving forms, which dominated the European and American cultural landscape from the late 19th century to the 1950s.

## Background

### Historical Events

* World War I (1914-1918)
* Inventions and technological developments (photography, telephone, cars, electricity, planes, moving pictures)
* Suffragettes' movement (1928)
* Spread of literacy
* Ireland:
	+ Anglo-Irish Guerrilla War (1919-1921)
	+ Irish Free State (1922)
	+ Irish Civil War (1922-1923)
	+ Republic of Ireland (1937)
* Depression and unemployment: (1929 Wall Street Crash)
* Rise of Totalitarianisms (Franco, Mussolini, Hitler)
* World War II

### Influences

Important intellectual precursors who questioned the certainties that had supported traditional modes of social organization, religion, morality, and also traditional ways of conceiving the human self.

* **Charles Darwin** (1809 – 1882) On the *Origin of the Species* (1859) uprooted the traditional view of “man made in the image and likeness of God,” replacing it with one of man as the descendant of an ape.
* **Karl Marx** (1818 – 1883) *Capital: Critique of Political Economy* (1867): his view of the economic determinism that governed western history and culture directly challenged the idealist philosophy of its time.
* **Friedrich Nietzsche** (1844-1900): his declaration of “the death of God” (end of the 19th c.) summarized the dismissal of the very ground of the Hebraic/Christian tradition
* **James G. Frazer** (1854-1941): his *The Golden Bough* (1915) stressed the correspondence between central Christian tenets and pagan, often barbaric, myths and rituals.
* **Sigmund Freud** (1856-1939) his theory of the unconscious (beginnings of 20th c.) called into question the notion of rational free choice
* **Albert Einstein** (1879 – 1955) Theory of Relativity (beginnings of 20th c.): his discoveries changed the way we view space and time, and showed us that time is relative to an observer. He found that space and time were interwoven into a single continuum known as space-time; that means that events that occur at the same time for one observer could occur at different times for another.

Critics have decided that these thinkers prepared the society that was to come. (Mussetta)

## Features

* Rejection of 19th-century traditions
* Celebration of cosmopolitan lifestyle
* Challenge to the norms of the dominant burgeois culture
* Purpose: to shock and disturb the sensibilities of the conventional audience by adopting complex and difficult new forms and styles
* Problematization of the very idea of art and its tradition
* Determination to dispense with the past
* Profound sense of intellectual crisis and social alienation
* Concept of truth as fleeting, impermanent, intensely personal moment that the artist could strive to capture
* Exaltation of difficulty and elitism
* Belief in the crisis of twentieth-century civilization: the world's fall into chaos, decadence, or other dismal, yet dramatically exciting, straits
* Reliance on the discontent, the dispersed, the fragmented, the dislocated
* Reflection on the revolutionary character of modern life: its speed, confusion, and reckless, sensational moods
* Violation of the accepted conventions and properties, not only of art but of social discourse, to create ever-new artistic forms and styles and to introduce hitherto neglected, and sometimes forbidden, taboo subject matter
* Expression of a sense of urban cultural dislocation, along with an awareness of new anthropological and psychological theories
* Tendency towards ironic modes
* Preference for the aesthetically radical and symbolic, containing striking technical innovation

## Modernism in Literature

Modernist writers doubt the essential validity of reality as the term understood by realists and naturalists. For them, "the real is not so much the external incident in the life of the character as the internal mental processes that develop in reaction to this incident." (Heiney and Downs 86)
Some movements within the visual arts influenced Modernist literature:

* Impressionism: tried to portray the psychological impressions these objects and events make on characters, emphasizing the role of individual perception and exploring the nature of the conscious and unconscious mind.
* Surrealism: tried to liberate the subconscious, to see connectionss overlooked by the logical mind, to deny the supreme authority of rationality and so portray objects and events as they seem rather than as they are.
* Expressionism: tried to express the inner vision, the inner emotion, or the inner spiritual reality that seem more important than the external realitites of objects and events.

### Modernist Fiction

* Rejection of the accepted continuity of chronological development (non linear plots).
* Attempt of new ways of tracing the flow of characters' thoughts in their STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS styles.
* Departure from the standard ways of representing characters.
* Fostering of techniques of juxtaposition and multiple points of view, challenging the reader to reestablish a coherence of meaning from fragmentary forms.

### Modernist Poetry

* Rejection of traditional METER in favour of FREE VERSE
* Replacement of the logical exposition of thoughts with collages of fragmentary images and complex allusions.
* Tendency to replace the standard syntactic flow of poetic language by fragmented utterances.
* Substitution of the traditional coherence of poetic structure by deliberate dislocation of parts, in which very diverse components are related by connections that are left to the reader to discover, or invent.
* Rejection of the diction of the Georgian poets (taking inspiration from the countryside and nature, and respecting traditional generic conventions) in favor of a newly harsh and strange expression.

## Source

Mussetta, Mariana. “Modernism in Art and Literature.” Literature II, 15 June 2020, UNVM. Prezi presentation.