Modernism

Birth of a Century and WWI

 Key Concepts
Challenging old traditions Stories without chronological
order
Doubt Fragmentation
Use of gaps
Mistrust of Authority
Uncertainty about language
World War I Stream of consciousness

Psychology and the unconscious

New Narrative Techniques

Stories told from multiple points of view

Famous Modernist Authors
James Joyce

Edith Södergran

William Butler Yeats

Ernest Hemingway

Andre Breton

Gunnar Ekelöf

Hermann Hesse
 James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February
1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish
novelist, short story writer, poet, teacher, and
literary critic.

He contributed to the modernist avant-

garde movement and is regarded as one of the
most influential and important writers of the
20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses
(1922), a landmark work in which the
episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in
a variety of literary styles, most
famously stream of consciousness. Other well-
known works are the short-story
collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
and Finnegans Wake (1939).
 Edith Södergran
Edith Irene Södergran (4 April 1892 – 24 June 1923)
was a Swedish-speaking Finnish poet.

One of the first modernists within Swedish-language

literature, her influences came from French Symbolism,
German expressionism, and Russian futurism.

At the age of 24 she released her first collection of

poetry entitled Dikter ("Poems"). Södergran died at the
age of 31, having contracted tuberculosis as a
teenager. She did not live to experience the worldwide
appreciation of her poetry, which has influenced many
lyrical poets. Södergran is considered to have been one
of the greatest modern Swedish-language poets, and
her work continues to influence Swedish-language
poetry and musical lyrics, for example, in the works
of Mare Kandre, Gunnar Harding, Eva
Runefelt and Eva Dahlgren
 If I had a big garden
I would invite all my brothers and sisters there.
Each one would bring a large treasure.
We own nothing, thus we could become one
people.
We shall build bars around our garden
letting no sound from the world reach us.
Out of our silent garden
we shall bring the world a new life.
 W.B Yeats
William Butler Yeats[a] (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939)
was an Irish poet, dramatist, prose writer and one of the
foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of the Irish
literary establishment, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre,
and in his later years served two terms as a Senator of
the Irish Free State.

Yeats was born in Sandymount, Ireland, and educated there

and in London. He was a Protestant and member of
the Anglo-Irish community. He studied poetry from an early
age, when he became fascinated by Irish legends and
the occult. These topics feature in the first phase of his work,
which lasted roughly until the turn of the 20th century. His
earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and its slow-
paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund
Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the poets of the Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood. From 1900, his poetry grew more
physical and realistic. He largely renounced the
transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained
preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with
cyclical theories of life. In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel
Prize in Literature.
 Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2,
1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer,
journalist, and sportsman. His economical and
understated style—which he termed the iceberg
theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century
fiction, while his adventurous lifestyle and his
public image brought him admiration from later
generations.

Hemingway produced most of his work between the

mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and he was awarded
the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published
seven novels, six short-story collections, and two
nonfiction works. Three of his novels, four short-
story collections, and three nonfiction works were
published posthumously. Many of his works are
considered classics of American literature.
 Andre Breton
André Robert Breton (18 February 1896 – 28
September 1966) was a French writer and poet.
He is known best as the co-founder, leader,
principal theorist and chief apologist
of surrealism. His writings include the
first Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du
surréalisme) of 1924, in which he defined
surrealism as "pure psychic automatism".

Along with his role as leader of the surrealist

movement he is the author of celebrated books
such as Nadja and L'Amour fou. Those
activities combined with his critical and
theoretical work for writing and the plastic arts,
made André Breton a major figure in twentieth-
century French art and literature.
 Surrealism
Surrealism was a cultural movement which developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I and was
largely influenced by Dada. The movement is best known for its visual artworks and writings and
the juxtaposition of distant realities to activate the unconscious mind through the imagery. Artists painted
unnerving, illogical scenes, sometimes with photographic precision, creating strange creatures from everyday
objects, and developing painting techniques that allowed the unconscious to express itself. Its aim was,
according to leader André Breton, to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into
an absolute reality, a super-reality", or surreality.

Works of surrealism feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however,
many surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and
foremost, with the works themselves being an artifact. Leader Breton was explicit in his assertion that
Surrealism was, above all, a revolutionary movement. At the time, the movement was associated with political
causes such as communism and anarchism.

The term "Surrealism" is said to have been coined by Guillaume Apollinaire as early as 1917. However, the
Surrealist movement was not officially established until October 15, 1924, when the French poet and
critic André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto in Paris. The most important center of the movement
was Paris, France. From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe, impacting the visual arts,
literature, film, and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice,
philosophy, and social theory.
 Example of Surrealism
"The shining worm, to me: 'You, take a stone and kill her.' 'Why?' I asked. And it said to me: 'Beware,
look to your safety, for you are the weaker and I the stronger. Her name is Prostitution.' With tears in
my eyes and my heart full of rage, I felt an unknown strength rising within me. I took hold of a huge
stone; after many attempts, I managed to lift it as far as my chest. Then, with my arms, I put it on my
shoulders. I climbed the mountain until I reached the top: from there, I hurled the stone on to the
shining worm, crushing it.

— Maldoror, Part I, Chapter 7

The swimmer is now in the presence of the female shark he has saved. They look into each other's eyes
for some minutes, each astonished to find such ferocity in the other's eyes. They swim around keeping
each other in sight, and each one saying to himself: 'I have been mistaken; here is one more evil than
I.' Then by common accord they glide towards one another underwater, the female shark using its fins,
Maldoror cleaving the waves with his arms; and they hold their breath in deep veneration, each one
wishing to gaze for the first time upon the other, his living portrait. When they are three yards apart
they suddenly and spontaneously fall upon one another like two lovers and embrace with dignity and
gratitude, clasping each other as tenderly as brother and sister. Carnal desire follows this
demonstration of friendship.

— Maldoror, Part II, Chapter 13

 Gunnar Ekelöf
Bengt Gunnar Ekelöf (15 September 1907, Stockholm – 16
March 1968, Sigtuna) was a Swedish poet and writer. He
was a member of the Swedish Academy from 1958 and was
awarded an honorary doctorate in philosophy by Uppsala
University in 1958. He won a number of prizes for his
poetry.

Gunnar Ekelöf has been called Sweden's

first surrealist poet. He made his debut with the
collection sent på jorden ("late on earth") in 1932, written
during an extended stay in Paris in 1929–1930

Ekelöf moved towards romanticism and received better

reviews for his second poetry collection, Dedikation (1934).
Both the volumes are influenced by surrealism and show a
violent, at times feverish torrent of images, deliberate
breakdown of ordered syntax and traditional poetic
language and a defiant spirit bordering on anarchism ("cut
your belly cut your belly and don't think of any tomorrow"
runs the black humorous refrain of a poem called "fanfare"
in sent på jorden; a collection that eschews capital letters).
 Hermann Hesse
Hermann Karl Hesse (German: July 1877
– 9 August 1962) was a German-born
Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. His best-
known works
include Demian, Steppenwolf, Siddhartha,
and The Glass Bead Game, each of which
explores an individual's search
for authenticity, self-knowledge
and spirituality. In 1946, he received
the Nobel Prize in Literature.

His books gained another level of

popularity from the mid 60s in the counter
culture movements. Bands like
Steppenwolf, and Santana’s Abraxas
reflect this.
 Steppenwolf
The book is presented as a manuscript written by its protagonist, a middle-aged man named Harry Haller,
who leaves it to a chance acquaintance, the nephew of his landlady. The acquaintance adds a short preface of
his own and then has the manuscript published. The title of this "real" book-in-the-book is Harry Haller's
Records (For Madmen Only).

As the story begins, the hero is beset by reflections on his being ill-suited for the world of everyday, regular
people, specifically for frivolous bourgeois society. In his aimless wanderings about the city he encounters a
person carrying an advertisement for a magic theatre who gives him a small book, Treatise on the
Steppenwolf. This treatise, cited in full in the novel's text as Harry reads it, addresses Harry by name and
strikes him as describing himself uncannily. It is a discourse on a man who believes himself to be of two
natures: one high, the spiritual nature of man; the other is low and animalistic, a "wolf of the steppes". This
man is entangled in an irresolvable struggle, never content with either nature because he cannot see beyond
this self-made concept. The pamphlet gives an explanation of the multifaceted and indefinable nature of every
man's soul, but Harry is either unable or unwilling to recognize this. It also discusses his suicidal intentions,
describing him as one of the "suicides": people who, deep down, knew they would take their own life one day.
But to counter that, it hails his potential to be great, to be one of the "Immortals".

By chance, Harry encounters the man who gave him the book, just as the man has attended a funeral. He
inquires about the magic theater, to which the man replies, "Not for everybody." When Harry presses further
for information, the man recommends him to a local dance hall, much to Harry's disappointment.
 Steppenwolf
Trying to postpone returning home, where he fears all that awaits him is his own suicide, Harry walks
aimlessly around the town for most of the night, finally stopping to rest at the dance hall where the man had
sent him earlier. He happens upon a young woman, Hermine, who quickly recognizes his desperation. They
talk at length; Hermine alternately mocks Harry's self-pity and indulges him in his explanations regarding
his view of life, to his astonished relief. Hermine promises a second meeting, and provides Harry with a
reason to live (or at least a substantial excuse to continue living) that he eagerly embraces.

During the next few weeks, Hermine introduces Harry to the indulgences of what he calls the "bourgeois".
She teaches Harry to dance, finds him a lover (Maria) and, more importantly, forces him to accept these as
legitimate and worthy aspects of a full life.

Hermine also introduces Harry to a mysterious saxophonist named Pablo, who appears to be the very
opposite of what Harry considers a serious, thoughtful man. After attending a lavish masquerade ball,
Pablo brings Harry to his metaphorical "magic theatre", where the concerns and notions that plagued his
soul disintegrate as he interacts with the ethereal and phantasmal. The Magic Theatre is a place where he
experiences the fantasies that exist in his mind. The Theater is described as a long horseshoe-shaped
corridor with a mirror on one side and a great number of doors on the other. Harry enters five of these
labeled doors, each of which symbolizes a fraction of his life.