MODERNISM

INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
The literary movement known as Modernism represents the most comprehensive
response to the modern era in English and American literature.
As has been previously said, it was a movement which emerged from the Modern
era, and is thus appropriately named after it.
As a term, it is a collective reference to the new literary perspectives, styles, and
approaches to writing which characterized the period.
These innovations were as a result of the revolutionary changes in outlook and
vision which happened in the wake of very disruptive social, political and
economic changes in England and the United States.
Modernism: Definitions
From [Link]
Modernism, in the fine arts, a break with the past and the concurrent search for
new forms of expression. Modernism fostered a period of experimentation in the
arts from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, particularly in the years following
World War I.
In an era characterized by industrialization, the nearly global adoption of
capitalism, rapid social change, and advances in science and the social sciences
(e.g., Freudian theory), Modernists felt a growing alienation incompatible with
Victorian morality, optimism, and convention. New ideas in psychology,
philosophy, and political theory kindled a search for new modes of expression.
Literary Modernism
From [Link] (cotd.)
The Modernist impulse is fueled in various literatures by industrialization and
urbanization and by the search for an authentic response to a much-changed
world. Although prewar works by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and other writers
are considered Modernist, Modernism as a literary movement is typically
associated with the period after World War I.
The enormity of the war had undermined humankind’s faith in the foundations of
Western society and culture, and postwar Modernist literature reflected a sense
of disillusionment and fragmentation.
Eliot and other Modernist
Poets
From [Link] (cotd.)
A primary theme of T.S. Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land (1922), a seminal
Modernist work, is the search for redemption and renewal in a sterile and
spiritually empty landscape. With its fragmentary images and obscure allusions,
the poem is typical of Modernism in requiring the reader to take an active role in
interpreting the text.
Eliot’s was not the dominant voice among Modernist poets. In the United States
Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg evocatively described the regions—New England
and the Midwest, respectively—in which they lived.
Harlem Renaissance and
U.S Poets
From [Link] (cotd.)
The Harlem Renaissance produced a rich coterie of poets, among them Countee
Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Alice Dunbar Nelson.
Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912 and made it the most
important organ for poetry not just in the United States but for the English-
speaking world.
During the 1920s Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, and E.E. Cummings
expressed a spirit of revolution and experimentation in their poetry.
Disillusionment in US
Modernism
From [Link] (cotd.)
A sense of disillusionment and loss pervades much American Modernist fiction.
That sense may be centred on specific individuals, or it may be directed toward
American society or toward civilization generally. It may generate a nihilistic,
destructive impulse, or it may express hope at the prospect of change.
F. Scott Fitzgerald skewered the American Dream in The Great Gatsby (1925),
Richard Wright exposed and attacked American racism in Native Son (1940), Zora
Neale Hurston told the story of a Black woman’s three marriages in Their Eyes
Were Watching God (1937), and Ernest Hemingway’s early novels The Sun Also
Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) articulated the disillusionment of the
Lost Generation.
Other US Modernist
Writers
From [Link] (cotd.)
Meanwhile, Willa Cather told hopeful stories of the American frontier, set mostly
on the Great Plains, in O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918), John Steinbeck
depicted the difficult lives of migrant workers in Of Mice and Men (1937) and The
Grapes of Wrath (1939), and William Faulkner used stream-of-consciousness
monologues and other formal techniques to break from past literary practice in
The Sound and the Fury (1929).
Characteristics of
Modernism
From [Link]
Individualism
In Modernist literature, the individual is more interesting than society.
Specifically, modernist writers were fascinated with how the individual adapted to
the changing world. In some cases, the individual triumphed over obstacles.
For the most part, Modernist literature featured characters who just kept their
heads above water. Writers presented the world or society as a challenge to the
integrity of their characters. Ernest Hemingway is especially remembered for
vivid characters who accepted their circumstances at face value and persevered.
Characteristics 2
From [Link] (cotd.)
Experimentation
Modernist writers broke free of old forms and techniques. Poets abandoned traditional rhyme
schemes and wrote in free verse. Novelists defied all expectations. Writers mixed images
from the past with modern languages and themes, creating a collage of styles. The inner
workings of consciousness were a common subject for modernists.
This dominant preoccupation led to a form of narration called stream of consciousness
writing, where the point of view of the novel meanders in a pattern resembling human
thought.
Authors James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, along with poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, are well
known for their experimental Modernist works.
Characteristics 3
From [Link] (cotd.)
Absurdity
The carnage of two World Wars profoundly affected writers of the period. Several great
English poets died or were wounded in WWI. At the same time, global capitalism was
reorganizing society at every level. For many writers, the world was becoming a more
absurd place every day.
The mysteriousness of life was being lost in the rush of daily life. The senseless violence
of WWII was yet more evidence that humanity had lost its way. Modernist authors
depicted this absurdity in their works. Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," in which a
traveling salesman is transformed into an insect-like creature, is an example of modern
absurdism.
Characteristics 4
From [Link] (cotd.)
Symbolism
The Modernist writers infused objects, people, places and events with significant
meanings. They imagined a reality with multiple layers, many of them hidden or in a sort
of code. The idea of a poem as a riddle to be cracked had its beginnings in the Modernist
period.
Symbolism was not a new concept in literature, but the Modernists' particular use of
symbols was an innovation. They left much more to the reader's imagination than earlier
writers, leading to open-ended narratives with multiple interpretations. For example,
James Joyce's Ulysses incorporates distinctive, open-ended symbols in each chapter.
Characteristics 5
From [Link] (cotd.)
Formalism
Writers of the Modernist period saw literature more as a craft than a flowering of
creativity. They believed that poems and novels were constructed from smaller
parts instead of the organic, internal process that earlier generations had
described.
The idea of literature as craft fed the Modernists' desire for creativity and
originality. Modernist poetry often includes foreign languages, dense vocabulary
and invented words. The poet e.e. cummings abandoned all structure and spread
his words all across the page.
Conclusion
It will be seen that literary Modernism in its basic essence reflected the desire of
English and American writers to respond to a changed world in new ways, ways
that had never been used in English and American literature before.
The unique problems of the modern era had given rise to different, markedly less-
optimistic visions of the world and new ways of portraying those problems.
As we shall see, the writers whose works we shall be examining tackle a variety of
quintessentially modern issues in ways which demonstrate both a keen
awareness of the problems of modern life as well as an awareness that,
ultimately, there could be no lasting solutions to them.