Modernism &
Modernist Literature
ASL ~ Literature in English
Modernism ~ Introduction
◼ A trend of thought that affirms the power of human
beings to create, improve, and reshape their
environment
◼ With the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and
practical experimentation
◼ Progressive and optimistic
◼ Political, cultural and artistic movements rooted in
the changes in Western society
◼ At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th
century
Modernism ~ Introduction
◼ A series of reforming cultural movements in art
and architecture, music, literature and the applied
arts emerged in the three decades before 1914
◼ Encouraged the re-examination of every aspect of
existence (e.g. commerce / philosophy)
◼ Goal: finding which was "holding back" progress, +
replacing it with new, progressive and better ways
of reaching the same end
◼ New realities of the industrial and mechanized age:
permanent and imminent
◼ World view: the new = the good, the true and the
beautiful
Modernism ~ Introduction
◼ Rebelled against nineteenth century
academic and historicist traditions
◼ “Traditional" forms of art, architecture,
literature, religious faith, social organization
and daily life: outdated
Thinkers of the Time
◼ The most disruptive thinkers:
❑ Charles Darwin (Biology)
❑ Karl Marx (Political Science)
❑ Sigmund Freud (Psychology)
◼ Darwin:
❑ Theory of evolution by natural selection
❑ “Survival of the fittest”
❑ Notion: Human beings were driven by the same impulses as
"lower animals"
❑ Undermining
◼ Religious certainty of the general public
◼ Sense of human uniqueness of the intelligentsia
◼ Ennobling spirituality
Thinkers of the Time
◼ Karl Marx:
❑ Problems with the economic order were not transient, the
result of specific wrong doers or temporary conditions
❑ Fundamentally contradictions within the "capitalist" system
◼ Sigmund Freud:
❑ Human mind: a basic and fundamental structure
❑ Subjective experience: based on the interplay of the parts
of the mind
❑ All subjective reality: based on the play of basic drives and
instincts, through which the outside world was perceived
❑ A break with the past: external and absolute reality could
impress itself on an individual
Thoughts of the Time
◼ Impressionism:
❑ A school of painting
❑ Focus: work done outdoors
❑ Human beings do not see objects, but instead see light
itself
◼ Symbolism:
❑ Language as expressly symbolic in its nature
❑ Portrayal of patriotism
❑ Poetry and writing should follow connections that the sheer
sound and texture of the words create
❑ Representative writer: The poet Stéphane Mallarmé
Modernist Literature
◼ The literary form of Modernism ❑ Short stories and Novels:
and especially High ◼ James Joyce
modernism ◼ William Faulkner
◼ Different from Modern ◼ Ernest Hemingway
literature: history of the modern
❑ The Old Man and the
novel and modern poetry as
Sea
one
◼ Franz Kafka
◼ At its height from 1900 to 1940
◼ Joseph Conrad
◼ Authors:
❑ The Heart of Darkness
❑ Poems:
◼ Virginia Woolf
◼ T. S. Eliot
◼ F. Scott Fitzgerald
❑ The Waste Land
❑ The Great Gatsby
◼ Robert Frost
◼ D.H. Lawrence
◼ W.B. Yeats
◼ Katherine Mansfield
◼ Ezra Pound
Modernist Literature ~ Overview
◼ Move from the bonds of Realist literature
◼ Introduce concepts such as disjointed timelines
◼ Distinguished by emancipatory metanarrative
❑ A comprehensive explanation of historical experience or
knowledge
❑ An explanation for everything that happens in a society
◼ Move away from Romanticism
◼ Venture into subject matter that is traditionally
mundane (Example: ..\Handouts\The Love Song of
J_Alfred Prufrock.doc by T.S. Eliot)
Stylistic Features of
Modernist Literature
◼ Marked pessimism: a clear rejection of the
optimism apparent in Victorian literature
◼ Common motif in Modernist fiction: an
alienated individual (a dysfunctional individual)
trying in vain to make sense of a
predominantly urban and fragmented society
◼ Absence of a central, heroic figure
◼ Collapsing narrative and narrator into a
collection of disjointed fragments and
overlapping voices
Stylistic Features of
Modernist Literature
◼ Concern for larger factors such as social or
historical change
◼ Demonstrated in "stream of consciousness"
writing
◼ Examples:
❑ Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway
❑ James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man + Ulysses
◼ A reaction to the emergence of city life as a
central force in society
Formal Characteristics of
Modernist Literature
◼ Open Form
◼ Discontinuous narrative
◼ Juxtaposition
❑ Two unlike things are put next to one another
❑ A quality of being unexpected
❑ To compare/contrast the two, to show similarities or differences
❑ Example: A teacup and its saucer are expected
◼ Classical allusions
❑ A figure of speech
❑ Making a reference to or representation of, a place, event, literary
work, myth, or work of art,
❑ Directly or by implication
❑ Left to the reader or hearer to make the connection
Formal Characteristics of
Modernist Literature
◼ Borrowings from other cultures and
languages
◼ Unconventional use of metaphor
◼ Fragmentation
◼ Multiple narrative points of view (parallax)
Formal Characteristics of
Modernist Literature
◼ Free Verse
❑ Vers libre
❑ Styles of poetry that are not written using strict meter or
rhyme
❑ Still recognizable as 'poetry' by virtue of complex patterns
of one sort or another that readers will peive to be part of a
coherent whole
◼ Intertextuality
❑ Coined by poststructuralist Julia Kristeva in 1966
❑ Shaping texts' meanings by other texts
❑ Author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text
❑ Reader’s referencing of one text in reading another
Formal Characteristics of
Modernist Literature
❑ Metanarrative
◼ Sometimes master- or grand narrative
◼ A global or totalizing cultural narrative schema
◼ Ordering and explaining knowledge and experience
◼ The prefix “meta” = "beyond" [about]
◼ A narrative = a story
◼ A story about a story
◼ Encompassing and explaining other 'little stories' within
totalizing schemas
Thematic Characteristics of
Modernist Literature
◼ Breakdown of social norms and cultural
sureties
◼ Dislocation of meaning and sense from its
normal context
◼ Valorization of the despairing individual in the
face of an unmanageable future
◼ Rejection of history and the substitution of a
mythical past, borrowed without chronology
Thematic Characteristics of
Modernist Literature
◼ Product of the metropolis, of cities and urbanscapes
◼ Overwhelming technological changes of the 20th
Century
◼ Disillusionment
❑ A feeling arising from the discovery
❑ Something is not what it was anticipated to be
❑ More severe and traumatic than common disappointment
❑ Especially when a belief central to one's identity is shown
to be false
Thematic Characteristics of
Modernist Literature
◼ Stream of consciousness
❑ A literary technique
❑ Portraying an individual's point of view
❑ By giving the written equivalent of the character's thought processes:
◼ Either in a loose internal interior monologue
◼ Or in connection to his or her sensory reactions to external
ocurrences
❑ A special form of interior monologue
❑ Characterized by:
◼ Associative (and at times dissociative) leaps in syntax and
punctuation
◼ Making the prose difficult to follow
◼ Tracing a character's fragmentary thoughts and sensory feelings
❑ Distinguished from dramatic monologue:
◼ The speaker is addressing an audience or a third person
◼ Used chiefly in poetry or drama
Thematic Characteristics of
Modernist Literature
◼ Stream of consciousness (Continued)
❑ A fictional device: Speaker’s thought processes depicted as
overheard in the mind (or addressed to oneself)
❑ Examples:
◼ Ovid: Metamorphoses (Ancient Rome)
◼ Sir Thomas Browne: The Garden of Cyrus (1658)
❑ Rapid, unconnected association of objects
❑ Geometrical shapes
❑ Numerology
◼ Gyula Krúdy: The Adventures of Sindbad
◼ Tolstoy: Anna Karenina (1877)
Make sure you pull yourself
together for the assignments!
