MODERNISM
“On or about December 1910 human nature changed. All human relations shifted, and when
human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and
literature.”
Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennet and Mrs Brown (1924)
• “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves,
the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet
owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is
there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have
to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become
gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
Friedrich Nietzsche
PAUL KLEE’S PAINTING “ANGELUS NOVUS”
• “A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move
away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings
are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where
we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon
wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make
whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings
with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into
the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm
is what we call progress.”
• ― Walter Benjamin
Modernism
• Designates the broad literary and cultural movement that spanned all of the arts and even
spilled into politics and philosophy
• Scholars identify its genesis as being before 1860 and world war II generally considered to
mark an end of the movement’s height
• Used widely to identify new and distinctive features in the subjects, forms, concepts, and
styles of literature and other arts in the early decades of the 19th Century, but especially after
World War I (1914-18)
• The specific feature signified by “modernism” (or by the adjective modernist ) : involves a
deliberate and radical break with some of the traditional bases of Western art, but of
Western culture in general
• Important intellectual precursors of modernism: they questioned the certainties that
supported traditional modes of social organization, religion, and morality / traditional
ways of conceiving the human self-thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche(1844-1900), Karl
Marx, Sigmund Freud, and James G Frazer
• Beginning of Modernism; 1890s
• High Modernism; after the first World War
• 1922: appearance of monuments of modernist innovation such as James Joyce’s Ulyssess and T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”
• Viginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room
• War
• Shaken faith in moral basis, coherence, and durability of western civilaization
• Raised doubts about adequacy of traditional literray modes to represent the harsh and s
• T.S. Eliot wrote in a review of Ulysses in 1923 that the inherent mode of ordering a
literary work, which assumed a relatively coherent and stable socila order, could not
accord with the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary
history.
• New style/new form that would render contemporary disorder
• Contrasting it to a lost order and integration that had been based on religion and myths
of the cultural past
• “The Waste Land”(1922)-- replaced the standard syntactic flow of poetic language by fragmented
utterence
• Substituted for the traditional coherence of poetic structure a deliberate disclocation of parts, in
which very diverse components are related by connections that are left to the readers to discover
or invent.
• Finnegans Wake (1939) by James Joyce-- subvert the basic conventions of earlier prose fiction by
breaking up the narrative continuity, departing from the standard ways of representing characters,
and violating the traditonal syntax and coherence of narrative language by the use of Stream of
Conciousness and other innovative modes of narrative
• Automatic writing (writing that has been freed from control by the conscious, purposive
mind)--violating the norms of standrard English syntax and sentence structure.
• Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Virginia Woolf
• “Avant-garde”( a military metaphor : advance-guard); a small, self-conscious group of
artists and authors who deliberately undertake, in
Ezra Pound phrase, to “make it new”--- Social alienation, experimentation, Art for Art’s
Sake, Anti-art, Jazz
• Modernism-- Empphasis on impressionism and subjectivity
• How the individual perceives
• Move away from objectivity
• No fixed points of view
• No clear-cut moral positions
• Blurring of distinction between genres
• Fragmented forms/discontinuous narrative/collages
• Modernism:
• Rejected elaborate formal aesthetic in favour of minimalistic designs, spontaneity and
discovery
• Rjected rigid genre distinction
• Parody/playfulness
• Favoured ambiguity/ fragmentation
• Emaphsis on the decentred/dehumanised subjects
Modernism
• Fragmentation is tragic
• Laments the loss of unity
• Art can provide unity
• Rationality and order are important, and possible
• The dominant centre represents Order, the powerless periphery is Disorder
Postmodernism
• Celebrates fragmentation
• Unity, coherence is NOT possible
• Rationalty and order are neither possible nor important
• Questions the superiority of Order
