Modernism1890-1945

Modernism

• An early twentieth-century movement in the arts responding to the fragmented world created by mass society and industrialism

Characteristics

• A new objectivity or impersonality, in which a work is built from images and allusions, not direct statements of thoughts and feelings

• A rejection of realistic depiction of life in favor of the use of images for the artistic effect

• Critical attention to the spiritual troubles of modern life

Commitment to Creating

• Perhaps the most important artistic movement of the 20th Century

• Many modernists used images as symbols, leading to indirect, evocative work

• Often presented experiences in fragments, rather than a coherent whole

Modernism in Poetry

• Stressed the use of precise visual images and unadorned, concise language

• William Butler Yeats was a leading poet during the Modernism using directness and drama

• T.S. Eliot – preeminent Modernist poet– American who lived in England– Wrote about the despair after WWI , while

linking the present with the past

Edwardian Age

• Named after King Edward VII, this period lasted from 1901-1910

• A period of drastic change• Changes that were undermining the

customs and assumptions of the Victorian Age– Ranges from use of electricity, to protests on

woman’s rights

Focus on Internal Conflict

• A struggle that takes place in a character's mind is called internal conflict. For example, a character may have to decide between right and wrong or between two solutions to a problem. Sometimes, a character must deal with his or her own mixed feelings or emotions.– Man against himself

• Joseph Conrad – Lord Jim

Importance of Internal Conflict

• In short stories, there is usually one major conflict. In longer stories, there could be several conflicts.

• Conflict adds excitement and suspense to a story. The conflict usually becomes clear to the beginning of a story. As the plot unfolds, the reader starts to wonder what will happen next and how the characters will handle the situation.

• The excitement usually builds to a high point, or climax.

Stream of Consciousness

• The technique of immersing readers in the associational, disjointed flow of one or more characters’ thoughts

• The plot line may weave in and out of time and place, carrying the reader through the life span of a character or further along a timeline to incorporate the lives (and thoughts) of characters from other time periods

• James Joyce was a pioneer in this type of writing

Images of Modernism

• Modernism can be thought of as a complex response to what photographs imply

• Ezra Pound (American) and T.S. Eliot wrote poetry as if they were taking snapshots of the world and then cutting and pasting them into collages

• Reliance on images to encapsulate a feeling or perspective

Images of Modernism

• Novelist Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, perfected techniques for conveying an individual’s moment-by-moment experience

• Her writing records what the moment looks like to the individual– What the world looks like depends on who is

looking

Short Story

• A brief work of fiction that usually features a plot with a distinct beginning, middle, and end

• Build up to a suspenseful climax with a dramatic twist at the end

Elements of the Short Story

• Plot• Conflict• Setting • Character• Theme• Point of View (see nest slide)

• Flashback: a scene that interrupts the sequence of events in a narrative to reveal events that occurred in the past

• Foreshadowing: clues hinting at events likely to occur later in the plot

Narrative Point of View• There are three types of narrative point of view in a

story. – 1st PPOV – main character is the

narrator….subjective narration based on POV of this main character.

– 3rd PPOV (limited) – external narrator (not a character in the story); connects with one main character and reveals only the thoughts and feelings of that character.

– 3rd PPOV (omniscient) – external narrator (not a character in the story); reveals the thoughts and feelings of all characters….all knowing

Elements of the Modern British Short Story

• Characters represent everyday people with everyday conflicts

• Conflicts tend to be internal and psychological• Many times the resolution of the conflict results in

characters experiencing a sudden, intuitive insight or perception into the reality or experience of a particular situation.

• “Epiphany”