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MODERNISM

CHARACTERISTICS OF MODERNISM

• New thinking in science, psychology, and

economics replaced many ideas of the

Victorian period.

• With the huge losses of World War I,

conventional patriotism and romantic notions

of bravery and heroes were swept away.

• Disillusionment with WWI caused artists and

intellectuals to reject traditional aesthetics,

especially order and beauty.

GENERALIZATIONS ABOUT MODERNISM VERSUS THE PREVIOUS 1900 YEARS OF WESTERN CULTURE

Pre-Modern World Modern World

(Early 20th Century)

Ordered Chaotic

Meaningful Futile

Optimistic Pessimistic

Stable Fluctuating

Faith Loss of faith

Morality/Values Collapse of Morality/Values

Clear Sense of Identity Confused Sense of Identity and

Place in the World

19TH CENTURY THINKERS WHO INSPIRED MODERNISM IN LITERATURE

AND THE ARTS

• Charles Darwin: His ideas were applied to

social settings suggested that only the fittest

should survive became a controversial

aspect of political, social, and economic

thought.

• Karl Marx: His theories led to sweeping

changes in government and economic

systems. Artists begin to question the

aristocratic nature of previous art with

emphasis on lower classes (i.e. realism,

naturalism, etc).

19TH CENTURY THINKERS WHO INSPIRED MODERNISM IN LITERATURE

AND THE ARTS

• Sigmund Freud: His theory of the unconscious

inspired writers to explore irrational motivations and

perceptions of characters.

• Nietzsche: His ideas of the will to power inspired

artists to explore individualized and original artistic

expressions; especially his idea that psychological

drives, specifically the "will to power", were more

important than facts, or things. After World War II,

Existentialism will become the dominate

philosophical movement.

EVENTS THAT INSPIRED MODERNISM

• Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (c.

1915)

• World War I (1914-1918)

• The Russian Revolution (1917)

• Instability in Europe in the 1920s because of

a weakened Central Europe (i.e.

Prussia/Germany, Austro-Hungarian Empire,

Ottoman Empire, Russian Empire)

• Influenza epidemic (1918)

• Global Depression in the 1930s

ALBERT EINSTEIN: THE SPECIAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY

• Space and time are

relative; only the

speed of light is

constant.

• There is no such

thing as a favored

point of view.

• Color is relative.

• A universal present

moment does not

exist.

Clocks positioned farther away from the

mass of the earth run faster than clocks

closer to the earth.

MODERNISM EXAMPLES IN ART

• Origins in late 19th Century Painters who

because of the invention of photography

and later film departed from mimesis or

realism as a goal of the artist.

• Modernism develops into multiple schools of

artistic representation: Primitivism,

Impressionism, Dadaism, Cubism, Surrealism,

Abstract Expressionism, Futurism.

PRE-MODERNISM: IMPRESSIONISM

DADAISM

Duchamp

CUBISM

SURREALISM

Dali Magritte

Jackson Pollock

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

FUTURISM

Giacomo Balla Kandinsky

MODERNISM AND LITERARY THEMES /TECHNIQUES

Alienation of Individuals

Complicated Narrative Structures

Stream of Consciousness

Multiple Points of View

Fragmented Narratives

Absurd Storylines

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

• Stream of consciousness, then, does not

appear to itself as chopped up in bits ... it is

nothing joined; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream'

are the metaphors by which it is most

naturally described. In talking of it hereafter,

let's call it the stream of thought,

consciousness, or subjective life.

--William James (1890)

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

• In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode that seeks to portray an

individual's point of view by giving the written

equivalent of the character's thought processes, either in a loose interior monologue

(see below), or in connection to his or her

actions. Stream-of-consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior

monologue and is characterized by associative

leaps in thought and lack of punctuation.

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS EXAMPLE

• frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling the strength those engines have in them like big giants and the water rolling all over and out of them all sides like the end of Loves old sweeeetsonnnng the poor men that have to be out all the night from their wives and families in those roasting engines stifling it was today Im glad I burned the half of those old Freemans and Photo Bits leaving things like that lying about hes getting very careless and threw the rest of them up in the W C 111 get him to cut them tomorrow for me instead of having them there for the next year to get a few pence for them have him asking wheres last Januarys paper and all those old overcoats I bundled out of the hall making the place hotter than it is that rain was lovely and refreshing just after my beauty sleep I thought it was going to get like Gibraltar . . . . .

James Joyce Ulysses (1922)

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

MULTIPLE POINTS OF VIEW EXAMPLE

• For example, William Faulkner’s As I Lay

Dying (1928) is told from 15 different

narrators, or his Sound and the Fury (1930)

has 4 narrators.

• James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) has 18 different

chapters, each told from a different point of

view, and in a different narrative style.

FRAGMENTED NARRATION EXAMPLE

“I love new clothes, I love new clothes, I love .”

“So essential when there was under-production; but in an age of machines and the fixation of nitrogen-positively a crime against society.”

“Henry Foster gave it me.”

“All crosses had their tops cut and became T’s. There was also a thing called God.”

“It’s real morocco-surrogate.”

“We have the World State now. And Ford’s Day celebrations, and Community Sings, and Solidarity Services.”

“Ford, how I hate them!” Bernard Marx was thinking.

“There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.”

“Like meat, like so much meat.”

“There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality.”

---from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932)

ABSURD STORYLINE EXAMPLE

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked. --Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915)