MODERNISM

The Age of Unbelief

“On or about December 1910, human
character changed.”
Virginia Woolf in “Mr. Bennet and Mrs.
Brown”
Definition
• The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms
and Literary Theory (2004) defines literary
modernism as:
“a breaking away from established rules,
traditions and conventions which reveals fresh
ways of looking at man’s position and function in
the universe and many ( in some cases
remarkable) experiments in form and style. It is
particularly concerned with language and how to
use it (representationally or otherwise) and with
writing itself.”
Modernism is synonymous with:
A rejection of the past
A rejection of
the past
And an
embrace of
aesthetic
innovation
With diverse
movements
in art…
photography
architecture…
and literature.
 It is synonymous with the
opening four decades of the
Twentieth century.
1910
1920
1930
1940
Modernism emerged as a complex
response across continents to a
changing world.
Modernism
“an art of a rapidly modernising
world, a world of rapid industrial
development, advanced
technology, unrbanisation,
secularisation and mass forms
of social life”
and also…
“ the art of a world from which many
traditional certainties had departed
and a certain sort of Victorian
confidence not only in the onward
progress of mankind but in the very
solidity and visibility of reality itself
has evaporated.”
(Bradbury and McFarlane,
Modernism, 1976)
 Modernism can be seen as…
A vigorous creative impulse to
“make it new”
 Or…
As a literature of crisis and dislocation,
desperately insisting on the power of art to
give shape to a world that has lost all
order and stability.
Leading intellectuals
challenged existing notions
of what it is to be human
and the nature of the world
around us. It is said
modernism was made
possible by their ideas being
‘in the air’.
Karl Marx
Freud
Charles Darwin
Einstein
 According to Virginia Woolf
The new pictures of existence that were
shaped by the works of these great
thinkers prompted “monstrous, hybrid,
unmanageable emotions” .
“That the age of earth is 3,000,000,000
years; that human life lasts but a second; that
the capacity of the human mind is
nevertheless boundless; that life is infinitely
beautiful but repulsive; that one’s fellow
creatures are adorable but disgusting; that
science and religion between them have
destroyed belief; that all bonds of union are
broken, yet some control must exist – it is in
this atmosphere of doubt and conflict that
writers have now to create.”
Virginia Woolf, Poetry, Fiction and the Future
These ideas were both
stimulating and problematic
and called for new forms of
imaginative representation.
The works of poets such as
T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound
and novelists such as James Joyce
and Virginia Woolf characterised
this period.
Modernist writing is associated with
the literary avant garde
• Works which are experimental in form and
language
• Radical in their aesthetics; self-consciously
reflexive
• Reflective of a non-chronological or non-linear
understanding of time favouring instead a spatial
or rhythmic structure
• Skeptical about the idea of a
centered human subject
• Interested in questioning the
uncertainty of reality.
 Representative features of
modernism include:
• Focusing on the micro rather than macrocosm: a
concern with the individual over society
• A concern with self-referentiality: producing art
that was about itself
• A movement away from Victorian harmony to the
disjointed
• A tendency towards feelings of apocalypse and
despair: a focus on social, spiritual or personal
collapse; history subsumed under mythology
and symbolism
 Modernist stylistics are identified
as:
• A solipsistic mental landscape
• An unreliable narrator
• Psychological and linguistic repetition
• An obsession with language
• A quest(ioning) towards
‘reality’
• Uncertainty in a
godless universe
 New stylistic developments
• Interior monologues
• Stream of consciousness
• Free indirect discourse
• Defamiliarisation
• irresolution
Ernest Hemingway's, The Sun Also Rises (1926), has
been considered the essential prose of the Lost
Generation. Its theme of detachment and alienation
reflected the attitudes of its time. The term, "Lost
Generation" was originally coined in a conversation by
Gertrude Stein, a member of the expatriates literary
circle in 1920's Paris. While spontaneous and
meaningless when first spoken, the expression would
unwittingly go on to become the label for the expatriates
from the United States and England who had rejected
traditional American and British conventions for the
more appealing lifestyle of Left Bank, Paris. Many
Americans in Paris became bohemian writers and
artists, their days spent lounging in cafes.