MODERNISM PERIOD

DEFINITIONModernism is a cultural movement that generally includes the progressive art and architecture, music, literature and design which emerged in the decades before 1914. It was a movement of artists and designers who rebelled against late 19th century academic and historicist traditions, and embraced the new economic, social and political aspects of the emerging modern world.

CHARACTERISTICMarked by a strong and intentional break

with tradition. This break includes a strong reaction against established religious, political, and social views.

Belief that the world is created in the act of perceiving it; that is, the world is what we say it is.

There is no such thing as absolute truth. All things are relative.

No connection with history or institutions. Their experience is that of alienation, loss, and despair.

Championship of the individual and celebration of inner strength.

Life is unordered.Concerned with the sub-conscious.

FORMAL CHARACTERISTICSOpen FormFree verseDiscontinuous narrativeJuxtapositionIntertextualityClassical allusionsBorrowings from other cultures and languagesUnconventional use of metaphorMetanarrativeFragmentationMultiple narrative points of view (parallax)

Thematic characteristics

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

DisillusionmentRejection of history and the substitution of a

mythical past, borrowed without chronologyProduct of the metropolis, of cities and

urbanscapesStream of consciousnessOverwhelming technological changes of the

20th Century

AUTHORSENGLISH

VIRGINIA WOOLFEZRA POUNDRICHARD ALDINGTON

AMERICANKATHERINE ANNE

PORTERWALLACE STEVENSE.E CUMMINGS

VIRGINIA WOOLF“Let us begin by clearing up the old confusion between the man who loves learning and the man who loves reading, and point out that there is no connection whatever between the two. A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what it suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.”

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), British novelist, critic. "Hours in a Library," vol. 2, Essays, Harcourt Brace (1987)

AMERICANIn American Literature, the group of writers and thinkers known as the Lost Generation has become synonymous with Modernism. In the wake of the First World War, several American artists chose to live abroad as they pursued their creative impulses. These included the intellectual Gertrude Stein, the novelists Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the painter Waldo Pierce, among others. The term itself refers to the spiritual and existential hangover left by four years of unimaginably destructive warfare. The artists of the Lost Generation struggled to find some meaning in the world in the wake of chaos.

AMERICANAs with much of Modernist literature, this was achieved by turning the mind’s eye inward and attempting to record the workings of consciousness. For Hemingway, this meant the abandonment of all ornamental language. His novels are famous for their extremely spare, blunt, simple sentences and emotions that play out right on the surface of things. There is an irony to this bluntness, however, as his characters often have hidden agendas, hidden sometimes even from themselves, which serve to guide their actions. The Lost Generation, like other “High Modernists,” gave up on the idea that anything was truly knowable. All truth became relative, conditional, and in flux. The War demonstrated that no guiding spirit rules the events of the world, and that absolute destruction was kept in check by only the tiniest of margins.

ENGLISH• Modernist Period in English literature was

first and foremost a visceral reaction against the Victorian culture and aesthetic, which had prevailed for most of the nineteenth century. Indeed, a break with traditions is one of the fundamental constants of the Modernist stance. Intellectuals and artists at the turn of the twentieth century believed the previous generation’s way of doing things was a cultural dead end. They could foresee that world events were spiraling into unknown territory. The stability and quietude of Victorian civilization were rapidly becoming a thing of the past. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria was essentially the triggering event of the First World War, a conflict which swept away all preconceived notions about the nature of so-called modern warfare.