MODERNISMc. 1890

OVERVIEW

There have been revolutions in the history of art today. There is a revolution with every new generation, and periodically, every century or so, we get a wider or deeper change of sensibility which is recognized as a period [….] But I do think we can already discern a difference in kind in the contemporary revolution: it is not so much a revolution, which implies a turning over, even a turning back, but rather a break-up, a devolution, some would say a dissolution. Its character is catastrophic.

Herbert Read

Jacques-Louis David

William Blake

Gustave Courbet

Pablo Picasso

Salvador Dali

LET’S START AT THE “BEGINNING”…

Enlightenment ideals/values: secular rationality promoting empiricism, material

progress & increasing democratization

versus

Romantic perception (via Kant): scientific rationality as a practical mode of

understanding bound to appearances; artistic powers capable of articulating

dynamic energies of spirit not bound to representation

LET’S START AT THE “BEGINNING”…

BUT no artist could sufficiently break from “reality,” no matter his/her genius

thus—

Flaubert and Baudelaire call for overt irony and self-reflexivity. These traits would

emphasize the chasm between the productive mind and passive nature,

bringing to light the paradox of alienation and free desires.

AN OVERVIEW1 Modernism has become a collective term for

several writers and smaller movements—the Lost Generation, the Dadaists, the Imagists, the Vorticists, the Objectivists, the Surrealists—some of which were antagonistic towards one another

2 A number of critics would say that it began in the 1860s and ended in the 1950s, and its peak was from 1910s to the 1920s

3 “The most acclaimed instances of high modernism used ironic strategies to focus attention on the work’s own syntactic intensity to demonstrate the significance of certain powers for engaging and interpreting experience”

CONTEXT

[Modernism] is the one art that responds to the scenario of chaos. It is the consequent on Heisenberg’s ‘Uncertainty principle,’ of the destruction of civilization and reason in the First World War, of the world changed and reinterpreted by Marx, Freud and Darwin, of capitalism and constant industrial acceleration, of existential exposure to meaninglessness or absurdity. It is the literature of technology.

Bradbury & McFarlane

RECURRENT THEMES

1 TECHNOLOGYMost modernist writers, as a rule, “feared” new technology and left it out of their writing. Joyce set Ulysses in 1904, before motorcars had become widespread. Eliot and Pound, despite writing about urban life in the ’20s, would look back to the classical, medieval, or Renaissance periods.

RECURRENT THEMES

1 TECHNOLOGY, cont’d.A number of Russian and Italian pre-war writers, however, extolled technology, as they, in the words of Marjorie Perloff, “felt themselves to be on the verge of a new age that would be more exciting, more promising, more inspiring than any preceding one. [They] found their roots in economically backward countries that were experiencing rapid industrialization—the faith in dynamism and national expansion associated with capitalism in its early phase.”

RECURRENT THEMES1 TECHNOLOGY

from F. T. Marinetti’s “The Manifesto of Futurism”:

1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.

4. We say that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot—is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

9. We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.

RECURRENT THEMES

2 PSYCHOLOGYModernist novelists such as Woolf and Joyce took to heart the tenets of Viennese psychiatrist Sigmund Freud and attempted to record thoughts instead of “reality” (in the way that realist writers would do it), so that the reader can understand things about a narrator that the narrator him/herself does not.

RECURRENT THEMES

3 THE “UNREAL CITY”The anonymity of the city, its darkness, its mechanization, its vast power, all inspired the modernists; it attracted and repelled them in equal measure. The city, where technology and masses of people come together, became the master trope of Modernism itself.

RECURRENT THEMES3 THE “UNREAL CITY”

from Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question... Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit.

RECURRENT THEMES

4 ALIENATIONIf the city is the master trope (or image) of Modernism, alienation is its master theme. Almost all modernist writing deals with alienation in some form. The primary kind of alienation that Modernism depicts is the alienation of one sensitive person from the world.

RECURRENT THEMES4 ALIENATION

from Eliot’s “…Prufrock”:

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

RECURRENT THEMES

5 THE PRESENCE OF THE PASTSurrounded by the debris of all the smashed certainties of the past, modernist writers looked at the contemporary world as a directionless place, without center or certainty. They often felt that they were at the end of history.Because of this, modernist texts often incorporate and mix together huge swaths of history.

RECURRENT THEMES5 THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST

from Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Seylwyn Mauberley”:

The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage, Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries Of the inward gaze; Better mendacities Than the classics in paraphrase!

The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster, Made with no loss of time, A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.

STYLE1 STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS IN FICTION

This “interior monologue” technique purports to record the thoughts as they pass through a narrator’s head. The unpredictable connections that people make between ideas demonstrates something about them, as do the things they try to avoid thinking about.This narrative technique attempts to record how scattered and jumbled the experience of the world really is, and at the same time how deeper patterns in thoughts can be discerned by those (such as readers) with some distance from them.

STYLE1 STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS IN FICTION

from James Joyce’s Ulysses:STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:—INTROIBO AD ALTARE DEI.Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely:—Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

STYLE

2 IMAGE / OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVEPound: “An ‘image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time… It is the presentation of such a “complex” instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.”

STYLE

2 IMAGE / OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVEEliot: “The only way of expressing emotions in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that when the external facts which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”

STYLE

2 IMAGE / OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE

In a Station of the MetroEzra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

STYLE

3 FRAGMENTATION & EXPERIMENTATIONIn the effort to convey or depict the convoluted relationships between the past and the present, technology and society, and literature with the other arts, modernist writers resorted to techniques such as allusion, chance operations, collage, pastiche, as well as those used in other arts. Moreover, the writers sought to “get back that intensity into the language” by resorting to increased “play” in poetry.

STYLE3 FRAGMENTATION / EXPERIMENTATION

from Gertrude Stein’s “A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson”:Idem the Same

I knew too that through them I knew too that he was through, I knew too that he threw them. I knew too that they were through, I knew too I knew too, I knew I knew them.

I knew to them.If they tear a hunter through, if they tear

through a hunter, if they tear through a hunt and a hunter, if they tear through the different sizes of the six, the different sizes of the six which are these… All these as you please.

In the meantime examples of the same lily. In this way please have you rung.

3 FRAGMENTATION / EXPERIMENTATIONThe Manifesto of Dada

ON MODERNISM

Indeed Modernism would seem to be the point at which the idea of the radical and innovating arts, the experimental, technical, aesthetic ideal that had been growing forward from Romanticism, reaches formal crisis—in which myth, structure and organization in a traditional sense collapse, and not only for formal reasons. The crisis is a crisis of culture; it often involves an unhappy view of history—so that the Modernist writer is not simply the artist set free, but the artists under specific, apparently historical strain…

ON MODERNISMIf Modernism is the imaginative power in the chamber of consciousness that […] ‘converts the very pulses of air into revelations’, it is also often an awareness of contingency as disaster in the world of time: Yeats's ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.’ If it is an art of metamorphosis, […] it is also a sense of disorientation and nightmare, feeling the dangerous, deathly magic in the creative impulse [….] If it takes the modern as a release from old dependencies, it also sees the ‘immense panorama of futility and anarchy’ [….] And if an aesthetic devotion runs deep in it, it is capable of dispensing with that abruptly and outrageously, as in the auto-destructive dimension of Dada or Surrealism.

Bradbury & McFarlane

SOURCESBradbury, Malcolm, and James McFarlane, eds.

Modernism: 1890 – 1930. London: Penguin, 1987.

Galens, David, ed. Literary Movements for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context and Criticism on Literary Movements. Detroit: Gale, 2002.

Hurt, James, and Brian Wilkie eds. Literature of the Western World Vol. 2: Neoclassicism through the Modern Period. 2nd ed. New York: MacMillan, 1988.

Preminger, Alex, and T.V.F. Brogan, eds. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.

Rothenberg, Jerome, and Pierre Joris, eds. Poems for the Millennium Vol. 1: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry: From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude. New York: U of California P, 1995.