Modernity and Modernism & Kafka’s Metamorphosis

Pop up Quiz

Modernization

• New means of transportation, such as the steamship, the railroad, the automobile, and the airplane.

• Other technologies, such as the telegraph and the telephone.

• People were living in large cities, and the world population more than tripled.

World War I

World War I

• World War I took place mainly in Europe• It was the most mechanized war to date • It killed fifteen million people. • After the United States joined the war in 1917

the Allies (France, Britain, Italy) repelled Germany from the Western Front (in Belgium and France).

• In the East, Germany and Austria-Hungary drove into Russian territory, which led to the establishment of a Communist dictatorship under Lenin.

Communist Russia

Russia’s near-defeat contributed to the Revolution of 1917, with Lenin establishing a Communist “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Nazis

• Nazism arose as a National Socialist Movement and came to power under Adolf Hitler in 1933

• The Nazis’ agenda included national rearmament and authoritarian politics held together by the glue of anti-Semitism.

The Final Solution

Starting in 1941, Hitler authorized the Final Solution, aimed at destroying the Jewish people, exterminating six million Jews and several million Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals, and political enemies of the Nazis.

Great Depression

Great Depression

• Beginning on October 24, 1929, the stock market crash heralded the Great Depression.

• Within a few years, a third of American workers were unemployed; hunger and joblessness spread throughout the industrialized world.

• Franklin Roosevelt was able to reverse the worst effects of the Depression in the United States with the New Deal, which included public works spending and the introduction of Social Security.

World War II

World War II began after Hitler’s military force invaded Poland in 1939. Germany allied itself with Fascist Italy and authoritarian Japan, which had earlier conquered Korea and occupied China. The United States entered the war after the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Modernism

• Linked political crises with the crisis of representation.• break with literary conventions including plots, verse forms,

narrative techniques, and the boundaries of genre• Charles Darwin - the animal nature of human existence is

explored • Karl Marx - the struggle between social classes is the main

drive of history• Friedrich Nietzsche - attacked a belief in God and the

conviction that humans are fundamentally rational• Sigmund Freud - stress on the unconscious and power of

sexual and destructive instincts• Writers had significant mobility, often studying or working

away from their native residences.

Scientific Advances

Scientists found that the natural world does not necessarily function in the way it appears to. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and other discoveries, such as radioactivity, X-rays, and quantum theory, presented counterintuitive understanding of the physical universe that conflicted with classical Netwonian physics and even common sense.

Novelists

• The great modern novelists, including Conrad, Proust, Joyce, and Woolf wrote realistic works in the manner of Flaubert or Tolstoy.

• However, they shifted toward interiority and focused on the limited perspective of an individual, often idiosyncratic character.

Asia

Asian writers embraced Communist or Socialist politics and a related style of politically engaged fiction. Their works—as in Ryunosuke, Jun’ichiro, Fusako and Man-sik, often blend modern techniques with old folklore or cultural practices of earlier Japan to make a political statement.

NegritudeDuring the 1930s, a group of African and Caribbean intellectuals, led by Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire, met in Paris (where they were pursuing higher education) and formed the Negritude movement, which celebrated the culture of Africa and the African Diaspora to provide leadership for decolonized states.

Which event had arguably the greatest impact on the early twentieth century?

a.the Russian Revolution of 1917

b.the Great Depression

c.the Second World War

d.the First World War

Test Your Knowledge

While each of these events was world changing, nothing compared to the destabilizing impact of the First World War. Death and destruction on that scale had previously been unknown—even unimaginable—for most people.

Modernist artists depended primarily on which of the following?

a.Reason

b.Experimentation

c.Science

d.tradition

Test Your Knowledge

Literature across the globe responded to world-changing events (world wars, revolutions, financial collapse) with an unprecedented wave of artistic experimentation, as though the previous modes and forms of art were simply no longer able to capture, recreate, or express the shocking realities of the modern world.

Fiction that includes references to itself is called: __________ .

a.Metafiction

b.Hyperfiction

c.stream of consciousness fiction

d.experiential fiction

Test Your Knowledge

A story or novel, for example, might address the reader as he or she is in the act of reading. Thus the very act of consuming art (whether reading, listening, or watching) becomes part of the art being consumed. (This technique is also known as self-referentiality.)

Franz Kafka (1883–1924)

• Jewish heritage• Prague• father–son

relationship• Freud - recognized

the oedipal tension in aspects of his family life.

• He worked as a civil servant for an insurance company

• The term “Kafkaesque” has become a commonly used idiom to describe situations like the nightmarish, oppressive, and frustrating ones found in Kafka’s fiction.

Kafkaesque

Bug and Grotesque

The one-dimensionality of the other characters, the detailed description of the apartment’s architecture, and the straightforward language, for all their clarity, create an emotional undercurrent of disorientation and imprisonment.

Bug and Grotesque

The emotional underpinning of grotesqueness, then, depends on the reader’s own idea of grotesqueness, whether cockroach or beetle.

“When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed” (p. 210).

“‘Oh my Lord!’ He thought. ‘If only I didn’t have to follow such an exhausting profession! On the road, day in, day out. The work is so much more strenuous than it would be in head office, and then there’s the additional ordeal of traveling, worries about train connections, the irregular, bad meals, new people all the time, no continuity, no affection. Devil take it!’” (p. 211).

“Unaccidental Accident”

“And it felt like a confirmation of their new dreams and their fond intentions when, as they reached their destination, their daughter was the first to get up, and stretched her nubile young body” (p. 241).

• Compare these closing lines to the opening lines—how did Gregor’s transformation into a cockroach with “numerous legs, pathetically frail by contrast to the rest of him” that “waved feebly before his eyes” (p. 210) compare to his sister’s stretching of her “nubile young body”?

Codependency

• Had Gregor developed a codependent relationship with his family, such that they could not progress in their lives as long as they maintained a dysfunctional dependence upon him? Was Gregor’s death sad but necessary?

Codependency

The word “metamorphosis” connotes a process or at least the moment of change, but Kafka’s story does not portray that moment. Gregor simply wakes up as the bug. How would the story change if Kafka had showed the audience the process of transformation? Why didn’t he show the metamorphosis?

Discussion Questions