Modernism

Modernism was a reaction to Victorian culture, industrialization, urbanization, and World War I. Modernism represented a rejection of 19 th -century Victorian traditions and morality. Modernists viewed European culture as hypocritical, “corrupt, complacent, and lethargic.”

The world was changing so quickly, so dramatically, and so frequently that modernists rejected any single “truth.” Freud, Einstein, and other thinkers had challenged conceptions of objective reality. Freud wrote of a “hidden self” of subconscious, repressed desires. Einstein's discoveries showed that time itself is relative. The Enlightenment conception of a universal, observable “truth” was now cast into doubt. Therefore, Modernists consciously attempted to break away from all past Western traditions. “Make it new!” --Ezra Pound

The horror and trauma of World War I led to bitterness and disillusionment. Patriotism, honor, and glory gave way to sorry, pity, and cruelty.

Characteristics: --Experimentation --Inaccessibility: “"riverrun, past Eve's and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs," -- Finnegan's Wake

--Individualism --Nihilism --Despair --Apathy

--Moral relativism --Self consciousness --Order and stability gives way to chaos, confusion, faithlessness, skepticism, and lost identity, and meaningless. --Split between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” art.

--Engaged with taboo subjects such as “disintegration, madness, suicide, sexual depravity, impotence, morbidity, deception” --Focus on cities-- where man is dehumanized-- nature not relevant --Stream-of-consciousness and unreliable narrators

Before: art as representation of the world (mimetic), focus on form and structure After: Search for “authenticity” and internal logic, focus on creative impulse

Modernism in Britain TS Eliot-- The Waste Land James Joyce-- Ulysses Virginia Woolf-- To the Lighthouse Ezra Pound-- The Cantos DH Lawrence-- Sons and Lovers WB Yeats-- The Tower

Modernism in America William Faulkner-- As I Lay Dying Ernest Hemingway-- The Old Man and the Sea F. Scott Fitzgerald-- The Great Gatsby Hart Crane-- The Bridge Wallace Stevens-- The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens Gertrude Stein-- Tender Buttons William Carlos Williams-- Spring and All EE Cummings-- Tulips and Chimneys

International Modernism ● Katherine Mansfield (New Zealand)-- The Garden Party ● Franz Kafka (Germany)-- The Metamorphosis ● Thomas Mann (Germany)-- The Magic Mountain ● Marcel Proust (France)-- In Search of Lost Time