Modernism & C20 An INtroduction

C20: A few Major Events 1905 – Einstein (myth) and Freud 1906-14 – liberal reforms 1914-1918 – WWI 1916 – Easter Rising in Ireland 1918 – Women over 30 given right to vote; full right in 1928 1922 – Irish Free State established 1930-45 – Great Depression 1936-39 – Spanish Civil War 1939-1945 – WWII 1918-1947 – Decline of the British Empire 1947-1997 – Decolonization and End of Empire

C20 literature overview Many C20 writers alienated in various ways (p. 1923) Vs. Victorians and Edwardians, taking stock of present (p. 1924) Modernism – why their innovations different than previous generations (p. 1925) Increasing sense of Fragmentation / Mistrust in “Unity” (p. 1925) Skepticism – unsure of experiments’ outcomes and of public taste (p. 1925-26) Social values are arbitrary constructions; sense of lost moorings (p. 1926) Nietzschean revaluation of all values (p. 1926) (cf. magazines) “God is Dead” – transcendent standards of truth are gone (p. 1927) Newtonian physics overthrown – 300 years of clockwork universe – certain and predictable – myth that after Einstein “all is relative” (p. 1927) *** Arnold / Einstein (p. 1928) *** Mistrust in civilization and Empire (p. 1928) Technology “symptomatic” of modernity (p. 1928)  cf. Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936)

modernism Find new values, sensibilities, and styles appropriate to modern age (p. 1929) Form and content (p. 1929) Revolutionary style and subject matter Difficulty – no exposition, force reader into vicarious experience (in medias res) Focus on revelatory image or moment – Imagism (p. 1930) Cf. “In a Station of the Metro” Vs. Bourgeoise taste Intertextual (see quotation and allusion in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land) Bibliographic coding – technologies of print affect text itself (cf. BLAST) Emphasis on modern city (p. 1932) Alienation – from ourselves and each other (p. 1934) Isolation, the subconscious and repressed memories Good quote on censorship and culture (Arnold?) (p. 1936)

imagism “Imagisme” coined by American exiled poet Ezra Pound. Poetic sensibility within the modernist movement. Lucid economy of phrasing (p. 2216) Precision, sharpness, concreteness Emphasis on the visual or other sense experience, rather than the event Dramatic understatement Vs. Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian sentimentality, ornamentation, and moralizing tone

Pound’s imagist dicta Direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.