1. The Age of Modernism (1910- 1949) The House of Windsor The name of Hanover was changed by George V after the declaration of war George V ( 1910- 1936) Edward VIII ( 1936) George VI (1936- 1952 ) Elizabeth II ( 1952….

2. Modernism flourished in the 20s and 30s A movement opposed to traditionalism through experimentation of forms and styles

3. Eliot said: «Every age gets the art it deserves and every age must accept the art it gets» A complex age as the 20° century, upset by two World Wars could not produce anything but complex art of experimentation.

4. Social and political events created a general sense od dissatisfaction ………………everything was put in doubt. All the established principles collapsed  Man questioned himself, his role in society, the concept of reality and beauty  The gesture we make are bound to be misread, so a great difference between the private stream of consciousness and the public gesture  The isolation of the individual consciousness, no more public values and every individual prisoner of his unique stream of consciousness.  The sense of the significant was personal, (Joyce’s view of “Epiphany” the sudden realization that an object or a quite ordinary situation encountered in daily experience, has an intense symbolic meaning,and cause the sudden revelation of an interior truth )  A general sense of discontent and anxiety, due to the economical crisis as well.  New concept of the character, objective truth becomes Subjective truth, it is the sum of his emotional experiences.

5. The Modernists represented a period in which men lost faith in the commonly held values as: religion, family, king and country They became dissatisfied with the traditional ways of perceiving human mind and human personality The idea that there is only one truth or interpretation of events is rejected.

6. Traditional forms of art are often rejected in favour of a direct attempt to represent the working of the mind and the unconscious Reality isn’t anymore the one you see but it is is fragmentary and relative ; there’s a subjective perceptions of reality The idea that there is only one truth or interpretation of events is rejected. The novelists tried to explore the mental processes through the so called «stream of consciuosness techique

7. Fauvism “ Le Fauves” = “ Wild Beasts”

8. Cubism : Picasso Braque Geometrical understructure of natural forms, their key word was “simultaneity”, that is to present a simultaneous vision of a figure from different point of view

9. Kandisky Refused to represent reality and focused his attention on a line, a shape or a colour making it the subject of his work

10. Wyndham Lewis Founded Vorticism: Idea of violent motion The image was a vortex from which, into which the ideas were constantly rushing

11. Marinetti Futurism The dynamism, speed and motion

12. Du Champ to dissacrate traditional artistic values "Elle a chaud au cul", literally “ She is hot in the arse". a vulgar expression directed at women implying sexual restlessness.

13. Mirò - dadaismo

14. De Chirico The new concept of time: everything is relative

15. His theory of Relativity states the relationship between energy and mass

18. Stravinsky and Schoenberg With The Firebird Igor experimented dissonance rejected the traditional rules of harmony www.youtube.com/watch?v=no2aPVEe0mA

20. Literature The novelists,horrified by the effect of war were interested in recovering the unique experience of the individuals by exploring and recreating their inner world The Victoria moral universe collapsed and was replaced by a climate of moral ambiguity, by a sense of emptiness due to the absence of values No more a novel seen as the mirror of the society

21. From a stlylistic point of view: The omniscent narrator as moral and spiritual guide disappeared and was replaced by the direct or indirect presentation of characters’ thoughts, feelings and memories No longer a linear plot or a chronological sequence of events BUT the idea of DURATION, of freezing or examining the so called “ moments of being” The analysis of a single moment can tell you more about a character than a traditional life- story

22. The theme No more man in society, but man ‘s inner life. The characters were important because of their inner seves and not because of what was going on around them The plot organized in a personal way, for example Joyce in his Ulysses linked Mythology, Bergson and Freud theories, the dissolution of the novel started by Sterne. Anglophone Modernism tended not to reject the past as such, but the recent past in favour of remoter periods of history. Primitive myths can help us to grasp and order the chaos of 29th c. experience ( Jung with his “ collective unconscious”) THE ACTION takes place in the mind of the character as a series of memories, associations, reflections and feelings stimulated by apparently unimportant things. THE EXTERNAL REALITY is not excluded, but it affects the inner consciousness producing a flow of thoughts

23. Freud 1856-1939 the multiplicity of consciousness Human consciousness involves different levels of experiences and memory The most significant level is the unconscious which can not be accessed except through dreams (“Interpretation of Dreams”-1900) Much of the human’s behaviour is governed by irrational unconscious drive established very early in life,so he destroys the old concept of respectability and self-responsibility Man’s childhood experience has a great influence on his behaviour as an adult because the memory of it is preserved in his unconscious free associations :each man organizes the information he receives from the outside world according to his own interior experience, desires and impulses. Therefore the perception of reality is subjective Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex, the male child unconscously wish to kill his father,influenced such writers as D.H.Lawrence

24. Freud new concept of time and a new theory of the unconscious asserting the simultaneous coexistence of different levels of consciousness and sub-consciousness, There are 2 levels of consciousness: –The speech level which can be communicated orally or in writing –The pre-speech level which has no communicative basis and is not rationally controlled and logically ordered.

25. Bergson 1859-1941 Clock Time and Inner time Time isn’t anymore a series of moments moving forward in progress but Time is a flow, a “ duration” “ inner time “ is an unbroken continuum We do not experience the world moment by moment but in a continuous way Instead of perceiving it as linear, we experience a mixture of past, present and future in the same momen In the same moment in which you perceive the present it is already past..we perceive only the past

26. William James Consciousness is not only conscious awareness but all the mental activity of man Consciousness is not chopped up in bits…but flows like a river or a stream

27. Magritte: the double secret

28. We can divide English prose production in 3 groups: 1st group of writers that constituted the bridge from the 19th c to the 20th c., the so called PSYCHOLOGICAL NOVELISTS,still presented the events in chrological order, where the only shift in time were determined by memory disgressions, but the focus was on the inner reaction to the external events, using different point of view.: Henry James born in New York but lived in England- The Portrait of a Lady Conrad Forster Lawrence- sex as a sort of religion, he saw modernism as unspontaneous. He disregarded the stream of consciousness technique and carried on his exploration into the nature of the self.

29. 2nd group, the so called Modernists They focused on the mental processes in the human mind It was impossible to reproduce the complexity of the human mind using traditional techniques, so the new one used was the “ Interior monologue” The method used : “ interior monologue” not to be confused with the “ stream of consciousness. The stream of consciousness is the mental activity The interior monoloque is the instrument used to translate this phenomenon into words

30. The third group: Due to the difficulties of the 30s,Some writers looked back at the society around them Utopian tradition turned into a distopian Novel: HUXLEY and ORWELL warning agaist totalitarian Governments

31. Joyce and Virginia Wolf exploited in different ways: Virginia Woolf used a more repetitive style and the so called “ indirect interior monologue”: a monoloque introduced by such clauses as “ he thought, He decided”..giving a more rational link to the assosiations of ideas Joyce, on the other hand, used the “ direct interior monoloque”, he shifted abruptly from thought to thought without any apparent connection of verb, subject and punctuation.