1. English Modernism

2. What is a literary “period”?
A literary style or movement is like a fad or fashion – but one that might last decades, and which responds to political, historical, or intellectual events

3. Romanticism / Realism → Modernism (about 1900-60) → Postmodernism
What is literary “modernism”?
A style of writing which rejected traditional and conventional methods and saw the experience of reality as individualistic, subjective, non-chronological, and often irrational.

4. Characteristics of modernism
Dark and pessimistic
Stream-of-consciousness
Nonsensical or ridiculous
Playful and Experimental
Strongly linked to Paris
We can’t be sure what truth is.

5. Origins of modernism
A decline in religious certainty and of man’s special and divine nature (Darwin)
A decline in confidence in progress (WW I)
A decline in confidence in rationality (Freud; Henri Bergson; William James)
Influences from art (impressionism)

6. Modernism is a style affecting:
Literature
Art
Music
Architecture
Theater
Fashion

7. Cezanne The Seine at Bercy (1878)

8. Renoir The Boating Party (1881)

9. Monet Sunrise (1874) Impressionism

10. Munch The Scream (1893) Expressionism

11. Picasso Les Demoiselles d‘Avignon (1907) Cubism

12. Ernst The Elephant Celebes (1921) Surrealism

16. The Motorist, 1906

17. Metropolis, 1927

19. Cleveland Greyhound Station

20. Chrysler Building, New York City,
Art Deco

21. Modernism in Fashion

22. Modernism in music

23. Gertrude Stein
The presentation of experience in the present continuous
non-linear and non-chronological
Contradictory and unreliable

24. T.S. Eliot 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.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

25. Ulysses: One day in the life of Leopold Bloom, June 16, 1904
James Joyce
Ulysses: One day in the life of Leopold Bloom, June 16, 1904
Get a light snack in Davy Byrne’s. Stopgap. Keep me going. Had a good breakfast.
—Roast and mashed here.
—Pint of stout.
He came out into clearer air and turned back towards Grafton street. Eat or be eaten. Kill! Kill!
My plate’s empty. After you with our incorporated drinkingcup. Rub off the microbes with your handkerchief. Father O’Flynn would make hares of them all. Have rows all the same. All for number one. Children fighting for the scrapings of the pot. Want a souppot as big as the Phoenix park. Hate people all round you. City Arms hotel table d’hôte she called it. Soup, joint and sweet. Never know whose thoughts you’re chewing. Then who’d wash up all the plates and forks? Might be all feeding on tabloids that time. Teeth getting worse and worse.