English Literature I

Caio Begotti

Definition of Modernism and Critical Approach

UFPR June 13th 2010

1. Introduction

We may better understand what exactly is modernism (focusing literature) if we take a look at the possible vernacular definitions or registered in a dictionary of what is modern, what makes modernism and what led us to modernity. It is wide known that whatever allow us to call something modern is still part of a ongoing process nowadays, so in order to try to define it we must take it into account.

Modernism – noun 1. modern character, tendencies, or values; adherence to or sympathy with what is modern. 2. a modern usage or characteristic. 3. a deliberate philosophical and practical estrangement or divergence from the past in the arts and literature occurring especially in the course of the 20th century and taking form in any of various innovative movements and styles.

Modern – adjective 1. of or pertaining to present and recent time; not ancient or remote: modern city life. 2. characteristic of present and recent time; contemporary; not antiquated or obsolete: modern viewpoints. 3. of or pertaining to the historical period following the Middle Ages: modern European history. 4. of, pertaining to, or characteristic of contemporary styles of art, literature, music, etc., that reject traditionally accepted or sanctioned forms and emphasize individual experimentation and sensibility.

The etymology of these words already gives us a couple of very good hints on what it is supposed to mean too. From the Latin modus, a noun, it is a manner or method of doing something; also from the Latin modo, an adverb, for something that occurred recently or just now. In a broad sense these terms describe the activities and lives of people who felt that the traditional art, literature, social values etc were now outdated, old fashioned for the new reality emerging, this industrialized world we are part of.

Thus one of the very best characteristic of modernism is the self-consciousness of these many movements, leading to high experimentalism with forms and the creative process. Modernist would be the recognition that the world got much more complex then.

2. Contextualized definition

Modernity usually refers to a post-traditional, post-medieval historical period; the period in which many cultures around the world moved from the feudalism system toward capitalism, highly industrialized, a rationalized age and in many cases secularist.

It is possible to identify major movements influenced by these facts during the mid-19th century and on particularly (though it is possible to say that it started way before that, however in a more isolated slower pace). In philosophy it was Nietzsche, for instance and just to name one person concerning it, that with his turn to aphorisms (strong, short and precise way of argumentation) that found a new way of writing, of self-expression; a characteristic that would relate to the modernist aesthetic practice. Nietzsche and the first so called modernist shared a dark look at society, for him it was now sick and weak due to the constraints of traditional values that got unquestioned for too long.

For these new modernists reality was not unique, only one, “reality was personal; it was individual and therefore subjective. As a general rule, modernism was less concerned with reality than with how the artist or writer could transform reality. In this way, the artist made reality his own. Whereas the middle class industrial society of the nineteenth century valued reason, industry, thrift, organization, faith, norms and values, the modernists were fascinated by the bizarre, the mysterious, the surreal, the primitive and the formless. In a word, the modernist fashioned a world shaped by the Irrational. In this way, the modernist artist and writer reflected the concerns of Nietzsche”.

According to him, men could only be saved by a new type of man, whom he called superman, the kind of man who would not be held by the mediocre industrial modernish bourgeois. This new man would not say “you should not”, he would for good start saying only “I will” and that was it. This new man would dare more, fight traditional values and settle the will to power that Nietzsche came up with. This superman “casts off all established values and because he is now free of all restraints, rules and codes of behavior imposed by civilization, he creates his own values. He lives his own life as one who takes, wants, strives, creates, struggles, seeks and

dominates. He knows life as it is given to him is without meaning -- but he lives it laughingly, instinctively, fully, dangerously”.

Then this new ideals composed what is now know as modernism, a sort of art that is supposed to invent new forms of life. Aesthetic and artistic schools having some quite diverse characteristics appeared in the 19th century and spread throughout the 20th century, but it is necessary to point out that it was at first a local evolution of art and social values. It has emerged around the middle of the 19th century to be precise, in France, with artists such as Baudelaire in literature and Manet in painting. They were looking for disruption (to break the actual rules for something entirely new or different), to reject or to move beyond the contemporary movements in literature and general arts.

Modernism as a literary movement reached its height in Europe between 1900 and the middle 1920s. It drew a many good attention to artists that the world itself was becoming also more dangerous, the First World War showed them how life could seem ridiculous in the face of the senseless slaughter of people. It was something that they would face again in the Second World War and would ultimately influence major artistic movements from that time on. Also, popular culture started to grow rapidly, magazines like The New Yorker began publishing new and modern ideas by young writers. This new popular culture was not derived from the high elite culture, but from its own realities, mass produced, full of modernist innovation by a new generation.

3. Defined characteristics

It can be such hard task to list a bunch of definite characteristics that makes a novel or a poem modern, but through examples we can identify similarities that permit us to understand it and set it apart from other type of literary works.

For modern novels, the aesthetic self-consciousness would be major; the simultaneity, juxtaposition and montage of setting or time is also of great importance. Paradoxical elements, ambiguity and uncertainty toward life and reality. The dissolution of integrated, consistent human subject, almost as an experiment settles it. In poetry the symbolism is one of the most evident movement that brought new ideas to the creative process of writing poetry. The transcendental ideal opposing the mundane values, the ethical ideal as a remedy of disintegrating values (that Nietzsche so much fight against) and the aesthetic ideal of art for the sake of art itself can be listed as the very relevant characteristics. Also, elements from naturalism were very important in this new poetry: the need of being true to life,

being scientific, treat all levels of society (including the poor, the workingmen) and the humanist values.

Taking a given list of modernist writer we can get a better view of it, a big picture that shows us the many characteristic that made something modern at that period of history. Following are some relevant writers with the major ideas represented on their works, generally speaking.

Pound: the removal of all unnecessary verbiage, clear language. Hardy: sins, class system, course of marriage and adult life. Wilde: pursuit of an aestheticism ideal. Woolf: stream of consciousness. Doolittle: free verse and the conciseness of the haiku, for example. Fitzgerald: youth, promises, despair and aging, morality. Hemingway: tightly written prose and death-related themes. Mansfield: loneliness, women's rights, shifts in the narrative. Joyce: ultimate experimentalism with language. Cummings: the self and meaning through typography, precise writing. Shaw: social problems, witty and energetic style. Eliot: metaphorical and figurative language, philosophical reflections. Lawrence: personal relationships and social subjects. Stein: humorous style, objective voice.

4. Critical approach

In a way, modernism movements can be seen as a sort of revelation of world in crisis. However, modernism can also be taken as a form of crisis production, a type of artistic philosophy which aims purely to produce a fiction of crisis, having no more than disruptive and destructive motives to exist. The issue in that is that modernism can not really be fully set apart from what we understand as modernity. It might seem the chicken-egg problem and also there are some criticisms on what is modernist today. It is likely we are now only seeing a never ending loop of radicalism and new ideas merely meant as... new ideas for the sake of it. Are not we just being duplicates of the artists from the past? Those who truly renewed many artistic branches in a time the World was really falling apart in many different senses?

Even so, the concept of what is modern, modernism in arts, is a very peculiar one as it is basically a concept developed in the Western part of the world, in Western societies with Western definitions. This development of arts in Europe “focused the individual, marking the ascendancy of the middle and lower classes, marking the autonomy of the self; something considered very differently in nonwestern cultures”.

Europe, and also the Americas for what is worth, represents only a small portion of everything produced in arts in the whole world. In the classical literary cultures outside Europe (such as the Arabic and the Japanese), modernism as we know it developed mainly in consumer-oriented (capitalist) environments, despite the fact that its proponents often rejected this consumerism society value. The modernist stress on freedom of speech, experimentation and radicalism probably seemed bizarre for so different societies. Anyway, it is extremely important to take it into consideration when discussing modernism movements, we may be discussing only the sparkle of it, its very roots and not its full unfolding.

5. Modern Arabic literature

The impact of modernity (as defined in the introduction and in the paragraphs following it) in the Arab life, the rise of the oil economy, political authoritarianism, corruption, the extreme influence of religion, poverty and mass immigration shaped the way the Arabic literature would develop in contrast with the European one. Modernist literature started to appear mainly in Egypt and until the 20th century it was confined to there, then it spread over the other countries of the region. It is also important to notice that “major political change in the region during the mid-20th century caused problems for writers. A common theme in the modern Arabic novel is the study of family life with obvious resonances with the wider family of the Arabic world. Many of the novels have been unable to avoid the politics and conflicts of the region with war often acting as background to small scale family dramas”

In Arabic terms, what defines a literary work as “modern” is not exactly the form of the narrative (as it is for many European branches of modernism), but the content itself and its true intention. The content of a fiction, being it a novel or a poem, is much more praised, rather than the technique used. The language itself show us the different nature of literature for Arabs, the relationship they have with it (concerning more poetry than the simple use of the language in every day life) is really especial; to that we can add that the Arabic ever favorite used to be poetry, that allowed the language to be fully expanded and appreciated, to manifest

emotions, its eloquence and richness. The growth of modernism in such societies started with the growth of Arabic cities into urbanized places, and it happened mostly by translating Western fiction, specially French, before it could settle and find its own path.

6. Modern Japanese literature

The current Japanese modern literature has its roots in the French modernism, so when we analyze Japanese poetry and fiction in a post-war Japan we are mainly analyzing works written in the European tradition of modernism in the 19th and 20th centuries. However, Japanese literature dates way before that. As a matter of fact the Japanese word for poetry is from the Chinese and in earlier periods many scholar works were written and published in Chinese, which makes the Japanese literary tradition before modernism somewhat attached to the Chinese one, which has nothing to do with the modernist ideals we see in European literature (especially because Chinese and Japanese literature, mainly about nature aspects, are much older than European equivalents).

In this pre-modernist Japan, the Chinese language and the Chinese tradition was for them what Latin was for Europeans. In this chain of cultural influence is also important to notice the importance the Japanese literature had upon the Korean, as Japan had invaded it and controlled the region for decades. In fact, in Korea, modern literature only started to grow on its own with the development of Hagul, the phonetic alphabet artificially created to educate as much possible the then illiterate society, which helped to spread literature from the dominant classes to the common people, including women. It only reached a full dominant position in Korean literature in the second half of the 19th century however, much more detached from the old Japanese influence. It seems completely unnecessary to demonstrate now how different these cultures are from our European-based ones, as the Arabic ones are too.

Nowadays, many Japanese modernists are banished from, for instance, haiku anthologies, many of them highly influenced by Valery and Baudelaire in the past. Japanese literature owes a great debt to the French in the 20 th century. Also, Eliot and Pound, not to mention the Beat generation from America, had influenced modern Japanese literature. After the turn of the 20 th century Japanese literature actually responded to every major movement in the West but with its own version of the same, during its incredible capacity and struggle to “modernize” the Japanese culture almost “by force”, sometimes miming too much, sometimes distorting (on good intentions) European ideals with its Chinese and Korean backgrounds. Unfortunately, mainly due to the lack of good translations, modern Japanese literature, from a now very information-intensive culture, can not reach the Western publishers as one would expect.

7. Bibliography

Published: (1) Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice, Chris Barker. Sage, 2005. ISBN 0761941568 (2) Modern Arabic Fiction: An Anthology, Salma Jayyusi. Columbia University Press, 2008. ISBN 0231132557 (3) Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913-1938, William J. Tyler. University of Hawaii Press, 2008. ISBN 0824832426

Online: (1) http://dictionary.reference.com (2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_of_the_Crowd (3) http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/lecture1.htm (4) http://www.historyguide.org/europe/lecture3.html (5) http://ericselland.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/the-modernist-traditionin-japan-some-introductory-comments (6) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_literature#Modern_literature _.281868.E2.80.931945.29 (7) http://neojaponisme.com/category/features/meeting-modernity (8) http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/modernityanditsdisc ontents.pdf (9) http://www.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/pm/baudelaire-painter.htm