MODERNISM 1918-1945

CHARACTERISTICS OF MODERNISM • New thinking in science, psychology, and economics replaced many ideas of the Victorian period. • With the huge losses of World War I, conventional patriotism and romantic notions of bravery and heroes were swept away. • Disillusionment with WWI caused artists and intellectuals to reject traditional aesthetics, especially order and beauty.

GENERALIZATIONS ABOUT MODERNISM VERSUS THE PREVIOUS 1900 YEARS OF WESTERN CULTURE Pre-Modern World

Modern World (Early 20th Century)

Ordered

Chaotic

Meaningful

Futile

Optimistic

Pessimistic

Stable

Fluctuating

Faith

Loss of faith

Morality/Values

Collapse of Morality/Values

Clear Sense of Identity

Confused Sense of Identity and Place in the World

19TH CENTURY THINKERS WHO INSPIRED MODERNISM IN LITERATURE AND THE ARTS • Charles Darwin: His ideas were applied to social settings suggested that only the fittest should survive became a controversial aspect of political, social, and economic thought. • Karl Marx: His theories led to sweeping changes in government and economic systems. Artists begin to question the aristocratic nature of previous art with emphasis on lower classes (i.e. realism, naturalism, etc).

19TH CENTURY THINKERS WHO INSPIRED MODERNISM IN LITERATURE AND THE ARTS • Sigmund Freud: His theory of the unconscious inspired writers to explore irrational motivations and perceptions of characters. • Nietzsche: His ideas of the will to power inspired artists to explore individualized and original artistic expressions; especially his idea that psychological drives, specifically the "will to power", were more important than facts, or things. After World War II, Existentialism will become the dominate philosophical movement.

EVENTS THAT INSPIRED MODERNISM • Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (c. 1915) • World War I (1914-1918) • The Russian Revolution (1917) • Instability in Europe in the 1920s because of a weakened Central Europe (i.e. Prussia/Germany, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ottoman Empire, Russian Empire) • Influenza epidemic (1918) • Global Depression in the 1930s

ALBERT EINSTEIN: THE SPECIAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY • Space and time are relative; only the speed of light is constant. • There is no such thing as a favored point of view. • Color is relative. • A universal present moment does not exist.

Clocks positioned farther away from the mass of the earth run faster than clocks closer to the earth.

MODERNISM EXAMPLES IN ART • Origins in late 19th Century Painters who because of the invention of photography and later film departed from mimesis or realism as a goal of the artist. • Modernism develops into multiple schools of artistic representation: Primitivism, Impressionism, Dadaism, Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Futurism.

PRE-MODERNISM: IMPRESSIONISM

DADAISM

Duchamp

CUBISM

SURREALISM

Dali

Magritte

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

Jackson Pollock

FUTURISM

Kandinsky

Giacomo Balla

MODERNISM AND LITERARY THEMES /TECHNIQUES

Alienation of Individuals Complicated Narrative Structures Stream of Consciousness Multiple Points of View Fragmented Narratives Absurd Storylines

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS • Stream of consciousness, then, does not appear to itself as chopped up in bits ... it is nothing joined; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let's call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life. --William James (1890)

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS • In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode that seeks to portray an individual's point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character's thought processes, either in a loose interior monologue (see below), or in connection to his or her actions. Stream-of-consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized by associative leaps in thought and lack of punctuation.

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS EXAMPLE • frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling the strength those engines have in them like big giants and the water rolling all over and out of them all sides like the end of Loves old sweeeetsonnnng the poor men that have to be out all the night from their wives and families in those roasting engines stifling it was today Im glad I burned the half of those old Freemans and Photo Bits leaving things like that lying about hes getting very careless and threw the rest of them up in the W C 111 get him to cut them tomorrow for me instead of having them there for the next year to get a few pence for them have him asking wheres last Januarys paper and all those old overcoats I bundled out of the hall making the place hotter than it is that rain was lovely and refreshing just after my beauty sleep I thought it was going to get like Gibraltar . . . . . James Joyce Ulysses (1922)

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

MULTIPLE POINTS OF VIEW EXAMPLE • For example, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1928) is told from 15 different narrators, or his Sound and the Fury (1930) has 4 narrators. • James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) has 18 different chapters, each told from a different point of view, and in a different narrative style.

FRAGMENTED NARRATION EXAMPLE “I love new clothes, I love new clothes, I love .” “So essential when there was under-production; but in an age of machines and the fixation of nitrogen-positively a crime against society.” “Henry Foster gave it me.” “All crosses had their tops cut and became T’s. There was also a thing called God.” “It’s real morocco-surrogate.” “We have the World State now. And Ford’s Day celebrations, and Community Sings, and Solidarity Services.” “Ford, how I hate them!” Bernard Marx was thinking. “There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.” “Like meat, like so much meat.” “There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality.” ---from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932)

ABSURD STORYLINE EXAMPLE One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked. --Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915)