Modernism

Q. The Modernism was a movement that begun with the industrialization after the
second world war in the late 19th century and early 20th century. It principal
mission was:
Break all connections to classical times, bringing down the barriers between the
fine arts and applied arts.
Q. The Modernism was a cultural and artistic movement based in the concept of
the _________ as finder of originality and harmony
Beauty
Good looks
Attractiveness
Q. The dominant line on every design of art nouveau is the curve. True
Q. Who developed the concept of Stream of Consciousness?
William James
Q. What is "Montage" and who developed it?
A cinematic technique developed by Sergei Eisenstein
Soviet montage theory is an approach to understanding and creating cinema that
relies heavily upon editing (montage is French for "assembly" or "editing"). It is
the principal contribution of Soviet film theorists to global cinema, and
brought formalism to bear on filmmaking.
Q. What major event of Modernism happened in 1913?
Stravinsky's and Nijinsky's Rite of Spring premiered in Paris
The Rite of Spring ("sacred spring") is a ballet and orchestral concert work by
the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky was a new structure.
Q. Who is the self-made man that became the literary symbol of the Jazz
Era?
Jay Gatsby
Q. Who is Clarissa Dalloway?
a character in a novel by Virginia Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway
Q. What modernist work best showcases the unconscious?
The Metamorphosis
Q. Which of these works cuts and pastes pieces of many texts together?
The Waste Land
Q. Which Modernist work of literature aims to be clear and concise?
"The Red Wheelbarrow"
Q. Which of the following works could be said to operate by the maxim
"Make it New"?
"In a Station of the Metro," by Ezra Pound

Modernism is a literary school that lasted from the beginning of the twentieth
century until the end of World War II. It rejects all literary conventions of the
nineteenth century, its conventional morality, taste, traditions, and
economic values.

Modernists experimented with literary form and expression, adhering to Ezra

Pound's maxim to "Make it new"

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Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, amongst others, who raised questions about the
rationality of the human mind.

The writers in this period new literary techniques, mostly stream of

consciousness.

Marked by a strong and intentional break with tradition. This break

includes a strong reaction against established religious, political, and social
views.
There is no such thing as absolute truth. All things are relative.
No connection with history or institutions. Their experience is that of
alienation, loss, and despair.
Championship of the individual and celebration of inner strength.
Life is unordered.
Concerned with the sub-conscious.

Stream of Consciousness is a literary style in which the author follows visual,

auditory, tactile, associative, and subliminal impressions and expresses them
using "interior monologue" of characters either as a writing technique or as a
writing style that mingles thoughts and impressions in an illogical order, and
violates grammar norms.

The phrase "stream of consciousness" was first used in 1890 by William

James in "Principles of Psychology". In literature it records character's
feelings and thoughts through stream of consciousness in attempt to capture all
the external and internal forces that influence their psychology at a single
moment. Any logical or sequential approach is disregarded.

The first example of this style is considered to be a novel James Joyce in

Ulysses (1922), and further developed by Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway
(1925) and William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury (1928).

Main characteristics:

Recording multifarious thoughts and feelings

Exploring external and internal forces that influence individuals
psychology
Disregard of the narrative sequence
Absence of the logical argument
Disassociated leaps in syntax and punctuation
Prose difficult to follow
In the 1880s increased attention was given to the idea that it was necessary to
push aside previous norms entirely, instead of merely revising past knowledge in
light of contemporary techniques. The theories of Sigmund Freud (18561939),
and Ernst Mach (18381916) influenced early Modernist literature. Mach argued
that the mind had a fundamental structure, and that subjective experience was
based on the interplay of parts of the mind in The Science of Mechanics (1883).
Freud's first major work was Studies on Hysteria (with Josef Breuer) (1895).

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According to Freud, all subjective reality was based on the play of basic drives
and instincts, through which the outside world was perceived. As a philosopher of
science, Ernst Mach was a major influence on logical positivism, and through his
criticism of Isaac Newton, a forerunner of Einstein's theory of relativity.
Many prior theories about epistemology argued that external and absolute reality
could impress itself, as it were, on an individual, as, for example, John Locke's
(16321704) empiricism, which saw the mind beginning as a tabula rasa, a blank
slate (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690). Freud's description of
subjective states, involving an unconscious mind full of primal impulses and
counterbalancing self-imposed restrictions, was combined by Carl Jung (1875
1961) with the idea of the collective unconscious, which the conscious mind
either fought or embraced. While Charles Darwin's work remade
the Aristotelian concept of "man, the animal" in the public mind, Jung suggested
that human impulses toward breaking social norms were not the product of
childishness, or ignorance, but rather derived from the essential nature of the
human animal.
Another major precursor of modernism, was Friedrich Nietzsche, especially his
idea that psychological drives, specifically the "will to power", were more
important than facts, or things. Henri Bergson (18591941), on the other hand,
emphasized the difference between scientific clock time and the direct,
subjective, human experience of time. His work on time and consciousness "had
a great influence on twentieth-century novelists," especially those modernists
who used the stream of consciousness technique, such as Dorothy
Richardson for the book Pointed Roofs (1915), James Joyce for Ulysses(1922)
and Virginia Woolf (18821941) for Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the
Lighthouse (1927). Also important in Bergson's philosophy was the idea of lan
vital, the life force, which "brings about the creative evolution of everything" [7] His
philosophy also placed a high value on intuition, though without rejecting the
importance of the intellect. These various thinkers were united by a distrust of
Victorian positivism and certainty. Modernism as a literary movement can be
seen also, as a reaction to industrialization, urbanization and new technologies.
Important literary precursors of Modernism were: Fyodor Dostoyevsky (182181)
(Crime and Punishment (1866), The Brothers Karamazov (1880)); Walt
Whitman (181992) (Leaves of Grass) (185591); Charles Baudelaire (182167)
(Les Fleurs du mal), Rimbaud (185491) (Illuminations, 1874); August
Strindberg (18491912), especially his later plays, including, the trilogy To
Damascus18981901, A Dream Play (1902), The Ghost Sonata (1907).
Modernist literature scholar David Thorburn saw connections between literary
style and impressionist painters such as Claude Monet. Modernist writers, like
Monet's paintings of water lilies, suggested an awareness of art as art, rejected
realistic interpretations of the world and dramatized "a drive towards the
abstract".
The poets of the Imagist movement, founded by Ezra Pound in 1912 as a new
poetic style, gave Modernism its early start in the 20th century, and were
characterized by a poetry that favoured a precision of imagery, brevity and free
verse. This idealism, however, ended, with the outbreak of World War I, and

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writers created more cynical works that reflected a prevailing sense of
disillusionment. Many modernist writers also shared a mistrust of institutions of
power such as government and religion, and rejected the notion of absolute
truths.
Modernist works such as T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) were increasingly
self-aware, introspective, and explored the darker aspects of human nature.
The term modernism covers a number of related, and overlapping, artistic and literary
movements, including Imagism, Symbolism, Futurism, Vorticism,
Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism, and Dada.

Early modernist writers

Early modernist writers, especially those writing after World War I and the
disillusionment that followed, broke the implicit contract with the general public
that artists were the reliable interpreters and representatives of mainstream
("bourgeois") culture and ideas, and, instead, developed unreliable narrators,
exposing the irrationality at the roots of a supposedly rational world.
They also attempted to take into account changing ideas about reality developed
by Darwin, Mach,Freud, Einstein, Nietzsche, Bergson and others. From this
developed innovative literary techniques such as stream-of-
consciousness, interior monologue, as well as the use of multiple points-of-view.
This can reflect doubts about the philosophical basis of realism, or alternatively
an expansion of our understanding of what is meant by realism. So that, for
example the use of stream-of-consciousness, or interior monologue reflects the
need for greater psychological realism.
It is debatable when the modernist literary movement began, though some have
chosen 1910 as roughly marking the beginning and quote novelist Virginia Woolf,
who declared that human nature underwent a fundamental change "on or about
December 1910." But modernism was already stirring by 1902, with works such
as Joseph Conrad's (18571924) Heart of Darkness, while Alfred Jarry's (1873
1907)absurdist play, Ubu Roi appeared even earlier, in 1896.
Among early modernist non-literary landmarks is the atonal ending of Arnold
Schoenberg's Second String Quartet in 1908, the Expressionist paintings
of Wassily Kandinsky starting in 1903 and culminating with his first abstract
painting and the founding of the Expressionist Blue Rider group in Munich in
1911, the rise of fauvism, and the introduction of cubism from the studios of Henri
Matisse, Pablo Picasso,Georges Braque and others between 1900 and 1910.
Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919) is known as an early work of
modernism for its plain-spoken prose style and emphasis on psychological
insight into characters.
James Joyce was a major modernist writer whose strategies employed in his
novel Ulysses (1922) for depicting the events during a twenty-four-hour period in
the life of his protagonist, Leopold Bloom, have come to epitomize modernism's
approach to fiction. The poet T.S. Eliot described these qualities in 1923, noting
that Joyce's technique is "a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and
a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is
contemporary history.... Instead of narrative method, we may now use the

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mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world
possible for art." Eliot's own modernist poem The Waste Land (1922) mirrors "the
futility and anarchy" in its own way, in its fragmented structure, and the absence
of an obvious central, unifying narrative. This is in fact a rhetorical technique to
convey the poem's theme: "The decay and fragmentation of Western
Culture". The poem, despite the absence of a linear narrative, does have a
structure: this is provided by both fertility symbolism derived from anthropology,
and other elements such as the use of quotations and juxtaposition. [14]
Modernist literature addressed similar aesthetic problems as contemporary
modernist art. Gertrude Stein's abstract writings, for example, have been
compared to the fragmentary and multi-perspectiveCubist paintings of her
friend Pablo Picasso.The questioning spirit of modernism, as part of a necessary
search for ways to make sense of a broken world, can also be seen in a different
form in the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the
Thistle (1928). In this poem, MacDiarmid applies Eliot's techniques to respond to
the question of nationalism, using comedic parody, in an optimistic (though no
less hopeless) form of modernism in which the artist as "hero" seeks to embrace
complexity and locate new meanings.