Modernism was an artistic and literary movement between 1900-1945 that embraced experimental styles and forms that challenged tradition. Modernist writers and artists sought to depict subjective experience, psychological realism, and disjointed narratives influenced by new theories of science, psychology, and philosophy. Some key characteristics of Modernist literature include nonlinear narratives, stream-of-consciousness writing, intertextuality, and themes of individual alienation, social change, and urban living.

1. Modernism
1900-1945

2. Literary Modernism
 Embraced nontraditional syntax and
forms.
 Challenged tradition
 Writers wanted to move beyond
Realism to introduce such concepts
as disjointed timelines.
 An overarching theme of Modernism
was “emancipation”

3. Difference between Realism
and Modernism
 Whereas REALISM  MODERNISM
 Emphasized  Argued for cultural
absolutism, and relativism,
 Believed that a  And believed that
single reality could people make their
be determined own meaning in the
through the world.
observation of nature

4. Value Differences in the Modern
World
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

5. World War I:1914 (1917-1918)

6. Russian Revolution: 1917

7. Between World Wars
 Many historians have
described the period
between the two World
Wars as a “traumatic
coming of age.”
 In a post-Industrial
Revolution era, America
had moved from an
agrarian nation to an
urban nation.
 The lives of these
Americans were radically
different from those of
their parents.

8. Social Snapshot of the Times
 Result of Political Turmoil
 Revolutionary Ideologies Rise
 Fascism
 The separation and persecution or denial of
equality to a certain group based on race,
creed, or origin
 Nazism
 Socialism featuring racism, expansionism and
obedience to a strong leader
 Communism
 Control of the means of production should rest
in the hands of the laborers.

9. Fascism
and
Nazism

10. Communism

11. Social Snapshot of the Times
 Scientific Revolution
 Quantum theory
 Explainsthe nature of matter and energy on
the atomic and subatomic level
 Principle of Uncertainty
 In
quantum mechanics: increasing the
accuracy of measurement of one observable
quantity increases the uncertainty with which
another may be known

12. Snapshot of the Times:
Implications for Nature of Reality
 Many-worlds (multi-verse) theory
 As soon as the potential exists for any object to be
in any state, the universe of the object transmutes
into a series of parallel universes equaling the
number of possible states in which an object can
exist. Stephen Hawking posits the possibility for
interaction between universes.
 Copenhagen interpretation: nothing exists until
it is measured:
 Schrödinger's cat (dead and alive)

13. Schrödinger's cat

14. Forces Behind Modernism
 The sense that our culture has no
center, no values.
 Paradigm shift
 from the closed, finite, measurable, cause-
and-effect universe of the 19th century to
an open, relativistic, changing, strange
universe;

15. Modernism in Art
Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism,
Futurism

16. The Armory Show: International
Exhibition of Modern Art, 1913
 Watershed date in
American art
 Introduced
astonished New
Yorkers, accustomed
to realistic art, to
modern art;
 Teddy Roosevelt
said, “That’s not art!”

17. Matisse

18. Cubism
 Cubism—1909-1911
 Art in which multiple views are presented
simultaneously in flattened, geometric way.

19. Cubism

20. Dadaism
 Dadaism –deliberately irrational
 a protest against the barbarism of the War and
oppressive intellectual rigidity;
 Anti-art
 Strives to have no meaning
 Interpretation dependent entirely on the
viewer;
 Intentionally offends.

21. Dadaism
Duchamp

22. Surrealism
 Surrealism
 Grew out of Dada and automatism.
 Reveals the unconscious mind in dream images,
the irrational, and the fantastic,
 Impossible combinations of objects depicted in
realistic detail.

23. Surrealism
Dali Magritte

24. Jackson Pollock

25. Futurism
 Futurism—grew out of Cubism.
 Added implied motion to the shifting planes
and multiple observation points of the
Cubists;
 Celebrated natural as well as mechanical
motion and speed.
 Glorified danger, war, and the machine

26. Futurism
Kandinsky Giacomo Balla

27. Modernism in
Literature
American and U.K. Authors

28. Roots of Literary Modernism
 Influenced by Walt
Whitman’s free verse
 Prose poetry of British
writer Oscar Wilde
 British writer Robert
Browning’s subversion of
the poetic self
 Emily Dickinson’s
compression
 English Symbolist writers,
especially Arthur Symons

29. American Modernist Writers
 Ernest Hemingway, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, William
Faulkner, John Steinbeck,
Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot,
E. E. Cummings, Robert
Frost
 Harlem Renaissance
writers such as Langston
Hughes, Zora Neale
Hurston, James Weldon
Johnson, Countee Cullen,
Jean Toomer, Richard
Wright

30. English/Irish Modernist Writers
 James Joyce (Ulysses,
Portrait of an Artist)
 Virginia Wolfe (Mrs.
Dalloway, To the
Lighthouse)
 Samuel Beckett (Waiting
for Godot) James Joyce
 D.H. Lawrence (Lady
Chatterly’s Lover)
Samuel Beckett

31. Imagism
 School of Imagism: Ezra
Pound, Hilda Doolittle, Amy
Lowell, William Carlos
Williams
 Direct treatment of the
“thing,” whether subjective
or objective.
 To use absolutely no word
that does not contribute to
the presentation.
 As regarding rhythm: to
compose in sequence of
the musical phrase, not in
sequence of the
metronome.

32. Characteristics
 Perspectivism
 Inner psychology of the mind
 Changes in perception of language
 Emphasis on the experimental
 Juxtapostion
 Discontinuous narrative
 Intertextuality
 Classical allusions
 Borrowing from cultures and other
languages

33. Characteristics of Modernism
in Literature
 Literature exhibits perspective
 Meaning comes from the individual’s
perspective and is thus personalized;
 A single story might be told from the
perspective of several different people,
with the assumption that the “truth” is
somewhere in the middle

34. Characteristics of Modernism
in Literature
 Inner psychological reality or “interiority” is
represented
o Stream of consciousness—portraying the
character’s inner monologue

35. Characteristic of Modernism in
Literature
 Perception of language changes:
 No longer seen as transparent, allowing us
to “see through” to reality;
 But now considered the way an individual
constructs reality;
 Language is “thick” with multiple meanings
and varied connotative forces.

36. Characteristic of Modernism in
Literature
 Emphasis on the experimental
 Art is artifact rather than reality;
 Organized non-sequentially
 Experience portrayed as layered, allusive,
discontinuous, using fragmentation and
juxtaposition.
 Ambiguous endings—open endings which
are seen as more representative of reality.

37. Juxtaposition
 Two images that are otherwise not
commonly brought together appear side
by side or structurally close together,
thereby forcing the reader to stop and
reconsider the meaning of the text through
the contrasting images, ideas, motifs, etc.
 For example, “He slouched alertly” is a
juxtaposition.

38. Discontinuous Narrative
 Narrative moves
back and forth
through time.
 Faulkner’s The
Sound and the
Fury or As I Lay
Dying

39. Intertextuality
 Intertextuality is a relationship
between two or more texts that
quote from one another, allude to
one another, or otherwise connect.
 Faulkner’s The Sound & the Fury
 Title related to Shakespeare’s Macbeth
 Joyce’s Ulysses
 Title and work related to The Odyssey

40. Themes
 Breakdown of social norms and
cultural sureties
 Alienation of the individual
 Valorization of the despairing
individual in the force of an
unmanageable future
 Product of the metropolis, of cities
and urbanscapes

41. Social Norms/Cultural Sureties
 Women were given the
right to vote in 1920.
 Hemlines raised;
Margaret Sanger
introduces the idea of
birth control.
 Karl Marx’s ideas
flourish; the Bolshevik
Revolution overthrows
Russia’s czarist
government and
establishes the Soviet
Union.
 Writers begin to
explore these new
ideas.

42. Theme of Alienation
 Sense of alienation in
literature:
 The character belongs
to a “lost generation”
(Gertrude Stein)
 The character suffers
from a “dissociation of
sensibility”—separation
of thought from feeling
(T. S. Eliot)
 The character has “a
Dream deferred”
(Langston Hughes).

43. Valorization of the Individual
 Characters are heroic
in the face of a future
they can’t control.
 Demonstrates the
uncertainty felt by
individuals living in this
era.
 Examples include Jay
Gatsby in The Great
Gatsby, Lt. Henry in A
Farewell to Arms

44. Urbanscapes
 Life in the city
differs from life
on the farm;
writers began to
explore city life.
 Conflicts begin
to center on
society.