This document provides an overview of modernism in various art forms including literature. It discusses how modernism challenged traditional practices through experimentation and innovation across music, painting, architecture, and literature between 1910-1930. Key modernist literary works rejected realism and chronological plots in favor of stream-of-consciousness techniques, subjective points of view, and fragmented or discontinuous narratives. The document lists some influential modernist writers in English and other languages.

1. WELCOME
Dr Rakhi Raghavan
Assistant Professor of English
PRNSS College
Mattanur, Kannur
12/08/2020

2. Modernism
Beginning Theory – Peter
Barry

3. MODERNISM
 The movement which dominated the arts and
culture of the first half of the twentieth century
 Earthquake in the arts – music, painting,
literature and architecture
 Major epicentres – Vienna, France, Germany, Italy
and Britain
 Challenged and rejected the fundamental
elements of practice in all the arts

4. Music, Painting and Architecture
 Music – Melody and harmony put aside
 Painting – Perspective and pictorial representation
abandoned in favour of degrees of abstraction
 Architecture – Traditional forms rejected in favour
of plain geometrical forms/new materials like
plate, glass and concrete used in the place of
traditional materials

5. Literature
Rejection of traditional realism
Chronological plots/continuous
narratives/omniscient narrators/closed
end-readings abandoned
New and experimental forms
attempted

6. Literary modernism
 Period – 1910 to 1930 (period of high modernism)
 Shift from traditional forms of literature
 Experimentation and innovation in treatment
 Reached its high point in the 1920s
 Retreated in the 1930s owing to the political and
economic tensions of the decade
 Renewal took place in the 1960s

7. Modernist Writers (writing in English)
 T S Eliot
 James Joyce
 Ezra Pound
 Wyndham Lewis
 Virginia Woolf
 Wallace Stevens
 Gertrude Stein

8. Modernist Writers ( French & German)
Marcel Proust
Stephane Mallarme
Andre Gide
Franz Kafka
Rainer Maria Rilke

9. Literary Modernism: Characteristics
 Emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity
 ‘How’ we see rather than ‘what’ we see
 Stream-of-consciousness technique
 A movement away from omniscient external
narration/fixed narrative points of
view/clear-cut moral positions

10.  A blurring of the distinction between
genres:
• novels become more lyrical and poetic
• poems become more documentary and prose-like

11.  Liking for fragmented forms
 Discontinuous narratives
 Collages of disparate materials

12.  Tendency towards ‘reflexivity’
• Literary texts (poems, plays, novels) show
an inclination for self-reflexivity
• Texts raise issues concerning their own
nature, status and role