Modernism emerged in response to new theories that destabilized traditional views of humanity. Freud, Marx, and Darwin challenged ideas of human rationality, independence, and superiority in nature. This caused a crisis of values and uncertainty. Modernist works reflected this by distorting forms, breaking norms, and focusing on disjointed experiences. Prominent modernist authors and artists like T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Picasso experimented with stream of consciousness, fragmentation, and abstract forms to capture this unsettled time.

1. Modernism
in literature
W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot
Kees IJzerman January 2014

2. Background
At the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th, people started to
feel increasingly unsettled. Old values were questioned.
Freud, Marx and Darwin had unsettled men from their secure
place at the centre of the human universe. Their theories
threatened humanist self-confidence and caused a feeling of
ideological uncertainty
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Freud challenged the thought that men were rational beings. He claimed that
humans were subject to their own unconscious instincts and lusts.
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Marx had revealed men’s dependence on laws and structures outside their
control and sometimes beyond their knowledge. Historical and material
determinism.
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Darwin in his conception of evolution and heredity had situated humanity as the
latest product of natural selection

3. Phenomena
Modernism comments on a feeling of lost community and
collapse of civilization. This gave rise to a few seemingly
contradictory phenomena:
Paradoxes:
• Revolution and conservatism
• Loss of a sense of tradition
– lamented in an extreme form of reactionary conservatism
– celebrated as a means of liberation from the past
• Increasing dominance of technology
– condemned vehemently
– embraced as the flagship of progress

4. How does this show?
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Intentional distortion of shapes
Focus on form rather than meaning
Breaking down of limitation of space and time
Breakdown of social norms and cultural values
Dislocation of meaning and sense from its normal context
Valorisation of the despairing individual in the face of an unmanageable
future
Disillusionment
Rejection of history and the substitution of a mythical past
Need to reflect the complexity of modern urban life
Importance of the unconscious mind
Interest in the primitive and non-western cultures
Impossibility of an absolute interpretation of reality
Overwhelming technological changes

5. So what IS it?
(an attempt at defining modernism)
Modernism is
• a literary and cultural international movement which
flourished in the first decades of the 20th century.
• an artistic response to the negative effects of modernity
(dehumanization)
• It reflects a sense of cultural crisis which was both exciting
and disquieting, in that it opened up a whole new vista of
human possibilities at the same time as putting into question
any previously accepted means of grounding and evaluating
new ideas.
• Modernism is marked by experimentation, particularly
manipulation of form, and by the realization that knowledge
is not absolute.

6. Influential thinkers
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Physicist Einstein on Relativity (1905)
Physicist Planck on Quantum Theory (1900)
Philosopher Nietzsche on the Will of Power
Philosopher Bergson on the Concept of Time
Psychologist William James on Emotions and Inner Time
Psychologist Freud on the Unconscious (The Interpretation of
Dreams, 1900)
• Psychologist Jung on Collective Unconscious
• Linguist De Saussure on Language
• Anthropologist Frazer on Primitive Cultures

7. Examples, painting
1. Picasso

8. Examples, painting
2. Braque

9. Examples, painting
3. Wyndham Lewis

10. Examples, architecture
Seagram Building

11. Examples: Music
Stravinsky, Schoenberg
• Dissonance/distorted music effects
• Rejection of rules of harmony and
composition
• Serial system of composition

12. Formal features of poetry
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Open form
Use of free verse
Juxtaposition of ideas rather than consequential exposition
Intertextuality
Use of allusions and multiple association of words
Borrowings from other cultures and languages
Unconventional use of metaphor
Importance given to sound to convey “the music of ideas”

13. Free verse
• Use of poetic line
• Flexibility of line length
• Massive use of alliteration
and assonance
• No use of traditional
metre
• No regular rhyme scheme
• Use of visual images in
distinct lines
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the
sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted
streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster
shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?“
Let us go and make our visit.
T.S Eliot
Prufrock

14. Modernist poets
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W.B. Yeats
Ezra Pound
T.S. Eliot
E.M. Rilke
Paul Valéry
André Breton
V Mayakovsky

15. W.B. Yeats (1855-1939)
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

16. W.B. Yeats (1855-1939)
• Annunciation Poetry
(sth. is announced)
• Leda and the Swan
• Part of Yeats’ vision of
historical cycles (gyres)
• A birth is announced >
new cycle starts.

17. W.B. Yeats (1855-1939)
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

18. T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock
(click here for full poem)
Form
•Dramatic monologue (~stream of consciousness)
•Irregular rhyme scheme
Themes
•Incapacity to act: modern man, overeducated,
sensitive
•Anxiety: growing bald, “I grow old”, intimidated by
women

19. T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
Themes in Eliot’s The Waste Land (full poem):
•Fragmentation (poem = collection of fragments)
•Water = life AND death
•Drought = death
•(Effects of) war
•Damaged people: psychologically & sexually
•The Fisher King: the wounded king as symbol for the wounded land

20. Modernist novelists
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J, Joyce
V. Woolf
D.H. Lawrence
J. Conrad
E.M. Forster
E. Hemingway
W. Faulkner
K.Mansfield
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M. Proust
F. Kafka
R. Musil
T. Mann
I. Svevo
L. Pirandello
B. Pasternak
M. Bulgakov

21. Formal features of narrative
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Experimental nature
Lack of traditional chronological narrative (discontinuous narrative)
Break of narrative frames (fragmentation)
Moving from one level of narrative to another
A number of different narrators (multiple narrative points of view)
Self-reflexive about the act of writing and the nature of literature (metanarrative)
Use of interior monologue technique
Use of the stream of consciousness technique
Focus on a character's consciousness and subconscious

22. Stream of consciousness
• Aims to provide a textual equivalent to the stream of a
fictional character’s consciousness
• Creates the impression that the reader is eavesdropping on
the flow of conscious experience in the character’s mind
• Comes in a variety of stylistic forms
• Narrated stream of consciousness often composed of
different sentence types including psycho-narration and free
indirect style
• characterized by associative (and at times dissociative) leaps
in syntax and punctuation

23. Interior monologue
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A particular kind of stream of consciousness writing
Also called quoted stream of consciousness, presents characters’ thought
streams exclusively in the form of silent inner speech, as a stream of
verbalised thoughts
Represents characters speaking silently to themselves and quotes their
inner speech, often without speech marks
Is presented in the first person and in the present tense and employs
deictic words
also attempts to mimic the unstructured free flow of thought
can be found in the context of third-person narration and dialogue