The document provides historical context on modernity and modernism between 1900-1945. It discusses the late 19th century Aesthetic Movement which rejected Victorian conventions. The Diamond Jubilee of 1897 celebrated Queen Victoria's empire. Critiques of Victorian attitudes emerged in works like The Way of All Flesh in the early 20th century. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness offered a critique of imperialism. The Edwardian era saw relative stability until World War I began in 1914, marking the end of that period. Key aspects of modernity included new philosophies, psychology, technology, and social/political changes like women's suffrage and labor issues. Modernist art and literature experiments with forms to capture this changing world.

1. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY:
Modernity and Modernism,
1900-1945
“The bloodiest century….”

2. Late Nineteenth Century (the fin de
siecle)
• The Aesthetic Movement
– Art for Art’s sake (i.e. Oscar
Wilde)
– Rejection of Victorian
emphasis on the artist’s
moral and educational role
– Aestheticism widened the
gap between writers/artists
and the British public
resulting in the “alienation”
of the artist from modern
society.
– Artists/writers repudiated
conventions and normative
models of “respectability.”

3. Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee
1897

4. On 22 September
1896, Queen Victoria
surpassed George III
as the longest-reigning
monarch in British
history. In accordance
with the Queen's
request, all special
public celebrations of
the event were
delayed until 1897, the
Queen's Diamond
Jubilee. The Colonial
Secretary, Joseph
Chamberlain,
proposed that the
Diamond Jubilee be
made a festival of the
British Empire. Thus,
the prime ministers of
all the self-governing
colonies were invited
along with their
families.

5. The procession in which the Queen participated
included troops from each Dominion, British colony and
dependency, together with soldiers sent by Indian
princes and chiefs (who were subordinate to Victoria,
the Empress of India).

6. The Diamond Jubilee
celebration was an
occasion marked by
great outpourings of
affection for the
septuagenarian
Queen, who was by
then confined to a
wheelchair. The
celebrations also
coincided with
heightened security
prompted by the
assassination plot on
her life by Irish
nationalists on her
Golden Jubilee 10
years earlier.

7. 1901: The Death of Queen Victoria
The End of an Era

8. Critiques of Victorian attitudes central
to what became known as modernism
• Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (begun in
1884 and published in 1903). Bitter indictment of
Victorian social mores, family life, religion, and
education.
• Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians 1918 (ironic
biographical essays of Victorian greats like
Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas
Arnold, and General Gordon)
• Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” (original
title “By the Century’s Deathbed”)

9. Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
1899/1902
Offered a critique
of British Empire
and the costs of
British Imperialism
to indigenous
people. Exposed
the hypocrisies
inherent in the
British Imperialist
mission as
discussed in
class.

10. • Like much of the
literature that
emerged during the
late nineteenth-
century and the
early twentieth-
century, Conrad’s
text offers a
pessimistic critique
of human nature
paired with a strong
sense of stoicism, or
an acceptance of
fate.

11. The Edwardian Era
• Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) Britain’s effort to
gain control political and economic control over
the Boer republics, which were self-governing, in
South Africa. An effort to extend British
Imperialism which was severely criticized by
British intellectuals.
• Reign of Edward VII: 1901-1910
– Edwardian Era a period of vulgar and conspicuous
consumption—social and economic stabilities of the
Victorian age had not been challenged (large country
houses with several servants, flourishing middle
class, strict hierarchy of social classes maintained and
strictly controlled social mobility and attitudes.

12. E.M. Forster examines this period in novels like Howards End.
E.M. Forster examines this period in novels like Howards End.
• E.M. Forster examines this period in novels like
Howards End.
Large country estates like Howards End were still flourishing during the Edwardian Era

13. The Georgian Period (1910-1914)
• George V comes to the throne.
• Balance between the class
consciousness and conspicuous
consumption of the Edwardian
period and a more stable,
inward looking period.
• The calm before the storm.
World War I breaks out August
4, 1914 and lasts until 1918

14. • Key Terms to understand:
– Modernity
– Modernism as an aesthetic Movement
– Modernist Literature: What types of aesthetic
forms were writers experimenting with given the
rapid and radical changes brought on by war,
immigration, imperialism, further advances in
technology and urbanization?

15. MODERNITY
• Refers to the
quality,
experience, or
period of the
“modern”
• Highlights the
novelty of the
present as a
break or rupture
with the past
and the
movement into a
rapidly
approaching and
uncertain future.

16. • In its broadest sense, modernity is associated
with the ideas of innovation, progress, and
fashion, and counter-posed to the ideas of
antiquity, the classical, and tradition.

17. • The term
“modernity”
comes from
Baudelaire’s essay
“The Painter of
Modern Life”–
defined there as
the ephemeral,
the fugitive, the
contingent

18. • Modernity or the
experience of the
modern (i.e. the
rapid industrialization
and growth of urban
spaces during the
late 19th and 20th
century) disrupts
notions of linearity
and temporal
continuity in favor of
instantaneous
“shocks,” fragmented
subjectivity, and
produces the crisis in
narrative forms and
representation that
becomes known as
MODERNISM.

19. • In its historical sense—the
fact that this way of
experiencing time emerges
only at a particular historical
moment, within particular
kinds of society—ties it
closely to the sociological
study of forms. As a
sociological concept,
modernity is associated with
industrialization,
secularization, bureaucracy,
and the city.

20. MODERNISM: 1890-1930
• A general term applied retrospectively by scholars to
the wide range of experimental and avant-garde trends
in the literature and arts of the early 20th century. These
included:
• Symbolism
• Futurism
• Expressionism
• Imagism
• Vorticism
• Dada
• Surrealism
•

21. In general these trends involve:
• A conscious attempt to exploit new perspectives;
• A reaction to the confusion of the contemporary
moment by seeking fresh ways to represent
human experience;
• Reworking conventional modes of expression to
create a radically new formal vision
• Displaying a highly self-conscious use of
language;
• A preference for craft and technique rather than
representation or a statement of emotion
• An effort to construct/shape a new perception of
human nature through the self-conscious
manipulation of form.

22. Modernist literature is characterized
by the following:
• A rejection of 19th-century
traditions and the conventions of
realism.
• A critique of Victorian and
bourgeois values.
• The adoption of complex and
difficult new forms and styles.

23. The Modernist Novel
• Chronology and linearity were upset
by writers like Joseph Conrad, Marcel
Proust, and William Faulkner.
• Writers like James Joyce and Virginia
Woolf experimented with new ways
of representing their characters’
inner consciousness through the
“stream of consciousness”
technique.

24. • Modernist writers also
experimented with mixing and
dissolving the boundaries
between conventional points of
view (i.e. first person, 3rd person
omniscient, 3rd person limited
(also known as free indirect
discourse).

25. POETRY and THEATRE
• Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot replaced the
logical exposition of thoughts with collages
of fragmentary images and complex
allusions.
• Luigi Pirandello and Bertolt Brecht opened
up the theatre to new forms of
abstraction, alienation, and audience
participation in place of realist and
naturalist representations.

26. Modernist Writing
• Predominantly cosmopolitan and
often expresses a sense of urban
dislocation.
• Favors techniques of juxtaposition
and multiple points of view thereby
challenging the reader to make
meaning from fragmentary forms.

27. • Also registers an awareness of
new developments in:
–Anthropology:
•Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough,
which challenged previous
conceptions of culture, religion,
and myth. Western religion is
decentered by a host of
alternative mythologies.

28. • generated optimism
• created dynamic
industrial and urban
growth
• accelerated the way
life is experienced
• shrank distances
through new
communication and
transportation systems
TECHNOLOGY AND THE NEW SCIENCES

29. –First wireless communication across
the Atlantic 1901
–Henry Ford’s Model T 1913
–Mass production of appliances and
products
–The gramophone
–Scientific materialism and positivism
seemed to be the new religion

30. The Modernist Philosophical
Paradigms
The New Perception of External Reality
• Modern thinkers broke with the belief in classical
mechanics.
• Newton had asserted that space and time were
absolute.
• Modernists, on the other hand, questioned
objective reality.
• Instead, the modernists embraced subjectivity.
• Observations about reality are observer-
dependent.
Relativity: Space, Time and Light

31. • Reality is not absolute.
• An object’s appearance varies
depending on from what
angle it is being viewed.
• To really understand an
object, one has to view it from
several points of view.
F. H. Bradley: Appearance and Reality
(1893)

32. Alfred Whitehead: Process and Reality
(1929)
• Reality is not static but in a
state of flux, always in the
process of becoming.
• No object exists in a
vacuum—rather “there is no
element whatever which
possesses this character of
simple location.”
• Each object is relevant to its
surroundings in that it is in
the process of becoming
another object.
• Matter, space, and time are
all interrelated.

33. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) revolutionized the way that modern man
experienced reality.

34. • 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.
Albert Einstein: The Special Theory of Relativity

35. The Modernist Psychological
Paradigms
The New Perception of Internal Reality
• Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
• expanded the definition of sexuality
• defined the major components of
personality/psyche
• created a dynamic psychology based
on the interaction of the id, the ego,
and the superego
• defined the importance of the
unconscious
• created psychoanalysis, a science that
uncovers the secrets of the psyche
and radically changed our notions of
self and subjectivity
• The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
• Three Essays on Sexuality (1905)

36. Carl Jung (1875-1961)
• based psychology on the
collective unconscious, the
inherited memories of the
race
• developed archetypes to
explain human behavior
• explained how archetypes
are expressed in fairy tales,
myths, and artistic
endeavors

37. • defined human
experience through
duration, psychological
time consisting of the
constant flow from the
past into the future
rather than a succession
of chronological instants
• believed that reality is a
past that constantly
becomes something
new
• held that intuition is the
most trustworthy guide
to understanding
Henri Bergson (1859-1941)

38. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CHANGES,
CRITIQUES, MOVEMENTS
KARL MARX (1818-1883)
The Communist Manifesto (1848)
“The history of all hitherto existing society
is the history of class struggles.”
“The development of Modern Industry,
therefore, cuts from under its feet the
very foundation on which the bourgeoisie
produces and appropriates products.
What the bourgeoisie therefore
produces, above all, are its own grave-
diggers. Its fall and the victory of the
proletariat are equally inevitable.”
-Marx sought to explain history and produce a
new sense of historical consciousness.
-He believed that the root of all behavior was
economic and that the leading feature of
economic life was the division of society into
antagonistic classes based on a relation to the
means of production.

39. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CHANGES
• Married Woman’s Property Act 1882—
allowed married women to own property
and to be admitted to certain
universities.
• 1918 women’s suffrage won for women
30 and over; 1928 for women 21 and
over

40. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CRITIQUES,
CHANGES, MOVEMENTS
• Women’s Suffrage:
– 1918 in Britain
– 1920 in America
– 1944 (!) in France
– 1918 in Germany
– 1947 in India
– 1952 in Greece
– 1956 in Egypt

41. Mass Dislocations of Populations: War, Empire, immigration

42. • Civic and ethnic nationalism developed in part as a response to
population shifts, often with disastrous consequences. As
Picasso’s Guernica shows, modernism investigates how
individual identity functions as part of larger economic,
political, and bureaucratic systems, which are often dislocated
from regions that defined group and individual identity for
other movements.
Modernism is also partially a response to mass dislocations of
population due to war, empire, and immigration. This dislocation
resulted in the unprecedented close quartering of different classes and
ethnicities in rapidly expanding cities.

43. LABOR UNREST
Began before the end of the 19th century with incidents like the Haymarket Riots on
May 4, 1886

44. WORLD WAR I: 1914-1918

45. WORLD WAR I CONT’
-It involved artists and thinkers with the brutal actualities of
large-scale modern war, images of catastrophe that
demythologized conventional notions of heroism.
-The sense of great civilization(s) being destroyed or
destroying themselves, of social breakdown, and of
individual powerlessness became part of the American and
European experience especially as a result of participation
in WWI, with resulting feelings of fear, discrimination, and
on occasion, liberation.
-In the wake of the apocalyptic sense of a new century and
the cultural crisis brought on by WWI, Western notions of
superiority came into question. In addition, long held
precepts of the Renaissance and Enlightenment models of
reality, all encompassing beliefs that humans were
essentially good and could perfect both themselves and
their societies, were beginning to collapse, and the value
systems underlying society—those of God, country, and
capitalism/government—also faced challenges on almost
all fronts.
-In America, a new term, coined by Gertrude Stein, came to
be used to describe the generation of men and women
who came to maturity between WWI and the Depression of
the 1930s: “the lost generation.”

46. With modernity came an overwhelming sense
of change, loss, destabilization.
– Yeats’ “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold”
– Eliot’s quest in “Four Quartets” for a “still point
to the turning world”
– The modernist notion “make it new” (Ezra
Pound’s phrase) emerges from a keen sense of
the radical changes happening during this period
and the need to revise conventional forms and to
create “new forms for *our+ new sensations”
(Virginia Woolf).

47. AVANT-GARDE ART MOVEMENTS
(in French literally means “advanced guard” or “vanguard.”) This was the term
used to refer to the innovative techniques and formal experimentations being
used, most specifically in relation to art, culture, and politics.

48. IMPRESSIONISM/POST-
IMPRESSIONISM
Monet’s Water Lilies Orangerie, Paris
Van Gogh’s The Starry Night 1889
Literary Impressionism:
 Characters, scenes,
moods appear through
a specific vantage point,
temperament.
 Fleeting impression of
the moment is more
significant than a
photographic
presentation of “fact.”
 The object of the
impressionist is to
present the moment or
the material not in an
objective manner but as
it is seen or felt to be by
the impressionist or a
character in a single
passing moment.

49. GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM
 Writers express an inner
vision, emotion, spiritual
reality in an effort to assert
their alienation from an
industrial bourgeoisie society
whose inhumanity repels
them
 they subordinate conventional
(rational) style and let
emotion dictate the structure
of their works, emphasizing
rhythm, disrupted narrative
line and broken syntax, and
distorted imagery.
 Distortion of the physical
world so that it better depicts
emotional states.

50. FUTURISM
Proclaims its enthusiasm for the dynamic new machine age through
experiments in typography, free association, rapid shifts and breaks of
syntax, and manipulations of sounds and world placement for special
effects apart from semantic meaning; the vision is harsh and stark; began
with Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto in 1908.

51. Marinetti: The Futurist Manifesto
(1908)
• We intend to glorify the love of danger, the custom of
energy, the strength of daring.
• The essential elements of our poetry will be courage,
audacity, and revolt.
• We declare that the splendor of the world has been
enriched with a new form of beauty, the beauty of
speed.
• There is no more beauty except in struggle. No
masterpiece without the stamp of aggressiveness.
• We will glorify war-the only true hygiene of the world-
militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of
anarchist, the beautiful Ideas which kill and the scorn
of woman.
• We will destroy museums, libraries, and fight against
moralism, feminism, and all utilitarian cowardice.

52. The Futurist Manifesto
• Avant Garde Movement
– Reaction to the Decadent Movement
– Connection to Social Darwinism
• Marinetti’s 1907 Launch in Milan
– Rejection of the old
– Cult of the New
• Machines
– Cars, Planes, etc…
• Speed
• Violence
• Competition
• Designed to Shock
– Welcomed confrontation
– Delighted by World War One

53. Legacy of Futurism
• Worship of Technological Advance
• Support to Fascism
– Allows Fascists to claim that they are the Party of the
Future
• Will Influence Fascist Art and Propaganda techniques
• Influences Cubism and Abstract Art Form
– Abstract representation of speed
• Little post WW2 Appeal as tainted by Fascist
connections

54. DADAISM
 Subverts authority and breaks all
the rules hoping to liberate the
creative imagination; Dada creations
were attacks on the mind and
emotions; began in Zurich in 1916.
 Very much a response to the
atrocity that was WWI.
 Referred to as an “anti-art” due to
the fact that Dadaists themselves
were not able to agree upon a
shared ideology or even a common
definition for the word “Dada.”
 Sure of what it was against, not
what it was for.
 Tristan Tzara wrote about freedom
and beauty in terms of the ugly and
grotesque: “shrieking of contracted
pains, intertwining of contraries,
non sequiturs: LIFE.”

55. SURREALISM
Dada and Surrealism were sibling movements that
emphasized collaborative work and the avant-garde,
anarchy, and antibourgeois sentiment; they attacked the
nihilistic and war mongering of the modern world. André
Breton as a surrealist was concerned with incongruity and
fantasy as the basis of creativity.

56. SURREALISM CONT’
• Drew upon Freud’s theory of the unconscious and used psychological and
parapsychological techniques such as “automatic writing” to achieve
incongruous and fantastic compositions.
• In the manifesto, Breton comments on the impossibility of the “real life,”
which exists only through the bourgeois lens of logic.
• Breton argued that the Freudian focus on the dream state is as tenable as a
focus on “real” experiences, because in his waking state “man is the play
thing of his memory,” whereas the resolution of reality and dreams forms a
“kind of absolute reality, a surreality.”
• Surrealism is defined as a belief in a superior reality that stems from the
dream, or “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to
express…the actual functioning of thought.”

57. CUBISM
Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)
Picasso’s “Girl with Mandolin” (1910)
Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude
Descending a Staircase” (1912)

58. • Cubism, as defined by E. H. Gombrich in Art
and Illusion, is “the most radical attempt to
stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one
reading of the picture – that of a man-made
construction, a colored canvas.” One single
reading does not refer to a single perspective
(which is ambiguous) but to an understanding
of all possible perspectives. (Simultaneity) In
the case of painting, this means a multi-
perspective view of, say, a woman in a blue
hat:

59. • In the case of writing, this
means shifting the literary
perspective – that is, the points
of view. It involves writing
about events and people as
they appear to one character,
then repeating through the
eyes of another, and then
moving to yet another. It
involves using different
narrators for different chapters
or even different paragraphs,
so as to describe how each
character views the others, put
in the words, thoughts and
feelings of the characters
themselves.

60. 1930s: The RED DECADE (rise of communism,
socialism, left liberalism)
-depression and unemployment
-rise of Hitler and Fascism/Nazism
-1936-1939: Spanish Civil War – Franco’s
fascist government challenged. A precursor to
the larger war to come.
-1939 WWII breaks out; WWII would end with
Hitler’s defeat in 1945

61. The New Global Economy
• industrialization
• social and psychological fragmentation
• alienation
• class warfare
• economic interdependence
• colonialism
• cultural cross-fertilization
• nationalism
• war