2. Introduction by Iqra Karamat
Difference between Victorian age and Modernism
by Iqra Karamt
New Paradigms by Hafiz Muhammad Usman
Modern Poetry by Javeria Kainat
Modern Drama by Nageen Akhtar
Modern Novel by Iram Iqbal
Difference B/W Modernism and Post-Modernism
by Tahira Amir
4. The Victorians accepted the Voice of Authority and
acknowledged the rule of Expert.
In modernism, Barnard Shaw challenged the Voice of
Authority and rule of Expert. The watchwords of his
creed were; Question’ Examine’ Test.
Nothing was considered as certain; everything was
question in Modernism.
5. Victorian believed in sanctity of home life.
In modernism sentiments for family circle declined.
They considered the domestic life as too narrow.
In Victorian age, male had free to do anything but
female had not.
In modernism sex no longer remained as mystery.
6. Victorianism
Mixture of Romanticism and Classicism
occurred/found.
Write in chronological order.
Authors and the reading public understood each other,
and had common outlook on and attitude to life and
its problems.
In simple form that everyone could understand.
7. Modernism
Realism
Not write in chronological order. Stories do not have
proper beginning and end.
No common ground on which author and their reader
meet.
It is opposed to general attitude to life and its
problems adopted by Victorians.
In highly complex and ambiguous style that
intellectual person can understand.
8. Society is important in Victorianism.
Individualism is more important than society in
modernism
9. Victorian London transportation was by foot, and
boats.
Modern London transportation was cars, buses, trains
and taxis.
10. Age of machine
Importance of money
Against the attitude of self-complacency.
Man was more of a social being than a spiritual being.
Love became much less of a romance and much more
of experience.
Science was responsible for attitude of interrogations
and disintegration of old value.
Modern man has now live according to time and
scheme, not according to mood and impulse.
Development in Science and Technology.
12. In modern literature a lot of movements started. They differed
frome each other and Some of them even contradicted each
other. People started to follow different paradigms. In fact it
was an age of transition and amalgamation of different
concepts. World war 1 and world war 2 left a reasonable
impression on the thoughts and concepts of writers and poets.
Modernists were equally influenced by the shiny new science
of their time and by new discoveries about ancient
civilizations. And on the other hand Religious belief started to
give way to science as the predominant way of understanding
the universe. Some of the paradigms are Stream of
Consciousness, The Unconsciousness, Make It New, The Jazz
Age, The City etc.
13. The carnage of two World Wars profoundly affected
writers of the period. Several great English poets died or
were wounded in WWI. At the same time, global
capitalism was reorganizing society at every level. For
many writers, the world was becoming a more absurd
place every day. The mysteriousness of life was being lost
in the rush of daily life. The senseless violence of WWII
was yet more evidence that humanity had lost its way.
Modernist authors depicted this absurdity in their works.
Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," in which a traveling
salesman is transformed into an insect-like creature, is an
example of modern absurdism.
14. The term "Avant-garde" comes from French military terminology. It refers to the
front line of soldiers, the vanguard, who are out in front of the rest.
It also refers to creating new art. This was also dangerous, both figuratively and
sometimes even literally. Writers were taking their positions on the battle lines,
fighting against the forces of the outmoded traditions to offend, upend, and
destroy the surviving vestiges of the old order. Out with the old, in with the new.
Modernism tends to blur the lines between media. Maybe that's because
Modernist writers hung out with visual artists all the time, and these kinds of art
tended to cross-pollinate.
Crazy-pants artistic movements like Cubism and Surrealism definitely influenced
writers. If visual artists could paint from all angles at once, or paint their dreams,
what was stopping their literary pals from doing the same?
Nothing but tradition, that's what. And Modernists weren't keen on the same.
Heard of Finnegan's Wake? it's generally acknowledged to be unreadable. It's
almost impossible to read Joyce's book without a dozen reference texts and
dictionaries in several languages. What could the point of such dizzying
confusion-making be?
15. We're talking Freud's idea about the stormy seas of desire and animal need that are crashing
about in the back of your mind right now. Wow. Sigmund Freud was kind of a big deal. Strictly
speaking, he wasn't the first or only psychologist of his time, he single-handedly founded
psychoanalysis, and in the process changed the way we think and write.
One of Freud's most important theories was that the mind is divided into three parts:
ego, or conscious mind;
superego, the in-house censor that cuts out all the nasty bits from dreams and thoughts so they
won't offend the delicate sensibilities of the ego; and
id, the wild unconscious mind where primitive drives and instincts rule.
Freud believed that the development of an individual human being tells us about the overall
development of the entire human race. Freud thought that human beings had become civilized
by repressing primitive drives.
His ideas greatly influenced artists and writers who emphasized the life of the mind over the
everyday existence of human beings in the world. That's one reason that the Modernists can be
so difficult to decipher… although, compared to deciphering dreams, even Mrs. Dalloway is
easy-peasy.
Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness contains Kurtz's famous last words: "The horror, the
horror!" What are you talking about, Kurtz? The horror of what, exactly? Conrad's not going to
tell you, because he knows you can fill in the blank by referring to the storehouse of fears
locked in your unconscious.
16. Freud's theories about the unconscious definitely changed the way people thought about the mind.
But William James' theories about the nature of consciousness that had a much greater influence on the way
Modernist literature was written than most people realize.
William James' had a little theory called Radical Empiricism which sheds doubt on the existence of a unified
self. In normal-people speak, this means that the "I" you were five years ago or even five minutes ago is not
the same "I" you are now. We are all a series of selves and that the self cannot be disentangled from the
world. In other words, we are what we see.
He shared with his brother, the novelist Henry James a preoccupation with consciousness. He described the
flow of thought, in a phrase that would launch a thousand works of fiction, as "a stream." The rest is
history… Modernist literary history.
Who employed stream of consciousness writing techniques? Um, everyone who was anyone in Modernism.
Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce… and that's just the tip of the stream of
consciousness iceberg.
Not surprisingly, Henry James was the earliest novelist whose work reflects his bro William James' theories.
The books Henry James published after the appearance of his brother's Principles of Psychology
(1890) seem to turn upon the issues related to consciousness. In novels like What Maisie Knew
(1897) and The Golden Bowl (1904), readers have to ask themselves how the narrators' perspectives account
for what they see.
James Joyce's novel Ulysses not only gives us access to the thoughts of its characters, but also presents each
chapter in the style of a different writer and work. This novel is a whole delta of streams of consciousness.
In the novel Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf plays up stream of consciousness while emphasizing the
uniqueness of the characters, creating a web of connection between them.
17. Gertrude Stein reportedly quoted the mechanic who fixed her car when she branded the young group of
artists and writers who attended her Paris salon as "a lost generation." Ernest Hemingway borrowed that line
(cause it's awesome) for the epigraph of his first novel, The Sun Also Rises.
This super-wise repairman based his view on the idea that the ages of 18-25 generally marked the period
during which individuals became civilized members of society. But the soldiers returning from WWI, which
ended in 1919, had missed this crucial "becoming a good citizen" period. They also returned traumatized by
modern warfare: poison gas and trenches don't exactly make for happy memories.
Modernism marked an age of accelerated technological change—both on and off the battlefield. Some of
this change we would probably list as positive (cars! movies!), but also there were also a whole lot of check
marks in the "Technology Is Evil" side of the list.
Airplanes are awesome, right? Sure, until they're used in warfare in WWI. The same goes for automobiles,
which brought tanks to the battlefield. Basically, war was more brutal than ever before.
So it's no shocker that young men began to question traditional wisdoms and new innovations. The
authorities sent these men into battle, and new innovations in weaponry helped kill, maim, or haunt them.
No wonder this generation didn't trust anyone. And if you don't know who to trust, it's pretty easy to feel,
well, lost.
Chew On This
Though Hemingway's writing style seems much more straightforward and conventional than other
Modernist writers' (although that's not saying much!) it still captures the spirit of the period: Hemingway
refuses to tell us how to feel.
Trench warfare, perhaps made possible by the invention of barbed wire, was its own sort of hell, as the
World War I British poet, Isaac Rosenberg testifies in his poem, "Dead Man's Dump." Rosenberg's poem is
like a close-up lens that gives us an individual's view of the war.
18. One of the most influential poets of the period was Ezra Pound, who
proclaimed the maxim "Make it New!" on frequent occasion and
even made it a title to one of his books.
Pound and his buddies disagreed with the Futurists and Dadaists,
who wanted to jettison everything from the past. In fact, Pound &
Co. sought out ancient traditions and used them in their work.
Pound felt that rather than throwing out every outmoded idea and
tradition, poets and artists had to gather up odds and ends of the past
and repurpose them. The resulting works would preserve civilization,
even in an age where everything seemed to be up for grabs.
Pound's poem "The River Merchant's Wife" is a Chinese translation,
relic of a tradition thousands of years old. Then how is Pound
following his own advice—is he making this poem new?
19. Modernist writers and artists not only congregated in major cities like Paris, London, St.
Petersburg, Chicago, and New York, but also frequently focused their work on these places.
Think about Joyce's Ulysses, which juxtaposes figures and fables of classical mythology to
the mundane world of Dublin and the people who inhabited it.
Or about William Carlos William's Modernist epic, Paterson, which is an amalgamation of bits
and pieces set in unlikely place—a highly industrialized and not at all glamorous town in New
Jersey. And that was way before Bruce Springsteen was putting his poetic spin on Joisey.
Modernism blew raspberries at the idea that everyday places, people, and language were unfit
for art. These artists insisted that any subject, location, or language could be turned to an
artistic purpose.
The city formed the central focus of these writers' world. Whether they celebrated
or complained about the city, it was generally a major feature of their work.
Have a look at the famous opening poem to The Bridge, "To Brooklyn Bridge." What is
Crane's overall attitude toward the bridge in this poem? What relationship to the human beings
around it does the bridge seem to have?
In his dystopian novel We, Russian novelist Evgeny Zamyatin creates the image of a nightmare
city where a totalitarian government controls every aspect of residents' lives. Blegh. Can you
think of any other writers of the period with a more positive (or at least neutral) view of cities?
20. The Modernist heyday was a time not only for revolutionary scientific and philosophical
theorie, it was also a time of literal revolutions and uprisings.
Over in Russia, Czar Nicholas was a weak and ineffective leader. His government was corrupt
and Russian soldiers fighting in WWI were unprepared and died in large numbers. Yhe poor
were horrifically poor while the rich were absurdly, disgustingly rich. People weren't too
happy, leading to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
In the US, the women's suffrage movement caught on like wild fire. This movement
culminated in the passing of the 19th Amendment of 1921, finally giving women the vote.
Around the world, the working classes formed labor unions. After the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist
Fire called the public's attention to the need for reform.
And the Modernist writers weren't plugging their ears and singing "Happy Birthday" while all
this political unrest heaved about them. Nope, they took sides.
Ernest Hemingway went to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War as a journalist, and ended up
writing one of his most famous novels.
German playwright Bertolt Brecht and Vladimir Mayakovsky in Russia were both loud n'
proud Marxists. Yeats and Joyce were Irish Nationalists.
Andrei Bely's famous novel, Petersburg, manages to create a literary equivalent of the
Bolshevik Revolution using modernist narrative techniques.
Pound and Eliot were both fairly politically conservative.
21.
22. The most striking element of modern poetry is the
invention and experimentation of new modes of
expression . It includes
Imagist way of presenting concrete images to
understand idea.
Symbolist way of presenting things in terms of deeply
significant symbols of ideas and feelings for readers
to interpret them intellectually.
Realistic way of truly reflecting way of world.
23. In modernist poetry ,we read poems about any topic and
themes.
We find poem about nature as well as eating plums , myth
as well as satire, allegory of life journey as well as irony
of death.
24. Modernist poems tend to be multiple in themes .
For example , Dylan Thomas poem’s This Bread I
Break is at the same time about nature ,about
spirituality, and also about art.
Meaning of the poem is the different interpretation of
different readers.
There is no single and fixed meaning of any poem.
25. Modern poet have violated all known conventions and
established rules of past.
Intertextuality -reference from other poems and
writings.
Massive use of alliteration and assonance.
No regular rhyming scheme.
Traditional poetic diction and even regular meter have
been discarded.
Use of allusions.
26. In traditional poetry the poet describe images in great
detail and then link the images to a philosophical idea or
theme.
Clarity of expression through use of precise visual image.
In modern poetry the writer does not talk about the themes
behind the images they let the image itself be the focus of
poem.
Imagist used exact words instead of decorative word.
They used language of common speech.
The leader of imagists was Ezra Pound.
27. Symbolism in France began as a reaction against
naturalism.
The practice of representing things by means of
symbols or of attributing symbolic meaning to objects
, events and relationship.
28. T.S ELIOT
He was born in USA.
He is a great poet and critic.
He is an innovator of new style of poetry.
T.S ELIOT adapted symbolism in the development of
his Individual style.
His major poems are The Waste Land and The
Hollow Men.
30. Modern dramatist focused on marriage, justice , law,
administration and talked against the parental
authority.
They used classical style. They focused on reasons.
They use theater for reform in condition prevailing in
society at that days.
Dealt with the problem of sex and youth.
31. 1st phase is marked by G. B Shaw’s plays.
2nd phase comprises on Irish movement.
3rd phase is comprises of plays of T.S.Eliot. This
phase show the composition of poetic drama inspired
by Elizabeth and Jacobean.
32. Realism.
Most important and significant figure.
Modren dramatics were interested in Naturalism and try
to deal with real life problem .
Ibsen Popularized the Realism In modern drama. And
dealt with real life problem in his novels.
33. Another main feature of modern drama.
Focused on emotions, nature , freedom, equality
which were the main characteristics of Elizabethan
age.
34. Modern drama is essentially a drama of ideas.
Dramatist used stage give expression to certain idea
which they want to spread in society.
Touch the human emotions. Deal with the things
which are near and dear to man.
35. A new trend was introduced by modern dramatist.
Who brought about Celtic revival in literature(
dramatist like yeast and T.C.Murrey)
In modern drama there cwas an expression of hope
and aspirations for Irish people.
36. Movement that rise to express the feeling and
emotions of people.
Started in Germany and made its way in England.
The great people who follow this movement:.
(J.B.Priestly, C.K.Munro)
38. Irish man, father of comedy of idea, great thinker,
genius, social entertainer, and great socialist
He was influenced by Karl Marx. As socialist.
He was under the influence of Samuel Bullet who was
dissatisfied by the Darwinian theory of natural
selection.
39. He discussed in his play certain modern life problem
He wrote prefaces before plays. Which makes batter
understanding to play.
Wrote on civilized society.
He did not wrote his play with the feature of revolt.
40. Jest (laughing stone), and verbal (express in words),
wit (reason)
remember classical style in writings.
41. Dealt with problems concerned with modern society.
Widower’,s house: he put the blame on society
not at the individual Landlord for creating abuses for
property.
Man and Superman:. Compels a woman to hunt out
man, capture and marry him.
In getting married:. He showed the unnaturalness of
home life as in present society.
In apple cart : Shaw ridiculed the working of
Democratic form of government.
44. Novel written in modern times-the twentieth century
and the end of nineteenth century.
Reflects aspiration, concerns, fears, way of thinking as
well as artistic and literary taste of the modern era.
The modern scientific discoveries, the new
technologies, the social and political ideologies, the
ideas and the beliefs, and people’s different
conceptions about themselves and about the universe
at large found their way in the modern novel.
45. Modern novel is realistic and presents a frank image of the
world and all aspects of human experience but abandons the
realism of nineteenth century where only the sordid aspects
of life are depicted.
Modern novel is subjective, presenting the world from
perspective of individual character, reflecting his or her
biases or distorted vision. A relativistic perception of reality
replaces the objective views of whole community.
Morality is relative.
Modern novel is psychological. Under the influence of the
modern theories of Sigmund Freud, modern novel tends to
reveal the hidden inner motives behind people’s actions.
46. The technique of the stream of consciousness reflects the
character’s jumbled flow of perceptions, memories and
feelings.
A break with linear, developmental, cause and effect
presentation of the reality and with the chronological
order of the plot make a large number of modern novels.
The impact of the two world wars has left its mark on
modern art and literature. A deep sense of pessimism has
replaced the nineteenth century optimism.
47. First major novelist of modern period is Thomas
Hardy whose best works include Tess of the
D’Urbervilles, Far from the Madding Crowd and
Jude the Obscure.
D. H. Lawrence wrote with understanding about
social life of lower and middle class. His works
include Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow.
James Joyce is best known for Ulysses, a land
mark work where Joyce utilizes the stream of
consciousness.
Viginia Woolf was an influential feminist and
associated with the stream of consciousness. Her
novels include Mrs. Dalloway, To the light house.
49. we're now living in a society in which nothing's real anymore:
"All that once was directly lived has become mere
representation."
For Baudrillard, postmodernism wasn't just about experimental
art and fiction: he focused on the 20th-century background in
which it had developed, arguing that media and consumer
culture had gone into overdrive and led to a Matrix-style
scenario where there's no originality left and what seems real is
just a simulation.
According to this guy, we've become so bombarded with
images that we've lost touch with reality and, what's more,
mistake these images, or "simulacra," for reality. The result?
Life may seem real but it's no longer really real—we're now
living in a state of hyperreality.
50. Where minimalism is all about making things neat, tidy, and low key,
maximalism goes against the grain by embracing excess. And for many
postmodernists, maximalism is where it's at.
Because postmodernism doesn't stick to any hard and fast rules, its texts can
be any length. Still, some of its best-loved texts tend to be on the long side
(coughDFWcough), and it's usually maximalism that's to blame—
er…thank? Postmodernists just love to describe stuff.
And it's not just lengthy descriptions that create these 800-page tomes.
These authors also tend to, um, go off on tangents. Postmodernism
definitely doesn't stick to traditional ideas about plotting and narrative
structure, which means authors are more likely to take diversions and
explore other themes and subplots that tickle their fancy.
Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000) is a classic example of maximalism:
following the lives of three families over three generations, the novel is jam
packed with different settings, characters, and voices. With all that going on,
it's no wonder that the novel grapples with so many themes.
51. Pastiche adopts the stylings of the original but doesn't comment
on or make fun of the material (if anything, it's more likely to
pay tribute).
As with postmodernism in general, not everyone is in love with
the idea of pastiche—Fredric Jameson famously called it
pointless and empty. Despite its critics, though, pastiche is a
super-popular technique in postmodern texts and can be found
in all areas of pop culture. Think Quentin Tarantino movies:
they imitate a bunch of genres, like kung fu, grindhouse, and
western movies; and dime store pulp novels.
So if you're reading or watching something and it seems like
it's a hodgepodge of different genres, you can put your money
on pastiche.
52. modernists and postmodernists had a lot in common. But
here's the thing: modernists tended to express a sense of
sadness about this turn of events seeing the fragmentation
as something to be mourned