2. Modernism is a cultural movement that generally
includes the progressive art and architecture, music,
literature and design which emerged in the decades
before 1914. It was a movement of artists and designers
who rebelled against late 19th century academic and
historicist traditions, and embraced the new economic,
social and political aspects of the emerging modern
world.
3. Marked by a strong and intentional break with tradition. This break
includes a strong reaction against established religious, political,
and social views.
Belief that the world is created in the act of perceiving it; that is,
the world is what we say it is.
There is no such thing as absolute truth. All things are relative.
No connection with history or institutions. Their experience is that
of alienation, loss, and despair.
Championship of the individual and celebration of inner strength.
Life is unordered.
Concerned with the sub-conscious.
4. Open Form
Free verse
Discontinuous narrative
Juxtaposition
Intertextuality
Classical allusions
Borrowings from other cultures and languages
Unconventional use of metaphor
Metanarrative
Fragmentation
Multiple narrative points of view (parallax)
5. Breakdown of social norms and cultural sureties
Dislocation of meaning and sense from its normal context
Valorization of the despairing individual in the face of an
unmanageable future
Disillusionment
Rejection of history and the substitution of a mythical past, borrowed
without chronology
Product of the metropolis, of cities and urbanscapes
Stream of consciousness
Overwhelming technological changes of the 20th Century
6. ENGLISH AMERICAN
VIRGINIA WOOLF KATHERINE ANNE
EZRA POUND PORTER
RICHARD ALDINGTON WALLACE STEVENS
E.E CUMMINGS
7. “Let us begin by clearing up the old confusion between the
man who loves learning and the man who loves reading, and
point out that there is no connection whatever between the
two. A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary
enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some
particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If
the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and
vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand,
must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge
sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read
on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very
apt to kill what it suits us to consider the more humane
passion for pure and disinterested reading.”
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), British novelist, critic. "Hours in a
Library," vol. 2, Essays, Harcourt Brace (1987)
8. In American Literature, the group of writers and thinkers known as
the Lost Generation has become synonymous with Modernism. In the
wake of the First World War, several American artists chose to live
abroad as they pursued their creative impulses. These included the
intellectual Gertrude Stein, the novelists Ernest Hemingway and F.
Scott Fitzgerald, and the painter Waldo Pierce, among others. The
term itself refers to the spiritual and existential hangover left by
four years of unimaginably destructive warfare. The artists of the
Lost Generation struggled to find some meaning in the world in the
wake of chaos.
9. As with much of Modernist literature, this was achieved by turning the mind’s eye
inward and attempting to record the workings of consciousness. For Hemingway,
this meant the abandonment of all ornamental language. His novels are famous
for their extremely spare, blunt, simple sentences and emotions that play out
right on the surface of things. There is an irony to this bluntness, however, as his
characters often have hidden agendas, hidden sometimes even from themselves,
which serve to guide their actions. The Lost Generation, like other “High
Modernists,” gave up on the idea that anything was truly knowable. All truth
became relative, conditional, and in flux. The War demonstrated that no guiding
spirit rules the events of the world, and that absolute destruction was kept in
check by only the tiniest of margins.
10. • Modernist Period in English literature was first and foremost a
visceral reaction against the Victorian culture and aesthetic, which
had prevailed for most of the nineteenth century. Indeed, a break with
traditions is one of the fundamental constants of the Modernist stance.
Intellectuals and artists at the turn of the twentieth century believed
the previous generation’s way of doing things was a cultural dead end.
They could foresee that world events were spiraling into unknown
territory. The stability and quietude of Victorian civilization were
rapidly becoming a thing of the past. The assassination of Archduke
Ferdinand of Austria was essentially the triggering event of the First
World War, a conflict which swept away all preconceived notions about
the nature of so-called modern warfare.
