M o d e R n I s M

Glencoe text 666 – 1157

A Movement Describing Us

TIMELINE

• While all movements and eras are blended, without an official “birthday,” a good date for the beginning of MODERNISM is 1914.

• The opening of WW I fractured the world, so not surprizingly, the creative minds in Visual Arts and Music and Dance and Literature and Architecture mirrored that extreme fracturing of Humanity.

• It was a radical departure from all previous periods, although hinted at in the late 19th Century with Impressionism.

Modernism’s 5 Tenets

• While Romanticism continued (and still does), with 1914 the era of Modernism arrived and sought to imitate the modern mindset.

• This can be illustrated/communicated, in all the Arts, with 5 “D’s” of creative expression.1. Destruction2. Delusion3. Deception4. Demented5. Dreams

1. Destruction:

Reality is fractured; it no longer follows the rules of Romanticism. Poems and stories are disjointed. Non-linear narratives (not merely flashbacks) jump the story around without transitions. Poems are visually fractured. Experimenting with form is celebrated, even if it doesn’t make logical sense.

2. Delusion:

Reality, by both the characters and audience, is not what it seems. The senses are fooled. Sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch are tricked into accepting something irrational and inexplicable. It doesn’t make “sense.”

3. Deception

The narrative (even omniscient p-o-v) isn’t always telling the “truth.” Truth and falsehood are so blended as to become one indistinct reality. It’s not even evident which is which.

4. Demented

The world is insane. The “normal” mindset is impaired through mental illness or drugs or drunkenness. The audience sees the world through this perspective.

5. Dreams

The dream world and reality become the same. Especially, the internal world overcomes the external world. Stream-of-consciousness and surrealism and the unconscious become all of life and even more real than reality.

What’s Next!?!?An important aspect of Modernism is that

reality is finally RECOVERABLE and mostly RESTORED. One or more of the 5 “D’s” become obvious as playing a trick on reality. Later in the 20th century, Modernism evolved (devolved?) into Postmodernism, which fractured the worldview even more and was NOT recoverable. . . without anymore norms of normalacy.

Literature

• Short Story– Welty's "A Worn Path"

page 910 (textbook)

• Poem• Strand's "Eating Poetry"

p. 714 and Reed's "beware: do not read this poem" p. 716 (textbook)

Short Answer Response

• Why are the selected poems and the story representative of the Modernism Period? – Support your answer with text evidence from at

least one of the poems and the story.