MODERNIST LITERATURE

INTRODUCTION

• The dominant artistic movement from about 1900 to 1940, modernism was characterised by the reexamination of existence from every possible angle (not just philosopy – the modernists also took a different approach to everything from biology to commerce).

• Modernist writers sought to leave the traditions of nineteenth-century literature behind in terms of form, content, and expression.

WHAT WERE THEY REBELLING AGAINST?

• Victorians placed humans over and outside of nature.

• They believed in a single way of looking at the world, in absolute and clear-cut separations between right and wrong, good and bad, hero and villain.

• Further, they saw the world as being governed by God's will, and that each person and thing in this world had a specific use.

• Finally, they saw the world as neatly divided between "civilized" and "savage" peoples.

CIVILISATION VS THE SAVAGE

• According to Victorians, the "civilized" were those from industrialized nations, cash-based economies, Protestant Christian traditions, and patriarchal societies; the "savage" were those from agrarian or hunter-gatherer tribes, barter-based economies, "pagan" traditions, and matriarchal (or at least "unmanly" societies).

THINK ABOUT OUR OWN HISTORY

MODERNISTS REBEL

• Blaming Victorianism for such evils as slavery, racism, and imperialism--and later for World War I--Modernists emphasized humanism over nationalism, and argued for cultural relativism.

• Modernists emphasised the ways in which humans were part of and responsible to nature. They argued for multiple ways of looking at the world, presenting antiheroes, uncategorizable persons, and anti-art movements like Dada.

MODERNISTS AS HUMANIST

• Further, they challenged the idea that God played an active role in the world, which led them to challenge the Victorian assumption that there was meaning and purpose behind world events.

• Instead, Modernists argued that no thing or person was born for a specific use; instead, they found or made their own meaning in the world.

MODERNISTS CHALLENGE

• Challenging the Victorian dichotomy between "civilized" and "savage," Modernists reversed the values associated with each kind of culture.

• Modernists presented the Victorian version of "civilized" as greedy and warmongering, as hypocrites, and as enemies of freedom and self-realization.

MODERNISTS REVOLT

• Those that the Victorians had dismissed (and subjugated) as "savages" the Modernists saw as being the truly civilized--responsible users of their environments, unselfish and family-oriented, generous, creative, mystical and full of wonder, and egalitarian.

• These "savages," post-WWI Modernists pointed out, did not kill millions with mustard gas, machine-guns, barbed wire, and genocidal starvation.

A LOSS OF INNOCENCE?

• They realized that a new industrial age—full of machines, buildings, and technology—had ushered out rural living forever, and the result was often a pessimistic view of what lay before humankind.

• Frequent themes in modernist works are loneliness and isolation (even in cities teeming with people).

• A significant number of writers tried to capture that sense of solitude by engaging in stream-of-consciousness writing, which captures the thought process of a single character as it happens without interruption.

• Some of the most famous modernist authors include Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce.

ESSENTIAL FACTS

• Open form and free verse are distinguishing characteristics of modernist poetry. Though commonplace now, this style was quite a break from nineteenth-century rules about meter and rhyme.• The moniker “The Lost Generation” was coined by

Gertrude Stein and refers to those artists of the 1920s who had become disillusioned with America and found themselves living as ex-patriots in Europe, chiefly in France.

THE LOST GENERATION

• Variously, the term is used for the period from the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression, though in the United States it is used for the generation of young people who came of age during and shortly after World War I, alternatively known as the World War I generation.

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

• An example of stream-of-consciousness (also called “interior monologue”) from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway: • “She felt somehow very like him—

the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble.”

• One of the most famous poets and influential critics of the modernist era was T. S. Eliot, whose seminal works like The Waste Land captured the despair and angst of the new century.

• “The Jazz Age” (1918-1929) was an especially productive period of modernist literature.

• The Jazz Age was immortalized by F. Scott Fitzgerald in his classic novel The Great Gatsby, which describes the decadence and sexual freedom of the post-World War I generation.