20th century literature 1
1. Modernism: an Introduction
1.1. Modern, modernity, modernism
BREAK VS. CONTINUITY (Background info)
‘the Danger is in the neatness of identification’
® Romanticism, realism, modernism, postmodernism;
¨ It’s very hard to say where one -ism ends/begins
¨ Action => reaction BUT it always turns out to be more of a mix/continuum than a radical break
• Action -> reaction --> interaction
• Fluid and porous borders but NOT a radical break
¨ But still: each “ism” gives an important scaffolding for the period at the time
® Modern
¨ Modern: from Lat. Modo (‘current’) = extremely polysemic (multiple, often related meanings)
¨ Linguistically modern is: “modern” English vs. middle English
¨ For literature:
• We talk about the ‘modern’ period = from 16th century onwards (cf. Shakespeare,
Milton, etc.)
• More specific use: avant-garde (late 19th cent)
• >> modernism
® Modernity
¨ Term first used by Baudelaire (1863) in essay ‘the painter of modern life’
• Modernity = the fashionable, fleeting and contingent in art, as opposed to the eternal
and immutable
¨ Imprecise term:
• From the renaissance onwards (16th cent)?
• Starting with 17th cent scientific revolutions (Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes) >>
Enlightenment?
• Michel Foucault (86): ‘modernity’ = an ATTITUDE rather than an epoch (distinctive
historic period), ie being open to radicality/innovation
® Modernity = extremely anthropocentric (=belief that human beings are the central, most significant
entities in the universe, interpreting the world strictly through human values and experiences)
¨ Defenders (eg Jurgen Habermans):
• Progress and productivity >> leads to gradual emancipation of human beings
• Extension of ‘Enlightenment’ optimism (?)
¨ Critics:
• Material benefit, but no individual autonomy
• No meaning, just change and transformation
• European global expansion >> Eurocentrism
¨ Theorized by sociologists
• Ferdinand Tonnies: shift from gemeinschaft >> rural, closely knit community to
gesellschaft >> urban, anonymous society
¨ Urbanization by 1900:
• Mass migration from countryside to city
, • London & New York: 5 million
• Paris 3 million
• Berlin 2 million
MODERNITY: PROGRESS, ‘ONWARDNESS’
® Kodak Camera (1888)
® Electric motor (88)
® Diesel Engine (1892)
® Ford Motor Car (1893)
® Kodak Camera: “capture time”
® “Modern Times” (1936), Chaplin: the human becomes
indifferent, a machine
¨ Conveyer belt (transportband) leads to alienation (you
start to lose touch with the end product)
¨ Life becomes too complicated to fully oversee it =>
leads to fear
¨ Lots of travel due to new inventions
• Automobile, motor bus, aeroplane (‘skywriting’, Mrs. Dalloway), tractor
¨ domestic appliances (electrical or mechanical machines designed tp assist with household chores)
• electric kettles/electric irons, telephone/radio, refrigerators
¨ “speed” – travel, cf. Mrs. Dalloway
® Le Corbusier (architect) – ‘architecture as a means to change society’
¨ Architecture reflects these changes, reflects how people think society should be structured
¨ Corbusier buildings reflect symmetry, strict lines and very functional design
¨ Modernism in general: movement of sophistication – pure, sleek, shape (technical display)
® Different responses to the technological progress:
¨ Celebratory
• (Fillipo Tommaso Marinetti: ‘We say that the world’s magnificence has been enriched
by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great
pipes, like serpents of explosive breath […]. Time and Space died yesterday. We
already live in the absolute because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed’
• Le Corbusier: ‘Cars, cars, fast, fast! One is seized, filled with enthusiasm, with joy ...
the joy of power. The simple and naive pleasure of being in the midst of power, of
strength’
¨ Despairing, apocalyptic (T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound)
• Most Anglophone literary modernism holds this stand
PIONEERING THINKERS
= intellectual context of modernism
® Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
® Karl Marx (1818-1883)
® Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
® Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
® Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)
® Henri Bergson (1859-1941)
® Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
,(1) Charles Darwin
Ø English naturalist
Ø The Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859)
Ø Nature (including humans) was not static but evolving
Ø Concept of natural selection (= ‘survival of the fittest’, organisms better adapted to their
environment survive)
Ø Evolution as a cyclical movement, not lineair progression
Ø Questioned religious dominance >> not divine creation but pure chance
Ø Human being is therefore – just another species
Ø Consequences of Darwin’s prevalence:
o Social Darwinism (Herbert Spencer) = misapplication of Darwin’s theory of natural
selection, arguing that “survival of the fittest” justifies social inequality, imperialism and
racism.
o Eugenics = selective reproduction to ‘better’ society (using science to justify racism – cf.
Social Darwinism)
o Degeneration (Max Nordau) = theory which argues that Modern Western Society,
particularly its avant-garde art and literature, was experiencing a rapid decline, or
“degeneration”, due to “hysteria” and “exhaustion”.
o Colonialism = social and racial superiority of the European ‘civilization’
o cf. Heart of Darkness
(2) Karl Marx
Ø Social, political and economic theorist
Ø Communist Manifesto (1848) & Das Kapital (1867-1894)
Ø Capitalism thrives on recurrent crises (>> Modernism = literature of the crises)
Ø Destabilizes society and causes alienation
Ø Loss of old values due to egalitarian nature of capitalism
(3) Friederich Nietzsche
Ø German philologist and philosopher
Ø The Birth of a Tragedy (1872)
o Apollonian vs. Dionysian experience (ratio vs. pleasure)
Ø Also Sprach Zarathustra (1883-92)
o ‘God is Dead’
o Theory of the Übermensch (Nietzsche) = humans are abused by political powers. The
Ubermensch is a hypothetical, evolved human who transcends conventional morality
and societal norms to create their own values. It is a call to self-overcoming and
embracing the “will to power”, rather than racial designation.
o ‘Become what you are’
(4) Sigmund Freud
Ø Austrian neurologist
Ø ‘psychoanalysis’ and Traumdeutung
Ø Ego = between id and super-ego (psychosis/neurosis)
Ø Society = repression of (sexual) desire
Ø Psychoanalysis (Freud) = principle of free association – theory of human psychology being
focused on the unconscious, deeply-rooted, and often childhood-derives conflicts.
o Cf. William James “stream of consciousness”
(5) Ferdinand de Saussure
Ø Swiss linguist
Ø Course in General Linguistics (1916, published after death)
Ø Language = arbitrary, socially constructed, not divine or natural
Ø Language (language as structures system) / parole (language as utterance or speech act)
, Ø Words are meaningless in absolute terms – only meaningfull in relation to each other
Ø Basis for structuralism, semiotics, and poststructuralism
(6) Henri Bergson
Ø Fench philosopher
Ø ‘chronological time’ (clocks) = different from ‘duration’ (personal time)
Ø Time is not objective, but differently experienced by each individual
Ø Cf. Mrs. Dalloway
(7) Albert Einstein
Ø German mathematical physicist
Ø Theory of Relativity overturned Newtonian Physics
Ø No physical law is reliable >> contingency (possibility/chance)
Ø Always relative to the observer’s position
Ø Narrative relativity of Modernism = exploring subjective truths, where understanding is shaped
by perspective, emotion, and context rather than a single, objective reality
o Multiple focalization
o Unreliable narrator
o Subjectivity
Ø Vs. (stable) Newtonian universe in realist novels
1.2. Defining modernism
Modernism is NOT a clear-cut definition but rather a set of characters. For instance; picture ‘A visitor looks at
Malevich’s ‘Black Square’ at Tate Modern’ illustrates the multiplicity of focalisers as it depicts a spectator
looking at the picture, while at the same time, we are looking at the spectator whose looking. There is 3 ways of
defining ‘modernism’ (period, genre & model).
MODERNISM: PERIOD
® Approximately 1890-1930
® 1922 : ‘annus mirabilis’ (year of wonders)
¨ T.S. Eliot, ‘the Waste Land’ (poem)
¨ James Joyce, ‘Ulysses’ (novel)
¨ Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Garden Party’ (story)
® BUT: most works in that period are not actually modernist – cf. Beckett (died in 1989)
MODERNISM: GENRE
® Modernism as genre = innovation and novelty:
¨ Experimental
¨ Formally complex
¨ Elliptical
¨ Self-Reflexive
¨ Apocalyptical
¨ Uncertainty of reality
MODERNISM: MODEL
® Model of modernism = description of representative features (Norman Cantor)
¨ Anti-historicism – history is not evolutionary or progressive (effects of WWII)
¨ Focus on microcosm vs. macrocosm
• Indicidual vs. social
¨ Self-referential
1. Modernism: an Introduction
1.1. Modern, modernity, modernism
BREAK VS. CONTINUITY (Background info)
‘the Danger is in the neatness of identification’
® Romanticism, realism, modernism, postmodernism;
¨ It’s very hard to say where one -ism ends/begins
¨ Action => reaction BUT it always turns out to be more of a mix/continuum than a radical break
• Action -> reaction --> interaction
• Fluid and porous borders but NOT a radical break
¨ But still: each “ism” gives an important scaffolding for the period at the time
® Modern
¨ Modern: from Lat. Modo (‘current’) = extremely polysemic (multiple, often related meanings)
¨ Linguistically modern is: “modern” English vs. middle English
¨ For literature:
• We talk about the ‘modern’ period = from 16th century onwards (cf. Shakespeare,
Milton, etc.)
• More specific use: avant-garde (late 19th cent)
• >> modernism
® Modernity
¨ Term first used by Baudelaire (1863) in essay ‘the painter of modern life’
• Modernity = the fashionable, fleeting and contingent in art, as opposed to the eternal
and immutable
¨ Imprecise term:
• From the renaissance onwards (16th cent)?
• Starting with 17th cent scientific revolutions (Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes) >>
Enlightenment?
• Michel Foucault (86): ‘modernity’ = an ATTITUDE rather than an epoch (distinctive
historic period), ie being open to radicality/innovation
® Modernity = extremely anthropocentric (=belief that human beings are the central, most significant
entities in the universe, interpreting the world strictly through human values and experiences)
¨ Defenders (eg Jurgen Habermans):
• Progress and productivity >> leads to gradual emancipation of human beings
• Extension of ‘Enlightenment’ optimism (?)
¨ Critics:
• Material benefit, but no individual autonomy
• No meaning, just change and transformation
• European global expansion >> Eurocentrism
¨ Theorized by sociologists
• Ferdinand Tonnies: shift from gemeinschaft >> rural, closely knit community to
gesellschaft >> urban, anonymous society
¨ Urbanization by 1900:
• Mass migration from countryside to city
, • London & New York: 5 million
• Paris 3 million
• Berlin 2 million
MODERNITY: PROGRESS, ‘ONWARDNESS’
® Kodak Camera (1888)
® Electric motor (88)
® Diesel Engine (1892)
® Ford Motor Car (1893)
® Kodak Camera: “capture time”
® “Modern Times” (1936), Chaplin: the human becomes
indifferent, a machine
¨ Conveyer belt (transportband) leads to alienation (you
start to lose touch with the end product)
¨ Life becomes too complicated to fully oversee it =>
leads to fear
¨ Lots of travel due to new inventions
• Automobile, motor bus, aeroplane (‘skywriting’, Mrs. Dalloway), tractor
¨ domestic appliances (electrical or mechanical machines designed tp assist with household chores)
• electric kettles/electric irons, telephone/radio, refrigerators
¨ “speed” – travel, cf. Mrs. Dalloway
® Le Corbusier (architect) – ‘architecture as a means to change society’
¨ Architecture reflects these changes, reflects how people think society should be structured
¨ Corbusier buildings reflect symmetry, strict lines and very functional design
¨ Modernism in general: movement of sophistication – pure, sleek, shape (technical display)
® Different responses to the technological progress:
¨ Celebratory
• (Fillipo Tommaso Marinetti: ‘We say that the world’s magnificence has been enriched
by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great
pipes, like serpents of explosive breath […]. Time and Space died yesterday. We
already live in the absolute because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed’
• Le Corbusier: ‘Cars, cars, fast, fast! One is seized, filled with enthusiasm, with joy ...
the joy of power. The simple and naive pleasure of being in the midst of power, of
strength’
¨ Despairing, apocalyptic (T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound)
• Most Anglophone literary modernism holds this stand
PIONEERING THINKERS
= intellectual context of modernism
® Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
® Karl Marx (1818-1883)
® Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
® Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
® Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)
® Henri Bergson (1859-1941)
® Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
,(1) Charles Darwin
Ø English naturalist
Ø The Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859)
Ø Nature (including humans) was not static but evolving
Ø Concept of natural selection (= ‘survival of the fittest’, organisms better adapted to their
environment survive)
Ø Evolution as a cyclical movement, not lineair progression
Ø Questioned religious dominance >> not divine creation but pure chance
Ø Human being is therefore – just another species
Ø Consequences of Darwin’s prevalence:
o Social Darwinism (Herbert Spencer) = misapplication of Darwin’s theory of natural
selection, arguing that “survival of the fittest” justifies social inequality, imperialism and
racism.
o Eugenics = selective reproduction to ‘better’ society (using science to justify racism – cf.
Social Darwinism)
o Degeneration (Max Nordau) = theory which argues that Modern Western Society,
particularly its avant-garde art and literature, was experiencing a rapid decline, or
“degeneration”, due to “hysteria” and “exhaustion”.
o Colonialism = social and racial superiority of the European ‘civilization’
o cf. Heart of Darkness
(2) Karl Marx
Ø Social, political and economic theorist
Ø Communist Manifesto (1848) & Das Kapital (1867-1894)
Ø Capitalism thrives on recurrent crises (>> Modernism = literature of the crises)
Ø Destabilizes society and causes alienation
Ø Loss of old values due to egalitarian nature of capitalism
(3) Friederich Nietzsche
Ø German philologist and philosopher
Ø The Birth of a Tragedy (1872)
o Apollonian vs. Dionysian experience (ratio vs. pleasure)
Ø Also Sprach Zarathustra (1883-92)
o ‘God is Dead’
o Theory of the Übermensch (Nietzsche) = humans are abused by political powers. The
Ubermensch is a hypothetical, evolved human who transcends conventional morality
and societal norms to create their own values. It is a call to self-overcoming and
embracing the “will to power”, rather than racial designation.
o ‘Become what you are’
(4) Sigmund Freud
Ø Austrian neurologist
Ø ‘psychoanalysis’ and Traumdeutung
Ø Ego = between id and super-ego (psychosis/neurosis)
Ø Society = repression of (sexual) desire
Ø Psychoanalysis (Freud) = principle of free association – theory of human psychology being
focused on the unconscious, deeply-rooted, and often childhood-derives conflicts.
o Cf. William James “stream of consciousness”
(5) Ferdinand de Saussure
Ø Swiss linguist
Ø Course in General Linguistics (1916, published after death)
Ø Language = arbitrary, socially constructed, not divine or natural
Ø Language (language as structures system) / parole (language as utterance or speech act)
, Ø Words are meaningless in absolute terms – only meaningfull in relation to each other
Ø Basis for structuralism, semiotics, and poststructuralism
(6) Henri Bergson
Ø Fench philosopher
Ø ‘chronological time’ (clocks) = different from ‘duration’ (personal time)
Ø Time is not objective, but differently experienced by each individual
Ø Cf. Mrs. Dalloway
(7) Albert Einstein
Ø German mathematical physicist
Ø Theory of Relativity overturned Newtonian Physics
Ø No physical law is reliable >> contingency (possibility/chance)
Ø Always relative to the observer’s position
Ø Narrative relativity of Modernism = exploring subjective truths, where understanding is shaped
by perspective, emotion, and context rather than a single, objective reality
o Multiple focalization
o Unreliable narrator
o Subjectivity
Ø Vs. (stable) Newtonian universe in realist novels
1.2. Defining modernism
Modernism is NOT a clear-cut definition but rather a set of characters. For instance; picture ‘A visitor looks at
Malevich’s ‘Black Square’ at Tate Modern’ illustrates the multiplicity of focalisers as it depicts a spectator
looking at the picture, while at the same time, we are looking at the spectator whose looking. There is 3 ways of
defining ‘modernism’ (period, genre & model).
MODERNISM: PERIOD
® Approximately 1890-1930
® 1922 : ‘annus mirabilis’ (year of wonders)
¨ T.S. Eliot, ‘the Waste Land’ (poem)
¨ James Joyce, ‘Ulysses’ (novel)
¨ Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Garden Party’ (story)
® BUT: most works in that period are not actually modernist – cf. Beckett (died in 1989)
MODERNISM: GENRE
® Modernism as genre = innovation and novelty:
¨ Experimental
¨ Formally complex
¨ Elliptical
¨ Self-Reflexive
¨ Apocalyptical
¨ Uncertainty of reality
MODERNISM: MODEL
® Model of modernism = description of representative features (Norman Cantor)
¨ Anti-historicism – history is not evolutionary or progressive (effects of WWII)
¨ Focus on microcosm vs. macrocosm
• Indicidual vs. social
¨ Self-referential
