College aantekeningen 20th century literature modernism

20th century literature in English 1
LES 2/10: defining modernism
General course overview
Introduction to modernism
 Break vs. continuity
o Romanticism
o Realism
o Modernism
o Postmodernism
o Action and reaction → interaction
o Fluid and porous borders ≠ radical break
o ‘The danger is in the neatness of identification’ (Becket)
 Not too quick in labelling things
 Modern
o Modern: from Latin modo (current)
o Extremely polysemic
o Linguistics: ‘modern’ English vs. middle English
o Literature
 Modern period = from 16th century onwards (Shakespeare Milton)
 More specific use: avant-garde (late 19th century)
 Modernity
o First used by Baudelaire in Essay ‘The painter of modern life’
 Modernity = the fashionable, fleeting and contingent in art as opposed to the
eternal and immutable
 Not here to stay
o Imprecise term
 From the Renaissance onwards (16th century)
 Starting with 17th century scientific revolutions (Galileo, Newton,…)
Enlightenment
 Michel Foucault (1986): ‘modernity’ = an ATTITUDE rather than an epoch
o Modernity = extremely anthropocentric (human experience as focal point)
o Defenders (Habermas)
 Progress and productivity leads to gradual emancipation of human beings
 Extension of Enlightenment optimism (?)
 Ongoing project (never-ending)
o Critics
 Material benefit, but no individual autonomy
 No meaning, just change and transformation
 European global expansion → Eurocentrism
o Theorized by sociologists different focus
 Emile Durkheim: division of labour in modern production
 Max Weber: disenchantment of reason
 Ferdinand Tönnies
 Shift from Gemeinschaft = rural closely knit community to
 Gesellschaft = urban anonymous society
o Frankfurter Schule (critical theory)
 Very Marxist and critical, they wanted to question the way things are
theorized (culture, economy, politics,…)

,  Theodor Adorno
 Max Horkheimer
 Walter Benjamin: ‘nightmare of history’ as modernists saw
it (cf. Ulysses)
 Modernist have very complicated relationship
with history
 Describing painting ‘Angelus Novus’
o Not a happy picture (see highlighted
words)
o Angel does not want to move forward, but
has to
o Dark imagery
o Urbanization by 1900
 Mass migration from country side to city
 Large number of people in cities: London & New York: 5 million– Paris: 3
million– Berlin: 2 million
o Due to technological changes
 Kodak Camera (1888)
 electric motor (1888)
 Diesel Engine (1892)
 Ford motor car (1893)
 Model T
o First affordable car
o assembly line
o conveyor belt
 Assembly line
o Modern times (1936)
 Human beings feeling small towards assembly
line, huge machine → alienation
o Gramophone, radio, cinematograph, X-ray, air flight
o Travel more modern: wright brothers first flight (1903)
 automobile– motor bus– aeroplane (‘skywriting’ in Mrs. Dalloway)– tractor
o Domestic appliances: electric kettles, electric irons– telephone, radio– refrigerators
o Eiffel tower: colonise the sky
o Le Corbusier: architecture as means to change society
 Utopian projects
o Different responses to technological progress:
 Celebratory: 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’ (‘The Manifesto of
Futurism’, 1909)
 Celebratory: 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’ (1924)
 Despairing, apocalyptic (T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound)
 Most of anglophone literary modernism

,Writing assignment

LES 9/10: introduction modernism + re-minding modernism
Introduction modernism
 Pioneering thinkers (not really talk about each person, but related to texts)
o Karl Marx (1818-1883)
 Social, political and economic theorist
 Communist Manifesto (1848)
 Das Kapital (1867-1894)
 Capitalism thrives on recurrent crises (Modernism =
literature of the crisis)
 Destabilizes society and causes alienation
 Crucial for modernism
 What am I doing and what am I doing this for
 Lose big picture, only small part of conveyer belt
 Loss of old values to egalitarian nature of capitalism
o Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
 English naturalist
 The origin of species by means of natural selection
(1859)
 Nature (including human) was not static but evolving
 Evolution = cyclical movement, not linear progression
 Questioned religious dominance = not divine creation, but
pure chance
 Human being – just another species
 Consequences
 Social Darwinism (Spencer)
o survival of the fittest
 Eugenics (Galton)
 Degeneration (Nordau)
 Colonialism = social and racial superiority of the European civilisation
 Cf. Heart of Darkness
o Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
 Austrian neurologist
 Psychoanalysis and Traumdeutung
 Ego = between id and super-ego (psychosis/neurosis)
 Society = repression of desire (sexual)
 Psychoanalysis (term coined in 1896) principle of free
association
 ~ James: stream of consciousness
 Mind as an object of science
o Henri Bergson (1859-1941)
 French philosopher
 Chronological time (clocks) = different from duration
(personal time)
 Time is not objective, but differently experienced by each
individual
 Mrs Dalloway
o Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
 German philologist and philosopher

,  The birth of a tragedy (1872)
 Apollonian vs. Dionysian experience (ratio vs. pleasure)
 Also sprach Zarathustra (1883-92)
 God is dead
 Theory of Übermensch
o Abused by political powers
o Transcends God and morality
o ‘Become what you are’
o Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)
 Swiss linguist
 Course in general linguistics (1916, published after
death)
 Language = arbitrary, socially constructed, not
divine or natural
 Langue (language as constructed system) / parole
(language as utterance or speech act)
 Words meaningless in absolute terms = only in
relation to each other
 Basis for structuralism, semiotics and poststructuralism
o Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
 German mathematical physicist
 Theory of relativity overturned Newtonian physics
 No physical law in reliable, contingency
 Always relative to observer’s position
 Embraced and discussed by artists
 Narrative relativity of Modernism
 Multiple focalisation
 Unreliable narrator
 Subjectivity
 Vs. (stable) Newtonian universe in realist novels
o = intellectual context of modernism
 Defining modernism
o Modernism period
 Modernism as period = approx. 1890-1930 (safe answer)
 1922 = ‘annus mirabilis’
o The Waste land T.S. Eliot (poem)
o Ulysses Joyce (novel)
o Mansfield The Garden Party (story)
 But: Beckett? (died in 1989) is he a modernist? = arguable
 Most of works written in that period = not modernist
o Modernism: genre
 Modernism as a genre = innovation and novelty, the wish to be different and
new
 Experimental
 Formally complex
 Elliptical
 Self-reflexive
 Apocalyptical
 Uncertainty of reality
 Typical formal properties
 In media res