MODERNISM: AN INTRODUCTION
Modern, Modernity and Modernism
-ism ending? (be weary)
Action and reaction >> interaction
Fluid and porous borders ≠ radical break
Modern
Very polysemic!
Modern English versus middle English
Modern period in literature (16th century - …) >> Modernism
Modernity
Baudelaire: “something fleeting, contingent”, something that’s going to
pass (<> classics)
Michel Foucault: an attitude rather than an epoch
Imprecise term: starting from Renaissance 16th century and scientific
revolutions 17th century
Very anthropocentric (human experience central)
Defenders:
- Jürgen Habermas (progress + productivity leads to gradual emancipation
of humans)
Critics:
- material benefit, but no individual autonomy
- no meaning, just change and transformation
- European global expansion >> Eurocentrism
Theorized by sociologists:
- Tönnies: urbanization (moving from smaller units/communities to cities)
Modernity = progress, onwardness
- Modern inventions (Kodak camera, Ford motor car, …) > assembly line
(also in Modern Times), losing your end product (causes alienation)
- Travel (aeroplane, automobile, …)
- Domestic appliances (electric kettles, telephone, refrigerators, …)
- Radical change in architecture (reflects changes in society, but most
importantly you can literally see it so easy to spot)
e.g. Le Corbusier (really saw architecture as a means to change society,
architecture needed to be functional and so shape was most important)
Different responses to technological progress
- Celebratory (Le Corbusier)
- Despairing, apocalyptic (Eliot, Pound, Yeats)
Pioneering thinkers
- Charles Darwin: nature is evolving (not static), evolution is cyclical
(not linear),
- Karl Marx: crises in economic theory (capitalism thrives on crises), idea of
alienation (laborers alienating themselves from their product)
- Friedrich Nietzsche: nihilism, Appollonian versus Dionysian, idea
Übermensch (transcends God and morality > pleading for autonomy of
individual)
- Sigmund Freud: psychoanalysis, ego (id, superego)
- Ferdinand de Saussure: idea of randomness and language being
arbitrary/socially constructed, words are meaningless but are meaningful
in relation to each other
- Henri Bergson: time (way back always seems shorter, but obviously isn’t)
1
, - Albert Einstein: everything is relative (stable, contingent >> unstable),
narrative relativity (unreliable narrator, subjectivity, multiple focalization)
So in all these views we see that there’s a move from something stable
(something you don’t question) to something unstable!
Modernism
Ca. 1890-1930
- 1922 = ‘annus mirabilis’ (Eliot’s The Waste Land, Joyce’s Ulysses, …)
- But a lot of works written in that period are not modernist (e.g. Beckett died
1989)
Modernism as a genre = innovation and novelty
- Experimental, formally complex, elliptical, self-reflexive, apocalyptical,
uncertainty of reality
- Response to crisis modernity: something is only new if it’s in relation to
something older
Model of Modernism = description of representative features
Anti-historicism
Focus on microcosm versus macrocosm (individual versus social)
Self-referential
Disjointed and disintegrated (<> Victorian harmony)
Focus on aesthetics
Modernism and history
A(nti)-historical?
e.g. Ulysses: “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (focus
on individual > society)
e.g. George Lukacs: “man is an ahistorical being, …”, history is important
e.g. Theodor Adorno: modernism tries to change society by offering it
shockingly radical art forms
Modernism ≠ Realism
- Realism >> verisimilitude (semblance of reality)
- Realism = emphasis on society rather than the individual (because has to be
educational), therefore a distinction between realists (society) and modernists
(inner lives characters)
- Woolf: “is life like this? Must novels be like this?” time to reevaluate what
novels do
Modernism stands on 2 pillars:
- “make it new” (Pound) = modify/overturn existing modes of representation,
radical innovation, however also relies on tradition
- “look within” (Woolf) = mind exploration, focus on individual and interior
mind, inward turn (term coined by criticisms’ side, so NOT Woolf or Herman)
Criticism of Modernist Project:
- Georg Lukacs: criticized the modernist project for its inward turn (lack of social
agenda), realist fiction (characters cannot be distinguished from their social and
historical environment. Their human significance and specific individuality cannot
be separated from the context in which they were created)
Look within?
- D. Herman in his essay:
2
, 3
Modern, Modernity and Modernism
-ism ending? (be weary)
Action and reaction >> interaction
Fluid and porous borders ≠ radical break
Modern
Very polysemic!
Modern English versus middle English
Modern period in literature (16th century - …) >> Modernism
Modernity
Baudelaire: “something fleeting, contingent”, something that’s going to
pass (<> classics)
Michel Foucault: an attitude rather than an epoch
Imprecise term: starting from Renaissance 16th century and scientific
revolutions 17th century
Very anthropocentric (human experience central)
Defenders:
- Jürgen Habermas (progress + productivity leads to gradual emancipation
of humans)
Critics:
- material benefit, but no individual autonomy
- no meaning, just change and transformation
- European global expansion >> Eurocentrism
Theorized by sociologists:
- Tönnies: urbanization (moving from smaller units/communities to cities)
Modernity = progress, onwardness
- Modern inventions (Kodak camera, Ford motor car, …) > assembly line
(also in Modern Times), losing your end product (causes alienation)
- Travel (aeroplane, automobile, …)
- Domestic appliances (electric kettles, telephone, refrigerators, …)
- Radical change in architecture (reflects changes in society, but most
importantly you can literally see it so easy to spot)
e.g. Le Corbusier (really saw architecture as a means to change society,
architecture needed to be functional and so shape was most important)
Different responses to technological progress
- Celebratory (Le Corbusier)
- Despairing, apocalyptic (Eliot, Pound, Yeats)
Pioneering thinkers
- Charles Darwin: nature is evolving (not static), evolution is cyclical
(not linear),
- Karl Marx: crises in economic theory (capitalism thrives on crises), idea of
alienation (laborers alienating themselves from their product)
- Friedrich Nietzsche: nihilism, Appollonian versus Dionysian, idea
Übermensch (transcends God and morality > pleading for autonomy of
individual)
- Sigmund Freud: psychoanalysis, ego (id, superego)
- Ferdinand de Saussure: idea of randomness and language being
arbitrary/socially constructed, words are meaningless but are meaningful
in relation to each other
- Henri Bergson: time (way back always seems shorter, but obviously isn’t)
1
, - Albert Einstein: everything is relative (stable, contingent >> unstable),
narrative relativity (unreliable narrator, subjectivity, multiple focalization)
So in all these views we see that there’s a move from something stable
(something you don’t question) to something unstable!
Modernism
Ca. 1890-1930
- 1922 = ‘annus mirabilis’ (Eliot’s The Waste Land, Joyce’s Ulysses, …)
- But a lot of works written in that period are not modernist (e.g. Beckett died
1989)
Modernism as a genre = innovation and novelty
- Experimental, formally complex, elliptical, self-reflexive, apocalyptical,
uncertainty of reality
- Response to crisis modernity: something is only new if it’s in relation to
something older
Model of Modernism = description of representative features
Anti-historicism
Focus on microcosm versus macrocosm (individual versus social)
Self-referential
Disjointed and disintegrated (<> Victorian harmony)
Focus on aesthetics
Modernism and history
A(nti)-historical?
e.g. Ulysses: “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (focus
on individual > society)
e.g. George Lukacs: “man is an ahistorical being, …”, history is important
e.g. Theodor Adorno: modernism tries to change society by offering it
shockingly radical art forms
Modernism ≠ Realism
- Realism >> verisimilitude (semblance of reality)
- Realism = emphasis on society rather than the individual (because has to be
educational), therefore a distinction between realists (society) and modernists
(inner lives characters)
- Woolf: “is life like this? Must novels be like this?” time to reevaluate what
novels do
Modernism stands on 2 pillars:
- “make it new” (Pound) = modify/overturn existing modes of representation,
radical innovation, however also relies on tradition
- “look within” (Woolf) = mind exploration, focus on individual and interior
mind, inward turn (term coined by criticisms’ side, so NOT Woolf or Herman)
Criticism of Modernist Project:
- Georg Lukacs: criticized the modernist project for its inward turn (lack of social
agenda), realist fiction (characters cannot be distinguished from their social and
historical environment. Their human significance and specific individuality cannot
be separated from the context in which they were created)
Look within?
- D. Herman in his essay:
2
, 3
