MODERNISM

Modernism

• began in Europe
• around 1910
• and flourished in the 1920s and 1930s
• (Robert Kohl, Street Scene, 1930)

Famous Modernists

James Joyce

Virginia Woolf

Franz Kafka

Robert Musil

Marcel Proust

T.S. Elliot

W.B. Yeats

Modern art replaced classical art

• It included Abstract art, Cubism, Pop art, Minimalism, and Dadaism.
• It affected sculptors like Rodin and later Henry Moore

Some famous Modernists

Pablo Picasso

Georges Braque

Henri Matisse

Vassily Kandinsky

Piet Mondriaan

Edvard Munch

Gustav Klimt

Alphons Mucha

Some famous Modernists

Igor Stravinsky

Arnold Schönberg

All modernists had in common the same desire

... make a clear break with the traditions that came before them.

Modernist writers
attempted to…

Recover the unique experience of the individual

Queen Victoria

The system of moral values which dominated the Victorian Age collapsed

Traditional forms are rejected in favour of…

A direct attempt to represent the workings of the mind and the unconscious

The Modernist work typically presents…

Reality as...

• fragmentary
• and relative

The Modernist work typically favours the…

Subjective perception of the real world

Pablo Picasso

The idea that there is only one truth is…

is rejected!

Theory of Relativity

In terms of
form and style, Modernist novels...

broke with most of the conventions of
Victorian fiction

Modernism was deeply influenced by the new psychological theories:

Sigmund Freud

Henri Bergson

William James

Freud suggested

Man organises the information he receives from the outside world to his own interior experience and desires

According to Freud:

• man’s perception of reality is fundamentally subjective

Bergson argued that:

• time cannot be measured according to units (such as hours, minutes, etc.)

Time is:

• a flow
• a duration
• not a series of points

Instead of perceiving time as linear, we experience….

• a mixture of past – present – future within the same moment

William James

• employed the term "Consciousness" to define...

The whole range of an individual’s mental activity
including pre-speech levels of consciousness and awareness

The term “Stream of Consciousness”

• ... was first coined by the American psychologist W. James

According to W. James:

• Human thoughts and memories are not “chopped up in bits” ...

... they are something fluid which flows like a stream

Many Modernist novels no longer followed …

• a linear plot or
• a chronological sequence of events

The idea of progress which laid behind the novel’s linear plot structure …

...gave way to the idea of duration

Thus a Modernist novel

• ...
• ... can be set in one single day

The analysis of a single moment

• can tell us more about a character than a traditional life-story

The figure of the omniscient narrator as a moral guide is replaced by...

the direct or indirect presentation of characters’ thoughts, feelings and memories

The two novelists who were...

• most interested in representing their characters' inner processes of memory and thought were:

James Joyce
Virginia Woolf

The techniques they used were partly different …

• Joyce increasingly tried to eliminate the narrator by using the so-called “direct interior monologue”

Virginia Woolf used:

• the “indirect interior monologue” resorting sometimes to an unobstrusive 3rd-person narrator”

The interior monologues can be …

• Direct or
• Indirect

The direct interior monologue refers to …

• the presentation of a character’s stream of consciousness without the guiding presence of a narrator

The indirect interior monologue refers to …

• the indirect presentation of a character’s stream of consciousness filtered by the voice of an anonymous 3rd-person narrator

Modernism was …

• not accessible to all
• only for a highly educated elite

Modernism often implied also …

• A vein of pretension of seriousness, which was contrary to the comic tradition and spirit of the English novel

T.S. Eliot's Wasteland

Ezra Pound

Despite modernist innovations …

• Conventional novels continued to be written in this period...

The realist novel continued

George Orwell

Aldous Huxley

Detective Stories

Arthur Conan Doyle

Agatha Christie

H.G. Wells

Time for reading !

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