MODERNISM (13.05.2013)

Modernism

(late 19

th

and early 20

th

centuries) is the new chapter in the history of literature. The

problem is that these dates are quite vague things, very general labels that you put on something. In
this bag called “modernism” you can find some elements from other centuries because of this never-
ending “recycling” of trends.

Modernism has shaped our ideas of literature: most important theories of literature have their
origins in the beginning of the 20

th

century. Previously people did not ask that many questions about

literature, so modernism as far as criticism is concerned is a time when people started to examine
texts.

In the past it was all very spontaneous. You read a book and you said whether you liked it or not e.g. I
like this book because it teaches you how to live.

There was a religious and a biographical criticism:

Influence of literature on your life was like the first thing discussed by people and then they focused
on the author: e.g. we should read someone’s book, because he’s a good person. People believed
that if you were a bad person, you couldn’t write a good book. You looked at a book as at an author’s
personality.

Modern ideas of narrative:

There was a theory that identity is basically a narrative. It’s a story that you keep telling to yourself.
When you have problem with yourself, the solution to this problem will be then changing that story.

If someone asked you: WHO ARE YOU?

Usually you’d draw a clear line between the story – which is a work of fiction – and reality. You’d not
invent a story, but answer the question truthfully, present certain facts that define you. Traditionally
it was believed that identity it’s not a story, it’s fact.

If you think of identity as a story you can – up to some point – improvise on the facts that are given
to you. Everything is a matter of interpretation. Using basic facts you can tell a number of stories.
You must accept certain things, but what you can made out of it is up to you.

This idea has some consequences:

It has revolutionized psychology – it suggested different forms of therapy (e.g. idea of Psychoanalysis
is based on the idea that the identity is a story). The people get helped by telling themselves their
stories.

Real difficulty is not that you have a problem. It is when you don’t know that you have a problem or
you know that you have, but you don’t realize what kind of problem it is. These are the gaps in your
story – you know that there’s something wrong with you but you don’t know what exactly.

It’s because we’re afraid of the unknown. Here psychology meets with literature, because lots of
traumas are connected with the fact that people are afraid of something.

Literature is focused on two questions:

-

What people are afraid of? (e.g. horror writers are interested in how to scare their readers),

-

Why people are afraid of something?

There was an idea that if you’re really afraid of something, you can’t talk about it. Like this
experience of horror is something non-linguistic, it’s something in your mind like dark region which
language does not reach and in this region there are hidden all horrors. You can’t talk about it,
because talking – using language – means making sense. When we’re talking about thing, we
transform our chaotic disorderly lives into consistent story which makes sense. There is cause and
effect.

TELLING A STORY = MAKING SENSE

Fear is something that doesn’t make sense. It destroys the meaning. When you’re afraid of
something, you cannot think logically. You’ll be cured the moment you learn to talk about your fears.

What’s the difference between creating something and discovering something?

Creating the identity vs. discovering the identity

You don’t know who you are: should you create the identity or discover it? e.g. why do we say that
Columbus discovered America rather than created it? It was there. It means when you’re discover
something, the thing is somewhere there, just you’re not aware of it. When you’re creating the
identity, you look deeply into your heart and there’s nothing, you have to come out with some sort
of answers on your own.

History as a narrative vs. history as a record of objective facts

Lots of historical debates have political context e.g. there’s a German way of seeing the history and
there’s Polish way. Usually the argument is about what’s true and what’s not. If you think of a history
like of a narrative, you don’t ask such questions. You understand that since it’s a story – you can tell it
from different perspectives. In the past people wanted to believe that history is an objective record
of facts and if it’s objective – there’s only one version of it. Today people say that everything depends
on how one interprets the facts.

There’s a postmodern idea that there’s no absolute truth. The postmodernists think that we made
up the world we’re living in. There are no facts, just interpretations. The world we’re living in is not
make out of things, but out of words.

Words ultimately do not exist in the same sense as paper or a window. They’re concepts that exist
inside your head and as such they’re not physical. You can argue that the world exists because you
can write it down and you can say that this is something physical, a page of paper. When somebody
talks to you it’s also physical, because this means certain breaks, sound waves.

You can record it,

store it somewhere and play this recording.

This is physical but this is not what really matters, because the thing you see on the page on paper or
what you hear is actually just something sending you to somewhere else e.g. if you write down
“Charles Dickens”, writing would be physical, but Charles Dickens wouldn’t be. The Postmodernists

say that even if you say “a chair” and you point on that chair, there’s no way to determine whether
the chair is really there. So we’re all living in some kind of matrix. We as people have similar picture
of the world, because we were taught similar stories, we believe that the things are what they are.
Even if there were some kind of aliens, we would probably have problems with talking to them,
because they could have other “pictures”. They’d have their stories and we – our own.