INTRODUCTION TO MODERNISM
THE TURN OF CENTURY
- hihg Victorian and post-Victorian
- the Edwardians
- the roaring 1920s
- artists and their world
- the intellectuals
- city dwellers
- history
ARITSTIC/INTELLECTUAL MOVEMENTS AND TRENDS
- the Celtic revival
- art for art's sake, aesthetic movement, The Yellow Back,
- the Fabian Society, the Bloomsbury Group
- pre-Raphaelites, Fauves, Cubism, Symbolism
= Imagims, Vorticism, Dadaism, Futurism, formalism
- the Post-impressionism
- theories of Darwin, Freud, Husserl, Planck, Einstein, Henry and William James
Social and technological highlights
- bohemian life, new role of literature and art, fine de siecle, socialism, the Theosophical Society
- working class gaining power, the suffragette movement,
- first radio connection between Europe and American (1901), successful flight of a machine heavier than air (the Wright brothers, 1903), the car production of Ford Motor Company starts (1903)
'What's in a name?'
SOMETHING OLD...
- Ch. Dickens, Arnold Bennett, Mrs. Humphry Ward, George Moore, John Galsworthy, Maurice Hewlett, William Hope Hodgson, James Matthew Barrie ('Peter Pan')
SOMETHING NEW...
(or the linking element)
- GK Chesterton, EM Forster, Oscar WIlde, Walter Pater, HG Wells, GB Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, John Buchan, TE Lawrence, AC Doyle, Agatha Chrisite, John Millington SYnge
...something modern,
-Roger Fry, Clive Bell, Joseph Conrad, Viriginia Wooolf. James Joyce, TS Eliot, George Orwell
FOLLOWED BY
Graham Greene, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, AA Milne
Border date - 1910
- a comment from some perspective, 1910 ushered us into a new era of human relations;
- what followed was chaos, war, disaster, pain, bewilderment, sorrow, crysis,and so on and so forth;
- WWI (1914-18)
- the Bolshevik Revolution and the execution of the Russian Tsar (1918)
- the Irish Free State (1922)
- the Soviet Union (1923)
- Hitler's Munich putsch (1923)
- the general Strike in Britain (1926)
- the crisis in America (the stock exchange collapsing, 1929)
- Hitler gaining power, the burining of the Reichstag (1933)
- the Spanish Civil War (1936)
- WWII with the concentration camps and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
PART 2
1. Main theories that altered (first) the view of the world and (second) the literary scene:
• 1900
- Sigmund Freud, his theory of dreams
- Husserl, Logic
- Russel, critique of Leibnitz
- Planck, his quantum theory
• 1905
- Einstein, his theory of relativity published
2. Narration
- the world is presented via a number of subjective viewpoints (Henry James, William James)
- this impressionistic way of treating the reality (describing it) results in an unclear, illusionary, sometimes artificial, picture of the reality described
- understanding of artificial here: often described in terms of art (as a stage in a theatre, as a fragment of a painted picture, as a fictional fairy-tale reality)
- greater narrative distance to the events – often due to the usage of the poetics of remembrance (the distance is merely temporal) and a number of narrators introduced in turns (special enlargement)
- introduction of several secondary narrators who all present their own fragments of the main story (cf. the Victorian narrator: objective and omniscient; judge-like personality)
- all narrators bring in their own intellectual and emotional distances to the events
- the vision of the world emerges as a large patchwork of ideas, opinions, views. ‘Objectiveness’ or ‘objective truth’ about the world appears more unattainable, elusive (Conrad, Forster)
- what becomes important is the telling mode – HOW the events are described rather than WHAT is being described
- the old convention of chronology becomes obsolete as well. Time is neither linear nor transparent
- language employed is full of ambiguities, implication, allusions, suggestions
- important: human consciousness shapes the reality of the present moment on the bits related to the past images/events/feelings, etc. mixed with the present stimuli and the future plans/dreams, etc.
-speed of time is based on personal, human awareness. The law of free association and the stream of consciousness eagerly picked up and used by the Modernist writers
- apart from ideas: language began to follow the rule of the subconscious flow of associations – the thoughts often presented with the use of uncommon word clusters, strange grammatical order of syntax, lack of punctuation marks
- not only the lexical and grammatical context but also situational and setting-related one gained on importance and complexity
3. Characterization: old versus new
- traditional traces still visible and wildly practiced. However, gradual introduction of new elements. Often- merger of old and new
- therefore, traditional simple, clear descriptions, straightforward references to the described characters, short biographical summaries co-exist with modern, complex, impressionistic ones which only gradually reveal the features of the character
- moreover, focus (similarly as in narration) tends to be on the process; HOW the character talks (style, language), HOW the characters act and think becomes important.
- the development of visual arts: cinematic shots. The impression of ‘watching while reading’. The impression reinforced by the use of painting-related language (the use of colours and their symbolic meanings)
- frequent use of metonymy
- indirect description ? showing the place of living, places of interests, books and friends of the character
- irony often used, either in reference to the character in question or (if the narrator tends to side with the very character, in reference to other characters surrounding the protagonist)
Symbol & Symbolism
1. symbolism
- no precise, unanimous definition
- Europe and two Americas
- all fields of human activity
- rooted in the middle of 19th century
- café meetings of artists and people of literature
- Romanticism ? (Coleridge, Khubla Khan, use of dreams, fantasies, seeking) pointing to the mysterious in the surrounding reality
- Idealism ? (Carlyle: ‘to see a double meaning in everything’)
- Pessimism ? (Schopenhauer)
- symbolism manifests itself most vividly in poetry, theatre, philosophy and broadly understood art
- it is the way of life/philosophy of life
- attracted highly original people, extremely original personalities, often scandalous (O. Wilde)
- comeback to primitive
Summary:
- literature is characterized by the fantastic, the unreal, dream-like
- death- a common subject
- the modernist symbol – often indescribable, shapeless, delusive
- thus – modernist symbol is non-referential
- the modernist protagonists live on the verge of life and death
- the sensual world appears more attractive, interesting, felt stronger
- literature is populated by demons, demon-like creatures as well as by fantastic or mythical figures known from myths, legends, the Bible and folk stories
- despite general/common characteristics of modernist literary symbolism, the texts show individual traits – writers differ in their use of symbolic elements. Among the modernists, E.M. Forster’s symbolism seems to be the most outstanding and personal
LECTURE 3
THEMES, SETTINGS AND THEIR ROOTS
General influences
- home politics
- economy
- social hisory
- world history
- foreign artistic movements
Politics and society 1901-1914
IMPERIALISM
- England is a commercial master
- the banker of the world - control through overseas investments
- unifies the world in a stable financial system based on gold-covertible sterling (importance of City of London)
- Influence on society: psychological
- its steady fall - next forty years (up to WWII)
- within the Empire: first stirrings of nationalism felt in Egypt, India, but also in the white dominions like South Africa
- conflicts of power (old: Russia, France; new: America, Japan, Germany)
ECONOMY
- soon turns out: the most antiquated industrial nation
- very few inventions
- still most firms small and privately owned - antiquated plants which lacked modernizaton
- productivity lagged behind (international competition)
LITERATURE AND ART
- themes - often based on imperialism (both fields, many branches, e.g. scholary, ideological, imaginative, historical, books for children, travel, exploration)
- some justifying (R. Kipling, JG Frazer)
- other criticizing (J Conrad, H James)
OTHER THEMES
- the condition of England
- working class
- mass culture
- Irish question (O Wilde, G Moore, GB Shaw, WB Yeats, JM Synge J Joyce)
- Rural vs Urban e.g.
FH Lawrence Sons and Lovers
BM Forster Howards End, The Longest Journey
Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians
MORE SPECIFICALLY...
- interest in human instincts (DH Lawrence, K Mansfield)
- social critique, social taboos (EM Forester, DH Lawrence)
- totalitarian future society (A Huxley, G Orwell, PW Lewis)
- foreign culture (EM Forester S Maugham)
IMPERILISM ALSO MANIFESTED ITSELF IN ARCHITECTURE
- Mannierist emphasis - contrast to Victorian Gothic
- Eclectism
EXPRESSIONISM
- main and foremost references to visual arts;
- violent and extreme reaction against realism or/and naturalism
-- rebelion against academics
- subective feelings over objective observation
- generally characterized by primitivism, mystery, ambiguity, play with colours and forms, references to mythology (in terms of mood, ambience etc.)
PART4
FUTURISM The Beginnings
- (an Italian poet, 1876-1944) Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's 'Manifesto of Futurism' (1909) - Le Figaro; coined the term, started the movement and led it.
The Manifesto of Futurist Painting (1910) by Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini and others, emphasised flux and movement as essentials of representation
Marine
tti's 'Technical manifesto of Literature' (1912) called ffor disruption of syntax and use of words for their sounds alone as methods of liberating language 'from the prison of Latin sentence'
Russian Futurism was established in 1912 by Viktor Khlebnikov (1885-1922) and Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) whose manifesto entitled 'A Slap in the Face for Public Taste' rejected the validity of the nineteenth-century Russian literary tradition.
GIACOMO BALLA, 'ABSTRACT SPEED - THE CAR HAS PASSED (1913, oil on canvas, 50.2x65.4cm, Tate Gallery, London
1920's and 1930: the term loosely used to descirbe a wide variety of agrresively modern styles in art and literature. The first deliberately organized, sell-conscious art movement of the twentieth century. It quickly spread to France, Germany, Russia and the Americas.
- Futurists:
mixed activism and artistic research;
ogranized events that caused scandal;
to glorify Italy and lead their country into the age of modernity.
Modes of writing, LOW and HIGH MODERist LITERATURE
- romantic and popular literature
- naturalistic
- satirical
- mimetic
- intertextual (allusions to other literary work)