British Modernism

Question 1

British Modernism (timeline)

Answer 1

1910 - 1930
- age of the “younger generation” who saw Victorianism and its values far in the past

Question 2

What influenced British Modernism?

Answer 2

1) WWI
- disillusion, doubts

2) popular culture
- the “Jazz Age,” emancipation, rejection of Victorian Puritanism

3) psychology - Freud and Jung

4) philosophy
- “stream of thought” and “flow of time”

5) graphic arts
- exhibition of Post-Impressionist painters

Question 3

RESULTS

Answer 3

• focus on inner life and human subjectivity
• traditional plot impossible
• stream of consciousness and interior monologue
• loosely related free associations
• experimental fiction

Question 4

The Wasteland
- author

Answer 4

T. S. Eliot
- his major work

Question 5

The Cantos
- author

Answer 5

Ezra Pound

Question 6

Typical features of modernist poetry?

Answer 6

• fragments, intertextuality
• irregularities in rhytm and rhyme
• juxtaposition of images
• thematically: state of the world

Question 7

Dubliners
- author + info

Answer 7

James Joyce
- depicting the “moral paralysis” of Ireland
- stories follow the temporal, intellectual and spiritual progress of a person (childhood → maturity)

Question 8

Who was the foremost representative of the poetic movement known as Imagism?

Answer 8

Ezra Pound

Question 9

Mrs Dalloway
- author

Answer 9

Virginia Woolf
- figurative style, often poetic and lyrical

Question 10

Lady Chatterley’s Lover
- author + info

Answer 10

Lawrence
- detailed descriptions of love making
- vitalistic life philosophy and criticism of the dehumanized industrial and material Western civilization

Question 11

Poems 1909-25 (contains “The Hollow Men”)
- author

Answer 11

T. S. Eliot

Question 12

The Bloomsbury Group characteristics?

Answer 12

• a very sincere and open-minded attitude to sexuality
• rejection of the doctrinaire realism and pragmatic rationalism
• focus - individual experience and perception
• ordinary, everyday things, simple moments of joy and happiness

Question 13

Women in Love
- author

Answer 13

Lawrence

Question 14

Ulysses
- author

Answer 14

James Joyce
- difficult;
- intertextual references and allusions
- experiments with language
- main parts written in a very pure form of stream of consciousness

Question 15

Who attempted to revive verse drama?

Answer 15

T. S. Eliot
- e. g. Murder in the Cathedral

Question 16

Another Time (contains “Musée des Beaux Arts”)
- author

Answer 16

W. H. Auden

Question 17

screenplay for Carol Reed’s movie The Third Man
- author

Answer 17

Graham Greene

Question 18

Animal Farm
- author

Answer 18

George Orwell
[Eric Arthur Blair]

Question 19

Goodbye to Berlin
- author

Answer 19

Christopher Isherwood
- the caring landlady
- the decadent cabaret artist Sally Bowles
- Peter and Otto, a gay couple

Question 20

Brave New World
- author

Answer 20

Aldous Huxley
- a satirical dystopia/anti-utopia

Question 21

The 1930s (characteristics)

Answer 21

• culture - jazz, sports („the fun stuff“)
• philosophy - Freud + newly Carl Marx
• consumer society - mass production - cheaper products → MASS consumption (consumers overwhelmed and depressed by the mass)
• great development in transport, especially in cars and airplanes
• 1929 - economic crisis (inflation etc.)

Question 22

2 main tendencies in fiction during the 1930s?

Answer 22

satirical and documentary