Modernism Flashcards
Changes
•All human relations have shifted – those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children —> at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature
Modernism Characteristics
• Late 19th/early 20th century
• Appears in all art forms; international
• Self-conscious break with tradition —> avant-garde
• Representation of reality no longer important
• Stress on form and material
• New ways of representations
• Stream of consciousness (Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway)
• Abstract art
• Twelve tone music
Art Forms
• Expressionism
• Impressionism
• Analytic Cubism
• Futurism
Futurism
Key Figures:
• Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876 - 1944)
Italian branch - writer of the Futurist Manifesto
•Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893 - 1930)
Russian branch - “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste”
Futurist Manifesto
Imagism
- Direct treatment of the “thing”, whether subjective or objective.
- To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
- As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.
Imagist Poets
• Richard Aldington
-* War and Love: Poems
- A Fool i’ the Forest: Phantasmagoria *
• H.D. (Hilda Dolittle)
- Sea Garden
- Helen in Egypt
• Amy Lowell
- Pictures of the Floating World
• Ezra Pound
- Ripostes
- Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
- Cantos
Ezra Pound
• Born in Hayley, Idaho
• Moves to Europe in 1908 (London, Paris, Rapallo)
• Imagisms —> Anthology *Des Imagistes *
• Support for publishing *Prufrock *and Ulysses
• Turn to Fascism
• Imprisoned by Americans after war
• Time in mental institution
• Main works:
-* Ripostes
- Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
- Cantos
T.S. Elliot
• Born in St. Louis, Missouri
• Moves to London in 1914
• Friendship with Ezra Pound
• Nobel Prize of Literature in 1948
• Main Works:
- *Prufrock, and Other Poems
- Waste Land
- Four Quartetts
- Murder in the Cathedral *
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
• Epigraph from Dante’s Inferno (XXVII, 61–66)
-Prufrock as Dante
- Dramatic monologue
Imagism Themes
• Loneliness/ Despair
• Sexuality
• Ageing
• Indecision/ Passivity
• Regret
•References
The Waste Land
Modernist Fiction
• the radical disruption of linear flow of narrative;
• the frustration of conventional expectations concerning unity and coherence of plot and character and the cause and effect development thereof;
• the deployment of ironic and ambiguous juxtapositions to call into question the moral and philosophical meaning of literary action;
• the adoption of a tone of epistemological self-mockery aimed at naive pretensions of bourgeois rationality;
• the opposition of inward consciousness to rational, public, objective discourse;
• and an inclination to subjective distortion to point up the evanescence of the
social world of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie.
Virginia Woolf
• Member of the Bloomsbury Group (Leonard Woolf, J.M. Keynes, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Vanessa Bell…)
• Founded Hogarth Press together with Leonard Woolf
• Majorworks:
The Voyage Out
Night and Day
Jacob’s Room
Mrs Dalloway
To the Lighthouse
Orlando
The Waves
Between the Acts
Modern Fiction
The Common Reader
A Room of One’s Own
+ Screenshot
Stream of Conciousness
• Representation of thought process —> subjective point of view
• Not necessarily structured or ordered —> no or little coherence
• Irregular syntax, ellipses, lack of punctuation
• No addressee
• Little or no fixed perspective —>
• Flashbacks, montage, rapid cuts
• In Mrs Dalloway: switch between several characters
James Joyce
• Born in Dublin
• Move to the continent in 1904; lived in Trieste, Paris and Zurich
• Main works:
- *Dubliners: 15 short stories
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Ulysses
- Finnegans Wake *
