Modernism Flashcards
Virginia Woolf 1910
‘On or about December 1910, human character changed’
Define it
‘Essentially rebellious in character and far too amorphous to ever be pinned down with precision’
Eliot’s task
‘The painful task of unifying’
- exploring murkier and less predictable operations of human perception and consciousness
To reconnect / integrate all Victorian moral dichotomy gore asunder - the human and animal, civilised and savage
William James
‘The stream of consciousness’ - raw sensory flux is the closest humans can get to knowing:
‘When we conceptualise we cut and fix… whereas in the real concrete flux of life experiences compenetrate each other’
McFarlane’s 3 stages of modernism
- Early rebellion - breaking up systems
- Restructuring fragments
- A dissolving, a blending, a merging
McFarlane’s conclusion
‘The defining thing in the modernist mode is not so much that things fall apart but that they fall together’
Alan Wilde
‘Articulation of disconnection’ is essence of modernism
Cultural reference
- cubism; all planes on canvas simultaneously, so you experience it as a fused whole
- cinematic montage, jazz music blends primitivism of African origins with modern sophistication
- attempt to breakdown boundaries between stage and audience in 20th c theatre
Stream of consciousness according to DH Lawrence
Captures the ‘real, vital, potential self” as opposed to the ‘old stable ego” of 19th c. Characters
The self - Judith Ryan
Just a ‘bundle of sensory impressions precariously grouped together and constantly threatened with possible dissolution’
What replaced the ‘substantial, consistent self’
‘Fluid, unbounded self’
Ronald Bush’s 20th Century Self
The self is ‘a state of continuous becoming’
Freud on the self
Ego has the task of organising the assorted fragments of identity into a consolidated persona, but process will never reach closure
the Love song of j Alfred Prufrock published
1915
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo
