Modernism Flashcards
Reinhart Koselleck - argues that by the year 1800 there was a feeling of living in a ‘neue Zeit’ (a period that was unprecedented and distinctive)
- why was this happening?
“lived time was experienced as a rupture, a period of transition in which the new and unexpected continually happened”
- chronic sense of novelty due to the growth of cities, speed of transportation etc.
- 1833: The Great Western Railway
- population ballooned to 25-26 million by the end of the 19th century
Michael Levenson
“the rhythm of war becomes the basis for Modernist temporality”
Virginia Woolf
1. (Modern Fiction, 1919)
- (Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown)
- “an incessant shower of innumerable atoms”
2. “on or about December 1910 human character changed”
Roland Barthes - [every text is]
“a new tissue of past citations”
How does Herbert Read summarise Modernism?
“not so much a revolution, which implies a turning over, even a turning back, but rather a break-up, a devolution, some would say a dissolution. Its character is catastrophic”
Where did Ezra Pound get his ‘make it new’ maxim from?
- inscription on a Chinese emperor’s washbasin
How did WW1 affect modern culture?
- the events have a power because they cut through omnipresent and perhaps necessary societal denial about the nature of who and what we are as creatures
We might say that Brecht’s ‘estrangement technique’ had a similar aim to that of TWL and possibly the Vorticist movement. Brecht used the estrangement technique - what was the aim of this?
- aimed to awaken the audience from their slumber and make them consider the political and social ramifications of the play, their own levels of culpability and privilege (or lack of) rather than being seduced or lulled into acquiescence by what he scornfully called‚ ‘culinary theatre’
“art could be a narcotic and, worst of all, an opiate” - though seemingly startlingly fresh - the ability of art to jolt us out of complacency is an archaic technique in relatively-new clothes
In April 1940: Virginia Woolf gave a lecture to the Workers’ Educational Association in Brighton - what was this and what did it say?
“Then, suddenly like a chasm in a smooth road, the [Great] war came”
- essay later published as’The Leaning Tower’
It is said that Eliot and Pound were influenced by Dadaism - what is this movement?
- 1916
- founders struck upon this essentially nonsense word to embody a simultaneously playful and nihilistic spirit alive among European visual artists and writers during and immediately after World War I
- salvaged a sense of freedom from the cultural and moral instability that followed the war, and embraced both “everything and nothing”
(1920: Tristan Tzara wrote in his Dadaist Manifesto) - in visual arts, this enterprise took the form of collage and juxtaposition of unrelated objects, as in the work of French artist Marcel Duchamp (‘Fountain’)
- later took form in Marshall McLuhan’s ‘The Medium is the Massage’
What does Vincent Sherry’s’The Great War’ say?
- the linguistic and representational inventiveness of modernism was rooted in the experience of war
- as writers attempted to form a new perspective on the disillusionment and devastation of the Great War
What significance does the quote “we live in the flicker” from Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ have on understanding Modernism?
- the light of knowledge is now a flickering light (if the Enlightenment has failed due to WW1 then how do we gain knowledge - can we even reach true knowledge?) - whether truth is knowable or desirable
- we live in the condition of continual flux
- relates to Husserl’s philosophy of phenomenology - attempts to develop a theory of retention in which he tries to describe the duration of ‘immediate experience’
Modernism deals with the concept of social/ cultural fragmentation but why was there an aspect of literary fragmentation?
- plots and characters and poems that had coherency did not seem adequate for the culture they were facing
How was class shifting in this period?
- idea that the middle class were infiltrating the upper classes etc. and that the lower class were infiltrating the middle class in incongruous and unsettling ways
- Virginia Woolf commented that the contemporary cook would enter the drawing room and ask to borrow the ‘Daily Herald’ - not just an invasion of class boundaries but also intellectual boundaries
What is problematic about Woolf’s comment: “in December 1910, human character changed”
(view of John Carey)
- highly elitist
- in popular newspapers the post-impressionists were actually mocked because people did not think much of them
- on the back of Woolf’s comment - does not mean that you don’t have a cook, the servants are still downstairs
What are the differing views on the unconscious from those in the period? (and how has John Carey cast a critical eye on Freud?)
- took a lot of influence from Freud’s work on the unconscious - influential for the Bloomsbury group especially
- D.H. Lawrence challenged Freud (saying he was not interested enough in bodies and too much in sex)
- John Carey has noted that Freud believed the unconscious was an evil aspect of ourselves and needed to be repressed for civilisation to continue (Lawrence disagreed and said it had to be let out and embraced)
