modernism

ORIGINS AND CONTEXT:

Modernism is a cultural and literary movement which flourished during the first decade of the 20 th century. The word modernism is used to designate works not only in literature but also in painting, music, science, theology, anthropology, sculpture.
Ex: T.S Eliot used some allusions to Picasso's works, notably cubism. The beginning of the 20 th century was a key movement as theories proved to be influenced on modernism were elaborated such as: Einstein treaties on relativity, Freud's theory on the unconscious and Marx Plunck's Quuntum theories.
In literature, influences came from the French novelist Flaubert and the symblolist poet Malarmé.
CHANGE was the norm of the 20th century, new social theories, industrialisation, the Second World War, and rise of communism changed the face of the world forever.
Karl Marx, Freud, and Darwin had unsettled human subject from its previously secur position, at least at the center of human universe and revealed his dependance on laws and structures which are beyond his control and outside even his knowledge.
The spychoanalytic theories (Freud's) had revealed the self as a pawn in a process dominated by inaccessible, unconscious play of forces. The conception of evolution and heredity (Darwin) situates humanity as no more than the latest product of natural selection.
Freud and Darwin contributed to create doubts concerning the humanist self-confidence and provoked a feeling of uncertainty.
The 20 th century was also marked by urbanisation and industrialisation as Western nations moved from their agricultural roots to factory nations. All Western countries developed very quickly exemples of slum conditions.

This era was also an era of WARS as two world wars broke out, killing millions of innocent people with the help of a technology which had seemed to make life better.

The rise of communism was another source of distruction. With its atheist creed, communism offered deluding promises to the blind masses. Nietsche predicted the age of Barbarism and saw modern life falling into hell.

He prophetically predicted: "there will be wars such as have never existed on earth".
Frank Kafca criticized the rise of communism, he said: " the buttresses of human existence are collapsing. Historical development is not determined by individuals but by societies. We are rushed away and swept. We are the victims of history" (attack on communism).

****In such a CONFUSED CONTEXT all old beliefs became illusions. The confident view of history that things are improving as rationality brought its social benefits looked wrong.

Beatrice Webb once wrote: "with science alone all human misery would be ultimatly swept away".

The social theorists, the two World Wars, rise of communism and industrialisation tended towards the apocaliptic conclusion imaged in T.S Eliot's The Waste Land that man was about to face.

In such context, the stable, coherent and inherently world view of the nineteenth century could not, wrote T.S Eliot: "accord with the panorama of futility and hanarchy of contemporary history"

This feeling of confusion and insecurity proved productive. It ingendered the aesthetics of FRAGMENTATION, ambiguity and neherism.

Modernism in fact can be considered as the movement which developed out of the loss of community and civilization.

Themes of Modernism:

This context in fact encouraged the modernists to inculed such themes as :
1- The question of the experience of reality itself.
2- The search for a ground of meaning in a world without meaning.
3- Critique of the tradition of the western culture.
4- The search for hope in a world without God.


Modernist techniques:

Recognizing the failure of language to fully convey meaning, Eliot's Prufrock said: " This is not it at all. This is not what I meant at all", the modernists adopted some techniques and strategies to support their themes throwing away the burden of the realist writings.

1- Time as psychological: it is not historical or rail way time. A good example of the use of time as psychological is the use of the stream of consciousness. Time is also structuring device. Through movement backward or forward to juxtapose the past with the present and to predict what is going to happen in the future.

2- The rejection of the past and even iconoclasm (hostile to tradition):
For modernists, the previous writing was inadequate and stereotyped. This is why the modernists were very much interested in technical innovations and sometimes even for their own sake.
Modernists abandoned the social world in favour of form. Form is part of the way a poem conveys its meaning.

3- A blurring distinction between high and low cultures:
The modernists sometimes rejected what they believed to be a highly elevated diction of the Victorian poets.
The use of daily speech aims at creating a sense of immediously that is dialect experience.

4- A blurring distinction between literary genres: A poem seems documentary and prose seems to be poetic.

5- The use of such new techniques as epiphany, "objective correlative", "perspectivism" (multiple narration) a technique borrowed from Picasso's cubism in visual arts.
In the story, you may have many narrators (multiple narration) to replace the omnicient narrator or point of view that characterizes the traditional novel.

6- The use of detached narrator through technique as narration within narration.(Faulkner for example detached himself frim his characters)

7- The open ending:
The modernists abandoned the realistic close ending in favour of open ending which reflects the inaccessible 20 th century.