The Rise of Modernism

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The Rise of Modernism

• English 3

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Contributing Factors

• World War I The Great War
• 1914-1918
• Fought under the banners of humanity and
  righteousness
• Became a bloodbathnearly a million soldiers
  perished in the single battle of Verdun
• Physically, emotionally challenging for all
  parties involved
• Trench warfare

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Contributing Factors

• War brought significant changes in attitudes
• Loss of innocence
• Idealism to cynicism
• Post-war disillusionment to cause to lose naïve
  faith and trust
• Introduced new moral codes loose morals,
  flappers, Jazz Age
• Stock Market Crash 1929
• Decade of economic depression
• Loss of faith in the promise of America

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Contributing Factors

• Marxism
• Russian revolution rise of Karl Marx
• Socialist belief system
• Directly opposed American ideals of capitalism
  and free enterprise
• Threat to spread
• Freud and psychoanalysis
• Study of the unconscious mind
• Role of human sexuality and its role in
  controlling behavior Id, ego, superego
• If actions were influenced by the
  unconsciouswhere is our free will?

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What did all of this mean?

• These factors initiated the rise of the modernist
  movementWhat did modernism affect?
• Literary Books, authors, experimentation of
  form, fragmented, poetry, manifestos
  (declarations)
• Socially Art and culture Dadaism, cubism,
  post-impressionism
• Philosophically Nietzsche, Freud, Marx
• -rise of cities-dehumanization, anonymity of
  people-class structure changing-advancing
  technology-politics revolutions, wars,
  1917-physics, quantum physics, Einstein,
  uncertainty principle-religion, God is dead,
  everything meaningless -Nietzsche

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Modernism

• A literary movement that ushered in bold
  experimentation and a sweeping rejection of all
  traditional themes and styles
• No specific definition, but there are definining
  characteristics and traits

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Literary Modernism traits

• Response to sense of social breakdown
• Sees world as fragmented
• Point of view is remote or detached from subject
• Poetry is highly allusive
• Poems like a riddle
• Subject of modernist literature often asks what
  is the purpose of literature and poetry
• Elite audience, academic, educated

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Characteristics of Modernism

• anti-Romantic, meaning not in nature but in art
  itself meaning is subjective, poem need not have
  a meaning.
• modernist searching for new forms.
• break with the past deliberately.
• poet responsible for life of the spirit.
• poetry becomes the subject of poetry the old
  subjects are the means, the poem is the end

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Characteristics of Modernist works

• Alienation from Society and Loneliness.
• Procrastination/An inability to act.
• Agonized recollection of the Past constant
  flashbacks into the past.
• Fear of death and the Appearance of Death.
• Inability to feel or express Love.
• World as a Wasteland poor Environmental
  portrayal.
• see Man creating his own myths within his mind to
  fall back upon

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Major themes of modernism

• Destruction of the American Dream
• America is a New Eden / vs. reality of postwar
  America
• Optimism opportunity vs. reality poverty,
  hopelessness
• Belief in the importance and triumph of the
  individual vs. the utter failure and loss of the
  individual
• Stream of consciousness writing style that
  abandoned chronology and attempted to imitate the
  moment by moment flow of a characters
  perceptions and memories
• Disillusionment to cause to lose naive faith
  and trust disillusioned dissatisfied,
  disappointed

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Major themes of modernism

• violence and alienation.
• historical discontinuity.
• decadence and decay.
• loss and despair.
• rejection of history.
• race relations.
• unavoidable change.
• sense of place, local color

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Important writers and works of the Modernist
period

• Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby
• Hemingway The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to
  Arms
• T.S. Eliot The Wasteland, Prufrock
• Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath
• James Joyce Ulysses
• William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury

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Citation

• http//www.millikin.edu/aci/Crow/basics/modernism.
  html