Classicism Romanticism Modernism

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JOURNAL ENTRY 16 What is modern
fiction? Assume the stories chosen illustrate all
tehre is to know about Modern Fiction. From what
youve read so far this year, what is your
subjective definition of modern fiction (at
this point)? List some characteristics of modern
fiction. What are some modern themes present in
the stories?
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Modernism
JACKSON POLLOCK Lavender Mist (1950)
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Modernism

• A comprehensive but vague term for a movement (or
  tendency) which began to get under way in the
  closing years of the 19th c.

PIET MONDRIAN Composition 10 (1939-1942)
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Persistence of Memory Salvador Dali
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Tenets of Modernism

• Challenged tradition and the status quo
• Fascination with the new, the modern, the
  mechanical
• Focus on form and stylistic experimentation

• Exploration of perception and representation
• Critique of mimesis or realism in how we
  represent the world

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The Treachery of Images (1929)
RENÉ MAGRITTE
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• Modernism was largely brought about by the
  convergence of several factors
• The devastation caused in Europe after World War
  I, when the most enlightened and advanced nations
  on the earth came together to kill each other in
  staggering numbers.

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• The wholesale urbanization and industrialization
  that took place during the nineteenth century.
• The fragmentation of belief in the unified
  individual that occurred as the result of the
  work of several scientists and philosophers.

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Karl Marx

• Asserted that human moral, cultural, and
  religious values were caused not by any inherent
  sense of good or evil but by the requirements of
  a particular system.

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Charles Darwin

• Discovered that the evolution of species was the
  result of natural selection and competition
  rather than through any special act of purposeful
  creation.

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Sigmund Freud

• Asserted that most elements of the human
  personality were the result of various
  psycho-sexual traumas experienced in infancy and
  early childhood and stored in the subconscious
  mind.

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Albert Einstein

• Discovered that even most of the physical
  properties in the universe (time, space, size,
  weight, density, gravity, etc.) were relative.

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Aesthetic Characteristics of Modernism

• Abandonment of traditional rules for creating
  art, music, and literature
• Fragmented representations of time, meaning, and
  human nature
• Sense of loss, alienation, abandonment, and
  disillusionment
• Attempts to find new kinds of truth in the
  absence of any traditional way to ground meaning
  or significance

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MARC CHAGALL I and the Village (1911)
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VINCENT VAN GOGH The Starry Night (1889)
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PABLO PICASSO Self-Portrait with Palette (1906)
MARCEL DUCHAMP Nude Descending a Staircase, No.
2 (1912)
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EDVARD MUNCH Evening on Karl Johan (1892)
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The Lovers II René Magritte
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• http//www.artgallery.lu/digitalart/women_in_art.h
  tml

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The avant-garde ("first wave") movements that
emerged in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries (such as symbolism, cubism,
futurism, Dada, and surrealism) accelerated the
break with the past, and following the horrors of
the Great War, modernism emerged as a new
aesthetic philosophy.
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The Red Wheelbarrow so much
depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed
with rain water beside the
white chickens. William Carlos Williams
Futurism exhorted writers and artists to
celebrate the new and to abandon the attitudes
and values of the past. Dadaism dada,
babytalk in French for hobbyhorse nonsense
collages of street debris as art and poems
composed of random syllables or words pulled out
of a paper bag, or of several unrelated passages
read aloud simultaneously. A number of Paris
Dadaists became Surrealists. Cubism presents
an experience as fragmented elements rearranged
to form a new synthesis, or whole.
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Modern Fiction

• The second and third decades of the 20th century,
  the heyday of what is sometimes called High
  Modernism, was a watershed for the development of
  European and American fiction, and we still live
  with its consequences.
• Writers, impelled by a sense of mounting
  historical crisis as well as by a desire to
  renovate and transform the inherited conventions
  of the 19th-century novel, undertook a bold
  renegotiation of the formal and thematic terms of
  the novel

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Modern Fiction

• No longer certain that art had a didactic
  function, writers questioned the moral and
  artistic purposes of literature. Culture no
  longer provided a set of shared beliefs but
  instead was fragmented and individualized.
  Language itself was seen as an unreliable medium,
  with an uncertain relationship to reality the
  very notion of clear, straightforward
  communication between people was brought into
  question.

Thats not it at all, thats not what I meant at
all.
T.S. Eliot
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Influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud, authors
made the interior their stage. Unlike the
realists, who had created broad social portraits,
the modernists emphasized the individual and the
subjectivity of perception. To this end,
modernist writers such as Eliot, Joyce, Woolf,
Yeats, Pound, Stein, and Lawrence experimented
with new uses of language and imagery and new
narrative structures. Modernist novelists
employed stream-of-consciousness narration,
multiple points of view, and fragmented,
nonsequential plots.
The first and last line of James Joyces
Finnegans Wake
riverrun, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of
shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius
vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and
Environs.
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Some final thoughts
Modernism saw the rise of the individual genius,
one who repudiated the mass culture of the cinema
and the rise of consumerism. These brilliant
writers, however, alienated from the world,
further estranged themselves from understanding,
rapt in aesthete elitism with little social
concern, with little sense or care except for the
reception of the educated audience. Bohemian,
shut off from the bourgeoisie and the masses,
Eliots self-professed obscurantism was indeed
to be perhaps the last gasp of so-called high
art before the blurring of distinctions in
post-modernism