The Modern World

1
The Modern World

• 1900 to the Present

2
Change on the Horizon

• If we had lived in the era of Victoria or during
  the nine-year reign of her son Edward VII, we
  would have believed that Britains moral and
  economic dominance of the world would continue
  forever.
• But even during this long, fairly stable period
  in Great Britain, profound changes were taking
  place.
• Several major coloniesAustralia, South Africa,
  and New Zealandgained their independence in the
  first decade of the twentieth century.
• Also, Britain was experiencing social reforms
  that were to have far-reaching consequences.
• The rise in literacy, the growing power and
  influence of the Labour party, the widespread
  interest in socialist ideologyall would
  dramatically change Great Britain and the world.

3
Darwin, Marx, and FreudUndermining Victorian
Ideas

• Many of the social and intellectual changes that
  were taking place in the early years of the
  twentieth century had their roots in the
  nineteenth-century work of three men Charles
  Darwin (18091882), Karl Marx (18181883), and
  Sigmund Freud (18561939).
• Darwins Origin of Species (1895) sets forth a
  theory of the evolution of animal species based
  on natural selection.
• The theory of natural selection claims that those
  species that successfully adapt to their
  environments survive and reproduce those that do
  not become extinct.
• This theory, which seems to contradict the
  Biblical account of the special creation of each
  species exactly as the species exists on earth
  today, fueled a debate that continues to the
  present.
• So-called social Darwinism, the notion that in
  human society, as in nature, only the fittest
  should survive and flourish, was a nasty
  extension of Darwins scientific theories.
• Social Darwinism was used to justify rigid class
  distinctions, indifference to social problems,
  and even doctrines of racial superiority.

4
Darwin, Marx, and FreudUndermining Victorian
Ideas

• Karl Marx was a German philosopher and political
  economist who spent the last thirty years of his
  life in London.
• In Das Kapital (1867), he advocates doing away
  with private property and argues that workers
  should own the means of production.
• His theories revolutionized political thought and
  eventually led to sweeping changes in many
  governments and economic systems, including those
  of Britain.
• The psychological theories of Sigmund Freud, a
  doctor in Vienna, were equally revolutionary and
  far-reaching in their effects.
• In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and later
  works, Freud finds the motives for human behavior
  in the irrational and sexually driven realm of
  the unconscious, which is revealed mainly in our
  dreams.
• Conservative Victorians were outraged by Freuds
  claims that sexual drives motivated their
  behavior, but many artists and writers were
  strongly influenced by the notion of the
  unconscious and its mysterious, illogical
  workings.

5
Darwin, Marx, and FreudUndermining Victorian
Ideas

• The work of these three thinkers helped to
  undermine the political, religious, and
  psychological assumptions that had served as the
  foundation of British society and the British
  Empire for generations.
• With the calamity of the Great War and the events
  that followed, that foundation was largely swept
  away.

6
The Great War A War to End All Wars

• The truly great disaster of the first half of the
  century was the breakdown of the European balance
  of power.
• In 1914, Britain, France, and Russia, bound by
  treaties, became locked in opposition to Germany
  and Austria-Hungary.
• When the German army invaded Belgium, all of
  Europe was plunged into World War I the Great
  War.
• The Victorian writer Rudyard Kipling celebrated
  the British character as essentially patriotic,
  and he was right.
• When Britain declared war on Germany in 1914,
  young Britons crowded to the recruiting stations
  to enlist.

7
The Great War A War to End All Wars

• Six months later hordes of them lay slaughtered
  in the miserable, rain soaked, vermin-infested
  trenches of France.
• Over the course of four years, an entire
  generation of young Englishmen was fed to the
  insatiable furnace of the war.
• With the armistice in 1918, a new cynicism arose.
  
• Britons gradually recognized that the results of
  the war were negative a weakened economy, a
  shaky colonial empire, and a loss of life equal
  to that caused by the plagues of the past.
• Out of disillusionment came a pessimism about the
  state and the individuals relation to society.
• A new realism swept in, a response to the
  romantic nonsense of the past and, in
  particular, to the propaganda machine that had
  led a whole people into war.

8
Experimentation in the ArtsShocking in Form
and Content

• The decade before the war had seen the beginnings
  of a transformation in all the arts, especially
  on the Continent.
• In Paris, Henri Matisse and other new painters
  exhibiting in 1905 were called les fauves (the
  wild beasts) by critics for their bold, new use
  of line and color.
• In 1913, Igor Stravinskys revolutionary music
  for the ballet The Rite of Spring, which was
  marked by strong, primitive (sexual) rhythms
  and dissonant harmonies, caused a riot at its
  première in Paris.
• The year after that, James Joyces Dubliners,
  containing stories written up to a decade before,
  finally found an Irish publisher brave enough to
  publish it.
• All these works challenged traditional values of
  beauty and order and opened new avenues of
  expression.

9
A Revolution in Literature

• The novelists of the twentieth century moved from
  a concern with society to a focus on
  introspection.
• Some novelists, including Virginia Woolf, even
  rejected traditional chronological order in
  storytelling.
• Experimenting with the novels structure, with a
  shifting point of view, and with a style called
  stream of consciousness, Woolf probed the human
  mind with the delicacy of a surgeon, examining
  all its shifts of moods and impressions.
• In his novels, D. H. Lawrence was expressing his
  own strong resentment against British society.
• Lawrence shocked the British with his
  glorification of the senses and his heated
  descriptions of relations between the sexes.
• His novel Lady Chatterleys Lover (1928), about
  an affair between an upper-class woman and her
  gamekeeper, is explicitly sexual, and its full
  publication was banned in England until 1960.

10
A Revolution in Literature

• Most influential of all was the Irish poet and
  novelist James Joyce, whose controversial novel
  Ulysses appeared in 1922.
• In this retelling of the story of Odysseuss
  wanderings, Joyce drew on myth and symbol, on
  Freudian explorations of sexuality, and on new
  conceptions of time and the workings of human
  consciousness.
• Literary critics called this experimentation with
  form and content modernism.

11
The Rise of DictatorshipsOrigins of World War
II

• The Great War, which had been called a war to end
  all wars, ironically led to another war.
• A worldwide economic depression that began in
  1929 gave rise to dictators in Germany, Italy,
  and Russia.
• In general, these dictatorial governments are
  called totalitarian, meaning that only one
  political party has control of the state and all
  opposition is banned.
• In Italy and Germany the form of totalitarianism
  that developed was fascism, a type of government
  that is rigidly nationalistic and that relies on
  the rule of a single dictator whose power is
  absolute and backed by force.
• Benito Mussolini, a fascist who came to power in
  Italy in 1922, held control through brutality and
  manipulation.
• Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party capitalized on
  Germanys economic woes to convince many Germans
  that their problems were caused by Jews,
  Communists, and immigrants.

12
The Rise of DictatorshipsOrigins of World War
II

• Russias totalitarian government, based on the
  political theories of the economist Karl Marx,
  was Communist.
• Its founder, Vladimir Lenin, had sought in the
  1920s to create a society without a class system,
  one in which the state would distribute the
  countrys wealth equally among the people.
• In reality, the new government became as
  repressive as the rule of the czars had been.
• After Lenins death in 1924, Joseph Stalin took
  power.
• Under Stalins rule, as many as fifteen million
  people were exiled to the gulag, or system of
  forced-labor and detention camps.

13
The Rise of DictatorshipsOrigins of World War
II
Italian Power Benito Mussolini
German Power Adolf Hitler
Russian Power Joseph Stalin
Russian Power Vladimir Lenin
14
The Rise of DictatorshipsOrigins of World War II

• By 1939, the Nazis were sweeping through Europe.
• Hitlers plan for the systematic destruction of
  the Jews and other minorities resulted in the
  deaths of millions of innocent men, women, and
  childrenincluding the six million Jews who were
  killed in the Holocaust.
• In 1940, Germany defeated France and then
  prepared to invade Britain by launching
  devastating air attacks against London and other
  cities.
• Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared We
  shall go on to the end.
• The British did persevere, but only after the
  Soviet Union and the United States entered the
  war did Germanys defeat become inevitable.
• For Japan, which had allied itself with Germany
  and Italy, the war ended in the ultimate horror.
• On August 6, 1945, the entire city of Hiroshima,
  Japan, was wiped out by a single atomic bomb
  dropped from an American plane.
• Small wonder, then, that much of the literature
  following the Second World War was dark and
  pessimistic.

15
Britain After World War IIThe End of an Empire

• After the war ended in Europe, Winston Churchill
  and his Conservative party were defeated by the
  Labour party, and Britain was transformed into a
  welfare state.
• The government assumed responsibility for
  providing medical care and other basic benefits
  for its citizens.
• While recovering from the war and rebuilding its
  own economy, Great Britain could not hold on to
  its many colonies.
• Most of themincluding India, the jewel in the
  crown became independent nations. The British
  Empire was gone.

16
British Writing Today

• After the war a group of young novelists and
  playwrights emerged who became known as the Angry
  Young Men.
• These writers criticized the pretensions of
  intellectuals and the boring lives of the newly
  prosperous middle class.
• One of the major works of the period was Kingsley
  Amiss novel Lucky Jim (1953), a scathing satire
  of British university life.
• Much of the work written in England since World
  War II is considered postmodern and often deals,
  either directly or indirectly, with issues of
  womens rights, multiculturalism, the
  environment, and nuclear destruction.

17
The Growth of World LiteratureA Remarkable
Diversity

• Though our world isnt really a global village,
  innovations in technology and transportation have
  linked us in ways our ancestors couldnt have
  imagined.
• Ideas travel as fast as electronic channels can
  carry them, and one writer may influence another
  writer living continents away.
• When important British, Asian, African, Middle
  Eastern, European, or Latin American writers
  publish in their native languages, translations
  are soon available for eager readers in other
  parts of the world.

18
Seeking Cultural IdentityPostcolonial
Literature

• Current world literature, more so than British
  literature of the past, frequently focuses on
  political and social problems.
• Literally hundreds of writers from former British
  colonies explore issues of personal identity and
  the effects of cultural domination and racism.
• Literary critics call their work postcolonial
  literature.
• These writers have seen their local cultures
  uprooted by colonialism or foreign influence, and
  they have had to ask themselves whether they are
  to celebrate their native traditions, imitate
  foreign models, or create new modes of
  expression.
• Further complicating their situation is the
  spread of English around the world, resulting in
  a kind of linguistic dominance.
• To reach the largest literate audience, some
  writers from other countries often feel obligated
  to write in English even if English fails to
  convey adequately the subtleties of their native
  language.

19
African Expressions

• In Africa one response to colonial oppression of
  native cultures was a literary movement called
  negritude, which encouraged black writers to
  turn to pre-colonial African culture, art, and
  history as a source of inspiration and pride.
• Although some writers believed that negritude was
  a necessary response to years of imperialism,
  others, like the Nigerians Chinua Achebe and Wole
  Soyinka, felt that negritude tended to idealize
  or cloak Africas pre-colonial past in nostalgia
  or innocence.
• They felt that African literature must instead
  examine that past more critically and
  realistically.
• Soyinka quipped that A tiger does not shout its
  tigritude.
• Though both Achebe and Soyinka write in English,
  Achebe has succeeded in grafting the oral
  tradition of Igbo storytellers and their idiom
  onto his novels.

20
African Expressions

• Liberal white writers in Africa face another kind
  of identity crisis as they confront racism and
  social inequality.
• The South African writer Nadine Gordimer says,
  One has an immense sense of shame.
• Several of Gordimers novels are such powerful
  indictments of racist government policies that
  they have been banned in her country.

21
Two Worlds or Ten Literature in India

• In India, despite nearly one hundred years of
  British rule, English is only one of a diverse
  number of languages used by Indian writers.
• Two of the best known and established Indian
  novelists writing in English are R. K. Narayan
  and Anita Desai.
• Narayan is perhaps Indias greatest modern
  fiction writer.
• His characters often reveal a sort of pluck or
  stubbornness that is peculiar to India.
• Desai, who excels at creating characters who must
  contend with an array of bewildering social
  forces vying for their attention, speaks of the
  chaotic patchwork that is India as two worlds or
  ten.

22
Other Postcolonial Explorations

• The Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul, from
  Britains former West Indies colony of Trinidad,
  takes an unrelentingly satirical, pessimistic
  view of postcolonial nations.
• One of his characters sums up the raw struggle
  for existence in a developing nation We lack
  order. Above all we lack power, and we do not
  understand that we lack power.
• The Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, who writes
  in Arabic, helped to establish and perfect the
  Arabic novel.
• In such works as the Cairo Trilogy, this Nobel
  Prizewinning writer has used the novel form to
  depict the struggles of Egyptians expelling
  foreign invaders he also uses his writing to
  criticize the social conditions, suffering, and
  spiritual emptiness in modern Egypt during and
  after British control.

23
Latin America and Magic Realism

• In Latin America, writers have responded to their
  changing societies in different ways.
• The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was greatly
  influenced by the modernist movement, but his
  epic work, The Heights of Machu Picchu (Alturas
  de Machu Picchu), published in 1944, reconciles
  the poet to his countrys ancient Indian
  heritage.
• The Mexican poet Octavio Paz writes about
  cultural questions involving the effect of
  history on the present in his country.
• The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges writes
  fiction that has stories within stories,
  character doubles, labyrinths, mysterious
  libraries filled with unreadable books, and
  parallel worlds that confuse and fascinate his
  narratorsall in the service of exploring the
  nature of time and reality.
• Borgess works, which he called fantástico,
  foreshadowed magic realism, a literary style that
  combines realistic details with incredible events
  recounted in a matter-of-fact tone.
• Magic realists hope to startle readers and create
  doubt in their perceptions of reality.

24
Womens Voices A Second Sex No More

• Political concerns in postwar world literature
  are not the sole domain of nations and cultures
  one of the strongest voices to emerge in the
  postwar world is that of women.
• Feminist writers dramatize womens lack of power
  in a world controlled by men.
• In the influential feminist work The Second Sex
  (1949), French author Simone de Beauvoir analyzes
  womens secondary status in society and denounces
  the male middle class for perceiving women as
  objects.
• The Nigerian feminist Buchi Emecheta has
  influenced numerous women writers from various
  African countries and uses motherhood (but not
  marriage) as a symbol for artistic creativity in
  her fiction.
• In The Handmaids Tale (1985), the Canadian
  novelist Margaret Atwood serves up a grim
  cautionary tale, warning readers of a possible
  future by creating a world in which a puritanical
  dictatorship seeks to repress and control women.

25
Never Forget Responses to Warand Government
Repression

• Since the beginning of the twentieth century,
  world history has been marked by periods of
  widespread warfare interspersed with periods of
  uneasy peace.
• Not surprisingly, then, much of modern world
  literature has been a direct and blistering
  response to war.
• In All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), German
  author Erich Maria Remarque described the
  physical psychological horrors of World War I.
• This harrowing war novel paled beside the
  personal trauma of World War IIs Holocaust as
  described by the Italian writer Primo Levi,
  interned at Auschwitz, and the Romanian writer
  Elie Wiesel, who has spent a lifetime serving as
  a witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust.
• Few modern Japanese writers could avoid
  addressing World War II.
• Writers in the former Soviet Unionsuch as
  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Anna Akhmatova made
  an art out of defying government attempts to
  regulate their writing.
• Even though Communist Chinas government set out
  to reeducate its stubborn writers, some, like
  Ha Jin who left China after seeing the Tiananmen
  Square massacre in 1989explore the troubling,
  unequal relationships between the state and the
  individual.

26
A Marvelous CapacityThe Promise of World
Literature

• In literature as in history, many different
  stories can proceed at the same time.
• Such a variety of writing can only broaden and
  deepen our understanding of the human condition.
• As Solzhenitsyn commented in his Nobel Prize
  acceptance speech, The only substitute for what
  we ourselves have not experienced is art and
  literature.
• They have the marvelous capacity of transmitting
  from one nation to anotherdespite differences in
  language, customs, and social structurepractical
  experience, the harsh national experience of many
  decades never tasted by the other nation.