MODERNISM AND MODERN AGE

1
MODERNISM AND MODERN AGE

• (1900-1930)

2
What is modernism?

• It is a global trend in culture
• It affected the intellectual elité (the only ones
  having the possibility to appreciate it at that
  very time)
• It rejected the paradigms of the Victorian Age
• It searches a new place for the man in the world

3
Why Modernism?

• At the end of the nineteenth century there was a
  global crisis of values disruption of positivism
• Neither God, nor the individual consciousness
  could still give meaning to man
• Traditional values were crumbled out by the
  revolutionary discoveries of the period Romantic
  codes were no longer valid, they were too naives

4
Frame of Modernism

• Modernism was the response of culture to
• Darwin theory of evolution
• the Industrial revolution and mass society
• Einsteins relativity
• Bergsons theories on time
• Freud and Jungs psychological studies
• Nietzsche God is dead

5
How the scenery changed
Man has no longer a divine reason to inhabit the
world
Shift of the point of view in physics and in
whole culture man at the centre in a universe
without a centre
Man is alone in a mechanical world
Crisis in liberal democracy, capitalism, and
sciences after First World War

• No valid points of references and philosophical
  systems

Human reason Unconsciousness, stream of
consciousness and racial memory
What remains to man?
6
Everyone gives its response

• No universal valid theories only innovation,
  individual search for order and impersonality
  were common features
• According to Aestheticism art was the response
  for art
• Symbolists and Imagist adopted a dry and hard
  style to adhere to reality, and symbols become
  the way to summarize meaning

7
Features

• Order
• Importance of form, content is useless
• Retaken of Enlightenment rationality against
  Romantic sentimentalism
• Elite referred difficult style
• Eclipse of narrator and readers importance in
  giving meaning
• Myth and anthropology The Golden Bough, From
  Ritual to Romance
• Neo dramatic novel

8
Main figures in Modernism

• T.S. Eliot poetry, Objective correlative and
  quotations in the global framework of myth and
  anthropology (The Wasteland)
• E. Pound (also Imagist)
• W.B. Yeats
• J. Joyce fiction, epiphany, interior monologue
  in the global framework of myth and anthropology
  (Ulysses)
• V. Woolf novel, moment of being, form (Mrs
  Dalloway, To the Lighthouse)