Modernism

1
Modernism

• 1900-present

2

• Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) suggested that human
  beings are driven by unconscious, irrational
  desires.
• Conservative Victorians were outraged by his
  claims.

3

• Social Darwinism was used to justify unrestricted
  competition, rigid class distinctions,
  indifference to social problems, and beliefs of
  racial superiority.
• This led to Britains involvement in WWI and
  WWII.

4

• The poets and philosophers before me discovered
  the unconscious what I discovered was the
  scientific method by which the unconscious can be
  studied.
• Sigmund Freud
• Question
• Does imagination precede reason?

5

• The suffering from WWI and WWII caused
  disillusionment and pessimism about the state
  and the individuals relation to society.
• A new realism arose, in response to romantic
  nonsense of the past.

6

• Discuss
• Why are realists and romantics often add odds
  with one another?

7

• Writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce
  experimented with stream of consciousness style.
  
• Literary critics called this experimentation with
  form and content modernism.