Modernism and Teaching Modern Literature
Abstract: Modernism provides many of the major works that continue to define what
literature and painting are. Understanding Modernism (between about 1870 and 1939) is
essential for understanding modern literature. Can only gifted students understand
Modernism? Can only gifted students understand modern literature and art? The focus
here is on classics of prose, poetry and painting that are interesting in themselves and
help to make sense of the period of cultural crisis that defined abstraction,
fragmentation, pastiche, tricks of perspective and surrealism in modern literature and
painting: T.S. Eliot The Waste Land (Part 1), W. B. Yeats ‘The Second Coming’,
Gertrude Stein Picasso (selections) and paintings by Picasso and Dalí. Discussion
includes the teaching advantages of the new iPad The Waste Land application and a
range of easier novels.
Modernism (about 1880 – 1939) is a cultural period defined in response to political
revolution, international war, and world wide revolutionary changes in understanding
the cosmos and human identity which encouraged a way of thinking in terms of a world,
global perspective and a sense that the old world order was at an end: political events
such as the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the extension of the right to
vote to women (in Australia 1894-1908, in England 1918-21); scientific developments
such as Einstein’s theory of relativity (1905-1917); industrial developments such as
Ford’s mass production of the motor car (1913) and the rise of twentieth century global
consumerism; medical developments such as Freud’s theory of psychosexual identity
and psychoanalysis in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899); philosophical
developments such as Nietzsche’s post-Christian theory of heroic existential survival in
an abyss of modern disillusion and lack of traditional sanctions for values, as in Beyond
Good and Evil (1886).
The culture of Modernism is concerned with radical transformations of traditional high
culture; the ‘new’ and the ‘modern’; liberation and optimism versus a sense of ending
and catastrophe (with a focus on iconic events such as the sinking of the Titanic (1912),
and the Battle of the Somme (1916) with more than a million casualties; focus on the
city as a centre of utopian wealth and the abject uniformity and poverty of the masses
(Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Chaplin’s City Lights (1931)); celebration of class
identity versus alienation and distrust of conformity; exploration of individual
subjective identity and liberation from traditional rules, including sexual codes; tradition
versus prophecies of the end of tradition and civilization – prophecies about the end of
civilization are a major theme; celebration of high art and the artist versus mass culture,
although with a direction towards mass culture becoming intellectual and aesthetic - as
with Chaplin, the motor car, clothing fashion, illustrated magazines and advertising art,
mass produced household goods and the modern home.
Modernism and the Present: Modernism was interrupted, transformed and to some
extent erased by the Second World War. The present period is closely linked with it and
as well involves discontinuities and blanks in understanding. It makes sense to study
Modernism in order to understand the present, but there are challenges. Modernism is
one of the most popular and familiar forms of art in the contemporary world (think of
the popularity of Picasso) but it can seem strange, alien and difficult.
© Axel Kruse, English Dept, University of Sydney
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Modernism and Teaching Modern Literature
Some Implications for Teaching: The emphasis on high culture combined with the
aesthetic and intellectual direction of mass culture involves challenges. (i) one reaction
was to continue traditional forms; another was to destroy traditional art; another was to
make art at once simple, strange and complex in a way that reflected their understanding
of the critical condition of modernity. Modernism is often difficult and weird. It
demands direct confrontation, including questions about the general nature of high art,
and why this kind of high art is so complicated and who it is for. (ii) Study needs to
include some of the more accessible range of the period – for example, a film such as
City Lights; magazines and fashion such as the Saturday Evening Post and Norman
Rockwell in 1925 (available online); and a popular novel or short story – Fitzgerald,
Maugham?
Modernism, Literature and Painting: A direction to formal aestheticism; abstraction,
fragmentation, tricks of perspective and pastiche as with Picasso and cubism; cubism in
painting parallels stream of consciousness, fragmentation, pastiche and dream-like
tricks of perspective in literature as in The Waste Land; literature and the arts involve a
strong focus, even an obsession, about civilization, the period and the world view;
literature and painting involve mimesis of the perceived condition of the world as well
as comment. In particular, the arts involve a tension between tradition and disruption in
representation of the world, personal identity, and the sense of history and civilization;
puzzles and dark prophecies are major directions in style and meaning.
W. B. Yeats ‘The Second Coming’ (1921): The poetic voice and style are relatively
direct and traditional, although in the manner of a prophetic puzzle. The first line sets a
puzzle about what a ‘gyre’ is (it’s a conical shape), then the meaning is prophetic but
more or less straightforward as a vision of the modern world as a state of catastrophic
anarchy and loss of traditional values. In the second stanza the puzzle is that the
Christian Second Coming of Christ at the end of the world is rewritten as an account of
the present as the end of the old and the dawn of a new civilization where the new god
is a ‘rough beast’ like a sphinx. Yeats said he associated the sphinx-like beast here with
a new age of ‘laughing, ecstatic destruction’. There is also the minor puzzle of the
Spiritus Mundi, as Yeats understood it, ‘the Great Memory’ of the world. The great
strength of the poem is the reworking of a traditional poetic voice for Modernist
prophecy and dreamlike images that Yeats derived from a personal code of magical
vision (Freud, Jung, magic and late Romantic poetic vision combined). Yeats’s magical
system is worth checking out to see the extremism of the possibilities for belief in the
period.
T. S. Eliot The Waste Land Part 1 (1922): In contrast to Yeats’s traditional poetic
speech, the poetic voice here becomes a disjointed, fragmentary stream of
consciousness performance which is a number of voices of characters (personas) who
are representatives of the modern world. In the first verse paragraph: l.1-18 what seems
at first to be the voice of the poet turns into a German speaking, European woman
aristocrat talking about her past; l.19-42 shifts between four or so voices – a voice like a
prophet of the horror of modernity, a quotation from Wagner in German, then a modern
hyacinth girl (is she a flapper?), then perhaps her partner who has had a vision, then a
return to Wagner. It is a dreamlike puzzle and operatic. The second verse paragraph is
about Madame Sosostris a clairvoyant telling fortunes with a Tarot pack of cards – easy
to understand and mainly sinister and satiric. The third verse paragraph seems to be the
voice of the poet presenting a visionary, nightmarish account of the streets of London,
© Axel Kruse, English Dept, University of Sydney
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Modernism and Teaching Modern Literature
as like a modern hell, a place of Gothic and Jacobean horror, with echoes of ancient
Greece and Baudelaire that make modern London a site of western civilization in a state
of urban confusion, decadence and ruin.
For teaching: Read The Waste Land aloud first without explanation, and with different
readers for each voice, act the voices, comment on how it is cinematic. Then check the
reading experience without explanation and without footnotes or explanations of the
literary references. For Eliot reading the poem see YouTube (he sounds very British for
an American, and sombre in a way that does not register the mix of humour and horror
in the poem). While the design is a fragmentary puzzle the meaning is more or less
clear without close study and without the footnotes? The Waste Land is not difficult to
understand as a prophetic account of the modern world as a sinister wasteland like a
nightmare, a place of strange horror, a place where people live in a state of confusion
and where the history of western civilization seems to be heading towards a barbaric
end? What do the footnotes add? The poetry is accessible, part of the radical awareness
of Modernism of being both in the modern world of mass culture (compare it to City
Lights) and elitist in its learning and style. For close study see the iPad The Waste Land
application.
Picasso and Cubism 1906 – 1910: Show Picasso images from the cubist period
including Picasso’s Portrait of Miss Gertrude Stein (1905 - 6) (online at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Portrait of Henry Kahnweiler (1910) (also online).
Gertrude Stein If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso (1923). Recorded by
Stein in New York, Winter 1934-35. For the recording see Pennsound Gertrude Stein:
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Stein.html
Explore the similarities between the thoughtful abstraction of Picasso’s cubist portraits
and Steins abstract ‘portrait’ of Picasso – extreme abstraction to the point of nonsense
but with aesthetic design, wit and a sense of history; in one sense the end of the old
world of civilization and art has happened with Picasso and Stein – the recording echoes
Yeats’s theme of ‘laughing, ecstatic destruction’, and it sets a direction to later rap?
Modernism at its most extreme is not so foreign in the contemporary world almost a
hundred years later?
Gertrude Stein Picasso (selections) (1938). This is less abstract but it is an exploration
of writing in the manner of cubist abstraction in order to define Picasso and the period
of Modernism. Read page 1: the characteristic Modernist concern with art as a
definition of the times, with a bias to literary abstraction that is at once a kind of art for
the sake of art, apparently artless and even child-like and primitive, wisdom that is
contrary to ordinary ways of making sense of history and art, and a sophisticated game
with contradiction and the absurd, and a kind of literary cubism. Read page 1 and note
‘everything changes’ then pages 7-8 on Stein’s portrait by Picasso. Read pages 9-12 and
the claim that nothing changes except the things seen, and consider how this compares
to other views of history. Read pages 29- 33 for a further post cubist version of the
history of the world in the time of Modernism: ‘really nothing changes but at the same
time everything changes’ (32). Modernism’s prophetic voice about momentous change
continues here to a point immediately before the Second World War.
© Axel Kruse, English Dept, University of Sydney
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