Session Five: Modernism

• Modernism
– Sculpture
– Painting
– Music
– Architecture
– Literature

W.B. Yeats, ”The Second Coming”
(1920)
• Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
• When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

•
W.B. Yeats, ”The Second Coming”
(1920)
• Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
• Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
• Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming!
• The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

• William Wordsworth
• Thomas Hardy
• W.B. Yeats

• Apocalypse now!
• After 2000 years, civilization is crumbling and a different cycle of history is at hand

• Radical change
• Discontinuity
• Rupture
• break
• Development
• Continuity
• Bridge
• line

Golden Bird, 1919/1920,
Constantin Brancusi

Red Stone Dancer, 1913-14,
Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri.

Wyndham Lewis,
Composition 1913

Picasso, Seated Woman with Wrist
Watch , 1932

Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. 1907

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Bower
Meadow.

Igor Stravinsky, Le Sacre du
Printemps
• Rhythm: time signatures

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, The Farnsworth House
(1946 to 1950)
• Functionality: glass, concrete, and steel

Victorian mansion, San Francisco
(1850-1915)

• T.S. Eliot, ”Tradition and the Individual
Talent”
• New ideas of poets, poetry, and the past

• ”The progress of an artist is a continnual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (2322)
• ”Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” (2324)

• I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is carried on; but the emotion, of whatever kind, and in whatever degree, from various causes, is qualified by various pleasures, so that in describing any passions whatsoever, which are voluntarily described, the mind will, upon the whole, be in a state of enjoyment. If Nature be thus cautious to preserve in a state of enjoyment a being so employed, the Poet ought to profit by the lesson held forth to him, and ought especially to take care, that, whatever passions he communicates to his Reader, those passions, if his Reader’s mind be sound and vigorous, should always be accompanied with an overbalance of pleasure.

Modernist Narrative: Virginia Woolf,
”The Mark on the Wall”
• What happens? Who, what, where, when?
• What happens to narrative? Compare to premodernist examples of narrative.
– Story – plot
– Character – characterization
– Imagery