What is modern fiction?
From what you’ve read so far this year, what
is your subjective definition of ‘modern
fiction’ at this point? List some characteristics
of modern fiction.
Modernism
How is this painting modern? JACKSON POLLOCK – Lavender Mist (1950)
Modernism . . .
is a comprehensive but
vague term for a
movement which began
to get under way in the
closing years of the
19th c. One question is,
Why?
What events might
inspire an artist to
create such a painting
as this one?
PIET MONDRIAN – Composition 10
(1939-1942)
Modernism pertains to all the creative arts, especially poetry, fiction,
drama, painting, music and architecture. What might this artist have
been trying to communicate?
Persistence of Memory – Salvador Dali
Modernism was largely brought about
by the convergence of several
factors:
• The devastation caused in Europe after
World War I, when the most
enlightened and advanced nations on
the earth came together to kill each
other in staggering numbers.
• The wholesale urbanization and
industrialization that took place during
the nineteenth century.
• The fragmentation of belief in the
unified individual that occurred as the
result of the work of several scientists
and philosophers.
Karl Marx
 Asserted that human
moral, cultural, and
religious values were
caused not by any
inherent sense of
good or evil but by
the requirements of a
particular system.
Charles Darwin

Discovered that the
evolution of species
was the result of
“natural selection”
and competition
rather than through
any special act of
purposeful creation.
Sigmund Freud
 Asserted that most
elements of the
human personality
were the result of
various psychosexual traumas
experienced in
infancy and early
childhood and stored
in the subconscious
mind.
Albert Einstein
 Discovered that even
most of the physical
properties in the
universe (time, space,
size, weight, density,
gravity, etc.) were
relative.
Philosophical Tenets of
Modernism
• Challenged tradition
and the status quo
• Fascination with the
new, the modern, the
mechanical
• Focus on form and
stylistic
experimentation
• Exploration of
perception and
representation
• Critique of realism in
how we represent the
world
Aesthetic Tenets of Modernism
• Abandonment of traditional “rules” for
creating art, music, and literature
• Fragmented representations of time, meaning,
and human nature
• Sense of loss, alienation, abandonment, and
disillusionment
• Attempts to find new kinds of “truth” in the
absence of any traditional way to ground
meaning or significance
Which tenets might this artist be addressing?
The Treachery of Images (1929)
–RENÉ MAGRITTE
How do the following paintings
represent some of these tenets?
Paul Klee
MARC CHAGALL
I and the Village (1911)
VINCENT VAN GOGH – The Starry Night (1889)
PABLO PICASSO
MARCEL DUCHAMP
Nude Descending a
Staircase, No. 2 (1912)
Self-Portrait with
Palette(1906)
EDVARD MUNCH – Evening on Karl Johan (1892)
The Lovers II – René Magritte
To reiterate, the avant-garde ("first wave")
movements that emerged in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
(such as symbolism, cubism, futurism, Dada,
and surrealism) accelerated the break with
the past. Following the horrors of the Great
War, modernism emerged as a new aesthetic
philosophy.
Some definitions that might be helpful
include . . .
Symbolism – Style of painting or writing that makes use of
colors and sounds as symbols.
Gustav Klimt The Kiss
1907-1908
Cubism . . .
is a style of painting, drawing, and
sculpture in which objects are
represented by cubes and other
geometric forms rather than by
realistic details.
Pablo Picasso
The Guitar Player 1910
Futurism . . .
is a modern movement in art and
writing characterized by
attempts to express the
sensation of movement and
growth in objects, not their
appearance at some particular
moment.
Kazimir Malevich
Morning in the Village After Snowstorm
1912
Dadaism . . .
is a movement in modern art
rejecting and ridiculing all
accepted standards and
conventions. Dada is a child’s
word for a hobbyhorse.
Marcel Duchamp
Mona Lisa 1919
Surrealism . . .
is a modern movement in art and
painting that attempts to show
what takes place in dreams and
in the subconscious mind.
Surrealism is characterized by
unusual and unexpected
arrangements and distortions
of images.
Salvador Dali
Soft Construction with Boiled Beans
(Premonition of Civil War) 1936
How does the following poem indicate a
modern sensibility?
cf1.netmegs.com/memestream/red%20wheelbarrow.jpg
The Red Wheelbarrow
Futurism – exhorted writers and artists to celebrate “the new”
so much
depends
and to abandon
the attitudes
and values of the past.
upon
Dadaism – [dada, babytalk in French for hobbyhorse] “nonsense”
red wheel
–– collages of astreet
debris as art and poems composed of
barrow
random syllables
or words pulled out of a paper bag, or of
several unrelated passages read aloud simultaneously. A number
glazed
with rain
of Paris Dadaists
became
Surrealists.
water
Cubism – presents an experience as fragmented elements
white
rearranged tobeside
form athe
new
synthesis, or whole.
chickens.
–William Carlos Williams
Modern Fiction
No longer certain that art had a didactic function,
writers questioned the moral and artistic purposes of
literature. Culture no longer provided a set of shared
beliefs but instead was fragmented and
individualized. Language itself was seen as an
unreliable medium, with an uncertain relationship to
reality; the very notion of clear, straightforward
communication between people was brought into
question.
“That’s not it at all, that’s not what I meant at all.”
–T.S. Eliot
Influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud, authors made the
interior their stage. Unlike the realists, who had created broad
social portraits, the modernists emphasized the individual and
the subjectivity of perception. To this end, modernist writers,
such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound,
Gertrude Stein, and D.H. Lawrence, experimented with new
uses of language and imagery and new narrative structures.
Modernist novelists employed stream-of-consciousness
narration, multiple points of view, and fragmented,
nonsequential plots.
The first and last line of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake:
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a
commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
Some characteristics to look for in
Modernist works include:
• Alienation from society and loneliness
• Procrastination/an inability to act
• Agonized recollection of the past/constant
flashbacks to the past
• Fear of death and the appearance of death
• Inability to feel or express love
• World as a wasteland/poor environmental
portrayal
• Man creating his own myths within his mind to
fall back upon
Major themes emerging in Faulkner,
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and others of the
period include:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Violence and alienation
Historical discontinuity
Decadence and decay
Loss and decay
Rejection of history
Race relations
Unavoidable change
Sense of place, local color
In the final analysis . . .
Modernism saw the rise of the individual genius, one who
repudiated the mass culture of the cinema and the rise of
consumerism.
These brilliant writers, however, alienated from the world,
further estranged themselves from understanding, with
little social concern, with little sense or care except for the
reception of the educated audience.
This stance left the door open for the post-modern artist,
one who is often left with only two responses to the angst
of modernism: parody and amused, ironic detachment.
Post-Modernism = Whatever
Jeff Koons
Michael Jackson and Bubbles
1988
42 x 70 1/2 X 32 1/2