1915 - 1946
Modernism
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As a term, Modernism refers to an experimental style of visual
arts, literature, and music that arose after the first World War.
Modernist works were avant garde, or against the norms of
the time in their form and content.
Generally, the content of Modernist works represents
disillusionment and fragmentation brought about by the loss of
optimism in humanity.
Between World Wars: Europe
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Many historians have
described the period
between the two World Wars
as a “traumatic coming of
age.”
In England and Europe, the
first World War left death,
destruction, and
disillusionment in its wake.
The Spanish and Russian
Revolutions bring further
instability.
The new technology of
grenades, poison gas,
machine guns, and bombs
brings death to countless
civilians and soldiers.
Between Wars: America
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The balance of power shifts
from Europe to the United
States.
In a post-Industrial Revolution
era, America had moved
from an agrarian nation to
an urban and suburban
nation.
World War I pushes Europe
and America into economic
instability leading to the
Great Depression and
hardships (think Germany)
The lives of these Europeans
and Americans were
radically different from those
of their parents.
Social Norms/Cultural Sureties
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Women were given the
right to vote in 1920.
Hemlines raised; Margaret
Sanger introduces the
idea of birth control.
Young people begin to
rebel against the strict
moral codes of the
Victorian pre-war era.
Karl Marx’s ideas flourish;
the Bolshevik Revolution
overthrows Russia’s czarist
government and
establishes the Soviet
Union.
Literary Themes
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Breakdown of social norms and cultural sureties
Alienation of the individual
Disillusionment of individual with modern world
Valorization of the despairing individual in the
force of an unmanageable future
Product of the metropolis, of cities and
urbanscapes
Roots of Modernism
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Influenced by Walt
Whitman’s free verse
Prose poetry of British
writer Oscar Wilde
British writer Robert
Browning’s subversion of
the poetic self
Emily Dickinson’s
compression of language.
English Symbolist writers,
especially Arthur Symons
British War poets
expressions of
disillusionment and angst
over the Great War.
Urbanscapes
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Life in the city differs
from life on the farm;
writers began to
explore city life.
Conflicts begin to
center on society.
The individual begins
to feel isolated from
society.
The Harlem Renaissance
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Also known as the “New Negro Movement”
A flowering of artistic contributions from the world or
literature
Poets included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen,
Claude McKay
Writers included Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes
Were Watching God
Wide variety of styles and themes, reflecting the
modernist trend
Valorization of the Individual
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Characters are heroic in
the face of a future they
can’t control.
Demonstrates the
uncertainty felt by
individuals living in this
era.
Examples include Jay
Gatsby in The Great
Gatsby, Lt. Henry in A
Farewell to Arms
Theme of Alienation
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Sense of alienation in
literature:
– The character belongs
to a “lost generation”
(Gertrude Stein)
– The character suffers
from a “dissociation of
sensibility”—
separation of thought
from feeling (T. S. Eliot)
– The character has “a
Dream deferred”
(Langston Hughes).
Modernist Writers
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James Joyce, Ernest
Hemingway, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, William
Faulkner, John
Steinbeck, Gertrude
Stein, T. S. Eliot, E. E.
Cummings, Robert Frost
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Harlem Renaissance
writers such as Langston
Hughes, Zora Neale
Hurston, James Weldon
Johnson, Countee
Cullen, Jean Toomer,
Richard Wright
Modernist Fiction
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Embraced nontraditional
syntax and forms. The birth of
“stream of consciousness”
brings a characters
uninhibited feelings to the
reader
Challenged tradition
Writers wanted to move
beyond Realism to introduce
such concepts as disjointed
timelines.
An overarching themes of
Modernism were
“emancipation" and
“disillusionment”
Science Fiction and
Dystopias (anti-utopian literature)
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The genre of science fiction
takes off with works like H.G.
Well’s The War of the Worlds.
Aldous Huxley’s Brave
New World depicts a frightening
society where human beings
are genetically engineered to
perform socially.
In addition to George Orwell’s
Animal Farm and 1984,
Huxley’s work centers of the
fears of state control,
propaganda and
technological/industrial growth.
Modernist Poetry: Imagism
School of Imagism: Ezra
Pound leads the
movement - H.D. [Hilda
Doolittle], Amy Lowell,
William Carlos Williams
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Direct treatment of the
“thing,” whether
subjective or objective.
To use absolutely no word
that does not contribute
to the presentation.
As regarding rhythm: to
compose in sequence of
the musical phrase, not in
sequence of the
metronome.
Imagist Poetry
“IN A STATION OF THE METRO”
Ezra Pound
The apparition of these faces
in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Imagist Poetry
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This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
Modernist Poetry
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William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), an Irish
nationalist, pens these prophetic lines in his
poem “The Second Coming” (1921):
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 conviction, while the worst
are full of passionate intensity.
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T.S. Elliot (1888-1965) writes “The Wasteland”
and “The Hollow Men”, in which he describes
through dense imagery, disconnected narrative,
and cryptic allusions, the desolation of a modern
life devoid of meaning.
Modernist Poetry Samples
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
THE SECOND COMING
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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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?