1) THE MODERNIST REVOLUTION: MODERNISM: a
cultural, artistic movement which developed in the first
decades of the 20th century./ THE LOSS OF OLD
CERTAINTIES: cultural crisis, religion no longer
offered security. The war left a disillusioned mood.
After the war, some soldiers searched frantically for
pleasure, others were haunted by a sense of guilt for
the horrors of war. There was a generation gap
between younger and older people./ NEW
PERSPECTIVE on man and the universe:
PSYCHOANALISIS (Freud, the unconscious);
THEORY OF RELATIVITY (Einstein changed the
concept of time and space)/ MAIN FEATURES OF
MODERNISM: rejected Naturalism and Aestheticism
in favour of introspection: intentional distortion of
shapes, breaking down of limitations in space and
time, reality perceived as temporary, reconsideration
of the past remoulded in an original way, the
importance of both conscious and unconscious
2) MODERN POETRY: Poetry before WWI (avant
garde groups, Georgian poets); poetry during WWI
(War Poets. who dealt with the horrors of modern
warfare, using violent language and unconventional
style)/ MODERN POETRY drew inspiration from
Imagism and Symbolism (Imagism: clear and precise
images, about any subject, short, freed from metrical
regularity or moral comment, Precision and
concreteness. Symbolism: born in France with
Baudelaire. Importance to dreams, visions,
associations, used evocative language, employed free
verse to exploit the musicality of words)./ YEATS,
T.S:ELIOT.
3) THE MODERN NOVEL: From the Victorian novel to
1901-1929: LITERATURE
4) THE INTERIOR MONOLOGUE
(different from the STREAM OF
CONSCIOUSNESS which is the
psychic phenomenon itself) is the
verbal expression of this
phenomenon with frequent lack of
chronological and formal logical
order, where the action takes place
within the character's mind/ 2 kinds
of I.M.: INDIRECT (Woolf) and
DIRECT (Joyce)
the modern novel (new role of the novelists: to mediate
between the unquestioned values of the past and the
confused present/ A new concept of time (Bergson,
James, Freud)/ The Modern novel: the novelists
rejected a chronological sequence of events so time
was subjective and internal; rejected the omniscient
narrator; flow of thoughts, stream of consciousness
technique)/ Two groups of novelists:
PSYCHOLOGICAL (Conrad, Lawrence, Forster,
focused on the character's mind and human
relationships, with innovative chronology and
structure); MODERNIST (Woolf, Joyce: subjective
narrative techniques to explore the character's
mindsand give voice to their thoughts)