Modernism
D. Bomberg
Polidori Chiara
cl. 5D
What is Modernism?
• It is a cultural trend.
• It is the movement in visual arts, music, literature
and drama which rejected the old Victorian
standars of how art should be made and
consumed.
Period of Time
It developed in the first three decades of the 20th
century.
Location
It developed in Europe, expecially in the Great
Britain.
Features
Poetry
Modernism
Drama
Fiction
Exponents
Poetry
Modernism
Drama
Fiction
The End
Modernism was very
important in Europe
because it “founded”
Postmodernist
movement, which
developed in the second
half of the 20th century.
Wyndham Lewis
Poetry
• T.S.Eliot
• E.Pound
• W.B.Yeats
Fiction
• James Joyce
• Virginia Woolf
Thomas Stearns Eliot
He was a poet, dramatist
and literary critic. He
received the Nobel Prize
in Literature in 1948. He
is considered the most
important modernist
exponent in poetry.
Eliot’s Main Important Poems
• “The Love Song of
J.A.Prufrock
• “The Waste Land”
Ezra Pound
He was an American
expatriate poet and
critic. He was a major
figure of Modernist
movement, notably
Imagism and
Vorticism.
William Butler Yeats
He was an Irish poet and
dramatist. In 1923 he
adwarded a Nobel
prize in Literature. He
was a very important
Modernist poet.
Features in Poetry
•
•
•
•
•
•
Intertestuality
Objective Correlative
Mythical Method
Cosmopolitan nature
Space and Time’s references
Dramatic Monologue
Features in Fiction
•
•
•
•
The
The
The
The
Stream of Consciousness
Inner Monologue
Shifting of the Point of View
Third-Person Narrator Voice
Features in Drama
• The social theatre of G.B.Shaw
• The continuation of the traditional Comedy of
Manners
• The importance of Irish drama production
The Love Song of J.A.Prufrock
It is a dramatic monologue where the protagonist
speaks with his consciousness about his inner
problems.
Key Words
Key Words
• Time: Prufrock has an unhappy relation with time.
It creates confusion in his mind.
• Space: Prufrock is imprisoned in an opaque
sphere, that is his consciousness.
• Epigraph: is the quotation of Dante’s Inferno. It
closes and opens the discourse of a poet-hero.
• Objective Correlative:is a method used by Eliot in
his poems. Here it is used to express the inability
of men to act and the vulgarity of society.
The Waste Land
It is the most important
poem of T.S.Eliot. It is
read as a representation
of the disillusionment of
the post-war generation.
It is a long poem: it
consists of 5 parts: “The
Burial of the Dead”, “A
Game of Chess”, “The
Fire Sermon”, “Death by
Water” and “What the
Thunder Said”.
Key Words
Key Words
• Verbs: the use of present participle recalls the idea
of continuity.
• Fragmentation: Eliot uses German words to create
a relation between two cultures. Moreover he uses
quotations by other poets.
• Mhytical Method: is important because it gives a
meaning to the panorama of futility.
• Intertestuality: Eliot adopts references of Chaucer,
Dante and Baudelaire.
• Pessimism: the situation of modern man in a city is
the same nowadays.
James Joyce
J.Joyce was an Irish expatriate
writer. He is best known for
his novel Ulysses and his
famous collection of short
stories, that is Dubliners.
Ulysses
The novel is the most important work of Joyce: it is a
modern interpretation of the Odyssey.
The Stream of
Consciousness
The Shifting of
the Point of View
Dubliners
It is a collection of short stories, written in 1914. It
tells about people who are timid and conformist.
Setting
Techniques
The city of
Dublin
The Stream of
Consciousness
Narrator
The third person
narrator
Virginia Woolf
She was a very important
modernist english
novelist. Her famous
works include the
novels “Mrs Dalloway”
and “To the
Lighthouse”.