• Interdisciplinary trend, affecting the visual
arts, literature, architecture, the social
sciences, philosophy, dance and music
• More a rebellious state of mind than a
distinct style
• Emerges out of large-scale changes in
Western society in the late 19th century
and early 20th century
Innovations that gave shape to
Modernism
• Technological and scientific
advancements
• New philosophical perspectives:
- the impact of Einstein’s theory of
relativity
- F.H. Bradley’s understanding that
reality is not absolute
- Henri Bergson’s conception of élan,
and his work on time & consciousness
- Freud’s work on dreams, the
unconscious and sexuality
Modernism implied…
• The rejection of accepted beliefs and
conventions
– In organized religion
– In science
– In social and economic paradigms
– In the arts
The Modernist Artist
• rejected Aristotelian
dictum that art should be
a mirror of reality
• developed an art that
testifies to all that is
unknown, troubling and
unpredictable in the self
• expressed a fascination
for the primitive impulses
of man
Pablo Picasso. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
(1907). Oil on canvas.
Art was not to be judged by the
old standard of mimesis, the
literal representation of reality
Experimentation and the
pushing of boundaries defined
much of modernist art
Modernism epitomized the
pursuit of personal and artistic
freedom
Raoul Hausmann. "Dada Siegt“ (1920)
Modernism focused on the City
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Berlin Street Scene
(1913-14). Oil on canvas.
Modernists explored the city as a place of
alienation and loneliness, but also of possibilities
and freedom
Modernist works have been
defined as…
“a self-conscious art of high aesthetic
value, usually non-representational and
non-mimetic. It is an art which turns from
realistic and humanistic representations
towards a more experimental style in
pursuit of a deeper penetration of life”
(Ray Bradbury, Modernism: A Guide to
European Culture, 1890-1930)
Literary modernism
• Internationalism: The experience of
migration marked the modernist
movement.
• Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Ernest
Hemingway lived in Paris; T.S. Eliot in
London, James Joyce in Zurich, Trieste
and Paris, etc.
Early antecedents
• Flaubert and Henry James in fiction
• The avant-garde movements in the visual
arts (cubism, futurism, surrealism…) had
abolished the conventions that had
governed the work of art:
• On or about December 1910, human nature
changed... (Virginia Woolf "Modern Fiction")
(Reference to the end of the Edwardian period,
also the first post-impressionist exhibition held in
London. Organised by Robert Fry, included
works by Gaugin, Cezanne, Matisse, van Gogh,
Picasso)
• It was in 1915 that the old world ended. (D.H.
Lawrence, Kangaroo)
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Pre-Modern World
Ordered
Hierarchical
Meaningful
Stable
Faith
Clear sense of identity
Modern World
chaos
dynamic
futile
unstable
loss of faith
Confused sense of
identity
Dada
The impact of WWI on
representation
• If the avant-garde had treated traditional
moral and aesthetic values with great
suspicion, WWI reduced words such as
truthfulness, goodness, progress and
rationality to meaningless husks
• WWI confirmed the modernist perspective
that being “civilized” was merely a veneer
that quickly vanishes
• “Abstract words such as glory, honour,
courage or hallow were obscene beside
the concrete names of villages, the
number of roads, the names of rivers, the
numbers of regiments and the dates.”
(Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms,
1929)
Modernist literature
• Suspension of Aristotelian conception of
art as imitation of external reality
• Explorations of reality from unconventional
or de-familiarized perspectives
• Interest in capturing personal impressions
and incomplete perceptions, which do not
claim to represent any objective truth
Temporality
• The passage of time, traditionally
represented in a linear fashion, changes
to capture the fluctuations of the mind
• Chronological time is often combined with
a more subjective representation
• Aesthetic values such as clarity and unity
of effect lose currency in favor of a style
that seeks to represent the disordered and
fragmented quality of modern experience
• Juxtapositions, fragmentation, collage, as
well as indirect style and stream of
consciousness emerge as central artistic
devices
• Modernism, which had been a minority
taste before the war, came to define the
1920s
• The Waste Land (1922) as the most
prominent poem of modernism, the
touchstone of modernist literature
The Waste Land
• Describes a mood of deep disillusionment
stemming from the collective experience of
WWI and Eliot’s personal circumstances
• It deploys “the sense of desolation, of
uncertainty, of futility… which is the
hallmark of a whole generation.” (I.A.
Richards)
What are the roots that clutch, what
branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images…
(T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922)
The Waste Land
• Recognized as a major statement of
modernist poetics in its use of formal
techniques
• The style is marked by hundreds of
allusions and quotations from other texts
(classic and obscure, “high-brow” and
“low-brow”) in different languages.
• Sources include: The Bible, the Book of
Common Prayer, Buddha’s Fire Sermon,
Ovid, Virgil, Homer, Sappho, Chaucer,
Shakespeare, John Donne, Milton,
Baudelaire, Sir James Frazer’s The
Golden Bough and Jessie Weston’s From
Ritual to Romance (particularly its study of
the wasteland motif in Celtic mythology)
• For T.S. Eliot, the function of all these
mythological, historical and literary
allusions was to create a “continuous
parallel between the present and
antiquity”, so as to satirize the present and
at the same time give meaning to the
“panorama of anarchy” (Eliot’s words)
which the modern world had become
Significance of the title
• The title comes from From Ritual to
Romance, in which Weston describes a
kingdom where the genitals of the king
have been wounded. This injury affects
the king’s fertility as well as the kingdom
itself. With its regenerative powers gone,
the kingdom has turned into a waste land
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
• An American expatriate and a major figure
in Anglo-American modernist poetry
• He was responsible for advancing the
literary careers of many writers and poets
(James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos
Williams, Ernest Hemingway)
• He acted as editor in journals that were
pivotal in bringing modernist poetry to
fruition
Magazines that recognised “no
taboos”
Ezra Pound
• The founder of Imaginism
• Imagist poetry was devoted to "clarity of
expression through the use of precise
visual images"
• The first tenet of the Imagism "To use the
language of common speech, but to
employ always the exact word, not the
nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative
word" → minimal designs in poetry
The apparition of these faces in the
crowd
Petals on a wet, black bough.
(Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the
Metro”, 1913)
H.D.
• She is known primarily as a poet, but she
also wrote novels, memoirs, and essays
and did a number of translations from the
Greek
• Her work is consistently innovative and
experimental
• She created a unique voice that sought to
bring meaning to the fragmented shards of
a war-torn culture
H.D.’s most
anthologized poem:
Whirl up, sea—
Whirl your
pointed pines,
splash your great
pines
on our rocks,
hurl your green
over us,
Cover us with
your pools of fir
(H.D. “Oread”,
1914)
Whirl up, sea—
Whirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines
on our rocks,
hurl your green over us,
Cover us with your pools of fir
(H.D. “Oread”, 1914)
… and another milestone in
American modernism
So much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
(William Carlos Williams, “The Red
Wheelbarrow”, 1923)