Modernism:
As a term, modernism is most often used to identify the most
distinctive forms, styles, concepts, and sensibilities in literature and art
from roughly the late 19th century to the mid 20th
century. Since it is a broad
intellectual movement, modernism varies widely in specific features, but most
critics agree that it involves a deliberate and radical break with the
traditional bases of both Western culture and Western art. Modernists were writers and artists who
questioned the certainties and standard truths that had previously provided
support systems for all social organization, religion, morality, and the
conception of the human self. Modernists
were influenced by 19th century thinkers, such as Nietzsche, Marx,
Freud, and Darwin. They were especially
influenced by the savagery and slaughter
of WWI.
The modernist revolt against traditional literary and
artistic forms and subjects manifested itself strongly after the catastrophe of
WWI, which shook human faith in the continuity and foundations of Western
culture. The inherited mode of ordering
a literary or artistic work—and for that matter of ordering the world—assumed a
relatively stable and coherent worldview. But there was a general shattering of
traditional beliefs and foundational truths after WWI, and there was a general
emergence of a belief in the futility and meaningless of life, that the world
was characterized by disorder rather than order, by anarchy rather than
stability. Experimenting with new forms
and styles, modernists explored the dislocation and fragmentation of parts
rather than the traditional artistic concept of unity. Modernist writers subverted the conventions
of earlier prose fiction by breaking up narrative continuity, departing from
standard ways of representing characters, and violating the traditional syntax
and coherence of narrative language.
Such techniques have obvious parallels in the violation of
representational conventions in the modernist paintings of Cubism, Futurism,
Dadaism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism as well as in the violations of
standard conventions of melody, harmony, and rhythm by the modernist composers
(Stravinsky, Copeland).
A prominent feature of modernism is the attempt to be
“avant-garde,” a military term for “advance-guard.” Quite self-consciously, authors and artists
attempted to, in Pound’s famous phrase, “make it new.” By violating accepted conventions and
decorums, they undertook to create new artistic forms and styles and to
introduce neglected, often forbidden subjects.
Frequently avant-garde artists represent themselves as alienated from
the established order, against which they assert their own autonomy. Their aim is often to shock the sensibilities
of their audiences and to challenge the norms and pieties of bourgeois culture.
Literary Characteristics: free verse,
stream-of-consciousness, objective correlative, imagism, multiple
points-of-view, broken or fragmentary narratives, iceberg narratives, alienated
characters, defiance of traditional values, taboo subjects, complexity.
As a
cultural movement, Modernism rebelled against Victorian mores. In general,
Victorian culture emphasized nationalism and cultural absolutism. Victorians
placed humans over and outside of nature. They believed in a single way of
looking at the world, and in absolute and clear-cut dichotomies between right
and wrong, good and bad, and hero and villain. Further, they saw the world as
being governed by God's will and that each person and thing in this world had a
specific use—and place. Finally, they saw the world as neatly divided between
"civilized" and "savage" peoples. According to Victorians,
the "civilized" were those from industrialized nations, cash-based capitalistic
economies, Protestant Christian traditions, and patriarchal societies; the
"savage" were those from agrarian or hunter-gatherer tribes,
barter-based economies, "pagan" or "totemistic" traditions,
and matriarchal (or at least "unmanly" societies).
In
contrast, Modernists rebelled against Victorian ideals. Blaming Victorianism
for such evils as slavery, racism, and imperialism--and later for World War
I--Modernists emphasized humanism over nationalism, and argued for cultural
relativism. Modernists emphasized the ways in which humans were part of and
responsible to nature. They argued for multiple ways of looking at the world,
and blurred the Victorian dichotomies by presenting antiheroes, uncategorizable
persons, and anti-art movements like Dada. Further, they challenged the idea
that God played an active role in the world, which led them to challenge the
Victorian assumption that there was meaning and purpose behind world events.
Instead, Modernists argued that no thing or person was born for a specific use;
instead, they found or made their own meaning in the world. Challenging the
Victorian dichotomy between "civilized" and "savage,"
Modernists reversed the values associated with each kind of culture. Modernists
presented the Victorian "civilized" as greedy and warmongering
(instead of being industrialized nations and cash-based economies), as
hypocrites (rather than Christians), and as enemies of freedom and
self-realization (instead of good patriarchs). Those that the Victorians had
dismissed (and subjugated) as "savages" the Modernists saw as being
the truly civilized--responsible users of their environments, unselfish and
family-oriented, generous, creative, mystical and full of wonder, and
egalitarian. These "savages," post-WWI Modernists pointed out, did
not kill millions with mustard gas, machine-guns, barbed wire, and genocidal
starvation.
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