Literature Focus II. Modernism

The British writer Virginia Woolf once declared that “in or about December, 1910, human character changed.” Woolf picked that date to mark the enormous changes that occurred in her lifetime. Her bold statement sets the context for modernism,a literary and artistic movement that developed in the early decades of the 20^th c.

Art for Art’s SakeIn literature, modernismwas a diverse movement that spanned Europe, the Americas, and even parts of Africa and Asia. In England, it took hold in the first decade of the 20^th c. As the economic, political, and social structure of Britain began to crumble in those years, British writers began to experiment with ways that would question the basic elements of literature—whether it be the structure of a poem or the narrative elements of a fictional story. A key figure in the modernist movement was James Joyce, whose novels, short stories, and poetry were anything but traditional. The 1922 publication of his work Ulysses marked the peak of the modernist movement in fiction. In this work, Joyce used an array of modern writing styles in portraying the random thoughts of his main character, Leopold Bloom, as he wandered the streets of Dublin. Other modernist fiction writers besides Joyce and Woolf included D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and Evelyn Waugh.

Breaking FormModernist poets typically broke new ground in style and form. T.S. Eliot and others abandoned traditional stanza forms and meter for the more natural flow of free verse and experimented with bold imagery and symbolism. Eliot also ushered in a new era in literary criticism. In his work as editor of the literary journal The Criterion, he argued for new standards of evaluation and reexamined the literary worth of past poets. While blasting the revered romantic and neoclassical poets, he resurrected the reputation of the metaphysical poets, who had been unpopular for at least a century.

The modernist period lasted through England’s economic depression of the 1930s and the political turmoil of World War II in the 1940s. The period gave way in the early 1950s to postmodernism,which is characterized by experimentation with discontinuity, parody, popular culture, irony, and language.

Modernist Content and TechniquesWhile no two modernist writers employed the same style, their works do share some defining characteristics:

• a sense of alienation, loss, and despair

• rejection of traditional values and assumptions

• elevation of the individual

• emphasis on introspection and the depths of the human mind rather than on outward or social aspects

One narrative technique that allowed the modernist writer to fully reveal a character and to explore the depths of the human mind was stream of consciousness,in which the rapid and jumbled flow of a character’s thoughts and feelings is presented as it occurs. Fiction writers Woolf and Joyce, along with poet T.S. Eliot, were known for using this technique.

For modernist writers, ironybecame something larger than a literary technique; it became an attitude that permeated the core of their writing. This new ironic attitude of the modernists is often described as detached and questioning. Modernists aimed for complete objectivity in presenting ideas and regarded such restraint as an appropriate response to the complexities of modern life. Recall that irony in literature is classified in three ways.

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 925