Young Scholars,

 Here is a packet on Modernism that collects definitions of its causes and characteristics from multiple sources. Some of the same topics will be covered in each (such as WWI) but one may explain its ideas more clearly to you and all will add something to the topic. Read them all and annotate the main points. Treat it like a boring history text.  I may check your notes.  We will go over this in class. Don’t sweat confusing parts. But do try to understand most of it.  Vocabulary study: Look up words you don’t know (you determine that—you are not required to look up “consensus”, for example, if you feel you know it’s meaning well enough). Look up any strange usage of words you know (i.e. “distinct gesture” is a phrase made up of words you know, but how is it being used in that sentence?). You don’t need to write down all of the definitions tonight, but this begins our vocabulary study and you will be asked to soon. I don’t want to force you to constantly interrupt your reading as you go, so you may want to first skim the reading for the underlined words you know you will need to define.

modernism From: The Facts On File Companion to the American Short Story, Second Edition.

The modernism movement has many credos: Ezra Pound's exhortation to "make it new" and Virginia Woolf's assertion that sometime around December 1910 "human character changed" are but two of the most famous. It is important to remember that modernism is not a monolithic movement. There are, in fact, many modernisms, ranging from the "high" or canonical modernism of a few avant-garde authors such as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce to the African-American modernism embodied in the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Modernism was a global phenomenon, but it had different impacts in Europe, Britain, and the United States, and it was reflected differently in writing and in the plastic arts (especially painting, sculpture, and architecture). Further, no consensus exists concerning the period that modernism is said to cover. Sometimes it is said to have begun at the turn of the 20th century with Joseph Conrad and W. B. Yeats; other times it said to have begun with World War I. It could perhaps end in the 1930s or at the end of World War II, or it might continue today, for the theorist Frederic Jameson has claimed that so-called postmodernism is actually just another form of modernism. Such writers as Raymond Carver or Toni Morrison might be considered to write in a kind of modernist style. Despite the divergent opinions, most critics probably would agree that modernist expression is epitomized in James Joyce's Ulysses and Eliot's The Waste Land, both published in 1922, and that modernism is the name put to the new paradigm for presenting the diverse facets of 20th-century culture.

Some of the shared characteristics of modernism can be identified. In the aftermath of post- Enlightenment culture, there was a call for a distinct gesture that could describe the quality of living. In other words, modernism inscribed a particular sense of radical rupture with the past and a perception of cultural crisis. Modernity, as Jurgen Habermas says, "revolts against the normalizing functions of tradition: modernity lives in the experience of rebelling against all that is normative." The normative changes associated with modernity include a sense of cultural crisis brought on by World War I and the sense that the new 20th century put the world closer to the apocalypse; Western notions of progress and superiority were breaking down. Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud all offered so- called master narratives that helped to explain history and to produce a new historical self- consciousness. Well-held precepts and norms for religion, sexuality, gender, and the family of 1 the past Victorian world were also collapsing. Conflicts over racial, gender, class, religious, and colonial systems of oppression were moving to the fore. Large-scale migrations from rural areas into overcrowded urban centers and technological change also were causing cultural dislocation, and a preeminent modernist figure became the alienated and nihilistic self in a usually urban world. The numb and dislocated protagonists of Ernest Hemingway's fiction provide good examples.

These very real historical and cultural exigencies resulted in aesthetic crises and compensatory strategies. This radically new modern world could be reflected adequately only in a new order of art, and writers reacted with various formal innovations. This search for order was also a response to what many artists perceived as a lack of coherence in romanticism, the "movement" that preceded modernism. Romanticism's "soft" or emotional expression and its valuing of sensibility and imagination over reason and the actual, of nature over culture and art, was inadequate to express a rhetoric of loss and new beginning. The search for order in the modern world can be seen in the private mythologies of T. S. Eliot, which in turn hearken back to a classical world and in Joyce's reworking of the tale of Ulysses; this kind of self-conscious use of myth to organize the details of a work reflected a new literary self-consciousness. William Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi also might be a kind of private modernist landscape populated with Faulkner-invented mythical families of the Sartorises and the Snopeses; even Hemingway's macho heroic codes of behavior are modernist versions of ancient paradigms of honorable behavior.

In a kind of aesthetic attempt to purify culture by purifying language, modernist writers emphasize the role of language and form as, for instance, in much of Hemingway's spare prose and Gertrude Stein's poetry or her famous assertion that "a rose is a rose is a rose." Other times, instead of seeming simplicity, artists relied on elitist, purposefully dense, and almost impenetrable prose and poetry; many would point to Faulkner's novels, Ezra Pound's cantos, and Joyce's Finnegans Wake as examples. Literary personae and masks in literature became very self-aware and self-reflexive; the characters of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway, for instance, clearly contain many of their creators' traits as well as their biographical details, and Eliot's speaker in the poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" shares many similarities with the writer himself. In addition to self-referentiality, the search for luminous epiphanies and moments of insight and intersection with the transcendent are omnipresent in modernist fiction.

Perhaps it is useful also to consider modernism in terms of both content and form. Thus a short story such as Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited" may not seem so obviously innovative in its language and form as a Hemingway story, but its reflection of postwar spiritual and moral crisis gives it a distinctly modernist content and tone. Modernism also might be accused of less innovation than its proponents pretended: After all, Eliot's formalism was neoclassical; Faulkner's natural world was very romantic in its own way. Modernism was thus double voiced, double visioned: It stepped free of the past and announced the new aesthetic era, yet simultaneously it failed to encompass or adequately survey the past, which perhaps accounts for the involvement of many modernists with political Fascism and intellectual elitism. Attempts at impersonality and formality emerged from a modernist belief that superior, more realistic art comes from knowledge born of reasoned discrimination and rationality. In a self-conscious enactment of nihilism and artistic self-possession, the modernist seems to say that there is a transcendent order out there, and he or she can write it.

Werlock, Abby H. P. "modernism." The Facts On File Companion to the American Short Story, Second Edition. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2009. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp? ItemID=WE54&SID=5&iPin= CASS589&SingleRecord=True (accessed October 11, 2012).

In the twentieth century, modernization was used in tandem with colonization as a means to legitimize the often forced adoption of Western concepts of "progress" in different parts of the world. As such, modernization also became a stimulus for movements that rejected "progress" in favor of "tradition." In the Western world (that is, 2 Europe and North America), modernization has meant industrialization, a refusal of positivism, and movements to redefine nationalist politics. In the non-Western world (that is, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and South America), modernization has generally meant Westernization in terms of technology, industry, political structures, mass culture, and other mechanisms of globalization (or neocolonialism, as it is sometimes called). Modernization arrived at different speeds in different parts of the world and was received with indifference, optimism, or outright horror. Success was measured according to Western values and institutions such as individualism, capitalism, democracy, literacy (often in terms of European languages, with no consideration for older local languages), private ownership, the middle class, religious freedom, scientific method, public institutions, and the emancipation of women, all of which may or may not have been realized in the West itself —even today.

The effects of the First World War were evident in literature, not only in subject matter but in use of language. European writers and thinkers looked beyond models of scientific rationalism for a means of expressing knowledge of the world and lived experience that could not be apprehended by intellect alone. Henri Bergson's philosophy criticized scientific rationality as artificial and unreal because it froze everything in conceptual space. Sigmund Freud's invention of psychoanalysis decentered conventions of medicine and psychology by focusing on the unconscious. Dreams, slips of the tongue, and dÈjý vu, for example, were understood as productive sites of inquiry into repressed desires and anxieties. Language, specifically free association, became the means by which the "talking cure" was realized, which was not always an end to unhappiness, but rather an understanding of it. In the "hard" sciences of physics and mathematics, Albert Einstein proposed his theory of relativity, challenging concepts of absolute motion and the absolute difference of space and time from the Newtonian model of physics. Einstein argued that reality should be understood as a four-dimensional continuum called space-time

The twentieth century is sometimes called a "century of isms" as different groups of European artists and intellectuals attempted to give expression to contemporary history and subjectivity. German and Scandinavian Expressionism rejected the direct representation of physical reality, or impressions of it (as in Impressionism), in favor of representations of inner visions, emotions, or spiritualities. Italian Futurism embraced fascism, glorifying terrorism and war as manifestations of a dynamic new order. By contrast, Russian Futurism was largely suppressed by the Soviet regime. Dada was a group of movements of absolute revolt and anarchism. The word dada is itself a nonsense word—or, at least, it was used as such by the Dadaists. Beginning in Zurich, Dada later emerged in Berlin, Cologne, Hanover, Paris, and New York. Perhaps the most far-reaching avant-garde movement of the early twentieth century was Surrealism, whose manifestos, poetry, and art emphasized a "revolution of the mind" through which conventional habits of seeing the world yielded to a "surreal" vision of it.

Modernist prose and drama writers such as Kafka, Pirandello, Proust, Brecht, Faulkner, Woolf, and Joyce used language in a self-conscious and exploratory manner to redefine the "art" much as the scientists and philosophers redefined their disciplines. Artists and writers from parts of the world colonized by the United States and Europe adopted Modernist techniques as a way of articulating the apparent contradictions in everyday reality. Life for colonial subjects often seemed quite "surreal."

Western Modernism is too conceptually limited to describe much of the cultural productions of older nations in North America such as the Navajo, Zuni, and Inuit. Western audiences often appreciate the Navajo Night Chant for its aesthetics without recognizing that the Night Chant is part of the Navajo fabric of life, directed primarily toward healing and the restoration of harmony between individuals and the environment. Zuni Ritual Poetry is an extensive collection of Native American oratory. The Zuni orations establish a clear relationship between the "daylight people," or ordinary humans, and the "raw people," such as deer, bear, the sun, rainstorms, corn plants, and ancestral spirits. Inuit songs may be performed in 3 communal feasting houses to the accompaniment of dancing and drumming, or they can be performed privately within the home. The works of these three nations merely hint at the massive cultural achievements of Native Americans, whose cultures were largely displaced, if not outright destroyed, by centuries of colonialist and military invasions by Europeans and European-Americans, particularly U.S. colonialists, in order to take possession of the North American continent. http://www.wwnorton.com/nawol/welcome.htm

Modernism and the Modern Novel

The term modernism refers to the radical shift in aesthetic and cultural sensibilities evident in the art and literature of the post-World War One period. The ordered, stable and inherently meaningful world view of the nineteenth century could not, wrote T.S. Eliot, accord with "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." Modernism thus marks a distinctive break with Victorian bourgeois morality; rejecting nineteenth-century optimism, they presented a profoundly pessimistic picture of a culture in disarray. This despair often results in an apparent apathy and moral relativism.

In literature, the movement is associated with the works of (among others) Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Franz Kafka and Knut Hamsun. In their attempt to throw off the aesthetic burden of the realist novel, these writers introduced a variety of literary tactics and devices: the radical disruption of linear flow of narrative; the frustration of conventional expectations concerning unity and coherence of plot and character and the cause and effect development thereof; the deployment of ironic and ambiguous juxtapositions to call into question the moral and philosophical meaning of literary action; the adoption of a tone of epistemological self-mockery aimed at naive pretensions of bourgeois rationality; the opposition of inward consciousness to rational, public, objective discourse; and an inclination to subjective distortion to point up the evanescence of the social world of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. (Barth, "The Literature of Replenishment" 68)

Modernism is often derided for abandoning the social world in favour of its narcissistic interest in language and its processes. Recognizing the failure of language to ever fully communicate meaning ("That's not it at all, that's not what I meant at all" laments Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock), the modernists generally downplayed content in favour of an investigation of form. The fragmented, non-chronological, poetic forms utilized by Eliot and Pound revolutionized poetic language.

Modernist formalism, however, was not without its political cost. Many of the chief Modernists either flirted with fascism or openly espoused it (Eliot, Yeats, Hamsun and Pound). This should not be surprising: modernism is markedly non- egalitarian; its disregard for the shared conventions of meaning make many of its supreme accomplishments (eg. Eliot's "The Wasteland," Pound's "Cantos," Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Woolf's The Waves) largely inaccessible to the common reader. For Eliot, such obscurantism was necessary to halt the erosion of art in the age of commodity circulation and a literature adjusted to the lowest common denominator.

It could be argued that the achievements of the Modernists have made little impact on the practices of reading and writing as those terms and activities are generally understood. The opening of Finnegans Wake, "riverrun, past Eve's and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs," seems scarcely less strange and new than when it was first published in 1939. Little wonder, then, that it is probably the least read of the acknowledged "masterpieces" of English literature. In looking to carry on many of the aesthetic goals of the Modernist project, hypertext fiction must confront again the politics of its achievements in order to position itself anew with regard to reader. With its reliance on expensive technology and its interest in re-thinking the linear nature of The Book, hypertext fiction may find itself accused of the same elitism as its modernist predecessors.© 1993-2000 Christopher Keep, Tim McLaughlin, Robin Parmar.

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