The Authors | In literature, the movement is associated with the works of What is it? (among others) • Eliot, • James Joyce, | The term modernism refers to the radical shift in • Virginia Woolf, • W.B. Yeats, in Great Britain; aesthetic and cultural sensibilities evident in the • Ezra Pound, art and literature of the post-World War One • Gertrude Stein, in America; period. • the Czech Franz Kafka and • the Norwegian Knut Hamsun. | Modernism had to wait until | Modernism thus marks a distinctive break with AFTER the SECOND WORLD WAR before it had its great Victorian bourgeois morality; rejecting impact on the English theatre. nineteenth-century optimism, they presented a | The most influential figure in profoundly pessimistic picture of a culture in the field of drama was the Irishman SAMUEL BECKETT. disarray. This despair often results in an apparent apathy and moral relativism.
Traditional Literary Devices literature
| In their attempt to throw off the aesthetic burden | In Dickens it was of the realist novel, these writers introduced a Modernism complex (plots and variety of literary tactics and devices: sub-plots);
| the radical disruption of linear flow of | It’s meaningless; | in Lawrence it was narrative | It has little autobiographical. | the frustration of conventional importance; expectations concerning unity and | There isn’t real coherence of plot and character plot. | the opposition of inward consciousness to rational, public, objective discourse
1 Traditional Traditional literature literature | Realistic Modernism | Real setting, well Modernism characters: they described; are described both | There is only a | in Dickens it is | Physical in their physical general idea of consistent with the descriptions are and psychological setting;Little subsequent action. absent; features. importance is | People are | We may have flat given to it; represented only characters or round | Sometimes it has by their characters. only a symbolic function. thoughts.
Traditional Traditional literature literature Modernism | The events are Modernism | Traditional generally related in language and a chronological | Depending on | New language to traditional the subject’s order or with the describe the thinking punctuation; mind; use of flash backs. process; association of sometimes used ideas; | Fading and in a highly | use of the STREAM of poetical way dissolving; CONSCIOUSNESS | Both “Ulysses” expressed through the (Lawrence) and “The Waste INTERIOR Land” deal with a MONOLOGUE single day. technique.
Traditional Traditional literature literature
| His role is passive: | We have omniscient he is taught, Modernism narrators (Dickens) Modernism entertained, and non-omniscient | The author ones; we also have emotionally intruding and non- | The reader has an stands apart from involved. intruding narrators. active role and has his work, to give his own subjective | he is completely interpretation. DETACHED.
2 E. Q.
3