Definition of Modernism and Critical Approach

Modernism – noun […] a deliberate philosophical and practical estrangement or divergence from the past in the arts and literature occurring especially in the course of the 20th century and taking form in any of various innovative movements and styles.

Modern – adjective [...] of or pertaining to present and recent time; not ancient or remote: modern city life. [...] of, pertaining to, or characteristic of contemporary styles of art, literature, music, etc., that reject traditionally accepted or sanctioned forms and emphasize individual experimentation and sensibility.

Thus one of the very best characteristic of modernism is the self-consciousness of these many movements, leading to high experimentalism with forms and the creative process. Modernism would be the recognition that the world got much more complex then.

Contextualized definition

Modernity usually refers to a post-traditional, post- medieval historical period; the period in which many cultures around the world moved from the feudalism system toward capitalism, highly industrialized, a rationalized age and in many cases secularist.

In philosophy it was Nietzsche, for instance, that with aphorisms (strong, short and precise way of argumentation) found a new way of writing, of self- expression; a characteristic that would relate to the modernist aesthetic practice. Nietzsche and the modernists shared a dark look at society, for him it was now sick and weak due to the constraints of traditional values that got unquestioned for too long.

As a general rule, modernism was less concerned with reality than with how the artist or writer could transform reality. In this way, the artist made reality his own. Whereas the middle class industrial society of the nineteenth century valued reason, industry, thrift, organization, faith, norms and values, the modernists were fascinated by the bizarre, the mysterious, the surreal, the primitive and the formless.

Modernism as a literary movement reached its height in Europe between 1900 and the middle 1920s. It drew a many good attention to artists that the world itself was becoming also more dangerous, the First World War showed them how life could seem ridiculous in the face of the senseless slaughter of people. It was something that they would face again in the Second World War and would ultimately influence major artistic movements from that time on.

Exemplified characteristics

Pound: the removal of all unnecessary verbiage, clear language. Hardy: sins, class system, course of marriage and adult life. Wilde: pursuit of an aestheticism ideal. Woolf: stream of consciousness. Doolittle: free verse and the conciseness of the haiku, for example. Fitzgerald: youth, promises, despair and aging, morality. Hemingway: tightly written prose and death-related themes. Mansfield: loneliness, women's rights, shifts in the narrative. Joyce: ultimate experimentalism with language. Cummings: the self and meaning through typography, precise writing. Shaw: social problems, witty and energetic style. Eliot: metaphorical and figurative language, philosophical reflections. Lawrence: personal relationships and social subjects. Stein: humorous style, objective voice.

Critical approach

Modernist movements can be seen as a sort of revelation of world in crisis. However, modernism can also be taken as a form of crisis production, a type of artistic philosophy which aims purely to produce a fiction of crisis, having no more than disruptive and destructive motives to exist. It is likely we are now only seeing a never ending loop of radicalism and new ideas merely meant as... new ideas for the sake of it. Are not we just being duplicates of the artists from the past?

Even so, the concept of what is modern, modernism in arts, is a very peculiar one as it is basically a concept developed in the Western part of the world, in Western societies with Western definitions. This development of arts in Europe “focused the individual, marking the ascendancy of the middle and lower classes, marking the autonomy of the self; something considered very differently in non-western cultures”.

In Arabic terms, what defines a literary work as “modern” is not exactly the form of the narrative, but the content itself and its true intention. The content of a fiction is much more praised, rather than the technique used. The language itself show us the different nature of literature for Arabs, the relationship they have with it is really especial.

In the pre-modernist Japan, the Chinese language and the Chinese tradition was for them what Latin was for Europeans. In this chain of cultural influence is also important to notice the importance the Japanese literature had upon the Korean, as Japan had invaded it and controlled the region for decades. In fact, in Korea, modern literature only started to grow on its own with the development of Hagul, the phonetic alphabet artificially created to educate as much possible the then illiterate society, which helped to spread literature from the dominant classes to the common people, including women.

The current Japanese modern literature has its roots in the French modernism, so when we analyze Japanese poetry and fiction in a post-war Japan we are mainly analyzing works written in the European tradition of modernism in the 19th and 20th centuries. As a matter of fact the Japanese word for poetry is from the Chinese and in earlier periods many scholar works were written and published in Chinese, which makes the Japanese literary tradition before modernism somewhat attached to the Chinese one, which has nothing to do with the modernist ideals we see in European literature.

Files from this presenation, and also the paper, available at http://tinyurl.com/369dsdc