Modernism

Modernism 1901?-8:15:17a.m. JST, Aug. 6, 1945 Modernism is a completely new Episteme—a way of knowing what we know. It grew out of philosophers, artists, writers, politicians, psychologists, architects, musicians, etc. who made a decision to Challenge the old way of looking at Life, The Universe, and Everything. Marked by key questions about Nature, Order, and the importance of Individual observation in the construction of reality.

Poetic Distinctions Ambiguity Style is usually free verse—no rhyme scheme, meter, or stanza form The romantic notion of nature driving artistic creation is inverted to the poet’s individual interpretation of the world, and not really the world of nature, but of human creation. Typically rely on established western myths, symbols, and narratives, but invert the traditional understanding and replace it with a darker view. Imagery is of a dark/urban/battle-scarred world Lack of easily identified meaning and the reader is often left struggling or torn between multiple interpretations—a single poem can deal with multiple, unrelated ideas and images. Marked by a presentation of experience as layered, allusive, discontinuous; the use, to these ends, of fragmentation and juxtaposition, motif, symbol, and allusion—often expressed through stream of consciousness. Ambiguity

Poets T.S. Eliot W.B. Yeats W.H. Auden e.e. cummings Wallace Stevens Amy Lowell Marianne Moore Edna St. Vincent Millay Elizabeth Bishop Langston Hughes Ezra Pound Robert Frost Emphasis on expansion of female and non-caucasion authors—Ezra Pound supported fascism and was never criticized for it , but Millay criticized heavily for her passionate support of democracy

Novelists James Joyce Virginia Woolf Joseph Conrad D. H. Lawrence T. S. Eliot Samuel Beckett E. M. Forster Earnest Hemmingway F. Scott Fitzgerald Emphasis on expansion of female and non-caucasion authors—Ezra Pound supported fascism and was never criticized for it , but Millay criticized heavily for her passionate support of democracy

Modernism in Art Picasso Weeping Woman, Jackson Pollack’s No. 5 sold for $140 million in 2006, Mark Rothko’s Orange and Yellow Which one holds the sale record for any piece of art? $140,000,000

Modernism in Architecture William Van Alan’s Chrysler building and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Waters

Modernism in Architecture Mile Van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House

Some of the characteristics of Modern Poetry I found include the following: Look for these as you explicate and prepare for your presentation: Formal characteristics Open Form Free verse Discontinuous narrative Juxtaposition Intertextuality Classical allusions Borrowings from other cultures and languages Unconventional use of metaphor Metanarrative Fragmentation Multiple narrative points of view (parallax) Thematic characteristics Breakdown of social norms and cultural sureties Dislocation of meaning and sense from its normal context Valorization of the despairing individual in the face of an unmanageable future Disillusionment Rejection of history and the substitution of a mythical past, borrowed without chronology Product of the metropolis, of cities and urbanscapes Stream of consciousness Overwhelming technological changes of the 20th Century