1. Doubts and Definitions
Modernism
Doubts and Definitions

2. Doubts
‘Somebody should write the history of the word “modern” […] [The Modern is not the same as the avant-garde.] But somebody should write a history of that word, too.’ (Frank Kermode, Continuities (1968), 27, 32)

3. Your definition?

4. Brief history of the term
Lat. Modo ‘current’ > 5th c. modernus: (the Christian present as opposed to the Roman past)
Modern English: language and literature after the 16th c.
Swift, 18th c.: the follower of modern ways over Ancient literature
Hardy, 19th c.: age of industrial age revolution
20th c.: a movement in the arts in the first half of the 20th c.
Not the same as ‘contemporary’.

5. Narrow sense
A movement in the arts and literature in the first half of the 20th c., which…

6. …demanded an open breach with the past or for the abolition of the past:
discontinuity with the past and
sense of newness
break with the past, i.e.: mainstream tradition
the remaking or realigning of tradition (Eliot).
discovered in the world: fragmentation of experience, legitimacy of multiple perspectives

7. but also created a new tradition (Eliot)
continuity of ideas, e.g.: French Symbolism (1850s); Dante (14th c.), Metaphysical poetry (17th c.).
Continuity of ideologies: French Symbolism underpins Modernism in the way that Romanticism underpins Symbolism.
other precedents: African
art, Byzantine painting,
it finds and founds its
own tradition

8. Dates 1899: Arthur Symons, 1922-25: the great years of Modernism
The Symbolist Movement in Literature
: the great years of Modernism
1922: Joyce, Ulysses, Eliot, The Waste Land, Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil
1923: Lawrence, Studies in Classic and American Literature, Forster, A Passage to India
1924: Richards, The Principles of Literary Criticism, Mann, The Magic Mountain, Breton, Surrealist Manifesto
1925: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Franz Kafka, The Trial, Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, Sean O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock; Ezra Pound, Cantos, etc.

9. Main features…

10. The linguistic turn 19th c.: historical linguistics
1916: Ferdinand Saussure, Course in General
Linguistics
synchronic view of language
arbitrary relation between linguistic sign and
the thing it refers to
meaning is created within the system of language
Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921): ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.’
our perception of the world is subjective and the
expression of the way we see the world depends on
our linguistic capacities.
language is a medium of cultural tradition:
civilisation depends on words and it is the function
of the poet to keep words accurate.

11. Interest in anthropology
the study and contrast of the culture,
mythology and psychology of primitive and
civilised societies
interest in primitive or exotic societies and their arts:
Cubism’s debts to African paintings, carvings and masks
in literature: Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Why?
earlier: primitive people were seen as a simpler and purer version of civilised people (Rousseau) but essentially the same as ourselves.
Modernism: primitive people were believed to have a different way of thinking.
psychological continuity with the world
Frazer’s interpretation of rites and rituals
Freud’s interpretation of psychic structures

12. Colonialism 19th c.: anthropology as a
scientific justification of colonial
expansion and mission. Primitive people were to be ‘civilised’ an ‘enlightened’:
Take up the White Man’s burden –
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard –
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:
“Why brought ye us from bondage,
“Our loved Egyptian night?”
(Kipling, ‘The White Man’s Burden’, 1903)

13. Colonialism (contd) Modernism: changing perception of colonial other.
Civilisation represents the conscious mind and primitive or colonised people represent the subconscious mind. (Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents, 1930)
Civilisation was built on the suppression and sublimation of the instincts.
Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)
D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (1915)
Forster, A Passage to India (1924)

14. Interest in mythology mythology is a repository of universal ideas
Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough
( , 12 vols., abridged 1922): a coherent ritual pattern in diverse mythological materials
the sacrificial killing of the king
fertility rites
dying and resurrected god
universal ideas in different communities in different ages
underneath modern sceptical intelligence there are elements of mystical, primitive, ancient ways of thinking

15. Interest in psychology
Sigmund Freud ( )
the place of primitive thinking is in our individual childhood
childhood is an abbreviated version of the development of the human race
we behave according to universal patterns, these universal patterns or layers are repressed by education, civilisation, and expected ‘normal behaviour’
hidden layers of the human mind have an influence on the production and interpretation of art
Joyce, Woolf, The Waste Land, Surrealism

16. Political conservatism
Modernism was revolutionary in the arts, but not in politics:
Yeats: supported the Irish aristocracy and despised common middle-class people (the ‘mob’), and flirted with European dictatorships
Eliot: conservative, royalist and Anglican
Lawrence: spoke about the submission of women, threat of Jews
Pound: identified with Italian fascism

17. The Aesthetics of Modernism…

18. Formalism
T.E. Hulme (philosopher), Wyndham Lewis (painter), Ezra Pound (poet), the leading figures in the magazine Vortex:
the art object must be dry, hard, clearly defined, discontinuous with ordinary space and time, abstract.
Why?
‘abstraction’ (i.e. formal, geometric, impersonal art) embodies order and authority

19. Imagism
‘An “Image” is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.’ (Ezra Pound)
to avoid feeling
to achieve ‘the exact curve of the thing’ as opposed to providing an interpretation
Ezra Pound, In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

20. Provincialism
the affirmation of the peripheral, the provincial, the outsider
Modernist writers are great outsiders to the English literary establishment, often exiles, émigrés:
white, male, Anglo-Saxon in origin, heterosexual in sexual orientation, Oxbridge education, Anglican in religion, upper-middle class, based in London
Eliot and Pound are Americans;
Yeats, Shaw, Joyce are Irish;
Conrad is Polish
Woolf is a woman and bisexual
EM Forster is a homosexual
MacDiarmid is Scottish
Joyce lived in exile
DH Lawrence came from a working-class background in northern England.

21. Further reading
Levenson, Michael (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), pp. 9-32
Brooker, Peter, Modernism / Postmodernism (London: Longman, 1992)
Childs, Peter, Modernism (London: Routledge, 2000)
Hewitt, Douglas, English Fiction and the Early Modern Period (London: Longman, 1992)
Trotter, David, The English Novel in History,