English 1061 Modernism What is a literary

English 1061 Modernism

What is a literary “period”? A literary style or movement is like a fad or fashion – but one that might last decades, and which responds to political, historical, or intellectual events

Romanticism / Realism → Modernism (about 1900 -60) → Postmodernism What is literary “modernism”? A style of writing which rejected traditional and conventional methods and saw the experience of reality as individualistic, subjective, nonchronological, and often irrational.

Characteristics of modernism • Dark and pessimistic • Stream-of-consciousness • Nonsensical or ridiculous • Playful and Experimental • Strongly linked to Paris We can’t be sure what truth is.

Origins of modernism • A decline in religious certainty and of man’s special and divine nature (Darwin) • A decline in confidence in progress (WW I) • A decline in confidence in rationality (Freud; Henri Bergson; William James) • Influences from art (impressionism)

Modernism is a style affecting: • Literature • Art • Music • Architecture • Theater • Fashion

Cezanne The Seine at Bercy (1878)

Renoir The Boating Party (1881)

Monet Sunrise (1874) Impressionism

Munch The Scream (1893) Expressionism

Picasso Les Demoiselles d‘Avignon (1907) Cubism

Ernst The Elephant Celebes (1921) Surrealism

The Motorist, 1906

Metropolis, 1927

Cleveland Greyhound Station

Chrysler Building, New York City, 1928 -30 Art Deco

Modernism in music https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v= e. GSi. Zd 1 f. TD 4

Gertrude Stein • • • The presentation of experience in the present continuous non-linear and non -chronological Contradictory and unreliable

T. S. Eliot Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question. . . Oh, do not ask, “What is it? ” Let us go and make our visit. In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.

James Joyce Ulysses: One day in the life of Leopold Bloom, June 16, 1904 Get a light snack in Davy Byrne’s. Stopgap. Keep me going. Had a good breakfast. —Roast and mashed here. —Pint of stout. He came out into clearer air and turned back towards Grafton street. Eat or be eaten. Kill! My plate’s empty. After you with our incorporated drinkingcup. Rub off the microbes with your handkerchief. Father O’Flynn would make hares of them all. Have rows all the same. All for number one. Children fighting for the scrapings of the pot. Want a souppot as big as the Phoenix park. Hate people all round you. City Arms hotel table d’hôte she called it. Soup, joint and sweet. Never know whose thoughts you’re chewing. Then who’d wash up all the plates and forks? Might be all feeding on tabloids that time. Teeth getting worse and worse.