Modernist literature

	Email		Print
	Bookmark		Link

Modernist literature

Modernist literature is the literary expression of the tendencies of Modernism

Modernism

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes both a set of cultural tendencies and an array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century....
, especially High modernism

High modernism

High modernism is a particular instance of modernism, coined towards the end of modernism. "High modernism", like similar names designating intellectual and artistic eras such as "the high Middle Ages" or "the high Baroque", presumably is meant to specify the most characteristic, developed, consistent, or florid manifestation of modernism....
.

Modernism as a literary movement reached its height in Europe between 1900 and the middle 1920s. Modernist literature addressed aesthetic problems similar to those examined in non-literary forms of contemporaneous Modernist art, such as Modernist painting. Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein was an American writer who spent most of her life in France, and who became a catalyst in the development of modern art and Modernist literature....
's abstract writings, for example, have often been compared to the fragmentary and multi-perspectival Cubism

Cubism

Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music and literature....
of her friend Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Diego Jos? Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Mar?a de los Remedios Cipriano de la Sant?sima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso was a Spanish people Painting, drawing, and Sculpture....
.

The general thematic concerns of Modernist literature are well-summarized by the sociologist Georg Simmel

Georg Simmel

Georg Simmel was one of the first generation of Germany sociology. His studies pioneered the concept of social structure, and he was a key precursor of social network analysis....
:

"The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life."

The Modernist emphasis on a radical individualism can be seen in the many literary manifestos

Art manifesto

Discussion

Ask a question about 'Modernist literature'

Start a new discussion about 'Modernist literature'

Answer questions from other users

Full Discussion Forum

Encyclopedia

Modernist literature is the literary expression of the tendencies of Modernism

Modernism

High modernism

Gertrude Stein

Cubism

Pablo Picasso

Georg Simmel

Georg Simmel was one of the first generation of Germany sociology. His studies pioneered the concept of social structure, and he was a key precursor of social network analysis....
:

"The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life."

The Modernist emphasis on a radical individualism can be seen in the many literary manifestos

Art manifesto

The Art manifesto has been a recurrent feature associated with the avant-garde in Modern art. Art manifestos are mostly extreme in their rhetoric and intended for shock value to achieve a revolutionary effect....
issued by various groups within the movement. The concerns expressed by Simmel above are echoed in Richard Huelsenbeck's "First German Dada Manifesto" of 1918:

"Art in its execution and direction is dependent on the time in which it lives, and artists are creatures of their epoch. The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week ... The best and most extraordinary artists will be those who every hour snatch the tatters of their bodies out of the frenzied cataract of life, who, with bleeding hands and hearts, hold fast to the intelligence of their time."

The cultural history of humanity creates a unique common history that connects previous generations with the current generation of humans. The Modernist re-contextualization of the individual within the fabric of this received social heritage can be seen in the "mythic method" which T.S. Eliot expounded in his discussion of James Joyce's Ulysses:

"In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him ... It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history."

Modernist literature involved such authors as Knut Hamsun

Knut Hamsun

Knut Hamsun, born Knud Pedersen was a Norwegian literature. He was considered by Isaac Bashevis Singer to be the "father of modern literature", and by Haakon VII of Norway to be Norway's soul....
(whose novel Hunger
Hunger (novel)

Hunger is a novel by the Norway author Knut Hamsun and was published in its final form in 1890. Parts of it had been published anonymously in the Denmark magazine Ny Jord in 1888....
is considered to be the first modernist novel), Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an England novelist and essayist, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literature literature figures of the twentieth century....
, T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

'Thomas Stearns Eliot', Order of Merit , was a poet, dramatist, and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Among his most famous writings are the poems The Love Song of J....
, Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein was an American writer who spent most of her life in France, and who became a catalyst in the development of modern art and Modernist literature....
, H.D.

H.D.

H.D. was an American poetry, novelist and memoirist best known for her association with the early 20th century avant-garde Imagism group of poets such as Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington....
, Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar was a seminal United States poet of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Dunbar gained national recognition for his 1896 Lyrics of a Lowly Life, one poem in the collection Ode to Ethiopia....
, Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an United States expatriate poetry, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist poetry movement in the first half of the 20th century....
, Mina Loy

Mina Loy

Mina Loy born Mina Gertrude Lowy was an artist, poet, playwright, novelist, Futurism , actress, Christian Science, designer of lamps and Bohemianism extraordinaire....
, James Joyce

James Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Ireland expatriate author of the 20th century. He is best known for his landmark novel Ulysses and its controversial successor Finnegans Wake , as well as the short story collection Dubliners and the semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ....
, Hugh MacDiarmid

Hugh MacDiarmid

Hugh MacDiarmid is the pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve , a significant Scotland poet of the 20th century. He was instrumental in creating a Scottish version of modernism and was a leading light in the Scottish Renaissance of the 20th century....
, William Faulkner

William Faulkner

Jean Toomer

Jean Toomer was an American poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance....
, Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short story author, and journalist. He was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, France, and one of the veterans of World War I later known as "the Lost Generation"....
, Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke is considered one of the German language's greatest 20th century poets. His haunting images focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety ? themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets....
, Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was one of the major fiction writers of the 20th century. He was born to a middle-class German language-speaking Jewish family in Prague, Austria-Hungary, presently the Czech Republic....
, Robert Musil

Robert Musil

Robert Musil was an Austrian writer. His unfinished long novel The Man Without Qualities is generally considered to be one of the most important modernist literature novels....
, Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad was a Polish novelist, writing in English. Many critics regard him as one of the greatest novelists in the English language, despite his not having learned to speak English fluently until he was in his twenties ....
, Andrei Bely

Andrei Bely

Andrei Bely was the pseudonym of Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev , a Russian novelist, poet, theorist, and literary critic. His miasmal and profoundly disturbing novel Petersburg was regarded by Vladimir Nabokov as one of the four greatest novels of the twentieth century....
, W. B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats

File:William Butler Yeat by George Charles Beresford.jpgWilliam Butler Yeats was an Irish people poet and dramatist and one of the foremost figures of 20th century in literature....
, F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an United States writer of novels and short stories, whose works are evocative of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself....
, Luigi Pirandello

Luigi Pirandello

Luigi Pirandello was an Italy dramatist, novelist, and short story writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934....
, D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence

David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an England author, poet, playwright, essayist and literary criticism. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization....
, Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield

Kathleen Mansfield Murry was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction from New Zealand who wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield....
, Jaroslav Hašek

Jaroslav Hašek

Jaroslav Ha?ek was a Czech people humorist and satirist best known for his world-famous novel The Good Soldier ?vejk, an unfinished collection of farcical incidents about a soldier in World War I, which has been translated into sixty languages....
, Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish people writer, dramatist and poet. Beckett's work offers a bleak outlook on human culture and both formally and philosophically became increasingly minimalism....
, Menno ter Braak

Menno ter Braak

Menno ter Braak was a Netherlands modernist author....
, Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust

Valentin Louis Georges Eug?ne Marcel Proust was a France novelist, essayist and critic, best known as the author of In Search of Lost Time , a monumental work of twentieth-century fiction published in seven parts from 1913 to 1927....
, Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov was a Russian novelist and playwright active in the first half of the 20th century. He is best known for the novel The Master and Margarita, which The Times has called one of the masterpieces of the 20th century....
, Robert Frost

Robert Frost

Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech....
, Boris Pasternak

Boris Pasternak

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Nobel Prize-winning Russian poet and writer. In the West he is best known for his epic novel Doctor Zhivago , a tragedy whose events span the last period of Tsarist Russia and the early days of the Soviet Union....
, Djuna Barnes

Djuna Barnes

Djuna Barnes was an United States writer who played an important part in the development of 20th century English language modernism writing and was one of the key figures in 1920s and 30s bohemian Paris after filling a similar role in the Greenwich Village of the 1910s....
, and others.

Overview

Modernist literature attempted to move from the bonds of Realist literature

Realism (arts)

Realism in the visual arts and literature is the depiction of subjects as they appear in everyday life, without embellishment or interpretation....
and to introduce concepts such as disjointed timelines

Nonlinear (arts)

Nonlinear narrative or disrupted narrative is a narratology, sometimes used in literature, film and other narratives, wherein events are portrayed out of chronological order....
. Modernism was distinguished by an emancipatory metanarrative

Metanarrative

In critical theory, and particularly postmodernism, a metanarrative is an abstract idea that is thought to be a comprehensive explanation of historical experience or knowledge....
. In the wake of Modernism, and post-enlightenment

Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment or The Enlightenment is a term used to describe a time in Western philosophy and cultural life centered upon the eighteenth century, in which rationalism was advocated as the primary source and legitimacy for authority....
, metanarratives tended to be emancipatory, whereas beforehand this was not a consistent characteristic. Contemporary metanarratives were becoming less relevant in light of the implications of World War I

World War I

World War I, or the First World War , was a global military conflict which involved the Great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies of World War I and the Central Powers....
, the rise of trade union

Trade union

A trade union or labor union is an organization run by and for workers who have banded together to achieve common goals in key areas such as wages, hours, and working conditions....
ism, a general social discontent, and the emergence of psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is a body of ideas developed by Austrian physician Sigmund Freud and his followers, which is devoted to the study of human psychological functioning and behaviour....
. The consequent need for a unifying function brought about a growth in the political importance of culture.

Modernist literature can be viewed largely in terms of its formal, stylistic and semantic

Semantics

Semantics is the study of meaning in communication. The word is derived from the Greek language word s??a?t???? , "significant", from s??a??? , "to signify, to indicate" and that from s??a , "sign, mark, token"....
movement away from Romanticism

Romanticism

Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution....
, examining subject matter that is traditionally mundane

Mundane

In science fiction and science fiction fandom, a mundane is a person who does not belong to a particular group, according to the members of that group; the implication is that such persons, lacking imagination, are concerned solely with the mundane: the quotidian and ordinary....
--a prime example being The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is the 1915 in literature poem that marked the start of T. S. Eliot's career as one of the twentieth century's most influential poets....
by T. S. Eliot. Modernist literature often features a marked pessimism

Pessimism

Pessimism, from the Latin pessimus , isa painful state of mind which negatively colours the perception of life, specially with regard to future events....
, a clear rejection of the optimism apparent in Victorian literature

Victorian literature

Victorian literature is the literature produced during the reign of Victoria of the United Kingdom and corresponds to the Victorian era. It forms a link and transition between the writers of the Romanticism period and the very different literature of the 20th century....
. In fact, "a common motif in Modernist fiction is that of an alienated individual--a dysfunctional individual trying in vain to make sense of a predominantly urban and fragmented society." But the questioning spirit of modernism could also be seen, less elegaically, as part of a necessary search for ways to make a new sense of a broken world. An example is A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle
A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle

A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle is a long poem by Hugh MacDiarmid written in Scots language and published in 1926. It is composed as a form of monologue with influences from stream of consciousness writing#Literature genres of writing....
by Hugh MacDiarmid, in which the individual artist applies Eliot's techniques to respond (in this case) to a historically fractured nationalism, using a more comic, parodic and "optimistic" (though no less "hopeless") modernist expression in which the artist as "hero" seeks to embrace complexity and locate new meanings.

However, many Modernist works like T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land
The Waste Land

The Waste Land is a revolutionary, highly influential 434-line Modernist poetry in English by T. S. Eliot. Despite the alleged obscurity of the poem ? its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of Narrator, Setting , its elegiac but intimidating summoning up of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and li...
are marked by the absence even of a central, heroic figure. In rejecting the solipsism

Solipsism

Solipsism is the philosophy idea that "My mind is the only thing that I know exists." Solipsism is an epistemology or ontology position that knowledge of anything outside the mind is unjustified....
of Romantics like Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major England Romantic poets and is widely considered to be among the finest Lyric poetry in the English language....
and Byron

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron

George Gordon Byron, later Noel, 6th Baron Byron Royal Society was a United Kingdom poet and a leading figure in Romanticism. Amongst Byron's best-known works are the brief poems She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, and So, we'll go no more a roving, in addition to the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and...
, such works reject the notion of subject associated with Cartesian dualism, collapsing narrative and narrator into a collection of disjointed fragments and overlapping voices.

Modernist literature often moves beyond the limitations of the Realist novel with a concern for larger factors such as social or historical change. This is prominent in "stream of consciousness" writing. Examples can be seen in Virginia Woolf's Kew Gardens
Kew Gardens (short story)

Kew Gardens is a short story by the England author Virginia Woolf.It was first published privately in 1919, then more widely in 1921 in the collection Monday or Tuesday, and subsequently in the posthumous collection A Haunted House ....
and Mrs Dalloway
Mrs Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway is a novel by Virginia Woolf that details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in post-World War I England. Mrs Dalloway continues to be one of Woolf's best-known novels....
, James Joyce's Ulysses
Ulysses (novel)

Ulysses is a novel by James Joyce, first serialized in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on February 2, 1922, in Paris....
, Katherine Porter's Flowering Judas, Jean Toomer

Jean Toomer

Jean Toomer was an American poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance....
's Cane
Cane (novel)

Cane is a 1923 novel by noted Harlem Renaissance figure and author Jean Toomer. The novel is structured as a series of Vignette revolving around the origins and experiences of African Americans in the United States....
, William Faulkner

William Faulkner

William Faulkner was a Nobel Prize in Literature-winning United States author. One of the most influential writers of the 20th century, his reputation is based on his novels, novellas and short story....
's The Sound and the Fury
The Sound and the Fury

The Sound and the Fury is one of the most celebrated novels of the twentieth century, written by American author William Faulkner, which makes use of the Stream of consciousness writing narrative technique pioneered by European authors such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf....
, and others.

Modernism as a literary movement is seen, in large part, as a reaction to the emergence of city life

Urbanization

Urbanization is the physical growth of rural or natural land into urban areas as a result of population im-migration to an existing urban area....
as a central force in society. Furthermore, an early attention to the object as freestanding became in later Modernism a preoccupation with form. The dyadic collapse of the distance between subject and object represented a movement from means to is. Where Romanticism stressed the subjectivity of experience, Modernist writers were more acutely conscious of the objectivity of their surroundings. In Modernism the object is; the language doesn't mean it is. This is a shift from an epistemological

Epistemology

Epistemology or theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge. It addresses the questions:...
aesthetic to an ontological

Ontology

Ontology in philosophy is the study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as of the basic category of being and their relations....
aesthetic or, in simpler terms, a shift from a knowledge-based aesthetic to a being-based aesthetic. This shift is central to Modernism. Archibald MacLeish

Archibald MacLeish

Archibald MacLeish was an American poet, writer and the Librarian of Congress. He is associated with the modernism school of poetry. He has received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work....
, for instance, said, "A poem should not mean / But be."

Characteristics of Modernity/Modernism

Formal/Stylistic characteristics

Open Form
Free verse
Discontinuous narrative
Juxtaposition
Intertextuality
Classical allusions
Borrowings from other cultures and languages
Unconventional use of metaphor
Symbolic representation
Metanarrative
Psychoanalysis
Fragmentation
Multiple narrative points of view (parallax)

Thematic characteristics

Breakdown of social norms and cultural sureties
Social meaning
Dislocation of meaning and sense from its normal context
Spiritual loneliness
Valorization of the despairing individual in the face of an unmanageable future
Alienation
Frustration and 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 writing|Stream of consciousness
Free indirect speech|Free indirect discourse
Overwhelming technological changes of the 20th Century

Modernist literature

Overview

Characteristics of Modernity/Modernism

Formal/Stylistic characteristics

Thematic characteristics

See also

External links