Lect. dr.

Andreea Paris-Popa
aparispopa@gmail.com
 
UNIT 2

MODERNISM - DEFINITIONS AND CHARACTERISTICS

Definitions

Modernism, in the arts, [is] a radical break with the past and the concurrent search for new forms of expression.
Modernism fostered a period of experimentation in the arts from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, particularly
in the years following World War I. (Encyclopædia Britannica)

Modernism was a movement in the arts in the first half of the twentieth century that rejected traditional values
and techniques, and emphasized the importance of individual experience. (Collins Dictionary)

Modernism: modern artistic or literary philosophy and practice; especially: a self-conscious break with the past
and a search for new forms of expression. (Merriam-Webster)

Modernism . . . 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 society in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. The term encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the “traditional form of art,
architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new
economic, social and political conditions of an emerging, fully industrialized world. (Lewis Pericles)

Characteristics

1). EXPERIMENTALISM, AVANT-GARDISM: innovation, breaking of the rules, bringing about novelty,
shock-factor; avant-gardists are eager to explore new ways of creating art, new forms of expression and new
angles of looking at the world - the untried is superior to the familiar, the rare to the ordinary, the experimental to
the routine
=> Italian Futurism: “To admire an old picture is to pour our sensibility into a funeral urn instead of casting it
forward with violent spurts of creation and action. Do you want to waste the best part of your strength in a useless
admiration of the past, from which you will emerge exhausted, diminished, trampled on? . . . The oldest among
us are not yet thirty years old: we have therefore at least ten years to accomplish our task. When we are forty let
younger and stronger men than [us]throw us in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts! . . .Look at us!
We are not out of breath, our hearts are not in the least tired. For they are nourished by fire, hatred and speed!
Does this surprise you? it is because you do not even remember being alive!” (Marinetti)
=> Impressionism
=> Post-Impressionism
=> Cubism
=> Non-objectivism
=> Imagism
=> Dadaism: “Dada doesn’t mean anything” (vs. the Enlightenment focus on reason), “DADA DADA DADA, a
roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE.”
(Tzara)
=> Surrealism: André Breton’s 1924 manifesto in which he defined surrealism as “Pure psychic automatism, by
which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought.
Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral
preoccupation”

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 Lect. dr. Andreea Paris-Popa
aparispopa@gmail.com
 

Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872) Van Gogh’s Starry Night (1889)

Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) Kandinsky’s Painting with a Red Stain (1914)

2). THE LURE OF HERESY: A Rejection of Traditional Values

- confront conventional sensibilities, drastic departures from settled aesthetic norms and habits, reject realism;
purposeful aesthetic rupture; undermine coherence, chronology, closure; reject the linear, teleological view of
history
3). CULTURAL RELATIVISM: Certainty Replaced by Ambiguity and Indeterminacy
- meaning of things is no longer assured, reject Victorian focus on nationalism and cultural absolutism
4). FRAGMENTATION AND ABSTRACTION: A Crisis in Representation
- fragmented, hollow and chaotic world, a waste land left behind by the Great War
- mourn the loss of wholeness, but still hope in the possibility of bringing the pieces together
- at least since ancient times, art has sought to represent reality, but with modernism, there is a tendency to move
away from representational realism and towards abstract, non-representational art: art is no longer mimetic- crisis
in perception and in language as tool for representation; the self is fragmented, the human being is disjointed
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 Lect. dr. Andreea Paris-Popa
aparispopa@gmail.com
 
5). SELF-SCRUTINY AND INTROSPECTION: A Celebration of Subjectivity
- re-examine every aspect of existence, starting with the self, exploration of the unconscious
=> stream of consciousness, inner voyage, psychology, psychoanalysis: the ego in conflict with the world
- the characters’ INNER REALITY (conflicting, overlapping thoughts) becomes more important than the
EXTERNAL WORLD (the plot)
- it is not WHAT happens that is important, but HOW what happens is perceived, felt by the characters
“Ironically, this subjectivism has to be accommodated alongside a whole series of announcements of the end of
individual subjectivity, from Eliot’s famous defense of impersonality in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, to
Joyce’s promotion (via his character Stephen Dedalus) of an aesthetic of authorial detachment” (Steven Connor)
6). IDEAL OF AUTONOMY: Art for Art’s Sake
- Kant: purposefulness vs. purposiveness of an object
- Oscar Wilde: “All Art is quite useless”.
- the purpose of art is art: art serves no one but itself…certainly not moral progress (French writer Theophile
Gautier) break Victorian concepts of morality and move away from didacticism
- Virginia Woolf: a novel “is complete in itself; it is self-contained; it leaves one with no desire to do anything,
except indeed to read the book again, and to understand it better. . . . both Sterne and Jane Austen were interested
in things in themselves; in character in itself; in the book in itself. Therefore everything was inside the book,
nothing outside”.
- a poem should not mean, but be (in the words of American poet Archibald MacLeish, “Ars Poetica”, 1926)
Ars Poetica (by Archibald MacLeish)
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
A poem should be palpable and mute Memory by memory the mind—
As a globed fruit,
A poem should be motionless in time
Dumb As the moon climbs.
As old medallions to the thumb, *
A poem should be equal to:
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone Not true.
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—
For all the history of grief
A poem should be wordless An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
As the flight of birds.
* For love
A poem should be motionless in time The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—
As the moon climbs,
A poem should not mean
Leaving, as the moon releases But be 
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
7). IRRATIONALITY
- literature becomes absurd and more inclined towards non-sense, intuition, mysticism
8). ALIENATION
- feeling of rootlessness, uncertainty, estrangement, impossibility of being understood (failure of language): “That
is not what I meant at all, That is not it at all” (Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”), “It seems to me I
am trying to tell you a dream. . . It is impossible. We live, as we dream-alone” (Conrad, Heart of Darkness):
individualism and solipsism
9). URBANISM
- the city, with all its chaos and anarchy, locus of intellectual and artistic; multiplicity of voices, simultaneity of
perspectives, labyrinthic disorientation, infinite opportunities
- the city as main character: James Joyce’s Dublin, Virginia Woolf’s London, T.S. Eliot’s London (but also
Proust’s Paris, Dos Passos’ New York, Kafka’s Prague etc.)

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 Lect. dr. Andreea Paris-Popa
aparispopa@gmail.com
 
10). REVOLUTION IN TASTE: The Pleasure and Pain of Difficult Reading
- D.H. Lawrence: “… to read a really new novel will always hurt, to some extent. There will always be resistance.
The same with new pictures, new music. You may judge of their reality by the fact that they do arouse a certain
resistance, and compel, at length, a certain acquiescence.” => incomprehensible compositions, plotless novels
- emphasis on HOW we perceive; elitism, difficult form aimed at intellectual readers
- criticism brought forth by John Fowles in his postmodernist novel Mantissa (1982): “serious modern fiction has
only one subject: the difficulty of writing serious modern fiction” (Fowles)

A Few Influential Thinkers of the Twentieth Century

Henri Bergson (1859–1941) – theory of time, la durée (distinction between objective and subjective time) – it is
the lived, internalized time that matters; l’élan vital, knowledge is based on intuition and subjectivity
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) – the unconscious, psychoanalysis, individual psyche, pleasure principle, latent
sexuality, repressed desires, Oedipus complex, interpretation of dreams
Gustav Jung (1875–1961) – the collective unconscious, inherited memory, archetypes
James Frazer (1854–1941) – The Golden Bough (multiple volumes, 1890-1936), humanity has surpassed the
stages of development based on magic and religion and has evolved into a modern stage based on science
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) – The Special Theory of Relativity (1905): the speed of light is absolute, always a
constant, but space and time are not (challenging the two absolutes of Newton’s physics) => there is no universal,
static frame of reference, which means that distance and time are dependent upon the viewpoint of the observer
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 –1900) – the end of objectivity (we only see in things that which we ourselves put
there); the world is relativistic, dynamic and open; God is dead => the collapse of absolute authority (secularized
modernity) leads to relativism, nihilism and alienation; the overman establishes his own values, influences others
through his will to power (the driving force of life is a yearning for mastery through knowledge and all forms of
knowledge are expressions of the will to power); two driving forces behind art: Apollonian (light, reason, logic,
control, form and tendency towards preservation) or Dionysian (darkness, irrationality, passion, intoxication and
compulsion towards destruction); need for rejuvenation, individually derived morality; the subject is fiction.
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) – phenomenology, studying the contents of consciousness, pure phenomena
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) – existentialism, the philosophy of despair, human beings are in the dark, but
condemned to be free and responsible for their own actions

Virginia Woolf’s manifesto for a new way of writing fiction in the twentieth century
“Modern Fiction” (1919)
“Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this”. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an
ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the
sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they
shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of
importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what
he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would
be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single
button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged;
life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the
end.” (Woolf)

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 Lect. dr. Andreea Paris-Popa
aparispopa@gmail.com
 
“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924)
- “on or about December 1910 human character changed . . . And when human relations change there is at the
same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature. Let us agree to place one of these changes about
the year 1910”
- according to Arnold Bennett “the foundation of literature is character-creating and nothing else . . . if the
characters are real the novel will have a chance; if they are not, oblivion will be its portion”
- Woolf agreed with the importance of character-creation, but challenged the notion of ‘reality’: “But I ask myself,
what is reality? And who are the judges of reality? A character may be real to Mr. Bennett and quite unreal to me
. . . There is nothing that people differ about more than the reality of characters”
- according to Woolf, instead of focusing on the characters themselves, Edwardian writers describe the houses
they live in, look at or think about, their job and wedges, their family history, their physical diseases and material
problems (only materialist, outward connections to the world made them real), but not their psychology and their
thoughts which are essential to character building

“Mrs Brown is eternal, Mrs Brown is human nature, Mrs Brown changes only on the surface, it is the novelists
who get in and out—there she sits and not one of the Edwardian writers has so much as looked at her. They have
looked very powerfully, searchingly, and sympathetically out of the window; at factories, at Utopias, even at the
decoration and upholstery of the carriage; but never at her, never at life, never at human nature. And so they
have developed a technique of novel-writing which suits their purpose; they have made tools and established
conventions which do their business. But those tools are not our tools, and that business is not our business. For
us those conventions are ruin, those tools are death.” (Woolf)

“Mrs Brown must be rescued, expressed, and set in her high relations to the world before the train stopped and
she disappeared for ever. . . . But do not expect just at present a complete and satisfactory presentment of her.
Tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure. Your help is invoked in a good cause. For I
will make one final and surpassingly rash prediction—we are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of
English literature. But it can only be reached if we are determined never, never to desert Mrs Brown.” (Woolf)

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