Modernism

(Modern, Modernity, Modernism

and Postmodernism)
 The Origin of the word “Modern”
• The word modern, first recorded in 1585 in the
sense "of present or recent times”.
• Antithesis to the word antiquity.
• Modern era is, ironically, associated with the
European Enlightenment in the 18th century
(around after 1870) and are expressed in the
ideas of Immanuel Kant, Voltaire and Hume.
 The Basic Idea of the Enlightenment (17th and
18th Centuries) are as follows:
A. The self is stable, coherent, rational.
B. It knows the world through reason.
C. The mode of knowing produced by the self is science.
D. Knowledge/ truth produced by this science will lead towards
progress.
E. Reason is the ultimate judge of what is true= the good = the right.
F. Science is the paradigm for all types of knowledge and those who
produce scientific knowledge are not motivated by other concerns
(power and knowledge).
G. Language, or other modes of expression used in producing or
disseminating knowledge must also be rational. Firm and objective
connection between signifier and signified.
 Modernity
1. Modernity follows this Enlightenment project. It began in
the 18th century.
2. Modernity is fundamentally about order: about rationality
and rationalization, creating order out of chaos.
3. It is also historically connected to the creation of many new
inventions. E.g. television, telephone and so forth.
4. Modernity exists in a post-industrial context. It is everything
that can generally be seen as modern, and therefore exists
as a historical period informed by all those before it.
5. It stands as an era of social relations most commonly
associated with capitalism and a new global awareness.
• Yet from the 1870s onward, the idea that history
and civilization were inherently progressive, and that
progress was always good came under increasing
attack.
• The detrimental effects of the industrial revolution,
e.g. Karl Marx’s alienation of capitalist workers and
deplorable living conditions of the working people.
There was also the general decline of religion
brought about by Charles Darwin’s Theory of
Evolution.
• In the 1880s, a strand of thinking began to assert that it was
necessary to push aside previous norms entirely, instead of
merely revising past knowledge in light of contemporary
techniques.
• Modernist art began to appear. Everdell dates its first
appearance to the years between 1885-86 with Goerges Seurat's
of Pointillism., the "dots" used to paint "A Sunday Afternoon on
the Island of La Grande Jatte.“
• Later, and not so locally, modernism appeared in music,
architecture and literature.
• “Avant-garde“ a term used for the first time to describe a literary
movement.
Georges Seurat’s "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” (1884).
• The growing movement in art paralleled developments in
physics, such as Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity
(1905); innovations in industry and the increased role of
the social sciences in public policy. Freud’s psychoanalytical
theory also showed that man was govern not by his
rational side but something in his unconscious mind.
• These were the beginning of a series of intense questioning
into the nature of reality and if previous restrictions
(namely religious and scientific authorities) which had been
in place around human activity were dissolving, then art,
too, would have to radically change.
 The period of “High Modernism”
• Thus, in the first twenty years of the 20th century
many writers, thinkers, and artists broke with the
traditional means of organizing literature, painting, and
music; the results were abstract art, atonal music, and
the stream of consciousness technique in the novel.
• Modernism as an artistic and cultural movement
operated within the context of the rejection of this
realism and rejection of the development of concrete
values.
• New styles were being invented!
Multiple Perspectives
The Cubist Art of
Pablo Picasso (1881-
1973) ,
“The Weeping
Woman” (1937)
Modernist Sculptures

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917.

Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz
Minimalist
Art
Piet Mondrian (1872-
1944), Composition 10
(1939-42).
 Modernism
• These developments began to give a new meaning to
what was termed "modernism": It approved
disruption, rejecting or moving beyond simple
realism in literature and art, and rejecting or
dramatically altering tonality in music.
• Modernism, while still "progressive", increasingly
saw traditional forms and traditional social
arrangements as hindering progress, and therefore
recast the artist as a revolutionary, overthrowing
rather than enlightening.
The impact of The World Wars on Modernist
Art
• The Great War and its subsequent events supported
the avant-gardists’ position. These proved that:
1) Men were ruled by their desire to dominate
regardless of the cost.
2) The birth of a machine age changed the conditions of
life—machine warfare became a touchstone of the
ultimate reality.
3) The view that mankind was making slow and steady
moral progress seemed ridiculous in the face of the
senseless slaughter.
 Some Modernist Writers and Artists from
America and Europe:
• 1) Ezra Pound (Imagism)
• 2) Virginia Woolf (Feminist theorist)
• 3) Bertolt Brecht (Alienation effect)
• 4) Pablo Picasso (Cubism)
• 5) William Faulkner
• And many others.
 Modernist Literature tend to follow these
trends:
• 1) An emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity, that is, on how we see
rather than what we see ( a preoccupation evident in the use of streams-of-
consciousness technique).
• E.g. In the following example of stream of consciousness from James Joyce's
Ulysses, Molly seeks sleep:

• “a quarter after what an unearthly hour I suppose theyre just getting up in

China now combing out their pigtails for the day well soon have the nuns
ringing the angelus theyve nobody coming in to spoil their sleep except an odd
priest or two for his night office the alarmlock next door at cockshout clattering
the brains out of itself let me see if I can doze off 1 2 3 4 5 what kind of flowers
are those they invented like the stars the wallpaper in Lombard street was
much nicer the apron he gave me was like that something only I only wore it
twice better lower this lamp and try again so that I can get up early”. [4]
2) A movement (in novels) away from the
apparent objectivity provided by such features
as: omniscient external narration, fixed
narrative points of view and clear-cut moral
positions. The narrators, hence, could be
unreliable. There could also be many narrators
and the moral position is sometimes unclear.
• 3) A blurring of the distinctions between
genres, so that novels tend to become more
lyrical and poetic, for instance, and poems
more documentary and prose-like.
4) A new liking for the fragmented forms, discontinuous narrative,
and random-seeming collages, of disparate materials.
E.g.
Am I To Understand - a fragment -

Am I to understand?
Where's McNally? Where's Rand?
However many grand,
Let's give a great big hand...
Am I to understand?
By Ryan McCabe
5) A tendency towards “reflexivity” or self-consciousness, about the
production of the work of art, so that each piece calls attention to
its own status as a production, as something constructed.

E.g. Six Characters in Search of An Author by Luigi Pirandello

Synopsis: An acting company prepares to rehearse the play Mixing
It Up by Luigi Pirandello. As the rehearsal is about to begin, they
are unexpectedly interrupted by the arrival of six strange people.
The Director of the play, furious at the interruption, demands an
explanation. The Father explains that they are unfinished
characters in search of an author to finish their story
6) A rejection of elaborate formal aesthetics in
favour of minimalist designs and a rejection in
large part, of formal aesthetic theories, in
favour of spontaneity and discovery in texts.

E.g. Ezra Pound’s poem “In a Station of the Metro” only consists of two lines.

THE apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.
By Ezra Pound
Look at youtube video: https://youtu.be/6F7quI-MbzY
7) A rejection of the distinction between “high”
and low or popular (pop) culture both in choice
of materials used to produce art and in methods
of displaying and distribution as something
constructed.

E.g. Some rap lyrics are treated as poetry.

• But then there was a shift from modernism to
postmodernism. (Cont. with Postmodernism
by another group)
• The end.