Historical - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

Historical Background

1901-1910 – Edward VII

1902 – End of The Anglo-Boer War

1910-1936 – George V

1914-1918 – First World War

1916 – Dublin,

Easter Rising

1917 – Revolution in Russia

1918 – Vote for Women over 30 years of age in G.B.

1919-20

– Treatise of Versailles – Society of Nations

1921 – Irish Free State, Ulster (Northern Ireland) belongs to the U.K.

1922 – Mussolini in Italy

1928 – Vote for Women in G. B.

1929 – Stock Market Crash and Great Depression

1933 – Hitler in Germany

1936-39 – Civil War in Spain

1936 – Edward VIII succeeds George V, but then abdicated in

favour

of his brother, who became king as George VI

1939-1945 – Second World War

1941-45 – Holocaust

1945 – Hiroshima

1952 – Elizabeth IISlide2

What

is

Modernism?

I do not think that any previous age

produced work

which was, in its own time, as shatteringly and bewildering new as that of the Cubists, the Dadaists, the Surrealists, and Picasso has been in ours. And I am quite sure that this is true….of poetry…I do not see how anyone can doubt that modern poetry is not only a greater novelty than any other ‘new poetry’ but new in a new way, almost in a new dimension

C.S. Lewis ,

De

Descriptione

Temporum

, 1954Slide3

What is

Modernism?

Modernist art is […] reckoned to be the art of what Harold Rosenberg calls “the tradition of the new”. It is experimental, formally complex, elliptical, contains of

decreation

as well as creation, and tends to associate notions of the artist ‘s freedom from realism, materialism, traditional genre and form, with notions of cultural apocalypse and disaster. … We can dispute about when it starts (French Symbolism, decadence; the break-up of naturalism) and whether it has ended (Kermode distinguishes ‘

paleo

-modernism’ from ‘neo-modernism’ and hence a degree of continuity through the postwar art). We can regard it as a

timebound

concept (say 1890 to 1930) or a timeless one (including Sterne, Donne, Villon, Ronsard). The best focus remains a body of major writers (James, Conrad, Proust, Mann, Gide, Kafka,

Svevo

, Joyce,

Musil

, Faulkner in fiction, Strindberg, Pirandello,

Wedekind

, Brecht in drama;

Mallarmé

, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Rilke, Apollinaire, Stevens in poetry) whose works are aesthetically radical, contain striking technical innovation, emphasize spatial or ‘fugal’ as opposed to chronological form, tend towards ironic modes, and involve a certain ‘dehumanization of art’ Malcolm Bradbury,

A Dictionary of Modern Critical TermsSlide4

Modernism:

features

in common with other

movements

Bohemia

active

in

Paris

from

the 1830s

The

artist

as

a

futurist

was

active

throughout

romantic

thought

Aesthetic

of

experimentalism

common

to

Naturalism

1880

The idea

of

the

multiplicity

of

consciousness

(Pater 1870)

Response

of

the

imagination

to

an

urbanized

world (Baudelaire:

unreal

city,

imagination

produces

the

sensation

of

newness

)

Desecration

of

established

conventions

,

witty

image

and

anguish

(Sterne, Donne,

Villon

)Slide5

Dating Modernism

1890-1903

For

Frank

Kermode

the 1890s are

forerunners

of

modernism

.

Modernism

: 1905-1927

1922

Annus

Mirabilis

: Eliot’s

The

Waste

Land

, Joyce’s

Ulysses

For

others

(Stephen Spender, Graham

Hough

)

period

of

enhanced

intensity

between

1910 and WW1Slide6

Dating Modernism2

“On or about December 1910 human nature changed… All human relations shifted – those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature” V. Woolf, “

Mr

Bennett and

Mrs

Brown”, 1924

“It was in 1915 the old world ended” D.H. Lawrence,

Kangaroo,

1923Slide7

Flaubert on style

“What strikes me as beautiful, what I should like to do, is a book about nothing, a book without external attachments, which would hold together by itself through the internal force of its style….a book which would have practically no subject, or at least one in which the subject would be almost invisible, if that is possible.” Flaubert, Letter to Louise Colet, January 16, 1852Slide8

Key features

of

Modernism

Radical

aesthetics

Technical

experimentation

Spatial

or

rhythmic

rather

than

chronological

form

Self-conscious

reflexiveness

Scepticism

towards the idea of a

centred

human subject

Inquiry

into

the

uncertainty

of

reality

Focus on the city

Championing as well as fear of technologySlide9

Key-features of

Modernism2

Anti-representationalism

in

painting

Atonalism

in

music

Vers

libre

in

poetry

Stream-of-consciousness

in

novelSlide10

Modernism

The sequence of Modernism […] is a very various sequence running through different subversions of the realist impulse: Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism,

Vorticism

, Futurism, Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism. They are not all movements of the same kind […] but one feature that links the movements at the centre of sensibility we are discerning is that they tend to see history or human life not as a sequence, or history not as an evolving logic […] Modernist works frequently tend to

be ordered, then,

not on the sequence of historical time or the evolving

sequence of

character, from history

or story,

as in realism and naturalism; they tend to work

spatially or

through layers of consciousness, working towards a logic of metaphor or form