Paper no: 9 Modernist Literature
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History of the Age
of Modernist Literature
Name : Vadher Arti
Hareshbhai
Roll no : 5
Year: 2016-18
M.A. semester :3
Paper no : 9
Modernist Literature
Assignment topic :
history of the age
Submitted to :
smt.S.B.Gardi, Department of English.
Introduction
Broadly speaking,
‘modernism’ might be said to have been characterised by a deliberate and often
radical shift away from tradition, and consequently by the use of new and
innovative forms of expression Thus, many styles in art and literature from the
late 19th and early 20th centuries are markedly different from those that preceded
them. The term ‘modernism’ generally covers the creative output of artists and
thinkers who saw ‘traditional’ approaches to the arts, architecture,
literature, religion, social organisation (and even life itself) had become
outdated in light of the new economic, social and political circumstances of a
by now fully industrialised society.
Amid rapid social change and significant developments in science
(including the social sciences), modernists found themselves alienated from
what might be termed Victorian morality and convention. They duly set about
searching for radical responses to the radical changes occurring around them,
affirming mankind’s power to shape and influence his environment through experimentation,
technology and scientific advancement, while identifying potential obstacles to
‘progress’ in all aspects of existence in order to replace them with updated
new alternatives.
All the enduring certainties of
Enlightenment thinking, and the heretofore unquestioned existence of an
all-seeing, all-powerful ‘Creator’ figure, were high on the modernists’ list of
dogmas that were now to be challenged, or subverted, perhaps rejected
altogether, or, at the very least, reflected uponfrom a fresh new ‘modernist’
perspective.
Not that modernism
categorically defied religion or eschewed all the beliefs and ideas associated
with the Enlightenment; it would be more accurate to view modernism as a
tendency to question, and strive for alternatives to, the convictions of the
preceding age. The past was now to be seen and treated as different from the
modern era, and its axioms and undisputed authorities held up for revision and
enquiry.
The extent to which modernism is
open to diverse interpretations, and even rife with apparent paradoxes and
contradictions, is perhaps illustrated by the uneasy juxtaposition of the
viewpoints declared by two of modernist poetry’s most celebrated and emblematic
poets: while Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was making his famous call to “make it
new”, his contemporary T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was stressing the indispensable
nature of tradition in art, insisting upon the artist’s responsibility to
engage with tradition. Indeed, the overtly complex, contradictory character of
modernism is summed up by Peter Childs, who identifies “paradoxical if not
opposed trends towards revolutionary and reactionary positions, fear of the new
and delight at the disappearance of the old, nihilism and fanatical enthusiasm,
creativity and despair”
THE‘EARLY MODERN’
PERIOD
‘Early modern’ is a term used by historians to
refer to the period approximately from AD 1500 to 1800, especially in Western
Europe. It follows the Late Medieval period, and is marked by the first
European colonies, the rise of strong centralised governments, and the
beginnings of recognisable nation-states that are the direct antecedents of
today’s states, in what is called modern times. This era spans the two
centuries between the Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution that provided
the basis for modern European and American society, and in subsequent years the
term ‘early modern has evolved to be less euro-centric, more generally useful
for tracking related historical events across vast regions, as the cultural
influences and dynamics from one region impacting on distant others has become
more appreciated.
The early modern period is
characterised by the rise of science, the shrinkage of relative distances
through improvements in transportation and communications and increasingly
rapid technological progress, secularised civic politics and the early
authoritarian nation-states. Furthermore, capitalist economies and institutions
began their rise and development, beginning in northern Italian republics such
as Genoa, and the Venetian oligarchy. The early modern period also saw the rise
of the economic theory of mercantilism. As such, the early modern period
represents the decline and eventual disappearance, in much of the European
sphere, of Christian theocracy, feudalism and serfdom. The period includes the
Reformation, the disastrous Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), which is generally
considered one of the most destructive conflicts in European history, in
addition to the Commercial Revolution, the European colonisation of the Americas,
the Golden Age of Piracy and the peak of the European witch-hunt craze.
The expression ‘early modern’
is sometimes (and incorrectly) used as a substitute for the term ‘Renaissance’.
However, ‘Renaissance’ is properly used in relation to a diverse series of
cultural developments that occurred over several hundred years in many
different parts of Europe –especially central and northern Italy – and spans
the transition from late medieval civilization to the opening of the ‘early modern’
period.
Artistically, the Renaissance is clearly
distinct from what came later, and only in the study of literature is the early
modern period considered broadly as a standard: music, for instance, is
generally divided between Renaissance and Baroque; similarly, philosophy is
divided between Renaissance philosophy and the Enlightenment. In other fields,
perhaps, there is more continuity through the period, as can be seen in the
contexts of warfare and science.
THE
‘MODERN’ PERIOD
The modern period (known also as the
‘modern era’, or also ‘modern times’) is the period of history that succeeded
the Middle Ages (which ended in approximately 1500 AD) As a historical term, it
is applied primarily to European and Western history.
The modern era is
further divided as follows:
* The ‘early
period’, outlined above, which concluded with the advent of the Industrial
Revolution in the mid 18th century.
* The 18th century
Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution in Britain, can be posited amid
the dawning of an ‘Age of Revolutions’, beginning with those in America and
France, and then pushed forward in other countries partly as a result of the
upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars.
* Our present or
contemporary era begins with the end of these revolutions in the 19th century,
and includes World War I, World War II, and the Cold War.
The modern period has been a
period of significant development in the fields of science, politics, warfare,
and technology. It has also been an age of discovery and globalisation: it is
during this time that the European powers and later their colonies, began their
political, economic, and cultural colonisation of the rest of the world.
By the late 19th and early 20th century, modernist art, politics,
science and culture had come to dominate not only Western Europe and North
America, but almost every civilised area on the globe, including movements
thought of as opposed to the West and globalisation. The modern era is closely
associated with the development of individualism, capitalism, urbanisation and
a belief in the positive possibilities of technological and political progress.
The brutal wars and other problems of this
era, many of which come from the effects of rapid change and the connected loss
of strength of traditional religious and ethical norms, have led to many
reactions against modern development: optimism and belief in constant progress
has been most recently criticised by ‘postmodernism’, while the dominance of
Western Europe and North America over other continents has been criticised by
postcolonial theory.
The concept of the modern world
as distinct from an ancient or medieval one rests on a sense that ‘modernity’
is not just another era in history, but rather the result of a new type of
change. This isusually conceived of as progress driven by deliberate human
efforts to better their situation. Advances in all areas of human activity –
politics, industry, society, economics, commerce, transport, communication,
mechanisation, automation, science, medicine, technology, and culture –appear
to have transformed an ‘old world’ into the ‘modern’ or ‘new world’. In each
case, the identification of the old Revolutionary change can be used to
demarcate the old and old-fashioned from the modern.
Much of the modern world has replaced the
Biblical-oriented value system, re-evaluated the monarchical government system,
and abolished the feudal economic system, with new democratic and liberal ideas
in the areas of politics, science, psychology, sociology, and economics.
MODERNISM
The first
half of the nineteenth century saw an aesthetic turning away from the realities
of politicaland social fragmentation, and so facilitated a trend towards
Romanticism: emphasis on individual subjective experience, the sublime, the
supremacy of Nature as a subject for art, revolutionary or radical extensions
of expression, and individual liberty. By mid-century, however, a synthesis of
these ideas with stable governing forms had emerged, partly in reaction to the failed
Romantic and democratic Revolutions of 1848. Exemplified by ‘practical’
philosophical ideas such as positivism, and called by various names – in Great
Britain it is designated the ‘Victorian era’ – this stabilizing synthesis was
rooted in the idea that reality dominates over subjective impressions.
Central to this synthesis
were common assumptions and institutional frames of reference, including the
religious norms found in Christianity, scientific norms found in classical
physics and doctrines that asserted that the depiction of external reality from
an objective standpoint was not only possible but desirable. Cultural critics
and historians label this set of doctrines Realism, though this term is not
universal. In philosophy, the rationalist, materialist and positivist movements
established a primacy of reason and system.
Against this current ran a series of ideas,
some of them direct continuations of Romantic schools of thought. Notable among
these were the agrarian and revivalist movements in plastic arts and poetry
(e.g. the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the philosopher John Ruskin).
Rationalism also drew responses from the anti-rationalists in philosophy: in
particular, G. W. F. Hegel’s dialectic view of civilization and history drew
responses from Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard, who were major
influences on Existentialism. All of these separate reactions together began to
be seen as offering a challenge to any comfortable ideas of certainty derived
by civilization, history, or pure reason.
From the 1870s onward, the ideas that history
and civilization were inherently progressive and that progress was always good
came under increasing attack. The likes of the German composer Richard Wagner
(1813-83) and the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) had been reviled
for their own critiques of contemporary civilization and for their warnings
that accelerating ‘progress’ would lead to the creation of individuals detached
from social values and isolated from their fellow men. Arguments arose that the
values of the artist and those of society were not merely different, but that
Society was antithetical to Progress, and could not move forward in its present
form. Philosophers called into question the previous optimism. The work of the
German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was labelled ‘pessimistic’
for its idea of the ‘negation of the will’, an idea that would be both rejected
and incorporated by later thinkers such as Nietzsche (1844-1900).
Two of the most significant
thinkers of the period were, in biology, Charles Darwin, and in political
science, Karl Marx. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection
undermined the religious certainty of the general public, and the sense of
human uniqueness of the intelligentsia. The notion that human beings were
driven by the same impulses as ‘lower animals’ proved to be difficult to
reconcile with the idea of an ennobling spirituality. Marx argued there were
fundamental contradictions within the capitalist system – and that, contrary to
the libertarian ideal, the workerswere anything but free. Both thinkers would
spawn defenders and schools of thought that would become decisive in
establishing modernism.
Separately, in the arts and
letters, two ideas originating in France would have particular impact. Thefirst
was Impressionism, a school of painting that initially focused on work done,
not in studios, butoutdoors. Impressionist paintings demonstrated that human
beings do not see objects, but instead see light itself. The school gathered
adherents despite internal divisions among its leading practitioners, and
became increasingly influential. Initially rejected by the most important commercial
show of the time, the government-sponsored Paris Salon, the Impressionists
organised yearly group exhibitions in commercial venues during the 1870s and
1880s, timing them to coincide with the official Salon. A significant event of
1863 was the Salon des Refusés, created by Emperor Napoleon III to display all
of the paintings rejected by the Paris Salon. While most were in standard
styles, but by inferior artists, the work of Manet attracted tremendous
attention, and opened commercial doors to the movement.
The second school was
Symbolism, marked by a belief that language is expressly symbolic in its
nature, and that poetry and writing should follow connections that the sound
and texture of the words create. The poet Stephane Mallarme would be of
particular importance to what would occur afterwards.
At the
same time social, political, and economic forces were at work that would become
the basis to argue for a radically different kind of art and thinking. Chief
among these was steam-powered industrialization, which produced buildings that
combined art and engineering in new industrial materials such as cast iron to
produce railroad bridges and glass-and-iron train sheds – or the EiffelTower,
which broke all previous limitations on how tall man-made objects could be –
and at the same time offered a radically different environment in urban life.
The miseries of industrial urbanism, and
the possibilities created by scientific examination of subjects, brought
changes that would shake a European civilization which had, until then,
regarded itself as having a continuous and progressive line of development from
the Renaissance. With the telegraph offering instant communication at a
distance, the experience of time itself was altered.
In the 1890s 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 current
techniques. It was argued that, if the nature of reality itself was in
question, and if restrictions which had been in place around human activity
were falling, then art, too, would have to radically change. Thus, in the first
fifteenyears of the twentieth century a series of writers, thinkers, and
artists made the break with traditional means of organising literature,
painting, and music. This wave of the modern movement broke with the past in
the first decade of the twentieth century, and tried to redefine various artforms
in a radical manner.
Composers
such as Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and George Antheil represent modernism in
music. Artists such as Gustav Klimt, Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, and the
movements Les Fauves, Cubism and the Surrealists represent various strains of
Modernism in the visual arts, while architects and designers such as Le
Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe brought modernist ideas
into everyday urban life. Several figures outside of artistic modernism were
influenced by artistic ideas; for example, John Maynard Keynes was friends with
Virginia Woolf and other writers of the London-based Bloomsbury group.
On the eve of the First World War a growing
tension and unease with the social order, seen in the Russian Revolution of
1905 and the agitation of ‘radical’ parties, also manifested itself in artistic
works in every medium, which radically simplified or rejected previous
practice. In 1913 – the year of Edmund Husserl’s Ideas, Ezra Pound’s founding
of Imagism, and the New York Armory Show – Stravinsky (1882-1971) composed The
Rite of Spring for a ballet, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, that depicted
human sacrifice. Meanwhile, young painters such as Picasso and Matisse were
causing a shock with their rejection of traditional perspective as the means of
structuring paintings.
These developments began to give
a new meaning to what was termed ‘Modernism’: it now embraced disruption,
rejecting or moving beyond simple Realism in literature and art, and rejecting
or dramatically altering tonality in music. This set modernists apart from 19th
century artists, who had tended to believe in 'progress'. Writers like Dickens
and Tolstoy, painters like Turner, and 7musicians like Brahms were not
‘radicals’ or ‘Bohemians’, but were instead valued members of society who
produced art that added to society, even if it were, at times, critiquing less desirable
aspects of it. Modernism, while it was still progressive, increasingly saw
traditional forms and traditional social arrangements as hindering progress,
and therefore the artist was recast as a revolutionary, overthrowing rather
than enlightening.
Modernist philosophy and art
were still viewed as being part, and only a part, of the larger social
movement. Artists such as Klimt and Cézanne, and composers like Mahler and
Richard Strauss were ‘the terrible moderns’ – those farther to the avant-garde
were more heard of than heard. Polemics in favour of geometric or purely
abstract painting were largely confined to ‘little magazines’ (like The New Age
in the UK) with tiny circulations. Modernist primitivism and pessimism were
controversial, but were not seen as representative of the Edwardian mainstream,
which was more inclined towards a Victorian faith in progress and liberal
optimism.
However, the Great War and its
subsequent events were the cataclysmic upheavals that late 19th century artists
had been worrying about: firstly, the failure of the previous status quo seemed
selfevident to a generation that had seen millions die fighting over scraps of
earth – prior to the war, it had been argued that no one would fight such a
war, since the cost was too high; secondly, the birth of a machine age changed
the conditions of life and, finally, the immensely traumatic nature of the
experience dashed basic assumptions – Realism seemed to be bankrupt when faced
with the fundamentally fantastic nature of trench warfare, as exemplified by
books such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Moreover,
the view that mankind was making slow and steady moral progress came to seem
ridiculous in the face of the senseless slaughter of the War. The First World
War, at once, fused the harshly mechanical geometric rationality of technology
with the nightmarish irrationality of myth.
Thus in the 1920s,
modernism, which had been such a minority taste before the war, came to define
the age, and was seen in Europe in such critical movements as Dada, and then in
constructive movements such as Surrealism, as well as in smaller movements such
as the Bloomsbury Group. Each of these ‘modernisms’, as some observers labelled
them at the time, stressed new methods to produce new results. Again,
Impressionism was a precursor: breaking with the idea of national schools,
artists and writers adopted ideas of international movements. Surrealism,
Cubism, Bauhaus, and Leninism are all examples of movements that rapidly found
adopters far beyond their original geographic base.
Exhibitions, theatre,
cinema, books and buildings all served to cement the public perception that the
world was changing. Hostile reaction often followed, as paintings were spat
upon, riots were organised at the opening of works, and political figures
denounced modernism as unwholesome and immoral. At the same time, the 1920s
were known as the ‘Jazz Age’, and the public showed considerable enthusiasm for
cars, air travel, the telephone, and other technological advances.
While some writers attacked the madness of the
new modernism, others described it as soulless and mechanistic. But
nevertheless, by 1930, modernism had won a place in the establishment,
including the political and artistic establishment, although by this time
modernism itself had changed. There was a general reaction in the 1920s against
the pre-1918 modernism, which had emphasized its continuity with a past while
rebelling against it, and against the aspects of that period which seemed
excessively mannered, irrational, and emotionalistic.
Modernism had by this stage entered popular
culture, too. With the increasing urbanization of populations, it was beginning
to be looked to as the source for ideas to deal with the challenges of the day.
Popular culture, which was not derived from high culture but instead from its
own realities (particularly mass production) fuelled much modernist innovation.
Modern ideas in art appeared in
commercials and logos, the famous London Underground logo, designed by
Edward Johnston (see above), being an early example of the need for clear,
easily recognizable and memorable visual symbols.
One of the most visible changes of
this period, in fact, is the adoption of objects of modern production into
daily life. Electricity, the telephone, the motorcar – and the need to work
with them,repair them and live with them – created the need for new forms of
manners, and social life. The kind of disruptive moment which only a few knew
in the 1880s, had by now become a common occurrence.
Many modernists believed that
by rejecting tradition they could discover radically new ways of making art.
Arnold Schoenberg believed that by rejecting traditional tonal harmony, the
hierarchical system of organising works of music which had guided music-making
for at least a century and a half, he had discovered a wholly new way of
organising sound. Abstract artists, taking as their examples the
Impressionists, as well as Paul Cézanne and Edvard Munch, began with the
assumption that colour and shape formed the essential characteristics of art,
not the depiction of thenatural world. Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich all
believed in redefining art as the arrangement of pure colour. The use of
photography, which had rendered much of the representational function of visual
art obsolete, strongly affected this aspect of modernism. However, these
artists also believed that by rejecting the depiction of material objects they
helped art move from a materialist to a spiritualist phase of development.
Other
modernists, especially those involved in design, had more pragmatic views.
Modernist architects and designers believed that new technology rendered old
styles of building obsolete. Le Corbusier thought that buildings should
function as ‘machines for living in’, analogous to cars, which he saw as
machines for travelling in. Just as cars had replaced horses, so modernist
design should reject the old styles and structures inherited from Ancient
Greece or from the Middle Ages. In same cases form superseded function and,
following this machine aesthetic, modernist designers typically rejected
decorative motifs in design, preferring to emphasise the materials used and
pure geometrical forms. The skyscraper, such as Mies van der Rohe’s 1950s Seagram
Building in New York, became the archetypal modernist building. Modernist
design of houses and furniture also typically emphasized simplicity and clarity
of form, open-plan interiors, and the absence of clutter. Many aspects of
modernist design still persist within the mainstream of contemporary
architecture today, though its previous dogmatism has given way to a more
playful use of decoration, historical quotation, and spatial drama.
In
other arts such pragmatic considerations were less important. In literature and
visual art some modernists sought to defy expectations mainly in order to make
their art more vivid, or to force the audience to question their own
preconceptions. This aspect of modernism has often seemed a reaction against
consumer culture, which developed in Europe and North America in the late 19th
century. Whereas most manufacturers would try to make products that will be
marketable by appealing to preferences and prejudices, high modernists rejected
such consumerist attitudes in order to undermine conventional thinking. The art
critic Clement Greenberg expounded this theory of modernism in his essay
Avant-Garde and Kitsch, in which he labelled the products of consumer culture
‘kitsch’, because their design aimed simply to have maximum appeal, with any
‘difficult’ features removed. For Greenberg, modernism thus formed a reaction
against the development of such examples of modern consumer culture as
commercial popular music, Hollywood, and advertising. Greenberg associated this
with the revolutionary rejection of capitalism. Some modernists did see
themselves as part of a revolutionary culture – one that included political
revolution. Others rejected conventional politics as well as artistic
conventions, believing that a revolution of political consciousness had greater
importance than a change in political structures. Many modernists saw
themselves as apolitical. Others, such as T. S. Eliot, rejected mass popular
culture from a conservative position. Indeed, one could argue that modernism in
literature and art functioned to sustain an elite culture that excluded the
majority of the population.
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