When seeking to describe or analyze Modernist literature, and the Modernist era as a whole, it is essential to keep in mind that these writers were challenging many core beliefs regarding being, both in relation to one’s self, as well as in the external world. Out of the many things Modernist literature does, one of the arguable contentions is that Modernity seeks to collapse the idea that the external and internal are separate. In modern writing, writers such as Joyce and Woolf make a move to disrupt traditional literary forms to push the concepts of truth, belief, and knowledge through the synthesis of experience in the visceral/physical world. Instead of direct being-in-the-world experience “playing the strings” of human perception and interpretation, modernist writers began using the sublime confrontation of the unfamiliar to push the limits of understanding, interpretation, and perspective to provoke new and/or alternate ways of looking at a world that often progressed faster than the existing structures of knowledge and order could compensate for in a direct and linear manner. However, Modernist views can be interpreted and viewed in any number of ways; a challenge or reversal of the internal impressing upon the external experience of egotistical sublime type of thinking, a la Wordsworth and the Romantic era poets; Or how the world plays us, even as we perceive we are playing with the world. When looking to previous forms, particularly within the directly preceding Victorian era, literature worked from the outside in, presenting narrators/characters that present their positioning and interaction in the world wholly externally – the “heart on their sleeve” blueprint, where the author is completely mixed with the external wo... ... middle of paper ... ... where as visceral phenomena is not. Finally, while we cannot control the hermeneutical or interpretive use of literature as time shifts and new questions are posed, modernist literature is still carrying out its agenda by leaving the experiential aspects up to us – is Joyce’s narrator in “Araby” ever going to find any of the fantasy-driven ideas in his head fulfilled in even a fractional fashion? Will Mr. Ramsay ever extend his knowledge past his current limits, without his sole/soul supporter, Mrs. Ramsay? These questions reflect the questions of a modern society with no direct answers in religion, politics, or community, and allow an audience to formulate the interpretations and experience as they fit amongst the other knowledge in life. And that “immortality” of being may be an authorial fallacy, but becomes a partial result of Modernist works of literature.
Modernism was the word of the era because it was the opposite of the last. People pined for new and exciting ways to make up for time lost to the war. This feeling of looking ahead through the ambiguity of the time permeated through all tiers of society from the working class to the elites. In Judith Walkowitz’s “A Jewish Night Out,” we find a dance hall catering to Jewish youth. One can rent a dance partner and learn how to dance well. It was suddenly important to be able to charm the opposite sex in talent, attitude, and appearance because sex wasn’t just for procreation anymore. Deborah Cohen’s Household Gods, she gives a look into architecture and material things. There’s a clear clash between the older and younger generations, and the younger ones enjoy modernism. “Advocates of the modern insisted that the new era required a new style. They deplored the vogue for reproductions, which, in the psychological language of the day, they analysed as evidence of an ‘inferiority complex’.” As well, stream of consciousness writing emerges from the depths of collegiate, middle class bohemia. The Bloomsburry Group were named after the London neighborhood they inhabited and were an artist collective, living life according to art and the new fragmentation of life after war. Virginia Woolf’s writing reflects the general feeling of the interwar period: confusing, ambiguous, hopeful, and moral-less. The Bohemians took the disassociation of the era and put it into new and modern art. All of these cultural ideas and forms of recreation were a result of the Great War because there was a generation of young people who were lost and needed a future meaningful to them, so they created
The year 1922 marks the beginning of High Modernism with the publications of T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland, James Joyce's Ulysses, and Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room. Woolf's novel, only her third, is not generally afforded the iconic worship and critical praise so often attached to those works of her most famous male contemporaries. Jacob's Room is seldom suggested as one of Woolf's best fiction; the novel has not generated the same encomia as her recognized masterpieces Mrs. Dalloway, Between the Acts, and The Waves. But Jacob's Room is indeed a revolutionary work in its original technical mastery, its mournful historicity, and its evocative tone. The novel is Woolf's manifesto in fiction of her unique enterprise to create character beyond the one-to-one mimetic method of conventional Victorian and Edwardian realism. Uniquely self-conscious and conscious of self, Woolf was attracted to exploring new modes of characterization, fictional consciousness, and epistemology. She is especially interested in exploring the nature, communication, and limits of fictional knowledge. Woolf's idiosyncratic mode of characterization in Jacob's Room is the epistemological complement in fiction to Eliot's formula for emotional expression in poetry, the objective correlative. While Eliot's description of the ideal artistic technique tries to be concise and formulaic, a direct mimetic correspondence, Woolf's technique is symbolic and metaphoric, collective, indefinite, and infinitely more ...
Modernist Poetry involves a movement away from the self and the emotions of the individual. Typically, the focus of Modernist poetry revolves around the rational notions of the self, unlike the Romantic period, which focused on the poet. Modernist poets ex...
Modernism can be defined through the literary works of early independent 20th century writers. Modernism is exp...
During the Modernity period, society transitioned into a progressive way of thinking, characterised with an Avant-garde approach to literature and the arts. While artistic approaches were transformed, civilization remained confined by the societal constraints brought about by the introduction of modernity. Virginia Woolf’s enlightened and controversial Mrs Dalloway interweaves the lives and stories of three multifocal narrators lost in life and time in Stephan Daldry’s The Hours. Both texts leave their characters succumbing to their opulent internal self becoming constrained by the contexts, which surround them, forced to battle or surrender to gender restrictions and the insusceptibility of mental deterioration. Link to the question.
Both Hemingway and Fitzgerald capture the essence of the modernist period, and both approach different aspects of the same genre. The goal of the modernist writer was to create an enjoyable piece of literature, while confronting issues that had never before been raised in the literary world to date. The Modernist hoped to wipe away the images of perfection in the imaginary realties of the literary past and create a clean slate filled with the reality of the modernist period. The Modernist authors will always be remembered for their exploration of language and form, and for their dedication to keeping us in a well lit place, in an otherwise deceiving reality.
One attribute of Modernist writing is Experimentation. This called for using new techniques and disregarding the old. Previous writing was often even considered "stereotyped and inadequate" (Holcombe and Torres). Modern writers thrived on originality and honesty to themselves and their tenets. They wrote of things that had never been advanced before and their subjects were far from those of the past eras. It could be observed that the Modernist writing completely contradicted its predecessors. The past was rejected with vigor and...
The characters of a modernist narrative reflected a new way of thinking. A summery no longer highlighted meaning, it was ambiguous. The ambiguity portrayed unmanageable futures. The Modernis...
Whenever we try to imagine the feelings or motives of a writer, we impose our own thoughts and ideas, our own biases, onto that person and their work. Perhaps in order to justify our choices or legitimate the philosophies that we hold dear, we interpret texts so that they fall into place in our own ideological frameworks. Literature, because it engages with the most important and passionate questions in life, evokes responses in readers that emanate not only from the mind but also from the subconscious and from the deepest places in the heart. Writers like Virginia Woolf ask, and sometimes answer, questions about life's meaning, about the nature and importance of relationships, about spirituality, work, family, identity and so on. It is what makes writing fascinating and the critiquing of writing something more than an intellectual exercise.
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot are representative works of two separate movements in literature: Modernism and Post-Modernism. Defining both movements in their entirety, or arguing whether either work is truly representative of the classifications of Modernism and Post-Modernism, is not the purpose of this paper; rather, the purpose is to carefully evaluate how both works, in the context of both works being representative of their respective traditions, employ the use of symbolism and allusion. Beckett’s play uses “semantic association” in order to convey meaning in its use of symbolism; Woolf’s novel employs a more traditional mode of conveying meaning in its own use: that is, the meaning of symbols in Mrs. Dalloway is found within the text itself. Woolf’s novel exists as its own entity, with the reader using the text as the only tool in uncovering any symbolic meaning, while Beckett’s play stimulates the audience in such a way that the audience projects their own meaning in the symbols presented.
Modernists did not have faith in the external reality put forth by social institutions, such as the government and religion, and they no longer considered these avenues as trustworthy means to discover the meaning of life. For this reason they turned within themselves to discover the answers. Modernist literature is centered on the psychological experience as opposed to the external realities of the world. The experience is moved inwards in an attempt to make modernist works more representative of reality by making the experience more personal. The modernist era of literature is closely associated with the works of T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, among others. These three authors stand out because they have made use of unique literary tactics and devices which emphasize the inward turn of modernist literature.
Many believed that Modernist works were not “art” because they did not always look like real life. But what is “real life”? A new outlook on reality was taken by Modernists. What is true for one person at one time is not true for another person at a different time. Experimentation with perspective and truth was not confined to the canvas; it influenced literary circles as well.
Modernism can be defined as the post-industrial revolutionary era, where which the western world began to see a change in all spheres of living. The effects of the industrial revolution became prevalent towards the end of the nineteenth century and the modernist movement drew inspiration from this widespread change. Artists, writers, architects, designers and musicians, all began to embrace the changing world and denounce their pre-taught doctrines and previous ways of producing work. Society felt the urge to progressively move forward toward a modern way of thinking and living.
Many may argue that the Modernist movement was a completely new and unique movement within British literature. The goal of this paper is to determine whether or not the Modernist Literary Movement was completely unique or not. The similarities found in the works of Modernist authors and poets, such as Joseph Conrad and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), will be examined against Romanticism themes and authors such as William Wordsworth. What will be found is that Modernism is not a completely unique movement, but one that combines elements from previous literary movements.
The advancement of sociological theory and philosophy into modernism and postmodernism has been a truly self-reflexive era of inspection of practices. A key intellectual here is Michel Foucault with his archeological analysis of punitive practices. More contemporary and darker sides of modernity have a similar methodological strife with positivist thought. A major question that modernists and postmodernists face is about legitimacy of discourse and practice. Specifically in academia as Foucault makes clear academia is intertwined with power. To understand legitimate power, we must view it through the lens of its practice. Postmodernists and some modernists moved away from a mystified critique of structures and actors and instead focused its discourses on practices, ideas, and conceptualizations.