Modernism

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Modernism
The Modern Age
Postmodernism
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Modernism

• The major artistic movement that attempted to
  develop a response to the sense of social
  breakdown occurring in the aftermath of WWI
• It was an international movement shared by many
  art forms
• Characterized by the use of experimental
  techniques with a common purpose to capture the
  essence of modern life in the form content of
  their work

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Experimentation

• In literature, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and
  Virginia Woolf experimented with narrative
  structure, grammar, syntax, and spelling.
• In dance, Sergei Diaghilev, Isadora Duncan, and
  Loie Fuller experimented with unconventional
  choreography and costume.
• In music, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky
  composed pieces that did not depend on
  traditional tonal structure.

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Stream of Consciousness/Interior Monologue

• A technique that was developed by modernist
  writers to present the chronological flow of the
  seemingly unconnected, unfiltered thoughts,
  responses, and sensations of a character.
• The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock T.S. Eliot
  
• Ulysses James Joyce
• The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner

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Stream of Consciousness/Interior Monologue

• A few of the more famous works to employ the
  technique are
• Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment
• James Joyce's Ulysses (in particular Molly
  Bloom's soliloquy)
• Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse
  and The Waves
• William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and As
  I Lay Dying
• Jack Kerouac's On the Road
• J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye
• Robert Anton Wilson's Robert Shea's
  Illuminatus!
• Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl

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Stream of Consciousness/Interior Monologuefrom
James Joyces Ulysses
"...I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I
put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls
used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed
me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as
well him as another and then I asked him with my
eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would
I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I
put my arms around him yes and drew him down to
me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes
and his heart was going like mad and yes I said
yes I will Yes. "
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Stream of Consciousness/Interior Monologuefrom
William Faulkners The Sound and the Fury
I could hear the clock, and I could hear Caddy
standing behind me, and I could hear the roof
It's still raining, Caddy said. I hate rain. I
hate everything. And then her head came into my
lap and she was crying, holding me, and I began
to cry. Then I looked at the fire again and the
bright, smooth shapes went again. I could hear
the clock and the roof and Caddy.   That's
right, Dilsey said. I reckon it'll be my time to
cry next. Reckon Maury going to let me cry on him
a while, too. His name's Benjy now, Caddy said.
How come it is, Dilsey said. He aint wore out
the name he was born with yet, is he. Benjamin
came out of the bible, Caddy said. It's a better
name for him than Maury was. How come it is,
Dilsey said. Mother says it is, Caddy said.
Huh, Dilsey said. Name aint going to help him.
Hurt him, neither. Folks dont have no luck,
changing names. My name been Dilsey since fore I
could remember and it be Dilsey when they's long
forgot me. How will they know it's Dilsey, when
it's long forgot, Dilsey, Caddy said. It'll be
in the Book, honey, Dilsey said. Writ out. Can
you read it, Caddy said. Wont have to, Dilsey
said. They'll read it for me. All I got to do is
say Ise here.      Your name is Benjy, Caddy
said. Do you hear. Benjy. Benjy. Dont tell him
that, Mother said. Bring him here. Caddy lifted
me under the arms. Get up, Mau I mean Benjy,
she said. Dont try to carry him, Mother said.
Cant you lead him over here. Is that too much for
you to think of. I can carry him,       Versh
set me down and we went into Mother's room. There
was a fire. It was rising and falling on the
walls. There was another fire in the mirror, I
could smell the sickness. It was on a cloth
folded on Mother's head. Her hair was on the
pillow. The fire didn't reach it, but it shone on
her hand, where her rings were jumping.
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Fragmentation

• related to the fragmentation of society in late
  19th early 20th century
• Increasing technological aspirations of the
  industrial revolution widened the rift between
  the middle and the working classes.
• Women demanded the vote and equal rights.
• Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis,
  stipulated that the human psyche was fraught with
  emotional conflicts and contradictions.

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Sigmund Freud

• Fragmentation of the human Mind
• Id
• Ego
• Super-Ego

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The Human Psyche - Freud

• Id
• primary process thinkingour most primitive,
  need-gratification impulses
• organized around the primitive instinctual drives
  of sexuality and aggression
• these drives require instant gratification or
  release
• Ego
• mediates among the id, the superego, and the
  external world to balance our primitive drives,
  our moral ideals and taboos, and the limitations
  of reality.
• Superego
• stands in opposition to the desires of the id
• based upon the internalization of the world view,
  norms and attitudes a child absorbs from parents
  and the surrounding environment at a young age.
• As the conscience, it includes our sense of right
  and wrong, maintaining taboos specific to a
  child's internalization of parental culture.

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Cubism

• Cubist paintings create an ambiguous sense of
  space through geometric shapes that flatten and
  simplify form, spatial planes that are broken
  into fragments, and forms that overlap and
  penetrate one another.
• The Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and the French
  artist Georges Braque invented the movement in
  1907-08.

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Surrealism Salvador Dali(The world is not what
it seems to be)
The discovery of X rays, physicist Albert
Einstein's theory of relativity, and other
technological innovations suggested that our
visual experience no longer corresponded with
science's view of the world.
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Futurism

• The futurists, a group of Italian artists working
  between 1909 and 1916, had an enthusiasm for
  technology.
• The futurists embraced all that glorified new
  technology and mechanization and denounced
  anything that had to do with tradition.
• To them, a speeding automobile was more beautiful
  than an ancient Greek statue.

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Free Verse Poetry

• Rhymed or unrhymed poetry composed without
  attention to conventional rules of meter
• Lines vary in length and cadence, usually not
  rhymed.

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cummings, e(dward) e(stlin) (1894-1962)

• American poet--one of the most radically
  experimental and inventive writers of the 20th
  century.
• A distinctive feature of Cummings' poetry is the
  abandonment of uppercase letters and often
  punctuation.
• Cummings' poetic style
• typographical nonconformity
• distortions of syntax
• unusual punctuation
• new words
• use of jazz rhythms, elements of popular
  culture, and slang.

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e e cummings
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l(a le af fa ll s) one l iness
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Imagism

• A literary movement established in the early part
  of the 20th century by Ezra Pound and other
  poets.
• The Imagists concentrated on the direct
  presentation of images, or word pictures. An
  Imagist poem expressed the essence of an object,
  person, or incident, without explanations or
  generalizations.

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Imagism

• Through the spare, clean presentation of an
  image, the Imagists hoped to evoke an emotional
  response.
• They hoped to freeze a single moment in time and
  capture the emotions of that moment.
• Everyday language was used.

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In a Station of the MetroEzra Pound
The apparition of these faces in the crowd
Petals on a wet, black bough.
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This is Just to Say- William Carlos Williams
I have eaten the plums that were in the ice
box and which you were probably saving for
breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so
sweet and so cold
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so much depends upon a red wheel barrow
glazed with rain water beside the white
chickens.
The Red Wheelbarrow- William Carlos Williams
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The Search for Meaning

• Themes of modern works were usually implied
  rather than directly stated, creating a sense of
  uncertainty Readers were forced to draw their own
  conclusions This search for meaning, even if
  unsuccessful, becomes meaningful in itself.
• Fog
• The fog comeson little cat feet.It sits
  lookingover harbor and cityon silent
  haunchesand then moves on.
• -- Carl Sandburg

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Reinventing Art Literature

• In Modernism, the pastformer beliefs, values,
  social structures, art formshave all been
  destroyed or are no longer valid
• The world is no longer seen as black white
• Therefore, art literature had to be reinvented
• The traditional voice lost its authority

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Postmodernism

• began in the 1970s
• artists and critics began to question the
  modernist directive to be original
• Instead, many postmodern artists have
  appropriated (taken for their own use) well-known
  images from their predecessors or contemporaries.
  

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Postmodern Literary Criticism

• Known as deconstructivism
• interpretation of complex literary works
  suggest no definitive meaning
• Proponents of deconstruction elaborate on
  textual ambiguities and paradoxes that most
  earlier interpreters (including the New Critics)
  attempted to resolve.

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Postmodern Art

• Bulgarian-born American artist Christo is noted
  for his large-scale environmental sculptures
  known as earthworks, such as the arrays of
  umbrellas that he conceived and began planning in
  1984 and set up in 1991 in the country sides of
  both Japan and California.
• Christos works embrace large areas, forcing his
  public to see familiar landscapes in new ways.

The Umbrellas, Japan-USA, 1984-91
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Christo Postmodern Art

• His method consists essentially of wrapping
  landscapes or large objects in a new packaging
  his goal is to prove the susceptibility of
  contemporary consumer society to packaging.
• Christos sculptures cost millions of dollars to
  plan and execute, and they remain standing for a
  relatively short period of time.