MODERNISM

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MODERNISM
2
WHAT, WHERE, WHEN

• Modernism is a cultural movement that developed
  in Europe during the first three decades of the
  XX century.
• Modernist thought had its origins in the
  Enlightenment.

3
THEMES

• Search for new narrative techniques
• Looking for anthropology and myth
• The absention of the author /omniscient narrator
• Use of current language
• Talking about old taboos (ex sexuality,...)
• Use of symbols, also from psychoanalysis

4
WHO

• THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT
• Born in St. Louis(Missouri) in 1888, educated at
  Harvard, the Sorbonne and Oxford University.
• He settled in England during World War I and
  worked in London as a bank clerck, then as a
  publisher.
• He died in London in 1956.

5

• JAMES JOYCE
• Born in Dublin in 1882 into a Catholic family,
  educated at Jesuits School and Universitiy
  College in Dublin.
• In 1904 he went into a self-imposed exile but he
  only wrote about Ireland.
• In Trieste he met the Italian writer Svevo.
• He died in 1941 in Zurich.

6

• VIRGINIA WOOLF
• Born in London in 1882, she was educated in a
  highly intellectual atmosphere at home.
• Her mother died when she was 13 and the loss
  affects her profoundly after her mother's dead
  she had the 1first of a series of nervous
  breakdowns wich affected her all the life.
• She comitted suicide by drowning in 1941.

7

• THE WASTE LAND
• by T.S.Eliot
• It is consider the most representative work
  ofModernist poetry..
• It is a poem made up of five parts (The Burial of
  the Dead, A Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon, Death
  by Water, What the Thunder Said).
• All the poem is a re-writing from texts from
  European literary culture.
• Themes
• Graals myth
• Fertility rites from the antropology
• The research for values in the contemporary
  society

8

• ULYSSES
• by J. Joyce
• This novel has not got a traditional plot.
• It is divided in 18 chapters that have titles
  derived from Homer's Odissey and each chapter is
  associated to a part of the human body, an art, a
  place, a planet, a feeling and to an hour.
• The novel is about the modern Odissey of the
  protagonist, Leopold Bloom he walks around
  Dublin on 16th June.

9

• TO THE LIGHT HOUSE
• by V. Woolf
• The novel is highly representative of Woolf's
  fiction the external event of the journey to the
  lighthouse is the counterpart of an internal
  journey of self-awareness.
• The novel is full of symbols the lighthouse as
  the contraddictory aspects of life, the sea in
  the positive and in the negative aspect united at
  least in the last part of the novel.

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BIOGRAPHY

• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waste_Land
• http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernist_literature
• http//www.soci.niu.edu/critcrim/papers/drag-pomo
  .html
• B. De Luca, D. Ellis, Literature in Time