20th century literature in English 1
LES 2/10: defining modernism
General course overview
Introduction to modernism
Break vs. continuity
o Romanticism
o Realism
o Modernism
o Postmodernism
o Action and reaction → interaction
o Fluid and porous borders ≠ radical break
o ‘The danger is in the neatness of identification’ (Becket)
Not too quick in labelling things
Modern
o Modern: from Latin modo (current)
o Extremely polysemic
o Linguistics: ‘modern’ English vs. middle English
o Literature
Modern period = from 16th century onwards (Shakespeare Milton)
More specific use: avant-garde (late 19th century)
Modernity
o First used by Baudelaire in Essay ‘The painter of modern life’
Modernity = the fashionable, fleeting and contingent in art as opposed to the
eternal and immutable
Not here to stay
o Imprecise term
From the Renaissance onwards (16th century)
Starting with 17th century scientific revolutions (Galileo, Newton,…)
Enlightenment
Michel Foucault (1986): ‘modernity’ = an ATTITUDE rather than an epoch
o Modernity = extremely anthropocentric (human experience as focal point)
o Defenders (Habermas)
Progress and productivity leads to gradual emancipation of human beings
Extension of Enlightenment optimism (?)
Ongoing project (never-ending)
o Critics
Material benefit, but no individual autonomy
No meaning, just change and transformation
European global expansion → Eurocentrism
o Theorized by sociologists different focus
Emile Durkheim: division of labour in modern production
Max Weber: disenchantment of reason
Ferdinand Tönnies
Shift from Gemeinschaft = rural closely knit community to
Gesellschaft = urban anonymous society
o Frankfurter Schule (critical theory)
Very Marxist and critical, they wanted to question the way things are
theorized (culture, economy, politics,…)
, Theodor Adorno
Max Horkheimer
Walter Benjamin: ‘nightmare of history’ as modernists saw
it (cf. Ulysses)
Modernist have very complicated relationship
with history
Describing painting ‘Angelus Novus’
o Not a happy picture (see highlighted
words)
o Angel does not want to move forward, but
has to
o Dark imagery
o Urbanization by 1900
Mass migration from country side to city
Large number of people in cities: London & New York: 5 million– Paris: 3
million– Berlin: 2 million
o Due to technological changes
Kodak Camera (1888)
electric motor (1888)
Diesel Engine (1892)
Ford motor car (1893)
Model T
o First affordable car
o assembly line
o conveyor belt
Assembly line
o Modern times (1936)
Human beings feeling small towards assembly
line, huge machine → alienation
o Gramophone, radio, cinematograph, X-ray, air flight
o Travel more modern: wright brothers first flight (1903)
automobile– motor bus– aeroplane (‘skywriting’ in Mrs. Dalloway)– tractor
o Domestic appliances: electric kettles, electric irons– telephone, radio– refrigerators
o Eiffel tower: colonise the sky
o Le Corbusier: architecture as means to change society
Utopian projects
o Different responses to technological progress:
Celebratory: Marinetti
‘We say that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new
beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned
with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath [...]. Time and
Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute because we
have created eternal, omnipresent speed’ (‘The Manifesto of
Futurism’, 1909)
Celebratory: Le Corbusier
‘Cars, cars, fast, fast! One is seized, filled with enthusiasm, with joy ...
the joy of power. The simple and naive pleasure of being in the midst
of power, of strength’ (1924)
Despairing, apocalyptic (T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound)
Most of anglophone literary modernism
,Writing assignment
LES 9/10: introduction modernism + re-minding modernism
Introduction modernism
Pioneering thinkers (not really talk about each person, but related to texts)
o Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Social, political and economic theorist
Communist Manifesto (1848)
Das Kapital (1867-1894)
Capitalism thrives on recurrent crises (Modernism =
literature of the crisis)
Destabilizes society and causes alienation
Crucial for modernism
What am I doing and what am I doing this for
Lose big picture, only small part of conveyer belt
Loss of old values to egalitarian nature of capitalism
o Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
English naturalist
The origin of species by means of natural selection
(1859)
Nature (including human) was not static but evolving
Evolution = cyclical movement, not linear progression
Questioned religious dominance = not divine creation, but
pure chance
Human being – just another species
Consequences
Social Darwinism (Spencer)
o survival of the fittest
Eugenics (Galton)
Degeneration (Nordau)
Colonialism = social and racial superiority of the European civilisation
Cf. Heart of Darkness
o Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Austrian neurologist
Psychoanalysis and Traumdeutung
Ego = between id and super-ego (psychosis/neurosis)
Society = repression of desire (sexual)
Psychoanalysis (term coined in 1896) principle of free
association
~ James: stream of consciousness
Mind as an object of science
o Henri Bergson (1859-1941)
French philosopher
Chronological time (clocks) = different from duration
(personal time)
Time is not objective, but differently experienced by each
individual
Mrs Dalloway
o Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
German philologist and philosopher
, The birth of a tragedy (1872)
Apollonian vs. Dionysian experience (ratio vs. pleasure)
Also sprach Zarathustra (1883-92)
God is dead
Theory of Übermensch
o Abused by political powers
o Transcends God and morality
o ‘Become what you are’
o Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)
Swiss linguist
Course in general linguistics (1916, published after
death)
Language = arbitrary, socially constructed, not
divine or natural
Langue (language as constructed system) / parole
(language as utterance or speech act)
Words meaningless in absolute terms = only in
relation to each other
Basis for structuralism, semiotics and poststructuralism
o Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
German mathematical physicist
Theory of relativity overturned Newtonian physics
No physical law in reliable, contingency
Always relative to observer’s position
Embraced and discussed by artists
Narrative relativity of Modernism
Multiple focalisation
Unreliable narrator
Subjectivity
Vs. (stable) Newtonian universe in realist novels
o = intellectual context of modernism
Defining modernism
o Modernism period
Modernism as period = approx. 1890-1930 (safe answer)
1922 = ‘annus mirabilis’
o The Waste land T.S. Eliot (poem)
o Ulysses Joyce (novel)
o Mansfield The Garden Party (story)
But: Beckett? (died in 1989) is he a modernist? = arguable
Most of works written in that period = not modernist
o Modernism: genre
Modernism as a genre = innovation and novelty, the wish to be different and
new
Experimental
Formally complex
Elliptical
Self-reflexive
Apocalyptical
Uncertainty of reality
Typical formal properties
In media res