Modernism

10 Key excerpts on "Modernism"

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  On the Margins of Modernism

  Decentering Literary Dynamics

  • Chana Kronfeld(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  C H A P T E R 1 Modernism through the Margins From Definitions to Prototypes The term "Modernism," though highly equivocal, com- monly refers to a cluster of international movements and trends in literature and the arts. Beyond this rudimentary labeling, however, there is little agreement about the term's meaning and scope. In some cultural centers one talks of Modernism as early as the 1880s; in oth- ers, as late as the 1950s. Although there seems to be some consensus that Modernism's "high points"—itself a charged and problematic description—were reached during the first thirty years of this cen- tury, critical opinions are as divergent about the meaning of modern- ism now as they were fifty years ago, despite the massive literature devoted to the subject in recent years. Three logically distinct sets of difficulties seem to have led to this impasse, each at a different level of discourse: the sense of the term itself, the nature of the category Modernism constitutes, and the gen- eral conceptual map of literary groupings of which it is part. Distin- guishing among these three levels of discussion is only a preliminary methodological gesture but—it seems to me—quite a necessary one given the conceptual fog in which the debate over Modernism is often conducted. (a) The term. "Modernism" remains a complex and contradictory literary label which, in the very process of naming, provokes some fundamental questions: Is Modernism by any other name ("moder- nity," "avant-garde") still the same? How does the meaning of the label change when it is applied across media (literature, art, architec- ture, music); across genres within the same medium; and, still more 21

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  Studying English Literature

  • Ashley Chantler, David Higgins, Ashley Chantler, David Higgins(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  The most significant texts of this period tend to be suspicious of preconceived categories and forms, particularly the notion of a single objective ‘reality’ that can easily be represented by literature. As we have seen, this leads to innovative, experimental writing that can be fluid, fragmented, ambiguous, and, yes, difficult. And yet, as I argued above, Literature 1901–1945 179 writers of the period are still trying to understand a complex world, even if such an understanding can only ever be limited, provisional, and constantly changing; this attitude, which we might call a sort of pessimistic optimism, seems to me to be the best critical approach to take to modernist texts. Further Reading Bradbury, Malcolm, and James McFarlane (eds) (1991), Modernism 1890–1930 . London: Penguin. One of the best surveys of the period; you will find particu-larly useful the opening essay, ‘The Name and Nature of Modernism’, and the extended sections: ‘A Geography of Modernism’; ‘Literary Movements’; ‘The Lyric Poetry of Modernism’; ‘The Modernist Novel’. Davis, Alex, and Lee M. Jenkins (eds) (2007), The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A decent overview; includes chapters on: ‘The Poetics of Modernism’; ‘Pound or Eliot: Whose Era?’; ‘Yeats, Ireland and Modernism’. Also contains ‘Guide to Further Reading’. Levenson, Michael H. (1992), A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908–1922 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. One of the best discussions of early Modernism. Conrad and Ford figure strongly in the first two sections; there is a detailed look at Imagism*; the chapter on Eliot’s The Waste Land is not only useful for understanding the poem but also other modernist writing. Nicholls, Peter (1995), Modernisms: A Literary Guide . London: Macmillan. Note the plural in the title: Modernisms . An insightful and refreshing study that embraces the diversity of the subject.

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  Racism and Xenophobia in Early Twentieth-Century American Fiction

  When a House is Not a Home

  • Wisam Abughosh Chaleila(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  However, the Victorian conventional writing could not meet the challenges of the new era and even failed to adapt itself and handle the issues that surfaced upon the emergence of its successor such as WWI, mass immigration, cutting-edge technology, mass production, capit- alism, metropolitan pandemonium, and sexual libertinism. Literary Modernism sought to respond to such pioneering developments including anxieties coming under the major vicissitudes of the epoch. Notably, such large-scale and rapid transformations were inspiring to many American writers providing an extended framework for their fiction. The historical events dramatized conveyed not only the authors’ anxiety and concern regarding these events, but also urged them to question the principles of democracy, the possibility of volition and freewill, the standard of living under the shadow of overcrowded housing and precarious labor conditions (MacGowan 11). Although the Modernist novel has long been juxtaposed with the realist one, not all writers were exclusively Modernists. Several nineteenth-century writers continued to write into the new era of the twentieth century and there- fore were considered realists-modernists as they “blended realist techniques with some amount of modernist experimentation” (Casey 183). The authors in hand are barely Modernist in the ethos they present but more so in addressing Modernism as a historical phenomenon that emerged in certain cultural contexts. That is, they are Modernists in their lament and angst over social change and the collapse of particular long-held traditions and values in the new modern world. Simultaneously, they are realists in bringing some of their life experiences into their novels, conveying the beliefs and principles of the time-period society, illustrating settings precisely and graphically, rendering reality elaborately and thoroughly.

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  Theory of the Novel

  • Guido Mazzoni, Zakiya Hanafi(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  For many of the great authors born between the 1870s and the 1880s—for Proust, Woolf, Forster, or Lawrence—the task of the novel was still that of telling about the existence of people like us, and not of creating fantastic worlds, stylistic games, metaliterature, écriture, or pure lies. The critical vocabulary that dominated during the years of mod-ernism was very different from the critical lexicon used by the avant-garde movements of the 1950s and 1960s to justify their works. The basic reason was that, although conceived in different terms, a majority of modernist novelists remained faithful to the same project we find in the critical writ-ings of the authors who were born around 1840 (Zola, James), and even before that in the critical writings of Balzac or Stendhal: to properly, realisti-cally, represent everyday life. The intentions of the modernist authors swarm 26. There are two ways to demarcate the symbolic thresholds: one is to make use of em-blematic years, distinguished by the appearance of major works or major events in world history; the second is to rely on generic thresholds. I opt for the latter solution, partly because each national culture has its own internal chronology and milestones, and partly because symbolic transformations are slow, extended processes, not sudden and discrete. The system of culture maintains partial autonomy with respect to political and social history: the latter can be quick and traumatic; the former is largely inert and sticky. Even the most traumatic crises, even world wars, take years to transform artistic approaches. Brusque changes are unknown to the collective imagination. T H E T R A N S I T I O N T O M O D E R N I S M 289 with appeals to “life.” So the criticism that Proust and Woolf directed against the realism coming before them starts from a typically realistic lit-erary project: the naturalists and the “Edwardians” are accused of not properly describing ordinary experience.

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  Modernism: Evolution of an Idea

  • Sean Latham, Gayle Rogers(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Others looked back into the earliest decades of the nineteenth century. Janko Lavrin’s Aspects of Modernism: From Wilde to Pirandello (1935), which begins by claiming polemically that “nothing is more hackneyed Modernism: EVOLUTION OF AN IDEA 34 and yet more vague than the words ‘modern’ and ‘Modernism’,” traces the “new” and “advanced type” of “European sensibility” explicitly back to Romanticism (9). In a broadly international survey focused primarily on his authors’ subject matter, he claims that the “brutal” and misogynistic features of Futurism, for instance, were a misguided and childish response to the fact that art since Romanticism had been “largely dominated . . . by the ‘feminine’ impulse” (186). Herbert Read’s Art Now (1933), on the other hand, sees a tautology in the term “modern art”—“Modern art is inevitably modern,” he writes—but claims that a certain spirit separates some new art whose “modernity is expressed in terms which are strictly artistic,” a line he traces from Symbolism, German Expressionism, Cubism and Abstraction, and more (11). In one of the first attempts to mark out a purely American tradition, Alfred Kazin, a New York Intellectual, claimed in his landmark study On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (1942) that the country’s “‘Modernism’ grew principally out of its surprise before the forces making a new world” of anti-Puritanism, populism, and disillusion with Realism. This led, he argues, to “our writers’ absorption in every last detail of their American world together with their deep and subtle alienation from it,” an “estrangement” and defamiliarization that he traces from Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser through Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis, from Willa Cather and the Lost Generation to the return of Naturalism in the 1930s (ix).

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  The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry

  • Alex Davis, Lee M. Jenkins(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  New schools and movements spring up across Europe and America, a plethora of new ‘isms’ vying for attention: Cubism, Futurism, Imagism, Vorticism, Surrealism, Dada. Peter B¨ urger has influentially argued that the avant-garde ambition to cross the divide between art and life praxis is ultimately thwarted by the inherent aestheticism of the institution of art under bourgeois capitalism. 1 Yet Modernism’s major writers and artists are born and raised during the closing decades of the nineteenth century. They come to adulthood amid profound political, technological, social and scientific transformations com- monly identified with ‘modernisation’: spreading industrialisation, growth of the bourgeoisie and democracy, increasing literacy, invention of new sci- ences, a proliferating print culture, expansion of commodity capitalism and modern imperialism. Raised in this rapidly transforming modernity, as alive to technological modernisation and the market economy as to artistic and social experiment, these artists and writers take up the tools of print capital- ism to promote their artistic and literary schools and movements. B¨ urger’s 28 Schools, movements, manifestoes argument notwithstanding, no amount of will or effort could detach modern art and literature from praxis. Indeed, this thing we think of when we think ‘modernist poetry’ was con- stituted out of the artistic, social and political ferment of the avant garde. Many modernist poets were affiliated with avant-garde groups. Many mod- ernist poems first appeared in avant-garde little reviews. Many books of modernist poetry were first published by small, alternative presses. Like mod- ernism in general, modernist poetry’s original production was collaborative and contentious, multifarious and dynamic – born out of the turbulent life of the modernising city, entangled with the modalities and technologies of print capital, especially modern publishing and advertising.

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  Experimental Fiction

  An Introduction for Readers and Writers

  • Julie Armstrong(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  What is interesting about the movement into Modernism of these figures is that they anticipated so many of the later concerns of postmodern writers, in terms of both form and ideas about insecure and unsettled identities, as they challenged gender and social boundaries. This resulted in such questions being asked as: what does it mean to be a man or a woman? Are men and women simply biological states of being or are they constructs imposed by society? To investigate such questions, new writing techniques evolved; as already discussed, the writer turned their attention inwards, rather outwards, at the exterior world. The stream of consciousness was a technique writers used to explore the inner world. What role did women have in the making of Modernism? Lyn Pykett suggests that women had an important role to play ‘in the making of Modernism’ (Pykett, 1995, p. 2). In the early years of the Gender Crisis Experimental Fiction 36 twentieth century, there was both a social crisis, how women lived their lives, and a crisis in representation. The struggles included both political and cultural representation. During this period, the women’s movement was seeking to improve women’s social and political positions and Modern woman (hence modern man), modern marriage, free love, the artistic aspirations of women, female eroticism … It was precisely these issues, and indeed, the whole context of the late Victorian dissolution with which self-consciously modern novelists engaged – from H. G.Wells, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence to May Sinclair, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson and Rebecca West. (Pykett, 1995, p. 15) By the beginning of the twentieth century, most men of 21 years and over had the right to vote in general elections. However, all women were excluded. Therefore, this period saw the ‘votes for women’ campaign with the founding of the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903, led by Emmeline Pankhurst.

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  The Turn of the Century/Le tournant du siècle

  Modernism and Modernity in Literature and the Arts/Le modernisme et la modernité dans la littérature et les arts

  • Christian Berg, Frank Durieux, Geert Lernout(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  20 Certainly after the authoritative analysis made by Benjamin: Charles Baudelaire. Ein Lyri-ker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus. Gesammelte Schriften vol. 1.2, pp. 509-690. 21 Cf. Ackroyd: Notes for a New Culture , p. 20. 8 Terminological and Theoretical Issues figuration of modernity, a notion which even constitutes the leitmotiv in Oc-tavio Paz' Los hijos del limo. However, the meaning of the terms may be narrowed down, as I said be-fore, towards the sense of a specifically Anglo-American 'Modernism' around Eliot, Woolf, Pound and Joyce (as does for example, Faulkner), or even to-wards a European modernist movement in the novel, in which Proust and Gide, Mann and Musil can also be included (as does for example, Fokkema). In so doing, of course, the starting-dates are moved towards the early 20th century, although we find that even then the generation of the 'poètes mau-dits' sometimes continues to be considered as the precursor. In this way we are given a rich choice of starting points, ranging from 1850 to 1915. In addi-tion to this the uncertainty is equally great with regard to the end-date, as it is situated somewhere between 1914 and 1950. For even though there is a con-sensus that the period of Modernism proper is now closed, 22 the precise mo-ment and especially the causes, the modalities (rupture or continuity?) and the symptoms of this new turn once again enjoy far less unanimity. 23 This is made abundantly clear if we turn to the already impressive amount of literature on postModernism, 24 but fortunately that even thornier issue is not the one at stake here. 3. Clearly, under the circumstances it is an almost hopeless task to try and work out a plausible definition, particularly of Modernism. And indeed, Ihab Has-san, whose own contribution to a generally acceptable elucidation can hardly be said to be helpful any way, labels such an attempt superlatively naive.

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  Translation and the Languages of Modernism

  Gender, Politics, Language

  • S. Yao(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Rather, it constituted an integral part of the Modernist program of cultural renewal, a crucially impor- tant mode of writing distinct from, yet fundamentally interconnected with, the more traditionally esteemed modes of poetry and prose fiction. As I will show over the course of this study, during the Modernist period translation Modernis t Translation Prac tice 7 served as a specific compositional practice by which different writers sought solutions to the various problems and issues that have come to be under- stood as the primary thematic concerns of Modernism, concerns about the disappearance of any stable religious or moral values by which to ground a viable society, the staggering realities of world conflict and economic col- lapse, the perceived radical inability of established artistic forms and genres to confront and accurately represent the new realities of the world as it existed, and, consequently, the need to develop new formal and representational possibilities more in tune with the demands of the expressly modern world. Throughout the period, translation as a literary mode functioned, and was recognized, as a kind of dynamic procedural lens through which the Mod- ernists could at once view both the past as well as other cultures and, perhaps even more importantly, focus their images of these traditions in their own times and in ways that could serve their individual ideological and aesthetic purposes.

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  The Cambridge History of Modernism

  • Vincent Sherry(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  It appears, in fact, that modernist radicalism in art – the breaking down of pseudo-traditions, the making new on a true under- standing of the nature of the elements of art – this radicalism involves the creation of fictions which may be dangerous in the dispositions they breed towards the world.” A good overview of the critical problem comes in “The Politics of Modernist Form,” New Literary History, 23/3 (1992), 675–90, where Marianne DeKoven rehearses the various claims that are made for the politically revolutionary and socially progressive dimensions of modernist technical and formal experimentation (677). DeKoven notices that the work of female modernists seems more readily identifiable with the convention- dismaying efforts of a liberating political ideology than, say, Pound, Eliot, or Joyce (680–81). 6 Max Nordau, Degeneration, trans. anon. (first English edn. 1895; repr. New York: Appleton, 1905); see esp. chap 4, “Etiology,” 36–39. 7 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ed. Simon Gatrell and Juliet Grindle (Oxford University Press, 2005), 140. 8 Robert Spiller, “The Influence of Edmund Wilson: The Dual Tradition,” The Nation, February 22 1958, 164. 9 Arthur Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, November 1893, 858–69 (at 858, 859, 866). 10 Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, (1899; repr. London: Archibald Constable, 1908), 6, 4. 11 Patrick McGuinness, “Introduction,” in McGuinness (ed.), Symbolism, Deca- dence, and the Fin de Siècle: French and European Perspectives (University of Exeter Press, 2000), 1–3. 12 Symons, Symbolist Movement, 139; J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Margaret Mauldon, ed. Nicholas White (Oxford University Press, 1998); the title may also be translated as “Against the Grain.” The Long Turn of the Century 99 13 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Michael Patrick Gillespie, 2nd edn. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), 254, 104, 268, 121.

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