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Modernism early 1900 to 1940 - Coggle Diagram
Modernism early 1900 to 1940
Historical background
Up until 1914, people believed in values emerged from enlightenment and scientific revolution
WWI challenged these thoughts
Age of anxiety
Long and destructive war
New technology that could kill
Wiped out the optimism
The home front
People thought it would end fast
People were enthustiastic and volunteered as soldiers
Later people were almost forced by the government to join
Great thinkers of the time
Environment of crisis and chaos, paved way for new ideas
psychology, philosophy, physics and in literature
gender discussions and class and race struggles opened up for a modern consciousness
more sceptic about the future
The period marked a loss of faith in Western Values, God, government and human goodness.
Karl Marx
Societies no longer looked the same
Time gave way to mass production, increased urbanization and the rise of the masses.
The changes had altered the world significantly leaving the capitalists and laborers in direct opposition to each other.
would lead to the laborers uniting and rising up against the capitalists in all industrialized countries.
Writers with inspiration from Marx would depict their characters as caught in large social and economic systems
Instead of individuals leading the way, they believed that mass struggle and political action were the means of creating a better world.
Albert Einstein
In Science things were changing
Theory of relativity made people question the solidity of the material world
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Charles Darwin's theories about how Man was part of evolution and not a creation by God, challenged established Christian beliefs
These fundamental changes in how we understood the world we lived in became connected with Modernist literature
Sigmund Freud
Philosophers, sociologists and psychiatrists also gave their contributions in destabilizing what was previously established about human behavior.
Freud argued that human behavior was determined by three things: the unconscious, earlier experiences and inner forces that we are unaware of.
he called these three elements the ID, Ego and Superego
Writers used this battleground of human consciousness and the complexities and irrationality of the human mind.
Fiction became interested in following characters' inner lives instead of just describing them as part of society.
People realised humans are violent irrational animals
Progress, science, right of individuals
Literary background
The modernist project
the Modernist project was an attempt to adapt art to resemble the changing world around the artists. In order for them to do this, they needed new methods and techniques.
The modernist worldview
Modernist artists expressed themselves in numerous ways, and due to this, there was massive deviation in form and content among them.
A break with tradition and history
Experimentation
Stream of consciousness technique
Multiple points of view and a sense of disillusionment and fragmentation
a special way of thinking, a willingness to experiment and a rejection of the artistic forms that came before them
The difference between romantic and modern age
The Romantics were concerned with Nature and Being while the Modernists focused on decay and the individual's growing alienation from the values and morals of society.
A break with tradition and history
writer's attempt of writing fiction that shows the complexities of modernity not only in content but also in style and form. This meant that many Modernist authors broke with tradition
Modernist novels and short stories broke with the conventional expectations readers had to plot structure, with a story having a clear beginning, middle and ending.
authors experimented with unity, narrative technique and coherence often leaving the unexperienced reader with a feeling that the story was going nowhere.
the stories explored the inner self and consciousness through a first person narrator. The ideas of progress were gone, and instead the novels revolved around the self and the decline of civilization.
Make it new! Experimentation
depicting the inner lives of people and instead of the novel looking out into the world
"stream of consciousness" technique that was an attempt to narrate the reality of people's thought processes.
"Stream of consciousness" is an interior flow of thoughts where fragmentation, digressions and flickering all show how the mind works. As readers, we gain entry to the characters by hearing their inner monologues, and thereby we get a view of their consciousnesses.
Often different readers will end up with different interpretations of Modernist novels
The war poets
Horror and brutality became a topic real Soldiers wrote poems
Siegfried Sassoon challenged how the atrocities of the war were hidden behind slogans of patriotism.
Some wrote about the war in a good way, some inn a bad way