V4- Literature lesson 3: Modernism

• Engels
• Middelbare school
• vwo
• Leerjaar 4

Literature lesson 3: Modernism 

A reaction to Realism

Roughly between 1860-1900 most literary works belonged to REALISM. 

Famous authors of this literary

movement include: Charles Dickens &

Leo Tolstoy. 

Do you know what is meant by Realism in 

literature?

Realism was:

• About real people, common people, living their ordinary and often harsh lives.
• Show how ordinary lives are just as meaningful as those of the upper classes.
• Intend on showing the ‘big picture’ of society and comment on its shortcomings.
• The genre was popular with everyone. No poetic, romantic language is used in realism. It had straightforward language that could be read and understood by all. 
• Focus on contemporary issues without any romanticism, showing readers the harsh realities of life instead of escaping them. 

We do not actually get to look inside the heads of the characters or form an opinion about them based on their innermost thoughts or desires, as we often do with characters today. This is where Modernism comes in.

Realism

• No poetic, romantic language is used in realism. The voice of speech represents average man and so it is simple.                            
• The most unique feature of realism is that everything, right from characters, plot and language is free of ornamentation. It is explained as it is, without any decorative language.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Realism attempts to sustain the illusion that the narrated world is a plausible version of the one we live in. You can think of realist narration as a transparent window through which the reader looks at the narrated world. So the foundation of realism is the conviction that the world can be described in an objective manner.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

"Well," says Buck, "a feud is this way: A man has a quarrel with another man, and kills him; then that other man's brother kills HIM; then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another; then the COUSINS chip in—and by and by everybody's killed off, and there ain't no more feud. But it's kind of slow, and takes a long time." (18.26)

  

• Sounds like an ordinary everyday conversation, don’t you think.
  

Modernism (+/- 1900 - 1940)

Modern writers disagree with realist ones the real world can be merely translated, transmitted or reflected – every act of writing is essentially creating a new world. Modernism rejects realist conventions, such as detailed descriptions or the third-person impartial narrator.

Modernism challenged realism, as it focused on inner self-consciousness and the power of scientific experimentation to challenge and consequently change reality.

The Second Coming 

W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Modernism 

 (+/- 1900 - 1940)

Modernism

A lot of Modernist art, ranging from literature to painting and film, was made as a response to WW I and created between the two World Wars, in what we now know as the Interbellum or Interwar Period.

Apart from the world recovering from a global war, a lot actually happened during this period.

Interbellum (1918-1939)

• End of WW I & Spanish Flu pandemic
• Women steadily get the right to vote across the globe
• Roaring Twenties: parties, jazz, Hollywood on the rise, seemingly endless economic growth
• Wall Street Crash of 1929 & the Great Depression
• Spanish Civil War & Francisco Franco
• Rise of fascism in Europe with Hitler & Mussolini
• Start of WW II

Modernism characteristics

• Breaking the rules of traditional writing and experiment with literary form and expression
• Exploring the human mind as psychology became a scientific field.
• Writers were so rebellious because they lived in an age of unseen technological upheaval
• Modernists were also horrified by the wartime terrors 
• Individual opinions towards modernity vary from author to author 
  
• Modern works contain a struggle for meaning or an outright refusal of consistent meaning.

This movement was a direct reaction to Realism and its objective approach to storytelling. The modernist authors weren’t objective at all, focusing instead on subjective modes of narration. 

The most notable ones are the Unreliable Narrator & The Stream of Consciousness

The Unreliable Narrator

• Authors sometimes use an Unreliable Narrator to tell the story, a protagonist who can't be trusted to tell the events accurately.
• This type of narrator might be insane, evil, delusional, forgetful, or just plain wrong...
• The writer uses this technique to 'hook' the reader.
• Mostly written from a first-person point of view.
• Examples are Gone Girl, Fight Club, The Girl on the Train,
  Life of Pi, Atonement, The Curious Incident of the Dog
   in the Night-time. 

Stream of Consciousness

A narrative technique that gives the impression of a mind at work, jumping from one observation, sensation, or reflection to the next seamlessly…

It can be written in the first as well as in the third person.

Include sensory impressions, association, repetition, incomplete ideas, incomplete sentences, and rough grammar to recreate the way the human mind works.

Everyone has an internal monologue.

The two most notable writers who used this technique are:

• James Joyce - Ulysses
• Virginia Woolf - Mrs Dalloway

Read their background information in the Reader!

S.of C in Mrs Dalloway:

She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fraulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.

What strikes you the most about this passage? Do you recognize anything about how Mrs Dalloway's mind works here?

1. What strikes you the most about this passage?
2. Do you recognize anything about how Mrs Dalloway's mind works here?

Assignment

Now that you know about the unreliable narrator and the stream of consciousness, do one of the following for next literature lesson:

1. You are an unreliable narrator and are telling us a story from your point of view. You can be anyone from a wallflower to a devious murderer. Now, your story must consist of at least 5 paragraphs of no less than 5 sentences. Make sure we are as readers become aware of your dishonesty.
2. Take 5 minutes, a pen and paper, and write down anything that crosses your mind. Here are the rules: write as fast as you can. Don’t stop writing. No erasing (that’s stopping), no talking or doing anything else (that’s stopping too). Cross out words if they are wrong and you catch them right away. Leave a ------ if you can’t remember a word. Don’t worry about grammar of spelling. Don’t know what to write? Say so!

Hand in your work  via lessonup weektask 6:  You're work will not be shared in class unless you have given permission to do so. Please note down if you don't want your work shared with the class.

Realism 

or

 Modernism?

Ben Nicholson OM

1934 project for Massine for Beethoven 7th Symphony Ballet 1934

Composition VII by Wassily Kandinsky (1913). According to the painter, this is his most complex work.