Transcript MODERNISM AND MODERN AGE

MODERNISM AND
MODERN AGE
(1900-1930)
What is modernism?
It is a global trend in culture
It affected the intellectual elité (the only one
who had the possibility to appreciate it in that
very time)
It rejected the paradigms of Victorian Age
It searches a new place for the man in the
world
Why Modernism?
At the end of nineteenth century there was a
global crisis of values: disruption of positivism
Neither God, nor the individual consciousness
could longer give meaning to man
Traditional values were crumbled out by the
revolutionary discoveries of that period:
Romantic codes were no longer valid, they were
too naives
Frame of Modernism
Modernism would have been the response of
culture to:

Darwin theory of evolution

II Industrial revolution and mass society

Einstein’s relativity

Bergson’s theories on time

Freud and Jung’s psychological studies

Nietzsche: God is dead
How the scenery changed
Man has no
longer a
divine reason
to inhabit the
world
Human reason:
Unconsciousness,
stream of
consciousness
and racial memory
Man is
alone in a
mechanical
world
Shift of the point of view
in physics and in the
whole culture: man at the
centre in an universe
without centre
Crisis in liberal
democracy,
capitalism, and
sciences after
First World War
What does it remains?
No valid points
of references
and
philosophical
systems
Everyone gives its response
No universal valid theories: only innovation,
individual search for order and impersonality
were common features
According to Aestheticism art was the
response for art
Symbolists and Imagist adopted a dry and
hard style to adhere to reality, and symbols
become the way to summarize meaning
Features
Order
Importance of form, content is useless
Retaken of Enlightenment rationality against
Romantic sentimentalism
Elite referred: difficult style
Eclipse of narrator and reader’s importance in
giving meaning
Myth and anthropology: The Golden Bough,
From Ritual to Romance
Neo dramatic novel
Main figures in Modernism
T.S. Eliot: poetry, Objective correlative and quotations in
the global framework of myth and anthropology (The
Wasteland)
E. Pound (also Imagist)
W.B. Yeats
J. Joyce: fiction, epiphany, interior monologue in the
global framework of myth and anthropology (Ulysses)
V. Woolf: novel, moment of being, form (Mrs Dalloway,
To the Lighthouse)