The Modern Age

CULTURAL BACKGROUND

Cultural changes
In the first half of the 19th century Western civilization believed in a common set of values which included
progress, optimism, faith in rationality and, as a consequence, in science, technology, politics, knowledge of the
true self. In the main, they were the values of the Enlightenment and expressed man’s trust in rational enquiry as the
only means to grant order, security and happiness. Yet, the changes in society and the innovations introduced in every
field at the beginning of the century started questioning these values.
At the end of the 19th century social and religious values started to be questioned by the drastic changes of the
Industrial revolution, the rise of Socialism and the theories of Darwin and Marx.
• Dar
win (1809-1882) in his conception of evolution and heredity had situated humanity as the latest product of natural
selection, undermining the very existence of God
• Mar
x (1818-1883) believed in material determinism, that is the theory that all cultural and social movements and ideas
are brought about by changes in economic and other material conditions. It follows that men depend on laws and
structures outside their control and sometimes beyond their knowledge.
If the cultural debate at the end of the 19th century had caused a feeling of ideological uncertainty, the new theories of
the beginning of the 20th century completely changed man’s view of himself and of the universe.
• Freu
d (1856-1939) challenged the thought that men were rational beings. He claimed that humans were subject to their
own unconscious instincts and lust.
• A.
Einstein (1879-1955), the German physicist, published his theory of relativity (1905) which gave a further blow to
the belief in objective reality, presenting science as a substitute for religion in giving a satisfactory explanation of the
universe
Influential thinkers
• Phys
icist Einstein on Relativity (1905)
• Phys
icist Planck on Quantum Theory (1900)
• Philo
sopher Nietzsche on the Will of Power
• Philo
sopher Bergson on the Concept of Time
• Psyc
hologist William James on Emotions and Inner Time
• Psyc
hologist Freud on the Unconscious (The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900)
• Psyc
hologist Jung on Collective Unconscious
• Ling
uist De Saussure on Language
• Anth
ropologist Frazer on Primitive Cultures

Social and political changes

But Europe was affected also by dramatic social and political changes.
The first World War, with its apocalyptic dimension and disruptive power, deeply affected culture and society. As a
result, people found it increasingly more difficult to believe in anything, whether it was religion, philosophy, art,
science or progress.
There was a general decline of faith in rationality and Western culture was permeated by a sense of uncertainty,
exhaustion, disillusionment with absolute knowledge, pessimism, irrationality, which was to result in alienation
and isolation.
The alienation of the artist
At the beginning of the 20th century the artist lives in a sort of multiple alienation, as an individual alienated from
the world around him, and as an artist, he no longer shares a common background of beliefs with his public
because of his extreme sensibility which widens the gap between him and his audience.
In their search for meaning, unity and identity, the artists try to reorganize the complexity of reality through a different
language. For example, they resort to myth as a reaction to the chaos of life, but they are unable to give a permanent
order to this chaos.
The anti-hero. This produced a new type of literary hero, a man without qualities, inept and defeated in his attempt to
interpret reality, who has no place nor identity and cannot modify the world all around him, an anti-hero, an ordinary
man who has lost the set of values which had characterized the previous century.

Modernism as an artistic movement

Modernism is a literary and cultural international movement which flourished in the first decades of the 20th
century (1901-1945) as the expression of a cultural crisis
• again
st 19th century ideas and conventions, social norms and cultural values
• again
st the senseless violence and futility of the war
• again
st the negative effects of modernity (dehumanization)
Though it is difficult to group poets and novelists under precise labels, a few generalizations are possible.
The Twenties: or first generation Modernist. The problem of how to describe the unconscious in everydaylife was of
major importance for James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, who used the stream of consciousness technique.
The lost generation. Modernism was partially born out of the devastating losses and tragedy of WWI. After 1918, the
world changed. Disillusioned by the senseless violence and seeming futility of war, the generation of young men and
women who came back from the battlefields became pretty cynical about the whole state of their society. After all,
everyone living in Britain lost somebody they knew in the war. A certain group of early twentieth-century thinkers and
modernist writers was even known as "The Lost Generation." The group usually included only American writers who
came of age during the war and established their literary reputations in the 1920s. The term stems from a remark made
by Gertrude Stein to Ernest Hemingway, “You are all a lost generation.” Hemingway used it as an epigraph to The Sun
Also Rises (1926), a novel that captures the attitudes of a hard-drinking, fast-living set of disillusioned young
expatriates in postwar Paris.
The generation was “lost” in the sense that its inherited values were no longer relevant in the postwar world and
because of its spiritual alienation from a U.S. that seemed to be hopelessly provincial, materialistic, and emotionally
barren. The term embraces Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish,
Hart Crane, and many other writers who made Paris the centre of their literary activities in the ’20s. They were never a
literary school. In the 1930s, as these writers turned in different directions, their works lost the distinctive stamp of the
postwar period. The last representative works of the era were Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934) and Dos Passos’
The Big Money (1936).
Modernist mythology. The great modernist writers looked for what was valuable in the past and trying to create their
own interpretation of reality they freely incorporated ancient myths into their works, continuing a process of myth-
making that had begun with the Romantics.
The Thirties: or second generation Modernists. Artists began to take sides in the philosophical and political fight
between right and left-wing views, and the majority of second generation modernist like Auden and Orwell turned to
the political Left. During the Spanish Civil War some of these intellectuals went to Spain to fight for the republicans.
The Forties. In the 1940s a group of young poets reacted against the intellectualism and commitment of Auden’s poetry
and his contemporaries’, appealing to emotions and rediscovering individual themes such as love, birth, death and even
sex. For this reason, they were labelled as the ‘new Romantics’. Their greatest representative was the Welsh poet Dylan
Thomas.

Modernist features: A new mode of expression

The chief concern of modern poets and writers was language and how to use it to express the uncertainty, loss of faith
and suffering of the early 20th century. They found a distinctly new mode of expression through experiments in form
and style:
• Focu
s on form rather than meaning: the use of complex language which often defies traditional syntax, grammar and
punctuation
• The
fragmentation of the traditional ideas of
• Inter
 est in the primitive and non-western cultures
• Need
to reflect the complexity of modern urban life
• Reje
ction of history and the substitution of a mythical past as a means to unify human experience in a universal and
symbolic pattern
• The
realization of the impossibility of an objective, absolute interpretation of reality
• Impo
rtance of the unconscious mind: thanks to psychoanalysis and Freud, the unconscious became as important as the
conscious level, thus giving artists the opportunity to investigate the individual from the inside, with an emphasis on
psychological truth rather than on realistic details
• an
insight into the nature of things was considered possible only through short flashes, images or epiphanies, true but
fragmentary
• The
consequent collapse of the traditional plot with a story that has a beginning and an end, as well as clearly identifiable
characters, and setting
Modernist poets: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats
Modernist novelists
J. Joyce, V. Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, J. Conrad, E.M. Forster, E. Hemingway, W. Faulkner, K. Mansfield

Formal features of poetry

• No
use of traditional metre
• Use
of free verse
• Flexi
bility of line length
• No
regular rhyme scheme
• Impo
rtance given to sound to convey “the music of ideas”
• Mass
ive use of alliteration and assonance
• Use
of visual images
• Unco
nventional use of metaphor
• Juxta
position of ideas rather than consequential exposition
• Use
of allusions and multiple association of words
• Dislo
cation of meaning and sense from its normal context
• Borr
owings from other cultures and languages
• Intert
extuality

Formal features of narrative

• Expe
rimental nature
• Lack
of traditional chronological narrative: time and place are compressed or diluted freely
• Brea
k of narrative frames (fragmentation)
• Movi
ng from one level of narrative to another
• A
number of different narrators (multiple narrative points of view)
• Self-
reflexive about the act of writing and the nature of literature (metanarrative)
• Use
of interior monologue technique
• Use
of the stream of consciousness technique
• Focu
s on a character's consciousness and subconscious
Stream of consciousness
• Aims
to provide a textual equivalent to the stream of a fictional character’s consciousness
• Creat
es the impression that the reader is eavesdropping on the flow of conscious experience in the character’s mind
• Com
es in a variety of stylistic forms
• Narr
ated stream of consciousness often composed of different sentence types including psycho-narration and free indirect
style
• chara
cterized by associative (and at times dissociative) leaps in syntax and punctuation

Interior monologue
• A
particular kind of stream of consciousness writing
• Also
called ‘quoted stream of consciousness’, presents characters’ thoughts exclusively in the form of silent inner speech,
as a stream of verbalised thoughts
• Repr
esents characters speaking silently to themselves and quotes their inner speech, often without speech marks
• Is
presented in the first person and in the present tense and employs deictic words
• also
attempts to mimic the unstructured free flow of thought
• can
be found in the context of third-person narration and dialogue

Questions
How did attitudes among artists change at the beginning of the 20th century?
How did science, philosophy and psychoanalysis change man’s idea of himself?
What was Modernism and which were its formal characteristics?
What was the general political trend among British intellectuals during the 1930s? Where did some go to fight?
What was the “lost generation”?