Characteristics of Modernisms 18901960 or 1890Now

1
Characteristics of Modernism(s) (1890-1960 or
1890-Now)
2
Consider Picassos Les Demoiselles dAvignon
(1907) in comparison to other portraits/paintings
weve seen so far this semesterEarly Modern
Hans Holbeins The Ambassadors (1533)
3
Enlightenment Thomas Gainsboroughs Blue Boy
(1777) and Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (1748-9)
4
Victorian Dante Gabriel Rossettis A Vision of
Fiammetta (1878)
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Modernism(s)

• As far as literature is concerned modernism
  reveals a breaking away from established rules,
  traditions and conventions, fresh ways of looking
  at mans position and function in the universe
  and many experiments in form and style. It is
  particularly concerned with language and how to
  use it (representationally or otherwise) and with
  writing itself (Dictionary of Literary Terms
  Literary Theory).
• Consider the following passage from Wide Sargasso
  Sea as an example of an experimental break with
  established rules of narrative description in a
  novel or novella
• Then I open the door and walk into their world.
  It is, as I always knew, made of cardboard. I
  have have seen it before somewhere, this
  cardboard world where everything is colored brown
  or dark red or yellow that has no light in it. As
  I walk along the passages I wish I could see what
  is behind the cardboard. They tell me I am in
  England but I dont believe them. We lost our way
  to England. When? Where? (Rhys 107).

6
Compare the first person description from Wide
Sargasso Sea with the following description of
England by the narrator in A Christmas Carol

• The house-fronts looked black enough, and the
  windows blacker, contrasting with the smooth
  white sheet of snow upon the roofs, and with the
  dirtier snow upon the ground which last deposit
  had been plowed up in deep furrows by the heavy
  wheels of carts and wagons, furrows that crossed
  and recrossed each other hundreds of times where
  the great streets branched off, and made
  intricate channels, hard to trace, in the thick
  yellow mud and icy water (Dickens 82).
• Please note
• Modernists are not the first group of thinkers
  and artists to consider themselves modern. The
  Renaissance and the dawn of secular humanism, the
  Enlightenment tradition of rational liberalism,
  and even the Victorians faith in technological
  progress all qualify as modern.
• All modernisms share a desire to offer universal
  solutions to complex problems. Think Atomic Bomb,
  Picassos Guernica, or James Joyces Finnegans
  Wake that writes all human history into a single
  book

7
Modernism emerged as a reaction to realism or
romanticism. These often challenging perspectives
evolved over several years before emerging into
diverse artistic approaches that emphasized
cultural context as well as the implications of
form.

• Originally called avant-garde by practitioners,
  modernism worked to break with past traditions,
  instead of reforming traditions to meet
  contemporary social, political and artistic
  needs.
• Like the Rene Magritte painting, The Portrait,
  shows, modernism examined the bases of certainty,
  the structures of knowledge, the systems of
  belief, and the repositories of authority of the
  Bourgeois class who rose to dominate the late
  part of the 19th century.

8
Modernism is as much interrogative as it is
productive it inquires about how knowledge is
processed and creates new categories of knowledge
along with new knowledge.

• The following are some of the subsidiary
  movements that make up modernism, and all share
  an obsession with the relationship between the
  perceiver and the object of perception
• Constructivism Dadaism Decadence
  Existentialism Expressionism Futurism Imagism
  New Humanism Primitivism Surrealism and
  Symbolism.
• Some other categories of knowledge emerge in the
  twentieth century such as
• Chemistry aided by the discovery of important
  underlying elemental structures.
• Astronomy which seemed to make the universe more
  rational and predictable and suggested the
  possibility of human mastery.
• Dialectical Materialism Thesis/anti-thesis/synthe
  sis into which Marx plugged class struggle to
  explain the failure of enlightenment revolutions
  to completely reform repressive political
  systems.
• Compulsory Education Leads to a mass literate
  population, at whom a new popular literature and
  mass media is aimed.
• Anthropology altered basic conceptions of
  culture, religion, and myth by decentering
  Western Religion by placing it in a global,
  cultural context.

9
The people of the twentieth century were the
first to live with machines in their everyday
lives. Modernism is, in part, a response to ways
technology forced culture to restructure how it
made sense of daily experiences.

• Consider the social impact of just a few modern
  inventions electricity, cinema, radio, x-rays,
  antibiotics, airplanes, mass produced cars,
  refrigeration, gramophone, canned food, DNA, the
  double-helix, and the atomic bomb.

10
Modernism is also partially a response to mass
dislocations of population due to war, empire,
and immigration. This dislocation resulted in the
unprecedented close quartering of different
classes and ethnicities in rapidly expanding
cities.

• Civic and ethnic nationalism developed in part as
  a response to population shifts, often with
  disastrous consequences. As Picassos Guernica
  shows, modernism investigates how individual
  identity functions as part of larger economic,
  political, and bureaucratic systems-often
  dislocated from regions that defined group and
  individual identity for other movements.

11
Modernism and Psychoanalysis Many, if not all,
modernists examine the relationship between
unconscious impulses and civilized
repressions.

• Perhaps more profoundly, Freud changed the
  nature of attentiveness itself. It was in
  listening to patients differently that Freud
  discovered the unconscious-a force of otherness
  as powerful as, but in no way equivalent to, a
  god. Inside every person, he said, there was
  something transmitting scrambled messages in a
  cryptic language, trying to break through the
  conscious surface of life. The other was in
  ourselves-indeed it was ourselves (Norton
  Anthology of Theory and Criticism 917).

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Location of Modernism(s)

• Nevertheless it is valid to point out certain
  places and periods where and when modernist
  tendencies were at their most active and
  fruitful
• In France from 1890 until the 1940s
• In Russia during the pre-revolutionary years and
  the 1920s
• In Germany from the 1890s and on during the
  1920s
• In England from the 1890s and on during the
  1930s
• In America from shortly before the First World
  War and on during the inter-war period.
• Thus it was a European and transcontinental
  movement, and its principle centers of activity
  were the capital cities (515).

13
Wide Sargasso Seas as a Modernist Text
14
Consider Wide Sargasso Sea as critical response
to both romanticism and realism. This is evident
through the obsession with literary form
throughout the novel and the criticism of ways
Empirical reason silences non-privileged social
groups.

• I feel very much a stranger here, I said. I
  feel that this place is my enemy and on your
  side.
• You are very much mistaken, she said. It is
  not for youre and not for me. It has nothing to
  do with either of us. That is why you are afraid
  of it, because it is something else. I found that
  out long ago when I was a child. I loved it
  because I had nothing else to love, but it is as
  indifferent as this God you call on so often
  (Rhys 78).

15
Consider the ways Wide Sargasso Sea inquires
about how knowledge is processed to create new
categories of knowledge along with new knowledge
itself

• She was undecided about certain facts-any fact.
  When I asked her if the snakes we sometimes saw
  were poisonous, she said, Not those. The fer de
  lance of course, but there are none here, and
  she added, but how can they be sure? Do you
  think they know? Then, Our snakes are not
  poisonous. Of course not (Rhys 52).

16
Consider the ways Wide Sargasso Sea depicts the
dislocation of people which resulted in the
unprecedented close quartering of different
classes and ethnicities in rapidly expanding
cities

• As it was late I ate with them instead of by
  myself as usual. Myra, one of the new servants,
  was standing by the sideboard, waiting to change
  the plates. We ate English food now, beef and
  mutton pies and puddings. I was glad to be like
  an English girl but I missed the taste of
  Christophines cooking. My stepfather talked
  about a plan to import laborers-coolies he called
  them-from the East Indies (21).

17
Psychoanalysis Inside every person, Freud
said, there was something transmitting scrambled
messages in a cryptic language, trying to break
through the conscious surface of life. The
other was in ourselves-indeed it was ourselves
(917). Consider the following

• And then, she went on in her judges voice,
  you make love to her till she drunk with it, no
  rum could make her drunk like that, till she
  cant do without it. Its she cant see the sun
  any more. Only you she see. But all you want is
  to break her up.
• (Not the way you mean, I thought)
• But she hold out, eh? She hold out.
• (Yes, she held out. A pity)
• So you pretend to believe all the lies that damn
  bastard tell you.
• (That damn bastard tell you)
• Now every word she said was echoed, echoed loudly
  in my head.
• So you can leave her alone.
• (Leave her alone)
• Not telling her why.
• (Why?)
• No more love, eh?
• (No more love) (Rhys 92).

18
Consider Wide Sargasso Sea as an experiment in
representing landscape

• I can remember every second of that morning, if
  I shut my eyes I can see the deep blue color of
  the sky and the mango leaves, the pink and red
  hibiscus, the yellow handkerchief she wore round
  her head, tied in the Martinique fashion with the
  sharp points in front, but now I see everything
  still, fixed for ever like the colors in a
  stained glass window (Rhys 71).

19
Freewrite (5 minutes) Draft a discussion
question on Wide Sargasso Sea.