Diapositiva 1

1
Modernism
Magonara Luca Alvise
2
What was it?

• a literary movement developed during 1900 and
  1930
• reached its height with authors like
• T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway,
  Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
  Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, H.D. and Mikhail
  Bulgakov.

3
What was its historical background?

• split in two notorious periods
• at the end of "The long nineteenth century"
• and
• at the beginning of "The short twentieth
  century".

4
What was its historical background?

• The Great Depression
• ?
• enormous unemployment rate
• loss of faith in liberal democracy.

5
What was its historical background?

• Wars
• World War I
• shocked a whole generation
• confirmed the Victorian doubts and fears.
• changed the positivist idea of progress
  completely

6
What was its historical background?

• Darwinism
• ?
• Human beings lost their central position in the
  universe
• Concepts such as unconscious influenced
  artistic currents (e.g. stream of consciousness
  and Surrealism)?

7
What were its literary features?

• Modernism
• ?
• an emancipated movement
• broke with Realistic and Romantic literature
• introduced new features such as

8
What were its literary features?

• Parody of the mundane The Love Song of J.Alfred
  Prufock by T.S.Eliot.
• In the room the women come and go
• Talking of Michelangelo.

9
What were its literary features?

• Absence of heroic figures there is a recognition
  that people are fraught with human frailties (
  e.g. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land)

10
What were its literary features?

• ..and much more
• Disjointed timelines
• No omniscient narrator
• Eclipse of the narrator
• Shift of the point of view
• No more framework of reference
• Flux of thought
• Elitarian movement
• The Objective correlative
• the Mythical method

11
What about its form?

• Particular features
• Plot reduced to minimum (e.g. Joyce's
  Ulysses)?
• Individual side and subjectivity (e.g. Joyce's
  Leopold Bloom)
• Internal monologue and personal search (e.g.
  Eliot'sPrufrock)?