Classicism Romanticism Modernism

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What is modern fiction? From what youve read so
far this year, what is your subjective definition
of modern fiction at this point? List some
characteristics of modern fiction.
2
Assessment thoughts

• Terms memorize and be able to identify usage and
  rhetorical purpose.
• Stories youll be expected to make connections
  thematically and in terms of style.
• Modernism Tenets of modernism should be learned
  and identified in the stories themes and style.
• Also, connections to art (and/or music,
  architecture, etc.) of the Modern era will make
  teacher happy!

3
Should we write this down?

• As I go over the tenets of Modernism, write down
  any of the ideas that seem relevant to a
  Modernist interpretation of the stories. You
  will be taking an Uber-quiz that applies an
  understanding of Modernism to the texts.
• You may also be comparing a painting in these
  terms. Remember
• Style is one way to connect, theme is another,
  and sometimes they are interwoven.

4
Modernism
How is this painting modern? JACKSON POLLOCK
Lavender Mist (1950)
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Modernism . . .

• is a comprehensive but vague term for a movement
  which began to get under way in the closing years
  of the 19th c. One question is, Why?
• What events might inspire an artist to create
  such a painting as this one?

PIET MONDRIAN Composition 10 (1939-1942)
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Modernism pertains to all the creative arts,
especially poetry, fiction, drama, painting,
music and architecture.
Persistence of Memory Salvador Dali
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• Modernism was largely brought about by the
  convergence of several factors
• The devastation caused in Europe after World War
  I, when the most enlightened and advanced nations
  on the earth came together to kill each other in
  staggering numbers.

9

• The wholesale urbanization and industrialization
  that took place during the nineteenth century.
• The fragmentation of belief in the unified
  individual that occurred as the result of the
  work of several scientists and philosophers.

10
Sigmund Freud

• Asserted that most elements of the human
  personality were the result of various
  psycho-sexual traumas experienced in infancy and
  early childhood and stored in the subconscious
  mind.

11
Influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud, authors
made the interior their stage. Unlike the
realists, who had created broad social portraits,
the modernists emphasized the individual and the
subjectivity of perception. To this end,
modernist writers, such as T. S. Eliot, James
Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Gertrude
Stein, and D.H. Lawrence, experimented with new
uses of language and imagery and new narrative
structures. Modernist novelists employed
stream-of-consciousness narration, multiple
points of view, and fragmented, nonsequential
plots.
The first and last line of James Joyces
Finnegans Wake riverrun, past Eve and Adams,
from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by
a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth
Castle and Environs.
12
As seen in Memento Mori / Tenet of modernism

• Because for a few minutes of every day, every man
  becomes a genius. Moments of clarity, insight,
  whatever you want to call them. The clouds part,
  the planets get in a neat little line, and
  everything becomes obvious. I should quit
  smoking, maybe, or here's how I could make a fast
  million, or such and such is the key to eternal
  happiness. That's the miserable truth. For a few
  moments, the secrets of the universe are opened
  to us. Life is a cheap parlor trick.

• Fractured sense of self

13
Karl Marx

• Asserted that human moral, cultural, and
  religious values were caused not by any inherent
  sense of good or evil but by the requirements of
  a particular system.

14
Charles Darwin

• Discovered that the evolution of species was the
  result of natural selection and competition
  rather than through any special act of purposeful
  creation.

15
As seen in Memento Mori / Tenet of modernism

• I had a thought just now. Maybe you'll find it
  useful.
• Everybody is waiting for the end to come, but
  what if it already passed us by? What if the
  final joke of Judgment Day was that it had
  already come and gone and we were none the wiser?
  Apocalypse arrives quietly the chosen are herded
  off to heaven, and the rest of us, the ones who
  failed the test, just keep on going, oblivious.
  Dead already, wandering around long after the
  gods have stopped keeping score, still optimistic
  about the future.

16
Albert Einstein

• Discovered that even most of the physical
  properties in the universe (time, space, size,
  weight, density, gravity, etc.) were relative.

17

• Western notions of progress and superiority were
  breaking down.
• Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud all
  offered so-called master narratives that helped
  to explain history and to produce a new
  historical self-consciousness.
• Well-held precepts and norms for religion,
  sexuality, gender, and the family of the past
  Victorian world were also collapsing
• --From your Modernism packet

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• These very real historical and cultural
  exigencies resulted in aesthetic crises and
  compensatory strategies.
• This radically new modern world could be
  reflected adequately only in a new order of art,
  and writers reacted with various formal
  innovations.
• This search for order was also a response to what
  many artists perceived as a lack of coherence in
  romanticism, the "movement" that preceded
  modernism.
• -- your packet

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Philosophical Tenets of Modernism

• Challenged tradition and the status quo
• Fascination with the new, the modern, the
  mechanical
• Focus on form and stylistic experimentation

• Exploration of perception and representation
• Critique of realism in how we represent the world

21

• In a kind of aesthetic attempt to purify culture
  by purifying language, modernist writers
  emphasize the role of language and form as, for
  instance, in much of Hemingway's spare prose and
  Gertrude Stein's poetry or her famous assertion
  that "a rose is a rose is a rose."
• --Packet

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Which tenets might this artist be
addressing? The Treachery of Images (1929)
RENÉ MAGRITTE
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Aesthetic Tenets of Modernism

• Abandonment of traditional rules for creating
  art, music, and literature
• Fragmented representations of time, meaning, and
  human nature
• Sense of loss, alienation, abandonment, and
  disillusionment
• Attempts to find new kinds of truth in the
  absence of any traditional way to ground meaning
  or significance

24
Modern Fiction

• No longer certain that art had a didactic
  function, writers questioned the moral and
  artistic purposes of literature.
• Culture no longer provided a set of shared
  beliefs but instead was fragmented and
  individualized.
• Language itself was seen as an unreliable medium,
  with an uncertain relationship to reality the
  very notion of clear, straightforward
  communication between people was brought into
  question.

Thats not it at all, thats not what I meant at
all.
T.S. Eliot
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How We Are Hungry After I Was Thrown in the
River

• The characters and narrators in How We Are
  Hungry, in which longer stories are interspersed
  with some of Eggers's Guardian pieces, find
  themselves on the edgeon the verge of
  breakdowns, breakups and other crises
• His narrative responds in kind, patrolling what
  lies on and beyond the far edges of speech and
  thought. In the work of lesser writersincluding
  some of those for whom Eggers has become a
  talismansuch narration can shrink into an
  aesthetic of studied faux-inarticulacy ... it is
  a mark of what Eggers can achieve at his best
  that his feeling for speech and its limitations
  rarely hits false notes.

26
Some characteristics to look for in Modernist
works include

• Alienation from society and loneliness
• Procrastination/an inability to act
• Agonized recollection of the past/constant
  flashbacks to the past
• Fear of death and the appearance of death
• Inability to feel or express love
• World as a wasteland/poor environmental portrayal
• Man creating his own myths within his mind to
  fall back upon

27
Major themes emerging in Faulkner, Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, and others of the period include

• Violence and alienation
• Historical discontinuity
• Decadence and decay
• Loss and decay
• Rejection of history
• Race relations
• Unavoidable change
• Sense of place, local color

28
In the final analysis . . .
Modernism saw the rise of the individual genius,
one who repudiated the mass culture of the cinema
and the rise of consumerism. These brilliant
writers, however, alienated from the world,
further estranged themselves from understanding,
with little social concern, with little sense or
care except for the reception of the educated
audience. This stance left the door open for the
post-modern artist, one who is often left with
only two responses to the angst of modernism
parody and amused, ironic detachment.
29
To reiterate, the avant-garde ("first wave")
movements that emerged in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries (such as symbolism,
cubism, futurism, Dada, and surrealism)
accelerated the break with the past. Following
the horrors of the Great War, modernism emerged
as a new aesthetic philosophy.
30
Some definitions that might be helpful include .
. .

• Symbolism Style of painting or writing that
  makes use of colors and sounds as symbols.
• Gustav Klimt The Kiss
• 1907-1908

31
Cubism . . .

• is a style of painting, drawing, and sculpture in
  which objects are represented by cubes and other
  geometric forms rather than by realistic details.
• Pablo Picasso
• The Guitar Player 1910

32
Futurism . . .

• is a modern movement in art and writing
  characterized by attempts to express the
  sensation of movement and growth in objects, not
  their appearance at some particular moment.
• Kazimir Malevich
• Morning in the Village After Snowstorm 1912

33
Dadaism . . .

• is a movement in modern art rejecting and
  ridiculing all accepted standards and
  conventions. Dada is a childs word for a
  hobbyhorse.
• Marcel Duchamp
• Mona Lisa 1919

34
Surrealism . . .

• is a modern movement in art and painting that
  attempts to show what takes place in dreams and
  in the subconscious mind. Surrealism is
  characterized by unusual and unexpected
  arrangements and distortions of images.
• Salvador Dali
• Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition
  of Civil War) 1936

35
How does the following poem indicate a modern
sensibility?

• cf1.netmegs.com/memestream/red20wheelbarrow.j
  pg

36
The Red Wheelbarrow so much
depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed
with rain water beside the
white chickens. William Carlos Williams
Futurism exhorted writers and artists to
celebrate the new and to abandon the attitudes
and values of the past. Dadaism dada,
babytalk in French for hobbyhorse nonsense
collages of street debris as art and poems
composed of random syllables or words pulled out
of a paper bag, or of several unrelated passages
read aloud simultaneously. A number of Paris
Dadaists became Surrealists. Cubism presents
an experience as fragmented elements rearranged
to form a new synthesis, or whole.
37
How do the following paintings represent some of
these tenets?

• Paul Klee

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MARC CHAGALL I and the Village (1911)
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VINCENT VAN GOGH The Starry Night (1889)
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PABLO PICASSO Self-Portrait with Palette(1906)
MARCEL DUCHAMP Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2
(1912)
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EDVARD MUNCH Evening on Karl Johan (1892)
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The Lovers II René Magritte
43
Compared to what?

• I dont get itpeople always painted weird stuff
  I hate art what does this have to do with English
  class this isnt art class who cares about Freud
  why did those people have bags on their heads
  when is he gonna tell us what that dog story was
  about I want peanut butter I hope Leslie brings
  my gym shorts before lunch. Apricot. Ap Ap Ap
  reeeeeee KOT!

44
Realistic representation/ mythology/ the
perfection of Man/ Religion
45
Religion/ Hierarchical representation
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47
The search for order in the modern world can be
seen in the private mythologies of T. S. Eliot,
which in turn hearken back to a classical world
and in Joyce's reworking of the tale of Ulysses
this kind of self-conscious use of myth to
organize the details of a work reflected a new
literary self-consciousness. William Faulkner's
fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi
also might be a kind of private modernist
landscape populated with Faulkner-invented
mythical families of the Sartorises and the
Snopeses
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The Glory of War/ Nationalism over Individualism
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Post-Modernism Whatever

• Jeff Koons
• Michael Jackson and Bubbles
• 1988
• 42 x 70 1/2 X 32 1/2