Modernism

1
Modernism

• Post WWI
• 1910-1940s

2
Modernism

• Reflects a sense of cultural crisis
• Knowledge is not absolute
• Marx, Freud and Darwin had started it with the
  naturalists
• Freuds psycho-analytic theories
• Loss of a sense of tradition
• Life is fragmented, not continuous
• Increasing dominance of technology

3
Modernist Period

• Late 19th century- 1930s/1940s
• Historians say that modernism is the result of
  the general transformation of society caused by
  industrialization and technology during the 19th
  century.

4
Modernism

• Focuses on how modern life is ruining the
  individual spirit
• Disillusionment- the impoverished human soul

5
Modernism

• Sense of alienation, loss and despair
• Portrays elements of society that serve to
  separate and isolate people
• The evils and effects of modern life

6
Modernism

• Radical experiment with form and style
• Unconventional structures
• Strange capitalization and lack of punctuation
• Stream of consciousness
• e.e.cummings and Gertrude Stein exemplified this
  experimentation

7
Prominent American Modernists

• Novelists
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
• John Steinbeck
• William Faulkner
• Ernest Hemingway
• Playwrights
• Tennessee Williams
• Arthur Miller
• Eugene ONeill

• Poets
• T.S. Eliot
• William Carlos Williams
• Ezra Pound
• John Dos Passos
• e.e. cummings
• Edna St. Vincent Millay