The Modernist Experiment: Overview

The early part of the 20th century saw massive changes in the everyday life of people in cities. The recent inventions
of the automobile, airplane, and telephone shrank distances around the world and sped up the pace of life. Freud’s
theory of the unconscious and infantile sexuality altered the popular understanding of the mind and identity, and the
late 19th century thinkers Marx and Nietzsche undermined traditional notions of truth, certainty, and morality.
In response to this acceleration of life and thought, a wave of aggressively experimental movements, collectively
termed “modernist” because of their emphasis on radical innovation, swept through Europe. In Paris, the Spanish
painter Pablo Picasso and the French Georges Braque developed cubism, a style of painting that abandoned realism
and traditional perspective to fragment space and explode form. In Italy, the spokesperson (portavoz) for futurism, F.
T. Marinetti, led an artistic movement that touched on everything from painting to poetry to cooking and
encouraged an escape from the past into rapid and mechanical world of the automobile and the airplane. Dadaists
such the French Marcel Duchamp began a guerrilla campaign against established notions of sense and the
boundaries of what could be called art. In music, composers such as the French Claude Debussy and the Russian Igor
Stravinsky were beginning experiments with rhythm and harmony.
In Anglophone literature, “modernism” describes an era rather than a unitary movement. But what connects the
modernist writers, aside from a rich web of personal and professional connections, is a shared desire to break with
established forms and subjects in art and literature. Influenced by European art movements, many modernist writers
rejected realistic representation and traditional formal expectations. In the novel, they explored the Freudian depths
of their characters’ psyches through stream of consciousness and interior monologue. In poetry, they mixed slang
with elevated language, experimented with free verse, and studded (adorner) their works with difficult allusions and
disconnected images.
Among the earliest groups to shape English-language modernism were the imagists, a circle of poets led initially by
the Englishman T. E. Hulme and the American Ezra Pound, in the early 1910s. Imagist poetic doctrine included the
use of plain speech, the preference for free verse over closed forms, and above all the creation of the vivid, hard-
edged image. Shaped by Asian forms such as the haiku, the imagist poem tended to be brief and ephemeral,
presenting a single striking image or metaphor. Pound soon disassociated himself from the movement and went to
become a literary proponent of vorticism, an English movement in the visual arts led by the painter and writer
Wyndham Lewis. The vorticists championed energy and life over what they saw as the turpitude (infamia) of
European society and sought to create the concentration of energies they called a “vortex”. After having published
only one issue of their journal Blast, the vorticists suddenly found their often violent rhetoric about English national
identity with the real violence of the World War I. The second issue of Blast, called a “war number”, declared the
vorticists’ loyalty to England in the fights against German fascism.
As modernism developed, the aggressive polemics of Lewis and Pound were replaced by the more reasoned,
essayistic criticism of T. S. Eliot. Eliot’s Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses were technically innovative and initially
controversial (Ulysses were banned in the United States and Great Britain), but their eventual acceptance helped to
bring modernism into the canon of English literature. In the decades to come, the massive influence of Eliot as a
critic would transform the image of modernism into what Eliot himself called classicism, a position rooted in the
literary past and emphasizing the impersonality of the work of art.
The influence of modernism, both on those artists who have repudiated it and on those who have followed its
direction, was pervasive. Joyce, Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and other modernists provided compositional strategies still
central to literature.

The American Modernism

Major influences
- WWI: 32 countries were declared in war. This war declared the end to idealism and ushered in an era
marked by hedonism (a school of thought that argues that pleasure is the primary and the most important
intrinsic good), political corruption, and ruthless practices.
 - The Jazz Age: young people began rebelling against the past and the traditions, and experimenting with
fashion.
- Prohibition (1920-1933): alcohol was made illegal, in response to which, speakeasies were created where
alcohol was served and bootleggers used to sell alcohol despite this prohibition.
- New era for women: there were more women working because men had gone to fight in the war; the right
to vote for women was established; Flapper was an emancipated young woman who embraced new fashions
and urban attitudes of the day.
- The Great Depression: Stock Market crashed in 1929; banks failed, business floundered, and workers lost
their jobs (the 25% of the population was unemployed).
- The New Deal: was a series of social liberal programs enacted in the United States between 1933 and 1938.
Its main goal was to relieve the hunger and the homeless, recover agriculture and business, and make
various economic reforms to prevent such a severe depression from occurring again.

Themes of Modern Literature

- Collectiveness vs. individualism
- Anxiety regarding the past
- Historical discontinuity
- Disillusionment
- Violence and alienation
- Decadency and decay
- Loss and despair
- Breakdown of social norms and cultural sureties
- Race and gender relations
- Sense of place, local color

Formal aspects of Modern literature

- Free indirect discourse: a style of third-person narration which combines some of the characteristics of third-
person report with first-person direct speech. Passages written using free indirect speech are often
ambiguous as to whether they convey the views, feelings and thoughts of the narrator or those of the
character the narrator is describing. This allows a flexible and sometimes ironic interaction of internal and
external perspectives.
- Stream of consciousness narration: a narrative mode which seeks to portray an individual’s point of view by
giving the written equivalent of the character’s thought processes, either through interior monologue or in
connection to action.

Major authors
- Djuna Barnes (1892-1982): was an American poet and novelist. She began her writing career as a reporter.
Her major work is Nightwood (1936), a cult classic of lesbian fiction.
- John Dos Passos (1896-1970): was an American novelist and a critique of materialism in his early works. His
literature includes fragments of pop songs, news headlines, stream-of-consciousness monologues,
naturalistic fragments from the lives of a horde of unrelated characters. His major works are Manhattan
Transfer (1925) and U.S.A. (1938).
- T.S. Eliot (1888-1965): was a British essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic, and “one of the
20th century’s major poets”. He was the most dominant literary figure between the two world wars. He
conceived the poem as an object demanding a fusion and concentration of intellect, feeling, and experience.
His major works are Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and The Waste Land (1922).
- William Faulkner (1897-1962): was a South American writer and Nobel Prize laureate (ganador) from Oxford,
Mississippi. He centred many of his works on the mythical Yoknapatawpha county. His experimental
 techniques included stream of consciousness and dislocation of narrative time. On his works, he focused on
issues of sex, class, and race relations. His major works are The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying
(1930), Absalom, Absalom! (1936).
- Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961): was an American novelist, short story teller, and journalist. In his works
dominated the spare and tight journalistic prose style, and the objective and detached point of view. His
works were centered in his examination of masculinity. His major works are The Sun Also Rises (1926, A
Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946): was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. She coined the
term “Lost Generation”. She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures in modernism in literature and
art would meet, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, and
Henri Matisse. Her major works are Three Lives (1909) and The Making of Americans (1925).
- F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940): was an American novelist and short story teller, whose works are the
paradigmatic writings of the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was a daydream and
poor student who wrote plays and short stories in his teens. He went to Princeton University in 1913, wrote
for the Nassau Literary Magazine. Fitzgerald entered World War I in 1917, and in the military camp wrote
The Romanic Egotist. While stationed in Camp Sheridan, in Alabama he fell in love with Zelda Sayre but she
turned down his marriage proposal because of his lack of money. However, Zelda married him after his first
novel This Side of Paradise was published in 1920, and they lived the life of glamour in New York and Paris.
Later they moved to St. Paul where their daughter Scottie was born. In 1925 Fitzgerald wrote The Great
Gatsby, a nearly flawless novel according to critics that represents the failure of the American Dream
(poverty, discrimination, hypocrisy, corruption, and suppression). Fitzgerald’s works reflect the key events of
his own life. He died in 1940 while writing The Last Tycoon (magnate).