MODERN

MODERNITY
MODERNISM
 Modernization
Renewal or Innovation
Convention or Tradition
Every so often, there occur in the arts certain
severe upheavals which seem to affect all their
products and radically change their temper. For
some reason these are often closely associated
with centuries: we can sense one such change
that belongs to the eighteenth century, which we
call ‘Neo-Classicism’; another associated with
the nineteenth, ‘Romanticism’;
and another associated with our own century for which we
have no clear name but which we often regard as the
most radical of all. There are, then, certain phases, often
taking place over a relatively short period of time, when
‘style’ shifts and the structure of perception among artists
significantly alters, and when the environment and
prevailing assumptions of art are so radically recreated
that it seems no longer to be witnessing to the same kind
of world, or employing structure, material or language in
the same way as before.
In short, when we speak of the modern world, we
do not simply mean a world that is modern only
because we live in it. We mean a world that is,
we feel, historically unique, evolving to new
principles, the principles of what we call
modernisation. And modernisation means not
simply the unparalleled scale of modern change,
but the kind of change it is and the direction in
which it is going. For modernisation […] is the
product of science, reason and industrialism.
Malcolm Bradbury, The Social Context of Modern Literature (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1972) xxviii.
[t]here is little doubt that of all the concepts
used in discussing and mapping twentieth-
century Western literature, ‘modernism’
has become the most important, either as
used by itself or as part of the kindred
concept ‘postmodernism.’
Modernism is a term used to signify “a
paradigmatic shift, a major revolt,
beginning in the mid- and late nineteenth
century, against the prevalent literary and
aesthetic traditions of the Western world.”

Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism

(Cornell: Cornell UP, 1990) 1-2.
 Modernization
• Charles Darwin -The Origin of Species by Means of
Natural Selection or
the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for
Life (1859)
• William James – Psychology (1892)
• Henri Bergson – Matter and Memory (1896)
• Sigmund Freud -The Interpretation of Dreams (1899)
• Max Planck – Quantum Theory (1899)
• Albert Einstein - Special Theory of Relativity (1905)
Marjorie Perloff, “Modernism Now.” (571-578)
A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture. Eds.
David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar

The great revolution of the early twentieth century

designated by the term modernism – a term that
refers not only to a period (roughly 1900–30) but
to an ethos – remains, at the beginning of our
own century, incomplete and open to the future:
modernism, it is now widely understood, is not
yet finished, its momentum having been
deferred by two world wars and the Cold War so
that many of its principles are only now being
brought to fruition.
Modernism perceived its own mission as a
call for necessary rupture.

It is the poetics of such resistance that

continues to dazzle readers coming to
modernist works a century later.
 What was it that made the modernist period, especially in
its early utopian stages, so revolutionary?
The transformation of an agrarian world into an urbanized
one, which went hand in hand with the astonishing
inventions of the period – the internal combustion
engine, diesel engine and steam turbine, the automobile,
motor bus, tractor, and soon the airplane, the telegraph,
telephone, and typewriter, the dissemination of
electricity, and the creation of synthetic dyes, fibers, and
plastics – all these contributed to the flight forward.
The Einsteinian revolution, the “new” non-
Euclidean geometries, the invention of the
Roentgen X-ray: these heavily influenced the
arts and poetries of the early century; witness
Marcel Duchamp’s found objects known as
ready-mades, his non-semantic poetry, his use
of chance and “playful physics” in The Large
Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by her
Bachelors, Even).
In New York, as in Paris, the advertising industry, mass
entertainment, and popular journalism came to the fore and
changed the dynamic of art reception. So successful and
widespread were the new networks of communication that
contact between individual nations became at once much
easier and yet fraught with the proximity and hence
competition that led to the First World War. The first flight
across the English Channel, for example, which took place in
July 1909, and was celebrated by Robert Delaunay in his
painting Hommage à Blériot, was followed, no more than six
years later, by airplanes dropping bombs over Paris in the
First World War.
The revolutionary modes and techniques we
associate with modernism – and which
have everything to do with the
revolutionary changes in the culture itself –
were all in place by 1916.
• the demise of mimesis, of representation,
as the accepted purpose of the literary
construct. For the modernists, the role of
poetry is not to represent the world outside
language, but to create a linguistic field
that has its own mode of being. “Reality,”
by this token, cannot, in any case, be
known directly; it can be revealed only by
the mediation of the Symbol.
• The projected autonomy of art and its divorce
from truth or morality puts heavy weight on the
poet him- or herself; the heroic modernist poet is
the genius who can and must “Make it New.”
The corollary of the anti-mimetic contract of
modernism is that the art work is autonomous,
that it has a life of its own, independent of its
possible “reflection” of reality or personal feeling.
• Language had to be concrete.
• Modernists demanded that the public would
meet them more than half-way, would take the
trouble to unravel what had taken the poets
themselves so long to do.
• Modernism attached much importance to the
newly discovered Freudian unconscious, to
dream work, and to the use of myth and
archetypal narratives as organizing structures.
• Roughly placed between 1880 and 1950, Modernism refers to:
– formal innovations in art, literature, and music;
– rebellious artistic movements like Surrealism and Imagism;
– the break with Victorian cultural and artistic traditions;
– focus on the aesthetic experimentation that accompanied the
self-conscious engagement with the idea of the new;
– centrality of the city to modernist writing;
– the use of visual abstraction to wrestle with the technological
changes in transportation and communication in the first part of
the twentieth century;
– the avant-garde.
• Articulation of a canon known as high modernism.
Martha Jane Nadell, “Modernism and Race”