MODERN AGE

WHEN: years between the two world wars, an age of

experimentations

WHAT: a new kind of sensibility developed, that is a new way of

looking at the world and a new way of understanding man and
society

WHY: the tragic consequences of the 2 World Wars challenged

Victorian values as people felt that it was no longer possible to
rely on beliefs universally recognized as meaningful:

a. FAITH IN PROGRESS crumbled: technological progress could

prove destructive (thanks to technological achievements man
could create deadly weapons)

b. RELIGIOUS FAITH as a set of beliefs that could help men to

interpret the world and their position in the Universe was
radically questioned; in particular, the CONCEPT OF
PROVIDENCE received a final blow: how can the death of
millions of people be part of God’s plan?

- development of new psychological and philosophical

theories that emphasize SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE:

a)FREUD: the founder of PSYCHOANALYSIS - man’s life

could not be reduced to a set of observable rational
behaviours, it being highly influenced by what he called the
‘unconscious’, that is his irrational instincts and desires

b)William JAMES and the “stream of consciousness”:

PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY (1890): man’s mental activity
described as “an unbroken flow of unordered thoughts “. A
river or a stream are the metaphors by which it is most
naturally described

c) BERGSON: made a distinction between mechanical/

historical time, which is divided into distinct instants that
can be measured quantitatively, and subjective time, which
is composed of moments that are distinct from one another
 qualitatively. His theory about memory: the past, rather than
disappearing, endures and is present in every moment of our
lives.
MODERNIST FICTION
Novelists and poets explored subjective experience > there was
a shifting of the narrative focus from the plot to the
consciousness of one or more characters

The true break from traditional fiction took place in 1922 with the
publication of Ulysses by James Joyce, and with the works of
Virginia Woolf, in the next twenty years.

Virginia Woolf claimed that the basis of good fiction lay in

“character in itself”:
- rejection of traditional techniques and creation of new
ones: she attacks Edwardian writers who still used
“conventions” and tools” to portray characters from outside;
Modernist writers represented the inside of the characters
(in Woolf’s essay Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown)

NEW FORMS OF EXPRESSIONS were created to suit new means of

expression that would reflect the complexity and discontinuity of
the modern spirit:
- cinematic devices like “montage” and “flashbacks”
- similes and metaphors
- special forms of punctuation like dashes and parenthesis
- The interior monologue:
a. DIRECT INTERIOR MONOLOGUE no interference from the
narrator; no reporting verbs: in this way the reader is allowed
a perspective from the inside of the character’s mind: JOYCE
INDIRECT INTERIOR MONOLOGUE is the more popular of
the two methods; the narrator does not disappear altogether
from the narration; reporting verbs can be found in the
narration: WOOLF

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS: a person’s mental activity

VS INTERIOR MONOLOGUE: a writer’s technique to reproduce
the stream of consciousness into words