BRITISH LITERATURE OF THE 20TH

CENTURY: MODERNISM AND

POSTMODERNISM
DR. PETRONIA POPA PETRAR
1ST TERM, 2018-2019
OVERVIEW
• FEATURES OF MODERNITY
• CULTURAL SOURCES FOR MODERN THOUGHT
• DEFINITIONS OF MODERNITY
• THE SPACE AND TIME OF MODERNITY
MODERNITY: MAIN FEATURES
• Historical-cultural background since the 18th c.
• Belief in (“instrumental”) reason & progress
• The “Cartesian ego” = individual identity
• Unprecedented technological innovation
• Globalisation
• Mass-culture & democratisation
• Unprecedented feeling of catastrophe (WWs,
Holocaust, Gulag) and danger of mass extinction
• Immanentisation
• Relativity & contingency/complex causality
what MODERNISM reacts to/against
CULTURAL SOURCES FOR MODERN
THOUGHT
“Positivism has been defined as ‘a collection of
prohibitions concerning human knowledge,
intended to confine the name “knowledge” or
“science” to the results of those operations that are
observable in the evolution of the modern sciences
of nature’. There is, then, a distinct circularity
involved in the claim that we can come to know
everything through scientific research, since science
itself has been allowed to prescribe what counts as
knowledge.” (11)
P. Parrinder, in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Literature, eds. Laura
Marcus & Peter Nicholls, CUP, 2007
J. Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)
After his first feeling of revolt he had come round to the view that only a
meticulous precision of statement would bring out the true horror behind the
appalling face of things. The facts those men were so eager to know had been
visible, tangible, open to the senses, occupying their place in space and time,
requiring for their existence a fourteen-hundred-ton steamer and twenty-seven
minutes by the watch; they made a whole that had features, shades of
expression, a complicated aspect that could be remembered by the eye, and
something else besides, something invisible, a directing spirit of perdition that
dwelt within, like a malevolent soul in a detestable body. He was anxious to make
this clear. This had not been a common affair, everything in it had been of the
utmost importance, and fortunately he remembered everything. He wanted to go
on talking for truth’s sake, perhaps for his own sake also; and while his utterance
was deliberate, his mind positively flew round and round the serried circle of
facts that had surged up all about him to cut him off from the rest of his kind: it
was like a creature that, finding itself imprisoned within an enclosure of high
stakes, dashes round and round, distracted in the night, trying to find a weak
spot, a crevice, a place to scale, some opening through which it may squeeze
itself and escape. This awful activity of mind made him hesitate at times in his
speech. . . .
CULTURAL SOURCES FOR MODERN
THOUGHT
• DARWIN
• NIETZSCHE
• MARX
• FREUD
• EINSTEIN
• HEISENBERG (uncertainty + the observer)

see M. Bell, “The Metaphysics of

Modernism”, in The Cambridge
Companion to Modernism
CULTURAL SOURCES FOR MODERN
THOUGHT
• Metaphors of the world (from the
“CLOCKWORK UNIVERSE” to UNCERTAINTY)
• Lord Kelvin’s laws of thermodynamics >
predictability of all events in the universe
<-> Darwin’s idea of evolution as dynamic
change
• 2nd law of thermodynamics: entropy always
increases in a closed system => narratives of
chaos (Lord Kelvin, 1881)
V. Woolf, Between the Acts, 1941
Scraps, orts and fragments! Surely, we should unite?”

The word was cut in two. A zoom severed it. Twelve aeroplanes in
perfect formation like a flight of wild duck came overhead. THAT was
the music. The audience gaped; the audience gazed. Then zoom
became drone. The planes had passed.

The gramophone was affirming in tones there was no denying,

triumphant yet valedictory: Dispersed are we; who have come together.
But, the gramophone asserted, let us retain whatever made that
harmony.
O let us, the audience echoed (stooping, peering, fumbling), keep
together. For there is joy, sweet joy, in company.
Dispersed are we, the gramophone repeated.
CULTURAL SOURCES FOR MODERN
THOUGHT
• Rise of anthropology as “the new Science of
Man” > attempt to develop a full explanation
of humanity by integrating Darwin’s theory
with archaeology and cultural history/history
of religions
• Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890-1915) >
divides history into the phases of magic,
religion and science (which he favours)
• Opposition to materialism and science
CULTURAL SOURCES FOR MODERN
THOUGHT
“The belief that what is ‘lower down’ is more
important and more fundamental is an almost
inevitable consequence of conceiving scientific
and scholarly work as a genealogical exploration
or a quest for origins.” (Parrinder, 18)
Psychoanalysis
Primitivism (Lawrence, Picasso, Stravinsky)
Return to mythology (Joyce, Eliot)
Pablo Picasso, Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon
(1907)
DH Lawrence, Women in Love (1920)
They were almost of the same ideas. He hated Mestrovic, was not satisfied with the
Futurists, he liked the West African wooden figures, the Aztec art, Mexican and
Central American. He saw the grotesque, and a curious sort of mechanical motion
intoxicated him, a confusion in nature. They had a curious game with each other,
Gudrun and Loerke, of infinite suggestivity, strange and leering, as if they had some
esoteric understanding of life, that they alone were initiated into the fearful central
secrets, that the world dared not know. Their whole correspondence was in a strange,
barely comprehensible suggestivity, they kindled themselves at the subtle lust of the
Egyptians or the Mexicans. The whole game was one of subtle inter-suggestivity, and
they wanted to keep it on the plane of suggestion. From their verbal and physical
nuances they got the highest satisfaction in the nerves, from a queer interchange of
half-suggested ideas, looks, expressions and gestures, which were quite intolerable,
though incomprehensible, to Gerald. He had no terms in which to think of their
commerce, his terms were much too gross.
The suggestion of primitive art was their refuge, and the inner mysteries of sensation
their object of worship. Art and Life were to them the Reality and the Unreality.
‘Of course,’ said Gudrun, ‘life doesn’t REALLY matter — it is one’s art which is central.
What one does in one’s life has PEU DE RAPPORT, it doesn’t signify much.’
‘Yes, that is so, exactly,’ replied the sculptor. ‘What one does in one’s art, that is the
breath of one’s being. What one does in one’s life, that is a bagatelle for the outsiders
to fuss about.’
CULTURAL SOURCES FOR MODERN
THOUGHT
• Socialism as the natural result of progress –
scientific implementation, rather than
revolution (Fabian Society)
• Feminism
• Decadence, “degeneration” (Max Nordau,
1892)
• Eugenics
MODERNITY - DEFINITIONS
Charles Baudelaire – "The Painter of Modern Life" (1863)
By 'modernity' I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the
contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal
and the immutable. Every old master has had his own
modernity; the great majority of fine portraits that have
come down to us from former generations are clothed in the
costume of their own period. They are perfectly
harmonious, because everything -from costume and coiffure
down to gesture, glance and smile (for each age has a
deportment, a glance and a smile of its own) – everything, I
say, combines to form a completely viable whole. This
transitory, fugitive element, whose metamorphoses are so
rapid, must on no account be despised or dispensed with. By
neglecting it, you cannot fail to tumble into the abyss of an
abstract and indeterminate beauty, like that of the first
woman before the fall of man.
MODERNITY - DEFINITIONS
Max Weber (“Science as a Vocation”, 1918)
• “intellectualist rationalization, created by science
and by scientifically oriented technology”
• “disenchantment of the world”
– Death has no meaning, therefore life has no meaning.
• AUTONOMISATION OF THE SPHERES OF THOUGHT:
COGNITIVE, AESTHETIC, MORAL/LAW
– no connection to the “sphere of life”
see Jürgen Habermas,
“Modernity, An Incomplete Project”
MODERNITY - DEFINITIONS
PETER BERGER - THE HOMELESS MIND: Modernization and
Consciousness (Penguin, 1974)
• Technological and bureaucratic society > cognitive style:
– machine-logic, componentiality, interdependence of
components & sequences, separability of means and ends,
implicit abstraction, anonymous social relations ==> self-
anonymisation
• Disintegration of community: pluralisation of life spheres
– private/public, division of labour, mass-media & urbanisation,
“life planning” deriving from future goals rather than past
events
–  open and incoherent identity – reflective, in crisis,
individuated
• Secularisation and privatisation of religion
 “homelessness” (“metaphysical loss of home”)
MODERNITY - DEFINITIONS
Matei Călinescu, Five Faces of Modernity:
Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch,
Postmodernism (1987)
• Modernity as “time-conscious civilisation”:
emergence of historical, linear, teleological,
unrepeatable time
• „awareness of the present, seized in its
immediacy and irresistible transitoriness”
• split from the normative past
• “two modernities”
MODERNITY - DEFINITIONS
Anthony Giddens (The Consequences of Modernity,
1990)
• the “communal” replaced by the “collective”
• disembedding & “time-space distanciation”
– D: “the ‘lifting out’ of social relations from local
contexts of interaction and their restructuring across
indefinite spans of time-space” (abstractisation: media,
money, expert systems)
– “time-space distanciation – the conditions under which
time and space are organised so as to connect
presence and absence”
• reflexivity
 “risk society” & modernity’s self-consumption
KEY WORDS
• CRISIS
• NOVELTY
• INDIVIDUALISM (+ questioning of)
• SELF-CRITICISM
• SELF-SUBVERSION
• SELF-CONTRADICTION