MODERNISM

Cultural Dimensions
 Malcolm Bradbury, The Social Context of Modern Literature
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972

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 18th
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.
 D. Fokkema, E. Ibsch, Modernist Conjectures: a mainstream in European
literature, 1910-1940
Palgrave Macmillan, 1988

It is also possible that the quick succession and

simultaneous development of different literary currents
characteristic of modern literary history will forbid future
attempts toward periodization - unless the coexistence of
many different currents is considered a distinctive feature of
a period.
 Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism
Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1990

Modernism represents the cultural and aesthetic changes

that “took place in a tumultuous era: an era of Western
imperialism, enormous advances in science and technology,
world war, communist revolutions, crisis in the capitalist
economy, the rise of fascism.
The turmoil of the era signals in several ways the
‘creation’ of the contemporary world, and no reading
of our world can overlook the way it emerged from
these historical disruptions.
The sweeping breadth of the concept of modernism
seems to indicate that changes of enormous
proportions are also seen to have occurred in
literature and art.”
 M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms

a prominent feature of modernism is the phenomenon

of an avant-garde…, that is a small, self-conscious
group of artists and authors who undertake, in Ezra
Pound’s phrase, ‘to make it new.’
By violating accepted conventions and decorums,
they undertake to create ever-new artistic forms and
styles and to introduce hitherto neglected, and often
forbidden, subject matters.
 Matei Călinescu, Five Faces of Modernity
Duke University Press, 1987

In France, Italy, Spain, and other European countries the avant-garde

tends to be regarded as the most extreme form of artistic negativism
– art itself being the first victim. As for modernism – it never
conveys the sense of universal and hysterical negation so
characteristic of the avant-garde. The anti-traditionalism of
modernism is often subtly traditional.
Impressionism
Claude Monet – Impressions
Sunrise
Cubism
Pablo Picasso – Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon
Expressionism

Edvard Munch – The Scream

 Features of Modernism

◦ Break with tradition;

◦ Demise of mimesis;
◦ Autonomy of art and its divorce from truth or
morality;
◦ Shift of focus from the outer to the inner world
(importance attached to the unconscious);
◦ Meaning dependent on the cretor as much as on the
receiver;
◦ Importance attached to form, which is the one
creating meaning;
◦ Transgressing of the boundaries between genres and
artistic forms.