MODERNISM

Present by.
M.Adnan
 • Modernism is an artistic and cultural movement flourished in the first
decades of the 20th. century, about the time of WWI. Modernism is a
cultural trend. It is the movement in visual arts, music, literature and drama
which rejected the old Victorian standards of how art should be made was
developed in the first three decades of the 20th century. It was developed in

What is Europe,

Modernism
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 The Modern Period?

Brief introduction of the modern period In the second

half of the 19th century and the early decades of the
20th century, both natural and social sciences in
Europe had advanced. Their rapid development led to
great gains in material wealth. But when capitalism
came into its monopoly stage, the sharpened
contradictions between socialized production and the
private ownership caused frequent economic
depressions and mass unemployment.

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Characteristics of Modernism
• Modernist writers believed that the traditional social, religious, and political
order had broken down. Economically, the World War marked the last stage of
the disintegration of the British Empire. Ideologically, The rise of the irrational
philosophy and new science greatly incited modern writers to make new
explorations on human natures and human relationships. A number of theories
which were influential for modernism were elaborated, such as Einstein's
treatise on relativity(1905), Max Planck's o Quantum Theory(1900), Freud's
theory (The Interpretation of Dream, 1900), and Darwin's theory of evolution
and heredity. Modernism was built on a sense of lost community and
civilization. It included contradictions and paradoxes. After the First World War,
all kinds of literary trends of modernism appeared: symbolism, expressionism,
surrealism, futurism, and imagism. The loss of a sense of tradition was a
common theme to modernist writers. They saw it as a means of liberation from
the limitations of past artistic traditions. The increasing dominance of
technology was another prevalent Modernist preoccupation.
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Questioning Nature of Modernism
Modernism questioned all the maxims which were untouched and were
blindly followed, with every aspect of existence, being re-examined ranging
from philosophy to commerce including Religion where even the existence
of an all-powerful Creator was questioned. Modernism saw the rise of the
‘self-consciousness’ and this commitment to a principled self-scrutiny
entailed an exploration of the self. This way of self exploration can be
observed in various forms of arts where the attention is on experimenting
with the form or on the processes or materials

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 Impact on Art?

Modernism is also viewed as an aesthetic contemplation.

It is a search for an abstract truth of life. Artists of this
movement attached traditional means of representation
and tried to reveal the ‘truth’ of human existence through
the creation of ‘high art’. There was a focus on
experimentation, randomness, fragmentation of forms
and of narratives that were not continuous. Formal
aesthetics was rejected as spontaneity and new discoveries
gained importance and minimalist designs were
embraced.
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 What are the main ideas of
modernism?

Modernism explicitly rejected the ideology of realism and

made use of the works of the past by the employment of
reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision
and parody. Modernism also rejected the certainty of
Enlightenment thinking, and many modernists also rejected
religious belief
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 What is an example of modernism?

James Joyce's Ulysses is the classic example of modernism in the novel. Ulysses
(1922) has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire Modernist
movement". Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (1915), The Trial (1925) and T.S.
Eliot's poem The Waste Land (1922) are also prime examples.

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Modernism vs.
Realism?
Much like adolescence, modernism represents
the accumulation of rebellious attitude against
traditional authority. This authority then was
the elitist and bourgeois state of realist art or
"realism," which normalized the form and
content of art as purely faithful imitation of
shared "true" reality.

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 Is modernism a part
of realism?
Modernism explicitly rejected the ideology of
realism and made use of the works of the past
by the employment of reprise, incorporation,
rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody.
Modernism also rejected the certainty of
Enlightenment thinking, and many modernists
also rejected religious belief.

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 Modernism in Pakistan

Since 1977 Pakistan has been experiencing what can generally be called Islamization or revival of Islamic
institutions. These terms, though often misleading in their attempt to explain a phenomenon, are, nonetheless,
familiar to students of Muslim history. Periods of turmoil and unrest in the Muslim community and the threats of
internal strife and dissidence have usually brought the uniting force of Islam to the rescue of the ummah. One can
easily identify al- Ghazzali's (1058-1111) work, Ihya' 'Ulum al-Din (The Revival of the Religious Sciences), Shah
Waliullah (1703-1762) and his disciples' "back to the Qur'an" movements, and Muhammad Iqbal's(1877-1938)
endeavor in Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam' as attempts by the intelligentsia either to revive or to
reconstruct religious institutions. Each of them represents a critical epoch for the Muslim community: first, when
the faith was endangered by the rationalism of the Mu'tazilites; secondly, when Muslims in South Asia were losing
their power and needed some inspiration to retain it; and finally, during the first half of the twentieth century, when
they were looking for guidance to carve for themselves a Muslim state in South Asia.

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 Criticism?

• Post World War II, modernism started being challenged and criticized.
Its controversial rejection of tradition backfired as it eventually
became a tradition by itself. Modernism shocks its audiences with
unpredictable effects so as to counteract normal expectations. The
criticism on modernism was disharmony was used in the modernist
music, there were no intelligible plots in movies or books and poetry
could not be interpreted clearly. Modernism slowly slipped from being
a revolutionary movement as its institutionalization increased
eventually leading to the birth of postmodernism.
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