“The Modern World: Self and Other in Global Context”

For the first time we no longer speak of one culture or another. Writers of this time period actually begin to speak to the world.

It is no coincidence that René-François-Armand Prudhomme (1839–1907), a French poet and essayist, was the first person to win the international Nobel

Prize in Literature, in 1901.

Leading up to the 20th Century’s Nihilism was the Loss of Faith in

the 19th Century

• Although we typically think of Christianity loosing ground in the late 20th century, in point of fact a lot of doubt was manifesting itself during the late 19th century and the elements coming up in the 20th only confirmed many of these doubts.

• On the Origin of Species was published 1859.

Tennyson struggled with doubt in In Memoriam (1849)

   'The stars,' she [sorrow] whispers, 'blindly run;        A web is wov'n across the sky;        From out waste places comes a cry,    And murmurs from the dying sun:

(Stanza III)'SO careful of the type?' but no.

       From scarped cliff and quarried stone        She [nature] cries, 'A thousand types are gone:    I care for nothing, all shall go.

(Stanza LVI )

Not Just Darwin

• Jean-Baptiste Lamarak’s 'Philosophie zoologique' (1809)

• Lyell’s 'Principles of Genealogy' (1830)

Mathew Arnold in “Dover Beach”

The sea is calm to-night.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; —on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

About the 20th Century• In the twentieth century, modernization

was used in tandem with colonization as a means to legitimize the often forced adoption of Western concepts of "progress" in different parts of the world.

• As such, modernization also became a stimulus for movements that rejected "progress" in favor of "tradition."

• In the Western world (that is, Europe and North America), modernization has meant industrialization, a refusal of positivism, and movements to redefine nationalist politics.

• In the non-Western world (that is, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and South America), modernization has generally meant Westernization in terms of technology, industry, political structures, mass culture, and other mechanisms of globalization (or neocolonialism, as it is sometimes called).

Define Terms:• Positivism is a philosophy of science based on

the view that information derived from logical and mathematical treatments and reports of sensory experience is the exclusive source of all authoritative knowledge, that there is valid knowledge (truth) only in scientific knowledge.

Modernization arrived at different speeds in different parts of the world and was received with indifference, optimism, or outright horror. Success was measured according to Western values and institutions such as individualism, capitalism, democracy, literacy (often in terms of European languages, with no consideration for older local languages), private ownership, the middle class, religious freedom, scientific method, public institutions, and the emancipation of women, all of which may or may not have been realized in the West itself—even today.

The First World War

• The effects of the First World War were evident in literature, not only in subject matter but in use of language.

• European writers and thinkers looked beyond models of scientific rationalism for a means of expressing knowledge of the world and lived experience that could not be apprehended by intellect alone

• Henri Bergson's philosophy criticized scientific rationality as artificial and unreal because it froze everything in conceptual space.

• Sigmund Freud's invention of psycho-analysis decentered conventions of medicine and psychology by focusing on the unconscious. – Dreams, slips of the tongue, and dÈjý vu, for

example, were understood as productive sites of inquiry into repressed desires and anxieties.

– Language, specifically free association, became the means by which the "talking cure" was realized, which was not always an end to unhappiness, but rather an understanding of it. In the "hard" sciences of physics and mathematics,

• Albert Einstein proposed his theory of relativity, challenging concepts of absolute motion and the absolute difference of space and time from the Newtonian model of physics. Einstein argued that reality should be understood as a four-dimensional continuum called space-time.

Literary and linguistic systems were seen as games

• Thus "pieces" (words) and "rules" (grammar, syntax, and other conventions) were combined with playfulness and sometimes with pathos to emphasize the instabilities of language.

• The linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein emphasized that language was connected to society and usage—not to reality. (See next plate)

• The connection between the word cat and the domesticated feline mammal is completely arbitrary. – The mammal remains the same whether it is

called chat, gato, gatto, bekku, bili, poonay, kuching, or just kitty.

• Writers such as Beckett, Borges, and Robbe-Grillet show that language determines how we see the world.

• Semiotics (the study of signs) allowed critics to examine similar games in film, television, advertising, and other cultural productions.

Sites Cited

• “Section 23: The Twentieth Century: European Modernisms.” The Norton Anthology of World Literature. http://www2.wwnorton.com/college/english/nawol//s23_overview.htm 5 April 2007.

• “Dover Beach” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover_Beach 15

April 2008.• “Marcel Proust” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia

.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proust 5 April 2007.