What is Modernism?

• 1956 Harry Levin first asked this

• unresolved

• different meanings across fields

• Politics and Econ

• Arts

• Religion – it is heresy (original use)

Modernism’s Materials

• the everyday – boring, mundane– day novels – Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, Under

the Volcano

• the transgressive – sex, bodily functions, madness, perversion

• women, Jews, brown-skinned people

• the “primitive”

Modernism’s Aesthetics

• disjunctive

• avant-garde

• discordant

• interiority, perception, pyschology

• in visual arts – anti-representational, formalist, experimental

• in music – atonality, graphic notation, 4’33”

• in drama – gritty, abrasive, scandalous

• in literature…

Modernism’s Aesthetics

• in visual arts – anti-representational, formalist, experimental

• in music – atonality, graphic notation, 4’33”

• in drama – gritty, abrasive, scandalous

• in literature…

• DEFAMILIARIZATION (ostranenie)

Defamiliarization I

• Viktor Shklovsky – “Art as Technique” (1917)“Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the

fear of war. ‘If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.’ And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important.”

Defamiliarization II

• Bertolt Brecht

• Entfremdungseffekt – the alienation of the world

• Verfremdungseffekt – the alienation of the work of art

• the task of art is to place alienation on show, to make it unavoidable

Modernist Literary Form• non-linear chronology

• unreliable narrators

• typographical experimentation

• foreign languages

• syntax and punctuation

• stream of consciousness, FID

• fragmentation

• lack of closure

• moral ambiguity

• “thickened” language

• DIFFICULTY – DEFAMILIARIZATION

Why Modernism?

• sense of decline, decay, decadence

• “an old bitch gone in the teeth” (Pound)

• “make it new!” (Pound again)

• must break from Tradition to do so

• heroic separation from the certainties and banalities of the previous century

• remake the world without religion, morality

• art to replace religion (Arthur Symons)

Why Modernism?

• Darwin

• Nietzsche

• Marx

• Freud

• (Einstein, Planck, Heisenberg, Röntgen)

Why Modernism?

• electricity

• telegraph

• wireless (radio)

• photography

• x-rays

• film

• automobile – tank – airplane

• telephone

Self-Conscious Break

• non-linear chronology• unreliable narrators• typographical

experimentation• foreign languages• syntax and punctuation • stream of consciousness,

FID• fragmentation• lack of closure• moral ambiguity

• linear chronology• reliable narrators • typographically regular• English only, please• regular syntax –

“transparent”• clear narrative voice• little concern with interiority• whole, integrated, complete• closure, finality• morality clear • “God’s in His Heaven All’s right with the world.” (Browning)

Modernism Realism

BLASTWyndham Lewis, 1914

1914 – The Great War

• 10 million dead

• 6 million more wounded

• every nation in Europe on every continent in the world except Antarctica

• trenches

• machines, industrialization

• generational clash – end of the ancien régime (sorry Lord Grantham)

Gas, mud, rot, corruption

Gas, mud, rot, corruption

Gas, mud, rot, corruption

Cluster-f*ck

• Clearly, the way things had been done, the men in charge, the old truths and values, were over

• if you want to talk obscenity, that was it

• History cried out to be made anew

• and modernism was going to do it

Blast Manifesto

Wyndham Lewis – “Portrait of an

Englishwoman”

Pissarro – “Port of Rouen Unloading

Wood” 1898

Manet – “Roses in a Vase” 1892

Frederick Etchells – “Head for

Ford’s ‘The Saddest Story’”

Gaudier-Brzeska –

Head of Ezra Pound

Nevinsen – “On the Way

to the Trenches”

Marcel Duchamp – “Nu Descendant l’Escalier”

Picasso – “Three Women”

Lee Amino – Standing Nude

Laurens – “Head of a Young

Woman” 1920

Picasso – “Les Demoiselles

D’Avignon” 1907