Modernism (literature)

Modernism (literature), a literary and cultural movement which flourished in the first decades of the 20th century. The term is generally used to refer to English literature in the broad sense, though its major figures included American and Irish writers, such as Eliot, Yeats, and Joyce, as well as the Norwegian and Swedish dramatists Ibsen and Strindberg. Moreover, the roots of Modernism are European rather than British, and indeed the determination to take European culture as a model was one of the hallmarks of the Modernist movement. The term “Modernist” was not generally used by the exponents of the movement themselves, who rather referred to their works and aesthetic theories as “modern”, but became popular later, when the group in question were clearly no longer modern in a historical sense. The one notable early use of the term was in the critical work by Robert Graves and Laura Riding entitled A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927).

Modernism as a movement can be recognized not only in literature but also in painting, music, sculpture, and architecture, as well as in the sciences and in theology, aesthetics, and anthropology. The turn of the century was a key moment when a number of theories, to prove influential for Modernism, were elaborated, such as Einstein's treatise on relativity (1905), Max Planck's on quantum theory (1900), and Freud's on the unconscious (The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900). In the literary domain, major influences on Modernism include the late 19th-century French novelist Flaubert, and the Symbolist poet, Mallarmé.

Modernism is not a term to which a single meaning can be ascribed. It may be applied both to the content and to the form of a work, or to either in isolation. It reflects a sense of cultural crisis which was both exciting and disquieting, in that it opened up a whole new vista of human possibilities at the same time as putting into question any previously accepted means of grounding and evaluating new ideas. Modernism is marked by experimentation, particularly manipulation of form, and by the realization that knowledge is not absolute. Marx, Freud, and Darwin had unsettled the human subject from its previously secure place at the centre of at least the human universe, and had revealed its unwitting dependence on laws and structures outside its control and sometimes beyond its knowledge. Historical and material determinism, psychoanalytic theories which reveal the self as a pawn in a process dominated by an inaccessible unconscious play of forces, and a conception of evolution and heredity which situates humanity as no more than the latest product of natural selection—these theories conspired to threaten humanist self-confidence and to provoke a feeling of ideological uncertainty. In so far as the Arts were concerned, such insecurity proved immensely productive. It engendered an aesthetics of experimentation, fragmentation, ambiguity, and nihilism. Modernism was built on a sense of lost community and civilization. It embodied a series of contradictions and paradoxes. Since it had no stable centre it could embrace a multiplicity of features of the modern sensibility which might have appeared, in a logical sense, mutually exclusive. The loss of a sense of tradition, for example, was a theme common to Modernist writers, but it was lamented by some in an extreme form of reactionary conservatism, and celebrated by others as a means of liberation from the stranglehold of past practices. Revolution and conservatism coexisted, not necessarily peaceably, under the Modernist umbrella. The increasing dominance of technology was another prevalent Modernist preoccupation, but it was condemned by some as vehemently as it was embraced by others who saw it as the flagship of 20th-century progress.

Not surprisingly, the diversity of Modernist theory is matched by the variety of Modernist practice. Poets like T. S. Eliot in his Waste Land (1922), and Ezra Pound in his Cantos (1917-1970) express the concerns of Modernism in a form which itself breaks radically with previous poetic tradition. Similarly, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925) and James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) explore the disintegration and fragmentation of conscious control in their protagonists, adopting a style which itself mirrors the disconnectedness of experience and the triumph of the random and contingent over the structured and unified. In works such as these it is impossible to separate form from content in any meaningful way. The dissolution of meaning, the incoherence of character, the lack of recognizable “plot” are features which not only transmit but actually constitute the “theme” of the art-work. Flaubert's famous desire to write a “book about nothing” was never realized by him (or, at least, not in Madame Bovary, about which he made the comment) but his successors sometimes seem to have come as close to accomplishing his aim as is possible using language which, of course, can never escape meaning entirely. Indeed, this relationship to linguistic meaning is one of the aspects of Modernism which is most commonly misrepresented: the desire expressed by the poets Mallarmé and Valéry, for example, to achieve the condition of music does not refer primarily to the aim of harmonious or “musical” sonorities. It represents rather the attempt to use language in a way that is driven by the signifier as much as by the signified (see de Saussure; semiotics), that is to say by the formal qualities of language as much as by the desire to communicate a “message”. Modernist novelists as well as poets viewed the work of art more as an aesthetic object than as a representation of reality. Their legacy survives in both contemporary theory and practice.

(see Postmodernism; Post-Structuralism).