Name: Baldaniya Vanita Velabhai
Semester: 3
Roll No: 29
Topic: Background of twentieth century
Work: Assignment
Paper: Course No: 9
The Modernist Literature.
Date: 19/10/2015
Submitted : Smt. S. B. Gardi
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji
Bhavnagar University.
Department of English.
BACKGROUNG OF THE 20TH CENTURY.
In the twentieth century the novelist
turned once more to seeking their romance in things primarily realistic. In the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the novel has been public instrument
focussing on what was significant to society as wrote.
The psychological theories of Freual
and Jang affected the technique of the
novel, too. The human being is typically a prisoner of his own.
Consciousness and consequently, isolated
what characteristically differentiated it the 20th century, novel from its
predecessors it the stress on the
loneliness condition of man.
The novels
of Henry James (1843-1916) and Joseph Conrad (1857-1954) although worlds apart
in terms of theme and content serve as
the earliest indicators of change in fiction writing. James proves himself to
be a pioneer in establishing the limited point of view by selecting a character
to be a mirror, a centre of consciousness reflecting upon the action. Joseph
Conrad , turns his back on London drawing rooms and upper middle class society.
His central concern is with the response of man
to danger and crisis, to situations demanding a moral choice on the part of the individual.
The definitive break with tradition come with the stream of
consciousness novel. The mode was first used by Dorothy Richardson in her series by thirteen lined novels which began
with "pointed Roofs" in 1915. The technique however, was refined by
James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
A other novel into which Joyce pours
his personal experience is 'a portrait
of the, Artist as a young man'.
Certainly the literary experiments of the writers of
the twenties make increasing demands on the readers. Virginia Woolf's novel are
also means for a diminishing audience of refined sensibilities the select
few who can understand what newness in fiction
is all about.
So, Woolf on her part, leads her
readers into inner experience of her character . For example : Mrs Dalloway. In the 20th century among realistic modern
novelist, the important were. Arnold Bennett, D. H. Lawrence, Compton Mackenzie,
E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley and Somerset Maugham.
The term 'modernist' encompasses
numerous movements that characterize
international development in literature, music. And other arts from the
late nineteenth century onward. Most scholars agree that the characteristics of
modernism manifested themselves in English Literature between 1890 to 1930. Modernism
is marked by experimentation, and
therefore, it 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. In English literature, the major landmarks of modernism are
Eliot's The waste land and Joyce's Ulysses, both published in 1922. The aim of
this essay is to discuss the General characteristics of modern age in
English Literature.
Christian
Howells comments that modernism:
"Reflected
a sense of culture 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."
The roast 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
Baudelaire, Flaubert and Rimbaud are regarded as the three principle progenitors
of modernism in European literature. The first world war (1914 to 1919)
accentuated the sense of general culture catastrophe and individual spiritual
crises reflected in various modern English poets and novelist.
Everything was held to be
open to question. Pound's Hugh Selwyn Nauberly, Eliot's The Waste Land, Woolf's Jacob's Room and Joyce's Ulysses, indicated
the breach with the conventions of rational exposition and stylistic decorum in
the immediate post- war period. A. C. Word's
notes:-
"From
1901 to 1925 English literature was directed
by mental attitudes moral ideals and spirituality
values at almost opposite
extreme to the attitudes,
ideas, and values governing
Victorian literature,"
Modernism in literature was built on a
sense of 105 community and civilization. It embodies a series of contradictions
and paradoxes. In so far as the arts were concerned a sense of insecurity proved immensely productive. It
engendered aesthetics of experimentation fragmentation, ambiguity, and nihilism
. Though some of the modern English writers retained traditional stylistic and
narrative technique, they respond acutely to the radical shifts in thoughts and beliefs in the
field of religion, philosophy and psychology brought about by the works, of
Charles Darwin, Frederick Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and so on. Experimental
technique become a distinguishing trait of modernist English literature texts between
approximately 1912 and 1930. W. H. Whitehead
comments that modernism:-
"Has
generated a multiplicity of approaches to literary,
from and content that have
affected writing in English
whether obviously or subtly,
on almost every level."
The use of myth as a structural device
is common to numerous influential modern English literary texts, most notably Joyce's Ulysses and
Eliot's Waste Land. The novel Ulysses
takes its title from parallels between the adventure of the main character,
Leopold Bloom, and those of Ulysses the hero of the Greek epic poem.
However, unlike the Greek hero, Bloom
suffers ridicule and his wife, Molly is unfaithful. A long and complex poem,
The Waste Land includes many obscure literary references from many different
language. It contrasts the spiritual bankruptcy
Eliot saw in modern European with the values and unity of the past.
Eliot's the Waste Land and the early
drafts of Pound's cantos 1917-1933 demonstrated the possibility of poet's
freedom from the constraints of orthodox thematic development fixes metrical form and
lyrical idiom.
In
fiction, radical changes in the use of narrative technique were brought
about by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
In the largely autobiographical
novel 'A portraits of the Artist as a
young man'. Joyce appears as the character Stephen Dedulus. In tracing
Stephen's growth to young manhood the novelist mixed conventional
realist prose with passage using techniques known as 'Stream of consciousness' technique that gives the reader the illusion of
following the character's thoughts. Joyce uses the same technique more
perfectly in his masterpiece Ulysses. Woolf's To The Lighthouse 1927 explores the inner workings of people
minds as they go through everyday life.
Woolf's Stream of Consciousness style constantly shifts from one character
perspective to another.
Modernist
writing is predominantly cosmopolitan
and often expresses a sense of urban cultural dislocation, along with an
awareness of new anthropological and psychological theories. However
the modernist writers
disregard for a common readership
resulted in allegations of obscurity and eclecticism. study of literature is
but the study of man's struggles and aspirations, which , of late, have assumed
desperate proportions because of a host of reasons social and philosophic, in
the broadest senses of the terms.
Hence, the
very character and nature of literature of the present century in general and
that in English in particular. For all
those engaged in a serious study of the modern predicament, sociologists,
psychologists, political scientists,
philosophers, creative writers, may, all thinkers in general literature
in English in the twentieth century assumes increasing importance. However, the
literature of the period is important not merely because it is,
chronologically, literature of the present age and hence, perhaps, more
immediately relevant to us because of its reflecting our own nightmares,
scepticism and apprehensions but also because it is the full fruition of the multifarious
renaissance marked by, what has been termed, for want of inter- disciplinary
import in the affairs of men.
The newly
emerging centres of literature in Africa, Asia, Australia and other far flung
areas of the commonwealth obviously could not remain unaffected by these
momentous happenings in the realm of thought.
from a
technical perspective, modernism involves the rejection of traditional forms as
well as the aesthetic perceptions associated with these forms. persistently
experimental by nature, modernism often involves a highly self-conscious
manipulation of form. At the back of this technical finesse lie a number of
pioneering studies in other disciplines, not necessarily related to literature
but which, nevertheless, left an indelible mark on the way the litterateurs
grasped the reality around them.
Modernism,
then, involves clearly a critical shuffling of perspectives as well as
priorities. It can be viewed as not so much a revolution, implying a turning
over, or a turning back but rather a break- up, a dissolution, an opening up, a
sort of devolution. The label sounds a kind of joke for how can anything
already acknowledged as existing, postdate the modern, if the term 'Modern' is
taken to mean contemporary.
However, to
regard literature in English in the present century to be a single kettle of
homogeneous fish would be too simplistic to be true. More so when one
is throwing the net wide enough to talk
of the literature in English of a number of countries, communities, creeds and
cultures occupying distant segments of
the globe, and confronted with varying issues which on the surface seem to have
no similarities with one another.
There
are writers like Scott Fitz Gerald and Ernest Hemingway in whom can be
discerned a certain kind of accommodation between the modernistic and the
realistic strains because of their use
of modernist form to express an inwardness in a realized social context and with a realist attention to narrative.
Such 'transitions' writing, blending realism and modernism or modernism and
post modernism co-exists with the professed post- modernism of writers like
John Fowles and William Golding, for example. This obviously gives twentieth
century literature in English a rainbow
character, for the dissimilarities in themes and technique only
reinforce the quintessentially modern temper in which the vast body of
literature in English spread almost all over the world is steeped.
Twentieth century British poetry begins chromatically as well as
quintessentially with Thomas Hardy whose
creative endeavours bridge the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Mallikarjun
Pishe in "Thomas Hardy- the man and the
poet" seems to reach the core of Hardy's poetry by linking the man behind
the creative mask with the feeling creator, thereby arriving at a fuller and
more satisfying perception of the poet's corpus.
The study reveals new facets of the achievement
of the novelist in Tristram Shandy, hard
Times And The return of from this angle
science fiction follows this chronological account.
The
contribution of Virginia Woolf a pioneer of modernism in fiction in particular
to the movement is the subject of study in Najma Manhood's "Feminism in world Thought with special
reference to Virginia Woolf's novels
from this point of view and arrives at fresh insights which add significantly
to the complexity and beauty of the much acclaimed works. Feminism is
incontrovertibly a way of protest against the blinkered smug and complacent,
gender determined perception of life.
In the face of the modern scepticism and
indiscriminate questioning of the old and halved ways of thinking and living,
quite a few artists in both England and
America turned to the pristine Indian wisdom which gave them all a
spiritual anchor.
Perhaps the
single most noteworthy aspect of twentieth century literature in English is its
responsiveness to the mutually interdependent need of the individual and the
society he forms part of, even if the twain seems exclusive and self
contradictory.
Twentieth
century literature in English is, thus, a vast body of writing, attempted in a
pluralistic social, and cultural context in different geographic regions of the
world and consequently it has obviously, varying emphases and seemingly
divergent preoccupations.
Twentieth century literature in English in
this respect can be views as a saga of
modern man's heroic endeavours to come to terms
with his own self, pitted, as he finds himself, against a world becoming
increasingly impersonal and indifferent, if not antagonistic.
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