Letteratura inglese II e III

1. Letteratura inglese II e III Modernism: Dates, Contexts, Definitions 20 February 2009

2. Context(s) • The half-century before the First World War was the most remarkable period of economic growth in history (Britain, France and Germany=60% of the world market for manufactured goods) • Key technological developments: internal combustion engine, diesel engine, electricity, automobile, motor buses (London, 1905), telephone, typewriters, etc. • Great increase in urban population (by 1910 Greater London and New York had 5 millions, Paris three, etc.) • Mass production for the mass market (Ford in USA and Lever in Britain) and advertising • Popular journalism (Daily Mail in 1896; cinematograph with Lumiere brothers in 1895; first motion picture theatre in Pittsburgh in 1905). The media. • The great age of imperialism (in 1900 the British empire covered one quarter of the land surface of the glop with 400 million people): material superiority as well as belief in the cultural and racial superiority of white people. Extreme wealth for upper and middle classes.

3. Intellectual contexts • Revolution in physics: (X-rays; radioactive properties of uranium, electrons, Einsteins’s Theory of Relativity published in 1905) • Freud and psychoanalysis • Max Weber and Durkheim: the foundations of sociology as a discipline. • Marx, socialism and workers’ movements.

4. Avant-garde • Avant-garde=as a literary term (not political or military) it appears in 1880. • Movement vs school (Renato Poggioli, Teoria dell’arte d’avanguardia, 1962) • 3 general features: a) theory and creativity (see V. Woolf); b) literary and non-literary discourse (philosophy, etc.); c) blurring of the distinction between genres (interdisciplinarity, interrelation literature, painting, sculpture, etc)

5. Modernist Avant-Garde(s) • Specific features of modernist avant-gardes: • A) opposition to ‘official culture’ and conformism. • B) agonism (i.e., will to destroy the antagonist, self-destruction) • C) sectarianism, Manichean vision • D) sense of historical discontinuity (T.E. Hulme: new art should be abstract and inorganic: rejection of anthropocentrism; Ezra Pound: modern art is hard and precise, not languid; Eliot: rejection of romanticism • E) radicalbreak with the past, but also fractures internal to the avant-garde movements.

6. Modernism • THE NEW (continuous overcoming; speed; rapid change). T.S. Eliot: chief editor of The Egoist; he then starts supporting impersonality in art (not contradictions but domains that are continuously being defined and re-defined.) • Il faut être absolument moderne (A. Rimbaud); • Awareness of living in totally novel times, of living in modernity (not just restrospective historical reconstruction): “In or about December 1910, human character changed” (Post-impressionist exhibition in Britain) • Modernism: as a term it covers Impressionism, Post-impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Symbolism, Imagism, Vorticism, Dadaism, Surrealism. Can we speak of a style of an age?

7. Modernism(s)? • Flaubert: “What strikes me as beautiful… is a book about nothing, a book without external attachments, which would hold itself together by itself through the internal force of its style” (Style is of paramount importance; movement towards sophistication, mannerism, vers libre, stream of consciousness. • Ortega Y Gasset (de-humanisation of art and non-representationalism: “the progressive elimination of the human, all too human elements predominant in romantic and naturalistic productions”. • Disorientation, nightmare, anomie, bleakness, alienation: can art set things in order? Art that responds to the scenario of our chaos. • Modernism as arcane and private art (division between those who understand it and those who do not) against the masses; Modernism as having a social meaning, avant-garde as revolutionary probe into future human consciousness

8. Modernism(s)? (2) • Combination of futuristic and nihilistic, revolutionary and conservative, celebration of the new technological age and a condemnation of it. • Explosive fusion: irrationalise the rational, de-familiarise the expected, secularise the spiritual, etc. • Tiresias in The Waste Land: seeing blindness. • Ezra Pound’s definition of image: “An image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (see Imagism)

9. Dating Modernism(s) • Because of its oblique and ambivalent nature, it is difficult to date • Modernism as movement (bohemia in Paris in the 1830s) • Aesthetic of experimentalism (Zola in 1880) • Multiplicity of consciousness (Walter Pater in the 1870s) • Response to an urbanised environment (Baudelaire) • Witty image and anguish (Donne, Sterne, etc.)

10. Dating Modernism(s) (2) • Modernism as an international movement and a focus of many varied forces which reached their peak in various countries at various times. • Cyril Connoly (1965), The Modern Movement: 1880-1950, starting in France. High season between 1910 and 1925. • First thirty years of the XXth century • Frank Kermode: the nineties as forerunners of Modernism, but the main period is 1907-1925 • 1910: the year of King Edward’s death and Post-Impressionist exhibition (English modernism) • First quarter of 20th century, with two peaks: the years before the First World War and the years immediately after the war (form an Anglo-centric perspective: New York-London-Paris axis)

11. Modernism (dates) • 1908: Ezra Pound arrives in England; Ford Madox Ford founds The English Review. • 1914: Pound and Eliot’s collaboration; serialisation of Joyce’s A Portrait starts; First Imagist anthology; Windham Lewis’s Blast • 1915: T.S.Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (Chicago) (Ezra Pound as a mentor). • 1917: Prufrock and Other Observations, containing twelve poems by Eliot. (The Egoist Press, run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf) • 1922: Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Brecht’s first play Baal, Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. • 1930s: Scrutiny (F. R. Lewis); Left Review; Criterion (Eliot).

12. Modernism (dates) • Has it ended? Post-modernism: minimalism, literature of Silence, chosisme and nouveau roman in France, non-fiction novel, parody and ‘cannibalisation’ of the past, etc.

13. National differences • Germany, Vienna, Oslo: 1880-1900 • Ibsen and Strindberg • Strindberg, Miss Julie (1888): “modern characters .. Living in an age of transition. I have drawn them as split and vacillating, conglomerations of past and present, scraps from books and newspapers” • Expressionism in Germany in the heydays of modernism in Britain