The modernist revolution

1. The modernist revolution Study Questions MILLENNIUM 2 P. 138

2. STUDY QUESTIONS • How did attitudes among artists change at the beginning of the 20th century? • Artists, writers and intellectuals found it more and more difficult to believe in anything, whether it was philosophy, art, science or progress. • How did science, philosophy and psychoanalysis change man’s idea of himself? • Belief in subjective reality and science took the place of man’s belief in religion. Abstract values, such as “the good”, “the beautiful” and “the true”, were considered decadent and the unconscious was explored as the only way of understanding man’s instincts and repressed desires. • Modern science brought the production of new technology but it also raised serious objections among intellectuals and writers. What were they? • Many intellectuals and writers were worried by the diffusion of new technology brought about by war experimentation and production, such as the nuclear bomb, because they thought this meant a loss of importance for the religious or humanistic explanations of reality and human life.

3. STUDY QUESTIONS • What was Modernism and which were its formal characteristics? • With the term Modernism critics refer to the new way of expressing the reaction against 19th century ideas and conventions in literature and art. • The movement was characterized by the: • breakdown of the traditional literary genre, • fragmentation of the ideas of time and space, • use of a complex language (which often defied traditional syntax, grammar and punctuation), • accent on psychological truth, • an eclectic use of myth, (different myths, including oriental myths, philosophies and traditions, were juxtaposed in new ways), • adoption of free verse, instead of traditional metres. • When did literary Modernism flourished, who were its main representatives and what did it mainly deal with? Literary Modernism flourished from 1922 to 1925 with the works by the first generation of modernist writers, whose leading representatives were Thomas Stearns Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. They dealt mainly with the unconscious in daily life expressed through the stream-of-consciousness technique.

4. STUDY QUESTIONS • How did the Modernists try to give their own interpretation of reality? • By investigating ancient myths with an anthropological interest and incorporating them freely into modern art and literature. • What was the general political trend among British intellectuals during the 1930s? Where did some go to fight? • In the 1930s, the second generation of Modernists turned to the political left. Marxism took root among a number of intellectuals and some even went to Spain to fight for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War.

5. How did the Modernists try to give their own interpretation of reality? • By investigating ancient myths with an anthropological interest and incorporating them freely into modern art and literature. • What was the general political trend among British intellectuals during the 1930s? Where did some go to fight? • In the 1930s, the second generation of Modernists turned to the political left. Marxism took root among a number of intellectuals and some even went to Spain to fight for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War.