What is modern fiction?

1. What is modern fiction? From what you’ve read so far this year, what is your subjective definition of ‘modern fiction’ at this point? List some characteristics of modern fiction.

2. Should we write this down? • As I go over the tenets of Modernism, write down any of the ideas that seem relevant to a “Modernist” interpretation of the stories. You will be taking an Uber-quiz that applies an understanding of Modernism to the texts. • You may also be comparing a painting in these terms. Remember: • Style is one way to connect, theme is another, and sometimes they are interwoven.

3. Modernism How is this painting modern? JACKSON POLLOCK – Lavender Mist (1950)

4. Modernism . . . is a comprehensive but vague term for a movement which began to get under way in the closing years of the 19th c. One question is, Why? What events might inspire an artist to create such a painting as this one? PIET MONDRIAN – Composition 10 (1939-1942)

5. Modernism pertains to all the creative arts, especially poetry, fiction, drama, painting, music and architecture. Persistence of Memory – Salvador Dali

7. Modernism was largely brought about by the convergence of several factors: The devastation caused in Europe after World War I, when the most enlightened and advanced nations on the earth came together to kill each other in staggering numbers.

8. The wholesale urbanization and industrialization that took place during the nineteenth century. • The fragmentation of belief in the unified individual that occurred as the result of the work of several scientists and philosophers.

9. Sigmund Freud • Asserted that most elements of the human personality were the result of various psycho-sexual traumas experienced in infancy and early childhood and stored in the subconscious mind.

10. Karl Marx • Asserted that human moral, cultural, and religious values were caused not by any inherent sense of good or evil but by the requirements of a particular system.

11. Charles Darwin • Discovered that the evolution of species was the result of “natural selection” and competition rather than through any special act of purposeful creation.

12. Albert Einstein • Discovered that even most of the physical properties in the universe (time, space, size, weight, density, gravity, etc.) were relative.

13. Western notions of progress and superiority were breaking down. • Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud all offered so-called master narratives that helped to explain history and to produce a new historical self-consciousness. • Well-held precepts and norms for religion, sexuality, gender, and the family of the past Victorian world were also collapsing • --From your Modernism packet

15. These very real historical and cultural exigencies resulted in aesthetic crises and compensatory strategies. • This radically new modern world could be reflected adequately only in a new order of art, and writers reacted with various formal innovations. • This search for order was also a response to what many artists perceived as a lack of coherence in romanticism, the "movement" that preceded modernism. • -- your packet

16. Philosophical Tenets of Modernism • Challenged tradition and the status quo • Fascination with the new, the modern, the mechanical • Focus on form and stylistic experimentation • Exploration of perception and representation • Critique of realism in how we represent the world

17. In a kind of aesthetic attempt to purify culture by purifying language, modernist writers emphasize the role of language and form as, for instance, in much of Hemingway's spare prose and Gertrude Stein's poetry or her famous assertion that "a rose is a rose is a rose." • --Packet

18. Which tenets might this artist be addressing? • The Treachery of Images (1929) –RENÉ MAGRITTE

19. Aesthetic Tenets of Modernism • Abandonment of traditional “rules” for creating art, music, and literature • Fragmented representations of time, meaning, and human nature • Sense of loss, alienation, abandonment, and disillusionment • Attempts to find new kinds of “truth” in the absence of any traditional way to ground meaning or significance

20. Modern Fiction No longer certain that art had a didactic function, writers questioned the moral and artistic purposes of literature. Culture no longer provided a set of shared beliefs but instead was fragmented and individualized. Language itself was seen as an unreliable medium, with an uncertain relationship to reality; the very notion of clear, straightforward communication between people was brought into question. • “That’s not it at all, that’s not what I meant at all.” –T.S. Eliot

21. How We Are Hungry –“After I Was Thrown in the River…” • The characters and narrators in How We Are Hungry, in which longer stories are interspersed with some of Eggers's Guardian pieces, find themselves on the edge—on the verge of breakdowns, breakups and other crises… • His narrative responds in kind, patrolling what lies on and beyond the far edges of speech and thought. In the work of lesser writers—including some of those for whom Eggers has become a talisman—such narration can shrink into an aesthetic of studied faux-inarticulacy ... it is a mark of what Eggers can achieve at his best that his feeling for speech and its limitations rarely hits false notes.

22. Influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud, authors made the interior their stage. Unlike the realists, who had created broad social portraits, the modernists emphasized the individual and the subjectivity of perception. To this end, modernist writers, such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and D.H. Lawrence, experimented with new uses of language and imagery and new narrative structures. • Modernist novelists employed stream-of-consciousness narration, multiple points of view, and fragmented, nonsequential plots. The first and last line of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake: riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

23. Some characteristics to look for in Modernist works include: • Alienation from society and loneliness • Procrastination/an inability to act • Agonized recollection of the past/constant flashbacks to the past • Fear of death and the appearance of death • Inability to feel or express love • World as a wasteland/poor environmental portrayal • Man creating his own myths within his mind to fall back upon

24. Major themes emerging in Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and others of the period include: • Violence and alienation • Historical discontinuity • Decadence and decay • Loss and decay • Rejection of history • Race relations • Unavoidable change • Sense of place, local color

25. In the final analysis . . . Modernism saw the rise of the individual genius, one who repudiated the mass culture of the cinema and the rise of consumerism. These brilliant writers, however, alienated from the world, further estranged themselves from understanding, with little social concern, with little sense or care except for the reception of the educated audience. This stance left the door open for the post-modern artist, one who is often left with only two responses to the angst of modernism: parody and amused, ironic detachment.

26. To reiterate, the avant-garde ("first wave") movements that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (such as symbolism, cubism, futurism, Dada, and surrealism) accelerated the break with the past. Following the horrors of the Great War, modernism emerged as a new aesthetic philosophy.

27. Some definitions that might be helpful include . . . Symbolism – Style of painting or writing that makes use of colors and sounds as symbols. Gustav Klimt The Kiss 1907-1908

28. Cubism . . . is a style of painting, drawing, and sculpture in which objects are represented by cubes and other geometric forms rather than by realistic details. Pablo Picasso The Guitar Player 1910

29. Futurism . . . is a modern movement in art and writing characterized by attempts to express the sensation of movement and growth in objects, not their appearance at some particular moment. Kazimir Malevich Morning in the Village After Snowstorm 1912

30. Dadaism . . . is a movement in modern art rejecting and ridiculing all accepted standards and conventions. Dada is a child’s word for a hobbyhorse. Marcel Duchamp Mona Lisa 1919

31. Surrealism . . . is a modern movement in art and painting that attempts to show what takes place in dreams and in the subconscious mind. Surrealism is characterized by unusual and unexpected arrangements and distortions of images. Salvador Dali Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) 1936

32. How does the following poem indicate a modern sensibility? cf1.netmegs.com/memestream/red%20wheelbarrow.jpg

33. The Red Wheelbarrow so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. –William Carlos Williams Futurism – exhorted writers and artists to celebrate “the new” and to abandon the attitudes and values of the past. Dadaism – [dada, babytalk in French for hobbyhorse] “nonsense” –– collages of street debris as art and poems composed of random syllables or words pulled out of a paper bag, or of several unrelated passages read aloud simultaneously. A number of Paris Dadaists became Surrealists. Cubism – presents an experience as fragmented elements rearranged to form a new synthesis, or whole.

34. How do the following paintings represent some of these tenets? Paul Klee

35. MARC CHAGALL I and the Village (1911)

36. VINCENT VAN GOGH – The Starry Night (1889)

37. PABLO PICASSO Self-Portrait with Palette(1906) MARCEL DUCHAMP Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912)

38. EDVARD MUNCH – Evening on Karl Johan (1892)

39. The Lovers II – René Magritte

40. Compared to what? I don’t get it…people always painted weird stuff I hate art what does this have to do with English class this isn’t art class who cares about Freud why did those people have bags on their heads when is he gonna tell us what that dog story was about I want peanut butter I hope Leslie brings my gym shorts before lunch. Apricot. Ap Ap Ap reeeeeee KOT!

41. Realistic representation/ mythology/ the perfection of Man/ Religion

42. Religion/ Hierarchical representation

44. The search for order in the modern world can be seen in the private mythologies of T. S. Eliot, which in turn hearken back to a classical world and in Joyce's reworking of the tale of Ulysses; this kind of self-conscious use of myth to organize the details of a work reflected a new literary self-consciousness. William Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi also might be a kind of private modernist landscape populated with Faulkner-invented mythical families of the Sartorises and the Snopeses

45. The Glory of War/ Nationalism over Individualism

46. Post-Modernism = Whatever Jeff Koons Michael Jackson and Bubbles 1988 42 x 70 1/2 X 32 1/2