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

3. 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)

4. Modernism pertains to all the creative arts, especially poetry, fiction, drama, painting, music and architecture. What might this artist have been trying to communicate? Persistence of Memory – Salvador Dali

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

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

11. 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 Philosophical Tenets of Modernism

12. 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

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

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

15. MARC CHAGALL I and the Village (1911)

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

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

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

19. The Lovers II – René Magritte

20. 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.

21. 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

22. 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

23. 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

24. 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

25. 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

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

27. 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.

28. 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

29. 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.

30. 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

31. 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

32. 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.

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