English Modernism - prima parte, Appunti di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica English Modernism - prima parte e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! MODERNISM: “On December 1910 human character changed….” Virginia Woolf She says that something changed in a specific period in the year, the human character. In reality the change wasn’t immediately but it took place in the British society and the faith in progress that have characterized the previous age was replaced by this era of disillusion. This means not exactly change but it was already in the air. Political and social event created the modernism, but it is also true that thinkers destroyed the universe of the Victorian Era for example the faith in science progress. Now something changes and there are some thinkers who start attacking this idea of progress, they are important because the roots of modernism are also present in the thoughts of these thinkers. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche with their pessimistic vision, Einstein with the sentence “everything is relative”. For Karl Marx the modern capitalist system is against freedom and Christian doctrines. This means that the Victorian system started to be crumbling under the attacks of these thinkers. Usually the modernism is dated 1880-1950 and was a period of crisis, physical and it penetrated the souls of people, so it was also metaphysical, it affected the consciousness of the people. The causes are many, in fact social and political event are responsible of the disintegration of the real world and also in the metaphysical sense. It was an age of anxiety and what reigned supreme was a feeling of lost. - In the last two decades of the 19th century system of Victorian values had come to an end and pervasive feeling was of general loss. - The positivistic faith in progress and science declined. - Nothing seemed to be certain and even science and religion seemed to offer little security. As a result, a new view of man and universe emerged. Individuals felt like strangers, nothing seemed to be certain, nothing could give people certainty, they couldn’t recognize nothing and lost their objectivity forever. HISTORICAL CONTEXT: The first years of the 20th century, called Edwardian Age are marked by the extension of the British imperial power. The reign of Edward VII, who came to throne in 1901 after the death of Queen Victoria was accompanied by an economic, industrial and military fortunes even though the working and living conditions of the laboring classes remained harsh and at times even inhuman. The dominant class, the triumphant bourgeoise, was the protagonist of a world and an order that would last forever. The WWI destroyed this illusion. The old world of the 19th century gave way to a new world, to “modernity”. The effect of World War I on the individual consciousness were traumatic and produced despair. But there are other important events during this period, like the emancipation of women and feminism with the women’s suffrage movement, the economic collapse in 1920 and the Wall Street crash 1929, the emergence of Fascism and the World War II. The war poets are often suicidal because they can't stand what happens after the war. Suicide is extremely common because the individual can't cope with reality. He can't handle such catastrophic conditions. The easiest example would be that of the Horror of the trenches, which could completely destroy individuals on a psychological level. These soldiers lose their coordinates and don't recognize the world anymore. It was a reality where everything collapsed, it was a nightmare. It represented a violent collapse with the traditions, the war destroyed the psychological world of people. Of course, there is a strong sense of discontinuity between past and present. In the poets there were also solitude. Moralist arts gave voice to these traumas and to bewilderment. Modernism (MODERN THOUGHT, CHARACTER or PRACTICE because this situation requires a certain way to see the world) was the name of the vital movement which set out to destroy everything that stood in the way of the foundation of the new world. The modernist movement has to be understood as a set of cultural tendencies, so we should talk about modernisms (final s) because there are different ways of conveying this idea of modernism in different fields. In fact it includes all the cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements arising in Western society in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries. At first labeled “avant-grade”. Modernism encouraged the RE-EXAMINATION OF EVERY ASPECT OF THE EXISTENT. The movement wanted a recovery of Tradition, not recent tradition, which was rejected to make a necessary break with the past (as Ezra Pound said, “make it new”), but the tradition of the “golden treasury” of European culture. For Pound this started with the Provencal poetry and Dante; for Eliot it refers to Homer. The modernist poet, said Eliot, needed to open up to international culture and the vast inheritance of the European mind. After the end of the WWI the changes broke “the community of thoughts and feeling”. There are different methods to describe modernism and explain these feelings. It tries to grasp a new meaning to reality. All that is solid melts into air: This word comes from Marx and it perfectly fits the idea of modernism.