Scarica Modernism: Literary & Cultural Movement - Relativism, Psychoanalysis, & Tech Impact e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! THE 20TH CENTURY: “THE AGE OF EXTREMES” THE ADVENT OF “MODERNISMS” The word “Modernism” designates a literary and cultural movement that was the most prominent literary movement in England and America during the 20th century, including all of the art, politics and philosophy. In the late 19th century, the rapid transformations in technology and the ground-breaking (rivoluzionarie) theories advanced by thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche began to question some of the certainties that the Victorian Age had established as a form of control over a world which was undergoing rapid transformations. Social and political unrest, as well as two world wars, characterized the historical context of Modernism. Modernist art first appeared in many European Capitals, especially in Paris. After World War I, it spread to the cities of the United States and South America. World War Il is usually considered to mark the movement's highest point. Modernism started by influencing painting first and then it became highly varied in its manifestations since writers such as Ezra Pound, Filippo Marinetti, James Joyce and Guillaume Apollinaire began to translate the experimentation of the visual arts into literature. Experimentalism is the key word to define the essential spirit of modernist art and culture, while the common aim of these artists was to do away with past conventions and create something absolutely original. RELATIVITY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS The process of “relativization” of the experience of reality was taken to extremes by Albert Einstein who introduced his theory of relativity, suggesting that time and space are not fixed. However, it was the Viennese psychiatrist Sigmund Freud who most profoundly transformed the way individuals were perceived. In his Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Freud advanced a three-part model of the psyche, consisting of the “id”, the "ego” and the “superego”. The “id” is the unconscious, impulsive, child-like portion of the psyche and it is governed by basic impulses and drives. The “ego” is the rational component of the psyche, which attempts to balance the primary instincts of the “id” and the moralism of the “super-ego". The "super-ego” is the moral component of the psyche, the codes of behavior we are taught (codici di comportamento che ci vengono insegnati). All these theories deeply influenced the development of modernist fiction and inspired writers to develop new techniques to represent these new perceptions of subjective reality. THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGY Between 1860 and 1940, technology moved from a developmental phase to a stage when inventions began to have a real impact on people's lives. By the 1940s, humans depended on powered machines for their transport, communication and entertainment. Cars gradually became a common feature of everyday life and, by the 1930s, most of the mechanical technology used in today's automobiles had been invented. Henry Ford opened the world's first assembly line in Detroit in 1913, changing forever the process of industrial production, and making cars a modern commodity. Flying became reality thanks to the progress aeronautic technology made during World War I and by the late 1920s airline services connected cities worldwide. As far as communication was concerned, in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, which allowed communication to extend to individuals in their private homes. At the turn of the century, the dream of transmitting voices through the air without wires came true: the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi made the first successful transatlantic radio telegraph message in 1901. The first commercial radio station went on the air in 1920. In the late 1920s, a primitive form of black-and- white television was publicly demonstrated and a decade later the first prototypes of televisions for sale were developed. Thomas Edison (1847-1931) invented, among many things, the light bulb, the phonograph and the key equipment for motion picture, which became a common form of entertainment during the 1920s. MODERNIST FICTION Freud's ideas circulated across Europe and writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce exploited them in their fiction. Since the psyche was shown to trigger complicated mechanisms of perception and behavior, writers began to believe that the realistic conventions of Victorian fiction were not adequate to describe what went on inside the characters' minds. Therefore, Woolf argued, while the traditional novel focused on the predictable sequence of hours and days, the modern novel should pay attention to the complex mixture of past and present, of feelings and memories, that the mind produces every day, every second. In this perspective, the traditional hierarchy of events is subverted as seemingly insignificant events or gestures might contain endless implications and therefore acquire a greater meaning. SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE Modern writers felt the urge to discard conventions and experiment with the novel to aim not simply at realism but at a new kind of faithfulness (fedeltà) to “the proper stuff of fiction” (vera e propria finzione), that is, the subjectivity of experience. Therefore, while 19th-century novels
