Modernism in Literature

Some Characteristics of Modernism in Literature

Modernist writers proclaimed a new "subject matter" for literature and they felt that their new way of looking at life required a new form, a new way of writing. Writers of this period tend to pursue more experimental and usually more highly individualistic forms of writing. The sense of a changing world was stimulated by radical new developments, such as:

new insights from the emerging fields of psychology and sociology

anthropological studies of comparative religion

new theories of electromagnetism and quantum physics

a growing critique of British imperialism and the ideology of empire

the growing force of doctrines of racial superiority in Germany

the escalation of warfare to a global level

shifting power structures, particularly as women enter the work force

the emergence of a new "city consciousness"

new information technologies such as radio and cinema

the advent of mass democracy and the rise of mass communication

fin-de-siècle ["end-of-the-century"] consciousness

Some of the features of the new sense of reality:

the replacement of a belief in absolute, knowable truth with a sense of relative, provisional truths (Einstein's first book on relativity 1905);an awareness of "reality" as a constructed fiction

a focus on the unconscious as an important source of motivation (Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams 1900)

a turning away from teleological ways of thinking about time to a sense of time as discontinuous, overlapping, non-chronological in the way we experience it; a shift from linear time to "moment time"

less emphasis on art's reflection of external reality and a greater emphasis on art's reflection of the perceiving mind; [compare developments in painting: moving from "representational" Victorian painting (painting that represents identifiable, often narrative, scenes in external reality) through Impressionism (e.g. Whistler; the attempt to paint the quality of the sensations stimulated by the external scene) to Post-Impressionism (e.g. Matisse; painting the "painterly" scene, the pure elements of colour and form--perhaps as a way of painting the perceiving mind, the aesthetic consciousness]

a focus on epistemological concerns (how do we know what we know?) and linguistic concerns (how is the way we think inseparable from the forms in which we think?); a sense of the break-down of a shared linguistic community; a reaction against the dominance of rational, logical, "patriarchal" discourse and its monopoly of power

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