Definition of Modernism
and Critical Approach
Modernism – noun
[…] a deliberate philosophical and practical
estrangement or divergence from the past in the
arts and literature occurring especially in the
course of the 20th century and taking form in any
of various innovative movements and styles.
Modern – adjective
[...] of or pertaining to present and recent time;
not ancient or remote: modern city life.
[...] of, pertaining to, or characteristic of
contemporary styles of art, literature, music, etc.,
that reject traditionally accepted or sanctioned
forms and emphasize individual experimentation
and sensibility.
Thus one of the very best characteristic of
modernism is the self-consciousness of these many
movements, leading to high experimentalism with
forms and the creative process. Modernism would
be the recognition that the world got much more
complex then.
Contextualized definition
Modernity usually refers to a post-traditional,
post-medieval historical period; the period in
which many cultures around the world moved
from the feudalism system toward capitalism,
highly industrialized, a rationalized age and in
many cases secularist.
In philosophy it was Nietzsche, for instance, that
with aphorisms (strong, short and precise way of
argumentation) found a new way of writing, of
self-expression; a characteristic that would relate
to the modernist aesthetic practice. Nietzsche and
the modernists shared a dark look at society, for
him it was now sick and weak due to the
constraints of traditional values that got
unquestioned for too long.
As a general rule, modernism was less concerned
with reality than with how the artist or writer
could transform reality. In this way, the artist
made reality his own. Whereas the middle class
industrial society of the nineteenth century valued
reason, industry, thrift, organization, faith, norms
and values, the modernists were fascinated by the
bizarre, the mysterious, the surreal, the primitive
and the formless.
Modernism as a literary movement reached its
height in Europe between 1900 and the middle
1920s. It drew a many good attention to artists
that the world itself was becoming also more
dangerous, the First World War showed them
how life could seem ridiculous in the face of the
senseless slaughter of people. It was something
that they would face again in the Second World
War and would ultimately influence major artistic
movements from that time on.
Exemplified characteristics
Pound: the removal of all unnecessary verbiage, clear language.
Hardy: sins, class system, course of marriage and adult life.
Wilde: pursuit of an aestheticism ideal.
Woolf: stream of consciousness.
Doolittle: free verse and the conciseness of the haiku, for example.
Fitzgerald: youth, promises, despair and aging, morality.
Hemingway: tightly written prose and death-related themes.
Mansfield: loneliness, women's rights, shifts in the narrative.
Joyce: ultimate experimentalism with language.
Cummings: the self and meaning through typography, precise writing.
Shaw: social problems, witty and energetic style.
Eliot: metaphorical and figurative language, philosophical reflections.
Lawrence: personal relationships and social subjects.
Stein: humorous style, objective voice.
Critical approach
Modernist movements can be seen as a sort of
revelation of world in crisis. However, modernism
can also be taken as a form of crisis production, a
type of artistic philosophy which aims purely to
produce a fiction of crisis, having no more than
disruptive and destructive motives to exist. It is
likely we are now only seeing a never ending loop
of radicalism and new ideas merely meant as...
new ideas for the sake of it. Are not we just being
duplicates of the artists from the past?
Even so, the concept of what is modern,
modernism in arts, is a very peculiar one as it is
basically a concept developed in the Western part
of the world, in Western societies with Western
definitions. This development of arts in Europe
“focused the individual, marking the ascendancy of
the middle and lower classes, marking the
autonomy of the self; something considered very
differently in non-western cultures”.
In Arabic terms, what defines a literary work as
“modern” is not exactly the form of the narrative,
but the content itself and its true intention. The
content of a fiction is much more praised, rather
than the technique used. The language itself show
us the different nature of literature for Arabs, the
relationship they have with it is really especial.
In the pre-modernist Japan, the Chinese language
and the Chinese tradition was for them what
Latin was for Europeans. In this chain of cultural
influence is also important to notice the
importance the Japanese literature had upon the
Korean. In Korea, modern literature only started
to grow on its own with the development of
Hagul, the phonetic alphabet artificially created to
educate as much possible the then illiterate
society, which helped to spread literature from the
dominant classes to the common people.
The current Japanese modern literature has its
roots in the French modernism, so when we
analyze Japanese poetry and fiction in a post-war
Japan we are mainly analyzing works written in
the European tradition of modernism in the 19th
and 20th centuries. As a matter of fact the
Japanese word for poetry is from the Chinese and
in earlier periods many scholar works were written
and published in Chinese, which makes the
Japanese literary tradition before modernism
somewhat attached to the Chinese one, which has
nothing to do with the modernist ideals we see in
European literature.
Files of this presentation, and also the paper,
available at http://tinyurl.com/369dsdc