Transcript Title

The Modernist culture
an introduction
Valentina Tenedini
ISRMA Aosta
• Modernism rose and developed in Europe in the
1910s -1930s.
• It was a complex movement which involved several
art forms (including the newest: photography and
cinema).
• It followed WWI, as a revolt against the traditional
conservative values and the philosophy of
ameliorism.
The Great War had left Europe disillusioned and
cynical, while artists needed and searched for new
modes of expressions .
MUSIC
The composers and musicians were fascinated by the
new aesthetics and techniques, as well as their
•cultural effects.
• Stravinsky, composed music in which he
introduced elements from various musical genres
including jazz.
• Schoemberg, founded a musical language
abolishing the traditional sound hierarchy
(atonalism), and developed a twelve-tone system,
(dodecaphony) based on the use of a systematic
series of sounds, including all twelve heights of the
system.
PAINTING
Cubism, which was conceived in 1907 by Pablo Picasso
and Georges Braque, was one of the most revolutionary
artistic movements of the 20th century.
• Cubist artists believed in breaking up the subject
matter, analyzing it, and then reassembling it in
abstract form.
• Instead of depicting an object from one angle, cubist
artists managed to paint an object from multiple
viewpoints and planes at the same time – so as to imply
the subjective, fragmentary and relative perception
of reality.
• Georges Braque, The
day (1929)
• Pablo Picasso, Bread
and fruit dish on a
table (1909)
Literature
Modern man saw the world as complex
and relative, since common principles and
beliefs were shattered by the Great War,
as a consequence the modernist artists'
representation of reality was
fragmentary, relative, and subjective,
there was no objective reality, no common
framework of reference any longer.
The most distinguished modernist authors
(in English literature) were F. M. Ford, V.
Woolf, W.B. Yeats, J. Joyce, T.S. Eliot, E.
Pound.
Modern literature developed
philosophy and psychology
under
the
influence
of
• William James argued that consciousness could not be divided into
different parts but was something that 'flows like a river a stream of
consciousness'. (The principles of psychology -1890)
• Henri Bergson claimed that time was a continuous flow - which he
termed “La Durée”- and could neither be broken up into units nor be
conventionally measured.
• Sigmund Freud theorized that the human psyche, whose most of
the activity occurred at an unconscious level, was made up of the
Ego, the Superego and the Id. The deepest level, the unconscious,
could be accessed through dreams .
He also revealed the importance of childhood experience (and sexual
drives) in the shaping of an adult's personality.
th
Philosophy, psychology and 20 century
fiction
The most evident result of these scientists' groundbreaking
principles in fiction is a narrative technique* termed
interior monologue, that is to say an author's attempt to
reproduce the workings of the mind (W James 's stream of
consciousness) in writing.
The stream of consciousness is a psychic phenomenon whereas
the interior monologue is the verbal expression of the psychic
phenomenon itself.
Just like it happens in the human mind this "immediate speech”*
reported in writing is freed from:
- introductory expressions (e.g "he thought, he remembered, he
said");
- formal structures, logical and chronological order, so it mixes
past present and future (see Bergson) and resorts to free
associations (as it happens in a psychonalitic setting).
Modernist fiction and the city
• Modernist fiction does focus on the city space as
well as the impact urban centres cause on human
relationships and communication.
The modernist representation of the city implies
that city life causes a more acute consciousness of
the relationships between individuals and of the
diversity and multiplicity of social and cultural
experiences.
So the city experience can be seen as a selfdiscovery experience and the realization of
modern man's loneliness and isolation.
“When I die, Dublin will be written in my heart”
Plaques on the streets of Dublin along Leopold Bloom’s trail.
James Joyce
• THE END
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) Still Life with a
Mandolin, 1924