Name: - chintavan bhungani
Course: - M.A. English
Semester: - 3
Batch: - 2015-2017
Enrolment no: - PG15101006
Submitted to: - Smt. S.B.Gardi Dept. of English MKBU
Email id: - cnbhungani7484@gmail.com
Paper no: - 9 the modernist literature
Topic: - A history of the age background reading A.c.ward’s twentieth century literature.
ANS:-
From this image
of chart we can see that how the twentieth century begins .this age is one of
most important and very interesting age because all the new and different
things and changing in writing of literature is done in this age. The modern
age is very different from the other ages in English Literature. The modern age
is known as “Modernist Movement” in English Literature. The period of modern
age is 1915 to 1945 and this age is totally different from the Victorian age.
The people of modern age reject old
forms and trying to do a new technique and new style. Even in literature also
many of the poet and writer wants to do different and bring something new in
their writing.
The
terms modern and modernism pertain to the beliefs and philosophy of the society
during the late 19th to the early 20th century. Because the concept has two
different accepted meaning.
Literary
Movements and Periods:-
Literature constantly evolves as new movements emerge to speak to the
concerns of different groups of people and historical periods. In this age
there are two movements start; Artistic and Literary Movements.
Absurd,
literature of the (c. 1930–1970): A movement, primarily in the theater,
that responded to the seeming illogicality and purposelessness of human life in
works marked by a lack of clear narrative, understandable psychological
motives, or emotional catharsis. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is one of
the most celebrated works in the theater of the absurd.
Beat Generation
(1950s–1960s):
A group of American writers in the 1950s and 1960s who sought release and
illumination though a bohemian counterculture of sex, drugs, and Zen Buddhism.
Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac (On the Road) and Allen Ginsberg (Howl)
gained fame by giving readings in coffeehouses, often accompanied by jazz
music.
Dadaism
(1916–1922):
An avant-garde movement that began in response to the devastation of World War
I. Based in Paris and led by the poet Tristan Tzara, the Dadaists produced
nihilistic and antilogical prose, poetry, and art, and rejected the traditions,
rules, and ideals of prewar Europe.
Lost Generation
(c. 1918–1930s):
A term used to describe the generation of writers, many of them soldiers that
came to maturity during World War I. Notable members of this group include F.
Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passes, and Ernest Hemingway, whose novel The Sun
Also Rises embodies the Lost Generation’s sense of disillusionment.
Magic realism
(c. 1935–present):
A style of writing, popularized by Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez,
Günter Grass, and others, that combines realism with moments of dream-like
fantasy within a single prose narrative.
Modernism
(1890s–1940s):
A literary and artistic movement that provided a radical breaks with
traditional modes of Western art, thought, religion, social conventions, and
morality. Major themes of this period include the attack on notions of
hierarchy; experimentation in new forms of narrative, such as stream of
consciousness; doubt about the existence of knowable, objective reality;
attention to alternative viewpoints and modes of thinking; and self-preferentiality
as a means of drawing attention to the relationships between artist and
audience, and form and content.
High modernism
(1920s):
Generally considered the golden age of modernist literature, this period saw
the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land,
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
Nouveau Roman
(“New Novel”) (c. 1955–1970): A French movement, led by Alain
Robbe-Grillet, that dispensed with traditional elements of the novel, such as
plot and character, in favor of neutrally recording the experience of sensations
and things.
Postcolonial
literature (c. 1950s–present): Literature by and about people from
former European colonies, primarily in Africa, Asia, South America, and the
Caribbean. This literature aims both to expand the traditional canon of Western
literature and to challenge Eurocentric assumptions about literature,
especially through examination of questions of otherness, identity, and race.
Prominent postcolonial works include Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, V. S.
Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.
Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) provided an important theoretical basis for
understanding postcolonial literature.
Postmodernism
(c. 1945–present):
A notoriously ambiguous term, especially as it refers to literature,
postmodernism can be seen as a response to the elitism of high modernism as
well as to the horrors of World War II. Postmodern literature is characterized
by a disjointed, fragmented pastiche of high and low culture that reflects the
absence of tradition and structure in a world driven by technology and
consumerism. Julian Barnes, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov,
Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, and Kurt Vonnegut are among many who are
considered postmodern authors.
Surrealism
(1920s–1930s):
An avant-garde movement, based primarily in France, that sought to break down
the boundaries between rational and irrational, conscious and unconscious,
through a variety of literary and artistic experiments. The surrealist poets,
such as André Breton and Paul Eluard, were not as successful as their artist
counterparts, who included Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and René Magritte.
The Twentieth
Century, Modernisms and Modernity
·
Society and
Culture:-
The
twentieth century introduces a cultural period in which individuals not only
reject the past but also question the very basis of knowledge and consider the
possibility that knowledge and concepts once thought to be fixed and objective
are instead constantly shifting and subjective.
Philosophers and
thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzche, Henri Bergson, Karl Marx, and Sigmund
Freud challenged nineteenth-century science and the positivist confidence in
its ability to explain both the physical and social worlds in completely
rational terms.
World War I had
a powerful impact in its aftermath, causing Europeans to reconsider their very
belief systems and leading to widespread dissatisfaction with the authorities
who, many believed, were motivated by greed, class exploitation, and hunger for
power.
A growing
interest in psychology influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud contributed
to a new emphasis on the internal reality of individuals, the importance of the
self, and the alienation of the self in modern society.
New studies in
the relationship between reality and appearance led to the philosophies of
phenomenology and existentialism as represented in the philosophical writings
of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre.
After the Second
World War, the rise of Communism, the gradual disintegration of colonialism,
and the exponential development of technology, existentialism flourished in the
1940s and 1950s as individuals struggled to find meaning in an increasingly
fragmented and confusing world.
A growing
awareness of a variety of other cultures that have differing worldviews than
traditional European or American ones undercut the assumptions of “cultural
parochialism” and led to pluralistic and postcolonial perspectives.
· The Bloomsbury Group:-
He
Bloomsbury Group was a small, informal association of artists and intellectuals
who lived and worked in the Bloomsbury area of central London. Most prominent
of these was novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf. In all, only about a dozen
people at any one time could have called themselves members of the group.
Beginning shortly before 1910, the Bloomsbury Group gathered at irregular
intervals for conversation, companionship, and the refueling of creative
energy. The members of Bloomsbury, or “Bloomsberries,” would more or less
maintain allegiance to their mutual philosophy of an ideal society, even
through a World War and three decades of tectonic shifts in the political
climate. They had no codified agenda or mission. They were not political in the
ordinary sense of the word. Most importantly, there was no application or
initiation required to become a member. Bloomsbury was an informal hodgepodge
of intellectual friends, and one either merited inclusion to that circle or one
did not. No rules of order, as in a committee, governed the way in which
Bloomsbury managed their interactions. Instead, they held impromptu dinners and
gatherings where any number of topics was the subject of serious discussion and
contemplation. These intellectual exchanges served as the main influence on
later work by individual members. By no means were all members in full
agreement on all subjects. Some of Bloomsbury’s most stimulating ideas and
writings were borne out of internal disagreement and strife. One can safely say
that each member of Bloomsbury was leftist in his or her politics, although as
individuals they expressed their politics in very different ways.
A significant
fact about the Bloomsbury Group is that the members, for the most part, did not
achieve their greatest fame until later in life. The Group held its discussions
and parties while all the participants were still virtually unknown. The men of
Bloomsbury were students at King’s College and Trinity College, constituents of
Cambridge University. They were almost all high achievers and active in student
life, yet one must imagine that they didn’t quite fit in as well as other
students. Many of the Bloomsberries held particular ideas on human society
which at the time seemed beyond radical. For example, the noncritical
assessment of homosexuality, however appropriate today, was considered a
serious moral error in the early twentieth century. Indeed, many of the
Bloomsberries called into question the idea of traditional monogamous marriage.
Several advocated for and practiced polyamory – multiple, consensual romantic
partners. The idea of this level of sexual liberation in Edwardian England was
unspeakable. In a sense, they made it very easy for their generation to dismiss
them as quacks and deviants. However, none could deny that the Bloomsbury Group
brought a great deal of intellectual clout to bear on any issue of the day.
· Members of the Bloomsbury Group
v
Strachey, Giles
Lytton (1880-1932)
v
Bell, Clive
(1881-1964)
v
Keynes, John
Maynard (1883-1946)
v
Fry, Roger
(1866-1934)
v
Grant, Duncan
(1885-1978)
v
MacCarthy,
Desmond (1877-1952)
v
Bell, Vanessa
Stephen (1879-1961)
v
Woolf, Leonard
(1880-1969)
v
MacCarthy, Mary
(1882-1953)
v
Stephen, Thoby
(1880-1906)
v
Stephen, Adrian
(1883-1948)
v
Carrington, Dora
(1893-1932)
v
Sydney-Turney,
Saxon (1880-1962)
1. Decay of
Character and Hero:-
Psychological
theories of Sigmund Freud created an impact on modernist writers, Writers found that the
traditional method of portraying characters was erroneous, Death of both hero
and villain
2. Decay of
Plot:-
Modern story
does not follow a chronological order, Modern stories do not have a beginning
or end, Modernist literature requires an
active reader
3. Stress on
Individual:-
Individual is
more important for modernist writers than society, in a modern story, there are
no universally accepted values of social conduct
4. Realism:-
Modern stories
are realistic, for writers, there is no such thing as absolute truth;
everything is relative. , Modernist literature is a portrayal of life as
it is.
CONCLUTION:-
At the end of
the twentieth century, as geopolitical boundaries blurred and shifted, an
increased recognition of the diversity of cultural identities in ethnic,
gender, and sexual issues led to a correspondent pluralism in writing that
depicts the full range of human diversity. Included in these new perspectives
is attention to the efforts of postcolonial cultures to develop a consciousness
apart from that of their colonizers.
WORK CITED:-
Ø
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nawest/content/overview/modern.htm
