Week 3 – Modernity Modernism

Question 1

Modernity / Modernism / Modern Times

Answer 1

Modernity (concept)
Modernism (literary/artistic movement)
Modern Times (historical period)

Question 2

What is Modernity?

Answer 2

• A larger perspective sees modernity’s beginnings at the end of the Renaissance (end of the 16th century), with the beginning of European colonialism.
• Others see it co-extensive with the advent of the Enlightenment (17th–18th centuries).
• Others consider it to start at the end of the 19th century, with industrialization and the dramatic increase of technology.
• While many connote with modernity an all-encompassing subjection of the individual, others describe it as an all-encompassing liberation of the individual, and as the age of an unprecedented individuation and restless individualism that subverts social ties, but also sheds social restrictions.

Question 3

Modernism I

Answer 3

• Loose term, broadly indicating an array of aesthetic reactions to modernity, which are as contradictory and heterogeneous as modernity itself.
• Attempt to break with previous literary traditions (“MAKE IT NEW”).
• Propensity for experimentation (i.e., free verse in poetry, stream of consciousness in fiction).
• Plurality of perspectives and voices.

Question 4

Modernism III

Answer 4

• In its search for new means to express the new experiences the modern lifeworld provides, it is strongly influenced by new technologies, but also by new subjects that offer themselves.
• Thus, not only the rising influence of the camera and photography can be felt, but also new subjects for art itself.

Question 4

Modernism II

Answer 4

• Question ability to represent and imitate reality (crisis of mimesis).
• Emphasis on difficulty to respond to the complexity of the new experience of modernity in the 20th century.
• Radical rupture with Victorian values: attention to taboo subject matters (sexual acts, adultery, bodily processes such as digestion) and challenge of conventional morality.

Question 5

Modern Times (1890–1940) I

Answer 5

Political Turmoil
- World War I
- Russian Revolution 1917
- Totalitarianisms & dictatorships of 1920s and 1930s
- World War II

Question 6

Modern Times (1890–1940) II

Answer 6

Social and Economic changes
- Expansion of markets and commodities
- Growth of mass culture
- Changing topography with growing urban centers
- Quickened pace of life, transformed experience of time
- Changing attitudes to gender (women’s suffrage movement), sex and sexuality (new consciousness of homosexuality)
- New image of race (New Negro)

Question 7

Modern Times (1890–1940) III

Answer 7

Scientific Innovations
- Technological advances (electric light, telegraph, telephone, cinema, automobile, airplane).
- New physics of relativity and quantum mechanics (challenges to scientific objectivity, new conceptions of space and time)

Question 8

Modern Times (1890–1940) IV

Answer 8

Ideological/Philosophical changes
- Skepticism, crisis of reason and faith: Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud as ‘masters of suspicion’ challenging Kant’s sovereign human reason.
- New models of consciousness and psychology (William James, Henri Bergson undermining traditional humanist conception of the integrity of the self, access to flux of immediate experience).

Question 9

The New York Armory Show in 1913

Answer 9

• One of the pivotal occasions that will revolutionize the American art landscape
• Organized by American painters Walt Kuhn, Arthur B. Davies and art-critic Walter Pach
• First large exhibition of modern art in America
• Though it is strongly criticized by both the press and the public, it has an enormous influence on the American scene, as the Americans are for the first time exposed to avant-garde European modernism comprising Dada, Cubism, Symbolism, and Neo-Impressionism

Question 10

Who are the European Modernists?

Answer 10

• Georges Braque
• Pablo Picasso
• Marcel Duchamps

Question 11

What’s Cubo-Futurism?

Answer 11

Cubo-Futurism, Russian avant-garde art movement in the 1910s that emerged as an offshoot of European Futurism and Cubism.

Question 12

New American painters influenced by Cubism and Impressionism

Answer 12

• Charles Sheeler
• Marsden Hartley
• Charles Demuth
• Joseph Stella

Question 13

Cubism I

Answer 13

• One of the most influential art forms introduced to the US by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque is Cubism.
• In Cubism the subject matter is broken up, analyzed, and reassembled in an abstracted form.
• According to the advice given them by Paul Cézanne, Cubist painters reconstruct nature according to the geometric forms of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone.

Question 14

Cubism II

Answer 14

• The result are works with flat, but very dense surfaces.
• Braque and Picasso try to add depth by integrating fragments of words, musical notes, and material elements, such as sand and sawdust, to create relief, later adding objects to create three-dimensional collages.

Question 15

Cubism and Free Verse

Answer 15

• As free verse – which was introduced into US literature by Walt Whitman – Cubism tries to rid itself from what it considers overcome, older rules of representation.
• Both Cubism and modernist poetry – such as that of William Carlos Williams – try to capture single moments of perception, and to thus achieve a new truth in perception.
• What counts is not so much the objects themselves, but how they are perceived and, in the act of perception, “created.”

Question 16

Language of Modern Poetry

Answer 16

Although the poetry of modernism is highly experimental, most of them avoid metaphors, which threaten to take away attention from the “thing itself.”

Question 17

Imagism

Answer 17

• Imagism drives at even more clarity than Cubism-inspired modernism.
• The Imagists write succinct verse of dry clarity and hard outline in which an exact visual image makes a total poetic statement. Imagism is a successor to the French Symbolist movement, but whereas Symbolism has an affinity to music, Imagism seeks analogy with sculpture.

Question 17

Ezra Pound and Imagism

Answer 17

While the works of Williams and Stein – though experimental and difficult – are informed by a democratic spirit, the oeuvre of Ezra Pound is more “elitist” in its character, especially when he later turns to Vorticism.

Question 18

Who are considered Imagists?

Answer 18

• William Carlos Williams
• Ezra Pound

Question 19

Walt Whitman

Answer 19

• The “Godfather” of American Modernism: Walt Whitman
• His innovative poetry, as well as his democratic spirit, made him the overpowering figure for many later poets, including Williams, Pound, and Allen Ginsberg.
• In his attempt not to leave out a single aspect or persona from his democratic enterprise, some of Whitman’s poems approach the quality of lists, which some commentators have compared to shopping lists or, even less sympathetically, with phone book entries.

Question 20

Whitman Disillusioned

Answer 20

• A later, disillusioned Whitman, however, must concede that the urbanization and the unbridled “pursuit of happiness” have strongly discredited his democratic and individualistic ethos.
• The US has exploded from a mostly agrarian country, infused with Victorian values such as genteelness, to a highly urbanized, economic powerhouse, in which the older value structures do no longer seem to apply, and in which the survival of the fittest seems to be the call of the day.
• This ‘shockingness’ is what avant-garde Modernism is trying to capture and to express.