What is Modernism.pptVIP

Terminology… Unlike Romanticism, Realism, or other movements the title Modernism creates some logical problems. The word modernism alludes to the concept of present time. However, the MOVEMENT of Modernism concerns an era of thought and culture. A lengthy definition… Modernism is far too general a term to break down into a simple definition. Unlike Romanticism, one cannot list a set of philosophical beliefs or stylistic characteristics that would broadly apply to every Modern Writer and Thinker. The Modern Period could be argued to extend from the late 19th century to the mid- to late-20th century and could include any author writing during that period—even if that author hated the modern world and Modernist thinking. In fact, the reactionary impulse—to go back to a time that was more civilized, more Godly, more rational, more whole—may be the most modern of all impulses as it is reflected in the work of Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Pound, and Jeffers. It may be most useful, then to look at Modern Writers as those authors who responded to the particular challenges that various upheavals from that era posed to the individual. The industrial revolution and its corresponding scientific advances, two major world wars, the development of the atomic bomb, The Great Depression, the Russian Revolution, the end of slavery in the United States, a burgeoning Women’s Movement, the influence of African Americans on world art and music etc., all combined to create a world in which the old order of things seemed to have been upended and there was no clear sense of a new direction being offered. For some artists, this meant a realization of freedom, for some it meant a disorienting, fragmented, and purposeless reality in which the individual was lost in a churning mass of humanity. A bit shorter definition… Modernism is an international cultural movement which flourished in the decades of the 20th century. Modernism is not a term to which a single meaning can be ascribed. It ma