第六讲 现代时期.ppt

The Modern Period The social, ideological background of the Modern English Literature: The influences of the two World Wars on English literature; Ideologically, the rise of the irrational philosophy and new science greatly incited modern writers to make new explorations on human natures and human relationships. So, after the First World War, all kinds of literary trends of modernism appeared. After the Second World War, a variety of modernism, or post-modernism, like existentialist literature, theater of the absurd, new novels and black humor, rose with the spur of the existentialist idea that the world was absurd, and the human life was an agony.  2. What is Modernism? A) Modernism was a complex and diverse international movement in all creative arts, originating about the end of the 19th century; B) Modernism rose out of skepticism and disillusion of capitalism; C) Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base; D) Modernism is, in many aspects, a reaction against realism. What are the basic characteristics of Modernism in literature? Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. One characteristic of English Modernism is the dehumanization of art. The major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between man and nature, man and society, man and man, and man and himself. The modernist writers concentrate more on the private than on the public, more on the subjective than on the objective. They are mainly concerned with the inner being of an individual. 4. In their writings, the past, the present and the future are mingled together and exist at the same time in the consciousness of an individual.  Why do we say Modernism is a reaction against Realism? Modernism is, in many aspects, a reaction against realism. A) It rejects rationalism, which is the theoretical base of realism. B) It e