Easy Way to Understand Modernism in Literature

Modernism is variously argued to be a period, style, genre, or combination of the above; but it is first of all a word; one which exists alongside cognate words. It’s stem, ‘Modern’, is a term that, from the Latin ‘modo’, means ‘current’, and so has a far wider currency and range of meanings than ‘Modernism’. In the late 5th century, for example, the Latin ‘modernus’ referred to the Christian present in opposition to the Roman past, modern English is distinguished from Middle English, and the modern period in literature is considered to be from the sixteenth century on, although it is sometimes used to describe twentieth-century writing.

More generally, ‘modern’ has been frequently used to refer to the avant-garde, though since World War II this sense has been embraced by the term ‘contemporary’ while ‘modern’ has shifted from meaning ‘now’ to ‘just now’. It is this sense of the avant-garde, radical, progressive or even revolutionary side to the modern which was the catalyst for the coinage ‘Modernism’, and it is to this meaning that Rimbaud appealed when insisting “Il faut etre absolument moderne”

The Modern movement in the arts, although seen as being almost synonymous with the advent of the twentieth century, actually goes back to the last decades of the nineteenth century when the foundations of high Victorian culture were facing serious threats from various agencies. As a cultural phenomenon, Modernism saw the departure from preexisting modes of aesthetic engagement to the sphere of art.

Modernism applies to literature, music, painting, film, and architecture and to some works before and after this period). In poetry, Modernism is associated with moves to break from the iambic pentameter as the basic unit of verse, to introduce vers libre, (free verse) symbolism, and other new forms of writing. In prose, Modernism is associated with attempts to render human subjectivity in more authentic ways than realism: to represent consciousness, perception, emotion, meaning and the individual’s relation to society through interior monologue, stream of consciousness, tunneling, defamiliarisation, rhythm, irresolution and other techniques. The Modernist writers therefore strove, in Ezra Pound’s brief phrase, to make it new”

With regard to literature, Modernism is best understood through the work of the Modernist authors who wrote in the decades before and after the turn of the twentieth century. One of the first aspects of Modernist writing to strike readers is the way in which such novels, stories, plays and poems immerse them in an unfamiliar world. Modernist writing frequently immerses the reader in a confusing and difficult mental landscape which cannot be immediately understood but which must be moved through and mapped by the reader in order to understand its limits and meanings.

Originally Published in https://www.eng-literature.com/2020/06/easy-way-understand-modernism-literature.html