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It may be hard to understand, but it's
important to know that modern culture dates back to the 16th
century. It's also important to know that the term modern is a
European concept, though it has come to have worldwide
implications.
Western historians distinguish the modern
from the medieval period by the shift
from a religious to a rational/scientific view of
the world, which took root with the development of:
- a changing view of the world where the
earth as no longer the center of the universe
- the rise of individualism
- the Protestant revolution
- the rise of the middle class
- the printing press
- European exploration of and expansion into
the east
- the building of empires
- a shift in the power base from the landed
aristocracy (noble landowners) to the middle class (businessmen),
especially those who owned the means of production.
Modernism began in the late
19th century in Europe and the U. S.
- as industrialization brought rapid and
radical changes to the traditional way of life
- as railroad lines were built from the
cities to rural areas
- as people moved from farms to the
cities
- as workers (including children) in the
factories, mines, railroads, etc. were forced to work for
subsistence wages
- as Marx
was showing that history was based on class conflict and that the
vast majority of workers were controlled by a small group of
people who owned the means of production and distribution
- as Darwin's
theory of evolution revealed that humans had an animal, rather
than divine or rational, nature
- as Freud
illuminated the unconscious as the repository
of socially unacceptable desires and the sex drive as the source
of action. The sexual
instinct was seen as unrelated to reproduction and bringing
individual gratification
- as physical scientists were replacing
causality with probability, unity with quantum gaps, certainty
with relativity
- as the English empire was reaching its
limit and all of Europe was developing colonies in Africa and
Asia
- as the wealth of Western nations became
more and more dependent, both directly and indirectly, on
slavery
- as advertising and popular culture were
reaching the masses
- as education expanded and literacy
increased
- as photography and movies became
popular
- as women sought a voice in public as well
as private affairs.
Virginia
Woolf playfully set the date when all these forces converged as
December, 1910, the year of the Post-impressionist exhibition in
London. She leads us to understand how they are related to the
modern novel:
On or
about December, 1910, human character changed . . . . All human
relations have shifted—those between masters and servants,
husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations
change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct,
politics, and literature. Let us agree to place one of these
changes about the year 1910
High Modernism
A group of artists, musicians, writers,
and film makers, whom we have come to call modernists, found that
traditional forms could no longer represent their
experience.
They sought to represent the flux,
incoherence, conflicts, and alienation of modern life and the
psychological depth of human thought by experimenting with new
forms. But they also longed for the stability, unity, and values of
the past--at least in the early years of the 20th century.
As a result writers would anchor an
incoherent, disunited representation (or story) with a stable,
classical form. For instance, Joyce built Ulysses--a story of
the life of an ordinary advertising salesman, told in shifting and
incoherent styles--on the superstructure of Homer's heroic Odyssey .
And William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald
lamented the loss of a stable, coherent past and, following T. S.
Eliot, present the modern world as a wasteland.
Nonetheless, this movement, called modernism,
rejected the stable values of the contemporary middle-class, and
appealed to an intellectual elite.
A Broader Modernism
But our view of modernism has been
changing to include more than what's now called high modernist:
Modernism has come to include the art, literature, and music that
called attention to social issues and sought ways for writers and
artists who had been silenced or misrepresented by those in power to
find and express their own voices: These were:
- women
- social activists concerned with working
conditions
- colonized people
- African Americans, who were displaced and
exploited in the U. S.
- different kinds of social or cultural
revolutionaries
who were
responding to modern conditions trying to find voices and express
experiences that had been silenced, ignored, or suppressed.
They were not aiming for the elite--and not noticed by the dominant
culture.
Postmodernism
For Modern
Drama Syllabus if you've read Postmodernism.
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