free essays modernism

Anna Balakian SOURCE: Problems of Modernism, in The Snowflake on the Belfry: Dogma and Disquietude in the Critical Arena, Indiana University Press, 1994, pp. 24-43. [In the following essay, Balakian considers the variety of meanings and manifestations of Modernism.] Each generation of writers had the habit of reacting against the past by declaring itself modern. The quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns used to be a cyclical phenomenon. New is in itself empty of meaning, a connective word between what was and what is to come. In early uses the word had a pejorative meaning, implying that what was new and modern could not be as good as what had the prestige of approval over a period of time. Baudelaire as both poet and critic was one of the first to splice the meaning of modern in a modest article relating to his viewing of the art of his time. In his piece called La Modernité he first gives the image of a little man running around searching for the modern and expresses the normally accepted derogatory meaning: the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, but then adds that which is capable of drawing the eternal from the transitory. Since the middle of the nineteenth century critics as well as artists in the broader sense of the word have compounded ambiguities on modern by using it in both senses. Succeeding generations have been calling themselves modern and allowing the word to lose gradually its defensive tone and instead assume an attitude of contestation and even arrogance. It has become in many cases a cry of rebellion, and sometimes what the late Renato Poggioli called agonism, no longer apologetic but rather challenging. Others have claimed the label modern in the Baudelairian sense that while reflecting the passing climate of the time, what is modern has caught the eternal and the immutable. Critic-readers have learned to distinguish between these two.
Contents 1 Tradition 2 Voice 3 Words at Liberty 4 Epic by Pericles Lewis “Eliot’s Waste Land is I think the justification of the ‘movement,’ of our modern experiment, since 1900,” wrote Ezra Pound shortly after the poem was published in 1922. T.S. Eliot’s poem describes a mood of deep disillusionment stemming both from the collective experience of the first world war and from Eliot’s personal travails. Born in St. Louis, Eliot had studied at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford before moving to London, where he completed his doctoral dissertation on the philosopher F. H. Bradley. Because of the war, he was unable to return to the United States to receive his degree. He taught grammar school briefly and then took a job at Lloyds Bank, where he worked for eight years. Unhappily married, he suffered writer’s block and then a breakdown soon after the war and wrote most of The Waste Land while recovering in a sanatorium in Lausanne, Switzerland, at the age of 33. Eliot later described the poem as “the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.” Yet the poem seemed to his contemporaries to transcend Eliot’s personal situation and represent a general crisis in western culture. One of its major themes is the barrenness of a post-war world in which human sexuality has been perverted from its normal course and the natural world too has become infertile. Eliot went on to convert to a High Church form of Anglicanism, become a naturalized British subject, and turn to conservative politics. In 1922, however, his anxieties about the modern world were still overwhelming. The Waste Land was quickly recognized as a major statement of modernist poetics, both for its broad symbolic significance and for Eliot’s masterful use of formal techniques that earlier modernists had only begun to attempt. The critic I. A. Richards.
T.S. Eliot Wiki Articles The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock La Figlia Che Piange The Waste Land 'Ulysses,' Order and Myth Tradition and the Individual Talent The Sacred Wood Biography by Anthony Domestico and Pericles Lewis For many readers, T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) is synonymous with modernism.  Everything about his poetry bespeaks high modernism: its use of myth to undergird and order atomized modern experience; its collage-like juxtaposition of different voices, traditions, and discourses; and its focus on form as the carrier of meaning.  His critical prose set the aesthetic standards for the New Criticism, and his journal Criterion was one of the primary arbiters of taste throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s.  Eliot’s wide-ranging but relatively small corpus of work  – the precocious “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), the seminal The Waste Land (1922), and the later Four Quartets (1943), which Eliot considered his masterpiece – has made him the primary figure of modernist poetry both for his peers and for subsequent generations.Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri to a wealthy Unitarian family with roots in Massachusetts.  Studying first at Smith Academy from 1898 to 1905 and then at Harvard College from 1906 to 1909, Eliot learned Greek, Latin, French, and German, developing philological skills and gaining familiarity with varying philosophical traditions.  While at Harvard, Eliot became interested in French symbolist poetry, finding himself particularly drawn to Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Laforgue.  These poets would prove influential for Ezra Pound as well.In 1911, Eliot enrolled as a doctoral student at Harvard, reading deeply in Buddhism and learning Sanskrit.  Having studied in Germany and at Oxford, Eliot settled in England after the outbreak of the First World War, working as a teacher and, famously, as a banker. .
For modern literature, see History of modern literature. Literary modernism, or modernist literature, has its origins in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mainly in Europe and North America. Some philosophers, like Georg Lukacs, theorized that literary modernism had its origins in the philosophy of Walter Benjamin. Modernism is characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional styles of poetry and verse. Modernists experimented with literary form and expression, adhering to Ezra Pound's maxim to Make it new.[1] The modernist literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of their time.[2] The horrors of the First World War saw the prevailing assumptions about society reassessed.[3] Thinkers such as Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx questioned the rationality of mankind.[3] In the 1880s increased attention was given to the idea that it was necessary to push aside previous norms entirely, instead of merely revising past knowledge in light of contemporary techniques. The theories of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), and Ernst Mach (1838–1916) influenced early Modernist literature. Mach argued that the mind had a fundamental structure, and that subjective experience was based on the interplay of parts of the mind in The Science of Mechanics (1883). Freud's first major work was Studies on Hysteria (with Josef Breuer) (1895). According to Freud, all subjective reality was based on the play of basic drives and instincts, through which the outside world was perceived. As a philosopher of science, Ernst Mach was a major influence on logical positivism, and through his criticism of Isaac Newton, a forerunner of Einstein's theory of relativity. Many prior theories about epistemology argued that external and absolute reality could impress itself, as it were, on an individual, as, for example.
by Pericles Lewis Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856) is the story of a bored housewife who has two extra-marital affairs but finds adultery almost as disappointing as marriage. The novel exemplifies the tendency of realism, over the course of the nineteenth century, to become increasingly psychological, concerned with the accurate representation of thoughts and emotions rather than of external things. In January, 1857, the French prosecutor Ernest Pinard accused Flaubert of an “offense to public and religious morality and to good morals” for publishing the novel. Pinard failed to win a conviction, but the court reprimanded Flaubert for forgetting that art “must be chaste and pure not only in its form but in its expression.”[1] Flaubert attempted to cure the banality of modern “received ideas” through the dispassionate and precise use of language. He wrote that “the artist in his work should be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.”[2] This idea of the godlike artist did not involve meting out punishments or pronouncing moral judgments. Rather, his narrators were generally unobtrusive. His use of what literary critics call “free indirect discourse” (in French, “style indirect libre,” “free indirect style”) tended if anything to undermine the idea of the objective narrator, by making it difficult to distinguish between the perspective of the narrator and that of the character. The method transformed realism and even became an issue in the trial. In direct discourse, the narrator quotes a character: “Madame Bovary said, ‘I have a lover! a lover!’” In indirect discourse, the narrator paraphrases a character’s statement or thought: “Madame Bovary said that she had a lover.” In free indirect discourse, however, the narrator paraphrases the thoughts of a character, sometimes at great length, without marking them off with a phrase like.