Modernist Literature: Key Concepts & Context Explained

[00:00:00]difficult just challenging sex and defecation technically novels if you can even call them that pretentious rubbish and absolute ball Lake to read hi guys I'm Jen and I'm a peaceful english-lit study videos on Shakespeare poetry fiction literary devices and more to help you get top grades in the subject yeah I know scary word probably one of the most loaded and thorny terms in literary studies because it's virtually impossible to explain or Define in a way that everyone agrees and we also know that modernism is famously difficult there's the iconic slogan of make it new which was proposed by Ezra pound who's one of the most famous modernist poets will go on to explore in this video and the slogans are sometimes taken to crystallize the spirit of the modernist age there's a fallback on this short imperative would be a gross reduction of what's really a highly complex and fascinating movement so what the heck is modernism well let's find out [Music] beginning from the early 20th century around 1909 and fading out with the start of World War II modernism was a time of Daring experimentation in style Aesthetics and ideas as artists musicians and writers revolted against the Primus and prudory of their Victorian greed assassins now granted there are debates around whether modernism had ever really ended but in general it's fair to argue that World War II marked a pivot away from the fervent explosive autistic experimentation and social inertia which characterized the modernist era because more immediate and human concerns came to the fall with the ghastly large-scale violence that was so evident in the early to mid 1940s of course because when you've got hordes of hungry and dying people everywhere deciding between using a Greek or Latin allusion to confuse your readers it's probably not going to be the top of mind for anyone not even for the snootiest writers so whereas 19th century writers cared about Concepts like realism and very similitude which is essentially describing reality in as accurate a way as possible the early 20th century modernist upstart felt that linear narratives long descriptions and turgid language fell way short of portraying the fullness of human experience which was also Complicated by the rise of modernity our focus on this channel is primarily literally in nature as we know but it's important to understand that most literary movements including modernism were also cultural philosophical intellectual and social political movements that involved multiple Paradigm shifts in the Arts music as well as politics and in fact this was especially apparent with modernism because you had movements like cubism and surrealism which emerged as new painting Styles while expressionism and neoclassicism introduced new ways of composition and music it was also a period when artists and writers of often doubled as cultural critics and through the commentary of the Zeitgeist they would often advocate for radical changes in the way people should experience and engage and get well imported that of course now given the limited scope of this video and the incredibly complex and multifaceted nature of modernism I'll be focusing largely on the most distinctive characteristics and iconic authors in literary modernism so I'm going to be looking at largely the high modernist poets and authors so as a starting point here are four key Concepts to help distill what literary modernism is it marks a turn away from conventional realist presentation to an Embrace of avant-garde experimentation in style and form it places an emphasis on portraying the processes of the human mind rather than those particularities of the outside world it marks a deliberate distinction between highbrow and Low brown literature and this is often Amplified by The Writer's conscious effort to make literature difficult Elusive and intellectually rigorous it often expresses a desire to redefine the modern identity and modern existence often in Def points against the pressures and Chaos brought about by modernity so let's now explore each of these ideas recall the pound injunction that I introduced at the start of this video make it new ironically this call for making things new is in fact anything but new because as with every historical cycle the sun setting of one period always brings with it a desire to transform innovate and the status quo so after the long 19th century of Victorian realism where focal objectivity temporal stability and narrative sentimentality were the norm the modernists wanted to shake things up the ruffle feathers to rock the boat to shock public sensibilities by writing openly about private topics like sex and defecation in the case of Joyce and Lawrence and also to push stylistic boundaries Often by rejecting grammar rules formal conventions and linguistic niceties whereas Victorian and Romantic Poets would often use fixed first forms like the sonnet ode or the Epic modernist poets consciously rejected such constraints and would present verse in unorthodox extreme and sometimes shocking ways one example is a majestic poetry which aimed at Absolute concision by crystallizing brief but Vivid moments in time very few words and lines for instance his Ezra pounds poet in a station of the Metro which contains just two clipped lines that read The Apparition of these faces in the crowd petals on a wet black bow that's it well if we cross the Atlantic we can look at the American poet Wallace Stevens the red wheelbarrow which is a poem that doesn't really say much at all but conveys a wealth of meaning through its sharp imagery and muted suggestiveness foreign and perhaps this avant-garde shock value is nowhere else stronger than in James Joyce's novels Ulysses and Finnegan's wake which are technically novels if you can even call them that but they contain so much jumbled description disruptive narratives incoherent and made of language that most readers even the most learned ones will probably find virtually unreadable just to give you a test of what I mean here's what some sections in these two novels look like brace yourself [Music] is this literary experimentation which is pretentious rubbish but there's a point of all of this and the universities excerpt the complete absence of punctuation is an attempt at recreating The Continuous Flow of one's thought which do not pause at any given moment and resembles more like an avalanche of random information bit than a train of neatly arranged ideas and in reality we often see or hear things wrong for example the phrase North America in the Finnegans Wake passage could be someone's mispronunciation of North America or it could be the narrator's Mind thinking of an armor suit while he overhears someone say North America but faintly in the distance the point here is that we don't know and for the modernist radical ambiguity is often the point that they're trying to make and the chaos that comes with The Human Experience should be portrayed in as unfiltered away as possible because it is in presenting the reality of how the mind works as messy and chaotic and incomprehensible as it can be the that we are reaching for internal truths Finnegan's wake is frankly more an art specimen or a political gesture than a book and it's not really meant to be read in a conventional sense because Joyce's point with this novel is to challenge the boundaries of human language and to show the limits and inadequacy of words and conveying the depth and complexity of the modern Consciousness broadly though this sort of avant-gardest impulse is a way for authors to contend with what they saw as a whole new world where modernity and its disorientating affects daily complicate man's relationship with their surroundings and so a complicated existence requires complicated modes of representation to do justice and even then actually the job isn't quite done by the way guys I'd massively appreciate it if you could hit the Thumbs Up Button below subscribe to my channel and switch on that Bell notification if you find this video helpful so far this would really help me carry on making these useful English Lit study videos so that you can get top grades in the subject and we can Inspire more people to enjoy the study of literature [Music] distinctive techniques and modernist writing is stream of consciousness and we've just seen an example of this from the Molly blue Soliloquy in choices Ulysses it's a method whereby the writer attempts to recreate a character's flow of thought emotions and Sensations in a way that's as similar to reality as possible the metaphor of stream highlights the continuity and simultaneity of the thought process and the word Consciousness implies that Human Experience is an organic combination of not just thoughts and feelings but also Sensations and Impressions many which we may not even be actively aware of Joyce's novels may be a bit too convoluted and challenging to make for enjoyable reading for most people including myself so Virginia was Mrs down the way into the lighthouse equally great examples of stream of Consciousness and in my opinion they are written in a more poetic Style with a stronger sense of narrative development and consistency as you can tell from these passages [Music] while a common trait of stream of Consciousness is garbled and sparse punctuation it's also marked by sharp juxtapositions abrupt interruptions spontaneous interjections jumbled narrative sequences and a general sense of unhinged chaos and unpredictability in the text and because the human mind and modern life in general are chaotic unpredictable and Ever Changing foreign of Consciousness is often used interchangeably with the term interior monologue which is more specific to a single character's perspective hence the word monologue right where our stream of Consciousness could include a variety of perspectives which are present in a givened moment captured in the text a good example of interior monologue would be TS eliot's poem the Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock which also happens to be one of my favorite poem of all time even though it's actually a pretty grim and melancholic work it's a work of free verse written in the voice of a middle-aged man who reflects wistfully on the passing of time and the passivity and lack of agency that he's demonstrated throughout his life as he registers these trivial details and recalls these Monumental moments that form the Mosaic of his ambivalent Consciousness in his poem thank you [Music] when we first read stream of Consciousness the writing can seem confusing and convoluted almost as if there is no point that we can grasp or hold on to but this in fact is a big part of its message there often isn't actually a concrete point and far from living a teleological coexistence where all action and thoughts tend towards some specific goal the modernist subject is often simply there to be to feel to experience and to demonstrate that the state of being is incredibly complex and something which no amount of human language or description can adequately capture did I mention that modernist literature is famously harmed to the Casual reader no scratchback actually to think that there would be casual readers of modernist works is quite paradoxical because most people probably wouldn't consider giving themselves an intellectual migraine to be allegedly past time so TS Eliot insisted that modern poets must be difficult by which he meant that poetry by extension or literature with a claim to seriousness must be works of intellectual rigor this sort of intellectual rigor is very often achieved with the sort of heavy-handed and often also heavily self-conscious use of the technique illusion and a lot of the most seminal modernist works are elusive tapestries because they would include a wide range of intertextual references from past and contemporary literary works as well as anglospheric European and foreign cultures they are often these elusive puzzles and riddles that are just designed to give you a massive headache for example pound featured Chinese two grams in his epic cantos Elliot references Dante's Inferno in the epigraph to his poem love song of Jay Albert proof Rock which we just read Joyce adopts an outer structure of Homer's Odysseus for his novel unices Yates Drew on Celtic occult symbols in his hugely influential poem the second comic so why did so many of the modernists set out to make their work such an absolute balling to read now this is a complicated question and while different modernist writers had their own varying agendas an interesting point to explore to understand this is TF eliot's claim of the impersonality of the poet in his essay tradition and the unlimited Talent now if you've watched my video on Romanticism you'll know that romantic poetry plays a premium of self-expression in that they believe that poetry was the ultimate outlet for the outpouring of individual emotions but to TF Eliot that is a load of crap because he believes that poetry is a space for cultural engagement and intellectual sparring between past and present Minds to take place not some kind of Willy Pulpit for the self-indulgent egotistical artist to pour his heart out to the world but with this new understanding of poetry not as an expression of the self but instead as an engagement with historical forebears it was unavoidable then that modernist writing would be so encyclopedic in its scope academic in content and highbrow in register because these writers would have to cram in all of the different sources and references from a long and Rich compendium of literature that all came before the early 20th century this is also why modernist Works often seem highly inaccessible and elitist because honestly how many people would have read great poetry Shakespearean plays Italian epics and much much much more as um these pre-reads for even War hardcore English reading foreign [Music] of all the emphasis on stylistic and formal experimentation modernist literature was also deeply concerned with a key theme and that was the overwhelming impact of modernity on one sense of identity and one's place in the world as more people moved away from the countryside in favor of the Metropolis this Locus shift accelerated the pace of living and altered Lifestyles whereas Community used to be the basic social unit in the 19th century and before that the individual is now left to their own devices to explore the excitingly spoiling but also cripplingly isolating City this individual is also known as the flannel a Trope which features in some of the most famous modernist works such as Stephen dedlers in Joyce's Ulysses who walks along Sandy Mount strand in Dublin or Clarissa Dalloway in Virginia wools Mrs Galloway who takes in the sights and sounds of Big Ben and London as she strolled along Westminster Bridge the modernist protagonist is often an introspective character who seems to live primarily in their own head as most of their environment is filtered through highly subjective sorted and chameleonic expressions but on the other hand you also had authors like D.H Lawrence who is not really part of the experimentalist craft as he retained the more traditional narrative style but he was equally revolutionary in terms of the frankness with which he handled topics like sex and incest as in his novels Southern lovers the rainbow and Lady Chatterley's Lover In fact for Lady Chatterley's Lover Lawrence was tried under the obscene Publications Act of 1959. one of the objections to this novel was the two frequent use of the F and c words and look how far we've come now despite attempts to paint warrants it's actually explicit descriptions as no more than pornography these people missed the point Lawrence saw sex as one of the few areas of human existence that remained Primal and Untouched by modernity and it's often dulling energies it was a place where men and women could ReDiscover their natural sounds in a world where authenticity and spirituality were being quickly swept aside by Machinery artifice and utility Lawrence was ultimately found not guilty which her son marched at the start of a more liberal publication culture in Britain but his novels continued to be banned in other countries like Australia and America until much later what Lawrence's example shows then is that modernist literature was characterized by a strong Spirit of defiant whether it be in style form theme or content writers were often challenging boundaries to make his symbolic and political point and they could frankly care less about pissing off the general public or about offending conventional sensibilities in fact the more shocking the better this contrasts with many Romantics and victorians who often wrote with the public tastes and preferences in mind but not all of them for example William Blake didn't really write for the public and his Works weren't published until posthumously but William Wordsworth was so popular with the public he was anointed Poet Laureate in 184 tree while someone like Charles Dickens famously serialized the publication of his novels so that he could decide how to continue his plots based on the public readership leadership response and that's it for this video guys I know finally right I know this is probably a lot to take in but I highly recommend that you look up the novels poems and authors that I referenced throughout this video so I know that gets into groups with modernism can be challenging and it's a truth universally acknowledged that modernist literature contains some of the most difficult words ever written when I was studying modernism I also found it to be incredibly overwhelming and just challenging so don't worry if a lot of this seems overwhelming right now it's meant to be just because you can't be asked to read unisees from cover to cover doesn't mean that you won't enjoy or understand other modernist writing so I've certainly for example not read you the season four and honestly I don't even think most English professors have done that except maybe okay say Ulysses expert but in any case modernism is a fascinating and important period of literary history which is why it's a topic that's worth exploring for any dedicated and top-rated students so as always I hope you found this video helpful in some way and if you did please do hit the Thumbs Up Button below because that is going to massively help the YouTube algorithm and help me continue making these videos so that I can help you and other like-minded passionate Learners to become top-breakers you and if you haven't already please do subscribe to my channel hit that Bell notification icon so that you don't miss out on any of my future study videos and see you guys in the next one bye