General Characteristics of Modern Literature

1. General Characteritics of
Modern Literature
• Name: Chauhan Hetal M.
• Paper No:09 Modernist Literature
• Course:M.A,sem-3,2018
• Roll No:14
• Email :hetalchauhan137@gmail.com
• Submitted to:
Smt.S.B.Gardi,Department Of
English,M.K.Bhavnagar University

2. What Is Modernism?
• According to
M.H.Abrahams,
• “The term modernism is
used to identify new and
distinctive feature in the
subject’s forms, concept
and style of literature and
other art…”

3. Time period
• Approximately 1890-1950
• Some poet started before 1890 in the
post-Romantic period
• Some poet continued writing major
works after World War2
• Focused in Europe and North
America

4. Major Characteristics
• Purposeful shift away from traditional
style
• Include techniques such as:
-Stream of consciousness
- Interior monologue
- Writing in multiple point of view
• Reflected the need for greater
psychological realism, especially during
World Wars

5. Major Characteristics
• T.S. Eliot said that modernist
literature is…
“…a way of controlling, of ordering,
of giving a shape and a
significance to the immense
panorama of futility and anarchy
which is contemporary
history…Instead of narrative
method, we may now use the
mythical method. It is, seriously
believe, a step toward making
the modern world possible for
art.” (Review of Ulysses by
James Joyce)

6. Major Characteristic
• Gives order to an ever changing at the
start of 20th century
• Acknowledges that world politics are
not working
• Criticizes the ubiquity of western
culture, and acknowledges its “decay
and fragmentation” as anarchy and
war change the World at the time

7. Major Characteristics
• Using word as part
of speech that they
aren’t (noun as
adjectives, verbs as
noun, etc)
• Reworking
traditional forms (like
Sonnets)
• Using disjointed
structure to reflect
the disfunction of
Western society
• Addressing inner
thoughts of regular
people

8. Origins of Modernism
• Victorian morals
• Divine Purpose
• Progress
• Formality
• Stability and Quitetude
• Truth and beauty
• Industrialization
• Technological Development
• Realism and Naturalism

9. Institution and Traditions
• Modernist authors felt by the war,
believing the institutions in which they
were taught to believe had led the
civilized world into a bloody conflict.
• They no longer considered these
institutions as reliable means to
access the meaning of life, and
therefore turned within themselves to
discover the answers.

10. Conti…
• Indeed, a break with traditions is
one of the fundamental constants
of the modernist stance.
intellectuals and artists at the turn
of the twentieth century believed
the previous generation’s way of
doing things was a cultural dead
end.

11. Nihilism
• Modernists repudiated the moral codes of
the society in which they were living in the
reason that they did so was not
necessarily because they did not believe
in god, although there was a great majority
of them who were atheists, or that they
experienced great doubt about the
meaninglessness of life.

12. Conti…
Rather, their rejection of conventional
morality was based on its arbitrariness,
its conformity and its exertion of control
over human feelings.
• In other words, the rules of conduct
were a restrictive and limiting force over
the human spirit.

13. Modern Poetry Characteristics
Formal Characteristics
• Open form
• Free verse
• Juxtaposition
• Intertextuality
• Classical allusion
• Metanarrative

14. Thematic Characteristic
• Breakdown of social norms and cultural
sureties
• Dislocation of meaning and sense from
its normal context
• Valorization of the despairing individual
in the face of an unmanageable future
• Rejection of history and substitution of a
mythical past, borrowed without
chronology

15. Thoughts of the time
• Impressionism
• A school of Painting
• Focus work done outdoors
• Symbolism
• Language as expressly symbolic in its
nature
• Poetry and writing should follow
connections that the sheer sound and
texture of the words

16. Major Players - Artists
• Pablo Picasso, Henri
Matisse, and other cubist
artists
• Embraced minimalism
• Celebrated the power of
simplicity

17. Major Players - Authors
• Virginia Woolf
(pictured),William
Faulkner(and many
more)
• Explored the inner mind
of Man

18. Major Players - poet
• Ezra Pound, E.E.
Cummings, T.S.Eliot,
Robert Frost
• Critics of Western
Culture
• Used Words and
traditional forms in
ways

19. Conclusion
• Literary modernism ,or modernist
literature, has its origins in the late
19th and early 20th centuries, mainly
in Europe and North America, and is
characterized by a very self-
conscious break with traditional ways
of writing, in both poetry and prose
fiction.