22403 Paper no.110 History of 20th-century Literature: from 1900 to 2000
Smt.S.B.Gardi Department of English, M.K.Bhavanagar University.
Vachchhalata Joshi
Vachchhalatajoshi.14@gmail.com
Roll no – 20
Topic: Modern Age
“Information is the oxygen of the modern
age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the
electrified borders.”
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The
20th century was like no time period before it. Einstein, Darwin, Freud and
Marx were just some of the thinkers who profoundly changed Western culture.
These changes took a distinct shape in the literature of the 20th century.
Modernism, a movement that was a radical break from 19th century Victorianism,
led to postmodernism, which emphasized self-consciousness and pop art. While
20th-century literature is a diverse field covering a variety of genres, there
are common characteristics that changed literature forever.
Fragmented Structure
Prior to the 20th century, literature tended to be
structured in linear, chronological order. Twentieth-century writers
experimented with other kinds of structures. Virginia Woolf, for instance,
wrote novels whose main plot was often "interrupted" by individual
characters' memories, resulting in a disorienting experience for the reader.
Ford Madox Ford's classic "The Good Soldier" plays with chronology,
jumping back and forth between time periods.
Many
of these writers aimed to imitate the feeling of how time is truly experienced
subjectively.
Fragmented Perspective
If there's one thing readers
could count on before the 20th century, it was the reliability of an objective
narrator in fiction. Modernist and postmodern writers, however, believed that
this did a disservice to the reliability of stories in general. The 20th
century saw the birth of the ironic narrator, who could not be trusted with the
facts of the narrative. Nick Carraway, the narrator of Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby,"
for example, tells the story with a bias toward the novel's titular character.
In an extreme case of fragmented perspective, Faulkner's "As I Lay
Dying" switches narrators between each chapter.
The Novel of the City
The 20th century is
distinguished as the century of urbanism. As more people moved to cities in
Europe and America, novelists used urban environments as backdrops for the
stories they told. Perhaps the best known of these is James Joyce's
"Dubliners," a series of short stories that all take place in various
locales in Dublin. Other 20th-century writers are also closely associated with
various urban centers: Woolf and London, Theodore Dreiser and Chicago, Paul
Auster and New York, Michael Ondaatje and Toronto.
Writing from the Margins
The 20th century gave voice to
marginalized people who previously got little recognition for their literary
contributions. The Harlem Renaissance, for example, brought together
African-Americans living in New York to form a powerful literary movement.
Writers such as Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston wrote
fiction and poetry that celebrated black identity. Similarly, female writers
gained recognition through novels that chronicled their own experience.
Finally, the post-colonial literary movement was born, with writers such as
Chinua Achebe writing stories on behalf of subjugated peoples who had
experienced colonization by Western powers.
Cubism
was principally a movement in the visual arts in the early 20th century
spearheaded by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. These painters explored new
forms of expression by emphasizing subjective mental experience over objective
sensible experience, fragmentation over linear plotting, and multiple
perspectives over singular perspective. The movement influenced modernist
novelists and poets of the same time period, such as Virginia Woolf, James
Joyce, Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner, who used cubist elements in their
writing to push the boundaries of literary portraiture.
Internal Landscape
Coming off groundbreaking
advances in the social sciences, particularly the theories of Sigmund Freud,
cubists were more concerned with the internal landscape of the individual than
the external landscape of the objective world. Likewise, the psyche, the subconscious,
the conscious intellect and creative abstraction itself all became more
important in modernist literature than the more objective, one-dimensional
portraiture of the Victorian period that preceded it. In “A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man,” James Joyce plumbed the internal depths of his
protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, discovering a vivid and varied inner life that
would come to characterize his later, more experimental novels: “His soul was
swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as undersea, traversed
by cloudy shapes and beings."
Stream of Consciousness
The cubists’ exploration of
the mind through visual arts led many writers to do the same through words and
sentence structure. Whereas previous modes of writing had relied on logic and
clarity to convey information, modernist writers tried to portray thought as it
happened, randomly and illogically. This method became known as the “stream of
consciousness.” One of the great pioneers of this method was Virginia Woolf. In
her groundbreaking novel “Mrs. Dalloway,” she captured the streaming thoughts
of multiple characters. For example, early in the novel, Woolf traces the
random and erratic thoughts of Septimus, a war-scarred visionary on the verge
of complete madness: “Men must not cut down trees. There is a God. (He noted
such revelations on the backs of envelopes.) Change the world. No one kills
from hatred. Make it known
Multiple Perspectives
Anyone familiar with Picasso
knows his paintings contained various planes and angles of perception.
Modernist writers used this technique to great effect to show how narrative
realities change through the subjective perspectives of different characters. A
master of this technique was William Faulkner. In his novel “As I Lay Dying,”
the death and burial of rural matriarch Addie Bundren is portrayed through the
interlinking perspectives of more than a dozen characters. Each character has
his own voice, tone and vocabulary, and relays the events of the narrative in a
distinct way. Like Picasso, Faulkner created a stark collage of images
revealing the subjectivity, and relativity, at the heart of the human experience.
Fragmentation of the Individual
Added together, cubist
techniques presented something rather frightening: the individual as an assemblage
of broken images. With the same techniques, modernist writers explored the
implications of movements like cubism. If subjectivity trumped all, then how
could the individual retain a rational purpose in society? How could the
individual avoid alienation, loneliness, and despair, or worse, the
fragmentation of insanity? In “As I Lay Dying,” Faulkner famously used a child
character to show how identity is irrationally predicated on discrete,
subjective percepts. Because his mother dies after he kills a fish, young
Vardaman projects the identity of the former onto the latter. One chapter is
composed of a single sentence: “My mother is a fish.”
Modern Novels
The 20th century is divided
into two phases of literature--modern literature (1900-1945) and contemporary
literature (1945 to the present), also referred to as postmodern. The
characters in modern and contemporary novels questioned the existence of God,
the supremacy of human reason, and the nature of reality. Novels from this
era reflected great events such as The Great Depression, World War II,
Hiroshima, the cold war, and communism. Famous modern novels include "To
The Lighthouse" (1927) by English novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf;
"Ulysses" (1921), by Irish novelist and short story writer James
Joyce; "All Quiet on the Western Front" (1929), the most famous World
War I anti-war novel by German novelist and journalist Erich Maria Remarque and
"The Sound and the Fury" (1929) by American novelist and short-story
writer William Faulkner, which depicts the decline of the South after the Civil
War.
Modern Horror
Today, many genres derive from
the Gothic tradition. Stephen King and Anne Rice are both household names in
Gothic fiction who use the unknown to build suspense. Their books incorporate
classic horror characters such as vampires, hearkening back to Stoker's
"Dracula," and serial killers, playing on the same fascination
Victorians had toward the notorious "Jack the Ripper" in 19th-century
England. Both vampire and horror novels have spawned their own genres,
targeting all ages, including teens, through such books as Stephanie Meyers'
"The Twilight Saga," and children, through R. L. Stine's
"Goosebumps" series.
Individualism
In Modernist literature, the
individual is more interesting than society. Specifically, modernist writers
were fascinated with how the individual adapted to the changing world. In some
cases, the individual triumphed over obstacles. For the most part, Modernist
literature featured characters who just kept their heads above water. Writers
presented the world or society as a challenge to the integrity of their
characters. Ernest Hemingway is especially remembered for vivid characters who
accepted their circumstances at face value and persevered.
Experimentation
Modernist writers broke free
of old forms and techniques. Poets abandoned traditional rhyme schemes and
wrote in free verse. Novelists defied all expectations. Writers mixed images
from the past with modern languages and themes, creating a collage of styles.
The inner workings of consciousness were a common subject for modernists. This
preoccupation led to a form of narration called stream of consciousness, where
the point of view of the novel meanders in a pattern resembling human thought.
Authors James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, along with poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra
Pound, are well known for their experimental Modernist works.
Absurdity
The carnage of two World Wars
profoundly affected writers of the period. Several great English poets died or
were wounded in WWI. At the same time, global capitalism was reorganizing
society at every level. For many writers, the world was becoming a more absurd
place every day. The mysteriousness of life was being lost in the rush of daily
life. The senseless violence of WWII was yet more evidence that humanity had
lost its way. Modernist authors depicted this absurdity in their works. Franz
Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," in which a traveling salesman is
transformed into an insect-like creature, is an example of modern absurdism.
Symbolism
The Modernist writers infused
objects, people, places and events with significant meanings. They imagined a
reality with multiple layers, many of them hidden or in a sort of code. The
idea of a poem as a riddle to be cracked had its beginnings in the Modernist
period. Symbolism was not a new concept in literature, but the Modernists'
particular use of symbols was an innovation. They left much more to the
reader's imagination than earlier writers, leading to open-ended narratives
with multiple interpretations. For example, James Joyce's "Ulysses"
incorporates distinctive, open-ended symbols in each chapter.
Formalism
Writers of the Modernist
period saw literature more as a craft than a flowering of creativity. They
believed that poems and novels were constructed from smaller parts instead of
the organic, internal process that earlier generations had described. The idea
of literature as craft fed the Modernists' desire for creativity and
originality. Modernist poetry often includes foreign languages, dense
vocabulary and invented words. The poet e.e. cummings abandoned all structure
and spread his words all across the page.
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