Modernism, Factors That Led to

¶ … Modernism, factors that led to the rise of Modernism and the characteristics of the period. Modernist literature is notable for its far more subjective and unreliable narrators, in contrast to the protagonists of the immediately preceding Victorian period. Modernist literature also tends to have a more fragmented narrative structure. Its tone is often pervaded by a sense of despair because of a perceived loss of faith in traditional institutions.

Its focus on psychological interiority rather than exterior relationships and 'plot' also reflects a sense that it is impossible to know anything for certain, other than one's own thoughts and feelings. The death and destruction of a generation of young men in the wake of World War I was one of the most significant factors in giving rise to the movement. Freudian psychoanalysis also was influential in disseminating the idea that a character's inner life could be just as potentially significant as a characters' outer life.

What goes on in a character's mind might be more exciting than what he or she 'did' on a daily basis, as well as profoundly discordant with the protagonist's placid surface. The rise in scientific literacy gave rise to the cultural questioning of traditional religious and sexual more. Stream-of-consciousness narration, bitter irony and satire, despair at the failure of old institutions, and fairly simple plots (versus the long, epic novels of the Victorians) were all characteristic of Modernism because of cultural as well as historical influences.

It should be noted that, although Modernism was highly focused upon the individual, it was also profoundly anti-heroic in nature. In contrast to the upstanding moral protagonists of many Victorian novels, Modernist heroes and heroines were highly imperfect and riddled with doubt. They also lacked the epic brilliance of Romantic heroes, and tended to be ordinary people who aspired to greatness, to escape the limitations of their daily lives. Q2. Give examples of Modernism using the following writers: a) T.S.

Eliot: Eliot's fragmented images of the "Wasteland" and their allusions to previous works of literature both satirize and express despair over the Modernist loss of faith. The Bible, Shakespeare, and many images of high and low culture are blended together to suggest that ordinary experience is all that is left of the great epics of the past, like the poetic refrain of "Hurry up please, it's time" to the lower-class women in the bar. "The Love Song of J.

Alfred Prufrock" is an extended stream-of-consciousness narration whereby the placid surface of social life (where women talk of Michelangelo and drink tea) hide the painfully ordinary title character's burning feelings of passion for an unnamed woman. b) James Joyce: Ulysses is an almost entirely non-linear stream-of-consciousness narration. The novel has no plot and merely portrays a day in Dublin, although it contains literary allusions to Shakespeare and other works in a parodic form, and has a non-believing protagonist in the form of Stephen Daedalus.

Joyce's writings were frankly sexual in a way that threatened the sensibilities of many of his readers who were more accustomed to conventional morality. c) Robert Frost: Robert Frost used very simple images from the natural world -- such as a field of birches, a forked path in the woods, and a broken fence as springboards for internal reflection and metaphors of his inner state of consciousness. Q3. Explain the importance of the Fisher King in Modern Literature.

The Fisher King is the wounded king that motivates Sir Galahad to find the Holy Grail to heal him and his people: the quest narrative is one of the most significant narratives in all of literature, and the Moderns despaired of finding a quest in the modern, faithless, directionless world. The Fisher King's wound symbolizes his lack of fertility, which leaves his kingdom hungry and barren. T.S. Eliot's poem "The Wasteland" suggests that modern life is like the Fisher King's kingdom. Q4.

Explain the importance of WWI trench poetry and the works of Wilfred Owen While some of the early poets celebrated patriotism, or eulogized the fate of the common soldier with quiet despair, Owen's poetry was harsh, gritty and realistic. In his poem "Dulce et Decorum est" Owen takes the familiar Latin phrase that it is sweet to die for one's country and pairs it with the grotesque image of a young man being gassed to death on the front lines.

Owen's poetry was literally from the front lines of war, and the fact that a soldier was willing to so completely eviscerate the values he was supposedly fighting for turned many people against the war. Q5. Explain the term "epiphany" and its significance in Joyce's "The Dead." An epiphany is a sudden, truthful realization. At the end of the short story "The Dead," the protagonist Gabriel suddenly gains a sense of the passage of time.

He realizes that his wife has aged, and her face is no longer the face for which her old sweetheart Michael Furey died. He suddenly realizes that the Morkan sisters, the.