Eng426 20th century english literature

Modernism and its Literary Propositions

Modern generally means contemporary so that what comes to mind when modernism is mentioned is ‘new ideas’ or a time in history when new ideas are in vogue. In literature, Modernism is not a chronological designation; rather it consists of literary work possessing certain loosely defined characteristics. It is a movement and it was the horrors of the First World War and its accompanying atrocities and senselessness that became catalyst for the Modernist movement. In relation to this course, modernism is an important literary movement of the twenty-first century English literature and cannot be ignored or glossed over. Though scholars have never agreed on the specific date of the commencement of modernism, it is gained momentum in the early 1900s and continued to the 1930s.

In the wake of the happenings that took place after the world war ended, writers sought for new ways to represent these new realities. The world according to them had gone through a most confounding experience that had fragmented and disrupted the normal and peaceful flow of life and human relations so, what was written would change and the style of writing too must change. According to Christopher Reed, these writers sought for writings “appropriate to the sensibilities of the modern outlook” (129). Prominent among these writers are James Joyce, W.B Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, D.H Lawrence, T.S Eliot, Aldoux Huxley, Stevie Smith and a host of others.

By definition, literary modernism is the radical shift in aesthetics and cultural sensibilities evident in the art and literature produced after the First World War. It is basically about modern thoughts, modern characters, modern styles or practices that arose after the change that affected the nature of human life and relationships. Although modernists built upon the progress of the post-Victorian literature, modernism in literature came up as a reaction against Victorian literary tradition. Modernism thus marks a distinctive break from Victorian bourgeois morality as it rejects the 19th Century optimism while presenting a profound pessimistic picture of a culture in disarray. It seeks for new aesthetics as against the traditional and old ways of writing because modernist writers saw traditional ways of writing as outmoded and inadequate.

Modernist writers argue that modern life is not symmetrical but is characterized by disjointedness, restlessness, absurdity, alienation, gloom, sadness, and the disruption of the traditionally accepted way of living. To the modernist writers, institutions in which they hitherto believed are no longer reliable means to give meaning to life; they believe that people should turn to themselves to discover the answers to life issues. In order words, the world is better viewed from individuals’ perspectives. This antipathy towards traditional institutions became the basis of the literary propositions of the modernist writers and this belief found its way into their writings and reflects in the contents and forms of their writings. The whole essence of writing, to the modernists, is to present life in its decadence and ugliness, and show that man is disillusioned, confused and marooned in a world that is devoid of order and peace.
The modernist literary propositions are vehemently opposed to the coherent, finished and unified representations of life in Victorian writings, especially the novel. They saw weaknesses in traditional English literature and regarded the realistic literary productions of Victorian writers as mere fact records. The truth, for modernists, could not be obtained from the details of external or environmental descriptions but from the progression of the minds of the characters. Modernist writers were more interested in the individual rather than the society. For them, there was no need for ‘guide books’ as the mind was sufficient to bridge the gap between the outer and inner realities and as a result, they argued for a change in form and content of literature.

In her essay “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”, Woolf posits that outward reflections are not enough to arrive at the truth as they are mere facts and that those things hidden and stored in the inner recesses of human mind are most likely to convey truth than those outward reflections. Unlike in Victorian literature where there are heroes and heroines, the modernists do not have heroes or heroines in their works because such portraiture falls short of depicting the complexities of human life and experience. Interior monologue and stream of consciousness are the predominant devices of modernist writing. As a matter of fact, modernists proposed to change the aspects of the Victorian literature that the Post- Victorian literature could not change. They went ahead to represent more complex realities that reflected the calamities of the First World War.

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