Eng426 20th century english literature

OBJECTIVES

At the end of this unit you should be able to:

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  List and discuss modernist themes;
  
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  Explain the concerns of modernist writers and how different or similar they are to the traditional ways of writing;
  
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  identify techniques that are peculiar to modernist writing
  
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  discuss techniques of modernist writing
  

0. MAIN CONTENT

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   Modernist Thematic Concerns
   

The modernist’s major concern was that there was a need for a new art for a new world which had new challenges and realities. Modernism refers to a group of characteristics which are new and distinct in form, concept and style in literature. It is a strong reaction against established religious, social and political views. Modernists had a deep distrust and disappointment in the institutions they were brought up with and held dear which had led their peaceful world into war and a state of destruction. As a result, their works reflected a persistent sense of despair, loss, disillusionment and trauma. They laid emphasis on fragmentation, discontinuous narratives, and randomness which to them was how the world was.

For modernists, characters are the soul of fiction. They tried to locate meaning from the view point of the individual and discarded the omniscient narrator who is all-knowing because they argued that nobody really could be the custodian of truth and therefore adopted the stream of consciousness technique to represent inner and psychological realities of man. To modernist writers, there is no absolute truth and everything is subjective and relative. To show the meaninglessness and disjointed nature of life, they paid less attention to plot or the structural organisation that would show cause and effect, beginning, middle or end of a text. The cause and effect presentation of the traditional writing was discarded for a discontinuous, fragmented and complex narration because it was seen as that which “…ceases to be a means of communication between writers and readers, and become instead, an obstacle and an impediment” (“Mr. Bennett and Mrs Brown”, 10). The modernist idea especially that of Woolf was that the literary convention of the previous age was artificial and that literature should demonstrate that the society had changed.

Modernist works are imbued with interrelated themes that show lack of communication, fragmentation, solitariness/aloneness, trauma and gloom, existentialism, quest, unrealised love and unfulfilled life, class differences, and anti-heroism, and so on.

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