Faculty of philology department of english philology viktorija mi

from many sources; great discoveries in the physical sciences, changing our images of the universe 
and our place in it, the industrialization of production, which transforms scientific knowledge into 
technology, creates new human environments and destroys the old ones, rapid and often 
cataclysmic urban growth”. (1988: 16) Thus, although some linguists still argue if Modernism 
truly represented a new cultural entity or was in fact better understood as an extension and 
exaggeration of basic modernist precepts, remained a matter for further analysis and debate. It 
seemed obviously that anyone seeking to understand the essence of Modernism must pay more 
attention to its broader social, cultural, economical, and political context. 
In Allen’s mind, although human nature preserves the same basic features, human 
understanding of that nature is constantly changing, thus, the natural interest into human 
psychology in modernist art was justifiable and understandable. Similarly, according to Peter 
Faulkner et al., “a general tendency in modern literature is to focus on the contents of a character’s 
mind, the inner, mental life of the experiencing subject”.(1977:31) Indeed, art in Modernism 
became independent from the real world; it rejected the mimetic and didactic functions and 
established the priority of the form over the content. Verdonk and Weber (1995), who state that the 

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main purpose of modernist literature was to reveal characters’ individual inner world, their 
psychological characteristics, as well as their constant fluctuation of mind, share Allen’s views. 
Indeed, as they say, it was important to describe life at the moment it is being lived paying attention 
to the smallest details that a human being perceives: smell and sound, colour and shape, movement 
and stillness. Although modernist characters try to escape from reality and neglect the past, at the 
same time they aim even stronger to stick in the present moment, to perceive some moments of the 
personal experience in their memories. 
Verdonk and Weber (1995:89) develop their insights in the changing role of history and time 
in modernist literature by stating that there is enough evidence to claim that during the period of 
Modernism, the notion of time underwent notorious changes. The linguists agree with Tim 
Armstrong’s claim that “the dynamization of temporality is one of the defining features of 
Modernism: past, present, and future exist in a relationship of crisis. Being and time are split”. 
(2005:9) Indeed, Armstrong foregrounds the fact that in Modernism, people recognized that the 
flow of time was fragmented and thus, the present was discontinuous with the past. It became 
obvious that through a process of social and cultural change life in the present was fundamentally 
different from life in the past: human existence was seen as a constant chain of periods of 
improvement and decline. Modernists view history and the current of time as a destructive and 
hopeless process. In their opinion, human existence is a tragedy, a continuous moral, cultural, and 
psychological degradation. Therefore, Allen argues (1954: 255) that Modernism rejects the 
conception of real time representation in literature and introduces a radically new psychologically 
based notion of broken or fragmentary time, which later penetrates into the world of art and brings 
its influence to bear on the concept of broken narrative in Modern fiction.
Indeed, the powers of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the 
aid of practical experimentation; scientific knowledge or technology denied the linear 
Enlightenment thinking in literary discourse. In her study, the psychologist Judith Greene (1973: 
39) suggests that the period of Modernism was full of oppositions: the assessment of the past as 
different to the modern age, the recognition that the world was becoming more versatile and 
chaotic, and that the authorities of reason, science, and government were subject to deep critical 
analysis. Modernists wanted to reformulate the existing world by revealing and contemplating on 
everything that was painful or meaningless in order to lessen the misery and to make human mind 
and soul free from the sense of being guilty, disappointed, and exhausted from the experience of 
reality. Thus, as Greene characterizes it (ibid.), the period of Modernism was marked by the 
rejection of the false subjective rational harmony, and by the impetus to create everything new: new 
aims, values, relationships, traditions, new life, and new future.

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