Eng426 20th century english literature

Rebellion and Individuality: The search for meaning and attempt to give meaning to an individual’s life in a practical world always lead to rebellion and assertion of individual’s notions. Through this theme, attention is usually drawn to how old traditions are questioned and reversed without moral decorum.

Anti heroism: Unlike in 19^th century literature where heroes and heroines are depicted, in modernist writing, characters are shown to be people with flaws and weaknesses and are unable to attain any lofty heights. Indeed, in the fail in their struggles to be “good” and oppose traditional values of their societies. Their acts might look incomprehensible but their strength, joy and pride are in their flaws and frailties.

0. Modernist Styles and Techniques

   1. 
      Anti- tradition
      

“With the modern soul in fragments, with human character in question, with the mind a mystery, and with authority now uncertain, fiction had to change, and ‘the modern novel’ refers to fiction that does so gladly, radically, and even with the hope of making a difference” (Matz:7). Modernist writings are marked by a strong conscious break from tradition. Modernism implies a historical discontinuity, a sense of alienation, loss, and despair and modernists try to show this in their works. It rejects not only history but also traditional values and assumptions, and rejects equally the rhetoric by which they are sanctioned and communicated (ibid). It elevates the individual and the inward over the social and the outward, and it prefers the unconscious to the self-conscious. In rejecting traditions and conventions like linear plot and omniscient narration, modernists introduced new and distinctive features in the subjects, forms, concepts, and styles of literature.

2. Subjective Realism

One of the significant ways in which modernists challenge the traditional representations in the ‘traditional’ novel form is by undermining the external reality and foregrounding the inner, subjective reality of the mind, and also by fashioning an appropriate medium to render that reality, namely, the stream-of-consciousness technique. There is no absolute truth because truth has become subjective, making objectivity almost impossible.

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