Understanding "Modernism"

From "English 1018: Introduction to Modern Fiction"

at the University of Minnesota

What is Introduction to Modern Fiction?

In this class you will study short stories and novels from a wide range of writers. This course is taught by a variety of staff and faculty every year.

What does "modern fiction" mean?

You will generally find two approaches to this course. In the first, instructors interpret "modern" as contemporary. In these classes, you will read a range of authors from the twentieth century, including current writers like Toni Morrison and Tim O'Brien.

In the second approach, "modern" refers to the early twentieth century and artistic trends retrospectively known as modernism. Students may encounter the works of many well-known modernist writers such as Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Kate Chopin.

What is modernism?

Modernism cannot be neatly defined because it includes many different movements and is a term that is applied retrospectively to a range of writings and art, philosophical perspectives, and a historical moment. Some scholars believe that modernism was a consequence of the Industrial Revolution, mass production, and other vast social changes such as a focus on imperial and colonial projects. Others comment that modernism directly challenged the social mores and the romantic ideals of the Victorian bourgeoisie. Modernism is also said to reflect the dynamic changes of the time period in science and humanities, including the theories of Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein.

In examining the modernist period, scholars often study how writers express these social, cultural, political, and philosophical changes in the style and form of the writing. In the works of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, for example, stream of consciousness (a narrative method whereby writers describe the thoughts and feelings of their characters without standard syntax or overt logical sequence) is used to create a new way of writing a self. Dennis Brown describes modernism in literature as "a movement that radically probed the nature of selfhood and problematized the means whereby 'self' could be expressed" (The Modernist Self 1).

Because it is not easy to label a time period, the beginning and end of modernism are difficult to pinpoint. In general, modernism is thought to span the first quarter of the century. (In your course, however, you may read texts from the late nineteenth century by writers such as Henry James or Herman Melville, and from the mid twentieth century by writers such as Zora Neale Hurston.)

Time Periods

One Basic, Common Idea:

• Modernism = 1914 - 1945

• Post-Modernism = 1945 - Present

From A Handbook to Literature (9th edition, page 18):

Features of Modernism from The Art of the Short Story

Faulkner, pages 224-225:

• Pioneered a new genre: novels composed of interrelated short stories

• Employed many unusual narrative techniques in his fiction, including stream of consciousness, multiple points of view, disjointed chronology, and unreliable narration

Porter, pages 726-727:

• At times a difficult stylist who employed such typical Modernist techniques as interior monologue and the fragmentation of chronology

Hemingway, pages 370-372:

• This early experience in daily journalism, which demanded compression, objectivity, and immediacy, influenced his mature literary style

• Hemingway perfected the terse, direct, and understated style that would change the direction of modern American fiction

• Hemingway's celebrated prose style embodies Pound's definition of the "Imagist" method that demands "direct treatment of the 'thing'" and "the use of absolutely no word that does not contribute to the total design"

• His greatest contribution may lie in the terse, stripped-down quality of his early stories, which renders contemporary alienation with stark concrete details and with dialogue that accurately captures the speech of hobos, waiters, bookies, and boxers

• His style succeeds because it is so inextricably wedded to the tragic vision of human existence it was created to express

See also:

• James Joyce

• Virginia Woolf

• Franz Kafka

• D. H. Lawrence

• Katherine Mansfield

• Zora Neale Hurston

• F. Scott Fitzgerald

• Jorge Luis Borges