L'impatto del modernismo sulla cultura e letteratura del XX secolo

Modernism was a cultural movement that has been characterized by a true and profound cultural, artistic and literary revolution which developed during the 20th century.

Influenze e scoperte

Its exemplary expression is the avant-garde, which was influenced by the terrible Word Wars: Dada, Surrealism, Futurism. Freud's discoveries change the idea of man, personality is now complex: the individual is not given a priori, but is a sum of interacting stimuli and impulses.
The most important English modernist writers were: Thomas Stearns Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and William Butler Yeats.

Caratteristiche del modernismo

The breakthrough aspects with the past that characterize modernism are: the end of the character - man; the privileged description of inept characters; the impossibility of explaining reality; the importance of everyday life; the centrality of themes as fragmentation, incomprehensibility and chaos, which express the state in which man feels trapped during the twentieth century.

Consapevolezza catastrofica

In fact, the consciousness of Modernism is catastrophic: artists feel in an abysmal and fragmented split, trapped in the chaos: for this reason, narrative (and artistic play too) is dominated by decomposition and chaos (as T.S. Eliot, Beckett and Joyce's works express).