Influences on Modernism

Influences on Modernism

• E.M. Forster: he believed in relationships based on equality and feelings
• A. Huxley
• G. Orwell
• Sigmund Freud
• Carl Gustav Jung
• Albert Einstein: his theory of relativity and the birth of quantic physics led to uncertainty, which discarded the concepts of time and space as objective dimensions.
• William James: in his “Principles of Psychology” (1890) he stated how our mind records every experience as a continuous flow of the “already” into the “not yet”.

He considered perceptions and unique and contextualized and defined thought as a “stream of consciousness”, as a constantly changing river. Many authors to describe a character’s thought process and interior monologues would use this concept later.
• Henri Bergson: he differenced historical and linear time, with the psychological one, which is internal, subjective and has a relative emotional intensity. He also said that a thought or feeling could be measured in terms of number of perceptions, memories and associations.
• James George Frazer: In his anthropology study “The Golden Bough” (1890-1915), he revisited what was considered as absolute religious and ethical truths in the past, as relative and uncertain, and as impossible to be converged in a commonly accepted picture of Man and society.
• Karl Marx
• Friedrich Nietzsche: he believed in human power and perfectibility.
• W.H. Auden
English philosophy slowly became analytical, focusing on perfecting the already existing knowledge, without trying to increase it.