Modernism - Cultural Background, Features

The complex art of the 20th century

This complex age (The XX° century) produced a complex art, in which the loss of stable values induced Men to research new instruments. In the cultural field, we find many novelties, for example:

• 1.Sigmund Freud made some innovations with his study of Psychoanalysis: he realized that we are made by a body but also we are characterized by the unconscious, and that many of our actions are dictated by it. These novelties changed the way of considering the relationships in society. Freud also introduced many scientific terms that described this sphere of ourselves.
  

• 2.Socialism influenced this age: with the Marxian age there is the realization that our behavior is due to the cultural, political and economical system.
  

• 3.During the first decades of the XX° century Einstein published his "theory of Relativity", which contributed to the loss of absolute values and to the ruthlessness of Men. According to Einstein there is no absolute time and space, so universe is not based on stable values.
  

• 4.Two other philosophers influenced culture in that period: Henri Bergson and William James. Bergson proposed a new conception of time, according to which there is no more conventional time, but only the inner time: so one hour is divided into sixty minutes, but it can pass more slowly and it can be felt like an eternity. William James proposed this new view of the thoughts and the unconscious, according to which it is like a river and the thoughts flow.
  

Influence on literary production

So the history influenced the literary production, for example:

1. As there is no more the influence of Europe on countries, there is the disappearing of “Omniscient narrator”: there is no more an absolute truth, novels are characterized by the “Multiple points of view” and so every character can express his opinion and he can play a rule in the story.

2.

Stream of consciousness technique

There is the introduction of the technique of the “Stream of consciousness”, according to which words are not told following a logic or chronologic order. The “S. of C.” is realized by the “Interior monologue”: it is characterized by the absence of logical transitions, formal syntax, conventional punctuation.

Modernism in the 20th century

With the term Modernism we can identify all the trends of the XX° century in literary production: it was characterized by experimentations (Joyce, Woolf, exc.) but also by novelists who followed Classics’ principles and criticized society (Orwell) and by novelists who gave importance to feelings (Lawrence, The last Romantic).