Modernist literature

The literature borders of standard plots, narrative techniques, and the boundary of genres was broken through by modernist writers. Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” and Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” challenged the view of human reasoning for understanding the world with the use of modernism in literature. The texts by Woolf and Kafka are examples of the information about modernism by Fernald and Bru. Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” and Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” held the characteristics of modernism by manipulating the past for a belief, challenged conventions and customs as lived experiences, and questioning conventions and customs of a society. Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” is a story that manipulated the past for a new outlook on a…

Modernism and postmodernism literature The 20th century can be separated into two distinct periods; one characterized by the modernism movement and the other by postmodernism. Some consider that postmodernism was a response to modernism and therefore consider them as two aspects of the same movement. The Modern Age in English Literature started from the beginning of the twentieth century, and it followed the Victorian Age. Modernism refers to cultural movements of the late nineteenth and…

The Modern Period was a time of great experimentalism, popular authors began to subvert the tropes of past renowned authors, and there was a new sense of what literature could be. New narrative techniques were being used by many, and one of the most notable was the Stream of Consciousness narrative, where the author would translate their protagonists thoughts directly, rather than giving the audience an omniscient narrator. This strategy was a tool that enabled an entirely different form of…

suffering as they were written a handful of years after the ending of World War 1. The Great Gatsby is a novel portrayed through the eyes of Nick who follows a man known as Jay Gatsby, and his persona as “The Great Gatsby”. Indian Camp is a short story through the eyes of a child witnessing a birth. Both stories set an archetype for Modernist literature. Indian Camp, is a short story of unexpected loss and twisted…

there is at the same time a change in…conduct…and literature” (Woolf 3). At the turn of the 19th century, writers were concerned with studying individual character in relation to the bigger picture as well as the human condition in a more specific sense (Who we are, in some cases why we are, and why we feel the way we do). Another important concept is brought up by Woolf that it is “the novelist who get in and out –- there [a character] sits and not one of the Edwardian writers has so much as…

the past.’ Meaning one has to learn to develop emotions which are seen to exist within present time as this will help the relationship between past and present develop and generate sentiments of value. Even though the urge to live in the past is an easy option for many people, reality is pressing. This formulates how nostalgia is a key theme within both novels, as involves a tension between past and present and creates a discussion between them. This was considered to be due to the wars, as…

Literature has been around for many centuries, and each piece is either influenced by something, or has the ability to influence a single person, or an entire society. It is quite obvious to the eyes of a reader that pieces written during the Modern Era of literature reflect the time period of that in the Roaring Twenties, which was a time period in America where the rich were too wealthy, but their hearts were poor and filled with greed. These pieces also reflect the time period of the…

Modern writers often questioned conventions within their society. Frank Kafka’s protagonist Gregor Samsa is the victim of oppression and alienation due to his transformation into a roach. Virginia Woolf’s narrator finds that women are being marginalized base on the opinions of men. According to Sascha Bru, modernist writers “depicted society in a state of disintegration and dehumanization.” (Page 111) Writers worked to break tradition and established social views. Frank Kafka’s…

Simply put modernism in a sense, is the resisting of the norm. Artists of the time who strayed away from the norm and used non-conventional techniques were seen as rebels. The use of avant-garde settings, tools, techniques and models, caused a rift in the emerging society, which essentially was the rise of modernism. Artists like Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet all help with the formation of the new world with their new techniques and ideas. Gustave Courbet was what some would look at as a…

Modernism and Modernisms - Semester 1 The modernist building that I will be discussing in this essay is the Barcelona Pavilion. The Modern Period began from the late 19th Century all the way to early 20th Century. “Modernism, in the arts, a radical break with the past and the concurrent search for new forms of expression.” This was an era defined by industrialisation and social change after World War 2. Paul Greenhalgh using a postmodern perspective describes modernity as “a set of ideas and…