Tekst- og litteraturhistorie i de engelsksprogede lande

1. Tekst- og litteraturhistorie i de engelsksprogede lande Session Five: Modernism

2. Agenda • Modernism • Sculpture • Painting • Music • Architecture • Literature

3. Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus MundiTroubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desertA shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about itReel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I knowThat twenty centuries of stony sleepwere vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? W.B. Yeats, ”The Second Coming” (1920)

4. Apocalypse now! • After 2000 years, civilization is crumbling and a different cycle of history is at hand

5. William Wordsworth: Romanticism • Thomas Hardy: Victorianism • Stephen Crane, Jack London: Naturalism • W.B. Yeats: Modernism

6. Radical change Discontinuity Rupture break Development Continuity Bridge line Two kinds of change

7. Golden Bird, 1919/1920, Constantin Brancusi

8. Red Stone Dancer, 1913-14, Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri.

9. Wyndham Lewis, Composition  1913

10. Ford Madox Brown, Work

11. Victorian painting of city scape

12. Picasso, Seated Woman with Wrist Watch, 1932

13. Victorian portrait

14. Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. 1907

15. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Bower Meadow.

16. Igor Stravinsky, Le Sacre du Printemps • Rhythm: time signatures

17. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, The Farnsworth House(1946 to 1950) • Functionality: glass, concrete, and steel

18. Victorian mansion, San Francisco (1850-1915)

19. The Modernist Manifesto

23. The Modernist Manifesto • Blast form – content. • T.S. Eliot, ”Tradition and the Individual Talent” • New ideas of poets, poetry, and the past

24. Depersonalisation • ”The progress of an artist is a continnual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (2322) • ”Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” (2324)

25. Wordsworth, ”The Preface” • I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is carried on; but the emotion, of whatever kind, and in whatever degree, from various causes, is qualified by various pleasures, so that in describing any passions whatsoever, which are voluntarily described, the mind will, upon the whole, be in a state of enjoyment. If Nature be thus cautious to preserve in a state of enjoyment a being so employed, the Poet ought to profit by the lesson held forth to him, and ought especially to take care, that, whatever passions he communicates to his Reader, those passions, if his Reader’s mind be sound and vigorous, should always be accompanied with an overbalance of pleasure.

26. Modernist Narrative: Virginia Woolf, ”The Mark on the Wall” • What happens? Who, what, where, when? • What happens to narrative? Compare to premodernist examples of narrative: Jack London, Stephen Crane, Thomas Hardy • Story – plot • Character – characterization • Imagery