Anglo-American modernism
The Anglo-American modernism (even Modernism or occasionally Late Modernism ) is a literary movement of the 20th century, by alienation of certain aspects negation of modernity and the Enlightenment , doubts about the belief in progress and the radical will be marked for renewal. Modernism destroys or ironizes traditional narrative or poem forms in which the complex and ambivalent feelings of the subjects can no longer be expressed in an era of disparate world experience.
Programmatic and stylistic devices
Programmatically for the modernists, Ezra Pound's call for Make It New! which he derived from similar formulations in ancient Chinese texts. As a pioneer of modernist aesthetics, he maintained close relationships with the most influential authors and poets of his time. With his formal experiments in The Cantos (first in 1917) he shaped the image of the constantly self-renewing avant-garde and promoted the abandonment of all poetic conventions and the (neo-) romantic and symbolist poetry of the bourgeois mainstream.
TS Eliot , too , in his essay That Poetry is Made with Words (1939), demands that the boundaries of the mind must continually expand beyond what has already been said, the “cultivated terrain”. The modern poet has to tame the "jungle" of emotions, which again and again sprouts this edge, by means of linguistic objectification and thereby constantly come into contact with human thinking of the past. This requires a high level of sensitivity for how something was said earlier or could not yet be said. These emotions are no longer the poet's private ones, but those of his epoch.
Modernist poetry therefore definitely includes recourse to ancient and medieval materials and traditions. The series of intertextual allusions in The Waste Land , the title of which refers to ancient fertility cults, ranges from Ovid to Augustine , Dante and Shakespeare to Charles Baudelaire , Paul Verlaine , Richard Wagner and the legend of the Grail . In Ulysses, James Joyce relies on the Odysseus myth, which is supposed to create unity in the disparately disintegrated world perception.
Stylistic devices of the modernists are the turning away from realism, depersonalization , alienation, the abolition of the separation between elaborate bound language, everyday communication and jargon , the inclusion of non-literary material, the celebration of the ugly and sexual allusions as well as parody, repetition and quotation, simultaneity of the non-simultaneous and multidimensionality of the event, intertextuality , collage , use of free rhythms and rhythm changes as well as an "aesthetics of noise" as a reaction to the presence of an urban and industrial background noise, which is not only found in literature (e.g. in Dos Passos or James Joyce ) , but also in music (with Charles Ives or in modern jazz ) gained in importance. Virginia Woolf wrote in 1940: I always think of my books as music before I write them , which indicates that the aesthetic of modernism is primarily not a visual one, but a musical and acoustic one.
Temporal delimitation and important representatives
Anglo-American modernism is much more radical in its modernization efforts than the older Latin American modernismo , which is still influenced by symbolism and shaped by the idea of purposeless beauty.
The beginning of modernism is usually set in the 1920s, and its end around 1950. However, there is a certain amount of confusion with regard to the naming and dating of the current or epoch. Cheryl Hindrichs dates the most important works of the literary movement, which he describes as late modernism, to 1930–1945. In contrast, Anthony Mellers assumes that the height of late modernism was only reached after 1945 after the shock of World War II . In Germany, too, the beginning of a literary late modernism is usually set after 1945, while Peter V. Zima dates the beginning of modernism, which he identifies with all of late modernism, to the late 19th century.
In addition to Ezra Pound and TS Eliot ( The Waste Land ), William Butler Yeats (due to his late work), Basil Bunting (1900–1985), William Carlos Williams , Charles Olson and the younger JH Prynne (* 1936) are considered to be important representatives of Anglo-American modernism . Alfred Döblin achieved similar effects in Germany and Roberto Arlt in Argentina . An important organ of American modernist authors was The Dial magazine , which appeared from 1920 to 1929.
Other radical renewal movements in art of the 20th century are also characterized by the features mentioned, such as abstract expressionism in painting or Italian futurism .
criticism
Modernism was criticized not only from the conservative side because of its iconoclastic attitude towards earlier art forms, but also because of its elitist character, which is based on a radical separation of art and life, i.e. ultimately on a conservative l'art pour l'art principle rest (according to Peter Carey ). Other authors criticize modernism because of its distance from capitalist mass culture , whose separation from high culture it codifies through its esotericism.
literature
- Anthony Mellers: Late modernist poetics: From Pound to Prynne. Manchester University Press 2011.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Michael North: The Making of “Make It New”. In: www.guernicamag.com , August 15, 2013.
- ↑ Quoted from Helen Vendler : Introduction to: TS Eliot: The Waste Land and other poems. Signet Classics, Penguin Books 1998, p. XVI f.
- ↑ Philipp Schweighauser: The noise of modernist form. In: Nicola Gess, Alexander Honold: Handbuch Literatur & Musik. Berlin 2016, p. 495 ff.
- ^ Sarah Fekadu: Music in Literature and Poetics of Modernism: Lowell, Pound, Woolf. Munich 2013.
- ↑ Cheryl Hindrichs: Late Modernism 1928-1945: Criticism and Theory . In: Literature Compass , Volume 8, Issue 11, pp. 840-855, November 2011.
- ^ Peter V. Zima: Modern / Postmodern. Society, philosophy, literature. 3rd edition, Tübingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-8252-4175-9 , p. 41 ff.
- ↑ Anne Quema: The Agon of Modernism: Wyndham Lewis's Allegories, Aesthetics, and Politics. Bucknell University Press, 1999, p. 152 ff.