Why can modernism be difficult to define

Modernism describes things you do that are contemporary or current. Modernism can describe thought, behavior, or values that reflect current times, but it can also be used to describe an art and literature movement of the 19th and 20th centuries that intentionally split from earlier conservative traditions.

Modernism is notoriously difficult to define clearly because the term encompasses a variety of specific artistic and philosophical movements including symbolism, futurism, surrealism, expressionism, imagism, vorticism, dada, and others.

Modernism was essentially based on a utopian vision of human life and society and a belief in progress, or moving forward. The passage of 19th Amendment in giving women the right to vote. Prohibition of the production, sale, and consumption of alcoholic beverages, 6. The stock-market crash of and the Depression of the s and their impact.

What is Realism? A faithful representation of reality concrete, historical in literature Emphasis on development of believable characters. Written in natural dialect. The Moderns. Mechanization reduced demand for farm jobs Mechanization reduced demand for farm jobs Industrialization led to urbanization Industrialization led to urbanization.

Modernism What is Modernism? Modernism is a cultural movement that includes the progressive art and architecture, music, literature and design. Trace the background and major writings of the literary periods from the beginning to the. The rejection of history.

What is Modernism? In very rough terms, Modernism is a far-reaching cultural, artistic and political movement that developed. Similar presentations. Upload Log in. My presentations Profile Feedback Log out.

Log in. Auth with social network: Registration Forgot your password? In the background are great critical figures of the late 19th and early 20 th centuries, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Ferdinand de Saussure and Albert Einstein And we cannot discount the importance of certain 19th century literary and artistic trends as well, those of impressionism, post-impressionism and symbolism. Modernism describes a resolutely international or transnational set of phenomena involving continental as well as Anglo-American writers and artists.

Cities become meeting points for migrating groups and Vienna in Austria and Paris in France play particularly important roles for modernist aesthetics. Questions about modernist aesthetics turn up in urban centers all over the world at different times … Argentina , Chile , India , Africa , Malaya , China and Japan.

Modernist writers and artists take great risks with technique in order to define their art against an increasingly market driven consumer society. The principles were those of innovation, rejuvenation and experimentation. Thus, the formation into small self-supporting movements and groups e. However, by the end of the period i. Does modernism lose its edge with maturity? Eliot and Pablo Picasso lose their right to the title modernist as they gain universal institutional respect and wealth?

With links to sites that provide either the text in question or information that is relevant. Modernity: It would be impossible to define modernity precisely and the term remains a highly contested one. Nonetheless, a number of momentous shifts in attitude, historical processes and dramatic technological changes can be observed to have occurred during the period, roughly, between and So, when dealing with the problem of modernity, we are dealing with at least years of social, historical, cultural and political development.

It has also been observed that the early stages of these developments were more or less narrowly focused on developments in Western Europe , spreading only later to the Eastern Europe , the Americas , India , Africa , Southeast Asia and Asia , with colonialism and then globalization.

We must always remember, however, that this model of the spread of modernity is a model that belongs to modernity itself. That is, if we know that modernity begins in the 16 th century Europe and gradually spreads around the world then that is because modernity has put it this way in the form of modern history. More specific issues, like nationality, democracy, race, class and morality, also rest upon assumptions that are so deeply embedded that we barely notice that they are assumptions.

Modernity is the name we use for the system of thinking we inherit after years of modern development. But the main strand of modernity—an attitude that is consistent across all the different variants over the last years or so—constitutes, again in various different ways, the repeated attempt to break free from the constraints and determinations of established systems of thinking.

Modernity is constituted historically as a series of repeated attempts to escape history. The most powerful of these attempts would arguably be that of Rene Descartes, a French philosopher whose contribution to modern thought both scientific and philosophical has been undoubtedly immense.

He wanted a point of origin, as it were, a secure starting point for knowledge. In order to achieve this he developed a philosophical method, according to which if you can disqualify every ground of knowledge that is susceptible to doubt then what you have left will be a point of absolute certainty. So all traditional knowledge Greek and Medieval philosophy and religious thought obviously fails this test as no established knowledge beyond doubt actually yet exists. The most authoritative sources Aristotle, Aquinas, etc.

Secondly, my senses can deceive me. If I was to believe my senses then I would have to accept that the moon was no bigger than a 50 cent coin. And when I dream I experience perceptions that I could not possibly really perceive. Thirdly, my memory is frail and vulnerable to deception by the often damaging effects of my creative imagination, so this must be ruled out as well. Fourth, language can deceive me into saying and even thinking things that might possibly be untrue.

So what is left? Descartes comes up with the following statement: cogito ergo sum —Quit with the Latin will you? He has established that, as long as we can doubt the evidence of our senses, our memory, our imagination, our knowledge and our language, we at least have the potential for good sound knowledge.

Two things follow from this, which are central for the development of modernity and, thus, for our understanding of modern ism. First, a general distrust of the senses hearing, seeing, feeling, tasting and smelling provokes an emphasis on thoughts and judgments and an over reliance on principles of reason.

Secondly the same distrust provokes the development of technological means of improvement—prosthetic appliances of all kinds, from eye glasses and hearing aids in the 18 th century, to prosthetic limbs and a fully fledged virtual reality by the beginning of the 21 st century.

In all kinds of ways we can locate precedents, precursors, preliminaries and seeds sown for thousands of years prior to the European 17th century and from all over the globe.

There are two good pages:. The Principia for the complete text. Shortly after Descartes had died in one of the most influential developments of modernity got under way in the form of what is now called Newtonian Science. Modernism: one of the ways of dealing with not only the vagueness of the term modernism but with the wide variety of currents, events, texts and attitudes it seems to designate, is to locate what is arguably a consistently maintained attitude towards modernity.

What this means is that a number of arguments and interventions made against certain aspects of modernity can be said to constitute an attitude we call modernism. Peter Childs, in his handy Routledge primer, Modernism recommended and available in the bookshop , puts it like this:.

The counter argument runs, while the dominance of reason and science has led to material benefit, modernity has not fostered individual autonomy or profitable self-knowledge. It has not provided meaning to the world or to spiritual life, religious or otherwise, perhaps reducing humans to rational izing animals who are increasingly perceived as more complex and consequently more emotionally, psychologically and technologically dependent.

Humanity arguably appears without purpose and is instead merely striving for change and transformation, which produces only momentary satisfaction or meaning. Written in two years before the gigantic Crime and Punishment after two visits to Western Europe , during which Dostoevsky had become horrified and fascinated by the state of Western Civilization.

A number of similarly powerful responses to modernity—from within its very system yet putting that system under great strain—can be identified in a number of movements, events and texts that, strictly speaking, precede or predate the conventional notions of modernism. Poe was a favorite of Dostoevsky and, in his paradoxical mocking of modern life, you can see why. It is one of the first documents to evoke, with any clarity, the increasingly perverse emptiness of modern urban existence.

Britain was at the forefront of this expansion, with Paris and then Chicago and New York catching up, so it would be wrong to leave out Delhi and Singapore , which as colonial urban nodes were developing at a comparable rate at the same time. The notion of alienation provides an account of the symptoms that many modernist writers attempt to account for.

Modernist art and writing, then, could be seen as an attempt to escape the flattening out of difference represented by the trends of mass culture—striving instead for something unique that would stress but also redeem the alienation effect of modern existence.

Labour Movements.