Literary Modernism

By Shreya Venkataraghavan

Literary modernism had its origins during the early 1900’s in Europe and North America.

Modernism, much like its predecessor romanticism, placed emphasis on individuality. Writing was focused on the individual perspective rather than the societal perspective. However, modernism was markedly different to romanticism in all other aspects. Where romanticism focused on the reverence of nature and spirituality, modernism dealt with themes of destruction, cultural fragmentation, dissent, etc.

Modernism was at its core a reaction to the changing times. Modernism arose during a period of building cultural and political turmoil leading up to World War One. It was also a time characterized by great leaps forward in industrialization and technology. All this cultural change catalyzed the modernist movement. Writers sought to break with tradition as a form of rebellion against all of the sudden change and horrors taking place around them.

This meant that modernist literature was characterized by a distinct break from traditions. This meant expressing opposition against established cultural, societal and political norms. The use of symbolism was therefore a huge part of modernist works. In the modernist era, writers began to use symbols that were much more open-ended than ever before. This left much more to be interpreted by the readers themselves. Modernist writers attempted to use people, things, places and occurrences as complex, layered symbols. This led to an abundance of symbols, metaphors, motifs and personification in modernist works. The idea of poems as pieces with multiple hidden meanings and messages left to the reader’s interpretation stemmed from the modernist period.

Owing to the tense and unsteady climate that modernism was born in, many modernist works displayed ideas of alienation. This was possibly in response to people’s growing disillusionment form the institutions around them and the world at large. For instance, in Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Sun also Rises’, the protagonist Jake Barnes feels alienated from his own community.

James Joyce’s novel ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ tells the tale of a man who feels alienated by the religion his religion and struggles to identify what his beliefs truly are.

Absurdity was also a prominent feature of modernist works. Due to all of the rapid and marked change surrounding them, writers channeled their response into their works. A great example of this is ‘The Metamorphosis’ by Franz Kafka. It tells the story of Gregor, a common, middle-class man who wakes up one day to find himself transformed into a giant insect. The reader is not given any explanation as to how this took place. Another feature of ‘The Metamorphosis’ that is commonplace to modernist works is that the story is told entirely from the protagonist’s perspective. The reader is told about what Gregor sees and his reactions to his situation. This is exemplary of the focus on individualism that was typical of most modernist works of the time.

In accordance with the spirit of the time which was to break with tradition and experiment, many modernist poets abandoned classical poetic rules and styles in favor of completely new structures. Edward Estlin Cummings’ poetry is an example of such a shift. His poetry was free verse and ignored traditional poetic convention when it came to the use of punctuation and indentation. His work really pushed the limits of what people of his time would have even considered as poetry.

Therefore, it can be said that modernism was a rebellion of sorts that was spurred on by the cultural, social and political climate. Writers of the time responded to the situation and expressed this in their works via pushing the boundaries and limits of society. They did this through breaking with literary convention when it came to structure, perspectives, themes and many other aspects of literarture.