The summary of Modernism (26^th November lesson)

Modernism is considered the period from 1890 to 1930. A lot of causes took some consequences in men's vision of life, so in them life style.  Men entered a crisis, because they lost their traditional point of references.

Great Britain entered a competition with France, Germany, Japan and the United States, because even in the Victorian Age Great Britain enjoyed an economical supremacy, thanks to its industrialization, by 1890 modernization had been so successful in another countries.

As a matter of fact, nations entered a international competition for raw materials, market and the control of trade. An atmosphere of tension was visible, when in 1914 a decisive conflict moment , called the First World War, came. The war destroyed European self-confidence, the faith in liberal democracy, capitalism and the Victorian idea of progress, because science and industry had not produced a better world, but they had only brutalized men.

Not only an economical and political crisis changed the way to thinking, but even a religious crisis.

Due to the discovery of the natural selection theory of Darwin (1859), people were afraid that man was only a superior man, who was living in an indifferent mechanical universe, without a meaning and without God. So people realized that the only sure point of reference that any individual had was himself, not God's existence.

As a consequence man lost all the traditional point of references, he realized his isolation and he lost the  idea of the anthropocentrism. So men felt displaced and he didn't found his function in the universe. The cause of man's disorientation was even the Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativism, that affirmed that space and time depended on the point of view of the observer. Relativism was the reason why values became different from each individual, everyone could decide what was right and wrong and act accordingly.

The conception of time changed, time in present was considered as the result of past memory and future expectations, it was the time of consciousness, existed in the men's mind. That idea of time was called simultaneity of time.

That conception implied some changes in literature: the plot of storyline was reduced and substituted with new narrative techniques like monologue, stream of consciousness and the shift of point of view. The functions of narrator and the reader changed, because if the narrator eclipsed in the character's mind, the reader can be free to interpret what characters express.

Such as literature, even psychology try to reflect and to analyse men's thoughts and actions.

The Viennese psychologists Sigmud Freud held that men's behaviours depends on the unconscious part of the mind, because men's actions are motivated by instincts and controlled by the social condition (the Super Ego). The power of the rational part (Ego) ha sonly a minimal percentage.

On the contrary, Carl Jung, a psychology lived from 1875 to 1961, argued that the basic element of the unconscious mind was formed by his racial memory, consisted of the race evolution and its culture signs.