SYNTESIS ABOUT MODERNISM:  1890-1930

Modernism was full of doubts because of the discovers that during the first three decades of XX Century come out from scientists and philosopher.

There is no reference in the society because the culture lacked of a code of values. The code of values before the discovers of Darwin, was a religious one: man was the perfect creation of God. But Darwin's theory about natural selection demonstrated that man was the evolution of monkeys and that he is the result of an adaptation progress. As to confirm the crisis of the society as a consequence of such theory of I quote the metaphorical  aphorism of the philosopher Nietzsche: "God is dead".

Contemporary also the idea of space and time that man has got since Modernism, changed.

Einstein's theory of Relativity proved that space and time are connected and that they depend on the observer point of view.

Bergson  stated the simultaneous idea of time. Present, in human's mind, is the coexistence of past, as memory, and future, as anticipation.

Such changes are visible in literature. The presence of the omniscient narrator lacks in the text: he used the narrative technique of the interior monologue. Using the shift of the point of view  he entered the characters mind describing their feelings, thoughts, doubts and troubles.

Joyce used the stream of consciousness: he tells the reader feelings, doubts...  without connections.

Literature would like to underline as man tried to investigate himself: that is proved by Freud and Hume's works about human psychology and behaviors.

Freud hold that human identity is made by three components: ego, id and super-ego. Ego is the small part we are aware of, id is the unconscious part, the part on which we have no control and finally the super-ego is the part made by social rules.

Hume went beyond Freud theories' and stated that human mind has got a racial memory, responsible for our reactions to symbols. The reaction to symbols is connected with the unconscious part and it is an action on which you have no control.

As a conclusion, Modernism's doubts are the consequence of the general crisis that I have analyzed by a philosophical and cultural point of view in the previous text.