Modernism is culture movement that develop during the first three decades of XXs century. It makes a cultural revolution aimed at supporting the traditional assumption about human life and the Universe. People lost all the traditional points of reference that assume them a sense in their life.
The traditional point of reference collapsed as a result of the studies of scholars live: Friedrich Nietzsche who's famous metaphor "God's death" very well synthesizes on which traditional western culture had based his reason of being.
In addition, Sigmund Freud, in his Interpretation of Dreams, showed how most of people's behavior is determined not by his rational control, but rather by his instinct, that is the unconscious' part of the mind, over which human beings have no control.
What is more (in più) Carl Gustave Jung also contributed studies about the way human unconscious works having to Freud's discoveries a reflection on our racial memory. And it is exactly according to our rational memory that it responds to the different sign and situation existence brings us to face.
In 1910 Albert Einstein, in his Theory of Relativity, demonstrated that space and time are no longer to be considered of as a separated phenomena, but the change according to the position of the viewer, thus making the vision of reality relative, not definitively define. Besides, always implies there are as many realities as the number of viewers on it. It follows that the position of the human being must necessarily became decenter and the human being whatsoever is and feel dis-placed and dis-locked. Therefore, it desperately needs to grasp to somebody or something which make compensated at least partly to the sense of void (vuoto) left by the collapse of certainties on which or traditional western culture was rooted (radicata).
Not even time could be conceived and perceived of according to traditional standards: in a linear way which implies conceiving of one's life as a sequencing of events. Time is now a quasi - philosophical and not psychological concept. This - rupting linearity standard in favor of a simultaneous concept of time embodying all chronological time.
Past and future are including in the present in a one's stream of consciousness. In a few words, according to Bergson's theory of time, the present result from our memory of the past and our future expectations.
All that considered can easily understand the reason why QUEST is the key words of Modernism. Quest means a search of meaning in existence. At the same time implying that modernist thought still looks for some form of meaning, a possible order on which to organized one's existence. No surprise then that even any kind of artistic production whatsoever concaved with formal research. And this also why modernist art besides displaying its meta -artistic nature is and as always being considered I and literary addressed to a culture of few people thus creating a somehow culture divide between popular culture and culture, that is high culture.
In literature this means modernist production is really demanding for the reader: he is asked for a never ending cooperation with the text in order for the text to make sense.
Modernism better than any time displaced its intertextual nature since writers, novelists, poets and playwrights, all the same, were aware of the working of intertestuality and of its potential.
In 1925 in an essay called "The Narrow Bridge of Modern Art", Virginia Woolf had define the novel "that cannibal, the novel that will devour other genres". In her personal case, the genre to be meanly devoured has POETRY. In that her fiction creates the same facts of poetry: it has got a rhythm of its own.
Modernist fiction:
- Reducing plot to the minimum (storyline generally covers one day)
- Using of third person, omniscient narrator, who even if apparently eclipsed, adopts the point of view of one or more characters in what goes under the name of the shift of the point of view.