Modernism is a cultural movement that developed during the first three decades of the twentieth century. It marks a cultural revolution aimed at subverting the traditional assumptions about human life and the Universe. People lost all the traditional points of reference that assured them a sense in their life. The traditional points of reference collapsed as a result of the studies of scholars like: Friedrich Nietzsche, who's famous metaphor "God is dead" very well sinthesize the abserdity of any metaphisical principals of which traditional wester culture had based his reason of being. In addition Sigmund Freud in is Interpretation of Dreams showed how most of peoples behaviour is determined not by rational control but rather by his instincts that is the unconscious part of the mind over which human being have no central. What's more Carl Gustav Young also contributed studies about the way human consciusness works adding to Freud's discoverings a reflaction on our racial memory. And it is exactly according to our racial memory that we respond to the different sign and situation existence bring us to face.
In 1910 Albert Einstein in his Theory of Relativity demonstrated that space and time are no longer to be conceived of as separate phenomenal but they change according to the position on the viewer this making the vision of reality relative, not definitely defined. Besides all this implies there are as many realities as the number of viewers on it. It follows that the position of the human being must necessarily become decentred and the human being what so ever is and feels displace and dislocated. Therefore he desperatly needs to grasp to somebody or something which may compensate at least partly to sense of void left by the collapse of certainties on which all traditional western culture was rooted.
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 if not psycological concept disrupting linear standards in favour of a simulthaneous concept of time containing all chronological time. Now past and future are included in the present in one's stream of consciusness. In a few words, according to Bergson's theory of time the present results from our memories of the past and our future expectations.
All that considered one can exactly understand the reason why quest is the keyword of Modernism.
Quest means a search for a meaning in existance at the sometime impling that modernist thought still looks forward some for a meaning, or possible order on which to organize one's existance. No surprise than that even any kind of artistic production coincide with formal research. On this explains also why modernist art elitaria, adressed to a cultural few people thus creating a somehow cultural 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 displays its intertextual nature since writers, novelists, poets and lady writers all the same were aware of the workings of intertextualities and of its potential.
In 1925 in an essay called "The Narrow Bridge of Modern Art" Virginia Woolf had defined the novel "that cannibal, the novel that will devour all other genres". In her personal case the genres to he mainly devoured was poetry in that her fiction creates the same effect of poetry: it has got a rhythm of its own.
Modernist fiction:
- reduce its plot to minimum (storyline generally covers one day)
- uses a third omniscient narrator, who even if appearently ecplipsed, adopts the point of view of one or more characters in what goes the name of the shift of point of view.