THE MODERNISM
The Modernage is a multidisciplinary and multi nationality movement belonging to the period from 1890 to 1930. The most important characteristic is his break with the past: many Victorian doubts and fears about man’s place in the Universe and about the society were confirmed and many optimistic hopers were disappointed. However it represents a reaction to traditional standards.
The modernization had been so successful in France, Great Britain, Unite States, Germany and Japan. Here the competition for raw material markets and the control of trade routes used conflicts and nations need to create alliances to protect them self during conflict and to survive.
The most important conflict, belonging to this period, is the first World War: it shocked the whole population and made people lost their faith in Victorian ideas, in democracy and capitalism.
Science and industry had not produced a better world on the contrary they had brutalized men. In addition the firs world war represents the end of European domination of the world indeed immediately after the USA and Russia had replaced Great Britain and France as the two goat powers and American capital began to replace British capital. Economic depression ha caused an important unemployment among the working class therefore governments decide the state have to control the economy and accepts to looking for the poorer citizens. It was also introduced the modern Warfare State thanks to the insurance for old age pensions, unemployment pay and medical treatment.
Some people want to do what Marx and suggested in the Communist Manifesto of 1848: to take power away form the middle class and establish a socialist society; an example came in 1917 whenLenin and the Bolshevik party, in Russia, to the control of Russia state in the name of the working class. (Bolshevik influences was great in Germany, France and also in Britain.
Marxism offered an optimistic future view to people who ha lost they faith in liberalism and democracy.
People who lived in the end of the 19th century and the end of the 20th century experienced the sense of man’s isolation, the sense of living a life without meaning and without God, the sense of vulnerability in a world that did not seem to respond toany divine principles. The only secure point of reference that everyone had was them self and since there is no God everyone could decided if something is right or wrong.

Writers of the period tried to make clear these doubts and fears and the sense of isolation.
Hardy and Conrad were both pessimist and they believed in a stoical dignity and that people have to accept what happened in their life as well as possible. Virginia Woolf, Lawrence and Forster thought that people could find a substitute to divine plane in personal relationship and in human core,
Belloc, Chesterton and Elliot didn’t follow their rational doubts and they became Christians.
However writers do not have set of values, either social or personal to which they could refer to indeed they left their characters speak for themself presenting the situation, their characterization and the way in which the see reality.
Things get more complicated to cope with when Einstein proposed is “General Theory of Relativity”. He thought time did not exist as an absolute and unseparated fenomena, it change according to people point of view. Also William James and Bergson proposed a new idea of time, in their opinion time is non an indipendent medium which contains event, time is the sum of past experiences and future expectation which they both exist in people’s mind.
Bergson considered this mixture the “Scream of Consciousness”; it constitutes people’s mind and it determines his thoughts but it is irrational.
According to this Freud discovered the importance of the irrational for people’ s action indeed in his opinion people are motivated by their instincts and controlled by their social conditioning.
Carl Jung argued that a basic element of people unconsciousness was formed by the racial memory which is the firs memory that everybody have preserved thanks the experiences made during the evolution. This means that it opened on symbolic level and that we respond to symboled without being totally sure of what we are doing and the reason why we do it. Only poets and psychologist understand their importance and their hidden meaning.
The Symbolists poets have influenced also Ezra Pound and T.S Elliot who had produced a form of poetry which broke completely with the Victorian tradition.
The development of this new form of poetry started with Hulme and his “the critical writings”. Hulme condemned the romantic idea that art was only a matter of self expression on the part of the artist: he believed it should be impersonal. Hulme had great influences in a whole generation and also in Eliot and Pound who wanted a new form of poetry which reflects on the cold and mechanical reality and which is not escapist. They both didn’t appreciate popular tastes indeed the way in which they write is not accessible to everyone.
The new form of novel is different form the old one.

The old one had a narrative structure and the narrator was omniscient had always present in the scene both in the first and third person narrator.
The narrator combined summaries, character’s and situation’s description, characterization, conversation, personal comments and judgements and the way in which he combined them creates the time and the space around which the whole novel is organized.
In the modern one the narrator is always present but not in the scene. He does not interviewing in the novel to make personal comments and to offer his point of view, it allows characters present themself, offers they vision of reality and tell the story. There is the shift of point of view among the characters which allows the reader to enter in the story and to have different point of view therefore he is not forced to see the story only in a way. Consequently the reader could identify him self.
The analysis is transferred from the narrator to the reader. He ave to analyses to whole novel, starting from the title moving to the lay- out and the narrative strategies used to create the effect the novel had. He have to pay attention in the way the novel is write instead of what there is write.
Readers create in their mind interior monologue when there is no perception for logical connection indeed the present of the narrator is sometimes important because he makes clear the development of the novel trough his comments.
The modern novels are essentially dramatic.
An other important characteristic of the modernism is the attention for the mythology.
Eliot see in myths and ritual the way to transformer contemporary experiences into significance.
After the Waste Land publication, (it is a novel about the land after the first World War) he stated that people have underestimated the importance of myths, necessary to create parallelism between the antiquity and contemporaneity.
James. Joyce has just written myths has the Odyssey but their technique were different: were Joyce expanded moments Eliot condensates them.
In Eliot’s opinion a successful artistic creation requires a balance between form 8usually words) and matters (feelings, action..).
If matters is too much according to the form there is a discrepancy, but there is a discrepancy too also if experience is overwhelmed by words.
Indeed when we say we have no words we are only saying we have not found a mater to say it.
Also Jesse Weston gave myths importance. She makes a complex synthesis, both geographical and historical behind the 12th century- medieval Grail legends.
Grail king was a strange and mysterious figure, the figure of a divine or semi-divine ruler at once God and King from who depends people life.

Last but not least in modernism assumes an important role also the attention of anthropology.
The work entitled “the Golden Bough” by J. Fraser was indicative of the new interests in mythology and pre-history which arose out of the Symbolist Movement and the Darwin’s theory of the evolution.
If art lay in the unconsciousness in writings and paintings we follows some models of behavior without knowing what we are doing.
He also discussed about primeval costume, fertility rites and the man under the surface of civilization. Fraser have always wished to investigate the solid layer of savagery under the crust of society.