Classtest Correction

Activity 1

Modernism emphasized on art's ability to affect the mind, rather than emphasizing on external reality. Let's take an example from an art form to make the concept more decipherable, paintings were "representational" in Victorian painting, which presented narrative scenes. On the other hand, in Impressionism, there was an attempt to paint the quality of the sensations stimulated by the scenes. Moving on to Post-Impressionism, you can see an attempt to portray the pure elements of color and form, an attempt to represent the perceiving mind and the aesthetic consciousness.

Task: discuss the quotation above with reference to your personal reading of The Dubliners( reference to a favourite short story of yours)

Modernism is a literary and cultural movement which developed from 1890 to 1930. To report some important features of the period, you can say that there was an economic depression after a period of economic growth, the Industrial Revolution, but even more important, a crisis of traditional values was recorded on. Indeed  the people of that time experienced the sense of living a life without a meaning and without God, as Nietzsche said "God is dead". What's more, Einstein' theory of relativity( 1906) underlined that the vision of reality changes according to the point of view of the observer.

So, the crisis of traditional values had a prominent influence on the way of making art and literature. In particular, a shift occurred from the interest in external reality to the inner one. I mean: during 1850s the artistic movement of Realism( eg., Gustave Courbet, Honore Daumier) aimed to report and represent reality exactly in the way reality showed itself. But at the end of 19^th century there was the development of the artistic movement of Impressionism( eg. Claude Monet), whose members tried to give life to an art which was able to underline the feelings that a scene could suggest. Obviously, feelings are relative, so they change according to different people. It follows that with Impressionism the shift I referred to above was visible.

Well, the attention for art in people's mind and therefore on subjectivism, rather than on external scenes(on objectivism), comes to the surface in the works of writers of the period, for example Hardy, Conrad, Joyce. In addition, it is important to remember the change in making literature. The most important are: the shift from the classical omniscient narrator to the invisible one, who let characters represent the story( the narrator is hidden); every reader has the objective to discover the meaning of  a text. It is not of the narrator to show it( Roland Barthes will proclaim "the death of the author" in Postmodernism, which included Modernism). Coming back to the main point of the discussion, that is the shift of interest in literature from external reality to people's mind and consciousness, it is interesting to take into consideration James Joyce's work Dubliners(1915), a collection of 15 stories set in Dublin at the beginning of the 20^th century, with the aim to portray Irish people. In particular, the last story of the work, named "The Dead", highlights Joyce's interest for people's feelings and inner thoughts. To sum up the content of the text in a few words, the annual Morkan sisters' dinner and dance is on stage. The main protagonist is Morkan sisters' nephew, Gabriel Conroy, who at the end of the party has an intense dialogue with his wife Gretta, because she was sad after hearing a song by Mr. D' Arci and therefore she started to remember her first lover, named Micheal Furey.

Now, the section of the story clearly underlines Joyce's attention on people's consciousness and thoughts. In particular, after the dialogue with his wife, Gabriel begins to think about his past and present, life and his future. The "monotonous" man understands that past lives with the present in people's mind, as well as their future expectations. What the French philosopher Henry Bergson defined  as "stream of consciousness": people are the result of their past experiences and future expectations.

Well, Joyce wanted to put into a better focus that past and present are strictly linked, and our minds are the custodian of the past. Going on, having what Joyce defines as "epiphany"( a very short moment in which a  character becomes aware of some aspects of life), Gabriel further understands that living a short but intense life is better than living a passive life. In that case Gabriel feels defeated, he perceives his own failure as human being.