Activity  1

The quotation that I have to analyze speaks about Modernism. Modernism is an aesthetical movement recording a radical break with and from the past; it developed more or less between 1890 and 1930s in countries such as Japan, France, Germany and the United States. Therefore it may be considered a cosmopolitan movement: on one hand it is multi-national, on the other hand it is multi-disciplinary because it was an object of study within philosophy, science, literature and art.

Art is the subject of the quotation that states that Modernism emphasized more on art’s ability to affect the mind, rather than emphasizing on eternal reality. To better understand the concept, there is a comparison between different forms of art: Victorian paintings were representational, Impressionism tried to paint the quality of the sensations stimulated by the scenes and Post-Impressionism tried to portray the pure elements of color and form, the perceiving mind and the aesthetic consciousness.

Therefore art transforms itself: you can consider the arts of two different periods and probably you will notice that subjects, themes, techniques and other features are different. But why does art depend on the period considered? Because in every period there is a specific set of values. So art depends on the set of values of the period like literature. Indeed considering the literature of Modernism you can notice that there were different innovations: for example the novelist seemed to disappear and left the fictional characters speak for themselves, without interviewing.  Moreover moral criticism and humorous observations are absent as you can see in James Joyce’s works and in particular within the novel The Dubliners. Indeed in the last long story: The Dead, the reader can notice that the novelist in not within the test, there is no moral criticism and no humorous observation, but rather the story develops through situations, which characterize the protagonist’s life.

So the new innovations in literature during the Modern Age were due to the crisis of values, that was caused by different events: the First World War, the elaboration of the theory of evolution by Charles Darwin and of the theory of relativity by Albert Einstein, the concept of time considered by Henry Bergson and William James, the theory of unconscious elaborated by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and last but not least the slogan  God is dead, by Friedrich Nietzsche. God is dead represented the death of metaphysics and it was the most important aspect that influenced writers and that led to the birth of new narrative thecniques.