MODERNISM

WHAT, WHERE, WHEN

Modernism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe during the first three decades of the

20° century.

Modernist thought had its origins in the Enlightenment period:this era was a celebration of the liberating potentials of the social sciences, the materialistic gains of capitalism, new forms of rational thought, due process safeguards,

abstract rights applicable to all, and the individual it was a time of great optimism.

THEMES

• Search for new narrative technique

• Looking for anthropology and myth

• The absention of the author /omniscient narrator

• Use of current language

• Talking about old tabù (ex: sexuality,...)

• Use of symbols, also from psychoanalysis

WHOTHOMAS STEARNS ELIOT

Born in St. Louis(Missouri) in 1888, he was educated at Harvard, the Sorbonne and Oxford University.

He settled in England during World War I and worked in London as a bank clerck, then as a publisher.

He died in London in 1956.

JAMES JOYCE

Born in Dublin in 1882 into a catholic family, he was educated at Jesuits School and Universitiy College in Dublin.

In 1904 he went into a self-imposed exile but he only wrote about Ireland.

In Trieste he met the italian writer Svevo.

He died in 1941 in Zurich.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Born in London in 1882, she was educated in a highly intellectual atmosphere at home.

Her mother died when she was 13 and the loss affects her profoundly: after her mother's dead she had the 1first of a series of nervous breakdowns wich affected her all the life.

She comitted suicide by drowning in 1941.

THE WASTE LAND

by T.S.EliotIt is consider the most important work of this writer.

It is a poem make up in five parts (The Burial of the Dead, A Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon, Death by Water, What the Thunder Said).

All the poem is a re-writing from texts of the European literary culture.

Some of the themes analized are:• Graal’s myth• Fertility rites from the antropology• The research for values in the contemporary society

ULYSSES

by J. Joyce

This novel has not a traditional plot.

It is divided in 18 chapters that have titles derived from Homer's Odissey and to each chapter it is made an

association to a part of body, to an art, to a place, to a planet, to a feeling and to an hour.

The novel is about a modern Odissey of the protagonist, Leopold Bloom: he walks around Dublin on 16th June.

TO THE LIGHT HOUSE

by V. Woolf

The novel is highly representative of Woolf's fiction: the external event of the journey to the lighthouse is the counterpart of an internal journey of self-awareness.

The novel is full of symbols: the lighthouse as the contraddictory aspects of life, the sea in the positive and in the negative aspect united at least in the last part of the novel.

BIOGRAPHY

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waste_Land• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernist_literature• http://www.soci.niu.edu/~critcrim/papers/drag-pomo.html• B. De Luca, D. Ellis, Literacture in Time