Essay on Modernism at Its Finest in Literature

The space in between the front lines of the defenders and the attackers was known as "No Man’s Land". ("Trench Warfare") Thousands of battle hardened soldiers would put their lives on the line by running into this "no man's land", just to win a few feet in the battle of the frontline. This led to hundreds of thousands of casualties just to gain two or three feet on the battlefield. There is no better picture of this theory of irrational creatures than in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which…

asunder the safeguard of the reliability of the narrator and required active contemplation by the readers. Perspective assumed a far greater importance in literature as writers offered more impressionistic work without omniscient narrators and clean resolutions. The proliferation of the experimental spirit in modernist works of literature often alienated popular readership, and such exclusivity served as a mark of quality to a certain extent as it went in hand with the modernist intellectuals’…

(Barth, "The Literature of Replenishment" 68) Modernism is often derided for abandoning the social world in favour of its narcissistic interest in language and its processes. Recognizing the failure of language to ever fully communicate meaning ("That's not it at all, that's not what I meant at all" laments Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock), the modernists generally downplayed content in favour of an investigation of form. The fragmented, non-chronological, poetic forms utilized by Eliot and…

accurate picture of society by confronting the problems of the individual and of the society. The only difference in the two is the difference in societies. These principles could be called the tenents of Modernism. My working definition of modernism would be a movement in American Literature that allowed writers to be able to express themselves but at the same time be able to celebrate the changes that are accruing around them. This movement also allowed poets to write about anything that they…

new form of literature that was not written on the basis of beliefs that earlier had seemed indisputable. Not only were old belief systems disregarded, they were openly opposed. Even more surprising, the new thoughts were acceptable, and in turn provided an alternative route for thinking that had not formerly been considered. Anti-Realism is another feature of Modernism. This element included the use of myth and allusion in writing. Description was a prominent feature in literature before the…

to intensive scrutiny and extensive redefinition, producing some of the most unusual and often difficult literary creations in English: Eliot's Wasteland, Yeat's Plays for Dancers, and the fiction of Joyce and Lawrence is some examples. Modernist literature reflects in it's structure as well as in it's content the overturning of tradition; the instances upon new design produced plays and stories without plots or recognizably human characters, poems without rhyme or meter"(16, 17). The Modernist author…

restrictions on sexuality were simply not warranted. “There was a new emphasis in general on leibeskultur, or body culture, on an appreciation of the human body devoid of social taboos or restrictions? Tolerance of homosexuals is a prime example of modernism because this approach was truly ahead of its time. One can make this deduction because homosexuals were shunned in all other European countries throughout this era. Although Germans did not collectively approve of homosexuality, their over-all measure…

included writers such as Flaubert, Zola, and Dickens. Rolling into the late 19th and early 20th century, modernistic literature became the style of writing. Modernistic thinking was a rebellion against realism, in which the literature was very abstract. The writers of that time period were experimental and used unusual techniques. There were four sub-categories of modernism: surrealism, cubism, existentialism, and dadaism. Surrealism and existentialism were the most popular of the four. Surrealism…

garde'. Their intention was to shock their readers and force them to doubt accepted norms and discuss 'forbidden' topics (Abrams 119). There was no single forerunner of modernism, but many famous authors emerged from this movement, such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence. The transition from modernism to postmodernism came with World War Two, when disillusionment became too great to keep this exploratory attitude alive. Modernismo The modernismo, or modernista…

Modernism or modernist poetry refers to the time period where poems were written by various people between the 1890s and 1970s. Modernism poets have a lot of knowledge and their works reflect it. The Era of modernism brought on modern language as it referred to thought, practice or someone’s character. This brought on a lot of change in the world. The thought behind the thinking of modernist poets were that of individualism. The modern movement came about as the result of the industrial revolution…