Talk:Modernist literature

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Modernist literature is part of WikiProject Literature, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to Literature on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
Literature Portal
??? This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale. Please rate the article and then leave a short summary on the talk page to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.
??? This article has not yet received a rating on the importance scale.

I agree - the writing style and, more generally, the organisation of the article is shambolic. What is more, and potentially what is more damaging, is that bold and mis-informed claims are made throughout as to the nature of literary modernism. Saying things like 'Modernist literature is defined by its move away from Romanticism' is overstating the case by some way. Certainly, writers like Virginia Woolf expressed a desire to move away from Victorian literary tendencies, but intent is not always equal to result.

There needs to be more acceptance of literary modernism (and here I'm thinking mainly of the big guns: Joyce, Woolf, Stein, Eliot, Pound and perhaps even Conrad and Kipling) as being not a single entity working in harmony, but rather as a group of writers who share 'family resemblances', if not one homogenous purpose. Conroy23 (talk) 14:51, 4 June 2008 (UTC)


This article reads as though it were written by an 8th grader. I came to the discussion page with hope that someone would be working to improve the overall tenor of the article. Instead, there is more of the same; banal commentary, name dropping ("Acmeism!"...pleeeease!),and the silly out of place comment about Ruben Dario (whoever he may be, he doesn't belong in this article).

Is anyone interested in actually fixing this article? If so we should form a discussion ring..


Was Modernism only an Anglo-American movement? Where is Russian Symbolism? Acmeism? Russian Futurism? I don't speak about other literatures here. --Ghirla -трёп- 17:47, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Where are the early pioneers? Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust and late Thomas Hardy? cfp 08:01, 4 June 2006 (UTC) hi

Contents

[edit] Ruben Dario sentence

An anonymous user keeps removing this sentence. Can the anonymous user either write a comment why here or stop doing it? I personally have never heard of Dario, but I am prepared believe it until someone who knows what they're talking about tells me it's rubbish. Rightly or wrongly, I think anonymous users will never have the credibility required to make this kind of claim. (Though it certainly needs a citation in any case. Who added it initially?) --cfp 01:11, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure who added it in the first place, but when I saw there was a discussion over it (removing it or keeping it), I modified the sentence to give it better context, changing it from "The father of Modernism is the poet Ruben Dario of Nicaragua" to "One of the "fathers" of Latin American Modernism is the poet Ruben Dario of Nicaragua" which is much less loaded. I'm not particularly knowledgeable about Latin American literary Modernism so I won't object to or confirm the claim, but to say he is the father of Modernism as a whole would definitely be incorrect. --TM 05:41, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
Ahh sorry I misunderstood your last edit. Didn't realise the claim had been inserted twice. It's fine as it is for now then. Nice work changing the controversial sentence into one that barely stakes any claim at all. It's always the safest option! --cfp 23:10, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
Ruben Dario is considered the father of Modernismo, the Modernism of the Spanish-speaking world. Though Modernism and Modernismo have similarities, they are NOT the same movement. There is a Modernismo stub on Wikipedia English. That's where Ruben Dario belongs.

[edit] bad article- needs expert

I wish someone really educated on the subject would drop in. "Modernist literature is defined by its move away from Romanticism, venturing into subject matter that is traditionally mundane"... Romanticism is also marked by mundane subject matter. food for thought.

I'm not an expert, but as far as "mundane" goes, I suspect it depends a lot on which Romantics we're talking about. Certainly, a lot of the most prominent Romantics like Coleridge, Lord Byron, and Hoelderlin took on subject matters that were far from mundane (i.e. Don Juan, ancient Greece, crazy sailing expeditions). But even in the works which do, in some sense, have a mundane subject matter (i.e. some guy walking in the woods), we might say the real subject matter is spiritual, and it tends to be treated in a way that's anything but mundane. So I do suspect there's a real contrast to be made here with modernist works, where the subject can just be a bureaucrat going through some bills, without the same spiritual flights of fancy.
As far as the article overall goes, though, I completely agree it needs a lot of work, and, like you, I'm very suspicious of the emphasis on and interpretation of Romanticism--although I'd point to different parts. It's much more common for literary modernism to be understood in juxtaposition to literary realism rather than romanticism--so this article gives a rather distorted treatment of the standard account. In addition, the subject-object-medium picture the article attributes to Gelpi is not characteristically associated with Romanticism, so much as philosophical modernism (which dates back to Descartes in the 17th century, and persists through 19th century Romanticism into the 20th century). It probably is right to understand literary modernism as somehow challenging the subject-object picture, but the connection with Romanticism is dubious.

[edit] worldwide view

This article lacks the coverage of writers of the size of Ruben Dario,Juan Ramón Jimenez,Pablo Neruda,Cernuda,the generation of the boom of latinamerican literature....so its pretty US/Europe centric,also i think the term modernism here should make more reference to the modernist movement understood as the blend and of romanticism,parnasianism;the revaloration of the art for the artthat fall out favor with the arrive of realism and naturalist movements,instead of the writers of the 20th century,that are not joint by any way you look at them:Hemingway wass a realist;joyce,Virginia Wolf,Faulkner were vanguardist,and so on--Andres rojas22 16:28, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Suggestions for Article Improvement

I've heard Modernism more often contrasted with Realism than with Romanticism, but generally this contrast is drawn in terms of a 20th Century identification of "mimesis" with "verisimilitude." Aristotle's use of "mimesis" was much more nuanced. The "stream of consciousness" found Joyce's Ulysses or Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is a form of psychological realism; perhaps the contrast has more to do with changes in the Enlightenment values that underlie Realism: that the Universe can be subjected to exaustive rational analysis. Beginning with the mystery novel as a genre, in Poe or Wilkie Collins's Moonstone for example, one finds the convergence of a literary movement wherein facts are deliberately witheld from the reader with Freudian analysis, which popularized the notion that we are not aware of all that is in our consciousness.

Dadaism as a force in Modernism was significant, as was Surrealism (which began as a literary movement centered on automatic writing -- there was actually a debate in early Surrealism as to whether Surrealist painting would even be possible). Many early Surrealist writers found inspiration in Isidore Ducasse (le Comte de Lautréamont).

The shift from a Kantian "art for art's sake" to a more object-status-oriented approach to artistic production was important but gradual, and never really a completed project on the part of critics; Clement Greenberg's popularization of medium specificity was important in this process; as was a shift from artwork understood in terms of traditional conventions (a painting is a framed image hanging on a wall) to artwork understood in terms of the literary/critical statement it produced (how does painting become sculptural, philosophical, or a record of an artist's actions). Kurt Schwitters offered an interesting demonstration that "logically consistent poetry" consists of arbitrary letters juxtaposed one against the other, on the basis that the signification of words is not unequivocal (the word "tree" might invoke a poplar for one person and a maple for another); equivocality and polyphony became stylistic considerations along this line of reasoning. Much of Modernism's effects can be characterized by an interest in novelty (what is new is good, what is old is smelly), and the self-conscious rejection of traditional approaches to aesthetic problemsolving.

The beginnings of Modernism can be pushed back to the mid-1800's, yet the 1910's and 1920's saw Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and other smaller -isms all wrestling with similar sorts of aesthetic problems, which often involved industrial urbanization, fragmented [consumer] landscapes, and other sorts of themes mentioned in the article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lulabell petunia (talk • contribs) 01:02, 25 May 2008 (UTC)