Below I have provided excerpts from the Harmon and Holman on
“modernism” and “modernist literature.” The term “modernism” has nothing to do
with the time period in which a piece is written (i.e. not all contemporary
pieces are modern). “Modern literature”:
“[…] is centered in the experimental examination of the
inner self”
“[…] protested against the nature of modern society”
“[…] explor[es] the private self through the stream of
consciousness”
“[…] is writing marked by a strong and conscious break with
tradition”
“It employs a distinctive kind of imagination that insists
on having its general frame of reference within itself.”
“[…] [employs the viewpoint that] we create the world in the
act of perceiving it”
“[…] implies […] a sense of alienation, loss, and despair”
“[…] rejects traditional values and assumptions, and it
rejects equally the rhetoric by which they were sanctioned and communicated”
“[…] elevates the individual and the inward over the social
and the outward, and it prefers the unconscious to the self-conscious”
“[…] revels in a dense and often unordered actuality as
opposed to the practical and the systematic, and in exploring that actuality as
it exists in the mind of the writer it has been richly experimental”
Now, you’re going to need five notecards, one for each of
the pieces that we’ve read this week (Woolf, Kafka, Faulkner, and Marquez) and
then an extra for the final question at the end of this post.
On each notecard, make connections between the tenets of
modernism and the piece you’re exploring.
Please note: we’ve dug into some pretty specific aspects of these pieces
during our discussions—I’d rather see you focus on specifics than fill your
notecard with broad, general statements that don’t really show a thorough read
of the pieces.
After you’re done, answer this question on a separate
notecard: What else have we read this year that you would consider modern? Why?
(Don’t fall into the trap of picking a piece just because it matches one
of the criteria above—make sure to choose based on a comprehensive view of the
piece and the excerpts from the H & H).
