1. Introduction. Modern, Modernity and Modernism
Modernism (brainstorm)
•Break from tradition: opposition between Victorian way of looking at the
world and the new way of understating the new world. Victorian saw the world
through science and religion. Darwin’s ideas were the first modern ideas.
Victorian look the world as a collectively of human beings. Tradition is showed
as a not rational way. There is a change of focus/point view: from collective
society to individuality.
•Cultural movement: the new author has more freedom. Organic forms: formal
patters. They were not using the traditional forms. Tradition imposed certain
formal constrain. They developed their own forms.
•Modernism: literary or artistic movement.
•Modernity: it can be understood as a bicultural idea. More general
movement. Identity between subject and present.
•Reaction to realism: realism is a convention of s fixed form and individual can
be related to realism in an objective way. The “I” (subject) cannot be objective.
•Complexity of character: stream of consciousness. Characters were driven by
morals and now there are several motivations that lie behind our morals. The
break consciousness (that break) is a way of looking at the present from a
subjective way. Every human way has different perspectives. The complexes are
part of ourselves.
•Enlightenment: it equals the subject with reason. It claims the use of
reason and through that you will know, understand and explain the whole
world. Step away from the world. Subject separated from the object and
the subject knows the object using reason.
•Romanticism: you use imagination to fill those gaps that you are not
able to fill using reason. Romantics are aware that you cannot step away
from the picture. The subject is part of the picture: the subject belongs to
the object, it is part of the object. There are parts of the object that we
will never know.
•Realism / naturalism: it relies in biology. Darwin relied on biology. The
subject equals reason.
•1890 - 1900 – Modernity / Modernism: it is the experience of the
world.
■E. Husserl, F. Nietzsche, H. Bergson: they claimed that the
subject cannot know the object but it can experience the object.
■According to Nietzsche, there is no way we can get away of our
consciousness. We cannot know the world as it stands. For him,
the world is the dyonisian substratum (reality) and the room
(consciousness) is the apollonian forces. The apollonian forces
are divided in two: dyonisian (feeling: music, dancing…) and
apollonian (reason: language, mathematics, science…). You can
get close to the room and look outside but you cannot escape the
room. When you do that, you experience the world as it is.
