20 the century

Question 1:-Characteristics of 20th Century Literature

Introduction

            The 20th century was like no time period before it. Einstein, Darwin, Freud and Marx were just some of the thinkers who profoundly changed Western culture. These changes took distinct shape in the literature of the 20th century. Modernism, a movement that was a radical break from 19th century Victorianism, led to postmodernism, which emphasized self-consciousness and pop art. While 20th century literature is a diverse field covering a variety of genres, there are common characteristics that changed literature forever.

Fragmented Structure

           Prior to the 20th century, literature tended to be structured in linear, chronological order. Twentieth century writers experimented with other kinds of structures. Virginia Woolf, for instance, wrote novels whose main plot was often "interrupted" by individual characters' memories, resulting in a disorienting experience for the reader. Ford Madox Ford's classic "The Good Soldier" plays with chronology, jumping back and forth between time periods. Many of these writers aimed to imitate the feeling of how time is truly experienced subjectively.

Fragmented Perspective

          If there's one thing readers could count on before the 20th century, it was the reliability of an objective narrator in fiction. Modernist and postmodern writers, however, believed that this did a disservice to the reliability of stories in general. The 20th century saw the birth of the ironic narrator, who could not be trusted with the facts of narrative. Nick Carraway, narrator of Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," for example, tells the story with a bias toward the novel's titular character. In an extreme case of fragmented perspective, Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" switches narrators between each chapter.

The Novel of the City

            The 20th century is distinguished as the century of urbanism. As more people moved to cities in Europe and America, novelists used urban environments as backdrops for the stories they told. Perhaps the best known of these is James Joyce's "Dubliners," a series of short stories that all take place in various locales in Dublin. Other 20th century writers are also closely associated with various urban centers: Woolf and London, Theodore Dreiser and Chicago, Paul Auster and New York, Michael Ondaatje and Toronto.

Writing from the Margins

           The 20th century gave voice to marginalized people who previously got little recognition for their literary contributions. The Harlem Renaissance, for example, brought together African-Americans living in New York to form a powerful literary movement. Writers such as Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston wrote fiction and poetry that celebrated black identity. Similarly, female writers gained recognition through novels that chronicled their own experience. Finally, the post-colonial literary movement was born, with writers such as Chinua Achebe writing stories on behalf of subjugated peoples who had experienced colonization by Western powers.

Cubism was principally a movement in the visual arts in the early 20th century spearheaded by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. These painters explored new forms of expression by emphasizing subjective mental experience over objective sensible experience, fragthation over linear plotting, and multiple perspectives over singular perspective. The movement influenced modernist novelists and poets of the same time period, such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner, wo used cubist elements in their writing to push the boundaries of literary por

Internal Landscape

           Coming off groundbreaking advances in the social sciences, particularly the theories of Sigmund Freud, cubists were more concerned with the internal landscape of the individual than the external landscape of the objective world. Likewise, the psyche, the subconscious, the conscious intellect and creative abstraction itself all became more important in modernist literature than the more objective, one-dimensional portraiture of the Victorian period that preceded it. In “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” James Joyce plumbed the internal depths of his protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, discovering a vivid and varied inner life that would come to characterize his later, more experimental novels: “His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings."

Stream of Consciousness

           The cubists’ exploration of the mind through visual arts led many writers to do the same through words and sentence structure. Whereas previous modes of writing had relied on logic and clarity to convey information, modernist writers tried to portray thought as it happened, randomly and illogically. This method became known as “stream of consciousness.” One of the great pioneers of this method was Virginia Woolf. In her groundbreaking novel “Mrs. Dalloway,” she captured the streaming thoughts of multiple characters. For example, early in the novel, Woolf traces the random and erratic thoughts of Septimus, a war-scarred visionary on the verge of complete madness: “Men must not cut down trees. There is a God. (He noted such revelations on the backs of envelopes.) Change the world. No one kills from hatred. Make it known (He wrote it down).”

Multiple Perspectives

          Anyone familiar with Picasso knows his paintings contained various planes and angles of perception. Modernist writers used this technique to great effect to show how narrative realities change through the subjective perspectives of different characters. A master of this technique was William Faulkner. In his novel “As I Lay Dying,” the death and burial of rural matriarch Addie Bundren is portrayed through the interlinking perspectives of more than a dozen characters. Each character has his own voice, tone and vocabulary, and relays the events of the narrative in a distinct way. Like Picasso, Faulkner created a stark collage of images revealing the subjectivity, and relativity, at the heart of human experience.

Fragmentation of the Individual

          Added together, cubist techniques presented something rather frightening: the individual as an assemblage of broken images. With the same techniques, modernist writers explored the implications of movements like cubism. If subjectivity trumped all, then how could the individual retain a rational purpose in society? How could the individual avoid alienation, loneliness and despair, or worse, the fragmentation of insanity? In “As I Lay Dying,” Faulkner famously used a child character to show how identity is irrationally predicated on discrete, subjective percepts. Because his mother dies after he kills a fish, young Vardaman projects the identity of the former onto the latter. One chapter is composed of a single sentence: “My mother is a fish.”

Literature scholars differ over the years that encompass the Modernist period, however most generally agree that modernist authors published as early as the 1880s and into the mid-1940s. During this period, society at every level underwent profound changes. War and industrialization seemed to devalue the individual. Global communication made the world a smaller place. The pace of change was dizzying. Writers responded to this new world in a variety of ways.

Individualism

            In Modernist literature, the individual is more interesting than society. Specifically, modernist writers were fascinated with how the individual adapted to the changing world. In some cases, the individual triumphed over obstacles. For the most part, Modernist literature featured characters who just kept their heads above water. Writers presented the world or society as a challenge to the integrity of their characters. Ernest Hemingway is especially remembered for vivid characters who accepted their circumstances at face value and persevered.

Experimentation

           Modernist writers broke free of old forms and techniques. Poets abandoned traditional rhyme schemes and wrote in free verse. Novelists defied all expectations. Writers mixed images from the past with modern languages and themes, creating a collage of styles. The inner workings of consciousness were a common subject for modernists. This preoccupation led to a form of narration called stream of consciousness, where the point of view of the novel meanders in a pattern resembling human thought. Authors James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, along with poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, are well known for their experimental Modernist works.

Absurdity

            The carnage of two World Wars profoundly affected writers of the period. Several great English poets died or were wounded in WWI. At the same time, global capitalism was reorganizing society at every level. For many writers, the world was becoming a more absurd place every day. The mysteriousness of life was being lost in the rush of daily life. The senseless violence of WWII was yet more evidence that humanity had lost its way. Modernist authors depicted this absurdity in their works. Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," in which a traveling salesman is transformed into an insect-like creature, is an example of modern absurdism.

Symbolism

           The Modernist writers infused objects, people, places and events with significant meanings. They imagined a reality with multiple layers, many of them hidden or in a sort of code. The idea of a poem as a riddle to be cracked had its beginnings in the Modernist period. Symbolism was not a new concept in literature, but the Modernists' particular use of symbols was an innovation. They left much more to the reader's imagination than earlier writers, leading to open-ended narratives with multiple interpretations. For example, James Joyce's "Ulysses" incorporates distinctive, open-ended symbols in each chapter.

Formalism

           Writers of the Modernist period saw literature more as a craft than a flowering of creativity. They believed that poems and novels were constructed from smaller parts instead of the organic, internal process that earlier generations had described. The idea of literature as craft fed the Modernists' desire for creativity and originality. Modernist poetry often includes foreign languages, dense vocabulary and invented words. The poet e.e. cummings abandoned all structure and spread his words all across the page.

Question 2:- write about the  impact of industrialism  

 

Impact of industrialism 

             The scale of industrial enterprises in the United States increased during the early years of the twentieth century, making the American workplace very different from that of the preceding century. During the period of the Industrial Revolution known as the Gilded Age (the era of industrialization from the early 1860s to the turn of the century in which a few wealthy individuals gained tremendous power and influence; see Chapter 5), manufacturers in the largest industries, such as steel and oil refining, were pushed aside by enormous new factory complexes sometimes employing fifteen thousand to twenty thousand workers. These new plants produced automobiles, farm machinery, electrical equipment, textiles, and many other goods.

             During the twentieth century the nature of manufacturing gradually changed. American consumers had more money to spend and wanted to be able to choose from a variety of products. To remain competitive, corporations had to respond to consumers' desires. Gradually, in the last decades of the century, the heavy industries such as steel and auto manufacturing went into a slow decline, and the U.S. economy passed into a postindustrial era—a time marked by the lessened importance of manufacturing and increased importance of service industries such as food and custodial services, health, finance, recreation, engineering, and computers.