Tanmayee Yenumula: Class Notes (3.7.11-3.18.11)

Modernism
- Characteristics of Modernism

• Disillusionment following WWI    many expatriates
• Universal Truth
• "angry young man" syndrome
• Stern's "Lost Generation"
• New narrative techniques
• Cri du cur     > "MAKE IT HAPPEN!"

- New Forms of Narrative

• Unreliable narrators
• Multiple narrators
• Minor characters as 1st person narrators
• Stream of consciousness

- Connection: Literary movements were not the only movements to follow a modernist way of thinking. Artistic movements also mirrored modernist ideology. Examples of this include Picasso and the Cubists and their usage of the technique of superimposition (looking at an object or person from all angles).


Post-Modernism

• PoMo (Post-Modernism)= Modernism- Universal Truth + Irony
• Blending of high and low culture
• Self-reference
• The simulacrum ("simulated world")
• Connection: Nowadays, we can see also sorts of simulated situations with many websites making profits from simulated worlds.

Surrealism

• A movement in the arts (visual, musical, dramatic, and literary) between WWI and WWII
• Uses unexpected juxtapositions in ways intended to activate subconscious associations that highlight truths hidden from us when we are trapped in linear, "logical" patterns of thought
• Uses juxtapositions     of images, words, etc.     determined by psychological "thought processes" rather than logical thought processes
• Attempts to join the worlds of dreams and fantasy to "reality" to create a larger reality     a "surreality"
• Dreamlike, playful, sometimes eerie or bizarre
• Influenced by the work of Freud and Jung