Modernism

AO4: To be able to comment on the cultural context of modernism.

AO3: To evaluate a number of readings of a text.

On your sheet, look at the passage. Around the extract, write as many questions as you can think of.

D – ask general comprehension questions.C – ask specific and detailed questions about individual words/

phrases.B – ask questions about why the extract is presented in a certain way

and what it is presenting.A – Evaluative questions on the style and format of the passage.

Homework

1) Can I have your modernist poem and essay from last week?

2) Compare how the writers present celebratory love in Yeats’ He Remembers Forgotten Beauty and e.e. cummings’ I like my body when it is with your?

3) Choose a lovesong that you like with interesting lyrics to comment on. Bring it to school on Monday after half term (we will be using them on the residential!).

God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing and as for them saying theres no God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and father and old captain Groves and Spanish girls laughing and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets yes and Gibraltar as a young girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

James Joyce - Ulysses

Considered to be one of the foremost modernist novels – it replays the events of Homer’s The Odyssey in one day in Dublin, 16th June 1904. It uses a huge range of diverse styles and flavours to display the modern world.

The extract is the final lines of the novel from the chapter titled Penelope. It is said by Molly Bloom, one of the main character’s wife, who up til now has been referred to as an adulteress, whorish and overly sexualised woman.

Molly Bloom’s soliloquy1) What kind of woman is the narrator? Is she contradictory?

2) How does Joyce indicate the natural flow and connections made by a mind thinking? Why would he do this?

3) What is the attitude towards love presented in this poem? Provide evidence and explain its effect.

4) How is repetition used to structure the piece? What is the tone created by this device?

5) How is a tone of nostalgia created throughout the poem? What does that imply about the love described in the piece?

6) How does Joyce manipulate traditional expectations of prose to present a powerful view of love?

With your partner, share your knowledge about modernism and make a list of 5 key facts/

criteria of modernist texts.

• Period of time• Key writers/ names• Stylistic Tools• Attitude to the world• Feelings created in the reader• Structures used• Goals of the movement

Rejection and breaking up of traditionChallenging false harmony and coherenceCelebrating the urban anonymity.Make it new!Collage and juxtaposition...Breaking and fragmenting to present a deeper

truthTo present a mind working naturally.Breaking the rules of language to show deeper

meaning.Pessimism?

Out of the horror of World War I...

T.S. Eliot “expressed the disillusionment of a generation” in his poem The Waste Land.

After WW1, a generation of men returned often unable to rationalise the horrors they had witnessed. The way machines (guns, grenades etc.) had killed millions, maimed millions and haunted the rest made people feel disjointed from the traditional world.

The movement of modernism (then termed ‘avant-garde’) arose out of this feeling – traditional values felt out of place in this new mechanised, world. As Ezra Pound wrote, these artists sought to ‘Make It New’.

Stream of Consciousness

The ordinary man’s experience, Eliot argued, is ‘chaotic, irregular, fragmentary’; the ‘ordinary man’ falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of booking, but for the poet ‘these experiences are always forming new wholes.’

Writers developed stream of consciousness as a mode to express the natural fragmentation of the human mind.

e.e. cummings – a sonneti like my body when it is with yourbody. It is so quite new a thing.Muscles better and nerves more.i like your body. i like what it does,i like its hows. i like to feel the spineof your body and its bones, and the trembling-firm-smooth ness and which i willagain and again and againkiss, i like kissing this and that of you,i like,, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzzof your electric fur, and what-is-it comesover parting flesh… And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new

He Remembers Forgotten Beauty

When my arms wrap you round I press My heart upon the loveliness That has long faded from the world; The jewelled crowns that kings have hurled In shadowy pools, when armies fled; The love-tales wrought with silken thread By dreaming ladies upon cloth That has made fat the murderous moth; The roses that of old times were Woven by ladies in their hair, The dew-cold lilies ladies bore Through many a sacred corridor Where such grey clouds of incense rose That only God's eyes did not close: For that pale breast and lingering hand Came from a more dream-heavy land, A more dream-heavy hour than this; And when you sigh from kiss to kissI hear white Beauty sighing, too, For hours when all must fade like dew, But flame on flame, and deep on deep, Throne over throne where in half sleep, Their swords upon their iron knees, Brood her high lonely mysteries.

W B. Yeats

my love is building a building around you, a frail slippery house, a strong fragile house (beginning at the singular beginning

of your smile)a skilful uncouth prison, a precise clumsy prison(building thatandthis into Thus, Around the reckless magic of your mouth)

my love is building a magic, a discrete tower of magic and(as i guess)

when Farmer Death(whom fairies hate)shall

crumble the mouth-flower fleet He'll not my tower,

laborious, casual where the surrounded smile

hangs breathless

ee cummings

i carry your heart with me (i carry it inmy heart) i am never without it (anywherei go you go, my dear; and whatever is doneby only me is your doing, my darling) i fearno fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i wantno world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)and it's you are whatever a moon has always meantand whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows(here is the root of the root and the bud of the budand the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which growshigher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

e.e. cummings