Updated Modern 2nd page

The Modern and Postmodern Periods (1901- Present)

1. "Yesterday, we split the atom...And because of this, the great dream and the great nightmare of
centuries of human thought have taken flesh and walk beside us all, day and night".
- Doris Lessing, from "The Small, Personal Voice"
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2. World War II and the Loss of the Empire: The aggression of Germany and Japan led inevitably to
World War II. When Hitler’s armies overran Europe, the English stood defiantly alone, shielded by the English Channel and the Royal Air Force. It was, Winston Churchill said, "their finest hour".
*In 1942, Russia blunted the German advance, America was in the war and the tide turned against the aggressors. After nearly six years of struggle, England emerged from the war victorious, battered, and impoverished.
* England's former colonies became independent colonies. The Indian subcontinent, where Gandhi had led an independence movement, was divided into the nations of India and Pakistan in 1947.
* The imperial British lion gave a dying gasp in 1956 when Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt to keep the control of the Suez Canal. However, the United States intervened, the Egyptians kept the Canal, and British troops came home to a country ashamed of its government's actions.
* Suez was forgotten in the cultural upheaval in 1960s, when British fashion and British rock musicians carried the flag around the world in a kind of cultural conquest. Also, writers from England's former colonies were engaged in their own re-conquest, enriching English literature.
* As the century closed, the violence in Northern Ireland seemed to be ending. Also, England pondered its involvement with Europe, not accepting the common currency, the Euro, but cooperating in a
drilling a tunnel under the English Channel, which joined England to the Continent. Do Sir Edward Grey's words still have a prophetic ring? Many thought the lamps came on again when the Berlin Wall fell. However, countries cobbled together in the aftermath of World War I- Yugoslavia and Iraq- have been the sites of bitter conflict.
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4. Vocabulary:
*generation- noun. all of the people born and living at the same time
*materialism- noun. belief in comfort, pleasure, and wealth as the highest values
*colonial- adj. of or relating to the colony or colonies of a mother country
*propriety- noun. display of proper manners or behavior
*aristocracy- noun. ruling class; nobility
*fascism- noun. type of government ruled by one party, which puts down all opposition
*inclusive- adj. tending to include; taking everything into account
*evocative- adj. calling up a particular image or reaction
*allusions- noun. indirect references
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5. Women and Writers: The work of Virginia Woolf revealed a new freedom that women were finding in literature as well. Woolf's experimental fiction broke new ground, and her nonfiction explored the social
conditions that would help women succeed in the arts.
* The bicycle as product and the right to vote as principle were part of the century-long process of loosening the rigid rules of class, propriety, and morality that bound the Victorians. this process applied to such areas as access to higher education, health care, marriage laws and customs for ordinary people and monarchy, home ownerships, pensions, and working conditions.
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5. Things were at their brightest in the next decade: the Swinging Sixties. Plato said: "When the modes of music change, the walls of the city are shaken". The walls were rocked by The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Although not as famous as these songwriters and singers, poets like Ted Hughes and peter Redgrove nevertheless opened their minds and their styles to a wide range of new influences.
*The pendulum slowed in the eighties. Margaret Thatcher, the first and only female prime minister of Britain, reversed many of the economic changes of the previous twenty-five years. However, there could be no reversing the social changes. Early in her administration, the army and navy crushed Argentina's attempt to seize the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. This was the final flick of the imperial lion's tail.
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6. George Orwell: More Relevant than Ever!-
Big Brother, Newspeak, doublethink are words that probably sound familiar because you hear them frequently. They were all coined in the 1940s by British author George Orwell for his novel 1984 (published in 1949). After World War II, Orwell was alarmed by a trend toward repressive totalitarian rule. Believing that language is the first weapon dictators use to seize power, he employed his own words as a warning. In the futuristic tyranny portrayed in his novel, words are used to obscure and destroy meaning:
- The official language, Newspeak, has been stripped of meaning
-The tyrannical ruler is deceptively named Big Brother
- Dissenters face torture in the innocently named Room 101
- Citizens are adapt at doublethink the ability to accept blatant contradictions, as in the government declaration "War is Peace".
* Sixty years later, these terms and others coined by Orwell still ring true. In fact, Orwell's own name is used as an adjective, Orwellian to describe this kind of abuse of language. Pundits, reporters, citizens, and bloggers alike use Orwell's words to criticize Orwellian practices. The year 1984 has come and gone, but Orwell's words live on.
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13. Images of Modernism: When you take a photograph, you record and preserve what is happening now. Modernism could be thought of as a complex response to what photographs imply. Some Modernists, such as the American poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and the British poet T.S. Elliot, wrote poetry as if they were taking snapshots of the world and then cutting and pasting them into collages. Elliot celebrated what he called objectivity in poetry. He relied on images, well-chosen and artfully rendered, to encapsulate a feeling or prospective.
On the other hand, the British Modernist novelist Virginia Woolf perfected techniques for conveying an individual’s moment-by moment experience. For Woolf, the mind is like a camera filming continuously. Her writing record what the moment looks like to an individual. A photograph shows us exactly what the world looks like; Woolf suggests that what the world looks like depends on who is looking.
14. Literary Analysis: Modernism was an early twentieth century movement in the arts. The movement responded to the fragmented modern world created by industrialization, rapid transportation and communication , and a feeling of alienation caused by mass society and the growth of cities. Eliot led the movement for Modernism in poetry, which had several features:
- A new objectivity or impersonality in poetry, in which a work is built from images and allusions rather than from direct statements of thoughts and feelings
- A rejection of realistic depictions of life in favor of the use of images for artist effect
- Critical attention to social conditions and the spiritual troubles of modern life.
As you read, look for details that reflect Modernism in Eliot’s poems.
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19. Literary Analysis: Searching for forms suited to modern experience, Modernist writers tested different points of view, perspective from which a story is told.
- A first-person narrator tells his or her own story. With this technique, authors can probe the thoughts of the narrator.
- A third-person narrator tells what happens to others. An omniscient