UTEL
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Glossary of Literary Theory |
Modernism
:
A term used to describe the characteristic aspects of literature and
art between World War I and World War II. Influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche's
annunciation of the death of God Karl Marx's view of consciousness as a
product of sociohistorical factors, Sigmund Freud's view of the unconscious
as the determinant of motivation and behavior, and the dislocating effects
of the carnage and devastation of the war, modernism embodies a lack of
faith in Western civilization and culture -- its humanism
and rationalism. In poetry, fragmentation, discontinuity, allusiveness,
and irony abound; in fiction, chronological disruption,
linguistic innovation, the stream-of-consciousness device, and point-of-view
narration; in art and theater, expressionism
and surrealism.
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