MODERN AGE

Modernism is a term which is not only associated in literature, but also with the great changes which corcerned all the art. This depend upon the changes of mentality and perspective in life. With the discover of relativity of Einstein, and the discover of unconsciouss of Sigmund Freud, the mentality in the world changes and the art too. Sigmund Freud in his Interpretations of dreams explained that our personality is unconsciouss and all men is moved from libido and its demands. The free association of thoughts is fondamental for Joyce and Woolf. In Modernism poetry and novel are new: they’re in break with the litterary tradition of past. The authors find new ways of expression. There is the the desire of representing the variety of urban life and the reality . The reality is fragmentary and changeable. The man or the artist detaches himself from society and detest every rational process. Life for modernist artists can’t be understood: in life it doesn’t exist rational order, but chaos.

THE NOVELThere is the destruction of traditional idea of novel. The novel hasn’t to teach, but to be a testimony or whitness. There is a new conception of time: Henry Bergson distinguishes between chronological time and memorial time: the first is real time, the second is the perception of time we have. The new conception of time in novel let use Stream of consciousness and flashback. Stream of consciousness is a narrative technique that attempts to reproduce the thought patterns of characters. A narrator does not tell us what one is thinking; the author uses stream-of-consciousness techniques to show what she is thinking. Flashback is destruction of time chronological in novel, by the use of zig zag in the past and in the future, by destroying classical conception of time of before and then.There is no one technique, but various conventions that are employed by different authors to convey psychological realism. Faulkner, Joyce, and Woolf, writing during the same period, each developed distinctive uses of stream of consciousness.

POETRY Extreme mouvements of Modernism was Italian Futurism and in France Dada group, in England there were Imagist poets. Imagism is founded by Ezra Pound. The idea is the use of precise images. Another movement is Vorticism founded by Pound and Eliot.

JOYCE

Joyce was born at Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin, on February 2, 1882. His father, who took pride in coming from an old and substantial Cork family, had some talent as a musician and much more as a genial lounger, and was little troubled by the economic straits into which is household was drifting during his son's boyhood.

Joyce was sent at first to the expensive Jesuit boarding school described in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But by the time he entered the Faculty of Arts in University College, Dublin, he was already involved in that struggle with dire poverty which was to continue into his middle years. He seems to have inherited something of his father's improvidence. He renounced the Christian faith and thereby thought to free himself from influences by which (as we can now see) his mind had been irrevocably coloured.

In 1904 Joyce again departed for the Continent, this time taking with him a girl called Nora Barnacle, who became the mother of his son and daughter, and whom he married in 1931. Miss Barnacle, who is said to have worked in a Dublin hotel [as a chambermaid], had little education and no understanding of Joyce's work; to the end she seems to have felt merely that he made things very difficult for himself by writing in so strange a fashion. But she shared the fondness for music and was vivacious and humourous. Joyce's domestic life was a happy one - although indeed checkered by a morbid jealousy correlative with his sense of persecution as a writer and in its last years darkened by his daughter's decline into insanity. He worked for many years as a teacher of English in Trieste and Zurich, in an exile which was to grow legendary with his tardily achieved fame. The course of his career, like that of so many artists of his time, was much influenced by the American poet Ezra Pound, whome he was on one occasion to describe as having taken him "out of the gutter". Pound indeed was to disapprove of Work in Progress, but before this he had been largely instrumental in sponsoring Joyce and in introducing him into circles which made easier his eventual setting in paris. There the writer who had in youth stood out against coteries became himself the center of a coterie.

His eyesight deteriorated progressively.untill the death.

Dubliners, a collection of 15 sketches or short stories, appeared in 191: his intention, he said, was to write, "in a style of scrupulous meanness," a chapter of the moral history of his country, and particularly of its capital city, which appeared to him "the center of paralysis." Some of the sketches are insubstantial and some are only deft applications to Dublin types and situations of naturalistic and realistic formulas as yet unfamiliar in English writing.

Ulysses was of very long gestation and resembles The most important character is Leopold Bloom, The theme of Odissey and the title is referred to Odissey: the travel is that of modern man. Ulysses is essentially an immense and exuberant exploration of the resources of language. The result is oftn highly fantastic and even phantasmagoric. We find here the flux of consciousness and Joyce's excursions into the complex workings of the mind often take him outside the common bounds and conventions of polite literature.

(FOR EXAMS ONLY) Ulysses is the record of a single day, Finnegans Wake (1939), for long known as Work in Progress and the exclusive object of Joyce's unremitting labour during the last 15 years of his life, is the answering record of a single night - or rather of the infinite world in which a finite mind may wander during one night's dreaming. Language as it has been evolved by men who go about their waking business may be used by the psychologist to explore the mechanisms of the unconscious; it is almost useless to the artist who would render the unconscious directly.

Finnegans Wake is a long book written in a language painfully invented by Joyce - a language designed to bear to ordinary language the same relationship that unconscious mental processes bear to conscious mental processes. A sentence in Finnegans Wake exhibits language subjected to all those processes of displacement, distortion, over-determination, condensation, secondary elaboration, and the like, which the depth psychologists of Joyce's age - Freud and, more notably for Joyce, Jung - were digging out of dreams.

Joyce, who had found himself continually harassed by censorship throughout his career, maded it the supreme task of his life to evolve as elaborately "censored" work as ever achieved by man. Where he was himself aware of the large irony of this is obscure. It is certain that the Wake, closely inquired into, is tortuously of obsessively confessional. The book cannot in any common sense be read. But it is of absorbing interest - particularly no doubt, to writers - as commemorating the most pertinaceous effort ever made to transmute language into new forms and apply it to new purposes.

EZRA POUND

Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885. He completed two years of college at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a degree from Hamilton College in 1905. After teaching at Wabash College for two years, he travelled abroad to Spain, Italy and London, where, as the literary executor of the scholar Ernest Fenellosa, he became interested in Japanese and Chinese poetry. Chinese Haiku is a short phrase who has epigrammatical value (Leave is a little dying). He married Dorothy Shakespear in 1914 and became London editor of the Little Review in 1917. In 1924, he moved to Italy; during this period of voluntary exile, Pound became involved in Fascist politics, and did not return to the United States until 1945, when he was arrested on charges of treason for broadcasting Fascist propaganda by radio to the United States during the Second World War. In 1946, he was acquitted, but declared mentally ill and committed to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. During his confinement, the jury of the Bollingen-Library of Congress Award (which included a number of the most eminent writers of the time) decided to overlook Pound's political career in the interest of recognizing his poetic achievements, and awarded him the prize for the Pisan Cantos (1948). After continuous appeals from writers won his release from the hospital in 1958, Pound returned to Italy and settled in Venice, where he died, a semi-recluse, in 1972.

He belongs to Imagist poetry and he founded Vorticism. The idea of Imagist poetry is very similar to Eliott and objective correlative: I substitute to a feeling an image  or an object who expresses the same feeling. 

              See, they return; ah, see the tentative
	     Movements, and the slow feet,
	     The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
	     Wavering!

	See, they return, one, and by one,
	With fear, as half-awakened;
	As if the snow should hesitate
	And murmur in the wind,
	               and half turn back;
	These were the "Wing'd-with-Awe,"
	               Inviolable.

	Gods of the wingèd shoe!
	With them the silver hounds,
	               sniffing the trace of air!

	[(from "The Return") Personae]

FORSTER

Edward Morgan Forster was born in London on 1 January 1879. It belongs an upper middle class family but unfortuately his father, an architect, died when of consumption before EM Forster was two years old. From 1883 to 1893 Forster lived at Rooksnest. He was educated at Tonbridge in Kent and then Kings College, Cambridge, which he remained connected with even after his graduation in 1901. He travelled extensively, living in Italy for several years and also to Greece, Germany and India. It was now that EM Forster seriously began to start writing. He had several short stories published in journals such as the 'Independant Review' and his first novel - 'Where Angels Fear to Tread' - was published in 1905 when he was only 26 years old. The "most brilliant, most dramatic and the most passionate of his works" (Lionel Trilling) and his most autobiographical novel 'The Longest Journey' was published two years later in 1907. 'A Room with a View' followed in 1908, the first part having been written years earlier when the author was in Italy. When 'Howards End' was published in 1910, Forster, at 31 years of age, was established as a respected and economically successful writer. He became a part of the Bloomsbury Group, "a set of Bohemian thinkers and doers who revolted against the manners and morals of Victorian England" (Jerry Carroll). Besides Forster, other members of the Bloomsbury Group included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Dora Carrington and Lytton Strachey. EM Forster's last novel, 'A Passage to India' was published in 1924. The story depicts the complicated reaction to the British Raj and has been called "a classic on the strange and tragic fact of history and life in India" (Lowes Dickenson). The book cemented his literary reputation and despite only writing relatively few novels, EM Forster has been acknowledged as one of the 20th century's greatest writers. Forster continued to write political essays and biographies and later became a broadcaster for the BBC. He was known as a great humanist and frequently spoke out on affairs of the day. He was awarded with membership in the Order of Companions of Honour in 1953 and he received the Order of Merit in January 1969. EM Forster died on 7 June 1970 in Coventry aged 91. His novel 'Maurice' written between 1913 and 1914 was published posthumously in accordance with his wishes. It’a scandalous novel in which he tells us the story of a homosexual Maurice and his difficult accectation.