Modernist literature

MODERNIST LITERATURE


Modernism as a literary movement reached its height in Europe between 1900 and the mid-1920s. ‘Modernist’ literature addressed aesthetic problems similar to those examined in non-literary forms of contemporaneous Modernist art, such as painting. Gertrude Stein’s abstract writings, for example, have often been compared to the fragmentary and multi-perspectival Cubism of her friend Pablo Picasso.).

The Modernist emphasis on radical individualism can be seen in the many literary manifestos issued by various groups within the movement. The concerns expressed by Simmel above are echoed in Richard Huelsenbeck’s First German Dada Manifesto of 1918: “Art in its execution and direction is dependent on the time in which it lives, and artists are creatures of their epoch.

Modernist literature involved such authors as Knut Hamsun (whose novel Hunger (1890) is considered to be the first ‘modernist’ novel), Virg inia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Dylan Thomas, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, James Joyce, Hugh MacDiarmid, William Faulkner, Jean Toomer, Ernest Hemingway, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Joseph Conrad, Andrei Bely, W. B. Yeats, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Luigi Pirandello, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Jaroslav Hašek, Samuel Beckett, Menno ter Braak, Marcel Proust, Mikhail Bulgakov, Robert Frost, Boris Pasternak, Djuna Barnes, and others.

IGOR STRAVINSKY (1882-1971)
Paris’ Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, on May 29, 1913,was the setting of the most notorious event in the musical history of the 20th century – the world premiere of The Rite of Spring. Trouble began with the playing of the first notes, in the ultra-high register of the bassoon, as the renowned composer Camille Saint-Saens conspicuously walked out, complaining loudly of the misuse of the instrument. Soon other protests became so loud that the dancers could barely hear their cues. Fights broke out in the audience. Thus, Modernism arrived in music, its calling card delivered by the 30-year-old Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.
LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE (1886-1969)


Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, along with Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, is one of the twentieth century’s most influential architects. Despite having no architectural training, his influence can be seen in cities the world over, from Anchorage to Adelaide, and the term ‘Miesian’ is now used to compliment the simplest, most elegant examples of Modernist architecture.