Qarshi davlat universiteti xorijiy tillar fakulteti ingliz tili va adabiyoti kafedrasi

 
THE CONCEPT OF MODERNISM
The large cultural wave of Modernism, which gradually emerged in Europe and the 
United States in the early years of the 20th century, expressed a sense of modern life through art 
as a sharp break from the past, as well as from Western civilization's classical traditions. Modern 
life seemed radically different from traditional life -- more scientific, faster, more technological, 
and more mechanized. Modernism embraced these changes.
In literature, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) developed an analogue to modern art. A 
resident of Paris and an art collector (she and her brother Leo purchased works of the artists Paul 
Cé, Paul Gauguin, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Pablo Picasso, and many others), Stein once explained 
that she and Picasso were doing the same thing, he in art and she in writing. Using simple, 
concrete words as counters, she developed an abstract, experimental prose poetry. The childlike 
quality of Stein's simple vocabulary recalls the bright, primary colors of modern art, while her 
repetitions echo the repeated shapes of abstract visual compositions. By dislocating grammar and 
punctuation, she achieved new "abstract" meanings as in her influential collection 
Tender 
Buttons
(1914), which views objects from different angles, as in a cubist painting:
A Table A Table means does it not my dear it means a whole steadiness. Is it likely that 
a change. A table means more than a glass even a looking glass is tall. 
Meaning, in Stein's work, was often subordinated to technique, just as subject was less 
important than shape in abstract visual art. Subject and technique became inseparable in both the 
visual and literary art of the period. The idea of form as the equivalent of content, a cornerstone 
of post-World War II art and literature, crystallized in this period.
Technological innovation in the world of factories and machines inspired new 
attentiveness to technique in the arts. To take one example: Light, particularly electrical light, 
fascinated modern artists and writers. Posters and advertisements of the period are full of images 
of floodlit skyscrapers and light rays shooting out from automobile headlights, movie houses, 
and watchtowers to illumine a forbidding outer darkness suggesting ignorance and old-fashioned 
tradition.
Photography began to assume the status of a fine art allied with the latest scientific 
developments. The photographer Alfred Stieglitz opened a salon in New York City, and by 1908 
he was showing the latest European works, including pieces by Picasso and other European 
friends of Gertrude Stein. Stieglitz's salon influenced numerous writers and artists, including 
William Carlos Williams, who was one of the most influential American poets of the 20th 
century. Williams cultivated a photographic clarity of image; his aesthetic dictum was "no ideas 
but in things."

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Henry James, William Faulkner, and many other American writers experimented with 
fictional points of view (some are still doing so). James often restricted the information in the 
novel to what a single character would have known. Faulkner's novel 
The Sound and the Fury
(1929) breaks up the narrative into four sections, each giving the viewpoint of a different 
character (including a mentally retarded boy).
To analyze such modernist novels and poetry, a school of "new criticism" arose in the 
United States, with a new critical vocabulary. New critics hunted the "epiphany" (moment in 
which a character suddenly sees the transcendent truth of a situation, a term derived from a holy 
saint's appearance to mortals); they "examined" and "clarified" a work, hoping to "shed light" 
upon it through their "insights."