Modernism. A Brief Overview.

Hello again everyone, sorry for the lack of posts but with exams I simply have not had the time. As I have became a bit more accustomed to this blogging business I have started to realise my blog has began to become more of a literary rambling than a strict book reviewing forum. Maybe that isn't necessarily a bad thing, in today's blog I am going to try to offer a brief overview of Modernism. Hopefully to all of you who are undertaking English qualification or to those of you who are interested in viewing literature in a new light this will be of some interest. Be warned, there is far more to Modernism than I could ever possibly hope to write in a single blog post.

American writer Harold Rosenberg was described Modernism as "the tradition of the new." If we take this as a starting point we then have to consider in terms of literature what is meant by new? The "Twilight," series is new but other than being perhaps the biggest affront to modern literature, is certainly not modernist. Therefore if Modernism does not refer to new as in an event in a chronological time frame, then "new," can be considered to be a break from the old.

The old, in terms of Modernism is Realism, a way of writing that recounts events in a believable and accurate fashion, a form of prose that holds a mirror up to our own lives. Arguably realist texts in their broadest sense form the bulk of novels in circulation; it is not hard to find examples of texts that reflect real life. Some examples include; Don Quixote by Cervantes, Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy and in more recent times books such as Saturday by Ian McEwan. Therefore what Modernism does through writing in a way that is different from Realism is writes in a way that does not hold a mirror up to our lives. Works that find their base in metaphor and complex allusions. Modernism is more like a projector, it takes the real world and beams it back to us in a way which we can relate to but don't immediately recognise.

T.S Eliot's The Waste Land is seen as the avante garde Modernist text. Set around the centre of London we are provided with a series of complex metaphors that are purposefully obtuse. Lines such as "This music crept by me upon the waters And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street," illustrate how on the one hand we are presented with the familiarity of the streets of London but at the same time offered a complex metaphor in "music crept by me upon the waters," in my opinion showing how Eliot believed the war had attributed sinister faculties to sweet things such as music.

Modernism is complex, it is obtuse but it is certainly interesting. I hope my extremely brief overview has been of some use and of some interest. I can't recommend enough going out and reading some modernists texts for yourself.

Please comment to let me know what you thought, I am a bit short on reading material at the moment so any suggestions would also be hugely appreciated :)

Barbara Clough. My own poem, because we all have to try.

Barbara Clough
Loyal wife, out of the spotlight.
Pleased to be housemaid?
The old fashioned type
The angry, the jealous, the stay at home, wife!
Well, to say I was just his wife would be the understatement of the season.

I was more than that, I was his sweeper.
His Target man and his strike partner.
His playmaker.
His main man.
He was great at home.
But then he started playing away.
He said I had too much width,
That I could not handle the pressure.
Well, he was crap in the box
Fucking useless.

Total football? Total bollocks.

“I wouldn’t say I was the best manager in the business. But I was in the top one.”
Typical pig headed Cloughie.
His mates, Jesus Christ, they were just as bad.
Johnny Walker, Jack Daniels, William Grant, his loyalist allies.

My number one.
His number nine.
Straight home after the match
Brian wasn’t the only disciplinarian in the Clough household.
Then his liver went, he thought I would care.
Jack Daniels had bit him right in the backside

Good, I hoped it would bloody kill him

He had it replaced, but I would have the last laugh.
Finally relief at last
“I’m not the best in the business but I am in the top one,
then the stomach cancer came, Brian was dead, finished, gone.




Let me know what you think guys, any suggestions for improvement or any comments at all would be greatly appreciated!

One Red Paperclip

Again, just a short one
Right, I know this is not specifically to do with literature but I thought that this merited a special mention. For all four of you who follow my blog at this present time I promise I will return to literature as soon as possible.

Anyway, I was talking to a friend of mine who mentioned that a gentleman in America had traded a house for a single red paper clip. Obviously confused by the disparity in monetary value I had to investigate further. After a quick search in Google I came across his blog wherein through a series of trade this man had in fact acquired a house from one red paper clip. To all of those who read this you must have a look at his blog, it is worth it for a laugh if nothing else. In a time where money is scarce it is reassuring a home can be acquired from one red paper clip.

What do we think? Could an experiment like this work in the UK? I have a feeling that had he done it over here at best he may have ended up with one red paper clip.

Anyway, here's the link to this blog.

http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/2005/09/one-red-generator.html

Percy Shelley; The Revolt of Islam.

Hello all just a quick one today! After recently purchasing the Penguin anthology of Shelley poems there are two lines from The Revolt of Islam, which in light of current events seemed to be particularly poignant.

"The calm: for sudden, the firm earth was shaken,
As if by the last wreck its frame were overtaken."

Undoubtedly these are two beautiful lines of poetry but are so obviously significant on more than a superficial level. Transposed to today the "for sudden, the firm earth was shaken," can be viewed as a reflection on how our world is constantly changing beyond our control in unexpected ways. The use of "shaken," coupled with the purveyance of the feeling of the unexpected makes it almost too crude a comparison with the recent earthquake in Japan.

Perhaps even more interestingly the line "as if by the last wreck its frame were overtaken," in a modern context could be seen as a scathing remark on how the impact of humans is lurching the Earth from one destructive wreck to another. The use of "frame," is very much implicit that we are confined to live within our means and that the exploitation of natural resources could have disastrous consequences.

Shelley was by no means a prophet and his poem is in fact about his disillusionment with the ideas of rebellion following the dissolution of the French Revolution. In any case it is interesting that although his poem was written two hundred years ago we can still find parallels in our world today.