12:36. a draft.
Intro:
Now that you know more about Conrad’s life, it’s important to place his life and his work in a larger social and historical context. My goal is to introduce the modernist movement and explain it’s relationship to the many other movements of the time.
-realism, romanticism, dadaism, lost generation
Definition of Modernism is elusive. Definitions are often circular, too vague, too narrow. More useful to outline the conventions, influences, and attitudes of the time that would later be calledthe Modernist Period.
Difficult to accurately pin Modernism to a specific time.
not modernism, but modernisms
-modernism vs high modernism (pre and post WWI)
-Frank Kermode’s paleo vs neo (pre and post WWI)
-modernism as a reaction to WWI
-modernism as beginning in 1910
Virginia Woolf:
“On or about December, 1910, human character changed”
this statement, written in 1924, was a modernist mantra for its time
-writing about the london scene as a modernist epicenter
-periodicals Blast, Vortex captured the energy of the time
Necessary to go back further in time to understand the age of modernism
Significant works in multiple disciplines:
1890 – Frazer’s “Golden Bough”
-first modernist mythology. viewed myth from a cultural perspective, not theological.
1900 – freud’s “interpretation of dreams”
-heavy emphasis on the unconscious and underlying motivation of human behavior
-stream of consciousness as a view into the subconscious
1905 – einstein’s “theory of relativity”
-turned objective, concrete physics completely around to reflect a more observer-oriented science
1912 Jung’s “psychology of the unconscious”
-again, an emphasis on the underlying thought process of human motivation
-inner consciousness over outer action
These groundbreaking revolutions of hard science and social science contributed to what would later be called the Modernist Movement, one branch of which is literary modernism.
Literary Modernism
Precedents:
Romanticism (1798-1832) – Reaction against restrain and universalism of the enlightenment. Rejected logic and reason as the highest ideals. Celebrated spontaneity, subjectivity, purity of nature.
-Blake, Shellley, Keats, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe
Victorianism – (1832-1901) – Emphasis of nationalism and absolutism. Humans over and above nature. Highlighted themes of Protestantism, patriarchy, and industrial sophistication.
-Dickens, Hardy, Kipling, Wilde
Realism (1830-1900) – Accurate, detailed portrayal of contemporary life
-Balzac, Flaubert, George Eliot, Maupaussant, Tolstoy, Twain
Modernism as a reaction against these:
-emphasized humanism over nationalism
-argued for cultural relativism
-blurred dichotomies (civilized, savage)
-antiheroes or uncategorizable characters
-challenging the teleology of the world
-reflected a shift from objective view to subjective view
Conclusion:
All of these can be seen in Conrad’s works, especially in Heart of Darkness (1899) and Lord Jim (1900). These were written 11 years before Woolf’s comment, 15 years before WWI.
This makes Conrad is one of the first modernist writers. Writing at the tail end of realism and voctorianism, his work still contains some of these conventions, combined with a new modern perspective.
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