Modernism

Anna Anselmo

• Publisher: EDUCatt Università Cattolica
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9788867806034
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The term "modernism" serves as a label for a variety of tendencies, attitudes, convictions, and for works of art disparate in quality and meaning, but alike in spirit and, sometimes, conception. Critics have been at pains to define modernism; some even wonder whether it should be defined at all. This introduction aims at presenting a number of critical attitudes to modernism in the hope of offering readers both a critical landscape and the necessary coordinates for the discovery of the literary and cultural patchwork of which modernism is composed.
The Oxford English Dictionary identifies "modernism" as the portmanteau term for "[a]ny of various movements in art, architecture, literature, etc., generally characterized by a deliberate break with classical and traditional forms or methods of expression;" moreover, 'modernism' refers to "the work or ideas of the adherents of such a movement". The definition is sufficiently informative, but it offers no chronological coordinates and is rather general. Every new artistic movement is characterized by "a deliberate break with classical and traditional forms or methods of expression"; in this respect, the Elizabethans were modernists, as were the Romantics; moreover, the definition not only considers "modernism" as referring to "various movements", but also mentions such disparate fields as "art, architecture, literature, etc.".
In pointing out the limits of the OED definition, I do not intend to question the lexicographers' ability; on the contrary, I intend to set forth a hypothesis: when attempting to define modernism, every effort, even the most accurate and refined, falls short of the mark, because modernism simply defies definition, as would any artistic movement which counts relative chronological indeterminateness and inherent diversity among its more interesting peculiarities. Furthermore, the idea of modernism is perhaps more enticing and familiar than the reality of it, it is thus hard to step away from prejudices and commonplaces to look at the object of study itself. "Modernism, " Lawrence Rainey writes, "is preceded by its reputation, or even by several reputations: it is endowed with authority so monumental that a reader is tempted to overlook the very experience of encountering modernist works; or it is attended with such opprobrium (the modernists were all fascists or anti-Semites, or if not that, "elitists") that one might wonder why anyone had bothered to read them at all. It is easy, too easy, to slight the grisly comedy or miss the mordant wit, to skim the surface of dazzling surprises, to neglect the sheer wildness and irredeemable opacity at the heart of modernist work". Tratto dall'Introduzione dell'Autrice

D.H. Lawrence
(1885-1930)

PIANO

1 Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;

Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see

A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling

strings

And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as

she sings.

5 In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song

Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong

To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside

And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour

10 With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour

Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast

Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for

the past.

1913

SNAKE

1 A snake came to my water-trough

On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,

To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree

5 I came down the steps with my pitcher

And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the

trough before me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the

gloom

And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over

the edge of the stone trough

And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,

10 And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small

clearness,

He sipped with his straight mouth,

Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long

body,

Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,

15 And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,

And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,

And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused

a moment,

And stooped and drank a little more,

20 Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of

the earth

On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.

The voice of my education said to me

He must be killed,

For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are

venomous.

25 And voices in me said, If you were a man

You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,

How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my

water-trough

And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,

30 Into the burning bowels of this earth.

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?

Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?

Was it humility, to feel so honoured?

I felt so honoured.

35 And yet those voices:

If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,

But even so, honoured still more

That he should seek my hospitality

40 From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough

And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,

And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, s...

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• MODERNISM
• Thomas Hardy(1840-1928)
• T.S. Eliot(1888-1965)
• D.H. Lawrence(1885-1930)