BBC In Our Time: “Literary Modernism”
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss literary modernism.With John Carey, Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford University; Laura Marcus, Reader in English at the University of Sussex; Valentine Cunningham, Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p00547fv
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"Modernism claimed to be revolutionary, and has been accused of being wilfully obscure. Some modernist writers campaigned for the rights of working women, others embraced fascism. What were the movements defining features, and do the questions that exercised the genre at the start of the twentieth century have relevance to us at the beginning of the twenty-first?"
With this introduction, Melvyn Bragg poses a question for his guests and they start debating about modernism and its implications.
In his first intervention, Professor John Carey raises the notion of fragmentation as a typical characteristic of modernism, in terms of philosophy, education and of course literature, which can be seen not only in characters but also in plots and poems. If we take for example, “The Second Coming”, by Yeats, I think it is quite an example of what Carey is saying.
Then, Laura Marcus, following with the idea of flickering, links modernism with avant- garde movements like futurism and scepticism, since all of them share features like rupture and newness. All this brings about a revolutionary aesthetic, which, from my point of view can be seen in most of the works we are dealing with this year, from Joyce to Elliot to name but two of them. In particular, Marcus mentions Virginia Woolf and her notions of subjectivity and identity.
Professor Valentine Cunningham raises the question of awareness and scepticism, since, he considers, contrary to other opinions, that modernists were not sceptical. He mentions some examples like Ezra Pound and Elliot who despised democracy. Unlike them, Joyce was considered low-bred since he was of a poor origin. Then he mentions Freud as the source of flickering as he starts to study the brain. Carey even points out that Eliot, Yeats, Pound and some others even embraced fascist ideas.
Marcus then engages in the debate of how Freud influenced those writers, as for instance Woolf claimed that she hadn’t read him till the end of her life. However, in my opinion her use of the stream of consciousness is related to Freud’s studies one way or another. Carey engages in talking about universal education. He points out that most modernists were, in fact, against it. Maybe that’s the reason why they despised Joyce since he had studied in a boarding school. They, in fact, wanted to exclude the mass from education, which is not, as I see it, modern at all. They were elitist people, generally speaking. Marcus, disagrees with this Carey’s vision by pointing out that Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, she was eenxtremely conscious about women, and the working class. She even went to labour party meetings.
Then, the three of them discus English poetry and how difficult the times were for writing poetry, since there was a total break with previous times. The hatred of the mass and even the misogyny associated to that. Although Carey claims that the mass does not exist as they are a bunch of people who you do not even know, so, the term mass does not exist as such. They mention The Waste Land as an example of how easy it was for them to despise little men, since in his work, Elliot depicts the clerk as a minor individual.
They move on to address the question of gender and how modernism approached it. Marcus thinks there is a kind of ambiguity about gender among modernists. I totally agree with this view, since we have examples like Woolf, for whom the issue of women was a core topic in her works, but then we have many other examples which prove that it was also a time of misogyny and sexism, as Marcus points out. In fact, they mention the example of Sons and Lovers as an example of Lawrence misogyny, although Carey thinks that this novel in particular is not the most representative of Lawrence hatred to women.
Finally, they debate about the role of technology in modernism and how it brought modernity into cities. So they argue about this idea that modernism happened to be antimodern, since it rejected modernity. As I see it, this is not always true at least not for all issues and not for all modernists, although, as we have been discussing all through this text, sometimes modernists were far from modernity in their ideas.
"Modernism claimed to be revolutionary, and has been accused of being wilfully obscure. Some modernist writers campaigned for the rights of working women, others embraced fascism. What were the movements defining features, and do the questions that exercised the genre at the start of the twentieth century have relevance to us at the beginning of the twenty-first?"
With this introduction, Melvyn Bragg poses a question for his guests and they start debating about modernism and its implications.
In his first intervention, Professor John Carey raises the notion of fragmentation as a typical characteristic of modernism, in terms of philosophy, education and of course literature, which can be seen not only in characters but also in plots and poems. If we take for example, “The Second Coming”, by Yeats, I think it is quite an example of what Carey is saying.
Then, Laura Marcus, following with the idea of flickering, links modernism with avant- garde movements like futurism and scepticism, since all of them share features like rupture and newness. All this brings about a revolutionary aesthetic, which, from my point of view can be seen in most of the works we are dealing with this year, from Joyce to Elliot to name but two of them. In particular, Marcus mentions Virginia Woolf and her notions of subjectivity and identity.
Professor Valentine Cunningham raises the question of awareness and scepticism, since, he considers, contrary to other opinions, that modernists were not sceptical. He mentions some examples like Ezra Pound and Elliot who despised democracy. Unlike them, Joyce was considered low-bred since he was of a poor origin. Then he mentions Freud as the source of flickering as he starts to study the brain. Carey even points out that Eliot, Yeats, Pound and some others even embraced fascist ideas.
Marcus then engages in the debate of how Freud influenced those writers, as for instance Woolf claimed that she hadn’t read him till the end of her life. However, in my opinion her use of the stream of consciousness is related to Freud’s studies one way or another. Carey engages in talking about universal education. He points out that most modernists were, in fact, against it. Maybe that’s the reason why they despised Joyce since he had studied in a boarding school. They, in fact, wanted to exclude the mass from education, which is not, as I see it, modern at all. They were elitist people, generally speaking. Marcus, disagrees with this Carey’s vision by pointing out that Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, she was eenxtremely conscious about women, and the working class. She even went to labour party meetings.
Then, the three of them discus English poetry and how difficult the times were for writing poetry, since there was a total break with previous times. The hatred of the mass and even the misogyny associated to that. Although Carey claims that the mass does not exist as they are a bunch of people who you do not even know, so, the term mass does not exist as such. They mention The Waste Land as an example of how easy it was for them to despise little men, since in his work, Elliot depicts the clerk as a minor individual.
They move on to address the question of gender and how modernism approached it. Marcus thinks there is a kind of ambiguity about gender among modernists. I totally agree with this view, since we have examples like Woolf, for whom the issue of women was a core topic in her works, but then we have many other examples which prove that it was also a time of misogyny and sexism, as Marcus points out. In fact, they mention the example of Sons and Lovers as an example of Lawrence misogyny, although Carey thinks that this novel in particular is not the most representative of Lawrence hatred to women.
Finally, they debate about the role of technology in modernism and how it brought modernity into cities. So they argue about this idea that modernism happened to be antimodern, since it rejected modernity. As I see it, this is not always true at least not for all issues and not for all modernists, although, as we have been discussing all through this text, sometimes modernists were far from modernity in their ideas.
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