Modernism

Modernism is a term applied retroactively to certain literary and artistic trends at the beginning of the twentieth century. Certain modernist characteristics can be discerned in post-1960 culture. Contemporary culture seems less to have gone on to new concerns and issues than it seems to have institutionalized certain modernist characteristics as if they had meaning in their own right. In a sense, though, they are used to avoid meaning altogether or to give the illusion of meaning where there is none. The disjointed time sense, the flight from the conventions of realism, and the adoption of complex new forms and styles in the modernist period were undertaken to provide new meaning, to illuminate the world in a different way, and to show different relationships within the observed world. Aspects of the trend can be discerned in three films from the 1960s: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), Dr. Strangelove (1964), and Midnight Cowboy (1969).

Modernism rejected traditions that existed in the nineteenth century and sought to stretch the boundaries, striking out in new directions and with new techniques. More was demanded of the reader of literature or the viewer of art. Answers were not presented directly to issues raised, but instead the artist demanded the participation of the audience more directly in elucidating meaning and in seeing the relationship between technique and meaning (Baldick 140). In part, this was a response to the discovery and dissemination

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been a shared illusion. The viewer is expected to participate in the unfolding of the drama in a modernist way--answers are not made clear, and the ultimate meaning of the entire night's exercise is left to the individual viewer. The characters themselves are uncertain about the reason for their fighting, and the two couples interact in a way evocative of psychodrama. The older couple is in control of aspects of this psychodrama, though they do not shape their own responses as well as they do those of the younger couple they are using as pawns in the battle taking place between the two of them, between George and Martha. The use of Virginia Woolf as part of a rewritten children's rhyme relates to the fact that the husband is a professor of literature, but the type of work for which Virginia Woolf was known also has meaning. Virginia Woolf is noted for her novels, which featured a new type of literary style based on psychology and deemed "stream-of-consciousness," but she is also known for her criticism and essays on literary subjects. The act of writing was an important human action for her, and she explored the meaning of this communicative process especially in terms of gender, in terms of the expression of women writers

Category: Philosophy - M