Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, performing arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and social issues were all aspects of this movement. Modernism centered around beliefs in a "growing alienation" from prevailing "morality, optimism, and convention"'Modernism (art)', Britannica online and a desire to change how "human beings in a society interact and live together".'Social structure, Britannica online
The modernist movement emerged during the late 19th century in response to significant changes in Western culture, including secularization and the growing influence of science. It is characterized by a self-conscious rejection of tradition and the search for newer means of cultural expression. Modernism was influenced by widespread technological innovation, industrialization, and urbanization, as well as the cultural and geopolitical shifts that occurred after World War I. Artistic movements and techniques associated with modernism include abstract art, literary stream-of-consciousness, cinematic montage, musical atonality and twelve-tonality, modern dance, modernist architecture, and urban planning.
Modernism took a critical stance towards the Enlightenment concept of rationalism. The movement also rejected the concept of absolute originality — the idea of "Creatio ex nihilo" creation out of nothing — upheld in the 19th century by both realism and Romanticism, replacing it with techniques of collage,Eco (1990) p. 95 reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision, and parody. Another feature of modernism was reflexivity about artistic and social convention, which led to experimentation highlighting how works of art are made as well as the material from which they are created. Debate about the timeline of modernism continues, with some scholars arguing that it evolved into late modernism or high modernism.Morris Dickstein, "An Outsider to His Own Life", Books, The New York Times, 3 August 1997; Anthony Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics: From Pound to Prynne. Postmodernism, meanwhile, rejects many of the principles of modernism.
Overview and definition
Modernism was a cultural movement that impacted the arts as well as the broader Zeitgeist. It is commonly described as a system of thought and behavior marked by self-consciousness or self-reference, prevalent within the avant-garde of various arts and disciplines.Everdell, William, The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth Century Thought, University of Chicago Press, 1997, . It is also often perceived, especially in the West, as a socially progressive movement that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment with the aid of practical experimentation, scientific knowledge, or technology. From this perspective, modernism encourages the re-examination of every aspect of existence. Modernists analyze topics to find the ones they believe to be holding back progress, replacing them with new ways of reaching the same end.
According to historian Roger Griffin, modernism can be defined as a broad cultural, social, or political initiative sustained by the ethos of "the temporality of the new".Griffin, Roger. “Fixing Solutions: Fascist Temporalities as Remedies for Liquid Modernity.” Journal of Modern European History / Zeitschrift Für Moderne Europäische Geschichte / Revue d’histoire Européenne Contemporaine, vol. 13, no. 1, 2015, pp. 5–23. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26266161. Griffin believed that modernism aspired to restore a "sense of sublime order and purpose to the contemporary world, thereby counteracting the (perceived) erosion of an overarching 'nomos', or 'sacred canopy', under the fragmenting and secularizing impact of modernity". Therefore, phenomena apparently unrelated to each other such as "Expressionism, Futurism, Vitalism, Theosophy, Psychoanalysis, Nudism, Eugenics, Utopian town planning and architecture, modern dance, Bolshevism, Organic Nationalism — and even the cult of self-sacrifice that sustained the Hecatomb of the First World War — disclose a common cause and psychological matrix in the fight against (perceived) decadence." All of them embody bids to access a "supra-personal experience of reality" in which individuals believed they could transcend their mortality and eventually that they would cease to be victims of history to instead become its creators.
Religion was similarly influenced by new scientific, philosophical and political developments of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and this led to the development of Catholic modernism.Bella, Julius I. "Father Tyrrell's Dogmas." Church History, vol. 8, no. 4, 1939, pp. 316–341. JSTOR T. S. Eliot was influenced by Catholic Modernism.Anna BUDZIAK, "Modernism and Muddle: Religious Implications of T. S. Eliot’s Use of the Term", e-Rea [En ligne], 15.2 | 2018, mis en ligne le 15 juin 2018, consulté le 12 mai 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/erea/6200 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/erea.6200 Haut de page. Writing in the Catholic Encyclopedia in 1911, the Jesuit Arthur Vermeersch gave a definition of modernism in the perspective of the Catholic heresiology of his time:In general, we may say that modernism aims at that radical transformation of human thought in relation to God, man, the world, and life, here and hereafter, which was prepared by Humanism and eighteenth-century philosophy, and solemnly promulgated at the French Revolution.
Modernism, Romanticism, Philosophy and Symbol Literary modernism is often summed up in a line from W. B. Yeats: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" (in "The Second Coming").James Longenbach, for instance, quotes these words and says, "What line could feel more central to our received notions of modernism?" in his chapter, "Modern Poetry" in David Holdeman and Ben Levitas, W.B. Yeats in Context, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p.327. Longenbach quotes Cynthia Ozik, who said, "That [i.e. this line], we used to think, was the whole of Modernism.... Now we know better, and also in a way worse. Yeats hardly foresaw how our dissolutions would surpass his own'. See Cynthia Ozick, 'The Muse, Postmodernism and Homeless', New York Times Book Review, 18 January 1987. Modernists often search for a metaphysical "center" but experience its collapse.According to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Lyotard claims that "Modern art is emblematic of a sublime sensibility, that is, a sensibility that there is something nonpresentable demanding to be put into sensible form and yet overwhelms all attempts to do so." See section 2 ("The Postmodern Condition") of the article on Postmodernism at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/#5. (Postmodernism, by way of contrast, celebrates that collapse, exposing the failure of metaphysics, such as Jacques Derrida's attempt at the deconstruction of metaphysical claims.)See section 5 ("Deconstruction") in "Postmodernism", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/#5.
Philosophically, the collapse of metaphysics can be traced back to the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776), who argued that we never actually perceive one event causing another.On Hume's part in the history of Modernism, see for instance 'Modernism and Postmodernism' in encyclopedia.com at https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/modernism-and-postmodernism We only experience the 'constant conjunction' of events, and do not perceive a metaphysical 'cause'.See The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed Ted Honderich. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, p.378.
Similarly, Hume argued that we never know the self directly, being blind to our true natures.As the Oxford Companion to Philosophy puts it, 'We have no impression of a simple, identical self, so we can have no idea of any such thing.' The Companion goes on to explain that 'Hume's own view is that mankind is nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions' and that Hume 'maintains a steady scepticism about personal identiy' See The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, p.379. As Roderick Chisholm put it, Hume in effect argues that we do not know the self as object, only the self as subject (though Hume does not use the language of subject and object, since this belongs to the later post-Kantian tradition).Chisholm, R., Person and Object: A Metaphysical Study, Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1976. See also Luca Forgione, 'Descartes and Hume on I-Thoughts', Thémata. Revista de Filosofía 57 (2018), 223 Hume himself says, 'For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception'.See A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I.iv, section 6. In the same section, Hume also claims that we 'are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions', though there is disagreement between commentators over whether this is an ontological claim (that the self just is the bundle) or an epistemological claim (we only know of the self as a bundle). See Humeanism and Strawson, Galen (2009). "7.6 Thin subjects: James and Hume". Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics. Oxford University Press.
Hume's scepticism about the self underlies later Modernist explorations of a de-centred self—for instance in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway or The Waves.Maya Kronfeld, 'Spontaneous Form: Four Studies in Consciousness and Philosophical Fiction', p.58. Kronfeld documents the likely source of Woolf's interest in Hume, in the writings of Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, on Hume (pp.70–72). See: https://escholarship.org/content/qt4v62w98x/qt4v62w98x_noSplash_fdca4c31c3abd7c891a77193b08610c7.pdf?t=qhtt74 More generally, if we only 'know' through sensory experience—such as sight, touch and feeling—then we cannot 'know' and neither can we make metaphysical claims.
Thus, modernism can be driven emotionally by the desire for metaphysical truths, while understanding their impossibility. Some modernist novels, for instance, feature characters like Marlow in Heart of Darkness or Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby who believe that they have encountered some great truth about nature or character, truths that the novels themselves treat ironically while offering more mundane explanations.Daphne Erdinast- Vulcan explores Conrad's relation to Modernism, Romanticism and metaphysics in Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. David Lynn describes Nick Carraway as "A synthesis of disparate impulses whose roots lie in nineteenth-century Romanticism and Realism[.] Nick's heroism is borne out in his assuming responsibility for Gatsby and in the act of narration." See 'Within and Without: Nick Carraway', in: The Hero's Tale, chapter 4, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989. Similarly, many poems of Wallace Stevens convey a struggle with the sense of nature's significance, falling under two headings: poems in which the speaker denies that nature has meaning, only for nature to loom up by the end of the poem; and poems in which the speaker claims nature has meaning, only for that meaning to collapse by the end of the poem.