Modernism

What is modernism?

• A cultural movement• Late 19th – early 20th C• Literature (Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Franz Kafka and T.S

Eliot)

• Architecture (Frank Lloyd Wright, Norman Foster, Le Corbusier )

• Art/ Design• Rejection of traditional style and

values

• Functionality in architecture • Rejection of distinctions between high and

low culture• Rejection of how texts ‘should’ be received• Celebration of plurality• Radical individualism against social forces

in literature

• Old traditions were outdated• Overtly self conscious• Favoured form over style• Sees the past as different and over• Traditional authorities to be questioned• Modernism attempted to rethink science,

art, culture, ethics, philosophy and psychology

• Culmination of Modernity (industrialism, capitalism, nation states, technology) - Transformation of the world

• Modernism as a cultural experience within modernity

• “All that is solid melts into air” - change and uncertainty

A Girl

The tree has entered my hands,The sap has ascended my arms,The tree has grown in my breast -Downward,The branches grow out of me, like arms.

Tree you are,Moss you are,You are violets with wind above them.A child - so high - you are,And all this is folly to the world.

Ezra Pound

Activity

• In small groups and using the internet to help brainstorm modernism as a way of thinking

• Go to www.glogster.com and begin to create posters