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125-437: The Montreal Group is associated with the rise of the "little magazines", which published contemporary innovative prose and poetry in the style of British and American modernism , and later works from Europe's aesthetic and decadent movements . The Encyclopædia Britannica credits the group and its members with having "precipitated a renaissance of Canadian poetry during the 1920s and ’30s ... They encouraged an emulation of

250-718: A higher power and meaning in the world. Modernism often yearns for a romantic or metaphysical centre, but later finds its collapse. This distinction between modernism and romanticism extends to their respective treatments of 'symbol'. The romantics at times see an essential relation (the 'ground') between the symbol (or the 'vehicle', in I.A. Richards 's terms) and its 'tenor' (its meaning)—for example in Coleridge's description of nature as 'that eternal language which thy God / Utters'. But while some romantics may have perceived nature and its symbols as God's language, for other romantic theorists it remains inscrutable. As Goethe (not himself

375-560: A mystical approach to suggest a non-rational sense of meaning. For these reasons, modernist metaphors may be unnatural, as for instance in T.S. Eliot's description of an evening 'spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table'. Similarly, for many later modernist poets nature is unnaturalized and at times mechanized, as for example in Stephen Oliver's image of the moon busily 'hoisting' itself into consciousness. Modernism developed out of Romanticism's revolt against

500-677: A Circle ), which he later called the first abstract painting. In 1912, Metzinger and Gleizes wrote the first (and only) major Cubist manifesto, Du "Cubisme" , published in time for the Salon de la Section d'Or , the largest Cubist exhibition to date. In 1912 Metzinger painted and exhibited his enchanting La Femme au Cheval (Woman with a Horse) and Danseuse au Café ( Dancer in a Café ) . Albert Gleizes painted and exhibited his Les Baigneuses (The Bathers) and his monumental Le Dépiquage des Moissons ( Harvest Threshing ). This work, along with La Ville de Paris ( City of Paris ) by Robert Delaunay ,

625-409: A conservative position. Some even argue that Modernism in literature and art functioned to sustain an elite culture that excluded the majority of the population. Surrealism , which originated in the early 1920s, came to be regarded by the public as the most extreme form of modernism, or "the avant-garde of modernism". The word "surrealist" was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire and first appeared in

750-551: A desire to change how " human beings in a society interact and live together ". 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

875-401: A direct means of accessing a higher reality. Modernism often rejects 19th-century realism when the latter is understood as focusing on the embodiment of meaning within a naturalistic representation. Instead, some modernists aim at a more 'real' realism, one that is uncentered. For instance, Picasso's 1907 Proto-Cubist painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon does not present its subjects from

1000-456: A large number of people. ... Mencken is essentially a young man's critic, violent and destructive." The MFR provided a space for modernists to ply their craft, to learn from and teach each other. Years later, Edel wrote that " The McGill Fortnightly drew to it other young writers – among them A. M. Klein, Leo Kennedy, and Leon Edel – on whom, as well as on Scott, Smith had an enduring influence." The writers who contributed to

1125-425: A line from W. B. Yeats : "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" (in ' The Second Coming '). Modernists often search for a metaphysical 'centre' but experience its collapse. ( Postmodernism , by way of contrast, celebrates that collapse, exposing the failure of metaphysics, such as Jacques Derrida 's deconstruction of metaphysical claims.) Philosophically, the collapse of metaphysics can be traced back to

1250-522: A revolutionary culture that included political revolution. In Russia after the 1917 Revolution , there was indeed initially a burgeoning of avant-garde cultural activity, which included Russian Futurism . However, others rejected conventional politics as well as artistic conventions, believing that a revolution of political consciousness had greater importance than a change in political structures. But many modernists saw themselves as apolitical. Others, such as T. S. Eliot , rejected mass popular culture from

1375-442: A romantic) said, ‘the idea [or meaning] remains eternally and infinitely active and inaccessible in the image’. This was extended in modernist theory which, drawing on its symbolist precursors, often emphasizes the inscrutability and failure of symbol and metaphor. For example, Wallace Stevens seeks and fails to find meaning in nature, even if he at times seems to sense such a meaning. As such, symbolists and modernists at times adopt

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1500-479: A single point of view, instead presenting a flat, two-dimensional picture plane . The Poet of 1911 is similarly decentered, presenting the body from multiple points of view. As the Peggy Guggenheim Collection comments, "Picasso presents multiple views of each object, as if he had moved around it, and synthesizes them into a single compound image." Modernism, with its sense that "things fall apart,"

1625-406: 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. Modernism often rejects nineteenth century realism , if the latter is understood as focusing on

1750-438: A thing or arrest an experience as precisely and vividly and simply as possible." Smith wrote a number of "Imagist poems" to illustrate the theory, the best known of which is "The Lonely Land". Some later critics noted that these poems didn't incorporate imagism as expressed by Pound and Hulme, but instead adapted imagist ideas in new ways, combining the imported practices to Canadian culture and environment. In Volume II No. 4 of

1875-427: A tonal center. A primary influence that led to Cubism was the representation of three-dimensional form in the late works of Paul Cézanne , which were displayed in a retrospective at the 1907 Salon d'Automne . In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up, and reassembled in an abstract form; instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent

2000-425: A way for knowledge to explain that which was as yet unknown, came the first wave of modernist works in the opening decade of the 20th century. Although their authors considered them to be extensions of existing trends in art, these works broke the implicit understanding the general public had of art: that artists were the interpreters and representatives of bourgeois culture and ideas. These "modernist" landmarks include

2125-476: Is among the first skyscrapers in the world. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 's Seagram Building in New York (1956–1958) is often regarded as the pinnacle of this modernist high-rise architecture. Many aspects of modernist design persist within the mainstream of contemporary architecture , though previous dogmatism has given way to a more playful use of decoration, historical quotation, and spatial drama. In 1913—which

2250-775: Is another modernist movement. In 1909, the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro published F. T. Marinetti 's first manifesto. Soon afterward, a group of painters ( Giacomo Balla , Umberto Boccioni , Carlo Carrà , Luigi Russolo , and Gino Severini ) co-signed the Futurist Manifesto . Modeled on Marx and Engels ' famous " Communist Manifesto " (1848), such manifestos put forward ideas that were meant to provoke and to gather followers. However, arguments in favor of geometric or purely abstract painting were, at this time, largely confined to "little magazines" which had only tiny circulations. Modernist primitivism and pessimism were controversial, and

2375-525: Is highly regarded for his humorous short stories that he published in magazines in the 1930s and 1940s, most often in The New Yorker , which are considered to be the first examples of surrealist humor in America. Modern ideas in art also began to appear more frequently in commercials and logos, an early example of which, from 1916, is the famous London Underground logo designed by Edward Johnston . One of

2500-483: Is often presented as an early example of a writer using the stream-of-consciousness technique , but Robert Humphrey comments that Proust "is concerned only with the reminiscent aspect of consciousness" and that he "was deliberately recapturing the past for the purpose of communicating; hence he did not write a stream-of-consciousness novel." Stream of consciousness was an important modernist literary innovation, and it has been suggested that Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931)

2625-525: Is often seen as the apotheosis of Romanticism. As August Wilhelm Schlegel, an early German Romantic, described it, while Romanticism searches for metaphysical truths about character, nature, higher power , and meaning in the world, modernism, although yearning for such a metaphysical center, only finds its collapse. In the context of the Industrial Revolution (~1760–1840), influential innovations included steam-powered industrialization , especially

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2750-459: Is similarly decentred, presenting the body from multiple points of view. As the Peggy Guggenheim Collection website puts it, 'Picasso presents multiple views of each object, as if he had moved around it, and synthesizes them into a single compound image'. Modernism, with its sense that 'things fall apart,' can be seen as the apotheosis of romanticism , if romanticism is the (often frustrated) quest for metaphysical truths about character, nature,

2875-530: The Fortnightly Review ; and the first issue praised a talk Bliss Carman had given at McGill. By issue three, in which Smith offered readers an analysis of The Waste Land , the new biweekly was focused directly on the introduction of Modernism into Canadian poetry. The publication regularly criticized the Canadian Authors' Association, which the editors saw as promoting the "quasi-Victorian" verse of

3000-525: 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. Literary modernism is often summed up in

3125-446: The MFR , Smith wrote an article arguing "that the new poetry 'must be the result of the impingement of modern conditions upon the personality and temperament of the poet' ... whatever the poet's response to modern civilization, Smith rightly saw 'the peculiar conditions of the time [as having] forced them all to seek a new and more direct expression, to perfect a finer technique.' Smith saw

3250-702: The McGilliad carried the first published poem by then high school student Irving Layton . Under Lewis the magazine became more political: It published editorials about his anti-communist views, though the December 1930 issue included his article expressing approval of the Russian Revolution and calling for a greater understanding of the Soviet Union . In the late 1920s, several of the group's core members left Montreal: Smith, Glassco, Edel, and Kennedy; however, four of

3375-505: The Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. The arts of cultures other than the European had become accessible and showed alternative ways of describing visual experience to the artist. By the end of the 19th century, many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art that encompassed

3500-484: The avant-garde of various arts and disciplines. 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

3625-617: The capitalist system and that workers are anything but free led to the formulation of Marxist theory . Art historians have suggested various dates as starting points for modernism. Historian William Everdell argued that modernism began in the 1870s when metaphorical (or ontological ) continuity began to yield to the discrete with mathematician Richard Dedekind 's (1831–1916) Dedekind cut and Ludwig Boltzmann 's (1844–1906) statistical thermodynamics . Everdell also believed modernism in painting began in 1885–1886 with post-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat 's development of Divisionism ,

3750-650: The neoclassicism of the 1920s (as represented most famously by T. S. Eliot and Igor Stravinsky —which rejected popular solutions to modern problems), the rise of fascism , the Great Depression , and the march to war helped to radicalize a generation. Bertolt Brecht , W. H. Auden , André Breton , Louis Aragon , and the philosophers Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin are perhaps the most famous exemplars of this modernist form of Marxism. There were, however, also modernists explicitly of 'the right', including Salvador Dalí , Wyndham Lewis , T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound ,

3875-681: The " stream of consciousness " technique, such as Dorothy Richardson , James Joyce , and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941). Also important in Bergson's philosophy was the idea of élan vital , the life force, which "brings about the creative evolution of everything." His philosophy also placed a high value on intuition , though without rejecting the importance of the intellect. Important literary precursors of modernism included esteemed writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), whose novels include Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880); Walt Whitman (1819–1892), who published

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4000-470: The " will to power " ( Wille zur macht ), were of central importance: "Nietzsche often identified life itself with 'will to power', that is, with an instinct for growth and durability." Henri Bergson (1859–1941), on the other hand, emphasized the difference between scientific, clock time and the direct, subjective human experience of time. His work on time and consciousness "had a great influence on 20th-century novelists" especially those modernists who used

4125-458: The "Victorian mannerisms" which were in common use at the time. American journalist H. L. Mencken was a major influence on the Group's prose style. Publisher Louis Schwartz, contributed an article to The McGill Fortnightly Review in which he calls Mencken "the creator of a new sort of writing ... Americanese of a racy bumptiousness so vivacious and interesting that he is eagerly followed by

4250-606: The "dots" used to paint A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte . On the other hand, visual art critic Clement Greenberg called German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) "the first real modernist", although he also wrote, "What can be safely called modernism emerged in the middle of the last century—and rather locally, in France, with Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) in literature and Manet in painting, and perhaps with Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), too, in prose fiction. (It

4375-439: 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

4500-478: The 1860s, two approaches in the arts and letters developed separately in France. The first was Impressionism, a school of painting that initially focused on work done not in studios, but outdoors ( en plein air ). Impressionist paintings attempted to convey that human beings do not see objects, but instead see light itself. The school gathered adherents despite internal divisions among its leading practitioners and became increasingly influential. Initially rejected from

4625-463: The 1920s and 1930s were Bertolt Brecht and Federico García Lorca . D. H. Lawrence 's Lady Chatterley's Lover was privately published in 1928, while another important landmark for the history of the modern novel came with the publication of William Faulkner 's The Sound and the Fury in 1929. In the 1930s, in addition to further major works by Faulkner, Samuel Beckett published his first major work,

4750-731: The 1920s until the 1950s. While modernist poetry in English is often viewed as an American phenomenon, with leading exponents including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore , William Carlos Williams , H.D. , and Louis Zukofsky , there were important British modernist poets, including David Jones , Hugh MacDiarmid , Basil Bunting , and W. H. Auden . European modernist poets include Federico García Lorca , Anna Akhmatova , Constantine Cavafy , and Paul Valéry . The modernist movement continued during this period in Soviet Russia . In 1930 composer Dimitri Shostakovich 's (1906–1975) opera The Nose

4875-659: The 1930s. Between 1930 and 1932 composer Arnold Schoenberg worked on Moses und Aron , one of the first operas to make use of the twelve-tone technique, Pablo Picasso painted in 1937 Guernica , his cubist condemnation of fascism , while in 1939 James Joyce pushed the boundaries of the modern novel further with Finnegans Wake . Also by 1930 modernism began to influence mainstream culture, so that, for example, The New Yorker magazine began publishing work, influenced by modernism, by young writers and humorists like Dorothy Parker , Robert Benchley , E. B. White , S. J. Perelman , and James Thurber , amongst others. Perelman

5000-459: The 1970s: "We despised them unbeknownst, and you can quote me." Or as Scott later put it, "it was all through us. There was the general feeling that practically all poetry – particularly Canadian poetry – was hardly worth looking at, that something new had to be found, new methods of expression." Other modernist Canadian writers, though sometimes published in the group's magazines, were never saluted or even acknowledged in its editorials. It

5125-623: The 19th century. Arguments arose that the values of the artist and those of society were not merely different, but in fact oftentimes opposed, and that society's current values were antithetical to further progress; therefore, civilization could not move forward in its present form. Early in the century, the philosopher Schopenhauer (1788–1860) ( The World as Will and Representation , 1819/20) called into question previous optimism. His ideas had an important influence on later thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Similarly, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) and Nietzsche both later rejected

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5250-518: The Confederation Poets, the members of the Montreal Group were cosmopolitans . Although members of the Group sometimes criticized the "Maple Leaf school" of poets for being wholly dependent on an imported tradition, some detractors pointed out that they themselves usually found their influences outside Canada. Smith, in a bid to set the tone for a new type of poetry, wrote about symbolism in

5375-481: The Dutch author Menno ter Braak and others. Significant modernist literary works continued to be created in the 1920s and 1930s, including further novels by Marcel Proust , Virginia Woolf , Robert Musil , and Dorothy Richardson . The American modernist dramatist Eugene O'Neill 's career began in 1914, but his major works appeared in the 1920s, 1930s and early 1940s. Two other significant modernist dramatists writing in

5500-700: The German Nazarenes ). The Pre-Raphaelites foreshadowed Manet (1832–1883), with whom modernist painting most definitely begins. They acted on a dissatisfaction with painting as practiced in their time, holding that its realism wasn't truthful enough." Two of the most significant thinkers of the mid-19th century were biologist Charles Darwin (1809–1882), author of On the Origin of Species through Natural Selection (1859), and political scientist Karl Marx (1818–1883), author of Das Kapital (1867). Despite coming from different fields, both of their theories threatened

5625-541: The Hope of Women was the first fully Expressionist work for the theater, which opened on 4 July 1909 in Vienna . The extreme simplification of characters to mythic types , choral effects, declamatory dialogue and heightened intensity would become characteristic of later Expressionist plays. The first full-length Expressionist play was The Son by Walter Hasenclever, which was published in 1914 and first performed in 1916. Futurism

5750-490: The Impressionist Claude Monet had already been innovative in his use of perspective. In 1907, as Picasso was painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , Oskar Kokoschka was writing Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen ( Murderer, Hope of Women ), the first Expressionist play (produced with scandal in 1909), and Arnold Schoenberg was composing his String Quartet No.2 in F sharp minor (1908), his first composition without

5875-529: The Montreal Group had achieved its purposes of creating acceptance in Canada for the tenets of modernism, of encouraging Canadian poets to include elements of modernism in their work, and of developing venues for those who did so to publish their work. Many poets contributed to both Preview and First Statement ; by 1945, when the two magazines merged to become Northern Review , the Group was no longer actively promoting modernism. The McGill Group came together with

6000-535: The Montreal Group. They founded a number of "little magazines" which gave Canadian modernists the opportunity to publish in their own country. As Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski were to write four decades later, in The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada (1967): The little magazine in Canada has been the most important single factor behind the rise and continued progress of modernism in Canadian poetry. The history of

6125-594: The Montreal modernists was no different from the Imagists they took them from. In his Rejected Preface to New Provinces , Smith's discussion about the poets' attempt to "get rid of the facile word, the stereotyped phrase and the mechanical rhythm ..." and "to combine colloquialism and rhetoric. ..." was built on ideas from F. S. Flint's 1913 manifesto. Smith went on to give a definition of imagism: "The imagist seeks with perfect objectivity and impersonality to recreate

6250-609: The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776), who argued that we never actually perceive one event causing another. We only experience the ' constant conjunction ' of events, and do not perceive a metaphysical 'cause'. Similarly, Hume argued that we never know the self as object, only the self as subject, and we are thus blind to our true natures. Moreover, 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

6375-521: The Supplement and began work on an independent publication to replace it. On November 21, 1925 the McGill Fortnightly Review published its first issue and branded itself and "independent journal devoted to purely literary, artistic and scientific matter." The editorial board was A. P. R. Coulborn, A. B. Latham, F. R. Scott, A. J. M and managing editor Leon Edel ;

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6500-526: The aim of modernizing Canadian poetry, by encouraging the inclusion of imagism and symbolism, which were already being used by poets from outside Canada, including William Butler Yeats , T. S. Eliot, H.D. , Wallace Stevens , E. E. cummings and Marianne Moore . They promoted the responsibility of the poet to comment on Canadian society through realistic expression, wit and irony, rather than just lyrical descriptive passages. The Smith group drew its models and its teachings from world literature. Like

6625-555: The atonal ending of Arnold Schoenberg 's Second String Quartet in 1908, the Expressionist paintings of Wassily Kandinsky starting in 1903, and culminating with his first abstract painting and the founding of the Blue Rider group in Munich in 1911, and the rise of fauvism and the inventions of Cubism from the studios of Henri Matisse , Pablo Picasso , Georges Braque , and others, in

6750-512: The city, including King's Cross station (1852) and Paddington Station (1854). These technological advances spread abroad, leading to later structures such as the Brooklyn Bridge (1883) and the Eiffel Tower (1889), the latter of which broke all previous limitations on how tall man-made objects could be. While such engineering feats radically altered the 19th-century urban environment and

6875-459: The coming of the Great War of 1914–1918 (World War I) and the Russian Revolution of 1917, the world was drastically changed, and doubt was cast on the beliefs and institutions of the past. The failure of the previous status quo seemed self-evident to a generation that had seen millions die fighting over scraps of earth: before 1914, it had been argued that no one would fight such a war, since the cost

7000-433: The concept of absolute originality — the idea of "creation from nothingness" — upheld in the 19th century by both realism and Romanticism , replacing it with techniques of collage , 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

7125-480: 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 , modernist architecture , and urban planning . Modernism took a critical stance towards the Enlightenment concept of rationalism . The movement also rejected

7250-739: The cultural institution as a whole is through its relationship to realism and the dominant conventions of representation." More explicitly: the Expressionists rejected the ideology of realism. There was a concentrated Expressionist movement in early 20th-century German theater, of which Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller were the most famous playwrights. Other notable Expressionist dramatists included Reinhard Sorge , Walter Hasenclever , Hans Henny Jahnn , and Arnolt Bronnen . They looked back to Swedish playwright August Strindberg and German actor and dramatist Frank Wedekind as precursors of their dramaturgical experiments. Oskar Kokoschka 's Murderer,

7375-497: The daily lives of people, the human experience of time itself was altered with the development of the electric telegraph in 1837, as well as the adoption of " standard time " by British railway companies from 1845, a concept which would be adopted throughout the rest of the world over the next fifty years. Despite continuing technological advances, the ideas that history and civilization were inherently progressive and that such advances were always good came under increasing attack in

7500-527: The dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously." However, the relationship of modernism with tradition was complex, as literary scholar Peter Child's indicates: "There were paradoxical if not opposed trends towards revolutionary and reactionary positions, fear of the new and delight at the disappearance of the old, nihilism and fanatical enthusiasm, creativity, and despair." An example of how modernist art can apply older traditions while also incorporating new techniques can be found within

7625-540: 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. Similarly, many poems of Wallace Stevens convey

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7750-649: The development of railways starting in Britain in the 1830s, and the subsequent advancements in physics, engineering, and architecture they led to. A major 19th-century engineering achievement was the Crystal Palace , the huge cast-iron and plate-glass exhibition hall built for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. Glass and iron were used in a similar monumental style in the construction of major railway terminals throughout

7875-556: The effects of the Industrial Revolution and bourgeois values. Literary scholar Gerald Graff , argues that, "The ground motive of modernism was criticism of the 19th-century bourgeois social order and its world view; the modernists, carrying the torch of Romanticism." While J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), one of the most notable landscape painters of the 19th century, was a member of the Romantic movement , his pioneering work in

8000-407: The embodiment of meaning within a naturalistic representation. At the same time, some modernists aim at a more 'real' realism, one that is uncentered. Picasso's proto-cubist painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907 (see picture above), does not present its subjects from a single point of view (that of a single viewer), but instead presents a flat, two-dimensional picture plane . 'The Poet' of 1911

8125-402: The established order. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection undermined religious certainty and the idea of human uniqueness ; in particular, the notion that human beings are driven by the same impulses as "lower animals" proved to be difficult to reconcile with the idea of an ennobling spirituality . Meanwhile, Marx's arguments that there are fundamental contradictions within

8250-485: The examples of Joyce , Hemingway , Shaw , Pound and Aldous Huxley in creating the future of Canadian literature. In the Mercury's final issue, Scott reviewed Bliss Carman 's new book, Wild Garden (published posthumously; Carmen had died earlier in 1929 ), finding not one decent poem in the book. The Canadian Mercury folded in the wake of the economic Crash of 1929 . This little-known successor McGill publication

8375-446: The experimentation in the forms of the arts that was so prevalent in the 1910s and 1920s not as something that stemmed out of a conscious choice on the part of writers, but as a condition 'forced' upon them." The Montreal Group's publications rarely had anything favourable to say about the work of Canadian writers outside of their own group, and the editors often declined to read or review it. Leo Kennedy told biographer Patricia Morley in

8500-471: The face of the senseless slaughter, described in works such as Erich Maria Remarque 's novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). Therefore, modernism's view of reality, which had been a minority taste before the war, became more generally accepted in the 1920s. In literature and visual art, some modernists sought to defy expectations mainly to make their art more vivid or to force the audience to take

8625-456: The founding of the Society of Incoherent Arts. The theories of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Krafft-Ebing and other sexologists were influential in the early days of modernism. Freud's first major work was Studies on Hysteria (with Josef Breuer , 1895). Central to Freud's thinking is the idea "of the primacy of the unconscious mind in mental life", so that all subjective reality was based on

8750-444: The fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse and reflected the social and intellectual preoccupations in all areas of Western culture at that time. Wassily Kandinsky , Piet Mondrian , and Kazimir Malevich all believed in redefining art as the arrangement of pure color. The use of photography, which had rendered much of

8875-548: The group have gone on to win a Pulitzer Prize (Edel), five Governor General's Awards (Scott [2], Glassco, Klein, and Smith), three Lorne Pierce Medals (Klein, Scott, and Smith), and a National Book Award (Edel). According to the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada , "the McGill group changed the standard for writing poetry in Canada, and its sense of the function of the poet and the demands of poetic craft continued to influence

9000-632: The horse, so modernist design should reject the old styles and structures inherited from Ancient Greece or the Middle Ages . Following this machine aesthetic , modernist designers typically rejected decorative motifs in design, preferring to emphasize the materials used and pure geometrical forms. The skyscraper is the archetypal modernist building, and the Wainwright Building , a 10-story office building completed in 1891 in St. Louis, Missouri , United States,

9125-499: The idea that reality could be understood through a purely objective lens, a rejection that had a significant influence on the development of existentialism and nihilism . Around 1850, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (a group of English poets, painters, and art critics) began to challenge the dominant trends of industrial Victorian England in "opposition to technical skill without inspiration." They were influenced by

9250-423: The influence of the English poets of the 1930s." In 1942, another Montreal literary magazine, First Statement was founded by Montreal poet John Sutherland ), after Preview had rejected some of his poetry. In his magazine he criticized the Montreal Group as "too exclusive in their demand for cosmopolitan sophistication, too ready to denounce the provincial in favour of anything new from far away." By this time,

9375-426: The interactions between basic drives and instincts, through which the outside world was perceived. Freud's description of subjective states involved an unconscious mind full of primal impulses, and counterbalancing self-imposed restrictions derived from social values. The works of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) were another major precursor of modernism, with a philosophy in which psychological drives, specifically

9500-520: The last issue of the journal in 1927. The McGill Fortnightly Review published many articles and editorials about Modernism, a well as a variety of modernistic poetry. In his editorials, Smith argued that Canadian poets must go beyond the traditional poetry of Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott, and Charles G. D. Roberts, and open themselves to contemporary forms, such as free verse, imagistic treatment, displacement, and complex poetic structure. He also urged writers to dispense with

9625-481: The little magazine covers a period of some forty years and closely parallels the development of modern poetry itself from the mid-1920s to the present time. All the important events in poetry and most of the initiating manifestoes and examples of change are to be found in the little magazines." This first publication began as a weekly supplement to the McGill Daily , the university undergraduate society's newspaper, and

9750-482: The mainstream in the first decade of the 20th century was still inclined towards a faith in progress and liberal optimism. Abstract artists, taking as their examples the Impressionists, as well as Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) and Edvard Munch (1863–1944), began with the assumption that color and shape , not the depiction of the natural world, formed the essential characteristics of art. Western art had been, from

9875-425: The manager was Montreal businessman Lou Schwartz. The journal was one of the first to publish modernist poetry and critical opinion in Canada, and was considered as rebellious in tone. The journal published the work of Leo Kennedy ; A. M. Klein 's one submission was turn down because it included the word "soul", which the editors considered old-fashioned. The name came from that bastion of Victorian tradition,

10000-482: 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 . Postmodernism , meanwhile, rejects many of the principles of modernism. 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

10125-435: The mid-1920s modernism was already firmly entrenched in both British and American literature , and would eventually have come to Canada one way or another with or without the Montreal Group. Still, the members of the Group were among the first Canadian writers to embrace its tenets, worked hard to facilitate its acceptance among Canadian writers, and went on to become well-recognized as 20th century modernist poets. Members of

10250-530: The most important commercial show of the time, the government-sponsored Paris Salon , the Impressionists organized yearly group exhibitions in commercial venues during the 1870s and 1880s, timing them to coincide with the official Salon. In 1863, the Salon des Refusés , created by Emperor Napoleon III , displayed all of the paintings rejected by the Paris Salon. While most were in standard styles, but by inferior artists,

10375-495: The most visible changes of this period was the adoption of new technologies into the daily lives of ordinary people in Western Europe and North America. Electricity, the telephone, the radio, the automobile—and the need to work with them, repair them and live with them—created social change. The kind of disruptive moment that only a few knew in the 1880s became a common occurrence. For example, the speed of communication reserved for

10500-428: The music of the composer Arnold Schoenberg . On the one hand, he rejected traditional tonal harmony , the hierarchical system of organizing works of music that had guided musical composition for at least a century and a half. Schoenberg believed he had discovered a wholly new way of organizing sound based on the use of twelve-note rows . Yet, while this was indeed a wholly new technique, its origins can be traced back to

10625-451: The nature of reality. They argued that since each viewer interprets art through their own subjective perspective, it can never convey the ultimate metaphysical truth that the Romantics sought. Nonetheless, the modernists did not completely reject the idea of art as a means of understanding the world. To them, it was a tool for challenging and disrupting the viewer's point of view, rather than as

10750-409: The novel Murphy (1938). Then in 1939 James Joyce's Finnegans Wake appeared. This is written in a largely idiosyncratic language , consisting of a mixture of standard English lexical items and neologistic multilingual puns and portmanteau words, which attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams. In poetry T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings , and Wallace Stevens were writing from

10875-548: The novelist Franz Kafka , poet Gottfried Benn , and novelist Alfred Döblin were simultaneously the most vociferous anti-Expressionists. What, however, can be said, is that it was a movement that developed in the early 20th century mainly in Germany in reaction to the dehumanizing effect of industrialization and the growth of cities, and that "one of the central means by which Expressionism identifies itself as an avant-garde movement, and by which it marks its distance to traditions and

11000-423: 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 believed that modernism aspired to restore a "sense of sublime order and purpose to the contemporary world, thereby counteracting

11125-434: The poetry collection Leaves of Grass (1855–1891); and August Strindberg (1849–1912), especially his later plays, including the trilogy To Damascus 1898–1901, A Dream Play (1902) and The Ghost Sonata (1907). Henry James has also been suggested as a significant precursor to modernism in works as early as The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Out of the collision of ideals derived from Romanticism and an attempt to find

11250-490: The poets,(Smith, Kennedy, Klein, and Scott) came together in 1931 to begin the creation of an anthology, New Provinces: Poems by Several Authors . In 1934 they invited Toronto poets E. J. Pratt and Robert Finch to participate. The result, published in May 1936, was an anthology which epitomized modernist poetry in Canada." For a Preface, Smith wrote a modernist manifesto that declared Canadian poetry to be dead. The Preface

11375-487: The preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias , which was written in 1903 and first performed in 1917. Major surrealists include Paul Éluard , Robert Desnos , Max Ernst , Hans Arp , Antonin Artaud , Raymond Queneau , Joan Miró , and Marcel Duchamp . By 1930, modernism had won a place in the political and artistic establishment, although by this time modernism itself had changed. Modernism continued to evolve during

11500-628: The prevailing Romantic tradition in Canada. The Canadian Mercury 's contributors represented a transitional style, as the beginnings of Canadian modernist poetry began to emerge. The Mercury continued the modernist program begun in the Review . Attacks on the CAA continued, such as Leo Kennedy's polemic, "The Future of Canadian Literature," in which he accused the Association of promoting "archaic transplanted Victorianisms . He urged young writers to look instead to

11625-514: The priority of suggestion and evocation over direct description and explicit analogy," and were especially interested in "the musical properties of language." Cabaret , which gave birth to so many of the arts of modernism, including the immediate precursors of film, may be said to have begun in France in 1881 with the opening of the Black Cat in Montmartre , the beginning of the ironic monologue, and

11750-434: The products of consumer culture " kitsch ", because their design aimed simply to have maximum appeal, with any difficult features removed. For Greenberg, modernism thus formed a reaction against the development of such examples of modern consumer culture as commercial popular music , Hollywood , and advertising. Greenberg associated this with the revolutionary rejection of capitalism. Some modernists saw themselves as part of

11875-410: The publication gained editorial experience and direction, and eventually formed a new literary movement, the McGill group, consisting originally of Scott, Smith and Leo Kennedy. Founded in 1928 , short-lived The Canadian Mercury was the first independent periodical produced by the Montreal Group. Its editorial board consisted of Jean Burton, F. R. Scott, Leo Kennedy and Felix Walter." Publication

12000-469: The realistic themes, metaphysical complexity, and techniques of the U.S. and British poets Ezra Pound , T.S. Eliot , and W.H. Auden that resulted in an Expressionist , Modernist , and often Imagist poetry reflective of the values of an urban and cosmopolitan civilization." In the 1920s, most Canadian poetry was similar to that of English poets of the Victorian era. This style had been popularized around

12125-430: The representational function of visual art obsolete, strongly affected this aspect of modernism. Modernist architects and designers, such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier , believed that new technology rendered old styles of building obsolete. Le Corbusier thought that buildings should function as "machines for living in", analogous to cars, which he saw as machines for traveling in. Just as cars had replaced

12250-436: The rise of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, there were subsequent Expressionist works. Expressionism is notoriously difficult to define, in part because it "overlapped with other major 'isms' of the modernist period: with Futurism , Vorticism , Cubism, Surrealism and Dada ." Richard Murphy also comments: "[The] search for an all-inclusive definition is problematic to the extent that the most challenging Expressionists," such as

12375-566: The second issue of MFR . His essay, "Symbolism in Poetry," argued for the need for symbolism in modern poetry, and explaining the theory and history of its use. Smith quotes Yeats, who describes the use of symbolism as 'a casting out of descriptions of nature for the sake of nature, of the moral law for the sake of the moral law, a casting out of all anecdotes and of that brooding over scientific opinion ... and of that vehemence that would make us do or not do certain things.' The Imagism espoused by

12500-463: The stock brokers of 1890 became part of family life, at least in middle class North America. Associated with urbanization and changing social mores also came smaller families and changed relationships between parents and their children. Another strong influence at this time was Marxism . After the generally primitivistic/irrationalism aspect of pre-World War I modernism (which for many modernists precluded any attachment to merely political solutions) and

12625-472: The study of light, color, and atmosphere "anticipated the French Impressionists " and therefore modernism "in breaking down conventional formulas of representation; though unlike them, he believed that his works should always express significant historical, mythological, literary, or other narrative themes." However, the modernists were critical of the Romantics' belief that art serves as a window into

12750-596: The subject in a greater context. Cubism was brought to the attention of the general public for the first time in 1911 at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris (held 21 April – 13 June). Jean Metzinger , Albert Gleizes , Henri Le Fauconnier , Robert Delaunay , Fernand Léger and Roger de La Fresnaye were shown together in Room 41, provoking a 'scandal' out of which Cubism emerged and spread throughout Paris and beyond. Also in 1911, Kandinsky painted Bild mit Kreis ( Picture with

12875-424: The term "Expressionism" did not firmly establish itself until 1913. Though initially mainly a German artistic movement, most predominant in painting, poetry and the theatre between 1910 and 1930, most precursors of the movement were not German. Furthermore, there have been Expressionist writers of prose fiction, as well as non-German speaking Expressionist writers, and, while the movement had declined in Germany with

13000-541: The time of Confederation by Charles G. D. Roberts , Bliss Carman , Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott , and continued to prevail among Canadian poets until the early 1940s. Some Canadians, though, were writing modernist poetry: W. W. E. Ross , R. G. Everson, Raymond Knister , and Dorothy Livesay were each individually publishing Imagist poetry in free verse in American and English literary publications. Over time these poets became known as

13125-404: The times. For example, the journal's second issue derided the CAA's promotion of a Canadian "Book Week", arguing that the association should focus on the development of excellence in Canadian literature rather than the promotion of existing books regardless of quality. F. R. Scott's satirical poem ‘The Canadian authors meet’, which claimed that the association encouraged amateurism, appeared in

13250-578: The trouble to question their own preconceptions. This aspect of modernism has often seemed a reaction to consumer culture , which developed in Europe and North America in the late 19th century. Whereas most manufacturers try to make products that will be marketable by appealing to preferences and prejudices, high modernists reject such consumerist attitudes to undermine conventional thinking. The art critic Clement Greenberg expounded this theory of modernism in his essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch . Greenberg labeled

13375-469: The work of Manet attracted attention and opened commercial doors to the movement. The second French school was symbolism , which literary historians see beginning with Charles Baudelaire and including the later poets Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) with Une Saison en Enfer ( A Season in Hell , 1873), Paul Verlaine (1844–1896), Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898), and Paul Valéry (1871–1945). The symbolists "stressed

13500-401: The work of earlier composers such as Franz Liszt , Richard Wagner , Gustav Mahler , Richard Strauss , and Max Reger . In the world of art, in the first decade of the 20th century, young painters such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse caused much controversy and attracted great criticism with their rejection of traditional perspective as the means of structuring paintings, though

13625-474: The writing of poetry in Canada until the end of the 20th century." Modernism Modernism was an early 20th century movement in literature, visual 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 " and

13750-560: The writings of the art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), who had strong feelings about the role of art in helping to improve the lives of the urban working classes in the rapidly expanding industrial cities of Britain. Art critic Clement Greenberg described the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as proto-modernists: "There the proto-modernists were, of all people, the Pre-Raphaelites (and even before them, as proto-proto-modernists,

13875-443: The years between 1900 and 1910. An important aspect of modernism is how it relates to tradition through its adoption of techniques like reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision, and parody in new forms. T. S. Eliot made significant comments on the relation of the artist to tradition, including: "[W]e shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of [a poet's] work, may be those in which

14000-413: Was a while later, and not so locally, that modernism appeared in music and architecture)." The poet Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal ( The Flowers of Evil ) and the author Flaubert's Madame Bovary were both published in 1857. Baudelaire's essay " The Painter of Modern Life " (1863) inspired young artists to break away from tradition and innovate new ways of portraying their world in art. Beginning in

14125-414: Was edited by Allan Latham, A. P. R. Coulborn, and A. J. M. Smith . It included poems, articles, and book reviews. When Scott submitted a translation of "an old French chanson", Smith printed it, and subsequently invited Scott to serve on the editorial board. The Literary Supplement contained no advertising, and after a time the students' society stopped funding it; Smith and Scott closed

14250-771: Was financed by Louis Schwartz, and the resulting financial security left the board free to pursue its literary agenda. Smith and Edel, doing graduate work in Edinburgh and Paris respectively, continued to contribute by mail. Unlike the McGill-affiliated publications, the Mercury solicited contributions from a wider group of Canadian writers, and was targeted to readers beyond the Montreal area. The first issue, published in December 1928, featured an essay on "The National Literature Problem in Canada" by Canadian institution Stephen Leacock . The editors continued their campaign to publish contemporary poetry and literary criticism to counter

14375-493: Was first performed in 1935. Like Shostakovich, other composers faced difficulties in this period. 1928 in poetry Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature (for instance, Irish or France ). Including all of the British colonies that later became India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. Listed alphabetically by first name, regardless of surname: Death years link to

14500-403: Was founded in 1930 and ran until 1931. It was edited first by co-founder Klein, and then by Klein's friend, co-founder David Lewis (who would later lead Canada's socialist New Democratic Party ). The publication's name was an obvious pun on the classic epic The Iliad – privately, Klein called it the "McGill Yid" (a pun on his and Lewis's Yiddish heritage). Under Klein's editorship

14625-415: Was not until the 1940s that Smith, who at the time described Canadian literary works as backward when compared to international poetry, repudiated his stance, which he blamed on youthful ignorance. He acknowledged the work of some of his Canadian contemporaries, including W. W. E. Ross and Dorothy Livesay , and also admitted that "Lampman, Roberts and Carman had written some very fine poetry." By

14750-575: Was not used. (It was incorporated into the reprinted edition in 1976.) Leon Edel later declared, "The poems in New provinces had an impact on Canadian verse far beyond any prefatorial pronouncements: in its implicit call for new findings and new attitudes in Canadian writing, it might be likened to the effect of the Wordsworth - Coleridge Lyrical ballads in 1798 on the Romantics .... The effect of New provinces

14875-743: Was premiered, in which he uses a montage of different styles, including folk music , popular song and atonality. Among his influences was Alban Berg 's (1885–1935) opera Wozzeck (1925), which "had made a tremendous impression on Shostakovich when it was staged in Leningrad." However, from 1932 socialist realism began to oust modernism in the Soviet Union, and in 1936 Shostakovich was attacked and forced to withdraw his 4th Symphony. Alban Berg wrote another significant, though incomplete, modernist opera, Lulu , which premiered in 1937. Berg's Violin Concerto

15000-428: Was still "progressive", it increasingly saw traditional forms and social arrangements as hindering progress and recast the artist as a revolutionary, engaged in overthrowing rather than enlightening society. Also in 1913, a less violent event occurred in France with the publication of the first volume of Marcel Proust 's important novel sequence À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927) ( In Search of Lost Time ). This

15125-537: Was that it established the ‘Montreal Group’ as the Canadian avant-garde of its time." The Montreal literary magazine Preview was founded by F. R. Scott and Montreal poet Patrick Anderson in March 1942 ; A. M. Klein and P. K. Page also became part of the editorial group. Preview continued the cosmopolitan editorial policies of the McGill Fortnightly Review Its contributors showed

15250-532: Was the first to make full use of it in his short story "Leutnant Gustl" ("None but the brave") (1900). Dorothy Richardson was the first English writer to use it, in the early volumes of her novel sequence Pilgrimage (1915–1967). Other modernist novelists that are associated with the use of this narrative technique include James Joyce in Ulysses (1922) and Italo Svevo in La coscienza di Zeno (1923). However, with

15375-758: Was the largest and most ambitious Cubist painting undertaken during the pre-war Cubist period. In 1905, a group of four German artists, led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner , formed Die Brücke (The Bridge) in the city of Dresden . This was arguably the founding organization for the German Expressionist movement, though they did not use the word itself. A few years later, in 1911, a like-minded group of young artists formed Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in Munich. The name came from Wassily Kandinsky 's Der Blaue Reiter painting of 1903. Among their members were Kandinsky , Franz Marc , Paul Klee , and August Macke . However,

15500-694: Was the year of philosopher Edmund Husserl 's Ideas , physicist Niels Bohr 's quantized atom, Ezra Pound 's founding of imagism , the Armory Show in New York, and in Saint Petersburg the "first futurist opera", Mikhail Matyushin 's Victory over the Sun —another Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky , composed The Rite of Spring , a ballet that depicts human sacrifice and has a musical score full of dissonance and primitive rhythm. This caused an uproar on its first performance in Paris. At this time, though modernism

15625-454: Was too high. The birth of a machine age, which had made major changes in the conditions of daily life in the 19th century had now radically changed the nature of warfare. The traumatic nature of recent experience altered basic assumptions, and a realistic depiction of life in the arts seemed inadequate when faced with the fantastically surreal nature of trench warfare . The view that mankind was making steady moral progress now seemed ridiculous in

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