Literary Analysis of Modernist Literature
Literary Analysis of Modernist Literature
Assignment Content
Assignment Content
1. Write a 3-page literary analysis of one of the short stories from the assigned readings for Module 02, explaining how the author used characteristics of modernist literature or dystopian elements to create the dominant theme of the short story. You should include five of the terms used in your Module 02 literary terms exercise, and highlight the unique elements utilized in either modernist or dystopian fiction from your reading this week. Consider the following:
· What was the main theme of your chosen story? (This is the main idea or message of the story). Examples of theme might be man vs. technology, man vs. nature, love, death, coming of age, freedom, the hero, or heroine’s quest, etc.
· If you chose a dystopian story, what vision of the future did the reading reflect?
· Which of the literary terms or characteristics of modernist fiction did you find in your chosen story? (See your lesson content and literary terms in Module 02 for more on these).
Focus as much as you can on how this short story exemplified the genre you have selected. You will also find it helpful to research the selected work online and in our library. You may use more than one article for your paper. Research includes at least one outside library article on the work selected.
Your paper must be written in APA format. Use the APA template from the Course Guide to complete this assignment. You should have an APA cover page; two full pages of essay text with in-text citations, quotes, and lines from the readings; and a reference page.
This week Readings
Activity Time: 8 hours, 30 minutes
· 40 Short Stories: A Portable Anthology
· “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin
· “Araby” by James Joyce
· “A Hunger Artist” by Franz Kafka
· “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson
· Yiu, A. (2003). Three-dimensional reading: Stories of time and space in Japanese modernist fiction, 1911-1932. University of Hawaii Press.
· “Hell in a Bottle” by Yumeno Kyusaku
· Haddon, M. (2003). The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
· Continue reading this week; no assignments on this work until Module 3 (Next 50 pages recommended) (Cloud Library edition)
Literary Terms 2 (Please use those words in your writing/essay)
In any field of study, you will find vocabulary and terms that are unique to that field. As you study literature, and in particular the differences between genres and styles across the decades covered in this course, you will find it helpful to utilize the particular terms associated with reading and analyzing works of literature.
Learning these terms will help you as you work through the readings, write about literature in your writing assignments, and prepare you for the final exam. Please make a note of any unfamiliar terms and their definitions, so that you may refer to them while studying. Many of these may be found in the glossary of your text, and some may be found within the lessons as you progress through the course.
Dadaism
A philosophy that rejected any s form of authority and created works which focused on mocking the establishment in art, music, and literature.
Anti-hero
A leading character, male or female, without positive attributes and status found in classic drama.
Nihilism
Total rejection of belief in anything; felt life was “meaningless”.
Surrealism
A 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature that sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind (e.g., irrational juxtaposition of images).
Stream of Consciousness
In fiction, the technique designed to represent a character’s inner thoughts, which flow in a stream without grammatical structure, punctuation or apparent coherence.
Utopian
A kind of fiction that imagines perfect social, moral, and physical worlds for the characters or citizens.
Didactic
A kind of fiction that is designed to present or demonstrate a moral, religious, political, or other belief or position.
Modernism
A movement that represented a radical break with conventions of the past, including religion, art, literature, and science.
Dystopian
A kind of fiction that illustrates the negative consequences of a so-called perfect society, usually created by technological advances leading to totalitarianism.
Primitivism
A recurrent theory or belief, as in philosophy or art, that the qualities of chronologically early cultures are superior to those of contemporary civilization.
This is just a side note for you to understand this theme of modernist literature or dystopian elements to create the dominant theme of the short story.
· Modernism and Modernist Literature
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“Modernism , in the arts, a radical break with the past and the concurrent search for new forms of expression. Modernism fostered a period of experimentation in the arts from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, particularly in the years following World War I” (Encyclopedia Britannica, Modernist, 2018).
In the 1800s, literature primarily had been either “realistic or naturalistic.” Both of these writing styles were predominantly born out of an artistic sensibility that an artist should portray the world as he or she saw it. With the enormous changes in society in the early part of the twentieth century, these ideas were used less frequently as more artists chose to experiment with poetry, drama, and fiction. There was less emphasis on conventional structure in the arts and more on creating a reaction within the audience. In art, it was Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Frieda Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and others who pushed the boundaries of traditional art into explorations with impressionism, primitivism, surrealism, and cubism. Their paintings were unlike anything the world had ever seen and challenged the public to leave the traditional world of the realists behind.
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Modernism, then, is tied to modernization but is different. As a result of the marked changes in the world, writers around the globe began to respond to these changes and events in literary styles that were revolutionary to their audiences. Since the human condition was changing, writers began to document those differences and experiment with a new way to represent the changes through literature. The rising middle class and the industrial age created new audiences, people now had more leisure time, and thus more time to develop an interest in the arts. These changes resulted in the birth of Modernist Literature.
Characteristics of Modernist Literature
Women were also now working alongside men in many occupations, thus changing the way society perceived their roles. WWI and WWII saw many women doing the jobs that traditionally only the men had pursued. After the war, many women wanted to continue to work, and many fought to change their traditional roles in society. Modernist literature reflected the struggles and frustration of a post-war society. A theme of modernism is that “reality” can be described only regarding the observer’s position, which is impermanent and changes from moment to moment. Modernist authors also were concerned with urban problems that all the new industrialization had brought to the cities. Modernist literature tended to have bleak expectations about the future and what it held for humanity. Modernist literature encompasses fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and drama.
· Utopian vs. Dystopian Fiction
The utopian vision in literature was first explored by Sir Thomas More in his Utopia, a socio-political satire written in Latin in 1516. Later authors used this definition to come to mean an idealized or perfect society where all live in harmony and under ideal conditions. Other authors like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, used a fictional utopian society to create a satire about the politics of their period. A utopian society is a place that by its very definition is impossible to attain as it would be a place of perfection. The opposite vision of that vision is dystopian.
Dystopian Literature
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What was the dystopian vision of humanity’s future? Dystopian literature can be seen in many science fiction novels of the 20th century as humanity moved into the technological age. Many feared the industrial revolution would erode man’s highest ideals and man would be ruled by the machines he created. In reading and comparing works like George Orwell’s 1984 and other modern novelists like Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, we are shown visions of a future where corporations run the world and survival depend on adhering to “Big Brother’s” decrees on what is acceptable.
How do you relate our society to the dystopian author’s view of what would come of the 21st century? Perhaps you are more familiar with the genre as it relates to popular 21st-century fiction. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games Trilogy, James Dash’s Maze Runner, Lois Lowry’s The Giver, and Veronica Roth’s Divergent series are all considered dystopian fiction. All of these novels were also translated into multiple languages and transformed by way of films, which also had a global audience that seemed to grow ever more fascinated with an imagined dystopian future.
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Modernist dystopian literature had its beginnings in the 19th century with an E.M. Forester short story, The Machine Stops, written in 1888 and published in 1909. This work is usually considered the first work of true dystopian literature. H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, written in 1895, is also considered one of the “pioneer dystopian” novels, along with We by Russian author, Yevgeny Zamyatin, published in 1921. All of these stories had this in common: They take place in a future ruled by a totalitarian government where individual freedom is a long-dead notion, and the state rules absolute over humanity. To stray from the path of the state is to court certain death in these societies.
Often, a dystopian future is imagined after a third World War, or another apocalyptic event has happened. The fictional protagonist is usually a strong believer in the totalitarian government, but through a series of events becomes disillusioned and rebels against the rules that such a society has deemed essential for survival in this post-apocalyptic world. Dystopian fiction is also often didactic fiction where the attitude and beliefs of the author are evident as the novel strives to teach a moral lesson, usually compassion or an overall warning for society as in Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984.
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