what is Modernist elements

[abudabor]

it's going crazy here i can't get what does modernism mean even what is modernist elements.:iamwithstupid:

[osho]

it's going crazy here i can't get what does modernism mean even what is modernist elements.:iamwithstupid:

This is an unspecific question and therefore you cannot expect a specific answer to your question. Anything is modernist that antagonizes or opposes the ancients, the traditional notions. And what we call modernist can in a while will be worn and will have a replacement. Everyday something new is going on and new cultures coming in that sheds all olden and obsolete.
During the renaissance there was a great surge for something new and novel and yet there was a returning to the past values once discarded and that re-intensified the Greek values their cultural aspects. This what we call modernist is always undergoing a transformation.

[Stewed]

Modernism was a movement in literature -but also all the arts- that got rolling around the end of the first world war, I think. In literature, they say it was influenced by symbolism. I don't know what symbolism as a movement was, except that it happened in France and involved symbols. & I never learned the specifics about modernism but the gist is that artists were trying to come to terms with a new, modern way of seeing the world, and of seeing how we perceive it in life and in art. In a lot of cases it shunned the old taste and values, (which were in some cases seen as discredited by the automated slaughter of the great war: Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum est was a repudiation of martial heroism, but also maybe a repudiation of Horace.) though it seems like most modernists were fairly well steeped in knowledge of the old-school. I think the new methods also involved more awareness of the reader, viewer, narrator's etc. own subjectivity, the lenses the world is filtered through. Which is not necessarily an embrace of subjectivity. Erich Aurbach said that western art was a long march towards an accurate reflection of the world; a lot of people disagreed, though. Being an avant garde and shunning the popular taste might also have led to an embrace of difficulty as a value in itself. A lot of modernist (and maybe later) poetry has been called 'small audience literature.' That's all I can remember.

[osho]

More than one factors contribute to modernism. And a century ago there were schools of modernism and even the romantics were highly modern against the classicism that prevailed previous to the romantic era. There has been post modernism and today we have post post modernism and maybe in a while henceforth we may have a new variant of modernism. But modernity has nothing to do with a great piece of literature, for example even after a century James Joyce, Virginia and some other old writers like Fitzgerald, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky are eternally modern and we have no modern writers to compare with them and therefore what we call modern is trash.

You write a story with an ultramodern theme in a while you will see a series of new stories that may shadow your sense of modernism. The idea of modernism is an allegory only.

[Stewed]

Agreed that modern doesn't = good, but modernism's still a handy definition when you've got to say things about literature, & doesn't ordinarily mean the same thing as 'modern.'

[osho]

Agreed that modern doesn't = good, but modernism's still a handy definition when you've got to say things about literature, & doesn't ordinarily mean the same thing as 'modern.'

Yes you hit on the point I missed in fact. Modern and modernism is not one and the same and is not taken to compliment each other. They are not polar opposites. It is like saying youth and youthfulness are one and the same in fact they are somewhat similar. Even an old man can have the vitality of youth and even the youth may have the limpness of the old. I have read plenty of old stories they have so much of modernism and though they are for that matter modern and inventive.

I often feel that my poems are much more obsolete and outdated than some of the metaphysical poets like John Donne or Andre Marvel.

That convinces me of the idea that modern and modernism are not necessarily indistinguishable.

[kelby_lake]

Playing around with narrative structure is a trait of modernist literature.

[mal4mac]

osho and Stewed are both right, it's another one of those words (like Literature!) that has two meanings, here's "Google define:":

modernism
1) Modern character or quality of thought, expression, or technique.
2) A style or movement in the arts that aims to break with classical and traditional forms.

TS Eliot is often described as modernist, partly because he broke with Romanticism. But he broke with Romanticism, partly, by becoming an anglo-catholic - thereby adopting another tradition, one not that popular amongst the literati of the time, but, obviously, *very* traditional. To see Eliot as a modernist, note the stress on "forms" in definition 2). He's modernist because he broke with ancient *forms*. He didn't write scriptures to back up his Catholicism, he alluded to it in a new, extremely allusive, very difficult verse form.

So Eliot was modernist in terms of technique, but not very modernist in terms of thought (except as it related to technique... and with some Buddhist & 'modern life' allusions here and there...)