Modernism and Post-Modernism

With the advent of the 20th century, culture and industry sky-rocket into a feverish pace: factories manufacture products at an assembly-line pace; studios produce and premiere films and make a new kind of cultural royalty known as movie stars; musicians and other artists craft new ways of interacting with their audiences while making bold statements about life; and writers attempt to capture the constantly changing voice of their generation. Modernism is highlighted by the emptiness and yearning for meaning left after the two largest global conflicts in modern human history: WWI and WWII. Between the two wars, tens of millions of lives, both civilian and military, were lost, and hundreds of millions of lives were affected permanently and irrevocably. The poetry and art of this time period in England follows that attempt to explain the sheer magnitude of the destruction caused: compare them to the jarring realities described by American Modern poets, like Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, and e.e. cummings.

In response to the artistic and written expression of Modernism, Post-Modernism arose to highlight (among other things) the audacity and irony of the act of thinking about thinking (meta-cognition) and the act of thinking about two completely opposing concepts (cognitive dissonance).

The anchor text in this unit is the haunting and poetic The Hollow Men (1925) by T.S. Eliot. Read through the poem and its lecture notes, as well as the other secondary texts, below and compare your observations with the genre lecture notes and discussions from class.