Modernism in Literature: Themes and Style

Theme of Modernism

Literature of the Senses

Some writers focused on the sensuous external, seeking formal perfection and beauty.

Privacy Literature

This points to the expression of intimacy, the author's feelings, which can be vitalistic or optimistic, anxious or melancholic.

Recurring Themes

1. The Spiritual Crisis

Feelings of loneliness, melancholy, sadness, and the uprooting from a society that is unable or unwilling to understand the artist, often in opposition to the rational and real. Expression was achieved by means of symbols.

2. Evasion

The writer, immersed in a reality they dislike, must manifest their disconformity somehow. Some attempt to transform reality through criticism and political action, but others prefer to escape that reality and forget it. There are three different ways to the evasion of reality:

1. The world of dreams.
2. A temporary escape into past worlds.
3. The temporary escape to exotic worlds.

3. Cosmopolitanism

This is an impact of the necessity of evasion, resulting in a devotion to the great city and the bohemian life.

4. The Feeling of Love

It oscillates between two poles: the idealization of love and understanding women as unattainable or impossible love. The vitalistic conception of love is marked by sex and pleasure.

5. Search for Roots

Recovery of the pre-Columbian past and its myths to assert themselves against the Spanish tradition.

Modernist Style

Modernism was the meeting of the new with beauty, buried during the 19th century by a general tone of bourgeois poetry.

Modernist Aesthetics

1. Attempt to capture multiple values by word sense.
2. Abundance in phonic elements to achieve the musicality of the verse.
3. Lexical enrichment through the introduction of cultisms and neologisms.
4. Adjectives are plentiful and often ornamental.
5. Utilization of synesthesia.
6. Metaphors and images are stunningly original.
7. Preference for long lines and the alteration, characterized by freedom from traditional lines and stanzas.

Phases of Modernism

1. Canonical Modernism

Aestheticism, escapism, literature of the senses, Parnassian influence.

2. Postmodernism

Less aestheticism, more compromise, privacy literature, influence of symbolism.

Characteristics of Modernism

1. Rejection of everyday reality. Before this, two options existed: escape in time or space.
2. Aristocratic attitude and preciousness.
3. Search for beauty.
4. Fidelity to the great classical verse as a test metric for variations on these patterns.
5. Use of mythology and sensationalism.
6. Large lexical renewal.
7. Search for formal perfection.
8. They are individualistic.
9. Review of the Castilian metric toward the Latin.
10. Desire to innovate and reach a level as refined as European literature.