Characteristics & Themes
This feeling of disillusionment and loss of traditional values is a central emotional theme in many Modernist works.
What is alienation or spiritual barrenness?
This Southern Author created the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, as the setting for many of his novels.
Who is William Faulkner?
The technique of writing exactly what a character is thinking, often jumping from one idea to the next without clear order.
What is Stream of Consciousness?
This massive global conflict, which ended in 1918, is often cited as the single greatest source of Modernist disillusionment and pessimism.
What is World War I?
This French thinker is famous for proving his existence with the phrase: "I think, therefore I am."
Who is Rene Descartes?
Modernist writers often rejected the traditional, omniscient narrator in favor of a narrator who is this.
What is a subjective or unreliable narrator?
This poet wrote the fragmented, 434-line poem titled The Waste Land.
Who is T. S. Eliot?
The poetic movement that said poems should use everyday language and focus on presenting one clear, concrete picture or "image" at a time.
What is Imagism?
The period between the two World Wars, which encompassed the height of Modernist literary output, is often referred to by this name.
What is the Interwar Period?
The belief that true knowledge comes mainly from thinking and reason, not from what you see or touch.
What is Rationalism?
Modernists often presented reality as broken and non-linear, emphasizing this structural element in their plots and narratives.
What is fragmentation?
This author and figure of the Harlem Renaissance wrote the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Who is Zora Neale Hurston?
The name of the fictional Mississippi county that William Faulkner created and used as the setting for almost all of his novels and stories.
This technological innovation, which allowed artists to capture non-linear, fragmented, and multiple perspectives, influenced how Modernist writers structured their narratives.
What is the cinema (or motion pictures)?
This major German philosopher from the Enlightenment tried to find a balance between reason and experience in his famous work, Critique of Pure Reason.
This key theme suggests that the natural world, social institutions, and even human reason are no longer sources of comfort or meaning.
What is the breakdown of civilization (or order)?
This author wrote poetry, plays, and novels that often focused on the struggles of everyday black life, as seen in the poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers."
Who is Langston Hughes?
The term for a writer making a quick, indirect reference to a famous historical event, Bible story, or piece of literature, assuming the reader will understand the hidden meaning.
What is Allusion?
A mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North and West, which inspired the cultural explosion known as the Harlem Renaissance.
What is the Great Migration?
The belief that all knowledge must come from our five senses and our experiences of the world.
What is Empiricism?
This Modernist characteristic requires the reader to actively interpret multiple, shifting perspectives within the narrative rather than relying on a single, clear viewpoint.
What is relativism or multiple perspectives?
This Nobel Prize-winning author wrote The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms.
Who is Ernest Hemingway?
The name given to the group of American writers, including Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who lived in Paris after being deeply disappointed by World War I.
The passage of this amendment in the U.S. in 1920 guaranteed women's right to vote, reflecting a massive shift in social and political roles that Modernist writers explored.
What is the 19th Amendment?
The ethical idea that the best action is the one that creates the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people.
What is Utilitarianism?