The Challenge of the New
As members of the Year 9 Athenaeum pondered the meaning of “A Carafe That Is a Blind Glass” by Gertrude Stein, from her anthology Tender Buttons, published in 1914, they were facing, as contemporaries had done, the challenge of the new.
Comparing it with Robert Browning’s “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad”, they were easily able to see not only the differences in structure but also the emotional impact and, more tantalisingly, the location of meaning.
Moving on to the towering figure of literary modernism, Virginia Woolf, it became clearer to what extent Modernist writers were subverting so many traditional features of literature, especially the novel. No longer was there one clear narrative voice, clear characterisation, and a definite sense of time; Joyce’s Ulysses takes place in a single day, and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway centres around the preparation for a party. In poetry and drama respectively, T. S. Eliot and Luigi Pirandello abandon traditional forms, whilst Kafka imagines waking up as a beetle! Much as the six characters in Pirandello’s play were in search of an author, many readers at the time may have been searching for reassuring forms and messages.
There was only time in the lesson to hint at Modernism’s enormous reach in cinema, science, and music — but that leaves, as the Modernists might approve of, plenty to look forward to!
