ShmoopTube
Where Monty Python meets your 10th grade teacher.
Search Thousands of Shmoop Videos
Crisis 507 Views
Share It!
Description:
Modernism was meant to solve the world's problems, but some authors—Virginia Woolf and Ezra Pound, for example—had a few crises of their own.
Transcript
- 00:04
Crisis, a la Shmoop. The twentieth century didn't start out so
- 00:08
great. Russia wentÉ redÉ and bid a fond farewell to the tsar and his family.
- 00:17
After the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire got shot, Europe lost its collective mind
- 00:24
and millions of people ended up dead.
- 00:27
Twenty-five percent of the global population caught a really nasty case of the flu.
Full Transcript
- 00:30
Heck, the Titanic was slayed by an iceberg. With so many crazy things happening, people
- 00:37
felt like they were living amidst an ongoing crisis. Writers of the age responded to this
- 00:42
in differentÉ sometimes opposingÉ ways.
- 00:45
The American poet Ezra Pound, for example, didn't like the language in which poetry was
- 00:50
written at the time. Way too many adjectives.
- 00:56
He decided to start the Imagism movement, the goal of which was to create an extremely
- 01:01
specific...
- 01:03
...yep, you guessed it...
- 01:04
...image in the reader's mind. Pound sought clarity in poetry. He wanted
- 01:09
to strip away past conventions, romanticism and rhetoric, and abstraction.
- 01:13
Pound also may have come up with Imagism as a marketing gimmick to help his friend Hilda
- 01:18
Doolittle...
- 01:18
...no relation to Eliza or Doctor...
- 01:24
...get her work published in Europe. It must have worked, because here we are one hundred
- 01:29
years later, still talking about how very important Imagism was to twentieth century
- 01:34
poetry. Pound may have wanted poetry to be hard and
- 01:37
polished, but the author Virginia Woolf believed the writing of the time should be more diffusedÉ
- 01:46
sort of like a spider web of different human perspectives.
- 01:51
For Woolf, one of the worst symptoms of the crisis of Modernism was the loneliness of
- 01:56
modern life.
- 01:57
And we figure she knew all about loneliness, given that she killed herself in 1941 by going
- 02:03
for a very permanent swim in the local river. Of course, loneliness and that sense of crisis
- 02:11
that helped define Modernist writing weren't the only feelings Woolf thought people needed
- 02:15
to overcome.
- 02:21
The prudishness associated with the late nineteenth century was still alive and very well in Woolf's
- 02:28
day.
- 02:29
So, not only was the world going to hell in a handbasket, but folks were supposed to be
- 02:34
very proper and moral...
- 02:35
...and never, ever, ever, ever talk about sex.
- 02:43
With that combo in play, no wonder Woolf thought that her writing should help readers feel
- 02:46
more connected to one another; that her purpose should be to reach out and touch someone...
- 02:53
...through literature, Virginia. Through literature. Pound and Woolf were two very different writers,
- 03:01
with two very different viewpoints of the Modernist movement.
- 03:04
Some prefer Pound's method of annihilating innocent adjectives...
- 03:08
...others dig Woolf's more lyrical prose.
- 03:10
Too bad Woolf went for a swim without end and Pound decided to add Italian fascism to
- 03:15
his repertoire of crazy.
Related Videos
The Modernists thought the world had a lot of problems, and they were intent on fixing them—or at least talking about fixing them. Unfortunately,...
This video discusses the major ideas of the satirical American war novel Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. The horror of war meets…absurdity and humor?...
This video explains Federalism and the quest for a fair balance between state and national power. It covers the progression and compromises of Fede...
We may all be fools when it comes to love, but thankfully none of us will accidentally switch places with our twin brother and fall in love with ou...