Chapter 5 The Modern Period
I. Objectives:
To get a good idea of the historical and cultural background of the modern period;
To know some representative authors of this period, including their life experiences, major works and artistic features;
To analyze and appreciate the selected readings.
II. Learning and teaching focuses:
An excerpt from Mrs. Warren's Profession;
D. H. Lawrence and Sons and Lovers;
"Araby"
III. Anticipated difficulty: the analysis and appreciation of the selected readings.
IV. Teaching methods and strategies: Class discussion and analysis.
V. Main body
An Introduction to the Period
Historical and cultural background
Two world wars→the collapse of the once sun-never-set Empire
The rise of philosophical ideas:
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: scientific socialism
Einstein: theory of relativity
Freud: analytical psychology
Friedrich Nietzsche: the doctrines of power and superman
Henry Bergson: irrational philosophy
Modernism (symbolism, expressionism, surrealism, futurism, Dadaism, imagism and stream of consciousness)
Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base.
The major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between man and nature, man and society, man and man, and man and himself.
The modernist writers concentrate more on the private than on the public, more on the subjective than on the objective. Therefore, they pay more attention to the psychic time than the chronological one.
Modernism rejects rationalism.
English poetry
early years: Thomas Hardy and the war poets of the younger generation→
"modern poetry" (Pound, Eliot and Yeats's matured poetry)→
1930s: "the red thirties" →
1950s: "The Movement" (a return of realistic poetry)
Novels
early years: the continuation of the Victorian tradition (John Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, and Arnold Bennett) →

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