Facts About Modernism
- Authors: Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Works: The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, The Wasteland
- Themes: One major theme is the rejection of norms, which is essentially a defiance of society's standards and norms (for example, pre-modernism often believed religion over science which modernism attempted to change).
- Modernism believes in the progress of science and technology and in the existence of hierarchy, order, and centralized control whereas post-modernism is skeptic of progress and takes an anti-technology view and believes in fragmentation with a loss of centralized control.
- Modernism expanded after World War II since many previous ideals and notions of life was shattered and there was a need for newness in rebuilding. For example, the overwhelming loyalty to the state--which was a major factor for the war--began to waver as people realized the consequences this loyalty lead to.
My color was brown, because modernism was a change from the past--it was a paradigm shift. For example, rather than perfect the actual content, modernism focused on combining the meaning of the content through it's connection of how it was presented. Last year we read The Sound and The Fury and AP Language, which was written through multiple perspectives, including an omniscient point of view and from a character obsessed with time and one without any concept of time at all. The reason I associate a paradigm shift with brown is that to me, brown is the color of Fall, the season of change. It is a transition season, with brown being at the forefront of every leave and tree.
My image was an impossible triangle, because (going along with the idea that modernism is a paradigm shift from the generation before it's era) a paradigm shift is a change in the fundamental beliefs and ideas of a topic (such as the concept of atoms in chemistry, the ideas of differentiation in mathematics, or the focus on learning by thinking in teaching) which is quite impossible to do by diverting your full attention to it. Instead it would likely come from a burst of insight--a eureka moment. Essentially my image is the same: a brief glance will appear to show a 3-dimensional triangle but tracing from a single vertex along the triangle and arriving back at that vertex would lead you to believe that this triangle is indeed possible (a classical example of depth perception failure). To me, modernism is this impossible triangle.
My symbol was the futuristic building which is the equivalent goal of modernism but adjusted to the--let's just call it the inflation of perspective and progression. Thus this would be modernism in the current generation, where the building drastically and fundamentally differs from the current rectangular prisms that populate every neighborhood and business plaza. Modernists believed in not being limited to the past or present presumptions (perhaps it is accurate to say modernism follows the cliche of being out of the norm and full of anti-conformity). A building such of that definitely does not follow the social 'guidelines' or norms that exist for buildings and that is why it represents modernism to me.
My image was an impossible triangle, because (going along with the idea that modernism is a paradigm shift from the generation before it's era) a paradigm shift is a change in the fundamental beliefs and ideas of a topic (such as the concept of atoms in chemistry, the ideas of differentiation in mathematics, or the focus on learning by thinking in teaching) which is quite impossible to do by diverting your full attention to it. Instead it would likely come from a burst of insight--a eureka moment. Essentially my image is the same: a brief glance will appear to show a 3-dimensional triangle but tracing from a single vertex along the triangle and arriving back at that vertex would lead you to believe that this triangle is indeed possible (a classical example of depth perception failure). To me, modernism is this impossible triangle.
My symbol was the futuristic building which is the equivalent goal of modernism but adjusted to the--let's just call it the inflation of perspective and progression. Thus this would be modernism in the current generation, where the building drastically and fundamentally differs from the current rectangular prisms that populate every neighborhood and business plaza. Modernists believed in not being limited to the past or present presumptions (perhaps it is accurate to say modernism follows the cliche of being out of the norm and full of anti-conformity). A building such of that definitely does not follow the social 'guidelines' or norms that exist for buildings and that is why it represents modernism to me.