Characteristics of Western Modern Literature

I. The Rise of Modernism

Modernism arose out of the turbulent social reality of the two world wars and the alienated social environment after the war. For some Western writers and artists, contemporary history is a huge scene of unproductive and chaotic chaos, the traditional creation is no longer applicable, only a variety of anti-traditional forms and styles can express the despair and chaos presented by the history of the scene, breaking out of the prison of monoculture towards the whole. Thus, on the basis of modern Western cultural and philosophical trends, artists focused their works on the complex feelings of despair over the human environment and the intolerable "metaphysical" pain of human existence with abstract meanings. The typical feature of modernist works in terms of ideological content is its expression of a deep sense of crisis and an urgent sense of change in modern Western capitalist culture and civilization.

The representative works of modernism

Modernism has a wide range of genres, and the works are colorful. Symbolism has Metrlink's play The Blue Bird, Baudelaire's collection of poems The Flowers of Evil, Expressionism has Strindberg's play Sonata for Ghosts, Schoenberg's twelve-tone system of musical works Warsaw Survivors, and Cubism has Picasso's Guernica, Aviator, and Picasso's The Ghosts. The Cubist Picasso's "Guernica", "The Maid of Avignon", Surrealism Dali's "Memory of Eternity", "Venus with drawers", etc..

Third, the main characteristics of modernism

In terms of artistic characteristics, subjectivity and introversion are the important features of modernism, which often focuses on reflecting the reality with the instinct-driven and changeable inner self, and often stirs up the expression of the real world and the psychological world, and pursues the reality of the psychological world under the extrusion of the real world and the reality of the real world under the distortion of the psychological world. The pursuit is the truth of the psychological world under the pressure of the real world and the truth of the real world under the distortion of the psychological world.

The metaphorical, ambiguous, and polysemous nature of the thematic ideas of modern art is the result of the extensive penetration of modern social sciences, especially philosophy and psychology. Thus "the emphasis on reason, the interest in dialectic, the love of paradoxical logic, and the use of symbols, metaphors, allegories, etc., all point to a conscious quest for a philosophical character in their work." The abstraction and symbolization of allegory, the characters in many works are often the carrier of ideas, the pursuit of "deeper philosophical connotations and as much information as possible", so as to inspire the audience to think, and "simplify the complexity, back to basics".

In terms of expression, the artist advocates "disassociation", i.e., "to make people's familiar experience unfamiliar, and to cause people to re-understand this experience from another angle"; he pursues innovation in expression, often using symbols, metaphors, allegories, hints, and the unconscious, The pursuit of innovation in expression, often using symbols, metaphors, allegories, hints, the unconscious, stream of consciousness, dreams, absurdity, paradox and other ways of exploration and means of expression, so as to convey the unspeakable meaning behind things.