Name:
Divya parmar
Paper:
110 History of English Literature: from 1900 to 2000
Roll number: 5
Enrollment number:
4069206420210024
Email id:
divyaparmar07012@gmail.com
Batch:
2021-23 M. A. Sem -2
Submitted to:
S. B. Gardi department of English Maharaja krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar university.
➡️ Points to ponder:
Introduction of modern age
History of modern age
Characteristics of modern age
Modern age
Introduction:
Modern history is the history of the world beginning after the Middle Ages. Generally the term "modern history" refers to the history of the world since the advent of the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. During the Modern age there were two World wars. That's why people have a feeling of anger, fear, and nihilism spreaded all around the world.
History of modern age:
The Modern Age is a period in human history which spans from the 20th century begining with the period after the end of First World War and ending with the advent of the Digital revolution. This period saw the improvement of contemporary weapons and technologies in the middle of the unstability and ravages of the Second World War, as the world began to move into a more technical, but more destructive age. Tanks and airplanes grew to dominate the battlefield. Warships, for centuries kings of the sea, were supplanted by the aircraft carrier, which proved its worth time and time again at engagements like Pearl Harbor and Midway. Finally, and most significantly, the atomic bomb- nuclear weaponry- was first developed and used during this period, ushering in the Cold War.
The Modern Age is a period in human history which spans from the 20th century beginning with the period after the end of First World War and ending with the advent of the Digital revolution. This period saw the improvement of contemporary weapons and technologies in the middle of the unstability and ravages of the Second World War, as the world began to move into a more technical, but more destructive age. Tanks and airplanes grew to dominate the battlefield. Warships, for centuries kings of the sea, were supplanted by the aircraft carrier, which proved its worth time and time again at engagements like Pearl Harbor and Midway. Finally, and most significantly, the atomic bomb- nuclear weaponry- was first developed and used during this period, ushering in the Cold War.
The Cold War was a half-century long age of distrust between the United States, supported by NATO, and the Soviet Union and its allies in the Warsaw Pact. Both suspected the motives of the other; the West despised the socialist Soviet Union, while the Soviets denounced the capitalistic West. A key hallmark of the Cold War was the new military technology available to combatants, namely nuclear weaponry. Both sides began only with atomic bombs dropped from bombers, but eventually enlarged their arsenals to the point where nuclear missiles could destroy all human civilization on Earth. Although Mutually Assured Destruction in the end ironically averted nuclear holocaust, it did not end conflict: there were still many wars waged between the two ideologies. However, instead of the plains of Western Europe, these conflicts took place in undeveloped countries where both the United States and Soviet Union hoped to spread their ideology. These wars included Korea, Vietnam, and almost led to direct nuclear confrontation in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Outside of the tense nuclear situation, there were also iconic cultural revolutions throughout the world. The end of the Second World War led to the resumption of the civil war in China, creating the People's Republic of China. Led by Mao Zedong, the newly Communist China launched "the Cultural Revolution," among other programs designed to modernize China. Although they certainly managed to industrialize the primarily agricultural state, they did not come without a cost: millions of Chinese were either imprisoned or starved to death as a result of these reforms.
The modern era also saw the Civil Rights movement in the United States, which ended racial segregation which had persisted for a century after the conclusion of the American Civil War. The ascendancy of America and Russia left most traditional powers in the dust. For example, the French, severely weakened and humiliated after World War II, was unable to stop the Vietnamese revolt in its Indochinese colonies. The British Empire also dissolved, as the United Kingdom's economy was left a shattered hulk after World War II. The era of decolonization left large power vacuums throughout the old European colonies; large regions of Africa remain unstable even to this day, while the old British colony of India fell into a religious civil war almost immediately after the British withdrew. India and Pakistan are still not reconciled, and a large threat exists that they may use nuclear weaponry against each other.
Characteristics of the modern age
Arising out of the rebellious mood at the beginning of the twentieth century, modernism was a radical approach that yearned to revitalize the way modern civilization viewed life, art, politics, and science. This rebellious attitude that flourished between 1900 and 1930 had, as its basis, the rejection of European culture for having become too corrupt, complacent and lethargic, ailing because it was bound by the artificialities of a society that was too preoccupied with image and too scared of change. This dissatisfaction with the moral bankruptcy of everything European led modern thinkers and artists to explore other alternatives, especially primitive cultures. For the Establishment, the result would be cataclysmic; the new emerging culture would undermine tradition and authority in the hopes of transforming contemporary society.
The first characteristic associated with modernism is nihilism, the rejection of all religious and moral principles as the only means of obtaining social progress. In other words, the modernists repudiated the moral codes of the society in which they were living in. The reason that they did so was not necessarily because they did not believe in God, although there was a great majority of them who were atheists, or that they experienced great doubt about the meaninglessness of life. Rather, their rejection of conventional morality was based on its arbitrariness, its conformity and its exertion of control over human feelings. In other words, the rules of conduct were a restrictive and limiting force over the human spirit. The modernists believed that for an individual to feel whole and a contributor to the re-vitalization of the social process, he or she needed to be free of all the encumbering baggage of hundreds of years of hypocrisy.
The rejection of moral and religious principles was compounded by the repudiation of all systems of beliefs, whether in the arts, politics, sciences or philosophy. Doubt was not necessarily the most significant reason why this questioning took place. One of the causes of this iconoclasm was the fact that early 20th-century culture was literally re-inventing itself on a daily basis. With so many scientific discoveries and technological innovations taking place, the world was changing so quickly that culture had to re-define itself constantly in order to keep pace with modernity and not appear anachronistic. By the time a new scientific or philosophical system or artistic style had found acceptance, each was soon after questioned and discarded for an even newer one. Another reason for this fickleness was the fact that people felt a tremendous creative energy always looming in the background as if to announce the birth of some new invention or theory.
As a consequence of the new technological dynamics, the modernists felt a sense of constant anticipation and did not want to commit to any one system that would thereby harness creativity, ultimately restricting and annihilating it. And so, in the arts, for instance, at the beginning of the 20th-century, artists questioned academic art for its lack of freedom and flirted with so many isms: secessionism, fauvism, expressionism, cubism, futurism, constructivism, dada, and surrealism. Pablo Picasso, for instance, went as far as experimenting with several of these styles, never wanting to feel too comfortable with any one style.
The wrestling with all the new assumptions about reality and culture generated a new permissiveness in the realm of the arts. The arts were now beginning to break all of the rules since they were trying to keep pace with all of the theoretical and technological advances that were changing the whole structure of life. In doing so, artists broke rank with everything that had been taught as being sacred and invented and experimented with new artistic languages that could more appropriately express the meaning of all of the new changes that were occurring. The result was a new art that appeared strange and radical to whoever experienced it because the artistic standard had always been mimesis, the literal imitation or representation of the appearance of nature, people, and society. In other words, art was supposed to be judged on the standard of how well it realistically reflected what something looked or sounded like.
Ironically, the modernist portrayal of human nature takes place within the context of the city rather than in nature, where it had occurred during the entire 19th-century. At the beginning of the 19th-century, the romantics had idealized nature as evidence of the transcendent existence of God; towards the end of the century, it became a symbol of chaotic, random existence. For the modernists, nature becomes irrelevant and passé, for the city supersedes nature as the life force. Why would the modernists shift their interest from nature and unto the city? The first reason is an obvious one. This is the time when so many left the countryside to make their fortunes in the city, the new capital of culture and technology, the new artificial paradise. But more importantly, the city is the place where man is dehumanized by so many degenerate forces. Thus, the city becomes the locus where modern man is microscopically focused on and dissected. In the final analysis, the city becomes a "cruel devourer", a cemetery for lost souls.
Conclusion:
Thus to conclude we can say that modern is a time when all around sadness, hopelessness and nihilism spreaded. People have lost trust in humanity and the world has become hell. We can not say that these are some particular characteristics of the modern age because there are so many trends and movements that play a role.
Word count: 1783
Reference:
“Historical Background of Modern Age .” History of Modernism, https://www.mdc.edu/wolfson/academic/artsletters/art_philosophy/humanities/history_of_modernism.htm.
“Modern Age/History.” Rise of Nations Wiki, https://riseofnations.fandom.com/wiki/Modern_Age
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