Modernism: the mythic method, the objective correlative and impersonality

MODERNISM

Impersonality

The mythical method In using the myth, in manipulating a

“The poet has not a

continuous parallel between

personality to express,

contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr.

but a particular medium,

Joyce is pursuing a method which

which is only a medium and

others must pursue after him. [....] It

not a personality, in which

is simply a way of controlling, of 

impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. The

The Waste

The Second 

 Land 

Coming

ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy

emotion of art is

which is contemporary history. It is

impersonal.” (T.S. Eliot)

a method already adumbrated by Mr. Yeats, and of the need for which I believe Mr. Yeats to have been the first contemporary to be conscious. (T.S. Eliot)

 Rhapsody on a

Ulysses

windy might 

Objective correlative “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is  by finding the ‘objective correlative’, in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall  be the formula of that  particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” (T.S. Eliot)

FUTURISM -Bisogna distruggere la sintassi disponendo i sostantivi a caso, come nascono ; One

must destroy syntax by arranging arranging nouns at random, as they are born.

- “Distruggere nella letteratura l’«io»” ; Destroy the “I” in literature - “Sostituire la psicologia dell’uomo, ormai esaurita, con l’ossessione lirica della materia”; Substitute man’s psychology, now exhausted, with the lyrical obsession with matter ” (From the Manifesto tecnico della Letteratura Futurista)