The Modernist Renouncement of Cultural Heritage

The coming of the twentieth century spurred an unprecedented metamorphosis that redefined society to many of those who inhabited it. Facets of the transformation included technological and scientific advancements that began to undermine the foundation of which many laid their belief structures upon, utterly annihilating the traditional perspective towards life. Scientists such as Darwin, who attenuated once concrete interpretations of the Bible with his evolutionary theories, or Freud, who depicted human individuality as being driven by primitive, sexual desires, illustrated that the world was not as it seemed. Accompanied by the painful shattering of many paradigms, the tragedy of the world’s first total war, the Great War, which was characterized by millions of bloody casualties and nightmarish battlefield conditions, traumatized the early twentieth century. Those tormented by these changes turned their backs to romantic tradition and heritage to embrace innovational styles that diverged from norms laid down by the Victorian era as a coping mechanism. Thus, modernism was born.

Modernist titans like T.S. Eliot depicted an infertile, dilapidated society in The Waste Land; John Dos Passos illustrated the hopeless battle between individual and the overwhelmingly powerful machine in Three Soldiers; Ernest Hemingway exemplified the degradation of morals and how alcoholism was used as a crutch in a hobbled limp in search of greater meaning in The Sun Also Rises. These individuals, in renouncement of their past cultural heritage, created a momentous movement that has left a tremendous impact still seen today.

At the forefront of this movement, Eliot, widely considered the greatest poet of the twentieth century, constructed The Waste ...

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...nged and everything was in place, but put the watch to the ear, and one heard nothing” (Hart xi).

Works Cited

Passos, John Dos. Three Soldiers. New York: George H. Doran Company, 1921. Print.

Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. The Waste Land: Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Michael North. New York: Norton & Company, 2001. 3-20. Print.

Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot’s Early Years. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Print.

Hart, Jeffrey. The Living Moment: Modernism in a Broken World. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2012. Print.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, 1926. Print.

Howard, Michael. The First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print.

Reef, Catherine. Ernest Hemingway: A Writer’s Life. New York: Clarion Books, 2009. Print.

Strachan, Hew. The Outbreak of the First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Print.