20th Century Avant-Garde Movements
Bilingualism and Diglossia
The linguistic phenomenon in which a society speaks two or more languages is called bilingualism. According to their prestige and social value, languages are divided into two types of bilingualism:
- Individual: Occurs when a bilingual speaker uses different languages without contact, both in oral communication and written.
- Social: Concerns not only the individual but also society. Social bilingualism occurs when an imbalance arises in the use of languages in contact.
Features of Current Spanish
Phonetic and Orthographic Features
The phonetic system of the Spanish language is made up of 5 vowels and 19 consonants. It presents intensity accents represented graphically with the tilde, and its orthography is simple.
Lexical Features
Most of the vocabulary comes from Latin, but its openness allows for the incorporation of new terms by different mechanisms, such as a tendency to lexical formation, frequent use of acronyms, euphemisms, abundant use of political jargon, and so on.
Morphological and Syntactic Features
Morphologically, Spanish is characterized by the distinction of gender and number in nouns and adjectives, and by complex verbal inflection. Syntactically, it distinguishes the possibility of omitting the subject. Other features include: adverbialization of adjectives, use of the main infinitive verb, employment of “to” to enhance negation, fillers, a tendency to mitigate the expression of an order, and so on.
Avant-Garde Movements
Artistic and cultural movements arose in Europe with a clear eagerness for renewal and change from previous approaches. Followers of the avant-garde movement tried to hold a revolution in every field of society and not only in the artistic one.
Features
- Rejection of previous art events: The avant-garde considered useless and with no artistic contribution all previous cultural movements.
- Creativity and originality above everything: Interest in any innovative aspect.
- Experimentation: Thematic search for surprising and new forms of expression.
- Irrationality: Expression of the deeper facets of the human mind.
- Elitism: Monitoring by a select minority audience attracted by the renovating aspect of the new art.
- Rebellion and provocation: Purpose of differentiating themselves from the masses and, at the same time, the intention to provoke with their art.
- Playful intention: Art for art’s sake. The avant-garde avoided the transcendental artistic sense, understanding it as something self-sufficient.
Futurism and Fauvism
Futurism
Marinetti founded the first avant-garde movement known as Futurism. The futurist manifesto advocated, among other things:
- The radical rejection of the past: Art is focused on the future.
- The attraction of recently released machines: The attractive design and speed of the automobile and the airplane become inevitable emotions and attractions to the modern world.
- The unsentimental: For futurists, human pain is not more important than the feeling of an electric lamp.
- The apology of violence: The Futurists argue for a radical destruction based on the clean expiration of an artistic type considered alien to the proposed ideology.
Future Techniques
Future literature aims to achieve a new expression by destroying syntax, omitting punctuation signs, and eliminating conventional images, leading to wireless imagination and freedom of words.
Fauvism
Appears in Paris. It can be considered one of the first pictorial movements of the twentieth century, and it had a reduced impact on art and literature. The artists of this movement performed in the Salon d’Automne with gaudy works and arbitrarily applied colors. Among these painters, Henri Matisse stands out.
Expressionism, Cubism and Dadaism
Dadaism
Founded by the Romanian writer Tristan Tzara. The chosen term means nothing in particular, as it is the babbling of a child. Dadaism gave up meaning for spontaneity and improvisation. This aesthetic annihilation blocked the creation of literary works and convincing systems against art and the beauty of art.
Cubism
Cubism had more of an impact on painting than on literature. The general characteristic of this art movement was the attempt to bring reality from different viewpoints and all at once. The most innovative compositions were calligrams.
Expressionism
This avant-garde movement of Germanic origin emerged in the early twentieth century. It was based on the following aspects:
- Inner reality: The inner reality is more important than the exterior one.
- Interpretation of reality: The artist interprets their anguish and frustrations.
- Inner turmoil: This disturbance of the artist addressed the audience with the objective of influencing them through their work.