Modernism and the Generation of ’98: Key Aspects
Modernism
Modernism is a facelift that collects and presents the vital innovative attitudes, philosophical and artistic ends of the nineteenth century, resulting from a crisis of conscience, a bourgeois reaction against materialism and the utilitarian spirit of the time. Modernism developed between 1885 and 1915. It expresses beauty with a new sensitivity on the issues and a new, very precious language, then becomes more intimate and essential and less contrived. It is a movement that has different influences:
- Parnassianism: a cult of beauty, the senses, to formal perfection, and defends art for art’s sake, extreme aestheticism. Also, a preference for mythological elements, biblical, exotic, and historical evocations. Théophile Gautier and Leconte de Lisle are its most important representatives.
- Symbolism: looking for music and art to suggest intuitively, through symbols, correspondences between the outer and inner reality. Symbolists include Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé.
Characteristics of Modernism
- The aesthetic beauty and vital principle: Art and beauty are the new idols. Poetry attempts to explain all the arts, to try to turn life into art, and create a “literature of the senses” through bright plastic effects (colorful adjectives, lexical sensory and sensual), phonetic and musical effects (alliteration, onomatopoeia, parallelism…). In poetry, rescue lines such as the Alexandrian or eneasílabo, adopt blank verse and free verse, seek renewed marked accentual rhythms, rhymes, very sound. Consider how rare is beautiful: words strange, strange mix of semantic fields, metaphors and images, rare and amazing.
- Melancholy and the vitality and life attitudes: The modernists feel existential angst. They appreciate the irrational and sentimental. They relate the interior to the outside world through symbols and feel an intense vitality, very sensual, exalting life and its pleasures, even to the badness.
- “Escapism”: They take escape routes to the unpleasant reality: intimacy, fantasy, escape in space (exotic), escape in time (the Middle Ages chivalry).
- Cosmopolitanism and localism: They are citizens of the world, polyglot and cosmopolitan, very local and authentic, the “andalucismo” Americanism, the “indigenous issues”.
Steps in the Generation of ’98
- Youth ’98 (until 1900): Juvenile stage of rebellion against the Spanish culture and society, reflecting the crisis of bourgeois consciousness.
- Advocacy Group of Three (1901-1910): Azorín, Baroja, and Maeztu published in 1901 a manifesto regeneration and Europe.
- The contemplative idealism (1905-1910): Activism just in a contemplative and skeptical idealism is markedly individualistic. The priority was to change the mentality of the Spanish people.
- Maturity and dissolution of ’98 (from 1910 onwards): Each author takes his own personal way, ideologically in the aesthetic, that if they all remain committed to maintaining an idealism in one way or another.
Features of the Generation of ’98
- Philosophical concerns, existential and religious: The authors of ’98 were asked about the meaning of human existence, about time, about death, about God, from a philosophical perspective irrational. That conflict creates a struggle between intellectual and vital: contemplative thought, faced with the life that seeks to state in the action. This perspective explains the trial and the novel, including poetry, blurring their boundaries.
- The theme of Spain: It increases from the disaster of ’98. Spain’s theme arises from the mental plane of ideas and beliefs. For this project on the Spanish reality a subjective, lyrical even, which is capable of capturing the “soul sleep” in Spain.
- History and intra-history: The critical inquiry in the past, which lies mainly in what Unamuno called intra-history “the quiet life of millions of people without history”, with its experiences create deep and important history.
- Renewal of literary language: The modernist literary language needs to renew the nineteenth century. They want a more precise language that is meaningful and express ideas. They will have a clear style: usually simple and quick, with a preference for shorter sentence, coordination, short paragraph, the rich and precise vocabulary. Renew novelistic technique.