How did literature become modern?

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How did literature become modern?

Greetings, dear @adsactly readers. I start as an author in this blog, after some time following the interesting and various productions that are published here. I intend to offer you a thematic series that may be of interest to all of you, especially to readers of literature. It is about presenting you with a panoramic vision, as if it were a walk, through the origin and development of modern western literature, making brief stops in some parts and primordial representatives. I hope it is to your liking and motivation.

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The first thing is a basic clarification. We must be aware that the term modern is controversial (and even ambiguous) in its meaning. How many times it is used without knowing exactly what is meant by that word. Its first and principal meaning has to do with its origin, that is, its etymology. Scholars point out that the origin of the adjective "modern" appears in Latin at the end of the 5th century as "modernus", coming from modo which means "recently, recently, now"; it designates what is present, what is present, what is present, what is spoken of, and would thus be distinguished from what is old or what is ancient. As is logical, the word will evolve and be loaded with a certain complexity; for example, how the distance between the present and the past is almost eliminated, making the old something "new" through change (fashion is its demonstration).

From modern other words will be derived later, such as modernity, whose birth is located in the nineteenth century (with two important writers: Balzac and Baudelaire), noun key to our approach. Modernity** can be understood in two complementary ways: as an epoch and as a culture.

_{Freedom guiding the people, by Delacroix, 1830. Fuente}

As an epoch, there are two different theses: the one that places its beginnings in the Renaissance, relating it to the appearance of the bourgeoisie, the Reformation and the expeditions of discovery of other regions, such as America. And the other thesis, with greater support, which situates it towards the second half of the 18th century, linking it to that European intellectual moment called Illustration (or Iluminism), which had its location in England, Germany and especially in France, with thinkers such as Diderot, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, etc. There the changes and values that will rule until our days are incubated and settled.

As culture, modernity inherits and inaugurates an era (which for many is not yet over) whose distinctive feature will be critique: of religion, morality, politics, philosophy, art. From it, from critical reason, arose or renewed the cardinal ideas that still move us: progress, freedom, fraternity, democracy, autonomy, revolution, rationality, among others.

_{Roman of Renart Fuente}

But how do modernity and literature fit together? What drives or concretizes literary modernity? The answer lies in Romanticism, considered the first aesthetic movement, particularly literary, of modernity. The etymology of the word that serves as its name has different explanations; the most accepted is that which associates it with the English adjective "romantic" or the French "roman", both related to the "old novels" with the "romance" (chivalrous song or story, and hence the relationship with Christianity), which connects the term with the sense of the fictitious, the unreal, the unusual.

The origins of Romanticism can be found at the end of the 18th century with advanced artists such as Goethe and Schiller in Germany, James Thompson in England and Chateaubriand in France. But its development will be in the first half of the nineteenth century, and its main achievements in the three countries indicated: Germany, England and France, extending to all of Europe then and then traveling to America.

_{Goethe in the Roman countryside (1786), por Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein.Fuente}

Numerous specialized studies have been written on this cultural movement that marks the beginning of modern Western literature, where it is characterized. The writer Octavio Paz (Mexican, Nobel Peace Prize laureate) synthesizes its transcendent meaning in this way:

Romanticism was the great change not only in the domain of letters and arts, but in imagination, sensitivity, taste, ideas. It was a moral, an erotic, a politics, a way of dressing and a way of loving, a way of living and dying.

In order to characterize it, it has been said that it is a "revolt of the soul", or an "irruption of the I", because as a movement -diverse and complex- it concentrates that liberation of individual subjectivity that had been, in some way, contained. It becomes an open display of emotions, feelings and passions and, at the same time, a critique of the society that denied or regulated them. It bursts against the rationalism already dominant by then, in rebellion with the rigid social norms and confronted with the prescriptive classics in art. And it will reach in literature (poetry, novel, drama) high manifestations that continue to be obligatory references, as will also happen in painting as well as in music.

_{Insomnia night, self-portrait by Edvard Munch (1920) Fuente}

Romanticism will therefore be the cradle and a means of modernity, but, at the same time, its critique: confirmation and negation.

References

Compagnon, Antoine (1993). The Five Paradoxes of Modernity. Caracas: Monte Ávila.
Jauss, Hans Robert (2000). Literature as provocation. Barcelona (Spain): Peninsula.
Paz, Octavio (1990). The other voice. Poetry and the end of the century. Barcelona (Spain): Seix Barral.

Authored by @josemalavem

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