ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the different ways in which the avant-gardists and moderate modernists like James Joyce said farewell to the literary conventions of previous centuries. The writers of the new century considered the literature of their predecessors as outdated due to new scientific, technological and psychological insights. Through provocative manifestoes and antisocial behaviour, the Italian and Russian Futurists made clear they wanted to erase literary tradition as a whole, as well as the institutions that it had fostered. They experimented with form and language by using montage techniques and neologisms in their poems. In their pamphlets they introduced concepts like “defamiliarization” and “transrational language”. Nineteenth-century realist prose conventions were rejected by such modernists as Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust. In his novel Ulysses, Joyce adopted a surprisingly innovative style by directly representing the thoughts, feelings and dreams of his characters, without the mediating influence of an omniscient narrator. Il Piacere (‘Pleasure’), this chapter’s key text, written by the Italian author Gabriele d’Annunzio, is introduced as an important forerunner of avant-gardists and modernists, as well as the poetry and prose they will write.
