E X T E N S I O N JOYCE AND MODERNISM The term Modernism refers to a series of cultural movements which developed at the beginning of the 20th century in Western society. It implied a break with traditional values and assumptions, the desire to experiment with new forms and shapes, the predominance of the subjective dimension as the only possible perspective on reality, and the notion of reality as fragmentary and multi-faceted. Modernism was influenced by important discoveries and new ideas. For example, Sigmund Freud s theory that man s psyche James Joyce in 1920. is deeply affected by the unconscious and his investigative methods based on the interpretation of dreams and free association of thoughts; Albert Einstein s theory of relativity, which discarded1 the traditional concepts of time and space; and Henri Bergson s distinction between chronological time (linear and external) and psychological time (subjective and internal), which led to the notion of emotional relativity. In the arts, Modernism is represented by Pablo Picasso s Cubism and Wassily Kandinsky s Abstract Painting. In music, by Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Sch nberg, whose compositions experimented with new musical effects and even dissonance. In literature, novelists such as James Joyce (Ulysses),Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse) and Marcel Proust ( la Recherche du Temps Perdu) avoided chronological plots and linear narratives to record the workings of the minds of their characters. Reality is represented through flashes of thoughts, which faithfully reproduce how the mind works and perceives the world. This is therefore portrayed not as objective and separate from the individual, but as necessarily fragmented and subject to individual association and interpretation. Man s psychic phenomena were called stream of consciousness by the American philosopher William James, who saw them as a continuous flow of the already into the not yet . The interior monologue is the most frequent technique used by Joyce and Woolf to give verbal expression to the stream of consciousness of their characters. 1. discarded: got rid of. 53