i think ulysses is actually the prime place to exercise this, because it's so famously Hard To Get. why try to get it on your first read? who do you think you are? idk maybe you could. but just read it twice, once without annotations and once with. the people who wrote those annotations didnt get all that on their first read. why concern yourself with getting a good grade in reading? ulysses is a really good book and i think most people would be stressing themselves out of enjoying it by trying to Get It on the first try. it's incredibly funny and poignant and full of fascinating storytelling techniques. you dont have to put a name to every single one of them to enjoy them. it's written in such a way that you can usually tell when joyce is making a Reference to something, even if you don't know what the reference actually is, so if you just let yourself enjoy the book at face value, you'll still probably get something out of it.

but Modernism, in the literary sense, was the aesthetic movement that rose to prominence in the early 20th century that could best be simplified under the rallying cry "Make it fresh, make it new." Rapidly increasing literacy rates paired with a swiftly changing industrial world led to increasing commercial possibilities with forms like the novel (it was getting easier and easier to make money writing and selling em) and infected many writers with an understanding that conventions could be broken and forms innovated and iterated on. There was an explosion in formal experimentation and a psychological undercurrent to much of the literature that the world had been made radically different from the past.

My knowledge base lies largely with the Harlem Renaissance (in which all the psychological undercurrents of transformation in the machine age were amplified - the Great Migration with all its triumphs and horrors were radically reshaping African American life). A great example of literary Modernism from the HR include Jean Toomer's Cane, which is a dreamy novel that's a sort've collection of poems, dialogues, and short stories that interweave throughout the work. Other great there are Bruce Nugent with his forays into free indirect discourse, Zora Neale Hurston's work with phonetically spelled dialect, and Wallace Thurman's play with unreliable narrators and roman a clefs (there are many other examples, but im sticking to some of my favorites - though if you were to read one and only one story to come out of the Harlem Renaissance I beg that you make it Nella Larsen's Passing).

But there's a multitude of other writers across discipline and culture who epitomized modernism. James Joyce, and especially his Ulysses is seen as like the crowning achievement of the movement. But other famous works of the movement include Beckett's Waiting for Godot and T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land".

Modernism is really hard to pin down and define exactly, with its edges and boundaries being really porous. You can contrast it with (but not separate it entirely from) other aesthetic movements like Romanticism (which Modernism kind of grew out of) and the Gothic (which also kind of grew out of Romanticism, but also Modernism and the Gothic deeply influenced each other - there's no good generalizations one can make here without being partially inaccurate).

Modernism also paved the way for (you guessed it) Postmodernism! (It's like modernism for posts -> that's a joke).

But, to summarize badly: Modernism is just the broad term for the hyper-inventive and exploratory literature of the early 20th century that attempted to grapple with huge changes in the world and the culture, and Modernism produced some of the greatest literary works of all time. And it's also one of my favorite aesthetic movements, having had a massive impact on my own writerly sensibilities

i think ulysses is actually the prime place to exercise this, because it's so famously Hard To Get. why try to get it on your first read? who do you think you are? idk maybe you could. but just read it twice, once without annotations and once with. the people who wrote those annotations didnt get all that on their first read. why concern yourself with getting a good grade in reading? ulysses is a really good book and i think most people would be stressing themselves out of enjoying it by trying to Get It on the first try. it's incredibly funny and poignant and full of fascinating storytelling techniques. you dont have to put a name to every single one of them to enjoy them. it's written in such a way that you can usually tell when joyce is making a Reference to something, even if you don't know what the reference actually is, so if you just let yourself enjoy the book at face value, you'll still probably get something out of it.

I am not primarily a CBT therapist. I use some CBT in my practice, but not to fidelity in the way that they do in the studies. CBT is not a perfect modality, and the rigid way it’s often implemented leaves a lot of people cold – in my opinion, any manualized treatment will fail if the therapist prioritizes fidelity to the manual over building a warm and trusting relationship with their patient, but that’s my bias as a person-centered therapist. But a lot of critiques of CBT are based on misinformation about how CBT is actually supposed to work.

CBT is not about looking at every single thought that distresses you and going “nuh uh, not true!” or automatically swapping it with a more positive thought that may or may not be accurate. CBT is about looking at your distressing thoughts and evaluating the evidence for those thoughts.

So if you are a trans person in America and you are distressed by the thought “my government is trying to kill me,” proper CBT would not try to talk you out of that thought, because there is actually quite strong evidence for that being true. The next step would be more along the lines of safety planning and identifying where you have agency to protect yourself.

But if you are depressed and anxious, you may also be prone to thoughts like “my boyfriend hates me” and the evidence for that may be “he didn’t answer my good morning text until lunchtime” or “he seemed sort of distracted on our phone call last night.” CBT would encourage you to reflect on whether that is actually strong enough evidence to believe that your boyfriend hates you, particularly in light of the fact that you may have other, stronger evidence that he actually likes you very much.

If you find yourself thinking things like “my boyfriend hates me” a lot, and you notice that the evidence for these thoughts is often not terribly compelling, the next step may be to identify cognitive distortions causing you to think that way. In the case of “my boyfriend hates me” the relevant cognitive distortion is “mind reading” – believing that you can tell what other people are thinking or feeling with no or minimal evidence, which for depressed and anxious people usually involves just taking your own negative thoughts about yourself (“I’m annoying,” “I’m stupid,”) and projecting them into the brains of innocent bystanders (“they think I’m annoying,” “she thinks I’m stupid.")

CBT obviously runs into limits when someone is distressed primarily as a result of their concrete life circumstances and not disordered thinking. But I have learned to be skeptical when people suffering extreme levels of depression and anxiety insist that their thinking is actually 100% accurate and not negatively biased in any way. This is not impossible – it is common for people living with abusive partners or families, in war zones, prison camps, homeless, very ill, etc. – but it is not the norm for the majority of depressed and anxious people.