Followers' Favorite Horror Movie Countdown 2025 Edition

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