Do U Know Me

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THE MODERN WORLD AND ITS DISCONTENTS

ENGLISH 3341: STUDIES IN WORLD LITERATURE

FALL 2012

Lecture 1

Part One: “A New World”

This lecture is a very general overview designed to give some historical background of

the modern world. In order to properly understand the fiction we will be studying this

semester, we must also the historical, social, and political contexts of the modern world.

I) Beginnings

No one really agrees when the modern world began. The Industrial Revolution, the

French Revolution, the political turmoil of 1848-1849, the publication of Origin of

Species, the start of World War I in 1914—you can make solid arguments for all these as

starting points for modernity. Of course, no historical period comes about without causes

or precedents, and eras do not usually have clear beginnings or endings (though most

people agree that the modern era ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of

the Soviet Union in 1989-91).

The modern world is confusing and contradictory. It has given us increases in production,

advances in science and technology, and broad political freedoms. At the same time,

however, modernity seems to increase feelings of alienation in individuals. The twentieth

century saw the rise of democracy, but it also saw the nuclear bomb, destructive wars,

genocide, and terrorism. For every FDR or Gandhi, there was a Hitler or Stalin.

So the modern world is clearly different than the past, but what exactly does that mean?

First, let’s figure out what “modern” does not mean. We are not using the word “modern”

to mean “contemporary” or “present”. Though this is clearly one of the meanings of the

word, we are more interested in a broad historical understanding of the term. However,

neither are we using it to refer to everything that happened post-Middle Ages or post-

1500—that is too broad a usage for our purposes. We should not think of “modern” as

synonymous with capital-M Modernism, which was an artistic...