Antonia+Modernism

Opening Activity: Each person in the group will randomly choose six common household items. To each of these items each person will give a new name and a meaning. For example, one could take the item cup and assign it the name beverage holder, and its meaning could be to serve me. After two minutes, each person in the group will go around and share two of their six items.
 * __Attention: this page is for Thursday, 5/10!__**

Modernism is a trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, reconstruct and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation, and is thus in its essence both [|progressive] and [|optimistic]. The term covers many political, cultural and artistic movements rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Broadly, modernism describes a series of reforming cultural movements in art and [|architecture], [|music], [|literature] and the [|applied arts] which emerged in the decades before 1914. But Modernism encouraged the re-examination of every aspect of existence, from commerce to philosophy, with the goal of finding that which was "holding back" progress and replacing it with new, progressive and therefore better, ways of reaching the same end. In essence, the modernist movement argued that the new realities of the industrial and mechanized age were permanent and imminent, and that people should adapt their world view to accept that the new equaled the good, the true and the beautiful. Modern (quantum and relativistic) physics, modern (analytical and continental) philosophy and modern number theory in mathematics are, however, also said to date from this period. Embracing change and the present, modernism encompasses the works of thinkers who rebelled against nineteenth century academic and historicist [|traditions], believing the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated; they directly confronted the new economic, social and political aspects of an emerging fully industrialized world. Some people divide the 20th Century into movements designated **Modernism** and [|Postmodernism], whereas others see them as two aspects of the same movement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism

Questions: 1. Considering the modernist view of love, do Mr. and Mrs. Cutter love each other? 2. Does Mr. Cutter respect his wife? Does she respect him? 3. Modernists believe that an object does not have meaning until they themselves give the object meaning. Consider this statement when answering the following question. What is the meaning of dancing to Jim, Antonia, Mr Harling, and Grandfather? Why? 4. Could Jim be considered a modernist hero? Antonia? Why or why not? 5. Modernists believe in breaking the mold of tradition. Using this perspective, who would be the villains in this novel and why? 6. In this novel, what would be considered as a form of art according to modernism? 7. Does Jim love Antonia? What does he think of her?

Jenny S.