Research Paper on:
Modernist Movement and Artist Mark Rothko

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
the early 20th century. Modernist literature is characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th-century traditions and of their consensus between author and reader, painter and observer, etc. relevant to the  conventions of realism or traditional meter. Modernist writers tended to see themselves as unorthodox and disengaged from bourgeois values, and are said initially to have disturbed their readers by adopting  complex new forms and styles. In fiction, the accepted continuity of chronological development was upset by Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner, while James Joyce and Virginia Woolf attempted  new ways of tracing the flow of characters thoughts in their stream-of-consciousness styles. In poetry, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot replaced the logical exposition of thoughts with collages of  fragmentary images and complex allusions. Modernist writing is predominantly cosmopolitan, and often expresses a sense of urban cultural dislocation, along with awareness of new anthropological and psychological theories. Its favored  techniques of juxtaposition and multiple points of view challenging the reader/ onlooker to establish a coherence of meaning from fragmentary forms. This characteristic was also exploited by the non-figurative  painters of the time, like Mark Rothko (Review of Modernism, Gilbert and McCarter 443). Moreover, the modernist obsession with the  "unreal city" (as T.S. Eliot put it) indicates the crucial importance of a metropolitan social life for the emergence of modernist writing and that this literature thus celebrates the sense  of freedom and possibility that this can offer. It has often been suggested that modernist writings frequent distaste for the city and its corresponding nostalgic desire for authentic experience  served as critical explorations of the paradoxes of modernity and urbanization. The dominant figure in modern poetry from the 1920s through the middle of the century, in part because of