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Notes:

1. In the twentieth century, modernization was used in tandem with colonization as a means to legitimize the often forced adoption of Western concepts of "progress" in different parts of the world. As such, modernization also became a stimulus for movements that rejected "progress" in favor of "tradition."
2. European writers and thinkers looked beyond models of scientific rationalism for means of expressing knowledge of the world and lived experience that could not be apprehended by intellect alone.
3. Literary and linguistic systems were seen as games in which "pieces" (words) and "rules" (grammar, syntax, and other conventions) were combined with playfulness and sometimes with pathos to emphasize the instabilities of language.
4. The twentieth century is sometimes called a "century of isms" as different groups of European artists and intellectuals attempted to give expression to contemporary history and subjectivity.
5. Western modernism is too conceptually limited to describe much of the cultural productions of older nations in North America such as the Navajo, Zuni, and Inuit.

Text:
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1. In the twentieth century, modernization was used in tandem with colonization as a means to legitimize the often forced adoption of Western concepts of "progress" in different parts of the world. As such, modernization also became a stimulus for movements that rejected "progress" in favor of "tradition." In the Western world (that is, Europe and North America), modernization has meant industrialization, a refusal of positivism, and movements to redefine nationalist politics. In the non-Western world (that is, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and South America), modernization has generally meant Westernization in terms of technology, industry, political structures, mass culture, and other mechanisms of globalization (or neocolonialism, as it is sometimes called). Modernization arrived at different speeds in different parts of the world and was received with indifference, optimism, or outright horror. Success was measured according to Western values and institutions such as individualism, capitalism, democracy, literacy (often in terms of European languages, with no consideration for older local languages), private ownership, the middle class, religious freedom, scientific method, public institutions, and the emancipation of women, all of which may or may not have been realized in the West itself—even today.
2. The effects of the First World War were evident in literature, not only in subject matter but in use of language. European writers and thinkers looked beyond models of scientific rationalism for a means of expressing knowledge of the world and lived experience that could not be apprehended by intellect alone. Henri Bergson's philosophy criticized scientific rationality as artificial and unreal because it froze everything in conceptual space. Sigmund Freud's invention of psychoanalysis decentered conventions of medicine and psychology by focusing on the unconscious. Dreams, slips of the tongue, and dÈjý vu, for example, were understood as productive sites of inquiry into repressed desires and anxieties. Language, specifically free association, became the means by which the "talking cure" was realized, which was not always an end to unhappiness, but rather an understanding of it. In the "hard" sciences of physics and mathematics, Albert Einstein proposed his theory of relativity, challenging concepts of absolute motion and the absolute difference of space and time from the Newtonian model of physics. Einstein argued that reality should be understood as a four-dimensional continuum called space-time.
3. The linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein emphasized that language was connected to society and usage—not to reality. The connection between the word cat and the domesticated feline mammal is completely arbitrary. The mammal remains the same whether it is called chat, gato, gatto, bekku, bili, poonay, kuching, or just kitty. Literary and linguistic systems were seen as games in which "pieces" (words) and "rules" (grammar, syntax, and other conventions) were combined with playfulness and sometimes with pathos to emphasize the instabilities of language. Writers such as Beckett, Borges, and Robbe-Grillet show that language determines how we see the world. Semiotics (the study of signs) allowed critics to examine similar games in film, television, advertising, and other cultural productions.
4. The twentieth century is sometimes called a "century of isms" as different groups of European artists and intellectuals attempted to give expression to contemporary history and subjectivity. German and Scandinavian Expressionism rejected the direct representation of physical reality, or impressions of it (as in Impressionism), in favor of representations of inner visions, emotions, or spiritualities. Italian Futurism embraced fascism, glorifying terrorism and war as manifestations of a dynamic new order. By contrast, Russian Futurism was largely suppressed by the Soviet regime. Dada was a group of movements of absolute revolt and anarchism. The word dada is itself a nonsense word—or, at least, it was used as such by the Dadaists. Beginning in Zurich, Dada later emerged in Berlin, Cologne, Hanover, Paris, and New York. Perhaps the most far-reaching avant-garde movement of the early twentieth century was Surrealism, whose manifestos, poetry, and art emphasized a "revolution of the mind" through which conventional habits of seeing the world yielded to a "surreal" vision of it. Modernist prose and drama writers such as Kafka, Pirandello, Proust, Brecht, Faulkner, Woolf, and Joyce used language in a self-conscious and exploratory manner to redefine the "art" much as the scientists and philosophers redefined their disciplines. Artists and writers from parts of the world colonized by the United States and Europe adopted Modernist techniques as a way of articulating the apparent contradictions in everyday reality. Life for colonial subjects often seemed quite "surreal."
5. Western Modernism is too conceptually limited to describe much of the cultural productions of older nations in North America such as the Navajo, Zuni, and Inuit.Western audiences often appreciate the Navajo Night Chant for its aesthetics without recognizing that the Night Chant is part of the Navajo fabric of life, directed primarily toward healing and the restoration of harmony between individuals and the environment. Zuni Ritual Poetry is a extensive collection of Native American oratory. The Zuni orations establish a clear relationship between the "daylight people," or ordinary humans, and the "raw people," such as deer, bear, the sun, rainstorms, corn plants, and ancestral spirits. Inuit songs may be performed in communal feasting houses to the accompaniment of dancing and drumming, or they can be performed privately within the home. The works of these three nations merely hint at the massive cultural achievements of Native Americans, whose cultures were largely displaced, if not outright destroyed, by centuries of colonialist and military invasions by Europeans and European-Americans, particularly U.S. colonialists, in order to take possession of the North American continent.