• “Modern” does not refer to time but to sensibility, styles and critical judgement.
• The modern writer is willfully inaccessible. He works with unfamiliar forms; his subjects disturb the audience and threaten its most cherished sentiments.
• The modern writer provokes the traditionalists.
• There’s a revolt against prevalent styles, a rage against the official order.
• Modernism does not establish its own style, if it does, it denies itself.
• It presents a dilemma without a solution, it never ends or never triumphs.
• It emerges in days of exhaustion, and it is revolutionary.
• The avant-garde emerges as a self-conscious group and combative group.
• The modern writer sometimes struggles with the audience, not out of whim but out of some moral or psychological necessity. He can no longer accept the norms of the audience, he finds himself depressed and outraged. The usual morality seems counterfeit, so the modernists rebel against traditions. It strips man of his systems of belief and his ideal claims. Modernism proposes salvation only for the self.
• Subjectivity is a typical condition of this outlook, it is close to solipsism.

· There’s a blockage of history (historical cul-de-sac or impasse).

· Man is mired, in the mass, in the machine, in the city, in his loss of faith, in the hopelessness of a life without intention or terminal value.

· Teleological (the ides that the universe has been made to fit a particular design or purpose, i.e. God’s) ends and secular progress are questioned.

· There’s disparagement of culture; the mind is an enemy of vital human powers.

· Bourgeois proprieties and self-containment of culture are challenged.

· Modernist writers discard the formal procedures of their Romantic predecessors. They feel that tradition is a nuisance, even a tyranny, to be shaken off; and they question the Romantic faith in transcendence through individual ego or its pantheistic merger with a god-filled universe. They also deny its idea of militant liberalism.

· Modernists embrace the avant-garde, extreme self-consciousness, prophetic inclination, and the stigmata of alienation. The avant-garde scorns notions of “responsibility” toward the audience and notions of aesthetic assumptions. The audience may or may not exist, they even ask whether it should exist. Modernism proclaims its faith in self-sufficiency.

· The modern writer presents dilemmas, not answers or endings.

· Nature ceases to be a central subject or symbol.

· Dominant motif is perversity—surprise, excitement, shock, terror, affront.