The word "romantic" is derived from the medieval romance, which was a tale of chivalry, written in a Romance language, which often took the form of a quest. In the 18th and 19th centuries, this idea of ​​romance became an intellectual or artistic quest strongly focused on the individual's personal search for the meaning and essence of human existence. Modernism, on the other hand, is characterized by a rejection or reaction against romantic ideas in order to establish a pure and original way of thinking. Modernists saw themselves as overturning traditional techniques to create revolutionary new art forms, replacing what they perceived as an outdated worldview with a new and progressive social and artistic identity. Virginia Woolf, a key figure in modernist literature, wrote in her essay "Modern Novels" that modern art is "art is in some way an improvement on the old" because it manages "to preserve more sincerely and more precisely what interests and moves [people] by rejecting most of the conventions commonly observed by novelists. According to Woolf, "what we might call life itself" is "the semi-transparent envelope, or luminous halo, which surrounds us from the beginning to the end of consciousness" and "the chief task of the novelist [is ] to convey this constantly evolving spirit with the stress or sudden deviation it may manifest, and with as little mixing of foreign and outside as possible. For Woolf, the duty of the novelist is to reveal the “conscience” of individuals and to refrain from using outdated literary forms that distract from this higher purpose. However, although Woolf wrote many landmark works of modernist literature, she not only uses, but relies on several Romantic conventions in her works. The notion of individual, subjective human experience, that private mental world of characters that so fascinated Woolf, is a characteristic Romantic idea. In William Wordsworth's poem "Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey", he reflects on subjectivity, stating: "with an eye soothed by the power / Of harmony and the deep power of joy, / We see things in life" and "With eye and ear, - both what they half create, / and what they perceive..." In To the Lighthouse , for example, Woolf's depiction of Lily Briscoe's artistic enterprise uses the distinctive romantic paradox between subject and object, between subjectivity and objectivity.Say No to Plagiarism.Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Video Games." violent should not be banned”? Get an original essay “She must try to get her hands on something that eluded her... that eluded her now when she thought of her photo Visions came. beautiful sentences. But what she wanted to capture was this shock on the nerves, the thing itself before it was created. Lily Briscoe is at an impasse because she cannot reconcile her inner vision of her painting with what she manages to put on the canvas, lamenting: "She could see everything so clearly, so authoritatively, when she looked : it was when she took her brush in hand and everything changed." The idea of ​​the spiritual realm of art, the subjective inner vision of a landscape, greatly interested German Romantic artists. Caspar David Friedrich, for example, paints with "his bodily eye closed and his spiritual eye open" and invites the viewer into his subjective inner world while making him aware of the boundary between personal space and real space in his paintings.Friedrich's paintings also show a deep awareness of romantic irony and, even though he inserts human figures into breathtaking landscapes, there still exists an impenetrable void between the subjective human and the objective world at large. “The Wanderer Above the Mists” shows a man who, although having reached the heights of a great mountain peak, appears even more insignificant when he sees the immensity of the world around him. Lily Briscoe feels a similar inadequacy when she paints, and Woolf writes: "And it was then also, in that icy, windy way, as she began to paint, that they imposed themselves upon her other things, her own inadequacy, its insignificance. " She paints the mother and child, "objects of universal veneration", like purple shapes on a painting, "shadows" simply projected by the light, because "a light here required a shadow there". Like Friedrich, Lily wants immortalizing the individual figures, the “form… in the midst of chaos”, while revealing their obscurity, their anonymity and their equivocation in relation to the “masses… of lights”. The paradox of the painting is only resolved at the very end. of the novel, after ten years of revisions Before Lily completes her painting, she must find a way to connect this paradox coherently she must resolve the subjective dream in her head with the tangible canvas, paint and image; The question, Woolf suggests, is whether this is possible: "no image having any semblance of divine service and promptness comes easily to hand, bringing order to the night and making the world so. reflects the compass of the soul." In "Miscellaneous Observations", Novalis writes: "We dream of traveling through the universe - but is not the universe within ourselves? The depths of our mind are unknown to us - the mysterious path leads within. Eternity with its worlds - the past and the future - is within us or not. where." To the Lighthouse is largely a book about people's "pasts and futures", spanning ten years in the lives of the Ramsays and their friends. Lily Briscoe is the passive observer of the journey of the Ramsay family through time, but she attempts to capture a solitary moment in her painting. She struggles to capture a singular, momentary awareness because her own awareness of her painting is so influenced by the passing of time. she lost consciousness of external things... her mind never ceased vomiting from its depths, scenes, names, sayings, memories and ideas, like a fountain gushing over this dazzling white and horribly difficult space, while She modeled with greens and blues. Woolf and her characters grapple with the idea of ​​objective and subjective time: the external, systematic passing of time and the ineffable way it affects us internally. From the beginning of UTo the Lighthouse] until the end, time continually passes on the Ramsay family, and they often struggle to control it -- to make it stop, speed up, or wait as they struggle to catch up -- but still without the slightest chance of success. The actual passage of time and the sensation of time as it passes over us are, according to Woolf, two completely distinct things, "for the night and the day, the month and the year followed one another shapelessly...it seemed as if the universe was struggling and tumbling, in brutal confusion and wanton lust, without purpose” Woolf asks: “But what is a short space after all, especially when darkness sets in? fades so quickly, and so quickly that a bird sings, a rooster crows or a pale green comes alive... Night, however, follows night Winter reserves a pack of them and distributes them. also, fairly, with fingers.