Digital SAT Reading and Writing Practice Question #472

Text 1 For decades, literary historians have posited that the sheer psychological devastation of World War I was the singular catalyst for literary modernism. The unprecedented scale of the conflict shattered faith in Victorian ideals of progress and objective reality. In response, writers like T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf abandoned linear narratives and omniscient narrators, developing fractured, stream-of-consciousness techniques that formally mirrored the fractured psyche of a traumatized post-war generation. Text 2 While World War I undoubtedly cast a long shadow over the 1920s, treating the conflict as the origin point of literary modernism ignores the historical timeline of aesthetic evolution. The foundational experiments in fragmented narrative and subjective temporality were already being rigorously explored in the late nineteenth century by the French Symbolists and in the early psychological novels of Henry James. The Great War did not invent modernism; rather, it served as a brutal accelerator, providing a widespread cultural resonance for formal experiments that an avant-garde had already initiated. Based on the texts, how would the author of Text 2 most likely respond to the claim in Text 1 regarding the origin of literary modernism?