Literature Between the two World Wars

(1915-1945)

Objectives:
 Study the backgrounds of America and the Western countries between the two
world wars ;
 Study the major genres and literary experiments in poetry, novel, drama etc.
 Study the major features of modernism;
 Compare the main features of realism with modernism;

Teaching Procedure:
I. Backgrounds
 Introduce the backgrounds of America and the Western countries between the two
World Wars;
 Introduce the effect of the two wars on the people , esp. on the intellectuals;
 Introduce briefly Eloit’s The Waste land;
 Introduce briefly the features of modernism;
 Introduce briefly the imagism, Lost Generation, the Left-wing Literature, and the
Southern Literature.
Reference:
The differnce among the several traditions to which the poets and novelists writers
more or less adhere: Frost, Stevens, Crane, a post-Emersonian romantic tradition of
vatic seeing and saying; Pound and Eliot, as high modernists who invoked a post-
Arnoldian tradition of cultural high seriousness and purpose; Stein, H.D. and Moore
as experimentalists interested in remaking poetry by reinventing the female poet;
Williams and Hughes, as poets in the Whitmanic tradition, writing in an "American"
idiom, stripping down the language to its "essential" character and qualities; Brown
and McKay exploring the vernacular idioms of a rural America then (1920s and 30s)
in economic and demographic decline.

II. Introduction to Modernism (in Amr. Lit. 1915-1945):

Modernism is a very comprehensive term applied to international tendencies and
movements in all creative arts since the latter end of the 19th century. As far as
Literature concerned, it reveals a break away from established rules, traditions and
conventions, fresh ways of looking at man’s position and function in the universe and
many experiments in form and style.
Characteristics of Modernism:
1. anti-Romantic, meaning not in nature but in art itself
meaning is subjective, poem need not have a meaning
2. modernist searching for new forms
3. break with the past deliberately
4. poet responsible for life of the spirit
5. poetry becomes the subject of poetry
the old subjects are the means, the poem is the end

III. The major points of modernism:

1. sees world as "fragmented"
-pattern of construction out of fragments
-unrelated pieces
-"these fragments I have shorn against my ruin" -Wasteland
-life is fragmented
-unusual connective patterns missing: morals, framework, gone
3. point of view is remote/detached from subject
-ironic but not unfeeling
4. Poetry is very allusive,
-allusions to myth, the Bible, foreign languages, street life, personal
-highly footnoted (see "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" or The Wasteland
5. poems like a riddle, labyrinth
-meaning must be searched for by reader
-like Joyce's Portrait of an Artist or Ulysses
6. Subject: the subject of modernist literature often asks what the purpose of literature
and poetry is.
-what is the use for art in a world falling apart?
7. Elite audience: intellectual, academic
-Wallace Stevens is the exception, not elitist like Eliot or Pound

Three Philosophical Backgrounds

(as opposed to historic causes: WW I, the Depression, America/Europe feeling lost)
A. Karl Marx
-economic determinism
-human behavior controlled by forces OUTSIDE self
-class struggle, workers unite for utopian change
B. Sigmund Freud
-psychoanalysis
-psychological determinism
-man behavior from forces INSIDE the self
-interior forces, man's taboos and rules govern self and world
-self-analysis
C. F. Nietzsche
-God is Dead
-economic and psychological determinism
-no divine patterns, search for meaning
-trying to put "world" back into some kind of form, structure
-spiritual ruins after the war, what is the meaning of life?
Modernism in America:
poets writing manifestos

modern art in painting, various schools:

Dada-ism, meaninglessness
futurism, love of the machine
post-impressionism
cubism

Modern Poetry: Imagism

Pound, propagandist for modernism
he influences Eliot, Frost
Pound manifesto, 1913/1918
1. Direct treatment of the thing, whether subjective or objective

2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute

3. As regard to rhythm, to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in the
sequence of a metronome

Two other statements:

--poetry, economy and precision of best modern prose
--an "image" is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an
instant of time
--the "instant-ness" of modernism very important
--verse (see above):
-demands direct treatment
-economy of words
-and sequence of the musical phrase

Some characteristics found in Modernistic works:

1. Alienation from Society and Loneliness
2. Procrastination/An inability to act
3. Agonized recollection of the Past
-constant flashbacks into the past
4. Fear of death and the Appearance of Death
5. Inability to feel or express Love
6. World as a Wasteland: poor Environmental portrayal
7. see Man creating his own myths within his mind to fall back upon

Major themes emerging in Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and others:

1. violence and alienation
2. historical discontinuity
3. decadence and decay
4. loss and despair
5. rejection of history
6. race relations
7. unavoidable change
8. sense of place, local color

Modern masters in this period:

1, Poets:
Robert Frost, 1191-1210: After Apple Picking, The road not Taken
Ezra Pound, 1257-1282; In a Station of the Metro, A Pact
T.S. Eliot, 1435-1469; The Waste land ( only a brief introduction to the poem)
2, Novelists and literary theorists:
The Lost Generation: E. Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
The Leftwing writers: John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
The Southern Writer: William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily

Topics for Discussion:

1. What are the main features of modern writing?
2. Why Did American Literature come to the second renaissance in the period
between the two world wars?
3. Why was modernism called comprehensive tendencies?

Note:
http://www.modernism.com/hemfaq.htm