Literature II

Fecha: Julio 21 de 2014

Topic: Modernism

Similarities between European and American writers

- A break with traditions is one of the fundamental constants of the Modernist stance.

- The modern writer’s fervent desire to break with the past, rejecting literary traditions that
seemed outmoded and diction that seemed too genteel to suit an era of technological
breakthroughs and global violence.

- Cubism, Constructivism, Futurism, Acmeism, and Imagism were among the most
influential banners under which the new artists grouped themselves.

- It was an era when major artists were fundamentally questioning and reinventing their art
forms.

- Narration through fragmented, internalized, or multiple perspectives or viewpoints.

- Realistic details: symbolic, suggestive, allegorical.

- Heroic individualism of Romanticism: isolation, eccentricity.

- The modernist writers have a desire to break with established forms and subjects in art
and literature.

- In the novel, they explored the Freudian depths of their characters’ psyches through
stream of consciousness and interior monologue.

- In poetry, they mixed slang with elevated language, experimented with free verse, and
often studded their works with difficult allusions and disconnected images.

Differences: European modernist writers

- This artistic movement grew strength first in Europe in the early 20th century.
- Influenced by European art movements, many modernist writers rejected realistic
representation and traditional formal expectations.

- Intellectuals and artists at the turn of the twentieth century believed the previous
generation’s way of doing things was a cultural dead end.

- An anglophone literature, “modernism” more nearly describes an era than a unitary

movement.

- The Modernist Period in English literature was first and foremost a visceral reaction
against the Victorian culture and aesthetic, which had prevailed for most of the nineteenth
century.

Differences: American modernist writers.

- This artistic movement eventually grew in the United States after that in Europe.

- Growth, prosperity, fear, war, death, money, materialism, psychology and disillusionment
all contributed to the creation of a modern literary movement in the United States.

- It was very much a reflection of the unease of a people who felt that the old rules and the
old ways of living and thinking were no longer relevant.

- Literary critics often designate as “high modernism” work that represents the
transformation of traditional society under the pressures of modernity and that breaks down
traditional literary forms in doing so. Many high modernist texts interpret modernity as an
experience of loss and represent the modern world as a scene of ruin.

- Some modernist literature draws on structures and fragments borrowed from earlier world
literature, mythologies, and religions. For some writers, these references to earlier texts
expressed profound truths. Other writers alluded to literary traditions ironically.

- Numerous American poets of stature and genuine vision arose in the years between the
world wars, among them poets from the West Coast, women, and African-Americans.

Opinion about those writers

I think those writers were the poets who took fullest advantage of the new spirit of the
times, and stretched the possibilities of their craft to lengths not previously imagined. In
general, there was a disdain for most of the literary production of the last century. They
through their written demonstrate a civilization that, on the evidence of the war, preferred
death or death in life to life, heading to the spiritual emptiness and rootlessness of modern
existence.