Modernist Principles: Make it New

English 3

American Literary Modernism

The greatest single fact about our modern American writing is our writers absorption in every last detail of their American world together with their deep and subtle alienation from it. Alfred Kazin

Literary Modernism: 1915-1945

Reaction to WWI

Response to the sense of social breakdown Development of Cubism and Surrealism in the visual arts Internal perspective on cultural matters

Literary Modernism: 1915-1945

The Jazz Age and the Great Depression

Investigation of the excess of the Roaring 20s Consideration of class and trauma as raised by the Great Depression

Literary Modernism: 1915-1945

View of the world as fragmented

The usual connective patterns are missing: morals and frameworks are compromised Artists self-consciousness about questions of form and structure Stylistic innovations, disruption of traditional syntax and form These fragments I have shored against my ruin (Eliot, The Wasteland)

American Literary Modernism

Modernism, according to Christ Baldick, The Concise Oxford Definition of Literary Terms is a general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and avantgarde trends in the literature (and other arts) of the early 20th century

The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 4th Ed. (1998) by J.A. Cuddar
a movement which began in the closing years of the 19th century and which had a wide influence internationally during much of the 20th century. [It] reveals a breaking away from established rules, traditions and conventions, fresh ways of looking at mans position and function in the universe and manyexperiments in form and style. It is particularly concerned with language and how to use it and with writing itself.

More definitions

the term Modernism is not a precise label but instead a way of referring to the efforts of many individuals across the arts who tried to move away from established modes [realistic] of representation Peter Childs, Modernism

Difference between Realism and Modernism

Whereas REALISM

MODERNISM

Emphasized absolutism, and Believed that a single reality could be determined through the observation of nature

Argued for cultural relativism, And believed that people make their own meaning in the world.

Value Differences in the Modern World

Pre-Modern World Ordered Meaningful Optimistic Stable Faith Morality/Values Clear Sense of Identity Modern World (Early 20th Century) Chaotic Futile Pessimistic Fluctuating Loss of faith Collapse of Morality/Values Confused Sense of Identity and Place in the World

Modernist writing reacts to several changes during the first part of the twentieth century:

Industrialization and mechanization Rapid technological advances

WHAT IMPORTANT CHANGES OCCURRED?

An Ugly War

WW I was the first total war in which modern weapons spared no one, including civilians. The casualties suffered by the participants in World War I dwarfed those of previous wars: some 8,500,000 soldiers died as a result of wounds and/or disease. War was increasingly mechanized from 1914 and produced casualties even when nothing important was happening.

Civilians

It has been estimated that the number of civilian deaths attributable to the war was higher than the military casualties, or around 13,000,000.

Largely caused by starvation, exposure, disease, military encounters, and massacres.

The enormity of the war had undermined humankind's faith in Western society and culture.

A generation of young men lost. Survivors reexamine bases of certainly, structure of knowledge, systems of belief and authorities, creating a feeling of hopelessness.

Postwar modernist literature reflected a sense of disillusionment and fragmentation.

PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY

An overview of the intellectual currents which influenced Modernism

Karl Marx

Historical progress as the political struggle between two classes resulting in a new socioeconomic order. The world is, in essence, a struggle.

Charles Darwin

New view of humanity as ascended from apes rather than descended from God shifts humanitys conception of its place in the world Displaces human position of privilege Collapses boundaries between human and animal

Ferdinand de Saussure

Swiss linguist who argues that language is relative, that words have no direct relationship to the concepts or objects they signify

Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche: when he said God is Dead and argued for the power of the human will, he shifted cultural ideologies about religion and philosophy There is no divine pattern

Sigmund Freud

Stressed subconscious motives and instinctual drives. After Freud, impossible to ignore psychological undercurrents of human behaviors. Writers deal with subconscious motivations. Writers stream of consciousness technique similar to Freuds therapeutic tactic of free association.

THE ART WORLD

Central ideas in visual art

Spirit of experimentation New ways of seeing New materials New ideas about the function art has in the world

Expressionism

Refused direct representation of reality. Favor of expressing an inner vision, emotion, or spiritual reality. The Scream by Edvard Munch evokes a whole realm of spiritual agony.

Surrealism

Aims to bring a fuller awareness of human experienceboth conscious and unconscious states.

MODERNIST WRITING

Themes of Modern Literature

Collectivism vs. individualism Anxiety about the past The present moment severed from the past Disillusionment Violence and alienation Decadence and decay Loss and despair Breakdown of social norms and cultural sureties Shift in race and gender relations

Tensions in Modernist Literature

Democratic impulse Anti-traditionalism Celebration of international culture Free expression of sexual and political matters Technology as liberation Revolution

Elitist impulse Traditionalism National pride and provinciality Puritanical and repressive elements Fear of technological advancement Conservatism

The Modern Self

The chief characteristic of the self is alienation.

The Lost Generation (Gertrude Stein) The Dream Deferred (Langston Hughes) Everything about T. S. Eliot

The modern self is often unable to act, feel, or express love. The modern self has a tormented recollection of the past

Modernisms Mission

Literature = art object produced by consummate craft rather than as a statement of emotion. Not a set of stylistic features; an impulse to perfect A refusal of clichs; a system of taboos A reaction against degraded Realism, especially in the marketplace A repudiation of monopoly capitalisms effects on human being (conformity, standardization, repetition, seriality, stupidity)

MAJOR AUTHORS

T. S. Eliot

The most dominant literary figure between the two world wars. Influential poet and literary critic. Conceives of the poem as an object demanding a fusion and concentration of intellect, feeling, and experience. Major works: Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), The Waste Land (1922)

William Faulkner

Southern American writer Many works center on the mythical Yoknapatawpha county Experimental techniques include stream-of-consciousness and dislocation of narrative time Focus on issues of sex, class, and race relations The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Focus on the Jazz Age and the Great Depression Examination of American Materialism Exploration of the American Dream The Great Gatsby (1925), Tender is the Night (1934)

Ernest Hemingway

Iceberg Theory of literature (1/8 above water) Spare, tight, journalistic prose style (was a former war correspondent) Objective, detached point of view Examination of masculinity, gender The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929) For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)