American Realism and Modernism

Le ruisseau noir , 1865 – Gustave Courbet

 From Realism to Modernism
The Breaking Up of Unity
 The Literature of Colonial America 1600-1763
 The New Nation (Enlightenment) 1763-1830
 Transcendentalism 1830-1860
 Realism, and to some extent Naturalism 1860-
1917
 Modernism 1917- 1945
 Postmodernism/Multiculturalism 1945-?
 American Realism and Naturalism 1865-1914
Cultural Background

 Industrialization, Urbanization, Modernization, Immigration

(Population double between 1870-1890)
 Connected with each other (railroads, telegraph, etc.) the
world grows smaller and larger simultaneously
 Tempo of life accelerated
 Mass labour, mass consumption  the Poor vs. the Rich,
the Concentration of wealth, e.g. the Rockefellers
 Social Darwinism
 European realists (Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert) and
naturalists (Émile Zola)
 Nature is indifferent
 Reaction against the naïveté of Transcendentalism
 Determinism
 Social criticism
 A New Set of Writers
 Slaves
 Women, e.g Emily Dickinson
 Journalists, e.g. Mark Twain
 Middle class writers
Describe a Fly
 Realism in the Arts
 Faithfulness towards the
reality we experience with our
physical senses and interpret
with our mind and sense,
which are colored by social
conventions.
 Detail instead of Overview
 The local instead of The
General: dialect, customs,
grammar, language
 Life as it really is: Reality;
Whose reality?
 Fragments and fragmentation
 Unity broke up, different lives
La Comédie humaine = different detail
by Honoré de Balzac 1799–1850  Ordinary subjects
 Subjective writers
 Realism
 Influenced by Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert,
Honoré de Balzac, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Count
Leo Tolstoy
 Realism: to portray life, the world as it really is
 Subjects: ordinary, local, dirty, dialects, customs
 Realism vs. Romanticism: no glorification, no
beauty, no imagination, no hope.
 Nature is indifferent
 Realism moving increasingly towards Naturalism
 Determinism and Behaviourism
Do Human Beings Have a Free Will or Are They Subjects of
Determinism (Biological, Social, Historical Materialism, etc.)?
 European Naturalism
 Philosophy: Environment heredity, no free will,
determinism, misery in life and oblivion in death
 Style: Realist, extremely detailed
 Subject matter: Low subjects
 Time: Around 1870
 Realism vs. Naturalism
 American Naturalism: Realism
with Determinism and Pessimism
 American Realists
 H. D. Howells: The Rise of Silas Lapham 1885
 Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens): The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer 1876, Huckleberry Finn 1884
 Henry James: Daisy Miller 1879, The Portrait of a Lady
1881, The Aspern Papers 1888, The Turn of the Screw
1898, The Wings of the Dove 1902, The Ambassadors
1903, The Golden Bowl 1904
 Kate Chopin: The Awakening 1899
 Charles W. Chesnutt: The House behind the Cedars 1900
 Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Women and Economics 1898,
Concerning Children 1900, The Home: Its Work and
Influence 1903, “The Yellow Wallpaper” 1899
 American Naturalists
 Stephen Crane: Maggie: A Girl of the
Streets 1893, The Red Badge of Courage
1895, “The Open Boat” 1898
 Jack London: The Call of the Wild 1903,
White Fang 1906
 Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie 1900, An
American Tragedy 1925
 Frank Norris: Mc Teague 1899, The
Octopus 1901
 Twain’s Huckleberry Finn 1884
‘I didn’ know dey was so many un um. I hain’t hearn ‘bout none un
um, skasely, but ole King Soller- mun, onless you counts dem kings
dat’s in a pack er k’yards. How much do a king git?’
‘Get?’ I says; ‘why, they get a thousand dollars a month if they want
it; they can have just as much as they want; everything belongs to
them.’
‘AIN’ dat gay? En what dey got to do, Huck?’
‘THEY don’t do nothing! Why, how you talk! They just set around.’
‘No; is dat so?’
‘Of course it is. They just set around — except, maybe, when there’s a
war; then they go to the war. But other times they just lazy around;
or go hawking — just hawking and sp — Sh! — d’ you hear a noise?’
[…]
EXPLANATORY
IN this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro
dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect;
the ordinary ‘Pike County’ dialect; and four modified varieties of this
last. The shadings have not been done in a hap- hazard fashion, or
by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance
and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of
speech. I make this explanation for the reason that without it many
readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk
alike and not succeeding.
THE AUTHOR.
 London The Call of the Wild
Buck's feet were not so compact and hard as the feet
of the huskies. His had softened during the many
generations since the day his last wild ancestor was
tamed by a cave-dweller or river man
[…]
Far more potent were the memories of his heredity
that gave things he had never seen before a
seeming familiarity; the instincts (which were but
the memories of his ancestors become habits)
which had lapsed in later days, and still later, in
him, quickened and became alive again.
[…]
He was a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the
things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his
own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly
in a hostile environment where only the strong
survived.
The Legacy of World War I –
The Great War
 Crusade for freedom
and national self-
determination
 Isolationist
 World leading economy
 Ended US cultural
provincialism
 Self-improvement 
Self-enrichment
 Idealism  Materialism
The Twenties
 Continued urbanization
 Businessman ideal
 Commercialized culture
 Economic inequality
 Immigration: suspicion of
foreigners
 Ideological fundamentalism
 Breakdown of traditional values,
morals, conventions
 The Jazz Age
 Women more liberated
 Mass entertainment: movies and
jazz
 The Great Depression 1930s
 Over-production and under-consumption
 Unemployment
 Migration
 New national self-awareness
 Individualism not enough
 Government intervention
The Legacy of World War II
The Legacy of World War II
 Ended the Depression
 Ended isolationism
 Women and minorities into the job market
 Nuclear weapons
 The US: an economic, military, and
cultural superpower
 New patriotism and renewed faith in
American ideology
 Modernism Background
 Industrialisation, mechanisation, urbanisation,
new discoveries
 World War One and Two: Destruction and Evil
 Reaction against Enlightenment and Realism
 The breakdown of order, what was thought to be
ordered reality turned out to be false, whether
social, political, artistic…
 In other words: Truth and reality is, as it is
perceived by humans, relative or subjective
Albert Einstein 1879-1955
 General Theory of Relativity
1916
“When you are courting a nice girl
an hour seems like a second.
When you sit on a red-hot
cinder a second seems like an
hour. That's relativity.” Einstein

“I know not with what weapons

World War III will be fought,
but World War IV will be fought
with sticks and stones” Einstein

“REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE – NEW

THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE –
NEWTONIAN IDEAS
OVERTHROWN” The Times of
London November 7, 1919
Sigmund Freud 1856-1939
 The founding father of
psychoanalysis
 The Interpretation of Dreams (Die
Traumdeutung), “Theory of the
Oedipus Complex”
 A Complete break with the past,
rejecting Protestantism’s absolute
moral judgements and its
asceticism
 Modernism
 Modernism born in Europe
 Myth, symbolism
 Elitist in Britain, more popular in America
 1922: The height of modernism, “The Waste Land” published by
Eliot, altering the nature of American poetry, James Joyce’s
Ulysses
 Disillusionment after WWI, the futility of hope, no solution to the
world’s problems was found. A lost generation devoid of faith
 Desire to do something new, a radical change
 Alienation brought these avant garde modernists together,
alienated from a civilisation
 America adopted modernism easily, no traditions that hold it back
 Gertrude Stein: a head figure in America. Experimented with
language, influenced Hemingway.
 Hemingway and Faulkner made American modernists.
 Nobel Prize Laureates  American literature becomes international
 “Pure” modernists
 Expatriates:
• Gertrude Stein: Three Lives 1909, Tender Buttons 1904
• Ezra Pound: Imagist poetry, Cantos 1925
• Hilda Doolittle (H.D.): Imagist poetry
• T. S. Eliot: Prufrock… 1920, The Waste Land 1922, Old Possum’s
Book of Practical Cats 1939, Four Quartets 1943
• Djuna Barnes: Nightwood 1936
• Ernest Hemingway: In Our Time 1925, The Sun Also Rises 1926,
Men Without Women 1927, A Farewell to Arms 1929, For Whom
the Bell Tolls 1940, The Old Man and the Sea 1952, A Moveable
Feast 1964
• F. Scott Fitzgerald: This Side of Paradise 1920, Tales of the Jazz
Age 1922, The Great Gatsby 1925, Tender is the Night 1934
 High modernists at home:
• Marianne Moore
• Wallace Stevens
 Regional Writers
 Midwest: Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters,
Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather
 California: Robinson Jeffers, John Steinbeck
 New England: Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert
Frost
 Southern Agrarians: John Crowe Ransom, Allen
Tate, Robert Penn Warren
 Other Southerners: Ellen Glasgow, Thomas
Wolfe, William Faulkner: The Sound and the
Fury 1929
 Other Writers of the Period
 Whole Nation: John Dos Passos, Hart
Crane, William Carlos Williams
 Harlem Renaissance: Countee Cullen,
Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston
 Drama: Eugene O’Neill
 The Modernist Work

 Constructed out of fragments

 A lot is taken away: explanations, interpretations,
connections, summaries, continuity, security
 Rapid shifts in perspective, voice, and tone
 Understatements, irony
 Suggestion rather than assertion
 Symbols and images instead of statements
 The effect is surprising, shocking, and unsettling;
the reading experience is challenging and difficult
 Allusions to past literature
 Art for art’s sake
 The Modernist Work
 Still, unlike Postmodernism, modernist literature
retains a degree of coherence, but it is hidden
beneath the surface. The reader has to be more
active; s/he has to dig and study to find the
structure. One such unifying structure is myth,
Christian, and other.
 The search of meaning becomes meaningful in
itself.
 The subject matter is the work of art itself. Form is
just as important as content.
 Limited audience. Art for artists.
 Subjectivity is valued and accepted.
 Compression; new significance for lyric poetry and
the short story -> describe the psychology of the
mind rather the reality.
 Typical Modernist Themes

 The decline of civilization, its emptiness

and lack of faith
 The search for some new kind of order
 Disillusionment, hollowness, and falsehood
of modern society
 Art and the artist, alienation
 The psyche of the struggling individual,
despair and the futility of hope
 Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Cory”

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
Ernest Hemingway 1899-1961
 Peeled down his style, did away
with everything except the
minimum – the iceberg technique,
little above lots below
 “Grace under pressure” – a phrase
often associated with Hemingway.
 Typical Hemingway themes (“The
Snows of Kilimanjaro”)
• Newspaper reporter & Writer of
literature
• Moral vacuum – Does life make
sense?
• The Hemingway hero: strong, self-
reliant, actually anti-hero but
trying to become a real hero
William Faulkner 1897-1962

 Uses a tremendous amount of

Christian myth
 Uses a tremendous amount of
experimentation with narrative
techniques
 Tries to get down to psychology
 Wrote The Sound and the Fury
1929, the title being an allusion
to Shakespeare’s Macbeth
 Typical subjects and themes:
• Moral decline of white American
south
• The human heart in conflict with
itself
• Family vs. individual
F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896-1940
 Coined his period “The Jazz Age”
 The Great Gatsby 1926
 A moral vacuum
 The American Dream declining to
a materialistic dream
 Wanted to get down to
psychology, took insights from
Sigmund Freud
 Time and Setting: 1922, “The
Waste Land”
 West and East of NY: Rural,
natural life and urban, modern
life
 Gatsby has a hope, a dream,
which the narrator Nick admires
 God: a diminishing subject, an
advertisement
 The Green Light
 Contrast: Old American Dream
vs. Gatsby’s dream of this
superficial woman
 The Modern Dilemma
Traditional Modern
 Rural/Agricultural  Urban/Industrial
 Aristocratic  Democratic
 Discipline/Form  Freedom
 Romanticism/Idealism  Realism
 Unity  Diversity/Multiplicity
 Order  Fragmentation
  Disintegration
 Convention  Experimentation
 Status Quo  Concern with language
 God/Religion  Naturalism, ?, Nothingness (nada)
 Morality  Moral vacuum
 Society  Family
 Conservative  Liberal, avant garde, bohemian
 Stability  Progress
 Regional  International
 Censorship  Free(r) expression
 Repressed sexuality  Free(r) sexuality
 Literature to reassure  Literature to challenge