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Unit 15 Early Twentieth Century - American Modernism: A Brief Introduction. The Centers of Modernism 1. Stylistic innovations - disruption of traditional syntax and form. 2. Artist's self-consciousness about questions of form and structure. 3. Obsession with primitive material and attitudes.
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Unit 15 Early Twentieth Century - American Modernism: A Brief Introduction • The Centers of Modernism • 1. Stylistic innovations - disruption of traditional syntax and form. • 2. Artist's self-consciousness about questions of form and structure. • 3. Obsession with primitive material and attitudes. • 4. International perspective on cultural matters.
Modern Attitudes • 1. The artist is generally less appreciated but more sensitive, even more heroic, than the average person. • 2. The artist challenges tradition and reinvigorates it. • 3. A breaking away from patterned responses and predictable forms.
Contradictory Elements • 1. Democratic and elitist. • 2. Traditional and anti-tradition. • 3. National jingoism and provinciality versus the celebration of international culture. • 4. Puritanical and repressive elements versus freer expression in sexual and political matters.
Literary Achievements • 1. Dramatization of the plight of women. • 2. Creation of a literature of the urban experience. • 3. Continuation of the pastoral or rural spirit. • 4. Continuation of regionalism and local color.
Modern Themes • 1. Collectivism versus the authority of the individual. • 2. The impact of the 1918 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. • 3. The Jazz Age. • 4. The passage of 19th Amendment in 1920 giving women the right to vote. • 5. Prohibition of the production, sale, and consumption of alcoholic beverages, 1920-33. • 6. The stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression of the 1930s and their impact.
Modernism and the Self 1. In this period, the chief characteristic of the self is one of alienation. The character belongs to a "lost generation" (Gertrude Stein), suffers from a "dissociation of sensibility" (T. S. Eliot), and who has "a Dream deferred" (Langston Hughes). 2. Alienation led to an awareness about one's inner life.
Modernism and the New Negro Renaissance (see my Introduction to the Harlem Renaissance) • 1. The relationship between the two is complex. • 2. They both share the important motif of alienation. • 3. However, American modernism is inspired by the European avant-garde art; the Renaissance represents the unique and distinct experience of black Americans.
4. Modernism borrows from the Renaissance the themes of marginality and the use of folk or the so-called "primitive" material. • 5. The use of the blues tradition - important for the Renaissance - is not shared by white modernists; considered too limiting (mere complaint about one's repressed and exploited condition), the blues tradition represents images and themes of liberation and revolt. • 6. This relationship requires reevaluation; the Renaissance is important for black and white readers and writers.
Achievement • "I will be a servant to words alone." - SA • An excellent storyteller, Anderson seems to be preoccupied by a need to describe the plight of the "grotesque" - the unsuccessful, the deprived, and the inarticulate. He sensitively describes poverty and eccentricity. His simple style, in the oral tradition of storytelling, influenced writers like Hemingway and Faulkner who, in 1956, acknowledged Anderson as "the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing which our successors will carry on."
Achievement • A prolific writer of a dozen books and sixty short stories, Willa Cather is an excellent stylist and structuralist. Her novels and stories chronicle the frontier experience, the plight of the artist during the age of industrialism and progress, and the alienation and initiation of the young. Her description of desert scenes, of the mesas, and of farms are like impessionistic landscape paintings.
Primary Works • White Buildings, 1926; The Bridge, 1930; Collected Poems, 1933; Hart Crane & Yvor Winters: Their Literary Correspondence, ed. Thomas F. Parkinson, 1978.
Achievement • A full-time artist, a novelist, a playwright, an "nonlecturer," E. E. Cummings was, most importantly, a poet. His poetry is known for its eccentric style, its unusual typography and spellings, and deliberate misuse of grammatical structure. He experimented with the "rhythm of the phrase" discovered by Walt Whitman and called the "variable foot" by poet William Carlos Williams. In many ways, Cummings is a traditional poet, especially in his love poems and his celebration of families, parents, children, values. His visual patterns of words are consistent with the movement toward "break up and restructuring" used as a revolt against realism in art and in writing.
Study Questions Cummings's works are an amalgam of lyricism, humor, satire, unabashed sex. Document their appearance in his poems.
Primary Works • Sea Garden, 1916; Collected Poems, 1923; Palimsest, 1926; Hedylus, 1928; By Avon River, 1949; Tribute to Freud, 1956; Bid me to Live (A MAdrigal), 1960; Helen in Egypt, 1961; Hermetic Definition, 1972; Trilogy, 1944-46, 1973; HERmione, 1981; Collected Poems, 1912-1944, 1983; Paint It Today, 1992; Asphodel, 1992.
Achievement • T. S. Eliot was the most dominant literary figure between the two world wars. Poet William Carlos Williams describes the effect of The Waste Land as that of an atom bomb. As an influential literary critic, Eliot describes his aesthetics in the famous essay Tradition and the Individual Talent." He conceives a poem as an object, an organic thing in itself, demanding a fusion and concentration of intellect, feeling, and experience.
He suggests that, through cultural memory, a poet unconsciously continues the tradition of his culture. His poetry presents difficulties of numerous allusions, use of foreign language, use of metaphysical conceit, and an absence of obvious narrative structure. The Waste Land, considered to be a remarkable and extraordinary achievement, deals with the failure of Western civilization as shown by World War I.
Primary Works • Prufrock and Other Observations, 1917; The Sacred Wood, 1920; The Waste Land, 1922; Four Quartets, 1936-43; Murder in the Cathedral, 1935; The Family Reunion, 1939; The Cocktail Party, 1950; The Confidential Clerk, 1954; The Elder Statesman, 1958.
Study Questions • 1. In "The Love Song ...," how does Prufrock deal with the world around him? What does he mean when he asks, "Do I dare / Disturb the universe?" and "How should I begin?" Discuss the recurrent phrase, "decisions and revisions", in relation to Prufrock's nature? • 2. How is the city portrayed in "The Love Song ...,"? Does this sense of the city bear any relation to Prufrock's char acter and his dilemma? What is the picture of modern life given in the poem?
