S.11: Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance

Modernism

• Early Modernism (1890s-1920s): experimental turn - radical, provocative, shocking. Dadaism, Futurism, Expressionism, Constructivism, Surrealism (all the -isms)

• High Modernism (1920s): Time of ‚Gesamtkunstwerk‘, the literary ‚master pieces‘: James Joyce ‚Ulysses‘, Thomas Eliot ‚The Waste Land‘, William Carlos ‚Spring & All‘, Harlem Renaissance

• Late Modernism (1930s-1940s): institutionalisation of modernism. Markedly political turn, toning down of experimentalism and Avantgarde spirit

Early modernism: Imagism

• : literary movement (1912-1917) around Hilda Doolittle, Amy Dowell, Ezra Pound and others

• Ezra Pound (1885-1972) turned to fascism, moved to Italy, supported Mussolini. ‚Imagist Manifesto‘

• Influenced by form of Japanese ‚haiku‘

Gertrude Stein

• ‚Tender Buttons‘, very influential author

• Early/high modernism

• Friends with Hemingway and Picasso

• Openly gay and did not give a single fuck

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

• High modernism

• ‚Spring and All‘,

• part of the New York avantgarde scene of art,

• initially close friend of Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle

• Effort to create a specifically American poetics: ‚In the American Grain‘

• Aesthetics of democracy set against Pound‘s fascism

America in the 1910s

• soaring immigration rates, class struggles, urbanisation, commercialisation

• Extreme political responses: anti-immigration, Anglo-Saxon race politics, nativism

• Liberal responses: Progressivism: Immigration as a chance, not as a danger

• Radical left responses: Cultural Pluralism: Immigration as the future of the US, against the idea of the melting pot - differences should be celebrated rather than dissolved

• Idea of a ‚trans-national America‘

Primitivism

• psychoanalysis and anthropology: interest in ‚primitive‘ peoples and conditions

• Taken up by white and by black artists in Europe and the US, in the visual arts, music, dance, literature, film, many other areas of creativity

• Idea of an immediate, authentic, ‚truthful‘ expression through primitivism

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963)

• Harlem Renaissance

• Made out Booker T Washington as a man of the 19th century, relentlessly wrote against him

• Studied psychology, sociology, philosophy at Harvard, professor of sociology

• ‚The Souls of Black Folk‘

• The ‚talented tenth‘ → African Americans needed to have access to academic education and needed an elite group

• Pointed back to Frederick Douglass

Booker T. Washington (1856-1915)

• Wrote against Du Bois

• reconstruction

• Advocated for professional training for young Black Americans

• Doctrine of ‚self-help‘

• Propagating ‚separate but equal‘ ideology → full equality right now doesn‘t work, we have to take steps in between

Harlem Renaissance

• High modernism

• heterogenous and multifaceted movement, emanating from Harlem, New York

• African-American art and culture

• 1920-1930

• Great Migration (1920-1970): Thousands of African Americans moving North

‚New Negro‘

• Black middle class, respectable, educated, self-confident, emancipated

• Alain Locke (1886-1954): philosopher and writer

Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

• central artist figure of the Harlem Renaissance Studied psychology

• Born in Missouri, mixed descent

• Studied at Columbia University in New York, dropped out and joined Harlem scene

• Walt Whitman as major influence

• ‚The Weary Blues‘, collection of poetry

Cubism

• abstract modern art form, emphasising the geometrical shape of the represented objects, often breaking them down to near-monochrome shapes, multiple points of view combined. Pablo Picasso.