American Lit Final Exam

Modernism

Modernism

• Deep disdain for the "old ways"

• New subjectivity

• REVOLUTION IN CONSCIOUSNESS

The Great War (1914-1919)

• Romantic nostalgia for the Civil War

• Destroyed the HEROIC IDEAL

• No "mythic structure" to help make sense of the war

WWI Ironies

• 12 million people died

• Loss of faith in the "life improvement" capacities of new industrial machines + tech innovations (airplanes, tanks, machine guns)

• Trench warfare (which was ineffective)

• "Total war"—Everyone was impacted

• America's intervention as an effort to "bring democracy to all of Europe" in a "war to end all wars"

WWI Cultural Ironies

• Failure of linguistic representation: language in wartime journalism was ill-equipped to match the atrocities of war

• Psychological unreadiness

• War undid the heroic tradition: "War Issues" courses (ex. that taught The Iliad) did not match reality

"Uncle Sam Wants You"

• Government-run propaganda campaign

• Mobilization of war witnessed a massive betrayal of democratic ideals in the Repression of Wartime Dissent

Alien and Seditions Acts of 1917 and 1918

• Jailed/Exiled those who spoke out against president Wilson or the war

• Suppressed pacifist or Liberal-left publications by the Post Office (no more "freedom of the press")

• Persecution of war resisters or conscientious objectors (no more "right to assemble"

100% Americanism (Blind Nationalism)

Rise of extralegal vigilante societies in the USA during WWI that persecuted anyone not in line with 100% patriotic ideals

Characteristics of the 1920s

1. A despairing "spiritual sickness" at the loss of "old verities"

2. A "reckless gaiety and spontaneity" in feelings of "sudden freedom" an exhilarating "sense of release"

3. "MAKE IT NEW!" (Ezra Pound)

4. Disillusionment and despair

Fragmentation

A world of "lost order;" the erosion of "meaning"

"The Lost Generation"

• An end to the sense of human progress in writing

• The Sun Also Rises epigraph

• F. Scott Fitzgerald: the 1920s were lived by “a generation grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.”

• Willa Cather: “All the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts.

The "Great Migration"

• Moved out of the South to work new jobs in the war industry

• Large groups of people isolated by sharecropping conglomerated in singular locations

• Fostered a more collectivized mentality of shared experience and political community driving for change.

Black Soldiers in WWI

• New sense of dignity and empowerment

• The experience of relative equality (in places like France)

• Rising sense of black pride

Red Summer of 1919

• Lynching and race rioting during the last summer of the war (in the North and South)

• Over 165 black men and owmen were killed by mob violence ("white terrorism")

The "New Negro"

• Coined by Alain Locke

• A more assertive race-consciousness and politically defiant attitude among a young generation of Black writers.

• AKA the "HARLEM RENAISSANCE"

Women During WWI

• Volunteered as nurses during the war, which unraveled the 19th century's "cult of domesticity"

• Worked in "knitting armies" that gave them more public and independent identities

The Flapper

• Women became "suffragettes" after their war service; advocated for the VOTE

• "first wave" of American Feminism

• Loosening of gender norms

19th Amendment

Passed in 1920 that gave American women the right to vote

Modern Lifestyle

• Kinetic and jolting; everything was racing into an unknown future (Roaring 20s, Jazz Age, LOST GENERATION)

• Mass production

• Tech developments: electrification, integrated transport + communication systems, rationalization of production

• Subordinated the individual to large-scale systems

TIME during Modernity

• The sense of CONTINUITY associated with gradual/ritual time declined in the face of automation

• Factory assembly line (Taylorism and Fordism)

• Disjunction rather that continuity

• Strategy of omission and FRAGMENTATION in art

SPACE during Modernity

• Cosmopolitanism

• Artists traveled to Europe to live as émigrés: "the homeless citizens of the world"

• New affordable automobile + electric radios

• Rising middle class subscribed to mass circulation periodicals(The world didn't seem so small anymore.)

The Unsettling of Identity

• The self as describable in terms of a malleable “personality” rather than (engraved) character

• Identity founded on appearance like "branded" produce

YOUTH CULTURE

• A new confidence and cultural authority among young people

• Retaliated against the provincialism and naiveté of their parents’ generation

• New culture permissiveness and defiance

18th Amendment (Prohibition)

Despite the illegality of alcohol, SPEAKEASIES operated underground with jazz, gin, and sex

SIGMUND FREUD

Claimed that repression and the inhibition of the libido’s desire were responsible for neurotic character formations

KARL MARX

Ideas about exploitation and alienation helped broker a revolutionary consciousness

ALBERT EINSTEIN

Theory of relativity: “mutability of speed at which time occurs" (This was also applied to the culture as a whole)

Existentialism

• Existence without essence

• Lives existed in a condition of "alienation" in an ABSURD world

• Despairing, but also radically free

New York Armory Show (1913)

• CUBISM

• Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, George Braques

• "Shatter the plan of perception"

• FRRAGMENTS

• Transformative modernist ART event

"Rite of Spring" (1913) composed by Igor Stravinsky

• Used dissonant, harsh atonal chords that was representative of its era

• Transformative modernist MUSICAL event

Publications of T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland (1922) and James Joyce's Ulysses (1922)

• Dispensed with coherent narrative flow

• Stream of consciousness

• Transformative modernist LITERARY event

Modernist Aesthetics

• Again, fragmentation

• Notable for what it OMITS

• Understated + Ironic

• Suggest rather than assert

5 Features of Modernist Writing

1. Experimental/Avante Garde: stream of consciousness

2. Omitting the omniscient narrator: Hemingway's "ICEBERG THEORY"

3. An effect of SHOCK

4. Modernism constitutes a rejection of the consensus tradition between author and reader—the first duty is not to the audience (to be easily understood) but to language and art (In layman's terms, "art for art's sake)

5. Power of the imagination

Reconstruction (1865-1877)

Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 ended the American system of slave labor

Jim Crow

• "Separate but equal" segregation

• Lynching and race rioting enforced through white supremacy

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON

• Founded Tuskegee University

• UPLIFT: encouraged African American to look to themselves and uplift out of the dark history of slavery

• "Atlanta Compromise" Address, 1895: APPEASEMENT address that preached gradual progress (GRADUALISM)

• Critique: placed the burden of racial progress and equality solely on black Americans

MARCUS GARVEY

• Pan-African philosophy of BLACK NATIONALISM (or Black Separatism)

• "Back to Africa Movement"

• Critique: Views on race are essentialist (did not see race as a social construct)

Reification

We make a “thing” out of something that is actually the product of a process

W.E.B. DU BOIS

-“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” ---> ties the identity structures of both whiteness and blackness to the same historical through-line.

• Called on a TALENTED TENTH of the black population to devote themselves to higher eduction and political activism

• DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS: African Americans' saw themselves through a white gaze

Critical Race Theory

Black and white identities are "mutually constitutive"— the symbolic meaning of whiteness is predicated on a cultural understanding of its relationship to the black “other”

White Privilege

Gains for white self-consciousness as a corollary result of black oppression, of “systemic” or “structural” racism

HARLEM RENAISSANCE

• AKA "New Negro Renaissance" or "Black modernism"

• Celebrated the beauty, innovation, and distinctiveness of Black cultural forms -"The New Negro has no fear!"

Race as a construct

Creation of "whiteness" as "cultural compensation" and of white normativity through the subjugation of the black Other

THE POSTWAR "AGE OF AFFLUENCE"

• Americans emerged from the midcentury crises of the Great Depression and WWII with a "boom economy" and an abundance of opportunities

• Spike in consumption/materialism

GI Bill

Cheap access to college for vets

CONSENSUS

• Affirmative attitude toward American culture

• "the nation had figured it out"

"White flight" | Consensus culture

• Rise of "middle class"

• Relocation to the suburbs ("The Suburban Ideal") to return to "agrarian ideals"

• Bomb shelters

• Emphasis on the nuclear family and reproduction (baby boomers)

• Diminutive lifestyle with TV

Triumphalist moralism

• A nation of hard-working, duty-bound citizens had defeated the obvious global menace of Nazism and fascism

• "The good war" against Hitler by America's "GREATEST GENERATION"

The Age of ANXIETY and CONTAINMENT

• Sense of dread, foreboding, and anxiety following the revelations of the Holocaust and atomic weaponry

• RED SCARE

• CONTAINMENT

• Mob hysteria and witch-hunts

• Conformist culture

McCARTHYISM

• Named after Joseph McCarthy

• Red Scare

• House Un-American Activities Committee: anti-Communist movement that launched investigations against supposed communist spies in the US

THE ORGANIZATION MAN

• Corporate worker who suppressed his individuality

• "Cooperation"

Women in Consensus Culture

• Return to their essential, feminine nature

• Restored nest of domesticity

• The "ideal woman:" pretty, a mother, housewife, emotional/sexual helpmate

Young People in Consensus Culture

• Juvenile delinquency

• “Structured activities” to channel and regulate children’s desire

1950s Religious Revival

• Generic orientation toward religion emerged

• Religion associated with patriotism

• "one nation under God"

• "In God we Trust"

The End of Ideology by Daniel Bell

• Humankind had reached the end of the historical dialectic, the “end of history

NEW FRONTIER

America entered into a new, unknown political arena (domestic and global) with JFK as the nation's leader in the 60s

Camelot

• Hope and excitement with JFK's presidency

• “one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot”—suffused with all the proud feeling of America’s ascendance into “leadership of the free world.”

LATE MODERNISM | MID-CENTURY MODERNISM

Characterized by the radical or "rebel" individual

BEBOP | BOP ERA JAZZ

• Dissolved big band orchestras for smaller ensemble groups with a notable, virtuoso soloist

• Dizzy Gillespie

• Charlie Parker

• Lester Young

• John Coltrane

• Thelonious Monk

• Miles Davis

FILM NOIR

• Black-and-white “expressionist” films

• Often crime dramas

• Centered on “hardboiled,” go-it-alone detectives

The Beat Movement

• Apocalyptic view

• Human life was in a "transformative threshold" that would unravel conformity

• Coined from being "beat down" by dominant culture

• Neo-romantic

• Emphasized a quasi-mystical vision of the self (seer, prophet, saint)

Beat Aesthetics

• Spontaneity + Improvisation

• "Wild form" in pursuit of "new vision"

CONFESSIONAL poetry

• Non-rhyming poetry that focused on individual experience, childhood trauma, sexual eroticism, and mental health issues (or the everyday)

• Sylvia Plath

• Robert Lowell

• Anne Sexton

• W.S. Merwin

Literary Non-fiction and Biographical Essays

• Extended mediations on contemporary themes and issues, “the spirit of the times"

• Explosion of magazines

• Joan Didion

• James Baldwin

• Norman Mailer

• Paul Sartre

Postmodernism

• Prime years: 1964-2000

• Grew out of or extended modernism without establishing a fundamentally new set of principles (FRAGMENTATION)

• Refuge in art; "negative autonomy" that would engender a "critical distance" from dominant culture

• Strove for innovation, invention, novelty, uniqueness, and improvisation

MASS SOCIETY

• No space of critical distance

• Over-determining rush of experience

• Society trapped in an "incarceral" network, or matrix

• Anti-Enlightenment: we’ve become spectatorial survivors of a SELF-REPLICATING WORLD that dominates us without means of intervention

• "The American Century" by Henry Luce

Late Capitalism

• Corporate hegemony

• "Military-industrial complex"

• Antidemocratic "power elite"

• Unraveling of the HISTORICAL DIALECTIC, which led to an art of "EXHAUSTION"

Anti-foundational

• Refusal of any objective or "totalizing" account of reality

• Rejects any "GRAND" or "MASTER NARRATIVE"

Information Age

• HYPERREALITY: the more information we have, the less certainty we seem to have

• Suspicion/Skepticism against all Truth Claims

"THE MAP THAT PROCEEDS THE TERRITORY"

SIMULACRA: we live in "secondary representation" more that we do primary experience

"ENGINEERING OF CONSENT"

• Scripted normality

• Refers to the way large, commercial media conglomerations have constructed a vast and naturalized vision of “common sense everyday life"

"PERFORMATIVE" Identity

• Lost concern with an authentic "core" self

• Emphasis on "subjectivity"

• Selfhood now understood as a performance of mediated styles and personas

Radical Relativism

POST TRUTH

Consumerism

• Every desire has become "monetized"

• Prioritizes the market

Environmental Issues

• Climate change (the 6th great extinction)

• pollution

• Sculpted nature (theme parks, golf courses)

• Source of anxiety and dread

ALIENATION

• Disassociation from a process (ex. meat seen as coming from packages, not animals)

• (Changed orientation toward time due to rapidly prepared, consumable goods)

Addiction

• Drugs and alcohol (opioid crisis)

• Hoarding, stalking

• Fetishization

• "the normal is never enough…which is itself a kind of Consumerism of Being"

Conspiracy Theories

• We're not "in" on what's really happening

• Qanon, flat-earthers, anti-vax

Cults

Manipulability of vulnerable people by the power of charisma and demagoguery (Jim Jones, Charles Manson, invented new religions)

Dysfunctional family life

Kids are more in charge or more mature than their parents

Celebrity worship

Produced media entities that are hyped up; "famous for being famous"

Cyborg consciousness

• Emancipatory protest movements organized through social media (BLM, Pride, etc.)

• Also, "a slavish addition to online validation on the level of individuals "

De-evolution

• History is turning backward

• Classes for breathing, eating, cooking, etc.

"Enjoying our symptoms"

• From the philosopher Zizek

• We enjoy the micro-pleasures in life

Postmodern Aesthetics

• ABSURDIST

• Embraces imitation and reproduction (satire, irony, parody, pastiche)

Pastiche and Bricolage

Combining recognizable but dissociated things and mashing them together

Economic "neoliberalism"

Socialized us in to thinking that nothing is strange about buying bottled water, about paying money to go to a gym, etc.