American literature

American Modernism

Context: Modernity

• slogan: “Make it new!” - Ezra Pound

• Ezra Pound is one of the most influential writers in American and European culture

Cultural and economic background

• capitsalism, free market → consumer society

• increasingly urbamized and capitalist society

• liberal democracy

• secularism: a very religious culture slowly turns into a secularized country → religion starts losing its importance

• positive self-image of Western culture

• science/ philosophy: Darwinism, rationalism → emphasis on humanism

• rejection of the old to embrace the new

Three Narcissistic Traumas

• heliocentric cosmology (Copernicus)

• evolutionary theory (Darwin)

• psychoanalysis (Freud)

• these notions decentralized people → inexpressibility of the depth of humans

• effects on modernism

  • decentralization of human being

  • introduction of science as a new language

  • progress and technology are glorified → embrace the NEW, reject the OLD (but not rejecting everything)

  • new generation: rebellion against the previous generations

  • willingness to experiment

General features of Modernism

• embraces all kinds of artistic production: visual art, architecture, literature, interaction between different art forms and media

• embracing the new, embracing progress

• the age of manifestos: rule books for how to produce art

• different”ism”: futurism, feminism, cubism, expressionism, Dadaism, imagism, Vorticism, Constructivism, Bauhaus

Modernism in Literature

• essentially epistemological

  • modernist texts usually embody a quest for meaning or truth

  • attempt to bring system into the confusion of modernism

  • to arrive at some kind of truth

• dualism: surface and depth

  • intentionally many layered works of art

  • hidden, abstract structures

  • underneath the surface → hidden layer, which the readers have to piece together from the information they get on the surface level

  • vertical structures: metaphorical images (always having an underlying meaning)

  • psychoanalysis: search for the motivation behind the action

  • symbolism

• experimentation

  • with form

  • with topic: what are the lengths one can go to

• emphasis on psychological mechanisms

• fragmentation

  • of linear chronology

  • of monolithic viewpoint → pluralism

  • destabilization of one truth

Modernist Poetry

• emerged in the 20th century

• new theme: the city

  • urban environment

  • rural setting is not totally forgotten

• new theme: explicit sexuality (against romantic love)

  • appears much more openly and more regularly

  • approving of boundaries

  • taboo of discussing sexuality openly (caused scandals)

• new theme: appearance of political topics

  • politics seen as corrupt

  • the image of democracy as a utopian formation → often criticized

  • political criticism, political discourse enters American poetry

• experimentation

  • formal experimentation (capitalization, including graphic images)

  • in style

    • colloquial language

    • discontinuiy composition: fragmentation, abrupt shift

    • free verse

  • in language, in theme

• categorization:

  • nativist vs. international: staying at home or traveling to Europe

  • popular vs. elitist: radical modernists embraced the popular, high modernists embraced elitism

  • High vs. Radical Modernists

High Modernism vs. Radical Modernism

• applied to poetry only

• radically different approaches

  • to how poetry should be written

  • what poetry should mediate

• coexistence

• simultaneously canonized

• relationship with Postmodernism

  • Postmodernism liked to rely on Radical Modernism → proximity to the popular, rejected elitism

High Modernism

• Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Stevens, Frost

• a tradition that transcends boundaries

• regarded the text as having several layers → symbolic dualism

  • surface which represents something deep

• metaphor as the basic trope of the movement

• symbolic duality and metaphor

Radical Modernism

• movements: the Imagists, the Objectivists

• Rimbaud, Pound, Williams, Stein

• more radical way in subject matter and in the form they used

• greater extent of experimentation

• championed direct representation of the object

  • try to dissemble the layers the poem contains

  • anti-symbolist

• values are immanent rather than transcendent

  • values contained within the text on the surface

• metonymy as governing rope instead of the metaphor

  • the object is nothing more than an object

Post-War Fiction and Poetry

Confessional poetry

• authobiographical

• personal experience

• emphasis on psychological processes

• confession

• personal voice, self-reflexivity

  • poet’s presence within the poem

  • reflection on the process of creation

• key figures: Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton

Postmodern poetry

• iconic influences: Ezra Pound and Charles Olson

• after WWII

• heir to Radical Modernism

  • further radicalization

  • decentralization

• diverse traditions

Characteristics of Postmodern Poetry

Surpassing Western cultural hegemony:

• post-West/ pre-West

• objectivism to replace the “egocentric humanism” of Western thinking

• high tolerance of disorder

  • dimantling of order, structure, pattern

Anti-metaphysics

• “negative capability” as a response to metaphysical thinking (replacements: unseen/seen, abstract/concrete, known/unknown, unsayable/sayable) - see modernist poetry's symbolic duality

• metaphors that embrace metaphysical binaries will prevent knowing physical reality (the rose or the dark sky regains its particularity and self-importance)

Indeterminacy and immanence

• indeterminacy as part of discourse, as the endless play of signifiers

• no core meaning exists

• impossible to stabilize meaning: signification itself is unstable

• the poem is not autonomous or autotelic 

• meaning is not self-contained in the text, but is activated during reading

• immanence as central category of postmodern poetics

• it is not the mind/creative imagination that creates value in the facts of nature

• but the poet as subject participates in the processes of nature as object, 

• allowing its inherent/immanent values to emerge

• the postmodern poet does not order chaos but makes it habitable, livable: ordering chaos in the hope of finding some ultimate meaning vs. living it in the hope of temporary and contingent illuminations

Performance

• transgressing such modernist dichotomies as life vs. art, high vs. low

• no rigid artifact, rather recreations of works of art through each performance

• culture of spontaneity

Foregrounding of the narrative

• language/form inherent part of meaning

• not conveyors of some abstract meaning

Schools, groups, movements

The First Generation (Donald Allen's NAP/1960)

• The Black Mountain Poets (Black Mountain Review, Origin)

• Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Ed Dorn, Joel Oppenheimer, Jonathan Williams

• Paul Blackburn, Paul Carroll, Larry Eigner

• the epic manner; the trad of the long poem; large-scale works

• relating the personal to the local to the universal

The San Francisco Renaissance

• Jack Spicer, Brother Antonius, Robin Blaser

• Helen Adam, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Lamantia

• (Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder Robert Duncan)

• marvelous formalists

The Beat Generation

• Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen

• social critics: criticizing official America

The New York Poets

• John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara

• Edward Field, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler

• anti-heroic language, exuberant humour, 

• white-washed intellectual/conversational poetry

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

• an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer

• she is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry

  • also won Pulitzer Prize (posthumous)

• born in Boston

• German father, Austrian-American mother

  • loss of faith after her father’s death – she was 8 then

• Smith College, Newnham College

• received acclaim as a poet and writer

• married to Ted Hughes – fellow poet

• lived also in the UK

• clinically depressed

  • committed suicide

Themes

• imagery: the moon, blood, hospitals, fetuses, and skulls.

• after 1960: surreal landscape in works, sense of imprisonment, looming death

• After Hughes left her, Plath produced, in less than two months, the forty poems of rage, despair, love, and vengeance on which her reputation mostly rests.

• landscape poetry

Lady Lazarus

• one of her Holocaust poems (Daddy, Mary’s song)

• title: Biblical character, Lazarus

  • whom Jesus raised from the dead

  • but when at the end she comes back she does it on her own

  • no Jesus (man) helping

• three-line stanzas: tercets

  • made up of short lines with a mix of enjambment and end-stopped lines

• she did it again after ten years (suicide)

  • she considers herself a walking miracle, with skin like “Jew linen”

• she is 30 years old, and she says she is like a cat and has 9 lives

• this was the third time she tried to kill herself

  • first was when she was 10

  • the second one was really on purpose, but people brought her back

• she says dying is an art and she does it very well

  • she says the hard part is the coming back

  • it is like a spectacle and people watch her and say it is a miracle

  • describing dying as an art enforces the image that there are spectators for her death and her resurrection

  • she seems to believe she will reach a perfection through escaping her body

• lastly, she addresses the reader as Herr Doctor and Herr Enemy

  • she says that there is nothing in her ashes just soap, wedding ring, and gold

  • she warns that she will rise from the ashes and eat men

• has a huge humanitarian undertone talking about how the Nazis treated Jews

  • talking to Herr Doctor: Nazi doctors were performing surgeries on Jews to learn about the body – “I am your opus”

  • she talks about how in her ashes it is only soap, wedding ring and gold filling, referring to the fact that Nazis made soap from the fat of Jews and how they collected ring and gold teeth from the ashes

• calling the reader Herr refers to the general men evil

  • at the end she says she will rise and eat men

  • this means traditions, social and political life that is controlled by men and destroys female identity (there was a feminist uprising in the 60s)

  • in mythology the Phoenix is born from the ashes of burnt women

  • Herr God refers to a men-controlled world

  • comparing dying to an art and saying that men bring her back against her will can refer to being artistically controlled by the patriotic society

• imagery related to suicide

  • death

  • resurrection

  • spectacle

• father figure / male figure

  • parent-child relationship

• intertextual layer:

  • (Lazarus, Christ, resurrection, numbers)

  • Holocaust (concentration camps, destruction of Jews)

  • classical mythology (Phoenix)

  • layers overlap

Daddy

• another one of her Holocaust poems

• one of the most controversial modern poems written

• published posthumously in 1965 as part of the collection Ariel

  • the poem was originally written in October 1962, a month after Plath's separation from her husband, the poet Ted Hughes and four months before her death by suicide

  • it is a deeply complex poem informed by the poet's relationship with her deceased father, Otto Plath

  • told from the perspective of a woman addressing her father, the memory of whom has an oppressive power over her, the poem details the speaker's struggle to break free of his influence

• it is a dark, surreal, and at times painful allegoric

  • uses metaphor and other devices to carry the idea of a female victim finally freeing herself from her father

  • her father died while she thought he was God (an immortal being)

• title: the first indication that the poem is addressing patriarchy

  • by addressing “Daddy” (rather than “father” or “dad”), Plath immediately sets up a dynamic in which a male figure is venerated, literally located at the top of the poem, while the female speaker is infantilized

  • she is an adult addressing her father with a child’s vocabulary, trying to communicate with him through the sing-song cadence of a nursery rhyme

• the speaker begins the poem by addressing the circumstances in which she lives

  • saying that they are simply no longer adequate

  • she compares herself to a foot living inside a black shoe

  • for 30 years she has lived this way, deprived and without colour, not even having the courage to breathe or sneeze

  • she describes the oppressive shadow of her father's memory

• the speaker then addresses her father

  • informing him that she has had to kill him

  • she then says that he actually died before she had the chance to do so

  • she describes her father as being heavy as marble and like "a bag full of God," as well as like a horrifying statue with one toe that looks like a San Francisco seal (huge and grey)

  • his head being located in the bizarre blue-green waters of the Atlantic Ocean, near the beautiful coastal town of Nauset, Massachusetts

• the speaker’s father “died before [she] had time” to see him for who he really was

  • and because of this the speaker has been trapped inside a childlike perception of her father as godlike

  • over the years, her memory of him has grown in its oppressive power, and she realizes she must destroy her godlike image of him in order to be free

  • she thus confesses to her father that she has had to “kill” him—or rather, the idea of him which has held her in thrall

  • this speaks to his personal hold on her, but also to the figurative force of the oppression faced by women in a male-dominated world

• the speaker tells her father that she used to pray for his return from the dead

  • the speaker prayed in the German language, in a town in Poland that was utterly destroyed by endless wars (the name of the town was common)

  • because of this, she could not tell where her father had been, nor where exactly he came from

  • she could not talk to him: it felt as though her tongue kept getting caught in her jaw, as though her tongue were stuck in a trap made of barbed wire

• because of this oppression, the speaker has felt unable to communicate with him

  • let alone stand up to her father throughout her life

  • barbed wire: the sheer violence of her father's hold over her, which denies her any ability to express herself

  • the poem thus presents the inability to communicate as one clear by-product of oppression

• she thought every German was her father

  • she thought the language was offensive and disgusting

  • it was like the engine of a train, carrying her off like a Jew to a concentration camp: she began speaking like a Jew, and then started thinking that she might in fact be a Jew

• throughout the poem the speaker also explicitly conflates her father with the Nazis

  • she begins to identify herself with the Jewish people: a response which reveals her feelings of utter powerlessness against her father

  • the Nazis were Fascists: authoritarians who violently squashed any dissent

  • this controversial comparison is meant to again highlight the brutality of her father's presence, something the speaker implies she was actually to cow to

• the speaker, perhaps still imagining herself on this train, then describes the Austrian state of Tyrol and the beer of Austria's capital city as being impure and false

• she then lists the other things that might make her Jewish:

  • her Romani ancestry, her strange luck, and her tarot cards

• again describing her father, the speaker claims that he is not God after all

  • but rather a swastika—the symbol of the German Nazi regime

  • so opaque that no light could get through it

  • all women love Fascists: being stepped on brutally by someone who is a monster at heart

  • this not only draws attention to the power imbalance between men and women, but to the normalization of violence against women

  • violence that is so woven into every aspect of society that women can only be seen to “adore” their oppressors

  • this oppression is so commonplace, so accepted, that it is hard for victims to even recognize it, let alone fight back

• the speaker decides that her father is in fact a devil

  • as was the wicked man who tore her passionate heart into pieces

• the speaker was 10 years old when her father died

  • when she was 20, she tried to commit suicide so that she could finally be reunited with him

  • she thought even being buried with him would be enough

  • the suicide attempt was unsuccessful, however, as she was discovered and forced into recovery

• the plan having failed, she came up with another

  • she made a model of her father, a man in black who, like her father, looked the part of a Nazi

  • his man had a love of torture and she married him

  • the speaker, directly addressing her father again, claims she is finally through

  • the telephone's unplugged and no one will be getting through to her → no one to save her from another suicide attempt

• she refers to her husband as a vampire

  • saying that he drank her blood for seven years → a metaphor for the way marriage, under patriarchy, robs a woman of any life of her own

• the speaker makes “a model” of her father and marries him

  • the husband is described as having “a Meinkampf look” and “a love of the rack and the screw,” two images which attest to his violent and oppressive nature

  • moving from her father to another man has done nothing to free the speaker, because she is still living within an oppressive world that treats her as subservient to the men in her life

• freeing herself

  • only in recognizing the patriarchal violence and oppression present in her marriage and asserting that she is “finally through” can the speaker metaphorically drive a stake through her father’s heart

  • she is not only freeing herself of her oppressive marriage, but of the kind of gendered dynamic modelled to her by her father

  • the only way to fight patriarchal oppression is to recognize and expose its many, shapeshifting forms

• the speaker imagines a village in which the locals never liked her father

  • and so they are dancing and stomping on his body because they always knew exactly what he was

  • the speaker deems her father despicable and again tells him that she is finished

• gender and oppression

  • the speaker’s relationship to her father’s memory can be thought of as representative of the broader power imbalance between men and women in a patriarchal society, or a society in which men hold most positions of political, social, and moral authority

  • such a world subjects women to repressive rules and violence at the hands of men, limiting their autonomy, self-expression, and freedom