Session 8: American Modernism

Cultural Context of the United States

• industrialization

• technology

• urbanization

• complete secularization

• advances in the sciences (relativity theory)

• psychoanalysis (Freud: id, ego, super-ego)

• World War I

• (attempted) shifts in gender and race relations

Literary Reactions

modernist literature obsessed with alienation, doubt, with form and language o its own:

• feeling of pessimism / disintegration of the world: political systems, traditions, human beings, psyche

• fragmentation

• disillusionment, skepticism, despair (for example: T.S. Eliot’s 1920 “The Waste Land”)

• yet often vision of putting fragmented world together as a whole!

Definition of Modernism

Modernism describes “the radical shift in aesthetic and cultural sensibilities evident in the art and literature of the post-World War One period.” Modernism breaks with Victorian bourgeois morality and rejects “nineteenth-century optimism,” presenting “a profoundly pessimistic picture of a culture in disarray. This despair often results in an apparent apathy and moral relativism.”

Three Basic Conflicts

• How should literature relate to literary history and those who came before?

• Should popular culture be a part of literature?

• How political/apolitical should literature be?

Modernist writers came to very different conclusions about these questions

Imagism: rules by F.S. Flint

• Direct treatment of the “thing”

• All words must contribute to the presentation of the “thing”

• Rhythm as a sequence of the musical phrase

Imagism: Ezra Pound

• Image presents an “intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”

• Experience of “sudden liberation”

Imagism Basic Elements

• Language of common speech

• New rhythms; often a changed rhythm means a new idea

• Freedom of choice of subject

• Presentation of an image, not its

description

• Clarity

• Concentration of language and of presentation

• Freedom from didacticism

Hilda Doolittle – H.D.

1886-1961

Famous modernist poet – imagist poetry

speech situation and imagery in Oread

speech situation: an oread commands the sea to rise up and splash them on their rocks

imagery: draws from fields of sea and forest, compares waves to the movement of trees, forest imagery for the sea

Oread

• Greek mythology: mountain nymph

• presided over activities that took place in the mountains such as herding and hunting

How is the merging achieved in Oread ?

fusion: no ‘unnecessary words’ such as “like” – cohesion through repetition, blending word fields

F.Scott Fitzgerald

• 1896-1940

• American novelist, essayist, and short story writer who chronicled the so-called ‘Jazz Age’

• Part of the ‘Lost Generation’ of American expatriates in Europe (alongside Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound); writers and artists often disillusioned, WWI figures looms large in their lives and works

Narrative Situation in Great Gatsby

• Nick as a minor character amd silent observer

• his observation is interrupted by changes of perspective and extradiegetic fragments

• homodiegetic narrator

unreliable Narration in The Great Gatsby

reliability is questionable: “I am one of the few honest people I have ever known”

Nick puts fragments together and highlights the mingling of narration in the beginning, later does not indicate this mingling anymore: describes Myrtle’s death as if he had witnessed it

• mingling of intradiegetic passages and the extradiegetic narration hints at unreliability

ambivalence in the great gatsby

• ambivalence on the level of content as well as on the level of narration: furthers sense of uncertainty

• Nick is both a participant and observer, and his own moral compass is not always clear

• ambiguity of the American Dream

The Valley of Ashes

• a place of desolation and urban despair

• long stretch of desolate land between West Egg and NYC created by dumping industrial ashes

• symbolizes moral and social decay that comes from the uninhibited pursuit of wealth

• symbolized plight of the poor

Eyes of T.J. Eckleburg

• eyes from an old advertisement billboard over the valley of ashes

• characters feel watched by his stare, he is like God, watching and judging

The Green Light: Failure of Romantic Vision

• situated by the end of Daisy’s East Egg dock

• represents Gatsby’s hopes and dreams, associates it with Daisy, did not realize it was already behind him

• Nick compares it to how America, rising out of the ocean must have looked like to Dutch sailors

Regions and Places in The Great Gatsby

East Egg

West Egg

New York City

The Valley of Ashes

The Midwest

➢ Smaller version of U.S. society

as a whole?

Topics in The Great Gatsby

• White supremacy and race ideology

• gender identities

• class struggle

• technology and mobility

• golden twenties, Jazz age, arts, radio

• corruption and crime

• decadence …

Context of the Harlem Renaissance

• Great Migration: mass migration of Black Southerners to the urban centers of the North and

Midwest, beginning in the 1890s as a trickle, then

a flood in the 1910s, 8 million African Americans

will leave the South until the 1970s

• Harlem, NYC becomes one such center where

workers but also artists and intellectuals settle

• Seeking greater opportunities in the North: jobs,

escaping segregation, education

• returning African American WWI soldiers

• Free to express themselves the way they wanted

to, chance to become a writers, musician; Harlem

and urban centers as places of possibility

• The Red Summer of 1919, Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die”

The Red Summer of 1919

• months of white supremacist terrorism and

racial riots in cities across the United States

• 38 dead in Chicago, roughly 200 Blacks killed

in rural Elaine, Arkansas

• Mob violence, lynchings

Dominant view of literature by Harlem Renaissance writers:

literature and the arts are political and (even though they disagreed on the ‘how’ and ‘what’)

Defining the Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance in literature was never a cohesive movement. It was, rather, a product of overlapping social and intellectual circles, parallel developments, intersecting groups, and competing visions – yet all loosely bound together by a desire for racial self-assertion and self-definition in the face of white supremacy. The interplay between intense conflict and a sense

of being part of a collective project identified by race energized the movement […].

Central Goals of the Harlem Renaissance

• racial pride

• call for acceptance in all areas of life:

countering Jim Crow segregation

• focus on rich history of African Americans

• emphasis on Black creativity and intelligence

• analysis of “double consciousness”

(two souls, two thoughts, two

unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in

one dark body, whose dogged strength alone

keeps it from being torn asunder” (Du Bois))

• experimenting with voice and form to create

meaningful art

Langston Hughes

• 1901-1967

• The writer of the Harlem Renaissance

• Essays, poems, short stories, plays,

novels

• Covered African American life in the

US, both in the South and in the

North

• Based in Harlem for many years

I, Too, Sing America

• speaker: a Black man

• tone: optimistic, certain, demanding, proud

• development: from someone who tolerates exclusion to someone that demands a seat at the table and is optimistic about the future

• similar to “I hear America Singing” by Walt Whitman

• → radical reference

• → making political claims through art