American Literary Modernism

Modernity

• Technological progress (trains, cars, mass communication, war)

• Social progress (women’s suffrage, “New Woman”, “New Negro)

• Fundamental concepts of human experience being fundamentally altered

  • Reoriented how people believe themselves to exist in time and space

Modernism

• An aesthetic response to/shaping of modernity

• Modernist art is not just a reflection of modernity, it participates in the shaping of it

• Reciprocal relationship with modernity

Dating Modernism

• Expansive (1880-1956): slow-growing/indebted to Whitman + Dickinson

  • What our course uses

• Historical/Traditional (1914-1945): Interwar phenomenon (WW)

• Aesthetic (1912-1956): begins with Pound and ends at post-modernism

Modernism in relation to WW

• WWI: World becomes tragically new and unfamiliar/break from the past

  • Sense of unfamiliarity/disorientation

• Promises of the Enlightenment/inevitable progress/Transcendentalism were put to rest due to the extremeness/fatalness of the WW

Modernism vs Puritanism

What kind of God would let this happen (WW)?

• Faith framework is being destabilized

• people who understand the world through the eyes of God are unable to do so anymore

Modernism vs Enlightenment

• Humans = “reasonable”?

• Would reasonable humans let something so destructive and fatal happen

Modernism vs Transcendentalism

• Humans = “divine”?

• Tragedy of the wars made these concepts insensible

Modernist Conclusion

A new world requires new art; new criteria:

• Artistic self-confidence

  • With new/powerful art, the audience can gain a sense of what was lost and how to move forward

• Formal and linguistic experimentation

• Radical ironies and juxtapositions

  • Word dissonance

• *Emphasis on reader responsibility

  • Goal: to create art that is fundamentally more difficult to understand

  • We need to become more conscientious readers

Imagism and Pound

• Imagism = a brainchild of Ezra Pound

• Beginning of literary modernism

• Reaction to “vers libre” (free verse) scribblers like Whitman

  • Whitman = wood chopper, modernist = wood carvers (the real artists)

• An effort to accord to poetry the same discipline and prestige as visual art

  • Poetry needs to be respected and left to the professionals

• A protocol for creating truly “modern” poetry

Imagist Criteria

• Direct treatment of the thing: essence not abstraction

  • Present words in a direct/streamlined manner

• Use no superfluous words

  • Don’t be like Whitman/don’t use words you don’t need

• Compose in the sequence of musical phrase

  • Don’t bind yourself to a meter that you’ll be confined to

  • Pound wants something more organic/authentic/musical

What is an “Image”?

An image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time

• Intellectual: what the poet thinks

• Emotional: what the poet feels

• Intellectual + emotional: a complex/tangle of thoughts and feelings

• Image = language beyond language

  • When we feel/sense something that we cannot explain, but poets can

Imagist Poem Purpose

• Gives the reader a “sense of sudden liberation”

  • You will become a better person with imagist poetry

• Helps reader transcend time and space

• Sudden growth

• Similar effects achieved by all great works of art

Criticisms of Modernist Poetry

Apolitical and escapist

• Its irresponsible to invite people to escape the world that is essentially in ruins

• We should be engaging in the world we live in

The “New Woman”: Ladies Home Journal

• Cult of True Womanhood

  • 19th century idealization of femininity/womanhood

• Clothing

  • Dress is made to hide any suggestion of the woman’s body

• Setting

  • Indoors, speaks to society’s expectations that women’s purpose is to maintain the house and entertain/amuse

• Positioning

  • Attention fully on the child; women aspire to nothing more than marriage and maternity

The “New Woman”: Modernist Image

• Calves are exposed (highly scandalous at the time)

• Clothing

  • Fabric is cotton: allows the shape of her body to be shown

  • Dress is far more minimalist

• Hair

  • 1920s flapper bob

  • Short hair symbolized cutting off the most reliable signs of femininity

• Positioning

  • Relaxed, feet up, reading a newspaper

  • Not confined to the indoors, reading allows her to connect with the outside world