1. American Modernism
American Modernism covered a wide variety of topics including: racial relationships, gender roles, and sexuality.

2. Time and Founders
It reached its peak in America in the 1920s up to the 1940s.
Celebrated Modernists include Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, and while largely regarded as a romantic poet, Walt Whitman is sometimes regarded as a pioneer of the modernist era in America.

3. Defined
A breaking away from established rules, traditions and conventions, fresh ways of looking at man’s position and function in the universe and many…experiments in form and style. It is particularly concerned with language and how to use it … and with writing itself

4. Rejects and Reacts
Modernism rejects the idea of the world as a machine and the belief that everything could be explained and understood through science
Modernist writing reacts to several changes: industrialization and mechanization
rapid technological advances

5. Conditions World War I dwarfed previous wars: 8,500,000 soldiers died
Karl Marx’s explanations of history—political struggle between two classes and socioeconomic order

6. Conditions Charles Darwin: view of humanity
Ferdinand de Saussure: language is relative, words have no direct relationship to concepts or objects
Albert Einstein: Theory of relativity

7. Descriptions De-centered Pessimistic Disaffected
“Literature in crisis”
Loss and despair
Violence and alienation
Race relations
Historical discontinuity
Decadence and decay
Rejection of history
Unavoidable change

8. What It Does
Elevation of art over everything else (morality, money, middle-class values)
Avant-garde—alienated from social reality
Rejection of realism ... or traditional meter
Predominantly cosmopolitan
Expresses a sense of urban cultural dislocation
Represents the stream of consciousness

9. What it Does Art is unique and original, is anti-commercial
It explores the human subconscious
Uses sensuality, intuition and a search for “Truth”
Feels human character can only be known through memories
Reacts against Realism and Victorian morality, sexuality and desire as a subject
Modernism is disenchanted

10. What it Does
Feels human character can only be known through memories and thoughts versus external description
Reacts against Realism and Victorian morality, find sexuality and sexual desire as a subject
Modernism is disenchanted

11. Forms of Writing
Experiments with point of view and narrative structure.
Rejection of chronological and narrative continuity.
Literature and language as a game
Stream of consciousness
Unreliable narrator

12. Mission
Literature = art produced by craft rather than statement of emotion
Not a set of stylistic features; an impulse to perfect
A refusal of clichés; a system of taboos
A reaction against degraded Realism
A repudiation of conformity, standardization, repetition, stupidity