1. A Look at MODERNISM: American Literature 1914-1945
Contemporary
Colonial
Realism
We are
going here
Modernism
Regionalism
& Naturalism
Romanticism

2. Causes of the Modernist Temper
World War I (gruesome view of death & technology)
Urbanization & Industry
Immigration
Technological Evolution
Growth of Modern Science
Influence of Austrian Sigmund Freud ( )
Influence of German Karl Marx ( )
Perceived problems with the ideals of the movements that preceded modernism: Romanticism, Victorianism, and Edwardianism.

3. WWI
WWI
-It involved Am. Artists and thinkers with the brutal actualities of large-scale modern war, so different from imagining heroism.
-The senses of a great civilization being destroyed or destroying itself, of social breakdown, and of individual powerlessness became part of the American experience as a result of its participation in WWI, with resulting feelings of fear, discrimination, and on occasion, liberation.
-In the wake of the apocalyptic sense of a new century and the cultural crisis brought on by WWI, Western notions of superiority came into question. In addition, long held precepts of the Renaissance and Enlightenment models of reality, all encompassing beliefs that humans were essentially good and could perfect both themselves and their societies, were beginning to collapse, and the value systems underlying American society—those of God, country, and capitalism—also faced challenges on almost all fronts.
-A new term came to be used to describe the generation of men and women who came to maturity between WWI and the Depression of the 1930s. Gertrude Stein first heard the phrase from the proprietor of the Hotel Pernollet in Belley. Referring to a young mechanic repairing Stein’s car, M. Pernollet used the expression une generation perdue to describe the dislocation, rootlessness, and disillusionment experienced in the wake of the war. Stein later expanded the meaning of the phrase in conversation with Ernest Hemingway, saying that his was a decadent generation that was drinking itself to death. Hemingway, whose early books were prototypes for the lost generation of writers, recounts this conversation in the preface to The Sun Also Rises and again in A Moveable Feast. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night is a striking account of the spiritual climate of the time. Much of Malcolm Cowley’s work deals with the writers of that generation. It applied to all Americans who, after the war, found life in the United States to be shallow, empty, vulgar, and unfulfilling.

4. URBANIZATION
Romanticism’s more moderate expression and valuation of nature—the rural, agricultural, and traditional—as opposed to culture and art seemed inadequate to express a sense of loss and new beginnings.

5. INDUSTRIALIZATION
Romanticism’s philosophies of pantheism and transcendence no longer seemed to cohere for those who had to cope with the technologies of industrial modernization.

6. IMMIGRATION
Oscar Handlin states, “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.”
Between 1880 and 1920, some 23 million immigrants came to a country that numbered only 76 million in Immigrants made up 15% of the total population in 1900; in the first decade of the 20th century, immigrants constituted nearly 70% of industrial workforce.

7. TECHNOLOGICAL EVOLUTION
-Telephones and electricity in homes changed the gap between better- and worse-off Americans. Those without electricity and phones were, literally, out of the network.
-Phonograph record and record player, the motion picture which acquired sound in 1929, and radio
-Automobile: millions of jobs were created; geography of the nation was altered by a new system of highways, which changed measure of distance, doomed some small towns to obscurity, and, put others, literally, on the map; made interstate trucking an alternative to railroading, cities changed shapes, suburbs came into being.
-Large-scale migrations from rural areas to urban centers, along with technological change, also caused feelings of cultural dislocation.

8. GROWTH OF MODERN SCIENCE
Scientists became aware that
the atom was not the smallest unit of matter
matter was not indestructible
both time and space were relative to an observer’s position
some phenomena were so small that attempts at measurement would alter them
Some outcomes could be predicted only in terms of statistical probability
the universe might be infinite in size and yet infinitely expanding
In short, much of the commonsense basis of nineteenth-century science had to be put aside in favor of far more powerful but also far more complicated theories. The prevalent assumption was that nonscientific thinking could not explain anything.

9. SIGMUND FREUD (1856-1939) Invented the use of psychoanalysis
as a means to study one’s
“unconscious”
-Hidden in this “unconscious” were repressed experiences: traumas, forbidden desires, unacceptable emotions—most of these of a sexual nature and many deriving from earliest childhood. The forbidden and impossible nature of these wishes left lifelong scars on the adult personality. Freud hypothesized that the process of analysis would help patients understand these emotions and that the understanding in turn would enable them to recover the ability to function as productive adults.
-In popularized form, these ideas were extended to support the relaxation of sexual mores as well as permissiveness in childrearing, and they underlay the larger trend toward openness and informality in American behavior.

10. KARL MARX ( )
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the
history of class struggles.”
“The development of Modern Industry, therefore,
cuts from under its feet the very foundation on
which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates
products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces,
above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the
victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”
-Marx sought to explain history and produce a new sense of historical consciousness.
-He believed that the root of all behavior was economic and that the leading feature of economic life was the division of society into antagonistic classes based on a relation to the means of production.
-The Industrial Revolution, according to him, depended on the accumulation of surplus capital by industrialists who paid the least possible amount to workers.
-Americans who thought of themselves as Marxists in the 1920s and 1930s identified with the world’s workers and with a society in which workers would control the means of production. These ideas went counter to traditional American beliefs in free enterprise and competition in the marketplace; therefore, the growth of labor movements in the 1920s was contested by industrialists.

11. INFLUENCES OF FREUD AND MARX
Modernist writers focused more on the inner being as opposed to the social being.
Marxism instructed even non-Marxist artists that the individual was being lost in a mass society.
Some modern writers believed that art should celebrate the working classes, attack capitalism, and forward revolutionary goals, while others believed that literature should be independent and non-political.
-The psychology of Freud and Carl Jung have been seminal in the “modern” movement in literature. In many respects it is a reaction against realism and naturalism and the scientific postulates on which they rest.
-All of these new ideas worked to undermine long-held assumptions about language, culture, religion, and reality, which aided in the creation of the “modernist self” prevalent among literary artists of this movement.
-This new sense of self gave the modernist writers a heightened sense of purpose, even as their responses to the cultural crises were highly individual.

12. SHIFTS IN THE MODERN NATION
from country to city
from farm to factory
from native born to new citizen
introduction to “mass” culture (pop culture)
continual movement
split between science and the literary tradition (“science vs. letters”)
-Artists belittled the capacity of science to provide accounts of the things that matter, like subjective experiences and moral issues.
-Victorianism and Edwardianism also proved inadequate: The first seemed too morally earnest, complacent, and, at times, overly squeamish about sexual matters; the second, a reaction to its predecessor’s conservatism, began to doubt authority, but not always very deeply. After the Edwardian period, the movement to the ideas of modernism seemed almost inevitable.

13. 1920’s: THE JAZZ AGE
To F. Scott Fitzgerald it was an “age of miracles, an age of art, an age of excess, an age of satire.”

14. 1930’s: THE DEPRESSION
“True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt

15. CHARACTERISTICS OF MODERNIST WRITING
A movement away from realism into abstractions
A deliberate complexity, even to the point of elitism, forcing readers to be very well-educated in order to read these works.
A high degree of aesthetic self-consciousness or awareness
Questions of what constitutes the nature of being
A breaking with tradition and conventional modes of form, resulting in fragmentation and bold, highly innovative experimentation
Along with the social realist and proletarian (amateur) prose of the 1920s and 1930s came a significant outpouring of political and protest poetry.

16. TECHNIQUES IN MODERNIST WORKS
The modernists were highly conscious that they were being modern—that they were “making it new”—and this consciousness is manifest in the modernists’ radical use of a kind of formlessness.
Collapsed plots (non chronological or logical; sometimes no structure)
Fragmentary techniques (bits and pieces come together, often vignettes and shorter)
Shifts in perspective, voice, and tone (narrator becomes a more innocent, naïve voice)
Stream-of-consciousness point of view (the flow of thought, random and irrational)

17. IMAGISM
Includes an eclectic group of English and American poets working between 1912 and 1917 including Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and William Carlos Williams.
It was a reaction against a prevailing cultural romanticism which encouraged social optimism.
The imagists aimed to strip away poetry’s tendency toward dense wordiness and sentimentality.
Early influences on the imagists included the symbolist poets, classical Greek and Roman poetry, and Chinese and Japanese verse forms, in particular the haiku, or hokku.

18. MODERNISM INCLUDES OTHER “ISMS”
Fauvism
Cubism
Dadaism
Expressionism
Surrealism
Symbolism

19. Henri Matisse. Woman with a Hat, 1905.
FAUVISM
A number of French artists such as Rouault,
Derain, Dufy, Vlaminck, and Braque who
grouped around Matisse and exhibited
together from 1905 to 1907.
The outraged critical reaction to their free use of color and distortion of form led to their being called Les Fauves (“the wild beasts”). Although Matisse was the only member of the group to continue with the fauvist style, the movement had a revolutionary impact on the development of modern art. Many of its adherents moved on to experiments with cubism.
According to Tate, the United Kingdom’s national museum of British and Modern Art, fauvist paintings were characterized by artists’ use of strident color and seemingly wild brushwork.
Henri Matisse. Woman with a Hat, 1905.

20. CUBISM A 20th century art movement that inspired other art forms.
In cubist artworks, objects are broken up and reassembled
into an abstract form.

21. DADAISM A movement in Europe during and just after WWI,
which ignored logical relationship between idea and
statement, argued for absolute freedom..
…a protest against the insanity
of the war.
Anarchy Art
Marcel Duchamp. Nude Descending a Staircase, No

22. EXPRESSIONISM
A subjective art form in which an artist distorts reality for an
emotional effect.
(represents moods)

23. SURREALISM A movement in art emphasizing the expression of
the imagination as realized in
dreams and presented without
conscious control.
Juxtaposed images to contradict each other

24. SYMBOLISM
Symbolism in France began as a revolt against the cold impersonality of the realistic novel and its minute descriptions of an objective, external reality.
As symbolism sought freedom from rigidity in the selection of subject matter, so it desired to free poetry from the restrictions of conventional versification. The most outstanding development of symbolism was in the art of the novel.

25. Works Cited
Baym, Nina, ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1998.
Harmon, William, and C. Hugh Homan, eds. A Handbook to Literature.
New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1996.
Kimmelman, Burt, ed. The Facts on File Companion to 20th Century
American Poetry. New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2005.
Lathbury, Roger. American Modernism ( ): American
Literature in its Historical, Cultural, and Social Contexts.
Backgrounds to American Literature Series. New York: Facts On
File, Inc., 2006.
Siepmann, Katherine Baker, ed. Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia.
New York: Harper-Collins Publishers, Inc., 1948.