Download - American Modernism
![Page 1: American Modernism](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062323/56816249550346895dd28c67/html5/thumbnails/1.jpg)
American Modernism
1900-1945
![Page 2: American Modernism](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062323/56816249550346895dd28c67/html5/thumbnails/2.jpg)
Between World Wars• Many historians have
described the period between the two World Wars as a “traumatic coming of age.”
• In a post-Industrial Revolution era, America had moved from an agrarian nation to an urban nation.
• The lives of these Americans were radically different from those of their parents.
![Page 3: American Modernism](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062323/56816249550346895dd28c67/html5/thumbnails/3.jpg)
Modernism• Embraced nontraditional syntax
and forms.• Challenged tradition• Writers wanted to move beyond
Realism to introduce such concepts as disjointed timelines.
• An overarching theme of Modernism is “emancipation”
![Page 4: American Modernism](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062323/56816249550346895dd28c67/html5/thumbnails/4.jpg)
Modernist Writers• Ernest Hemingway, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Robert Frost
• Harlem Renaissance writers such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright
![Page 5: American Modernism](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062323/56816249550346895dd28c67/html5/thumbnails/5.jpg)
Themes
![Page 6: American Modernism](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062323/56816249550346895dd28c67/html5/thumbnails/6.jpg)
Social Norms/Cultural Sureties
• Women were given the right to vote in 1920.
• Hemlines raised; Margaret Sanger introduces the idea of birth control.
• Writers begin to explore these new ideas.
![Page 7: American Modernism](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062323/56816249550346895dd28c67/html5/thumbnails/7.jpg)
Theme of Alienation• Sense of alienation in literature:
–The character belongs to a “lost generation” (Gertrude Stein)
–The character suffers from a “dissociation of sensibility”—separation of thought from feeling (T. S. Eliot)
–The character has “a dream deferred” (Langston Hughes).
![Page 8: American Modernism](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062323/56816249550346895dd28c67/html5/thumbnails/8.jpg)
Valorization of the Individual
• Characters are heroic in the face of a future they can’t control.
• Demonstrates the uncertainty felt by individuals living in this era.
• Examples include Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, Lt. Henry in A Farewell to Arms
![Page 9: American Modernism](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062323/56816249550346895dd28c67/html5/thumbnails/9.jpg)
Urbanscapes• Life in the city
differs from life on the farm; writers began to explore city life.
• Conflicts begin to center on society.
![Page 10: American Modernism](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062323/56816249550346895dd28c67/html5/thumbnails/10.jpg)
THE SPIRIT OF MODERNIST LITERATURE
• Previous structures of life (social, political, religious, or artistic) had been either destroyed or determined to be falsehoods: therefore, art had to be renovated.
• Marked by a conscious break with tradition - rejects traditional values and assumptions.
• “Modern” implies a historical discontinuity, a sense of alienation, loss, and despair.
• It rejects not only history but also the society on which history is based.
![Page 11: American Modernism](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062323/56816249550346895dd28c67/html5/thumbnails/11.jpg)
THE SPIRIT OF MODERNIST LITERATURE
• provides pessimistic cultural criticism • a skeptical, apprehensive attitude
toward pop culture - criticized and deplored its manipulative commercialism
• Literature, especially poetry, becomes the place where the search for meaning, is carried out; therefore, literature should be vitally important to society.
![Page 12: American Modernism](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062323/56816249550346895dd28c67/html5/thumbnails/12.jpg)
CHARACTERISTICS OF MODERNIST WRITING
• A movement away from realism into abstractions
• A deliberate complexity - forcing readers to be very well-educated in order to read these works
• A high degree of aesthetic self-consciousness• Questions of what constitutes the nature of
being• A breaking with tradition and conventional
modes of form, resulting in fragmentation and bold, highly innovative
![Page 13: American Modernism](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062323/56816249550346895dd28c67/html5/thumbnails/13.jpg)
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• Fragmentary techniques• Shifts in perspective, voice, and tone• Stream-of-consciousness point of view• Associative techniques
![Page 14: American Modernism](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062323/56816249550346895dd28c67/html5/thumbnails/14.jpg)
COLLAPSED PLOTS• It will seem to begin arbitrarily, to advance
without explanation, and to end without resolution
• It will suggest rather than assert, making use of symbols and images instead of statements.
• The reader must participate in the making of the story by digging the coherent structure out that, on its surface, it seems to lack.
![Page 15: American Modernism](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062323/56816249550346895dd28c67/html5/thumbnails/15.jpg)
FRAGMENTARY TECHNIQUES
• notable for what it omits—the explanations, interpretations, connections, summaries, and distancing that provide continuity, perspective, and security in traditional literature
• The idea of order, sequence, and unity in works is sometimes abandoned - sometimes registers more as a collage.
• This fragmentation in literature was meant to reflect the reality of the flux and fragmentation of one’s life.
![Page 16: American Modernism](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062323/56816249550346895dd28c67/html5/thumbnails/16.jpg)
SHIFTS IN PERSPECTIVE, VOICE, AND TONE
• includes speech of the uneducated and the inarticulate, the colloquial, and the popular - the traditional educated literary voice lost its authority
• Writers strove for directness, compression, and vividness - they were sparing of words.
• Modern fiction tends to limit the reader to one character’s point of view on the action - often that of a naïve or marginal person (a child or an outsider) to convey better the reality of confusion
![Page 17: American Modernism](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062323/56816249550346895dd28c67/html5/thumbnails/17.jpg)
STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS
• An attempt to depict the mental and emotional reactions of characters to external events - continuous sequence of thoughts that run through a person’s head, usually without punctuation or literary interference.
• writers seem to share certain assumptions: – that the significant existence of human
beings is to be found in their mental-emotional processes and not in the outside world
– that this mental-emotional life is disjointed and illogical
![Page 18: American Modernism](https://reader035.vdocument.in/reader035/viewer/2022062323/56816249550346895dd28c67/html5/thumbnails/18.jpg)
ASSOCIATIVE TECHNIQUES
• Modernists sometimes used a collection of seemingly random impressions and literary, historical, philosophical, or religious allusions with which readers are expected to make the connections on their own.
• This reference to details of the past was a way of reminding readers of the old, lost coherence.