- Lasted from around 1910-1940, though Modernist influence continued long past that period.
- Experimentation with form and subject matter; a period of transition from traditional forms to looser, less-structured forms. Old forms were seen as an inadequate means for expressing 20th C experience
- Sense of fragmentation and disruption of culture; sense of alienation and a feeling of pessimism about the world. Fear that human culture is meaningless or unable to exert a positive influence on the world, leading to a sense of impotence that could be spiritual, sexual, and psychological. Some literature is intentionally fragmentary and disunified to reflect these feelings
- Along with the sense of fragmentation comes the use of multiple perspectives in literature and art, often representing a sense that it is no longer possible to accept that there is one universal "truth" upon which everyone agrees.
- Influenced by WWI. After witnessing trench warfare and worldwide devastation, it was hard to accept old ideas that gave life meaning: that war is glorious and honorable, that religion and the arts give life meaning, that human culture will gradually improve over time.
- Forces
- Science (Darwin, Einstein) and technology
- Psychology (Freud)
- History (Marxism)
- Urbanization, industrialization, economics, labor, unrest
- The literary movements of Realism and Naturalism
- New aesthetics redefining the understanding and representation of the physical world, time and space.
- Sense of shrinking individual's significance, which imparts a sense of powerless & diminishing sense of the value of the individual life
- The modern poem must tell the truth
- The truth is not nice, decent, ordered, or reassuring; instead it is subject to and suffers from all the maladies of the modern world:
- Fragmentation (partial knowledge, inadequacy of language)
- Isolation
- Alienation
- Focus on the self (intense subjectivity/self-absorption, coupled with impersonality)
- Disillusionment, a sense of pointlessness, nothingness, death-in-life
- moral relativism and paralysis
- Loss of faith in old systems of order and authority (religion, government, language)
- The key aspects of the modern poem: stylistic individuality, formal experimentation, subjective voice, image, symbol, ellipses, opacity, irony, fragmentation, impersonality, and an avoidance of generalizations, morals, messages
- Science had an impact on intellectual issues
- In the late 1800's, Darwin suggested that people are basically animals, not special creatures made in the image of God. Darwin argued that natural selection involves random changes in a species, so evolution does not lead people forward according to a preordained plan.
- In physics, Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity concluded that time is relative, while quantum physics (including Werner Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle") suggested that the fundamental nature of reality is less orderly and less predictable than people once assumed
- Sigmund Freud theorized that people are driven by unconscious psychological motives, a death wish, and an animalistic impulses associated with the "id." If our motives are unconscious, can we understand even our own individual reality? Freud also called humans "the neurotic animal."
- Influenced by philosophy:
- In the late 1800's, Nietzsche famously declared that "God is dead" and argued that people would come to reject any sense of universal objective truth
- Also in the late 1800's, the economic and social philosopher Karl Marx argued that the inequality caused by industrialization and capitalism would lead to a social upheaval and revolution
These other people were
- In human psyche there is a vast dark area that the conscious mind does not have access to. Two levels: unconscious (area of forgetting and repression) and the id (area of the human psyche that has no direct ___________ to the human mind)
- There are no absolutes. And if there are no absolutes
- Shift from third person omniscient perspective where there is a comforting authorial voice that knows everything about world writer is writing about to fictional perspective governed by multiple objectives
- Have to rely on human being's perspectives
- Id = amoral; compels behavior that we have no control over
- Ego = has to maintain uneasy negotiation between forces of conscious and unconscious
Multiple Versions of Modernism
- TS Eliot and William Carlos Williams were both modernists, but had strong disagreements about the direction poetry should take
- Additionally, many writers did not participate in Modernist experimentation
- Edna St. Vincent Millay and Robert Frost, for example, continue to use traditional poetic forms and techniques (sonnets, meter, rhyme, etc) while Robinson Jeffers was influenced more by Whitman than by the Modernists of his own time period.
- Another example, Langston Hughes created "modern" verse forms, but he was influenced less by Modernism and more by Jazz, blues, and black vernacular language
- Major American Modernists: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Marianne Moore, H.D., Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and others
- Major European Modernists: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, Marcel Proust, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, and others
Imagism was a short-lived but important movement in poetry. Led by Ezra Pound, several poets published Imagist work between 1914 and 1917. According to Pound, Imagism involves concise, direct phrasing and the "direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective": in other words, an impression of an object, situation, or feeling without any unnecessary words and no commentary by the narrator. Imagism in Poetry:
- sort of at the heart of modernism poetry
- the revolt against conventional art at the end of the 19th century was across the board. Everybody was experimenting with new forms. In poetry, that revolt took initial form of imagism
- represented a revolt of the conventions of mainstream victorian poetry
- intention was to loosen meter
- language of poetry should represent as close as possible the language of ordinary speech
- an attempt to return poetry to that point in order to allow thought and emotion to dictate the cadences
- stresses the primacy of the concrete particular as opposed to moralizing, generalizations, abstractions, mere rhetoric
- a poetic image is an instance of sensory perception expressed in representational language that resists definitive analysis or interpretation
- an image in a poem is a representation in language of something in a physical world but that representation in language resists interpretation
- it is to be first and foremost itself
- imagist poem is highly condensed poem which focuses on concrete particulars and has a meaning but meaning is felt rather than expressed in....
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Highly black dialect
- Zora Neale Hurston:
- Frame story
- comes into town & tells her friend where they've been
- Woman empowering
- Realism to modernism
- dialect/realistic/not much experimentation
- like Mark Twain
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T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land
- 1922 (Great Gatsby)
- Tyresius (both female/male)
- man-->woman-->man - who has greater pleasure -->woman
- Fragmentation
- Not equipped to stand up to Modern world like the human psyche
- Physical level in the poem
- Myth/popular songs/Eliots only ideas
- 1st copies Chaucer's ideals
- April is the cruelest month
- Profrock - passive agent (crying for help
- 1st step on the road back
________________________________________________________
J Alfred Prufrock
-->party to confess his love because doesn't want to grow old alone
paralyzed - scared of her indifference
-->Rather be a pair of scuttly claws across the ocean
isolation & loneliness
Modern world
Alienation
Unhealthy focus on self
Unable to stand up to modern world
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High modernism was white movement
- Langston Hughes (Harlem Renaissance)
- Dialect
- Jazz in word form
- Marginalized, Alienated, isolated, then & historically
- Chief black voice of the time
- Authentic African American voice
- Involve black art
- Intellect way of life
________________________________________________________
- Imagination is the heart of modernist poetry
- Revolt against mainstream Victorian poetry/meter
- Wordsworth
- Coleridge
- Every day man voice
- Emily Dickinson
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African American Culture and the Harlem Renaissance
- Early 1900's: The Washington - Du Bois debate
- Booker T. Washington
- A leading African-American public figure; published his autobiography Up from Slavery in 1901
- Founded several schools, including Tuskegee Institute (Alabama)
- Advocated education for blacks, including vocational training (manual labor, factory work, farming)
- Said to be the first black man invited to the White House as a guest (by Theodore Roosevelt)
- Favored non-confrontational, assimilationist approach: African-Americans should improve themselves and work within the system in order to make a place for themselves within white society
- W.E.B. du Bois
- Editor, author, sociologist, historian; a leading African-American public figure
- Major founder of the civil rights group NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People)
- Published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903
- Favored more direct confrontation of white domination; disagreed with Booker T. Washington
- Favored liberal arts education; more intellectual and less focus on vocational training
- Was an editor during 1920's, published Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer
- Used the term "double consciousness" to describe the African-American experience "twoness": a feeling of conflicted identity as both a black person and as an American.
- The Harlem Renaissance
- Resulted partly from the Great Migration in which southern African-American moved north to urban centers from around 1915-1930: New York City, Detroit, Chicago, Boston, Kansas City, St. Louis, etc.
- Harlem Renaissance was a "flowering" of African-American culture during the 1920's, centered in New York
- Included musicians (jazz and blues), painters, poets, playwrights, fiction writers, political activists.
- Some funding came from progressive white patrons, who could influence the content of black writers' work
- Fad for "primitivism" (raw, natural, untrained art and emotions): writing in dialect, etc
- Some black writers felt compelled to follow white literary traditions
- Some music venues, such as The Cotton Club, featured black performers playing to white-only audiences
- There were also many attempts to develop a black voice in literature (e.g. Langston Hughes's use of jazz and blues rhythms) and to create a distinctively black culture
- Major authors= Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer
- Faded after the stock market crash of 1929, which led to an economic crisis and the Great Depression of the 1930's
- Paved way for African-American literature of the 1930s-40's, the Black Arts Movement of the 1960's-70's; has continued to influence present-day authors such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker
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- Modernism was predominantly a white, male movement
- Women weren't allowed to be full participants in modernism when it was happening though there were a lot of women writers <-- special case
- Langston Hughes and other African American writers = other special case because not white
- Women were also alienated and isolated, as were African Americans
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