Modernism Flashcards
Chicago Literary Reneissance
Lead to the modernism - little town motif exhibit modernist features
Spoon River Anthology
Edgar Lee Masters, a collective picture of a little, fictional town, situated on the midwest.
Each poem is an autobiographical epitaph narrated by a dead citizen - told from perspective of a graveyard in their own voice (like in Mark Twain).
Chicago
Carl Sandburg. A poem that focuses on Chicago as a symbolic city - time when America becomes largely urbanized.
Urban setting determines identity of the nation
Winesburg; Ohio
Sherwood Anderson. A collection of tales characterized by many features such as in Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology - collection of portraits of characters living in Winesburg in their own language - small town life characterized by alienation and frustration.
They gravitate to aspiring writer, since mastery of language can help them articulate their stories and figure out what they want in life - grotesque characters (not in negative sense - finding beauty in misfits in life) - beauty, irresistible fascination. Beauty is hidden.
Modernism
Starts with WW1. Impacted the entire generation of writers who fought or served (PURRRR). After returning from battlefield, they started questioning old conventions and lost many values and spirituality. Where was God? Due to the market crash, they also had to think about survival. Modernism was pessimistic, bleak and nostalgic.
Motto: make it new!
Symbolic beginning of Modernism
The Armory show in 1913 - Americans for first time could see impressionists and cubists - it was a shock - for example Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude descending a staircase”.
The very nature of perception has changed, old way of depicting reality realistically wouldn’t do, and artists became aware that what we see is illusion, reality is in movement.
Characteristics of Modernism
- Impression, no smoothly-flowing stories.
- Writing technique that would work with DISCONTINUITY of life; dissonance; construction out of fragments; omitting explanations.
- Often a collage; collection of fragments;
- Several narrators telling the same contradictory story - different versions of reality; \
- Irony, understatements, symbols, images, archetypes; challenging for the reader, searching for missing coherence;
- No one can have access to final ultimate reality -
- subjectivity stressed by modernists
Style:
- stress on discipline, working hard, revising,
- artist is a craftsman
- abandoning of romantic explosions of feelings,
- art is rigorous;
Gertrude Stein
Moved to Paris before WW1, opened a house visited by many artists.
Revolutionary writing techniques - relied on repetition of words; arrangement of words was important; literary cubism; collage of sounds, reader becomes a viewer.
No descriptions - she simply names things; a rose is a rose.
Ernest Hemingway
Part of Lost Generation. Saw the war - was an ambulance driver.
Master of modernist craft; simple, declarative sentences; main characters - solitary individual who comes to terms with existence full of meaningless violence with moral courage and honesty.
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway.
Portrait of Lost Generation, wounded american expatriates, who stayed in Paris and tried to make sense of their lives.
Novel follows them as they follow from bar to bar; spare characterisation; almost no description; action carried on by dialogues - showing, not telling; fast-paced action. Bull-fight - ritual transformations of fighting into art
Old Man And the Sea
Ernest Hemingway. A long short story, got him a nobel prize; fisherman who struggles with a big fish - loses, but it’s not that important that he lost. After all, what’s important is the style of failure - a moral win :]
Harlem Renaissance
Harlem became fashionable, afroamericans living there were discovered producing exciting art; jazz music, paintings, literature, poetry, novels
Langston Hughes
Black author - Rhythms of jazz and blues in his poetry, trying to blend his poems with jazz
Francis Scott Fitzgerald
Chronicler of jazz age; (first two) depicting middle classes, who were fashionably rich and enjoying prosperity of WW1
The Great Gatsby
Francis Scott Fitzgerald. A novel that captures the spirits of 1920s; main characters - images of author and his wife; easy read, but an essence of modernist craft.
Fitzgerald disciplines his style; only essential details are present. A story of tragic consequences of american naive optimism; Gatsby - outsider in the world of the rich; makes his fortune by smuggling alcohol; comment on american dream - it has become corrupted, diminished, betrayed by the present; belongs to the past; perhaps can be regained in future; but Lost Generation has lost it.; narrator - observer - through his consciousness we have access to the story; no authorial influence.
