Modernism Flashcards
MODERNISM
Modernism is a very complex phenomenon. When the United States entered
World War I in 1917, the country had a phenomenal growth with its industrial
power and its major cities because of the immigrants who arrived massively from
Southern and Eastern Europe, from the West Coast and from Asia.
A series of transcontinental railroads were built for a nationwide transportation
network that united California with Boston. In that period, Early Ford began the
transformation of the automobile and in 1912 the United States did its first
transcontinental highway. The inventions such as the photograph, the telephone,
radio, and cinemaimproved the life for many citizens. A very common topic of the
intellectual scene of the time had to do with the role of science. There was the
growth of modern science at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th
century. Scientists discovered the productivity of the atom or the probability of the
infinite universe. For many Americans the war helped accelerate the changes in the
forms of political and social life. We can mention women’s struggle for the right to
vote started in the 18th – 19th century. In fact, it was World War One that gave a
final push to the 19th amendment of the American constitution guaranteeing the
right vote for women in 1920. As we see in “The Great Gatsby” the women
began to demand a similar freedom for themselves.
An important role is played by the African American community. In 1909 the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, very well known as
an NAACP was founded and successfully argued during World War One to
promote use of the courts to restore the legal rights of black Americans.
At the beginning of the 20th century,many political programs were in line with the
Marxist tradition, that is they used a method of socioeconomic to understand
class relations and social conflict to view social transformation. Many Americans
travelled abroad for shorter or longer stretches of time for example James. In that
period, the question of identity was very strong. Modernity over after the stock
market crashed in 1929 which led to an economic depression with a big
percentage of unemployment and poverty.
The United States came out of the Great Depression only by entering World War
II, following the Japanese attack on the Americans leader of Pearl Harbor in
1941. In the 19th century literature and culture were important because there was a
national literature. As regard to literature, some writers such as TS Eliot were
interested in the psychology, questions about life and death. In fact, they used the
technique of the stream of consciousness. In the modern textsthere are general
patterns that are drawn from world literature and mythology. We can think about
some of the classic texts for example Ulysses by Joyce that it’s a sort of modern
rewriting of the Odyssey. In these texts there are profound similarities or ironic
contrasts between the modern world and the past. As we know, the debate about
the past and tradition is one of the main debates in the modern era. The debate is
linked to the construction of human and historical meaning in an historical
moment of crisis in the 20th century
What is the main object of modernist literature?
It is to make meaningful
situations and emotions because of the First World War that destroyed previous
human certainties and values. So, the modernist literature tended to foreground
the search for meaning. For this reason, poems and poetry had the effect of
limiting of the audience. The modernist literature found itself in a difficult
relationship because it attacked the old-style ideals of classic literature. The
reading audience in America was vast more than in Europe, there were a lot of
people that preferred the books that weredifferent from those produced in England.
Romance, historical novels, crime, fiction, and westerns became popular. In
that period there was not a certain flexibility between what was considered high
literature and what was considered middle or low literature, but we had to wait
much later in the 20th century to findmore flexibility between the high, the middle
and the low literature. In the 19th century a novel was supposed to show two or
even three volumes, in fact the modernists gave a new significance to the short
story. They decided to go to Europe, precisely in London and in Paris in the first
and second decade of the 20th century because The United States was not
considered the place where to beartists. In fact, in these places they found a society
that respected them and a great deal of freedom. In fact, the major literary themes
of the Modernist Era are confusion, isolation, and disillusionment
Ezra Pound
He was an American poet. He studied languages (French, Italian and Old
English) at the University of Pennsylvania and there he met William Carlos
Williams and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). After the graduation, he was convinced that
his country had not made for him, there is no place for him and no place for art.
So, he started to travel in Europe, in 1908 he settled in London and quicklybecame
prominent in movements that intended to revolutionize poetry, presenting his
beliefs about what makes good poetry. In his poem “A Retrospect”, he defined
“image” as “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” This
name “image” refers to a new kind of poetry. He discussed the merits of
translation, the rigors of free verse, and poets of the past. He wrote another poem
“The cantos”, this book combines reminiscent memories, meditations,descriptions
and transcriptions from the books that he was reading at the time.
Then he left England in 1920, he lived in Paris but also in various town on the
Mediterranean Sea and stayed in Italy near Genova. In Italy he became
increasingly fascinated by Benito Mussolini, and from 1941-1943 he made radio
talks in which he expressed his support of the dictator. He was arrested forweeks
in Pisa. He brought to the United States to be tried for treason, but the trial did not
take place because he was defined as insane. Many writers and intellectuals of the
time composed poems in his favor, so in the end he was released, and he returned
to Italy where he died.
He had a great influence on his contemporaries and W.B. Yeats and Robert
Frost both accepted editorial advice from him. A champion of T.S. Eliot, he
convinced Harriet Monroe, the editor ofPoetry, to publish Eliot’s The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock. Pound also heavily edited Eliot’s draft of The Waste
Land. He died in 1972
Thomas Eliot
He was born in St. Louis in Missouri in 1888. His mother was involved in cultural
and charitable activities, his father was successful businessmen and his
grandfather had been a New England Unitarian Minister and was most notable for
founding Washington University in St. Louis, but also contributed to the founding
of numerous other civic institutions. He attended at Harvard where he began to
write poetry and to work as philosophy assistant from 1909 to 1910. He moved
to Paris where, from 1910 to 1911, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, here he
encountered the symbolist movement. He was highly influenced fascinated by
them as it is pretty evident in his poetry “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock”, published in 1915.
He went to Oxford when the First World War was broken out. This city had a
monumental and life-altering effect on Eliot for several reasons, the most
significant of which was his introduction to the influential American literary
figure Ezra Pound. Pound was crucial to Eliot’s fledgling career as a poet
because he introduced Eliot in literary circles. In October 1922, Eliot published
The Waste Land in The Criterion. It was composed during a period of personal
difficulty for Eliot, his marriage was failing, and he was suffering from nervous
disorders.
The poem is known for its obscure nature—its slippage between satire and
prophecy, its abrupt changes of speaker, location, and time. This structural
complexity is one of the reasons why the poem has become a touchstone of
modern literature. On 29 June 1927, he converted from Unitarianism to
Anglicanism, and in November that year he took British citizenship. In the
1930s, he focused less onhis own writing and became primarily a cultural critic.
After the Second World War he gave up writing poetry altogether and turned his
attention to plays and literary essays. In the 1940s, he asked the Ceylonese poet
and editor Meary James Tambimuttu to edit the anthology Poetry in Wartime
(1942). He was a support of Tambimuttu’s successful magazine Poetry London.
In 1948, Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature and was awarded the Order of
Merit. In his later years, he assumed a more reclusive lifestyle, sharing a flat with
his friend John Hayward in Carlyle Mansions on the Chelsea Embankment, until
his marriage to his second wife Valerie Fletcher in 1957.
He died on 4 January 1965 of emphysema at his home in London
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
This poem, commonly known as “Prufrock”, was completed in 1910 but
published in 1915 on “Poetry: A Magazine of Verse”, one of the leading
monthly poetry journals in the English-speaking world founded in 1912 byHarriet
Monroe and remains in circulation today.
The poem is characterized by nineteen stanzas plus an epigraph in Italiantaken
from Dante Alighieri’s “Inferno”.
It is written in free verse, so that, most of the lines do not follow a specific rhyme
scheme.
It is a dramatic monologue, in which the speaker narrates the anxieties, the
isolation and the incapability of taking decisive action during his life. In this poem
Eliot tries to put his feelings into words but is unable to finish his sentences. He
is consistently struck by indecision and frustration as he strugglesto understand
how to create and maintain relationships.
Eliot uses the present tense in order to give the impression that everything
happens as the speaker gives his monologue “let us go”, “come and go”, “do I
dare” and the future tense to convey the speaker’s perspective on time.
The title of the poem indicates a romantic love situation, but it is used ironically
by the Poet. It is no conventional song of love. In a love song, the poet’s main
concern is to express the passion of love of a particular man or woman, as seen in
different sonnets, love poems, and other lyrical verses. In this case, it is an
analysis of the mind of the lover who is unable to take a decision about making
the proposal to the lady he loves. In a series of paragraphs, the lover analyses the
reason for a resolution and decision and tries to justify his cowardice and lack of
nerves, which make him completely incapable of formulating a proposal of love
to his lady. It is doubtful whether he is a serious lover or a man, seeking love as a
refuge from the exhaustion of the mechanical urban life of modern times.
“THE FREEWOMAN”
A weekly feminist reviews
The review came out on November 23, 1911, volume 1, so this is the first number of
the weekly journal “The freewoman”. The magazine was born in London, notin
the United States with the subtitle “a weekly feminist review”.
Dora Marsden: the director
The director of this magazine was Dora Marsden, she was a teacher and a feminist
militant of the Women’s Social and Political Union, the union was famous
because it’s famously connected to the episode when the activists of the union
climbed up the route of the empire hole in Southportin 1909 and interrupted with
dramatic effect the inauguration speech of Wilson Churchill, accusing him of not
representing women, because women could not vote, in fact, this movement
wasn’t associated with the suffragemovement.
The Dora Marsden’s thought and the magazine’ story
In her discourse about who are the freewoman she says, “there are only 10
probably in the British Isles, the majority of us are bond women”, so women are
not free, and they round off their personality with some of other individual. The
main reason why they are not free is because they cannot vote, and they cannot
own properties. Economy is big part of her discourse because she says that the
women work hard, but their job is unpaid and unrecognized. At most they can
administrate their money, a family money, but if they don’t have a husband and if
they don’t have someone who provides for them, they cannot be independent, in
most cases they are regarded as objects.
She says that the main difference between men and women is that some men are
servants, some other men are masters, so in the men category you can have this
distinction between servants and masters, but all women are servants and so all
women are a subordinate class. She uses the specific word “class” that at the time
meant social class, so she was creating a sort of alliance between women as a
gender category and social category. Her idea appeared with the publication of the
first number of “The freewomen”, afterwards Marsden disassociated herself from
the suffrage movement and from the politics sponsored by the Women’s Social
and Political Union because she founded two tactically interested in establishing
an alliance with the bourgeoisie about specific issues of the women vote. They
were pursuing that direction, they wanted to gain the vote and they were willing to
compromise themselves, their politics and their struggles in orderto just obtain the
vote. She considered this struggle for women rights and claims way more complex
andshe considered subordination of women are much broader issue that had to do
a lot with economy and ideology, but also with the psychological relations in the
family and its society. “The freewoman” is a magazine not interested in what
women could obtain their civil rights, but in what they may become, so in their
identity, in their subject position. She writes: “our interests are the freewoman,
herself and psychology, philosophy, morality and achievement, and only in a
secondary level their politics and economics”.
The magazine situated the feminist struggle in the broader context of anticapitalist fight and the free women as title was the female version of the medieval
free men, that was the man whose political rights were based on his money and on
his land properties.
On the one hand, the magazine and her idea emphasize that radical character of
the fight over women’s rights, on the other hand she lined her magazine to a
feminist theory which intended to support an individualistic idea of womanhood,so
a philosophical idea. She privileged the idea of freedom and then an anarchic
idea of libertarian individualists, which in the meantime was a common political
and philosophical idea proposed, for example, by Emma Goldman, a Jewish
anarchist and political activist and a British writer who come to the United States.
What she proposed was a new social order based on freedom for all individuals on
the basis because they were individuals. This last theory had a very strong
influence on modernist writers, especially those who contributed to the magazine,
but not only, and those who contributed to this magazine were: James Joyce, Ezra
Pound, William Carlos Williams and many others.
The magazine worked as an open space for research where all opinions, even the
oppositional ones, were debated and tested, so they tried with Dora Marsden a
new word equally created by men and women and founded on the free explorationof
dissent. The magazine in general was shaped around dialogue for example
between writers and readers over the weeks, so the first number came out, I could
read it and write a reaction to it and send it to the magazine, and so the magazine
would eventually publish the second number and maybe a response.
The Dora Marsden’s libertarian feminism was directed to all individuals and
wasmuch more structured as a culture that not as a political movement, because
according to her, the liberation of all women and men would have produced per se
a revolution in the relationship between women and men in society. All gender
relationship stopped being based on the appropriation of some individuals by
others. After six months of publications, on May 23, 1912, the magazine subtitle
changed from “a weekly feminist review” into “a weekly humanist review”, so
there was a change that emphasized the move from a discourse of feminist
liberation to a philosophy of the liberation of humanity. This philosophical
evolution was also connected to the increasing participation in magazine of male
contributors.
This new extreme position affected a lot of criticism so much so that the
publishing house refused to distribute the magazine and in October 1912 “The
Freewoman” closed. However, the interests of its contributors and readers,both in
England and in the United States, was such that they decided to collect money as
a subscription and inform an editorial cooperative, so “The Freewoman” top to be
Dora’s project and became a comedy project. In June 1913 “The Freewoman”
became “The New Freewoman” and this new version had a strongly transatlantic
profile, it circulated widely not only in England, but also in the United States,
especially in the intellectual cycles of the Greenwich village, and through this
channel the idea of a transatlantic modernism in an Anglo- American
phenomenon took its form
Eliot and Ezra Pound: members of the magazine
“The new Freewoman
“The new Freewoman” cut the emphasis over this anarchic and individualistic
philosophy and cab to the interest in a radical transformation of the approach to
new meanings, new relations, a language that disrupted social and artistic
conventions.
The new Freewomen also established itself as an avant-garde cycle, so it became
more and more a place where intellectuals were debating about modernity.
Behind this project there were Eliot, Ezra Pound and others, Pound started to
collaborate with the new Freewoman from the 5 volumes, but he wasn’t there from
the beginning, he was introduced to the committee by another writer, her name
was Rebecca Richardson. At that point, Pound was immediately invited to join
the board of the magazine and thus he pushed more and more the magazine
towards subject’s matter connected to the esthetic debate. In 1913 was published
an important number that contained many famous theoretical articles about the
SERIOUS ART or THE ART OF THE FUTURE, so they debated about the
innovations in art and its function.
Pound shared with Marsden an anarchic and individualistic position, maintaining
that argued the rule of art is that of unveiling the truth, the nature of everyone,
their esthetical values. So, the meaning the value of art was to be found in this
precise revelation of men as the center, as a thinking creature.
For example, they promoted the idea of self-consciousness, which also had a
huge influence on the art of women such as Virginia Woolf. A few months later,
at the beginning January 1914, the magazine changed its name into “The
Egotist”, that was clearly a Pound’s choice, in fact he roads a letter signed by
himself and other friend’s old men, this letter has always been considered as
evidence of Pound’s action to take possess of the magazine. He eliminated all
traces of feminist and debates over the woman condition, becoming a neutral
term, “The Egotist”, that could empower all individuals.
The new subtitle was an individualist review, so the magazine shifted from a
feminist review into an individualist review and shifted even more on esthetic
and literally means rather than on philosophy or politics. At that point, Dora
Marsden contributed less and less until 1917 when she left the direction to Eliot
who kept the position of director until the last number in 1919. While Dora
Marsden had always refused the idea of a final cause for a magazine because
she believed in the necessity of its maximum flexibility and openness, Pound and
Richard Aldington had worked hard to channel all the attention into the literary
discourse, gradually excluding Dora Marsden from her magazine and they
explicitly admitted it in public.
Marsden was still not only an important intellectual, but also the main source of
funding of money, she was putting money in this journal. So, with this takeover of
Poundand Eliot of the magazine, it was widely considered as both authoritative an
important voice and avant-gardes innovative and experimental, they used to
promote their fellow writers. At the same time, they also self-promoted
themselves as critics and theoreticians of a new type of art which became
normative and to gradually more invested with an authoritative power.
They became so normative and authoritarian that they could exclude any other
form of art, as well as any social and political issues linked to this struggle,
especially women emancipation, considered misogyny, so it was a center male
power that suppressed the memory of women contributions to modernists.
Conclusion
When we think modernism, we think a conservative male project, but this is a
constructed idea, because they gain power, and they had the means to express and
impose their positions. Instead, women contributions to modernism have been
crucial not only from a poetic point of view for the actual artistic contributions,
but also from an institutional and economic one, in many cases they had the
money and the means to express and to contribute to this big change that
modernism claimed as its highest goal.
The saddest part of this story is that Dora was there, there was no man behind, it
was a feminist magazine created, run, directed and financed by women, but Pound and
his friends took it over to impose themselves on a magazine as a space of debate
and they pull the Dora in a position of being behind scenes.
It is not only a matter of doing justice to the modernist feminists, but also of
putting back in the right perspective the idea of American corner modernism,
which is a very precise idea, with both political and aesthetic ideas very precise.
Over time has established a modernism that has many faces, we will see it with
authors like Helen and Du Bois; therefore, it is very limiting to stop at Pound and
Eliot when you think of modernism. Also, the artistic discourse is extremely
connected a discourse of power, who has the power to speak, who has the means to
assert one voice over another, in fact, even before being a textual discourse, it is a
discourse to question the canon of American literature.
Hilda Doolittle
She was known as a mysterious writer. She was born in Pennsylvania and grew
up in Philadelphia. She was the only daughter in a family. Her mother was a
musician teacher, and her father was an astronomer and mathematician. From her
parents she gained, on her father’s side, an intellectual inheritance, and, on her
mother’s, an artistic and mystical one. We know it because she was very
interested in numerology and symbolism.
H.D.’s first published poems appeared in the journal Poetry, the magazine by
Pound, in January 1913 under the initials H.D.
She became a leader of the Imagist movement which emphasized simplicity,
clarity of expression, and precision using exacting visual images. She reflects
in her poems on the condition of the women of that period, so she struggles to
gain her own voice. She was 15 years old when she met Ezra Pound. The two
were engaged, but their romantic relationship didn’t last long. She attended
college and in 1911 she moved to London. She married Richard Addington, to
whom she was married from 1913 to 1938. In this period, she studied Greek and
read the classics.
She moved to Vienna in 1933 to undergo analysis with Sigmund Freud because
she wanted to understand both her writers-block and her love for women and for
men. Thank to Freud, she was more and more convinced that images are coded
with personal meanings and the happiness of women was determined by their
biological inferiority of men. She went to London when the Nazi regime took
over in Austria. During the 1930s, she composed several biographical pieces
which remain today unpublished. She wrote Sea Garden (1916), Heliodora and
Other Poems (1924), Nights (1935), Tribute to the Angels (1945), Helen in Egypt
(1961), Bid Me to Live (1960). Shedied in Zurich in 1961.
Helen
She wrote Helen in 1924.
As for the formal aspect, Helen is a short poem made up of three stanzas in free
verse. The first stanza contains five lines, the second six, and the third, seven.
This escalation of line numbers creates tension as the poem increases until the
climax occurs in the last three.
The tone
The poetry has a neutral tone.
Summary
The poem begins with the assertion that the whole Greek nation shows some
bitterness towards the fine Helen. The author refers to Helen of Troy’s,
considered as the most attractive, beautiful of all women and object admiration
and desire by many. The author too gives space to the description of Helen’s
physical aspects, in which it can realize how much “hate” is made central in the
rendition. The author writes: “the still eyes in the white face, /the lustre of
olives/where she stands, /and the white hands”. This description gives us details
about the esthetic canon of that society. As of Greek society, what was requested
of women to be considered “beautiful” was a nice face, shiny skin, bright eyes,
and thin legs. Greek hated “the still face” because she was considered an
inanimate object, like a sort of statue.
