Art and literature from approximately 1900-the present

 Novels  Plays  Poetry (a great resurgence after deaths of Whitman & Dickinson)  Highly experimental as writers seek a unique style  Use of interior monologue & stream of consciousness

 Characters:  in pursuit of the American dream--  Admiration for America as land of Eden  Importance of the Individual : large cultural wave of Modernism, which gradually emerged in Europe and the United States in the early years of the 20th century, expressed a sense of modern life through art as a sharp break from the past, as well as from western civilization's classical traditions.  Modern life seemed radically different from traditional life -- more scientific, faster, more technological, and more mechanized. Modernism embraced these changes.

 Gertrude Stein ( ) developed an analogue to modern art. A resident of Paris and an art collector (she and her brother Leo purchased works of the artists Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Pablo Picasso, and many others).  Stein once explained that she and Picasso were doing the same thing, he in art and she in writing.  Stein’s work is characterized by:  simple, almost childlike quality, concrete words as counters, develops abstract, experimental prose poetry.  simple vocabulary recalls the bright, primary colors of modern art, while her repetitions echo the repeated shapes of abstract visual compositions.  dislocating grammar and punctuation give rise to new "abstract" meanings.

 Her collection Tender Buttons (1914) views objects from different angles, as in a cubist painting:  A Table A Table means does it not my dear it means a whole steadiness. Is it likely that a change. A table means more than a glass even a looking glass is tall.

 Writers reflect the ideas of Darwin (survival of the fittest) and Karl Marx (how money and class structure control a nation)  Overwhelming technological changes of the 20 th Century  Rise of the youth culture  Reactions and results of WWI and WWII  Harlem Renaissance

 Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby  Poetry of Jeffers, Williams, Cummings, Frost, Eliot, Sandburg, Pound, Robinson, Stevens  Short stories and novels of Steinbeck, Hemingway, Thurber, Welty, and Faulkner  Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun & Wright's Native Son (an outgrowth of Harlem Renaissance-- see below)  Miller's The Death of a Salesman (some consider Postmodern)

 Mixing of fantasy with nonfiction; blurs lines of reality for reader  No heroes  Concern with individual in isolation  Social issues as writers align with feminist & ethnic groups  Usually humorless  Narratives  Metafiction  Present tense  Magic realism

 Erodes distinctions between classes of people  Insists that values are not permanent but only "local" or "historical"  Vision and viewpoint became an essential aspect of the modernist novel as well. No longer was it sufficient to write a straightforward third-person narrative or (worse yet) use a pointlessly intrusive narrator. The way the story was told became as important as the story itself.  Henry James, William Faulkner, and many other American writers experimented with fictional points of view (some are still doing so). James often restricted the information in the novel to what a single character would have known. Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury (1929) breaks up the narrative into four sections, each giving the viewpoint of a different character (including a mentally disabled boy).

 To analyze such modernist novels and poetry, a school of "new criticism" arose in the United States, with a new critical vocabulary. New critics hunted the "epiphany" (moment in which a character suddenly sees the transcendent truth of a situation, a term derived from a holy saint's appearance to mortals); they "examined" and "clarified" a work, hoping to "shed light" upon it through their "insights."

 Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and The Executioner's Song  Feminist & social issue poets: Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Bill Levertov, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker  Miller's The Death of a Salesman & The Crucible (some consider Modern)  Lawrence & Lee's Inherit the Wind  Capote's In Cold Blood  Stories & novels by Kurt Vonnegut  J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye  Beat Poets: Kerouac, Burroughs, & Ginsberg  Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

 Postmodern literature argues for:  expansion  the return of reference  the celebration of fragmentation rather than the fear of itfragmentation  the role of reference itself in literature. While drawing on the experimental tendencies of authors such as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner in English, and Jorge Luis Borges in Spanish - writers who were taken as influences by American postmodern authors such as Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo, John Barth, William Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, and Paul Auster - the advocates of postmodern literature argue that the present is fundamentally different from the modern period, and therefore requires a new literary sensibility. HemingwayWilliam Faulkner Luis Borges MailerThomas PynchonKurt VonnegutDon DeLilloJohn BarthWilliam GaddisDavid Foster WallacePaul Auster