1. MODERNISM: American Literature 1914(?) - 1945(?)

2. Modernism Was a rejection of traditional norms in society and art.
The old ways weren’t working. Instead “make it new!”
Brought a pessimistic view of the meaning of life and how people are to each other.
The search for meaning becomes more important than the actual meaning.
Perceived problems with the ideals of the movements that preceded modernism: Romanticism, Victorianism, and Edwardianism.

3. Causes of the Modernism
WWI
Urbanization
Industrialization and Technology
Growth of Modern Science
Influence of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx
Influence of Charles Darwin
Perceived problems with the ideals of the movements that preceded modernism: Romanticism, Victorianism, and Edwardianism.

4. WWI
WWI
-It involved Am. Artists and thinkers with the brutal actualities of large-scale modern war, so different from imagining heroism.
-The senses of a great civilization being destroyed or destroying itself, of social breakdown, and of individual powerlessness became part of the American experience as a result of its participation in WWI, with resulting feelings of fear, discrimination, and on occasion, liberation.
-In the wake of the apocalyptic sense of a new century and the cultural crisis brought on by WWI, Western notions of superiority came into question. In addition, long held precepts of the Renaissance and Enlightenment models of reality, all encompassing beliefs that humans were essentially good and could perfect both themselves and their societies, were beginning to collapse, and the value systems underlying American society—those of God, country, and capitalism—also faced challenges on almost all fronts.
-A new term came to be used to describe the generation of men and women who came to maturity between WWI and the Depression of the 1930s. Gertrude Stein first heard the phrase from the proprietor of the Hotel Pernollet in Belley. Referring to a young mechanic repairing Stein’s car, M. Pernollet used the expression une generation perdue to describe the dislocation, rootlessness, and disillusionment experienced in the wake of the war. Stein later expanded the meaning of the phrase in conversation with Ernest Hemingway, saying that his was a decadent generation that was drinking itself to death. Hemingway, whose early books were prototypes for the lost generation of writers, recounts this conversation in the preface to The Sun Also Rises and again in A Moveable Feast. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night is a striking account of the spiritual climate of the time. Much of Malcolm Cowley’s work deals with the writers of that generation. It applied to all Americans who, after the war, found life in the United States to be shallow, empty, vulgar, and unfulfilling.

6. URBANIZATION
Romanticism’s more moderate expression and valuation of nature—the rural, agricultural, and traditional—as opposed to culture and art seemed inadequate to express a sense of loss and new beginnings.

7. INDUSTRIALIZATION
Romanticism’s philosophies of pantheism and transcendence no longer seemed to cohere for those who had to cope with the technologies of industrial modernization.

8. GROWTH OF MODERN SCIENCE
Scientists became aware that
the atom was not the smallest unit of matter
matter was not indestructible
both time and space were relative to an observer’s position
some phenomena were so small that attempts at measurement would alter them
Some outcomes could be predicted only in terms of statistical probability
the universe might be infinite in size and yet infinitely expanding
In short, much of the commonsense basis of nineteenth-century science had to be put aside in favor of far more powerful but also far more complicated theories. The prevalent assumption was that nonscientific thinking could not explain anything.

9. Charles Darwin
While Origin of the Species was published back in 1859, his ideas of Natural Selection and the origin of humanity are becoming the foundation of modern science and philosophy.
Effect: If humanity is simply the product of random changes, then does life have any real purpose?
-Hidden in this “unconscious” were repressed experiences: traumas, forbidden desires, unacceptable emotions—most of these of a sexual nature and many deriving from earliest childhood. The forbidden and impossible nature of these wishes left lifelong scars on the adult personality. Freud hypothesized that the process of analysis would help patients understand these emotions and that the understanding in turn would enable them to recover the ability to function as productive adults.
-In popularized form, these ideas were extended to support the relaxation of sexual mores as well as permissiveness in childrearing, and they underlay the larger trend toward openness and informality in American behavior.

10. SIGMUND FREUD Invented the use of psychoanalysis
as a means to study one’s
“unconscious”
-Hidden in this “unconscious” were repressed experiences: traumas, forbidden desires, unacceptable emotions—most of these of a sexual nature and many deriving from earliest childhood. The forbidden and impossible nature of these wishes left lifelong scars on the adult personality. Freud hypothesized that the process of analysis would help patients understand these emotions and that the understanding in turn would enable them to recover the ability to function as productive adults.
-In popularized form, these ideas were extended to support the relaxation of sexual mores as well as permissiveness in childrearing, and they underlay the larger trend toward openness and informality in American behavior.
Modernist writers concerned themselves with the inner being more than the social being and looked for ways to incorporate these new views into their writing.

11. SHIFTS IN THE MODERN NATION
from country to city
from farm to factory
“mass” culture (pop culture)
split between science and the literary tradition
-Artists belittled the capacity of science to provide accounts of the things that matter, like subjective experiences and moral issues.
-Victorianism and Edwardianism also proved inadequate: The first seemed too morally earnest, complacent, and, at times, overly squeamish about sexual matters; the second, a reaction to its predecessor’s conservatism, began to doubt authority, but not always very deeply. After the Edwardian period, the movement to the ideas of modernism seemed almost inevitable.

12. 1920’s: THE JAZZ AGE
To F. Scott Fitzgerald it was an “age of miracles, an age of art, an age of excess, an age of satire.”

13. 1930’s: THE DEPRESSION
“True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt

14. CONCERNS OF MODERNIST LITERATURE
Question Everything
Reject traditional norms/values
Experiment
Establish “NEW”
Psychology of the Individual
Possibilities of Communication
Presence of the Past

15. Characteristics Collapsed plots Shifts in perspective, voice, and tone
Stream-of-consciousness point of view
Comparisons and Juxtaposition
Irony and/or Satire
Allusions

16. COLLAPSED PLOTS
Begins without explanation and consists of vivid segments juxtaposed without transitions
Suggests instead of asserts - symbols and images instead of statements.
The reader must dig out the plot structure

17. FRAGMENTARY TECHNIQUES
Omits:
the explanations
interpretations
connections
summaries
and security in traditional literature.

18. SHIFTS IN PERSPECTIVE, VOICE, AND TONE
Often 1st person POV because “truth” does not exist objectively but is the product of a personal interaction with reality.
To better convey the reality of confusion rather than the myth of certainty.

19. STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS
Depicts the mental and emotional reactions of characters to external events, rather than the events themselves
Unedited thoughts

20. Allusions
Details of the past reminded readers of the old, lost coherence.
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is arguably the greatest example of this allusive manner of writing; it includes a variety of Buddhist, Christian, Greek, Judaic, German and occult references, among others.