Modernism in British and American Literature

МИНИСТЕРСТВО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ И  НАУКИ РЕСПУБЛИКИ КАЗАХСТАН

ВОСТОЧНО-КАЗАХСТАНСКИЙ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННЫЙ  УНИВЕРСИТЕТ

им. САРСЕНА АМАНЖОЛОВА

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

РЕФЕРАТ

на тему « Modernism in British and American Literature »

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

выполнила: Мукашева Айгерим,

405 группа

       проверила: Апалькова Г.А.                 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

г. Усть-Каменогорск, 2013

CONTENTS

 

I INTRODUCTION       3

II MODERNISM IN ENGLISH LITERATURE     4

III MODERNISM IN AMERICAN LITERATURE     6

3.1 The Jazz Age       7

3.2 The Lost Generation              10

3.3 The Harlem Renaissance               13

IV BIBLIOGRAPHY                  17

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

 

In the world of art, generally speaking, Modernism was the beginning of the distinction between “high” art and “low” art. The educational reforms of the Victorian Age had led to a rapid increase in literacy rates, and therefore a greater demand for literature or all sorts. A popular press quickly developed to supply that demand. The sophisticated literati looked upon this new popular literature with scorn. Writers who refused to bow to the popular tastes found themselves in a state of alienation from the mainstream of society. To some extent, this alienation fed into the stereotype of the aloof artist, producing nothing of commercial value for the market. It’s worth mentioning that this alienation worked both ways, as the reading public by and large turned their backs on many “elitist” artists. The academic world became something of a refuge for disaffected artists, as they could rub elbows with fellow disenfranchised intellectuals. Still, the most effective poets and novelists did manage to make profound statements that were absorbed by the whole of society and not just the writer’s inner circles. In the later years of the Modernist period, a form of populism returned to the literary mainstream, as regionalism and identity politics became significant influences on the purpose and direction of artistic endeavor.

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes a set of cultural tendencies and movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world. The first half of the 20^th century is then normally referred to in literary histories as ‘Modernism’, a very general term used to talk about a series of different movements and tendencies (impressionism, expressionism, imagism, futurism, surrealism) that tried to break with old tradition and the realistic concept of art. Modernism challenged the assumption of reality which is at the roots of realism: that there is a common phenomenal world that can be reliably described. Psychoanalysis, Darwinism, Nietzche and Marxism questioned traditional assumptions and so did World War I and the skeptical spirit it brought about. They all helped to shatter traditional beliefs. Regardless of the specific year it was produced, modernism is characterized primarily by a complete and unambiguous embrace of what Andreas Huyssen calls the "Great Divide." That is, it believes that there is a clear distinction between capital-A Art and mass culture, and it places itself firmly on the side of Art and in opposition to popular or mass culture. The artistic response to all these changes took place both in the realm of form and content. From the point of view of content, the horrors of World War I and the arrival of the ideas mentioned before brought about a general spirit of pessimism, disillusionment and skepticism (reflected in The Waste Land, for instance).

There was an important group of American writers (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Hart Crane) who shared this spirit of post-war alienation and lived in Paris for some time, who came to be known as the Lost Generation.

This period has sometimes been described as the ‘coming of age’ of American Literature, and it is certainly an extraordinarily productive time with an outstanding number of excellent writers in English, whether British, Irish or American.

II Modernism in English Literature

 

The Modernist Period in English Literature occupied the years from shortly after the beginning of the twentieth century through roughly 1965. In broad terms, the period was marked by sudden and unexpected breaks with traditional ways of viewing and interacting with the world. Experimentation and individualism became virtues, where in the past they were often heartily discouraged. Modernism was set in motion, in one sense, through a series of cultural shocks. The first of these great shocks was the Great War, which ravaged Europe from 1914 through 1918, known now as World War One. At the time, this “War to End All Wars” was looked upon with such ghastly horror that many people simply could not imagine what the world seemed to be plunging towards. The first hints of that particular way of thinking called Modernism stretch back into the nineteenth century. As literary periods go, Modernism displays a relatively strong sense of cohesion and similarity across genres and locales. Furthermore, writers who adopted the Modern point of view often did so quite deliberately and self-consciously. Indeed, a central preoccupation of Modernism is with the inner self and consciousness. In contrast to the Romantic world view, the Modernist cares rather little for Nature, Being, or the overarching structures of history. Instead of progress and growth, the Modernist intelligentsia sees decay and a growing alienation of the individual. The machinery of modern society is perceived as impersonal, capitalist, and antagonistic to the artistic impulse. War most certainly had a great deal of influence on such ways of approaching the world. Two World Wars in the span of a generation effectively shell-shocked all of Western civilization.

In its genesis, the Modernist Period in English literature was first and foremost a visceral reaction against the Victorian culture and aesthetic, which had prevailed for most of the nineteenth century. Indeed, a break with traditions is one of the fundamental constants of the Modernist stance. Intellectuals and artists at the turn of the twentieth century believed the previous generation’s way of doing things was a cultural dead end. They could foresee that world events were spiraling into unknown territory. The stability and quietude of Victorian civilization were rapidly becoming a thing of the past. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria was essentially the triggering event of the First World War, a conflict which swept away all preconceived notions about the nature of so-called modern warfare.

The nineteenth century, like the several centuries before it, was a time of privilege for wealthy Caucasian males. Women, minorities, and the poor were marginalized to the point of utter silence and inconsequence. The twentieth century witnessed the beginnings of a new paradigm between first the sexes, and later between different cultural groups. Class distinction remains arguably the most difficult bridge to cross in terms of forming a truly equitable society. Some would argue that class has become a euphemism for race, but that’s another discussion. The point is that as the twentieth century moved forward, a greater variety of literary voices won the struggle to be heard. What had so recently been inconceivable was steadily becoming a reality. African-Americans took part in the Harlem Renaissance, with the likes of Langston Hughes at the forefront of a vibrant new idiom in American poetry. Women like Hilda Doolittle and Amy Lowell became leaders of the Imagist movement. None of this is to suggest that racism and sexism had been completely left behind in the art world. Perhaps such blemishes can never be fully erased, but the strides that were taken in the twentieth century were remarkable by any measure.

In Modernist literature, it was the poets who took fullest advantage of the new spirit of the times, and stretched the possibilities of their craft to lengths not previously imagined. In general, there was a disdain for most of the literary production of the last century. The exceptions to this disdain were the French Symbolist poets like Charles Beaudelaire, and the work of Irishman Gerard Manley Hopkins. The French Symbolists were admired for the sophistication of their imagery. In comparison to much of what was produced in England and America, the French were ahead of their time. They were similarly unafraid to delve into subject matter that had usually been taboo for such a refined art form. Hopkins, for his part, brought a fresh way to look at rhythm and word usage. He more or less invented his own poetic rhythms, just as he coined his own words for things which had, for him, no suitable descriptor. Hopkins had no formal training in poetry, and he never published in his lifetime. This model – the self-taught artist-hermit who has no desire for public adulation – would become synonymous with the poet in the modern age. This stereotype continues unrivaled to this day, despite the fact that the most accomplished poets of the Modern period were far from recluses. Even though alienation was a nearly universal experience for Modernist poets, it was impossible to escape some level of engagement with the world at large. Even if this engagement was mediated through the poetry, the relationship that poets had with their world was very real, and very much revealing of the state of things in the early twentieth century.

Leading up to the First World War, Imagist poetry was dominating the scene, and sweeping previous aesthetic points of view under the rug. The Imagists, among them Ezra Pound, sought to boil language down to its absolute essence. They wanted poetry to concentrate entirely upon “the thing itself,” in the words of critic-poet T. E. Hulme. To achieve that effect required minimalist language, a lessening of structural rules and a kind of directness that Victorian and Romantic poetry seriously lacked. Dreaminess or Pastoral poetry were utterly abandoned in favor of this new, cold, some might say mechanized poetics. Imagist poetry was almost always short, unrhymed, and noticeably sparse in terms of adjectives and adverbs. At some points, the line between poetry and natural language became blurred. This was a sharp departure from the ornamental, verbose style of the Victorian era. Gone also were the preoccupations with beauty and nature. Potential subjects for poetry were now limitless, and poets took full advantage of this new freedom.

No Modernist poet has garnered more praise and attention than Thomas Stearns Eliot. Born in Missouri, T. S. Eliot would eventually settle in England, where he would produce some of the greatest poetry and criticism of the last century. Eliot picked up where the Imagists left off, while adding some of his own peculiar aesthetics to the mix. His principal contribution to twentieth century verse was a return to highly intellectual, allusive poetry. He looked backwards for inspiration, but he was not nostalgic or romantic about the past. Eliot’s productions were entirely in the modern style, even if his blueprints were seventeenth century metaphysical poets. One of the distinguishing characteristics of Eliot’s work is the manner in which he seamlessly moves from very high, formal verse into a more conversational and easy style. Yet even when his poetic voice sounds very colloquial, there is a current underneath, which hides secondary meanings. It is this layering of meanings and contrasting of styles that mark Modernist poetry in general and T. S. Eliot in particular. It is no overstatement to say that Eliot was the pioneer of the ironic mode in poetry; that is, deceptive appearances hiding difficult truths.

 

III Modernism in American Literature

 

In American Literature, the group of writers and thinkers known as the Lost Generation has become synonymous with Modernism. In the wake of the First World War, several American artists chose to live abroad as they pursued their creative impulses. These included the intellectual Gertrude Stein, the novelists Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the painter Waldo Pierce, among others. The term itself refers to the spiritual and existential hangover left by four years of unimaginably destructive warfare. The artists of the Lost Generation struggled to find some meaning in the world in the wake of chaos. As with much of Modernist literature, this was achieved by turning the mind’s eye inward and attempting to record the workings of consciousness. For Hemingway, this meant the abandonment of all ornamental language. His novels are famous for their extremely spare, blunt, simple sentences and emotions that play out right on the surface of things. There is an irony to this bluntness, however, as his characters often have hidden agendas, hidden sometimes even from themselves, which serve to guide their actions. The Lost Generation, like other “High Modernists,” gave up on the idea that anything was truly knowable. All truth became relative, conditional, and in flux. The War demonstrated that no guiding spirit rules the events of the world, and that absolute destruction was kept in check by only the tiniest of margins.

The novel was by no means immune from the self-conscious, reflective impulses of the new century. Modernism introduced a new kind of narration to the novel, one that would fundamentally change the entire essence of novel writing. The “unreliable” narrator supplanted the omniscient, trustworthy narrator of preceding centuries, and readers were forced to question even the most basic assumptions about how the novel should operate. James Joyce’sUlysses is the prime example of a novel whose events are really the happenings of the mind, the goal of which is to translate as well as possible the strange pathways of human consciousness. A whole new perspective came into being known as “stream of consciousness.” Rather than looking out into the world, the great novelists of the early twentieth century surveyed the inner space of the human mind. At the same time, the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud had come into mainstream acceptance. These two forces worked together to alter people’s basic understanding of what constituted truth and reality.

Experimentation with genre and form was yet another defining characteristic of Modernist literature. Perhaps the most representative example of this experimental mode is T. S. Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land. Literary critics often single out The Waste Land as the definitive sample of Modernist literature. In it, one is confronted by biblical-sounding verse forms, quasi-conversational interludes, dense and frequent references which frustrate even the most well-read readers, and sections that resemble prose more than poetry. At the same time, Eliot fully displays all the conventions which one expects in Modernist literature. There is the occupation with self and inwardness, the loss of traditional structures to buttress the ego against shocking realities, and a fluid nature to truth and knowledge.

The cynicism and alienation of the first flowering of Modernist literature could not persist. By mid-century, indeed by the Second World War, there was already a strong reaction against the pretentions of the Moderns. Artists of this newer generation pursued a more democratic, pluralistic mode for poetry and the novel. There was optimism for the first time in a long time. Commercialism, publicity, and the popular audience were finally embraced, not shunned. Alienation became boring. True, the influence of Modernist literature continues to be quite astonishing. The Modern poet-critics changed the way people think about artists and creative pursuits. The Modern novelists changed the way many people perceive truth and reality. These changes are indeed profound, and cannot easily be replaced by new schemas.

 

3.1 The Jazz Age

 

The Roaring Twenties was a period of literary creativity, and works of several notable authors appeared during the period. D. H. Lawrence's novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, was considered scandalous at the time because of its explicit descriptions of sex. American Modernism reached its peak in America between the 1920s and the 1940s. Celebrated Modernists include Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner, and while largely regarded as a romantic poet, Walt Whitman is sometimes regarded as a pioneer of the modernist era in America. The loss of self and the need for self-definition is a main characteristic of the era. American modernists echoed the mid-19^th century focus on the attempt to "build a self"—a theme well illustrated in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Influenced by the first World War, American modernist writers, such as Ernest Hemingway, offered an insight into the psychological wounds and spiritual scars of the war experience.

The Roaring Twenties was alternatively known as The Jazz Age. This "movement" in which jazz music grew in popularity by immense standards in the U.S., also influenced other parts of the world.

Following World War I, around 500,000 African Americans in search of better employment opportunities moved to the northern part of the United States. With them, they brought their culture and in New York, the start of the Harlem Renaissance. During this period of time, the works of African Americans in fields such as writing and music escalated. Styles of music including Dixieland and blues became popular as well.

The Charleston, a lively dance with origins in South Carolina and African American styles, became immensely popular. The dance, which can be done solo, with two, or in a group, received attention after being shown in Runnin' Wild, a 1923 musical. One man, John Giola, from New York managed to do the Charleston for 22 hours and 30 minutes! This particular dance was introduced to Europeans in 1925. Other dances of the era included the Cake-Walk, the Turkey Trot, the Black Bottom, and the Bunny Hug. With the increased popularity of dances, events such as dance marathons were also created.

Throughout the 1920's many people took an interest in music. They owned pianos, played sheet music, and listened to records.

One name, arguably one of the most famous jazz musicians of all time, is worth mentioning. Louis Daniel Armstrong (1901 - 1971), from New Orleans, Louisiana, displayed his amazing talents as a trumpeter, cornet player, and singer during the Jazz Age. He studied and played with a famed cornet player named Joseph "King Oliver" Oliver (1885 - 1938). Afterwards, he became a member of Fletcher Henderson's group.

In 1925, "Satchmo," who had learned to play cornet at the age of twelve, started The Hot Fives. The band would later gain two more musicians and was appropriately renamed The Hot Sevens. His wife, Lil, was also a member of the group and played the piano. The following year, Armstrong recorded "Heebie Jeebies". "Pops" did not restrict his talents to just music, however. He also starred in films such as Pennies from Heaven. He continued working in the last three years of his life, most of which was spent in hospitals. He died at home on July 6, 1971.

Some of the many great artists of that time also included Duke Ellington (1899 - 1974), Joseph "King Oliver" Oliver (1885 - 1938), Bessie Smith (1894? - 1937), Benny Goodman (1909 - 1986), and Ma Rainey.

The surface characteristics of the Jazz Age, images such as bootleggers, gangsters, and flappers, as well as lifestyles characterized by "loose" living and the cultural evolution of "hot jazz", were outward signs of a deeper cultural conflict going on in the country during the 1920's. The conflict was between "traditional", rural America, and a more "cosmopolitan" attitude and approach to living by those who gravitated to urban cultural centers such as New York, Chicago, and other big urban areas in the United States.

The 1920's were, in part, a reaction to the end of WWI. Post WWI, America was evolving into a great world power, however, it was a time of social repression. The '20's were a reaction against this rigid conservatism, and literature reflected this social change, most specifically, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The youth generation of the 20's rebelled against traditional social mores; the '20's became an era of "consumption and speculation" (Digital History). This period of time, post-WWI, was known as the "Jazz Age."

The social changes taking place in the '20's were not unlike those of the late '60's. There were upheavals and changes in the sexual morays of the period, for example. Society was becoming more consumer-oriented. Movies influenced how Americans dressed, and how they interacted socially, it was a "looser" time, a reaction against a more conservative America of the past, as was the social upheaval of the 1960's.

As with the decade of the '60's, the Jazz Age evidenced a real shift in social mores, manners, and style between the young people of the time as opposed to their parent's generation, similar to the reaction of the "hippie" culture in the 1960's to the preceding generation. "Each succeeding generation seems to be born to shock its parents, and the children of the twenties were no exception" (Digital History). The younger generation of the '20's was "acting out" - testing the social limits as far as behavior, music, fashion, and lifestyle were concerned.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. The writer most associated with the Jazz Age was F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald helped to define and describe, through his writing, what the cultural and social lifestyle of the Jazz Age was all about. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the "dialogue" of the era.

Fitzgerald's first published novel was This Side of Paradise (1920). With the publishing of this novel, Fitzgerald became "the 'golden boy' of American letters" (Northman, page 10), and his writings reflected the new era in American history, the "Roaring Twenties", the Jazz Age.

Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, pursued the new lifestyle and social status of the privileged class in the Jazz Age. The Fitzgeralds were, in a sense, the "King and Queen" of the Jazz Age. Society parties thrown by the couple were notorious and legendary, and these events and happenings were chronicled in the author's works.

Paris in the 1920s proved the most influential decade of Fitzgerald's development. Fitzgerald made several excursions to Europe, mostly Paris and the French Riviera, and became friends with many members of the American expatriate community in Paris, notably Ernest Hemingway. Fitzgerald's friendship with Hemingway was quite vigorous, as many of Fitzgerald's relationships would prove to be. Hemingway did not get on well with Zelda. In addition to describing her as "insane" he claimed that she "encouraged her husband to drink so as to distract Fitzgerald from his work on his novel,"^[16][17]the other work being the short stories he sold to magazines. Like most professional authors at the time, Fitzgerald supplemented his income by writing short stories for such magazines as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire, and sold his stories and novels to Hollywood studios. This "whoring", as Fitzgerald and, subsequently, Hemingway called these sales, was a sore point in the authors' friendship. Fitzgerald claimed that he would first write his stories in an authentic manner but then put in "twists that made them into saleable magazine stories."

Fitzgerald wrote frequently for The Saturday Evening Post. This issue from May 1, 1920, containing the short story "Bernice Bobs Her Hair", was the first with Fitzgerald's name on the cover.