American Literary Modernism
Doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Ph.D.
Francisco Goya – Nude Maja (1800)
Henri Matisse - The Blue Nude (1907)
Marcel Duchamp – Nude Descending
the Staircase No 2 (1912)
Arthur Beecher Carles –
Seated Nude (1931-35)
(1910-5 - The Crucial Years)
• Around 1910 a certain space was shattered. It
was the space of common sense, of knowledge,
of social practice, of political power, a space
hitherto enshrined in everyday discourse, just as
in abstract thought, as the environment of and
channel for communication…. Euclidean and
perspectivist space have disappeared as systems
of reference, along with other former ‘common
places’ such as town, history, paternity, the tonal
system of music, traditional morality, and so
forth. This was a truly crucial moment. (Lefebvre,
qtd. In Harvey, 1974)
Crisis in the Experience of
Space and Time
• How was it possible, using the narrative
structures of realism to write anything other than
a parochialist and hence to some degree
‘unrealistic’ novel in the face of all this spacial
simultaneity? Realist narrative structures
assumed, after all, that a story could be told as if
it was unfolding coherently, event after event, in
time. Such structures were inconsistent with a
reality in which two events in different spaces
occuring at the same time could so intersect as to
change how the world worked. (Harvey)
The Nature of Modernist Time
• The thrust of the age (1880-
1918) was to affirm the reality
of private time against that of
a single public time and to
define its nature as
heterogeneous, fluid and
reversible. (Kern 34)
• "The soft watches are an
unconscious symbol of the
relativity of space and time, a
Surrealist meditation on the
collapse of our notions of a
fixed cosmic order".(Ades)
Marcel Duchamp – Nude Descending
the Staircase No 2, 1912
Edwaerd Muybridge – Human
Locomotion Studies, 1880s
Freud in America - 1909
• As the George Washington pulled into
New York Harbor, he supposedly remarked
to Carl Jung, who accompanied him, "They
don't realize that we are bringing them
the plague." His more vociferous
contemporary critics would probably
agree.
• But Freud did not defend psychoanalysis
on the basis of its therapeutic
effectiveness; he had other, perhaps more
imperial ambitions. […] He wanted
psychoanalysis to contribute to literature
and culture, even reform society. He
invoked the possibility of "combating the
neuroses of civilization.“ (Jacoby)
• At Clark U. in 1909, from left (front):
Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Carl Jung;
(back): Abraham A. Brill, Ernest Jones, and
Sandor Ferenczi.
Armory Show - 1913
• When the Armory show
opened in New York in
1913, it caused one of the
biggest sensations the art
world had ever known. An
exhibition conceived by
artists, it drew
unprecedented crowds—
about 87,000 at its debut in
New York, 188,700 in
Chicago, and 14,400 in
Boston—publicizing
modernism in a big way.
(Begley)
“The Stigmata”
according to Commager
• 1) the rejection of reason, meaning, normality,
morality, continuity, and coherence, the rejection
of civilization itself as eccentric and decadent.
• 2) a passionate interest in the subconscious and
the unconscious […]
• 3) an obsession with sex, especially in its
abnormal manifestations […]
• 4) a weakness for the primitive […]
• 5) repudiation of all orthodox moral standards
• (Commager, 1950)
Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972)
• Born in Idaho, lived in
Pennsylvania
• Studied Romance languages
• Travelled to London in 1908
• Early poetry: „decadent“ –
archaic forms, romantic themes,
melodic sound
From the Imagist Manifesto:
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/
• 1. To use the language of common speech, but to employ the exact word, not
the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.
• 2. We believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed
in free verse than in conventional forms. In poetry, a new cadence means a new
idea.
• 3. Absolute freedom in the choice of subject.
• 4. To present an image. We are not a school of painters, but we believe that
poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities,
however magnificent and sonorous. It is for this reason that we oppose the
cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real difficulties of his art.
• 5. To produce a poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.
• 6. Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of
poetry.
The Imagist Principles
• Direct treatment of the
“thing,” whether
subjective or objective
• To use absolutely no word
that did not contribute to
the presentation
• As regarding rhythm: to
compose in sequence of
the musical phrase, not in
sequence of a
metronome
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
/" In a Station of the Metro", 1913, 1916
Separation on the River Kiang
Ko-Jin goes west from Ko-kaku-ro,
The smoke-flowers are blurred over the river.
His lone sail blots the far sky.
And now I see only the river,
The long Kiang, reaching heaven.
From Cathay (1915)
Vorticism (1914)
Ezra Pound - from Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley (1920, 1921)
• V
• There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,
• Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,
• For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
T.S. Eliot (1888 – 1965)
• An essayist, publisher,
playwright, literary and social
critic and "one of the
twentieth century's major
poets.“
• Born in St. Louis, Missouri in
the United States, he moved
to the United Kingdom in 1914
• In 1927 was naturalized as
British subject
• Nobel Prize 1948
from The Waste Land
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that
cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mud-cracked houses (331-345)
The Waste Land
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes
swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in
cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the
violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
W. C. Williams
• Born, lived and died in Rutherford, New
Jersey
• Studied medicine at
the University of Pennsylvania
• Led a decent life of
a family doctor
• Later mentor of younger
poets (Allen Ginsberg)
Williams’ Literary Career
• During his university studies he became friends with Ezra
Pound -> for a short time involved in the Imagist
movement
• Later criticised works of Pound and T. S. Eliot – disliked their
allusions to foreign languages and attachment to European
culture
• The Waste Land (1922) x Williams's Spring and All (1923)
Williams's Poetry
• Attempted to write exclusively American
poetry in colloquial American English
• Centred on everyday life and common people
Poems on prescription blanks
Young Sycamore
• I must tell you
this young tree
whose round and firm trunk
between the wet
pavement and the gutter
(where water
is trickling) rises
bodily
into the air with
one undulant
thrust half its heightand
then
• dividing and waning
sending out
young branches on
all sideshung
with cocoons
it thins
till nothing is left of it
but two
eccentric knotted
twigs
bending forward
hornlike at the top
• Alfred Stieglitz’s
• Spring Showers, 1902
• W.C. Williams’
• Young Sycamore
I must tell you
this young tree
whose round and firm trunk
between the wet
pavement and the gutter
(where water
is trickling) rises
bodily
into the air with
one undulant
thrust half its heightand
then
dividing and waning
sending out
young branches on
all sideshung
with cocoons
it thins
till nothing is left of it
but two
eccentric knotted
twigs
bending forward
hornlike at the top
Young Sycamore - analysis
• The poem takes its place as another artifact, an object in the world,
but also refers to a series of parallel motions: Nature produces the
tree, in a fashion very close to the way we have seen the production
of inventions described; Williams produces his poem; and the
reader is invited to join in the creative process, not by looking
through the language to that which it describes, but by paying
attention to the poem itself, and, if the paradigm of the poet and
nature holds, producing some object of his own.
• Even without knowing Williams's theories about poetry, by turning
mind and attention to the poem-as-object, the reader is referred to
Williams's process of creation in language. Although the poem
describes an act of detailed perception, and thus at first recalls
Williams's statement that artists teach us to see, a closer
examination of "Young Sycamore" shows that it places equal
emphasis on speaking and language. (Steinman)
Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955)
• Wallace Stevens
• was born in Reading,
Pennsylvania, educated at
Harvard and then New York Law
School.
• He spent most of his life working
as an executive for an insurance
company in Hartford,
Connecticut.
• He won the Pulitzer Prize for
Poetry for his Collected Poems in
1955.
Anecdote of a Jar
• I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
• The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
• It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
“Lost Generation”
• Who?
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Sherwood Anderson
• Ezra Pound
• Gertrude Stein
• Sylvia Beach
• James Joyce
• John Dos Passos
– Painters:
• Miro
• Picasso
• Gertrude Stein’s term
• LG defined a sense of moral
loss or aimlessness
• -> many young men lost their
hope => they become “lost”
• Well-known term due to its
publication in novel The Sun
Also Rises
Gertrude Stein
Ezra Pound
F.Scott Fitzgerald
Sylvia Beach
Why Lost Generation?
• It was lost, first of all because it was uprooted, by
experience torn away from any tradition. It was lost
because the schools and education had prepared it for
another world than what existed after the war, and
because the war did not prepare them for anything
other than travel and thrills. It was lost because it had
lost attachment to any reagion, because it tried to live
in permanent exile. It was lost because it rejected all
older values, but also illusions, hopes for a bright
future, real feelings certainties […] expectations and
explanations. They also lost God. (Ulmanová, Roraback)
Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1961)
• Ernest Miller
Hemingway
• American novelist,
short-story writer,
journalist, (dramatist)
• Regarded as a hero,
celebrity, star of the
world of literature
• Major literary
influence, Nobel Prize
for litarature
Hemingway’s successful period
• 1926 – The Sun Also Rises –
his first really famous novel
was published and made a
celebrity of him,written in
stripped-down “Hemingway
style”
• 1927 – Men without
Women – a collection of
short stories
• 1929 – A Farewell to Arms
• http://www.dibache.com/t
ext.asp?cat=51&id=639
(The Killers)
From “Cat in the Rain”
• ‘Did you get the cat?’ he asked, putting the book down.
• ‘It was gone.’
• ‘Wonder where it went to,’ he said, resting his eyes from reading.
• She sat down on the bed.
• ‘I wanted it so much,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why I wanted it so much. I
wanted that poor kitty. It isn’t any fun to be a poor kitty out in the rain.’
• George was reading again.
• She went over and sat in front of the mirror of the dressing table looking
at herself with the hand glass. She studied her profile, first one side and
then the other. Then she studied the back of her head and her neck.
• ‘Don’t you think it would be a good idea if I let my hair grow out?’ she
asked, looking at her profile again.
From “Cat in the Rain”
• George looked up and saw the back of her neck, clipped close like a boy’s.
• ‘I like it the way it is.’
• ‘I get so tired of it,’ she said. ‘I get so tired of looking like a boy.’
• George shifted his position in the bed. He hadn’t looked away from her
since she started to speak.
• ‘You look pretty darn nice,’ he said.
• She laid the mirror down on the dresser and went over to the window and
looked out. It was getting dark.
• ‘I want to pull my hair back tight and smooth and make a big knot at the
back that I can feel,’ she said. ‘I want to have a kitty to sit on my lap and
purr when I stroke her.’
• ‘Yeah?’ George said from the bed.
• ‘And I want to eat at a table with my own silver and I want candles. And I
want it to be spring and I want to brush my hair out in front of a mirror
and I want a kitty and I want some new clothes.’
From “Cat in the Rain”
• ‘Oh, shut up and get something to read,’ George said. He was
reading again.
• His wife was looking out of the window. It was quite dark now and
still raining in the palm trees.
• ‘Anyway, I want a cat,’ she said, ‘I want a cat. I want a cat now. If I
can’t have long hair or any fun, I can have a cat.’
• George was not listening. He was reading his book. His wife looked
out of the window where the light had come on in the square.
• Someone knocked at the door.
• ‘Avanti,’ George said. He looked up from his book.
• In the doorway stood the maid. She held a big tortoiseshell cat
pressed tight against her and swung down against her body.
• ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘the padrone asked me to bring this for the
Signora.’
John Dos Passos (1896-1970)
• studied at Harvard
• studied art and architecture
in Spain
• worked as a voluntary
ambulance driver in Italy
and France
• during his life his political
views changed from
communism to
conservativism
The 42nd Parallel
(The USA Trilogy 1)
Four Narrative Modes
Newsreel (collections of
headlines, news briefs and song
lyrics)
The Camera Eye
(autobiographical stream-ofconsciousness
passages)
Traditional realist passages
(headed with the names of the
protagonists)
Biographies (Edison, Morgan,
Ford, Debbs, Valentino, Taylor,
Veblen)
Dos Passos’ The 42nd Parallel
(The USA Trilogy 1) - Newsreel
BUGS DRIVE OUT BIOLOGIST
Elopers bind and gag; is released by dog
EMPEROR NICHOLAS II FACING REVOLT OF EMPIRE
GRANTS SUBJECTS LIBERTY
paralysis stops surgeon’s knife by the stroke of a pen
the last absolute monarchy of Europe passes into history
miner in Death Valley and freak advertiser od Santa Fe
Road may die sent to bridewell for stealing plaster angel
On the banks of the Wabash far away
Newsreel – p.895
BODY TIED IN BAG IS FOUND FLOATING
Chinatown my Chinatown where the lights are low
Hearts that know no other land
Drifting to and fro
APOPLEXY BRINGS END WHILE WIFE READS TO HIM
Mrs. Harding was reading to him in low soothing voice. It had been hoped that he would
go to sleep under that influence.
DAUGHERTY IN CHARGE
All alone
By the telephone
Waiting for a ring
Two Women´s Bodies in Slayer´s Baggage
RACE IN TAXI TO PREVENT SUICIDE ENDS IN FAILURE AT THE BELMONT
„The Camera Eye“ – p. 931
sirens bloom in the fog over the harbor horns of all
colors everyshaped whistles reach up from the river and the churn of
screws the throb of engines bells
the steady broken swish of waves cut by prows out of
the unseen stirring fumblingly through the window tentacles
stretch tingling
to release the spring
tonight start out ship somewhere join up sign on the dotted
line enlist become one of
hock the old raincoat of incertitude (in which you
hunch alone from the upsidedown image on the retina painstakingly
out of color shape words remembered light
and dark straining…
The Southern Renaissanse
• In the 1920s and 1930s, a
renaissance in Southern
literature began with the
appearance of writers such
as William Faulkner,
Katherine Anne Porter,
Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate,
Thomas Wolfe, Robert Penn
Warren, and Tennessee
Williams, among others.
During the 1920s, Southern
poetry thrived under the
Vanderbilt "Fugitives".
(Wikipedia)
Some distinctive features…
• 1) a strong historical consciousness
• 2) an agricultural tradition
• 3) the existence of of an oral story-telling tradition
• 4) the question of race; tense relationships between
the blacks and the whites
• 5) ubiguitous presence of black and southern dialects
• 6) strange concepts of God and responsibility to family,
home and region
• 7) an all-penetrating sense of the grotesque
William Faulkner 1897 - 1962
• Born in Mississippi
• William Cuthbert Falkner
• Focus on: Southern
history, significance of
family, sense of justice
and issues of racial
tension
• Narrative complexity,
stylistic virtuosity
• Nobel Prize 1949
William Faulkner
• 19 novels
• 125 short stories
• 1 play
• A number of essays,
screenplays and poems
• Most popular novels: As I
lay dying (1930) and The
Sound and the Fury
(1929)
• Favorite setting:
Yoknapatawpha County,
on Lafayette County
William Faulkner:
“Barn Burning” (1939)
• The store in which the justice of the Peace's court was sitting smelled of
cheese. The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the crowded
room, knew he smelled cheese, and more: from where he sat he could see
the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat, dynamic shapes of
tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which
meant nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils and the silver curve
of fish - this, the cheese which he knew he smelled and the hermetic meat
which his intestines believed he smelled coming in intermittent gusts
momentary and brief between the other constant one, the smell and
sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce
pull of blood. He could not see the table where the Justice sat and before
which his father and his father's enemy (our enemy he thought in that
despair; ourn! mine and hisn both! He's my father!) stood, but he could
hear them, the two of them that is, because his father had said no word
yet… (Faulkner)
Zora Neale Hurston
• Zora Neale Hurston (1891 –
1960) was an American
folklorist, anthropologist,
and author.
• Wrote four novels and more
than 50 published short
stories, plays, and essays
• Best known for her 1937
novel Their Eyes Were
Watching God.
The Harlem Renaissance
• The Harlem Renaissance was
a cultural movement that
spanned the 1920s. At the
time, it was known as the
"New Negro Movement",
named after the 1925
anthology by Alain Locke. The
Movement also included the
new African-American cultural
expressions across the urban
areas in the Northeast and
Midwest United States
affected by the Great
Migration (African American),
of which Harlem was the
largest. (Wikipedia)
Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Ships at a distance have every
man's wish on board. For some
they come in with the tide. For
others they sail forever on the
horizon, never out of sight, never
landing until the Watcher turns
his eyes away in resignation, his
dreams mocked to death by Time.
That is the life of men.
• Now, women forget all those
things they don't want to
remember, and remember
everything they don't want to
forget. The dream is the truth.
Then they act and do things
accordingly.
Their Eyes Were Watching God
• So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from
burying the dead. Not the dead of sick and ailing with friends at the
pillow and the feet. She had come back from the sodden and the
bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment.
• The people all saw her come because it was sundown. The sun was
gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It was the time for
sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things
and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless
conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied
their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the
skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and
lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in
judgment.
Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Seeing the woman as she was made them remember the envy they
had stored up from other times. So they chewed up the back parts
of their minds and swallowed with relish. They made burning
statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It was
mass cruelty. A mood come alive, Words walking without masters;
walking altogether like harmony in a song.
• "What she doin coming back here in dem overhalls? Can't she find
no dress to put on? -- Where's dat blue satin dress she left here in?
-- Where all dat money her husband took and died and left her? --
What dat ole forty year ole 'oman doin' wid her hair swingin' down
her back lak some young gal? Where she left dat young lad of a boy
she went off here wid? -- Thought she was going to marry? --
Where he left her? -- What he done wid all her money? -- Betcha he
off wid some gal so young she ain't even got no hairs -- why she
don't stay in her class?" (Hurston)