American Lit Home
Modern Fiction--Between the World Wars
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Modernism Similar in many ways to Realism, Modernism is a movement in art and literature that is characterized by a new way of responding to the new realities that emerged after World War I. The loss of stability, order and optimism that was felt so strongly during and after the war is mirrored by the shift away from traditional and comfortable conventions in art and literature. For example characters in modernist literature are lonely, disconnected, isolated and emotionally impoverished; they contrast sharply with the emotional, hopeful and enthusiastic characters of the Romantic Age. The modernist character is bored and spiritually empty, unable to connect with the genteel social rituals of the Victorian Age, or the urban materialism of the current age. Modernism did, however, share Romanticism's rejection of the imitation of classical models, whose focus was on form and structure. Modernism emphasized the connotative rather that denotative aspect of language. Words used in poetry, for example, can have many possible meanings at one time, and symbolism continued to be an important tool. |
Sherwood Anderson-- "Brother Death"
Anderson is known for his use of characters he calls "grotesques." Grotesques, according to Anderson, seize on one "truth," and idea or an ambition, and allow it to become an obsession. In their single-minded passion for an overriding idea, they lead lonely, possessed lives, cut off from those who pursue other truths, or have a more balanced view of life. Anderson made his grotesques into symbols of the American village. Other writers saw the small town as a snug, secure community bound together by common traditions and attitudes. Anderson saw it as an unhappy place full of isolated, despairing souls leading hidden lives. He was one of the first modern writers to deal with a significant American figure: the human being whose life is tragically warped by his or her dreams or ambitions.
Katherine Anne Porter-- "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall"
Porter is known for her use of the literary device known as "stream-of-consciousness," the recording or re-creation of the uneven and illogical flow of a character's thoughts, sensations, memories, and mental and emotional associations, without any attempt at explanation. As in The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, the technique is used to suggest both the vagueness and confusion of Granny's mind, as well as moments of sharpness and clarity. Thus, passages like ". . . Doctor Harry floated like a balloon around the foot of the bed" alternate with and are contrasted to sharp images like ". . . white stone-china jars with blue whirligigs and words painted on them. . ."
Ernest Hemingway-- "Soldier Home"
Hemingway once told and interviewer, "I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows." His style is deceptively simple and intensely compressed--he attempts to take the reader's focus off the words on the page, and place it on the depth of meaning beneath and around the words. Hemingway has made two major contributions to American literature: the first is the vision of life as a perpetual battlefield or war game in which everyone is eventually wounded; the second is the "Hemingway hero," a man for whom it is a point of honor to suffer with grace and dignity, and who, though sensing that defeat is inevitable, plays the game well.
William Faulkner-- "A Rose for Emily"
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1950, Faulkner suggested that his stories dealt with "the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself." In the thirties and forties, Faulkner was regarded as merely an eccentric writer, and by 1945 his novels were nearly out of print. Gradually, however, he became recognized as a major writer--critics began to penetrate the surface of his work to discover that he was concerned not just with issues peculiar to the South but those involving all of humanity. His novels combine stream-of-consciousness with a scrambling of chronology so that they are sometimes difficult to follow, but profound in their insight into humanity.
John Steinbeck-- Of Mice and Men
When Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962, the Swedish Literary Academy noted his "great feeling for nature, for the tilled soil, the wasteland, the mountains and the ocean coasts. . ." He used this context to explore the uncomfortable side of humanity, "the oppressed, the misfits, the distressed." He once wrote, "I have been accused so often of writing about abnormal people." His critics have observed that he often compares human behavior to animal behavior--he sees human beings as subject to the same biological forces that drive the rest of nature, forces they neither understand nor control.
Eudora Welty-- "A Worn Path"
While most of her stories are set in the South where she was born and raised, Welty's themes extend beyond geological boundaries, dealing with the problems of adolescence, loneliness, and the failures of human communication. Welty objectively and impartially notes humanity from the ludicrous and pathetic to the brave and mighty, and sets them in a rich background of descriptive settings. Sinclair Lewis once said of her, "Her writing is as clear . . . as the Gettysburg Address."
TS Eliot--"The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock"
If you asked 100 English professors to name one writer whose work defined and personified Modernism, ninety-nine of them would say TS Eliot (the last one would say, "Don't touch me. I broke my collar bone snow boarding"). Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri,was educated at Harvard and later at Oxford University, England. He arrived in England shortly before the outbreak of WWI, and stayed for the duration. Having married an English writer, Vivian Haigh-Wood in 1915, he chose to remain in England permanently. Eliot's first wife was highly neurotic and suffered increasingly bad health. The strain brought Eliot to the verge of a nervous breakdown, and he spent time in a Swiss sanitorium. His style was influenced by classical literature, and his poetry is filled with allusions to those works. "Prufrock" was written in 1915, and "The Wasteland," a long poem about a civilization that is spiritually empty and paralyzed by indecision and anxiety, was written in 1922. "The Wasteland" became the most significant poem of the early twentieth century, so influential that the word "wasteland" made its way into common usage.
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The Harlem Renaissance From 1920 until about 1930 an unprecedented outburst of creative activity among African-Americans occurred in all fields of art. Beginning as a series of literary discussions in the lower Manhattan (Greenwich Village) and upper Manhattan (Harlem) sections of New York City, this African-American cultural movement became known as "The New Negro Movement" and later as the Harlem Renaissance. More than a literary movement and more than a social revolt against racism, the Harlem Renaissance exalted the unique culture of African-Americans and redefined African-American expression. African-Americans were encouraged to celebrate their heritage and to become "The New Negro," a term coined in 1925 by sociologist and critic Alain LeRoy Locke. |
Zora Neale Hurston-- "Sweat"
"I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about....No, I do not weep at the world--I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife." (from "How It Feels To Be Colored Me," World Tomorrow, 1928). Click here for biographical information.
Langston Hughes--"I, Too", "Harlem" and "Theme for English B"
Working as a busboy in a Washington DC hotel in 1925 at the age of 22, Hughes noticed that one of the customers was the poet Vachel Lindsay. Hughes left three poems he had written next to Lindsay's plate, and Lindsay was so impressed that he presented them in his poetry reading that night, telling the audience that he had discovered a true poet. Hughes was influenced heavily by Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, who were pioneers of free verse. His poetry is also marked by the use of jazz rhythms and the repetitive structure of the blues. He is perhaps the most recognized name of the Harlem Renaissance.
Countee Cullen--"Tableau" and "Incident"
Cullen's talent for poetry appeared at an early age, while he was still in high school. He published his first volume of poetry while he attended New York University, from which he graduated in 1925. He graduated with a Master's degree in English Literature from Harvard one year later. Cullen's style was influenced heavily by the English Romantic poets, especially John Keats, and his poems show the structured rhythm and rhyme patterns associated with them. While he called for blacks to write traditional poetry and stay away from the issues surrounding racism, his own poetry is repeatedly drawn back to those themes. In fact, some of his most powerful poetry is that which addresses the racial prejudice he experienced and observed.
Unit 6 Review
In addition to the authors listed above, the test will cover the following discussions from class: