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American Literary Modernism
Tomáš Pospíšil
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Francisco Goya – Nude Maja (1800)
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Henri Matisse – The Blue Nude (1907)
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Marcel Duchamp – Nude Descending the Staircase No 2 (1912)
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A Crisis in Representation
̶ 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)
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A Crisis in Representation
̶ •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)
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Edwaerd Muybridge – Locomotion Studies
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Relativity of Space and 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)
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The House of the Four "Mamlas"vs. Loos House
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“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
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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)
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Imagism: H. D and Ezra Pound
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Imagism - Principles
̶ Direct treatment of the "thing," whether subjective or objective.
̶ To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the
presentation.
̶ As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical
phrase, not in sequence of the metronome
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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)
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H. D. - The Pool
Are you alive?
I touch you.
You quiver like a sea-fish.
I cover you with my net.
What are you—banded one?
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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
The Waste Land
From 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’ Vein of US Modernism
• 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, objectiong to their allusions to foreign
languages and attachmentto European culture
• The Waste Land (1922) x Williams's Spring and All (1923)
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• 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
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An 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)
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Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955)
̶ 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.
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Anecdote of a Jar (1932)
̶ 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.
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An Analysis
̶ The jar, then, essentially infects nature, taming or domesticating
̶ its wilderness....
̶ While Keats’s jar seems to almost take on a life of its own, the
behavior of Stevens’s jar seems wholly dependent on the
perspective of the human who is there to see it.
̶ [Thus it may represent] a meditation on the human instinct for
narrative and meaning—the desire to create an “anecdote,” to
make sense of the world through stories and art.
̶ https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/wallace-stevens/anecdote-of-the-
jar
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The “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 the novel The
Sun Also Rises by Hemingway
Gertrude Stein
Ezra Pound
F.Scott Fitzgerald
Sylvia Beach
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Why Lost Generation?
̶ uprooted, by experience torn away from any tradition
̶ the schools and education had prepared it for another world than what
existed after the war, because the war did not prepare them for anything
other than travel and thrills.
̶ it had lost attachment to any region, because it tried to live in permanent
exile.
̶ 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)
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Ernest Hemingway
̶ 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 literature
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Hemingway´s most successful period
̶ 1926 – The Sun Also
Rises his first 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
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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.
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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.’
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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.’
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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
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The 42nd Parallel (The USA Trilogy, Part 1)
̶ Four Narrative Modes
̶ Newsreel (collections of headlines,
news briefs and song lyrics)
̶ The Camera Eye (autobiographical
stream-of-consciousness passages)
̶ Traditional realist passages (headed
with the names of the protagonists)
̶ Biographies (Edison, Morgan, Ford,
Debbs, Valentino, Taylor, Veblen)
Newsreel
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´sBaggage
RACE IN TAXI TO PREVENT SUICIDE ENDS IN FAILURE AT THE BELMONT
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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
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Camera Eye
̶ 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 ten̶
tacles 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…
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The Southern Renaissance
̶ In the 1920s and 1930s, a renaissance
in Southern literature
̶ William Faulkner, Katherine Anne
Porter, Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate,
Thomas Wolfe, Robert Penn Warren,
and Tennessee Williams, etc.
̶ During the 1920s, Southern poetry
thrived under the Vanderbilt "Fugitives".
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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
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William Faulkner 1897 - 1962
̶ Born in Mississippi
̶ Focus on: Southern history,
significance of family, sense of
justice and issues of racial
tension
̶ Narrative complexity, stylistic
virtuosity
̶ Nobel Prize 1949
• 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
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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.
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Zora Neale Hurston (1891 – 1960)
̶ 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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)