American Modernism

Phases of Modernism• Early • 1890-1920 Avant-garde (Dadaism, Surrealism, Cubism)

• High • 1920 – 1929 Modernist Classics (Ulysses, The Waste

Land, Manhattan Transfer,The Great Gatsby, Cane), Experimenalism, Minimalism, Black modernism

• Thirties 1930 – 1940 Socialist realism, proletarian novel, black modernism

• Late Modernism: 1940 - 1960 modernism is canonized

• Post-Modernism 1960 - 1990s radicalization of modernism or break with high modernism

Ezra Pound – Make it new!

Isabel,

Caroline,

Denise,

Jelena

Chantal,

Tatjana

Cornelia,

Valerie,

Annika

Lena,

Julia,

Mirjam,

Caroline

Luisa,

Katharina

Daniela,

Sofia,

Jan, Maria

Steven

Christoph,

Nadja,

Kathi,

Falko

The Armory Show 1913

• Watershed date in American art

• Introduced astonished New Yorkers to modernism

• Teddy Roosevelt said, “That’s not art!”

“In 1913, a single exhibition changed the face of American art forever. The International Exhibition of Modern Art, known as the Armory Show,endeavored to combine the newest and most striking examples of European art with their American counterparts in a magnificent, unparalleled show.“

http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/the-1913-armory-show-much-ado-about-everything/)

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912

"Take the picture which for some reason is called 'A Naked Man Going Down Stairs'. There is in my bathroom a really good Navajo rug which, on any proper interpretation of the Cubist theory, is a far more satisfactory and decorative picture. ... and from the standpoint of decorative value, of sincerity, and of artistic merit, the Navajo rug is infinitely ahead of the picture."

(Theodore Roosevelt )

Thomas Eakins The Swimming Hole, 1884/85

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925)Mrs Knowles and her Children, 1902

Henri Matisse, 1869-1954

The Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra), 1907

oil, 36 1/4 x 55 1/8.

Marcel Duchamp, 1887-1968Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (Nu descendant un escalier), 1912

oil, 58 x 35.

"Duchamp’s Nude creates an atmosphere of

release, color release, release from

stereotyped forms, trite subjects. I (William

Carlos Williams) laughed out loud when I first

saw it, happily, with relief."

(Williams 134). 

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d‘Avignon, 1907

The Birth of Modernism

Ezra Pound – Make it new!

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Ezra Pound, 1913

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much dependsupona red wheelbarrowglazed with rainwaterbeside the whitechickens.

William Carlos Williams, 1923

Ta

ta ppin g toe

hip popot amus Back

gen teel-ly lugu bri ous

eyes LOOPTHELOOP

as

fathandsbangrag

E.E.Cummings, 1923

Harlem

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Langston Hughes, 1951

T.S. Eliot: “These fragments that I have

shored up against my ruins”

“The fragments are fragments from the literature of the

past. Eliot contrasted the wholeness of past eras in our

heritage with what he saw as the fracturing of feeling,

sensibility and belief in his own day, the 1920s, a time of public and, for Eliot himself, personal collapse.“

(Excerpt from The Great Books by Anthony O'Hear)

What is Modernism? A Dictionary Definition:"a general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and avant-garde trends in the literature (and other arts) of the early 20th century.... Modernist literature is characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th-cent traditions and the conventions of realism ... (e.g. traditional meter). Modernist writers tended to see themselves as an avant-garde disengaged from bourgeois values, and disturbed their readers by adopting complex and difficult new forms and styles. In fiction, the accepted continuity of chrono-logical development was upset…. In poetry, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot replaced the logical exposition of thoughts with collages of fragmentary images and complex allusions. Modernist writing is predominantly cosmopolitan, and often expresses a sense of urban cultural dislocation, along with an awareness of new anthropological and psychological theories. Its favoured techniques of juxtaposition and multiple point of view challenge the reader to reestablish a coherence of meaning from fragmentary forms.”

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 1991

What is Modernism?

• International tendency in the arts (literature, music, architecture, film, dance…)

• Rejection of tradition, Anti-Victorian

• Experimental, fragmented, non-representational, anti-realist

• New narrative techniques: stream of consciousness, interior monologue

• Themes: psychological, self-alienation,-realisation, emancipation, tries to represent human subjectivity

• Goals: Make art more vivid & authentic • Effect on the reader: challenging, unsettling, disturbing

Value Differences in the Modern World

What events/trends/theories do you associate with these dates?

• 1900

• 1929

• 1939

Scientific Revolution

– Albert Einstein’s Principle of Uncertainty• In quantum mechanics: increasing the accuracy of

measurement of one observable quantity increases the uncertainty with which another may be known

– Quantum theory• Explains the nature of matter and energy on the

atomic and subatomic level

• Kinetoscope 1893-95• Thomas Edison in 1891 patent; 1893 demo of 35mm film • Andrew Holland opened 1st peep-show parlor on Broadway April 1894, with

Kinetoscopes for individual viewers; 25 cents for 16-second film viewed individually

• Vaudeville Theaters 1895-1905• Louis and Auguste Lumiere in Paris 1895

Edison purchased rights to the Vitascope 1896

• Nickelodeon 1905-15• urban working-class storefront theaters showing movies for 10 cent.• Edwin S. Porter's photoplay The Great Train Robbery,1903. The 300

vaudeville theaters offered a variety of entertainment for 50 cents • by 1910, 26 mill. attended 10,000 movie theaters each week for 10 cents.

• 1915-1925 Rise of Classical Hollywood Narrative Film 

Modernism =

W – worldly

MODERNITY

M – metropolitan

D – democratic stylistic

personal emancipation

sexual

Characteristics of Modernism in Literature

– Meaning comes from the individual’s perspective and is personalized;

– A single story might be told from the perspective of several different people, with the assumption that the “truth” is somewhere in the middle - relativism

Inner psychological reality or “interiority” is represented

oStream of consciousness—portraying the character’s inner monologue

Characteristics of Modernism in Literature

– No longer seen as transparent, allowing us to “see through” to reality;

– But now considered the way an individual constructs reality;

– Language is “thick” with multiple meanings and varied connotative forces.

Characteristics of Modernism in Literature

• Emphasis on the Experimental– Art is artifact rather than reality;– Organized non-sequentially

• Experience portrayed as layered, allusive, discontinuous, using fragmentation and juxtaposition.

– Ambiguous endings—open endings which are seen as more representative of reality.