American Modernism

American Modernism covered a wide variety of topics including: racial

relationships, gender roles, and sexuality.

Time and Founders• It reached its peak in America

in the 1920s up to 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.

Defined• A breaking away from

established rules, traditions and conventions, fresh ways of looking at man’s position and function in the universe and many…experiments in form and style. It is particularly concerned with language and how to use it … and with writing itself

Rejects and Reacts• Modernism rejects the idea

of the world as a machine and the belief that everything could be explained and understood through science

• Modernist writing reacts to several changes: industrialization and mechanization

• rapid technological advances

Conditions

• World War I dwarfed previous wars: 8,500,000 soldiers died

• Karl Marx’s explanations of history—political struggle between two classes and socioeconomic order

Conditions

• Charles Darwin: view of humanity

• Ferdinand de Saussure: language is relative, words have no direct relationship to concepts or objects

• Albert Einstein: Theory of relativity

Descriptions• De-centered• Pessimistic• Disaffected• “Literature in crisis”• Loss and despair• Violence and alienation• Race relations• Historical discontinuity• Decadence and decay• Rejection of history• Unavoidable change

What It Does• Elevation of art over

everything else (morality, money, middle-class values)

• Avant-garde—alienated from social reality

• Rejection of realism ... or traditional meter

• Predominantly cosmopolitan • Expresses a sense of urban

cultural dislocation• Represents the stream of

consciousness

What it Does

• Art is unique and original, is anti-commercial

• It explores the human subconscious

• Uses sensuality, intuition and a search for “Truth”

• Feels human character can only be known through memories

• Reacts against Realism and Victorian morality, sexuality and desire as a subject

• Modernism is disenchanted

What it Does• Feels human character

can only be known through memories and thoughts versus external description

• Reacts against Realism and Victorian morality, find sexuality and sexual desire as a subject

• Modernism is disenchanted

Forms of Writing

• Experiments with point of view and narrative structure.

• Rejection of chronological and narrative continuity.

• Literature and language as a game

• Stream of consciousness Unreliable narrator

Mission• Literature = art produced by

craft rather than statement of emotion

• Not a set of stylistic features; an impulse to perfect

• A refusal of clichés; a system of taboos

• A reaction against degraded Realism

• A repudiation of conformity, standardization, repetition, stupidity