Identity Fusion, Outgroup Relations, and Sacrifice: A Cross ...
Literary Modernism (1910-1945)...Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms, musing on the words...
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1 Literary Modernism (1910-1945)
Transcript of Literary Modernism (1910-1945)...Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms, musing on the words...
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Literary Modernism (1910-1945)!
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n Virginia Woolf: “On or about December 1910 human character changed.”!
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Period of Intense Change!
A New Literature!n Ezra Pound
challenged artists to “Make it New”!
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World War I!n Late 19th C faith in
science and technology undermined!
n Technology in WWI:!n Machine guns!n Poisonous gas!n Tanks!n Airplanes!
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. . . the immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is contemporary history. --T. S. Eliot
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Henry James on WWI!n “The plunge of
civilization into this abyss of blood and horror so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be…gradually bettering, that. . . [it] is too tragic for any words.”!
From “Hugh Selwyn Moberley” (Ezra Pound, 1920)!
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.!
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Hemingway on WWI!n Frederic Henry in A Farewell
to Arms, musing on the words “sacred,” “glorious,” “sacrifice,” and “in vain”:!“We had heard them…and had
read them…and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had real dignity.”!First Edition Cover, 1929
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Lost Generation!n Phrase coined by Gertrude
Stein to describe Hemingway and group of disillusioned ex-patriot American writers living in Paris in the 1920’s!
n Included Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound, Kay Boyle, Ford Maddox Ford, etc.!
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Following the war, an explosion of modern culture!
n Jazz—Harlem Renaissance!
n Movies!n Radio!n Electrification!n Mass transit!n Telephones!n Airplanes!n Automobiles!n Psychoanalysis!
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World of Ideas Changing as Well!
Art
Science
Religion
Psychology
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That’s Not Art!!n London Exhibit of Post-
Impressionist Painting, 1910!n Armory Show* (International
Exhibition of Modern Art) opens in New York in 1913!
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Impressionism:Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte” (1886)!
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Rods and Cones!n Until the 19th C, color
thought to be an intrinsic object of a property!
n Using new scientific theory, Impressionist painters realize color is a product of the object, lighting, and instrument perceiving (rods and cones in the eye)!
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How do we see?
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Impressionist Painting!
Claude Monet’s Paintings of Rouen Cathedral
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Post ImpressionismVincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” (1889)!
17!Henri Matisse’s “Red Fish” (1911)!
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Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase, Number 2” (1912)!
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Perspective in Literature!
n Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, 1929!
n Same story told from 4 different perspectives!
n “A tale told by an idiot” !
Opening Paragraph of The Sound and The Fury!
“Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence.”
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Science!n What is Real? The
Cartesian/Newtonian universe:!n Scientist is objective
observer!n Does not influence
what he’s observing!n Can faithfully
represent what he sees!
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The New Science!n Einstein and
Relativity!n Quantum
Mechanics!n Heisenberg’s
Uncertainty Principle!
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Religion!n God is dead. God remains dead.
And we have killed him. --Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Nietzsche by Munch
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Modern crisis of meaning!
n Post-Darwinian disillusion!n Scientific contradictions of Biblical history!
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Art Replaces Religion?!n Wallace Stevens: “In
an age of disbelief…it is for the poet to supply the satisfactions of belief in his measure and style.!
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Psychology!n Sigmund Freud:!
n Id!n Ego!n Superego!n Sublimation!
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Alienation!n People alienated from God!n Marx and alienation: workers alienated
from their labor!n People alienated from each other:
communication often difficult or even impossible!
n Modern humans, according to Freud’s theories, even alienated from themselves!
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William James and Stream-of-Consciousness!
n Psychologists and philosophers start complicating our view of reality!
n Is “reality” as straightforward as it seems (a clear window or mirror) or just another convention, as artificial as any other style?!
n Stream-of-consciousness!n “The Jilting of Granny
Weatherall”!
...and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. !
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Molly Bloom's closing soliloquy from James Joyce’s Ulysses
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Hemingway’s Modernism:Style!
n Doesn’t use stream-of-consciousness very often!
n Yet, still heeds Ezra Pound’s advice to “make it new”!
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Elements of Hemingway’s Style!
n Stripped down, terse prose !n Dialogue (no tag lines)!n Psychological displacement onto natural world!n Moral ambiguity (lack of authorial editorializing)!n Codified violence!n Iceberg principle!
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Iceberg Principle!“If a writer of prose knows enough about
what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”
--From Death in the Afternoon !
33!33!Hemingway in uniform, 1918
Hemingway’s Modernism:World War I!
n Hemingway’s own experiences!
n “Soldier’s Home”!n “The Sun Also
Rises”!
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Hemingway’s Modernism:Religious Disillusion; Alienation!
!n Harold Krebs!n Older waiter in “A
Clean Well-Lighted Place”!
In Italy, 1918
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Hemingway’s Modernism:Romantic Disillusion!
!n The New Woman!
n Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises!
n Girls in “Soldier’s Home”!
n Prostitution!!
From Life magazine, early 1920’s
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Hemingway’s Modernism:Order/Disorder!n Characters often search for meaning in a
chaotic, disordered universe (feeling man in an unfeeling universe)!
n Hemingway Hero:!n Wounded physically, emotionally, or psychologically!n Drinks too much!n Sleeps with lights on!n Afraid of dying!n Yet, remains stoic; exhibits “grace under pressure”
in the face of pain and suffering”!
