Prof. Derek P. Royal

ENG 442 – Survey of American Literature II

American Modernism

Modernism is a comprehensive term for a movement (or tendency) which began to get under way in the closing years of the nineteenth-century and which had a wide influence internationally during much of the twentieth-century. In the United States, Modernism spanned roughly from shortly before the First World War into the inter-war period. (It should be pointed out, however, that, as with any literary “movement,” the beginning and ending of Modernism is open to critical question. Indeed, one could argue that Modernism reaches into the 1950s, and there are even critics who suggest that the modern period is still not entirely over.) It is perhaps best characterized not by any particular style or structure, but by the search for an individual style and structure. Modernism is most commonly summarized by Ezra Pound’s famous statement, “Make it new!” “Day by day,” Pound says in The Cantos, “make it new/cut the underbrush/pile the logs/keep it growing.” As such, Modernism acknowledges the failure of existing literary forms and a desperate search for new ones. It reveals a breaking away from established rules, traditions, and conventions, emphasizing aesthetic independence; fresh ways of looking at the human position and function in the universe; a turning inward to explore consciousness; and encourages many experiments in form and style to “get to” this consciousness. Some American modernist writers include Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe, Henry Roth, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer (in fiction); T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, H. D., Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes (in poetry); and Eugene O’Neill, Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller (in drama).

It is most useful to look at Modernism not as a consensus of artistic ideas, but as an interplay of groups, aesthetic attitudes, and techniques, many of which are incompatible. Some of these artistic schools or “isms” include:

Ø Symbolism – there is a further reality beyond that of the senses, and this can only be approached only in special states of consciousness (such as poetic inspiration or aesthetic reverie); the symbol, the key to artistic knowledge, can only be indirectly understood

Ø Naturalism – a “scientific” and unsentimental treatment (or “documentation”) of human activity in literature that suggested that people are at the mercy of outer (social, economic, political, environmental) as well as inner (hunger, sex drive, anger) forces; humans have no choice…there is only coercion

Ø Impressionism – stresses the inward, human, variable perceptions of things and events; a radical emphasis on subjectivity and significance of point of view

Ø Expressionism – the presentation of an inner (at times chaotic and violent) reality; the projection of the personal vision of the world, where emotional expression determines the form; anti-realistic, anti-mimetic

Ø Imagism – an emphasis on the hard, clear image in poetry as well as prose; stressed verbal concentration and economy, the use of ordinary or “unpoetic” language, and the belief that any subject matter can produce striking imagery

Ø Cubism – emphasizes a flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane, rejecting traditional techniques of perspective and refuting established theories of art as the imitation of nature; not bound to copying form, texture, color, or space in a traditional manner, but instead shows reality/objects as fragmented, showing several sides simultaneously

Ø Futurism – advocates a new form of art in the context of an increasingly mechanized age; emphasized the dynamo, technology, speed, power; tendencies toward anti-humanism

Ø Vorticism – like Cubism, representing human figures as abstract planes and with machinelike angularity; related to Futurism, it stressed energy and vitality, and attacked bourgeois culture

Ø Surrealism – an attempt to express in art and literature the workings of the unconscious mind and synthesize these workings with consciousness; stressed free association and “automatic” processes for generating unexpected images; artistic work developed non-logically (as opposed to illogically) so as to best represent the processes of the unconscious

Some of the general features of modernism include:

Ø A break with the past; in particular, a style and approach that are different from whatever came before (much of the writing is experimental or avant-garde, at times radically so)

Ø A concern with the processes of consciousness; stream-of-consciousness writing in which the narrative reflects the on-going, at times disjointed, interior world of a character

Ø An emphasis on form: the way the story is told and who tells it; unreliable narrators add ambiguity to the story

Ø A concern with language and how to use it (representationally or otherwise) and with writing itself; a realization that the ways we narrate the world is through language itself

Ø An outlook upon modern life—especially in light of changes brought about by technology, mass entertainment, and consumerism—and the cultural crisis that many artists believed defined this time

Ø A redefining, although reaffirming, of the cultural role of the artist figure; in many ways the artist becomes an alienated, yet socially engaged, critic or observer of his/her culture; an emphasis on the küstlerroman

Ø Poetic and narrative modes are self-conscious, self-referential, and self-perpetuation (which some argue tended to lead toward an increasingly allusive and obscure literature)

Ø No real beginning, in medias res; readers are many times plunged into the middle of some story

Ø An ending that is open and ambiguous

Ø A departure from a strictly chronological ordering of the material; in other words, the story is told out of sequence and time is disjointed

Ø An art of omission; what is left out of a story is just as important as what is left in (urging the reader to become a participant in the story)

Ø An emphasis on (often an obsession with) time, especially with the past: how the mind constructs time and the ways in which characters are determined by their pasts

Ø Repetitions (in imagery, character, wording, or even the story itself) with variations

Ø An interest in mythic archetypes and rituals, especially from other cultures

Ø A concern with depth: determining the truth about a character or place, getting to the root cause, discovering the core of something, reaching back into the past, etc.

Ø Indirect judgments; the writer doesn’t comment in the third person, and there is a tendency to understand instead of to judge