THE MODERN AGE1901 - Present

AUTHORS OF THE PERIOD

• Many historians argue that America’s cultural coming of age occurs during this time.

• The artistic innovations of Modernism are viewed as a response to dramatic historical, cultural, and economic events.

Significant Events of the Modern Period

• 1914 – World War I begins. President Wilson declares America’s neutrality.

• 1917 – The U.S. enters World War I to “make the world safe for democracy.”

• 1918 – World War I ends

8.7 million people died for reasons many people could not understand.

Before World War I, people believed that technology was a sign of progress and that it would help to serve humanity. The horrors of technology applied to warfare, however, highlighted the ambiguities of “progress.”

Machine guns, tanks, submarines, airplanes, flame throwers, and poison gas proved that technology could be used for mass violence.

• 1919 – Riots motivated by racial tensions erupt in American cities during the “Red-Summer of 1919.”

• The worst riots occurred in Chicago after a black teenager was stoned to death for swimming in a whites only Lake Michigan beach.

• Blacks retaliated, and whites reacted. After over a week of violence, 38 people were killed, 537 were injured, and over 1,000 were left homeless.

1920 – The Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote.

• 1920 - Prohibition begins after the Eighteenth Amendment forbids the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors.”

• 1933 – The Eighteenth Amendment is repealed.

1923 – Ku Klux Klan membership rises to a reported four million.

1929 – The U.S. Stock Market crashes

1930s – The Great Depression

1939 – France and England declare war on Germany when Hitler invades Poland. World War II begins.

• 1941 - Japan attacks Pearl harbor, and America enters WWII.

• 1942 - President Roosevelt initiates the Manhattan Project, a research and development project to build the atomic bomb.

• 1945 - Allied troops liberate German concentration camps, American bombers drop napalm in Tokyo, the U.S. drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan surrenders, World War II ends.

TWO VIEWSThe Soldier

If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England.  There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England's, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

--Rupert Brooke

WILFRED OWEN, “DULCE ET DECORUM EST”

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,And towards our distant rest began to trudge.Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hootsOf gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumblingFitting the clumsy helmets just in time,But someone still was yelling out and stumblingAnd flound'ring like a man in fire or lime. —Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sightHe plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could paceBehind the wagon that we flung him in,And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,If you could hear, at every jolt, the bloodCome gargling from the froth-corrupted lungsBitter as the cudOf vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —My friend, you would not tell with such high zestTo children ardent for some desperate glory,The old Lie: Dulce et decorum estPro patria mori.

The events that took place during these tumultuous times had a deep and wide-ranging impact on aesthetic sensibility.

Artists felt that traditional art forms could no longer express the modern psychological state of dislocation, alienation, anxiety.

Literary Modernism’s most significant feature is:

Experimentation

The phrase “make it new,” attributed to Ezra Pound, became a rallying cry for writers who participated in this cultural movement.

Style Subject Matter

The phrase "beyond the pale" dates back to the 14th century, when the part of Ireland that was under English rule was delineated by a boundary made of such stakes or fences, and known as the English Pale. To travel outside of that boundary, beyond the pale, was to leave behind all the rules and institutions of English society, which the English modestly considered synonymous with civilization itself.

“Beyond the Pale”

• Metaphorically means standing outside of conventional boundaries (law, behavior, class, gender, etc.)

• Symbolically represents literary modernism—art going beyond boundaries of thought, style, propriety, genre, etc.

The Style of Literary Modernism

• Modernism’s literary forms are innovative and, often, challenging.

• Writers were willing to disrupt traditional notions of order, sequence, and unity. They risked a certain amount of incoherence for the sake of experimentation.

• Instead of predictable rhymes and forms, Modern poetry is sometimes chaotic, as if to mirror the randomness of modern life and to challenge the reader’s notion of order. Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein will give you a sense of Modern poetry’s experimentation with style.

The Style of Literary ModernismStream of consciousness is a style that some Modern

writers use to portray the inner workings of a character’s mind.

Writers catalog or describe the character’s thoughts, impressions, emotions, and ideas in rapid succession and without any interpretation or explanation by an outside narrator.

Writers who employ this style believe that it more accurately represents the confused and sometimes random jumps of the human mind.

The Subject Matter of Literary Modernism

Alienation

Existentialism Primitivism

The Harlem Renaissance

Alienation• Many young Americans felt like outsiders within their own

culture. It was difficult for them to come to terms with the unnecessary suffering and enormous loss of life caused by war. Many artists were also troubled by the racism and sexism that was prevalent in American culture.

• This helps explain why many Modernists experimented with their own styles, rather than tap into the traditional literary forms of their culture.

• The pervasive sense of alienation that many writers felt led them to leave the U.S. and live in “voluntary exile” in England and Europe.

• Often referred to as “expatriates,” writers as diverse as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, and Sherwood Anderson spent years living abroad.

• In fact, some of them never returned home to the U.S.

Alienation

“You are all a lost generation.”

-Gertrude Stein(quoted by Ernest Hemingway as an epigraph

to his 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises)

ExistentialismMany modernists rejected traditional philosophical and religious systems of belief in favor of Existentialism, which suggests a meaningless, chaotic, Godless world.

Existentialists believe that the individual has the sole responsibility for giving his/her own life meaning and living life passionately and sincerely, in spite of many obstacles and distractions including despair, angst, absurdity, boredom, and death.

PrimitivismModernists were inspired by Native American and

African American art. The obsession with so-called “primitive” material and attitudes was fueled by an exploding interest in Freudian and Jungian psychology. Both Freud and Jung discussed “hidden,” subconscious motives, and the “primitive” appeared to offer a setting to explore their theories of psychology and sexuality.

Harlem RenaissanceDuring the 1920s, Harlem – an area in upper

Manhattan, New York -- became the national center of African American culture: theater, music, dance, and literature. The Harlem Renaissance refers to the

period just after WWI to the Depression when African American writers produced a tremendous amount of literary work.

Writers of the Harlem Renaissance express disillusionment with America and its promises. Their disappointment was fueled by the continued racial strife and outbursts of prejudice and violence.

In conclusion, Modernism was a massive movement that included a broad range of authors, styles, and themes. It was a revolt against the conservative values of Realism.

• Modernism underscored the abstract, unconventional, largely uncertain ethic brought on by rapidly changing technology and dramatic cultural shifts.

• Due to the richness of the art and literature produced during this time, it is sometimes referred to as the 20th Century Renaissance.

• Due to the richness of the art and literature produced during this period, it is often referred to as the Twentieth Century Renaissance.

LITERARY MODERNISM GOES BEYOND THE PALE…

“Make it new!”

“Make it different!”

“Make it difficult!”

“MAKE IT NEW!”Resentment at close-mindedness and

complacency of late Victorian cultureIncreasing fragmentation and

insecurities lead to cynicism and distrust of “pat” solutions—doubts no longer resolved by faith

Nature replaced with the impersonalism of cities, the sterility of wastelands…

Sense that the “givens” are no longer good, that the moorings have been eroded away

Imagist poetry instead of Victorian expansiveness

“The Second Coming” instead of “Ulysses”

“MAKE IT DIFFERENT!”Emergence of vers libre (free verse) to

replace prescribed metric forms

Attack on and dismantling of Victorian literary proprieties: language, sex, form, etc.

“Anxiety of influence”—effect of tradition on individual writers, trying to get out from under the perceived weight of the past

REMEMBER: “FREE VERSE” IS STILL CAREFULLY CRAFTED

“MAKE IT DIFFICULT!”Sense that “intellectual” literature

had to be different from that which pleased the masses. Modernists believed that art had to be perceived as elitist and ‘hard’ to have value.

Bring in anthropology, mythology, psychology, science—challenge readers’ knowledge and expectations

“Stream of consciousness”—attempts to recreate the thinking of characters in works, to find a literary equivalent for how minds work