Chapter 5 Modernism (2)

1. Chapter 5Modernism (2) T. S. Eliot Stevenson Williams

2. Assignments • Define the term modernism • List the thematic characteristics modernism • Tell T. S. Eliot’s artistic features • What are the symbols in W. C. Williams’ Spring and All • List the themes of W. C. Williams’ Spring and All and find lines from the poem to support the themes each • Answer the first two question on page 183 from the Selected Readings

3. Contents • Modernism • High-modernism • Post-modernism • T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) • William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) and Spring and all by William Carlos Williams

4. Modernism • As a literary term • Overview • Characteristics of Modernity/Modernism *Formal/Stylistic characteristics *Thematic characteristics

6. Year that modernism starts

7. As a literary term Modernism, as a literary style, emerged after WWI, beginning in Europe and then progressing into American literature by the late 1920s. After the First World War many people questioned the chaos and the insanity of it all. The world’s “universal truths” and trust in authority figures began to crumble, and Modernism as a literary movement was a response to the destruction of these beliefs.

8. Overview *Modernist literature can be viewed largely in terms of its formal, stylistic and semantic movement away from Romanticism,examining subject matter that is traditionally mundane--a prime example being The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot.

9. Romanticism stressed the subjectivity of experience, Modernist writers were more acutely conscious of the objectivity of their surroundings. In Modernism the object is: the language doesn't mean it is. This is a shift from an epistemological aesthetic to an ontological aesthetic or, in simpler terms, a shift from a knowledge-based aesthetic to a being-based aesthetic. This shift is central to Modernism. Archibald MacLeish, for instance, said, "A poem should not mean / But be."

10. *Modernist literature often features a marked pessimism, a clear rejection of the optimism apparent in Victorian literature. In fact, "a common motif in Modernist fiction is that of an alienated individual--a dysfunctional individual trying in vain to make sense of a predominantly urban and fragmented society." But the questioning spirit of modernism could also be seen, less elegaically, as part of a necessary search for ways to make a new sense of a broken world.

11. *Modernist literature often moves beyond the limitations of the Realist novel with a concern for larger factors such as social or historical change. This is prominent in "stream of consciousness" writing. Examples can be seen in Virginia Woolf's Kew Gardens and Mrs Dalloway, James Joyce's Ulysses, Katherine Porter's Flowering Judas, Jean Toomer's Cane, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and others.

12. *Modernism as a literary movement is seen, in large part, as a reaction to the emergence of city life as a central force in society.

13. Characteristics of Modernity/Modernism *Formal/Stylistic characteristics *Thematic characteristics

14. *Formal/Stylistic characteristics Free indirect speech Stream of consciousness Juxtaposition of characters Wide use of classical allusions Figure of speech Inter-textuality Personification Hyperbole Parataxis Comparison

15. Quotation Pun Satire Irony Antiphrasis Unconventional use of metaphor Symbolic representation Psychoanalysis Discontinuous narrative Meta-narrative Multiple narrative points of view

16. Thematic characteristics *Breakdown of social norms *Realistic embodiment of social meanings *Separation of meanings and senses from the context *Despairing individual behaviors in the face of an unmanageable future *Sense of spiritual loneliness *Sense of alienation *Sense of frustration

17. *Sense of disillusionment *Rejection of the history *Rejection of the outdated social system *Objection of the traditional thoughts and the traditional moralities *Objection of the religious thoughts *Substitution of a mythical past

18. Post-modernism

20. As a liyerary school, it came about around the end of WWII, though not actually studied as a form until the mid 1980s. The characteristics are the same as modernism except postmodernism is more playful or celebratory regarding the world's "insanity." The idea being, okay, the world is chaotic, there are no universal truths, lets see what we can do with that. Examples of postmodern works include:

21. Anais Nin's Under a Glass Bell (1944), William Gass's In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968), and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987). Both modernism and postmodernism may have all or some of the above characteristics; it isn’t required that all of the traits are used in order for a piece to be classified as modernist writing. The key characteristics are usually fragmentation, loss, distrust of authority, and the lack of universal truths.

22. High modernism

23. *High modernism is a particular instance of modernism, coinedtowards the end of modernism. "High modernism", presumably is meant to specify the most characteristic, developed, consistent, or florid manifestation of modernism. The term is used in literature, criticism, music and the visual arts.

24. In one sense, "high modernism" is closely associated with anthropologist and political scientist James C. Scott, who uses the phrase in a pejorative sense. Scott and his followers use the phrase with an implied criticism of modernism as austerely minimalist and excessively rationalist or bureaucratic combined with a sense of hubris in its claims about the inevitability of progress, or its claim to embody progress.

25. In literature The term "high modernism" as used in literary criticism generally lacks the pejorative connotations it has in other contexts. High literary modernism, on the contrary, is generally used to describe a subgenre of literary modernism, and generally encompasses works published between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second.

26. Regardless of the specific year it was produced, high modernism is characterized primarily by a complete and unambiguous embrace of what Andreas Huyssen calls the "Great Divide." That is, it believes that there is a clear distinction between capital-A. Art and mass culture, and it places itself firmly on the side of Art and in opposition to popular or mass culture. (Postmodernism, according to Huyssen, may be defined precisely by its rejection of this distinction.)

27. Lists of canonical high modernists often include: James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound ,Virginia Woolf ,E. M. Forster, Marcel Proust, Katherine Mansfield, Ernest Hemingway Gertrude Stein and Joseph Conrad (most of whose work predates the generally accepted time-frame of high literary modernism). Whatever the literary schools are, they all belong to modernism.

28. T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

29. Outline • Life (p172) • His major works (p173-174) • His theories about literature(His “the impersonal theory” of poetry or “objective correlative” ) • The basic themes of his criticism • Understanding of his The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. And The Waste Land (p183) • V. His artistic features

30. His theories about literature T. S. Eliot claimed himself a `classiest’ in literature, royalist in politics and Anglo-Catholic in religion'. *His “the impersonal theory” of poetry or “objective correlative” →Emphasizes the relation of a poem to the poems by other authors and suggests “the conception of poetry as a living whole of all poetry that has ever been written.”

31. →Focuses on the relation of the poem and its author. →Impressions and experiences important for the man may take no place in the poetry. →The relevance of a poem may be ascribed, not to its reflection of the author's personality, but to the fact that the author's mind is a finely perfected medium in which varied feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.

32. → “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." Eliot saw that in this depersonalization the art approaches science. →Defined the objective correlative as a way of expressing emotion by finding "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion."

33. →The objective correlative makes a poem intellectually and emotionally intelligible to the reader by presenting concrete circumstances that evoke an abstract emotion. For an example of the technique in action, consider the opening stanza of his The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. →"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality

34. The basic themes of his criticism *The relationship between tradition and individual talent; *The relation between the past, the present and the future.

35. His artistic features →Fresh visual imagery →Flexible tone and highly expressive rhythm →Full of quotations and allusions →Images and symbols seem disconnected →Lines in a number of foreign languages, lack of narrative structure compounded by startling juxtapositions, →A sense of aloofness from the ordinary sensory universe of day-to-day living.

36. William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

37. Outline • Life • His literary ideas • Williams’ poetic method • Experiencing Spring and all by William Carlos Williams

38. His literary ideas Although his primary occupation was as a doctor, Williams had a full literary career. His work consists of short stories, poems, plays, novels, critical essays, an autobiography, translations and correspondence, often associated with modernism and Imagism. Williams won the Pulitzer Prize in May of 1963.

39. →As a young man Williams stayed true to imagist style and principles and his early poems, such as The Red Wheelbarrow,etc.are similarly laconic and focused on things in the world rather than abstractions. However, as he grew older Williams distanced himself from the imagist ideas he had helped to establish with Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle, whom he ultimately rejected as being "too European."

40. → (This break came on the heels of a brief collaboration with Pound on T.S. Eliot’s epic poem The Waste Land, which he derided as baroque and obscure. Eliot's poem, despite its genius, seemed to him years later a "great catastrophe to our letters," a work of stylistic brilliance and the learning, yet profoundly pessimistic its description of modern culture as a "waste land." Imagism, to Williams, had focused so intently on images and things that it had lost its human audience.)

41. →Williams disliked Ezra Pound's and especially T. S. Eliot's frequent use of allusions to foreign languages and Classical sources, as in Eliot's The Waste Land. →Williams most famously summarized his poetic method in the phrase "No ideas but in things" →He advocated that poets leave aside traditional poetic forms and unnecessary literary allusions, and try to see the world as it is.

42. →Williams drew his themes from what he called "the local." →He sought to renew language through the fresh, raw idiom that grew out of America's cultural and social heterogeneity, at the same time freeing it from what he saw as the worn-out language of British and European culture. →Williams tried to invent an entirely fresh form, an American form of poetry whose subject matter was centered on everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people.

43. →Finding beauty in the commonplace was the goal of Williams' poetry throughout his life, and while as a young man he wrote about common things, as he matured he came to write uncommon thoughts with common words. The ordinary, the local, becomes reinvigorated through the light of the poetic imagination,

44. Williams’ poetic method Itis probably best summarized by the phrase “No ideas but in things,” which is taken from his 1944 poem A Sort of Song. Williams strongly advocated that poets abandon traditional forms and unnecessary literary allusions and attempt to seethe world directly and reflect that in their writing.

45. Spring and all

46. Outline • Introduction • Brief Summary • Line-by-lineunderstanding • Themes • Literary device (technique)

47. Introduction In a lot of ways, Spring and All is a classic William Carlos Williams poem: short, beautiful, and filled with simple images. It focuses on making each moment as clear and sharp as possible. He’s discovering poetry in the world around him, in daily experience. He’s inventing a style that doesn’t need fancy words or references to history in order to make its point or to amaze reader with its beauty.

48. (But, before starting thinking that he’s all about plants and fruit and simple pretty words, we should know where this poem comes from. It is part of a much longer book called Spring and All, which is CRAZY. It’s a mix of poems, prose, and all kinds of ideas about the imagination, writing, history, and so on. The chapters are out of order, and the sentences stop midway. In a lot of ways, it sounds like a rant.)

49. Eventually, the book makes a kind of weird sense, but it takes a lot of work to get there. Luckily, Williams’s genius also comes in bite-sized pieces, like this poem. The bottom line? It’s easy to read – and that’s how it’s supposed to be – but there’s a lot behind it, and a lot going on under the surface.

50. Brief Summary Someone has stopped by the side of a road that leads to a hospital, and he or she is looking at the landscape. This person (the speaker of the poem) begins by describing the scene: the dead plants that cover everything at the end of winter. Then, the poem shifts, and the speaker describes the coming of spring, imagining how new life will emerge from this landscape as it begins to wake up.