Modernism and PostModernism

1. Modernism and PostModernism Art and literature from approximately 1900-the present

2. The Moderns 1900-1950s • Novels • Plays • Poetry (a great resurgence after deaths of Whitman & Dickinson) • Highly experimental as writers seek a unique style • Use of interior monologue & stream of consciousness

3. Key ideas • Characters: • in pursuit of the American dream-- • Admiration for America as land of Eden • Importance of the Individual: large cultural wave of Modernism, which gradually emerged in Europe and the United States in the early years of the 20th century, expressed a sense of modern life through art as a sharp break from the past, as well as from western civilization's classical traditions. • Modern life seemed radically different from traditional life -- more scientific, faster, more technological, and more mechanized. Modernism embraced these changes.

4. Literary and visual example: • Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) developed an analogue to modern art. A resident of Paris and an art collector (she and her brother Leo purchased works of the artists Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Pablo Picasso, and many others). • Stein once explained that she and Picasso were doing the same thing, he in art and she in writing. • Stein’s work is characterized by: • simple, almost childlike quality, concrete words as counters, develops abstract, experimental prose poetry. • simple vocabulary recalls the bright, primary colors of modern art, while her repetitions echo the repeated shapes of abstract visual compositions. • dislocating grammar and punctuation give rise to new "abstract" meanings.

5. Stein example: • Her collectionTender Buttons (1914) views objects from different angles, as in a cubist painting: • A Table A Table means does it not mydear it means a whole steadiness.Is it likely that a change. A tablemeans more than a glass even alooking glass is tall.

6. Pablo Picasso

7. Central issues in Modernism • Writers reflect the ideas of Darwin (survival of the fittest) and Karl Marx (how money and class structure control a nation) • Overwhelming technological changes of the 20th Century • Rise of the youth culture • Reactions and results of WWI and WWII • Harlem Renaissance

8. Modernist writers • Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby • Poetry of Jeffers, Williams, Cummings, Frost, Eliot, Sandburg, Pound, Robinson, Stevens • Short stories and novels of Steinbeck, Hemingway, Thurber, Welty, and Faulkner • Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun & Wright's Native Son (an outgrowth of Harlem Renaissance-- see below) • Miller's The Death of a Salesman (some consider Postmodern)

9. Post-Modernism • Mixing of fantasy with nonfiction; blurs lines of reality for reader • No heroes • Concern with individual in isolation • Social issues as writers align with feminist & ethnic groups • Usually humorless • Narratives • Metafiction • Present tense • Magic realism

10. Qualities and Characteristics • Erodes distinctions between classes of people • Insists that values are not permanent but only "local" or "historical" • Vision and viewpoint became an essential aspect of the modernist novel as well. No longer was it sufficient to write a straightforward third-person narrative or (worse yet) use a pointlessly intrusive narrator. The way the story was told became as important as the story itself. • Henry James, William Faulkner, and many other American writers experimented with fictional points of view (some are still doing so). James often restricted the information in the novel to what a single character would have known. Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury (1929) breaks up the narrative into four sections, each giving the viewpoint of a different character (including a mentally disabled boy).

11. New Criticism • To analyze such modernist novels and poetry, a school of "new criticism" arose in the United States, with a new critical vocabulary. New critics hunted the "epiphany" (moment in which a character suddenly sees the transcendent truth of a situation, a term derived from a holy saint's appearance to mortals); they "examined" and "clarified" a work, hoping to "shed light" upon it through their "insights."

12. Examples of Postmodern writers and works • Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and The Executioner's Song • Feminist & social issue poets: Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Bill Levertov, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker • Miller'sThe Death of a Salesman & The Crucible (some consider Modern) • Lawrence & Lee's Inherit the Wind • Capote's In Cold Blood • Stories & novels by Kurt Vonnegut • J.D. Salinger'sCatcher in the Rye • Beat Poets: Kerouac, Burroughs, & Ginsberg • Ken Kesey'sOne Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

13. Final note on Postmodern lit • Postmodern literature argues for: • expansion • the return of reference • the celebration of fragmentation rather than the fear of it • the role of reference itself in literature. While drawing on the experimental tendencies of authors such as ErnestHemingway and William Faulkner in English, and JorgeLuis Borges in Spanish - writers who were taken as influences by American postmodern authors such as NormanMailer, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo, John Barth, William Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, and Paul Auster - the advocates of postmodern literature argue that the present is fundamentally different from the modern period, and therefore requires a new literary sensibility.