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THE MODERNIST NOVEL IN THE USA

2. Characteristics of the Modernist Novel. Experimental and innovatory in formConcerned with consciousness: introspection, analysis, reflection, reverieWeakening of narrative structure: no real beginning, stream of experience, open endingNo omniscient, reliable narrator, limited point of viewMythical archetypes.

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THE MODERNIST NOVEL IN THE USA

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    1. THE MODERNIST NOVEL IN THE USA Francis Scott Fitzgerald Ernest Hemingway Djuna Barnes

    2. 2 Characteristics of the Modernist Novel Experimental and innovatory in form Concerned with consciousness: introspection, analysis, reflection, reverie Weakening of narrative structure: no real beginning, stream of experience, open ending No omniscient, reliable narrator, limited point of view Mythical archetypes

    3. 3 American Modernist Novelists Inherited the tradition of 19th-century writers Lived and worked during the 1920s The Lost Generation Expatriates The Jazz Age

    4. 4 Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)

    5. 5 Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) The ideal American boyhood Born in the family of a prosperous physician in the pleasant suburb of Oak Park, Chicago, in 1899 At the age of 18 he became a reporter on the Kansas City Star.

    6. 6 Hemingway’s Life In 1918 he was in Italy as an ambulance driver and became the first American to be wounded in the WWI The next year he was back home in Chicago, then on the Toronto Star In 1921 he was married and on his way to Paris preceded by a letter of introduction to Gertrude Stein from Sherwood Anderson

    7. 7 Hemingway’s Books First book Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923) In Our Time (1923), a series of one-page vignettes The culmination of a word-by-word approach to writing Endowing prose with the density of poetry.

    8. 8 Hemingway’s Books First novel: The Sun Also Rises (1926) Men Without Women (1927). A Farewell to Arms (1929). For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 for The Old Man and the Sea in 1952

    9. 9 Hemingway’s Books

    10. 10 Hemingway’s Art His world is characteristically violent and often brutal, the world of war, of crime, of dissipation, of the bullring and prize-ring, of big game hunting and deep-sea fishing A world of fear and despair, a world in which man cannot find meaning, a world of nothingness The themes of war, love and death become central to Hemingway’s work between the two World Wars

    11. 11 Hemingway’s Art ‘Grace under pressure’ code: If the hero is to be defeated, it is to be upon his own terms, this is what distinguishes the Hemingway hero from the fictional characters in naturalism who merely follow their natural instincts. The issue for the Hemingway hero, always male and almost always white, is to cope simultaneously with the threats coming from the outside world and from his inner world.

    12. 12 Hemingway’s Art The story has two characteristic forms: that of the initiation, and that of the test. The Hemingway story is characteristically without past and without future. It appears as an archetypal moment outside of time, and outside of society. The art of Hemingway is essentially a lyric art, not a dramatic art.

    13. 13 Hemingway’s Art “You could omit anything … if the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood"(75). A Moveable Feast This “new theory” as he called it has become known as the “iceberg technique” and could have been the result of his working as a journalist and wiring stories in which he was forced to omit the details.

    14. 14 Hemingway’s Art In this respect he is very close to E. A. Poe since both of them aimed at an intensity of emotional effect based on rigorous selection and arrangement of material, and the effect both aimed at is, in the end, a sublimation of terror. Turned the profession of the writer into a sacred one, the writer as a priest

    15. 15 Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) Family background: Irish nobility and colonial aristocracy Confederate romanticism Francis Scott Key, the author of "The Star Spangled Banner”

    16. 16 Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) Education: boarding school, Princeton (left in1917 without graduating) Two years in the Army without being able to participate in the Great War After the end of the war went to New York to work in advertising.

    17. 17 Scott & Zelda Epitomized the young and glamorous people of the age Tried to live the American dream of money, success, and happiness But their lives were touched by sadness and even tragedy

    18. 18 Scott and Zelda Rather extreme fusion of public role and fictional image Popular culture, advertising, and the movies also played an important role As Zelda put it : “We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion.”

    19. 19 Scott & Zelda

    20. 20 Zelda Fitzgerald /1900-1948/ The prototype of the rich, beautiful woman, the flapper An accomplished writer, dancer, and painter Epitomize the kind of Jazz Age style that Fitzgerald’s fiction portrays

    21. 21

    22. 22 Zelda Fitzgerald /1900-1948/ Save Me the Waltz 1932 Bits of Paradise 1974 Scandalabra 1980

    23. 23 Fitzgerald’s Works This Side of Paradise 1920 “Flappers and Philosophers” 1920 The Beautiful and the Damned 1922 "Tales of the Jazz Age" 1922 ?he Vegetable 1923, play

    24. 24 Fitzgerald’s Works ?he Great Gatsby 1925 "?ll the Sad Young Men" 1926 Tender is the Night 1934 "Taps at Reville" 1935 "?he Crack-Up" – an essay published in the Esquire 1936 ?he Last ?????? 1940-41, ed. and published by Edmund Wilson 1945

    25. 25 ?he Great Gatsby 1925 Several titles proposed by F. S. Fitzgerald: - Trimalchio or Trimalchio in West Egg - On the Road to West Egg - Gold-Hatted Gatsby - The High-Bouncing Lover Not liked by his publisher, who gave the present title to the book A last minute suggestion by F. S. Fitzgerald to call it Under the Red, White and Blue

    26. 26 ?he Great Gatsby 1925 The basic story of the novel is simple The factual summary of the action is different from the plot, i.e. the order of treatment of action A central consciousness, a character whose reactions serve as an index to meaning, Nick Carraway

    27. 27 ?he Great Gatsby 1925 Created a new version of the outrageous lowborn, even criminal, American 'hero', the Great Gatsby Symbolic figures from American history: - Dan Cody is a blend of Daniel Boone and William Cody (Buffalo Bill) - Hopalong Cassidy - James J. Hill - Horatio Alger and Benjamin Franklin

    28. 28 ?he Great Gatsby 1925 Gatsby 's story acquires mythic dimensions Gatsby's incorruptible illusion, and capacity for wonder are fused with versions of the American dream The symbolic landscapes: - the opposition between East and West, between East Egg and West Egg - the Valley of Ashes

    29. 29 ?he Great Gatsby 1925 The way the women characters are treated: The name of the main heroine "Daisy" implies a nostalgia for the old Edenic world, for the virginal land that the first settlers ravished and possessed Some very strong attacks on the part of the feminist critics as another of the American 'love stories', hostile to women. Judith Fetterley’s The Resisting Reader (1978)

    30. 30 ?he Great Gatsby 1925 Fitzgerald’s book has also been subject to Marxist and New Historicism critiques Cultural materialism (embodied in Tom Buchanan) exhausting a romantic energy (embodied in Gatsby) leaving us a physical residue (embodied by George and Myrtle Wilson and the Valley of Ashes

    31. 31 Fitzgerald’s Other Works "The Rich Boy" and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”: - his fascination with the very rich as another aspect of the cultural materialism “Babylon Revisited”: - a poignant and devastating judgement of the irresponsibility and careless extravagance of the 1920s Tender is the Night (1934) The Last Tycoon, published posthumously in 1945 by his friend Edmund Wilson

    32. 32 Djuna Barnes (1892-1982)

    33. 33 Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) Born in Cornwall-on-Hudson in a wealthy and free-spirited family Her father, Henry Budington ("Wald") Barnes, was an unsuccessful painter, who ran a farm on Long Island Elizabeth (Chappel) Barnes, her mother, was an English violinist Raised by her mother and her suffragist grandmother outside the school system

    34. 34 Barnes’s Career In 1911 she enrolled at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn; studied briefly at the Art Students League After the divorce of her parents, she started to work as a journalist and freelance illustrator Lived a Bohemian life in Greenwich Village and wrote for several New York newspapers

    35. 35 Barnes’s Works The Book of Repulsive Women (1915), a collection of poetry and drawings One-act plays

    36. 36 Barnes’s Works In 1920 left for Paris and spent the next twenty years abroad Met Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and interviewed them

    37. 37 Barnes’s Works A collection of interviews with Diamond Jim Brady, Florenz Ziegfeld, Frank Harris, D.W. Griffiths I Could Never Be Lonely without a Husband: Interviews by Djuna Barnes (1987) - ed. A. Barry

    38. 38 Barnes’s Works Ryder (1928), a mock-Elizabethan chronicle The Antiphon (1958), a verse play

    39. 39 Nightwood (1936) A stream-of-consciousness narrative, which has become a cult classic William Burroughs: "I read Nightwood back in the 1930s and was very taken with it. I consider it one of the great books of the 20th century.” A story marked by an unsurpassed sense of humor and a novel of destruction at the same time

    40. 40 Nightwood (1936) The story of Robin Vote and those she destroys: her husband "Baron" Felix Volkbein and their child Guido, the women who love her, Nora Flood and Jenny Petherbridge Commenting on them all is Doctor Matthew O'Connor, whose outlandish monologues elevate their romantic losses to the level of Elizabethan tragedy

    41. 41 Nightwood (1936) Tells the story of the marginal and the different Unlike Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, it is situated in the pre-war world of Paris and Vienna Very much like Hemingway’s characters, Barnes’s characters are over-ridden by their sense of alienation Grotesquely trying to find love and to make sense of sexual and racial identity

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