American Modernism

1. American Modernism

2. Phases of Modernism • Early • 1890-1920 Avant-garde (Dadaism, Surrealism, Cubism) • High • 1920 – 1929 Modernist Classics (Ulysses, The Waste Land, Manhattan Transfer,The Great Gatsby, Cane), Experimenalism, Minimalism, Black modernism • Thirties 1930 – 1940 Socialist realism, proletarian novel, black modernism • Late Modernism: 1940 - 1960 modernism is canonized • Post-Modernism 1960 - 1990s radicalization of modernism or break with high modernism

3. Ezra Pound – Make it new!

4. Isabel, Caroline, Denise, Jelena Chantal, Tatjana Cornelia, Valerie, Annika Lena, Julia, Mirjam, Caroline

5. Luisa, Katharina Steven Daniela, Sofia, Jan, Maria Christoph, Nadja, Kathi, Falko

7. The Armory Show 1913 • Watershed date in American art • Introduced astonished New Yorkers to modernism • Teddy Roosevelt said, “That’s not art!” “In 1913, a single exhibition changed the face of American art forever. The International Exhibition of Modern Art, known as the Armory Show,endeavored to combine the newest and most striking examples of European art with their American counterparts in a magnificent, unparalleled show.“ http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/the-1913-armory-show-much-ado-about-everything/)

8. Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912

9. "Take the picture which for some reason is called 'A Naked Man Going Down Stairs'. There is in my bathroom a really good Navajo rug which, on any proper interpretation of the Cubist theory, is a far more satisfactory and decorative picture. ... and from the standpoint of decorative value, of sincerity, and of artistic merit, the Navajo rug is infinitely ahead of the picture." (Theodore Roosevelt )

10. Thomas Eakins The Swimming Hole, 1884/85

11. John Singer Sargent (1856-1925)MrsKnowlesand her Children, 1902

12. Henri Matisse, 1869-1954 The Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra), 1907 oil, 36 1/4 x 55 1/8.

13. Marcel Duchamp, 1887-1968 Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (Nu descendant un escalier), 1912 oil, 58 x 35.

14. "Duchamp’s Nude creates an atmosphere of release, color release, release from stereotyped forms, trite subjects. I (William Carlos Williams) laughed out loud when I first saw it, happily, with relief." (Williams 134). 

15. Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d‘Avignon, 1907 The Birth of Modernism

17. Ezra Pound – Make it new!

18. In a Station of the Metro The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. Ezra Pound, 1913

19. The Red Wheelbarrow so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.William Carlos Williams, 1923

20. Ta ta ppin g toe hip popot amus Back gen teel-lylugu brious eyes LOOPTHELOOP as fathandsbangrag E.E.Cummings, 1923

21. Harlem What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode? Langston Hughes, 1951

22. T.S. Eliot: “These fragments that I have shored up against my ruins” “The fragments are fragments from the literature of the past. Eliot contrasted the wholeness of past eras in our heritage with what he saw as the fracturing of feeling, sensibility and belief in his own day, the 1920s, a time of public and, for Eliot himself, personal collapse.“ (Excerpt from The Great Books by Anthony O'Hear)

23. What is Modernism? A Dictionary Definition: "a general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and avant-garde trends in the literature (and other arts) of the early 20th century.... Modernist literature is characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th-cent traditions and the conventions of realism ... (e.g. traditional meter). Modernist writers tended to see themselves as an avant-garde disengaged from bourgeois values, and disturbed their readers by adopting complex and difficult new forms and styles. In fiction, the accepted continuity of chrono-logical development was upset…. In poetry, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot replaced the logical exposition of thoughts with collages of fragmentary images and complex allusions. Modernist writing is predominantly cosmopolitan, and often expresses a sense of urban cultural dislocation, along with an awareness of new anthropological and psychological theories. Its favoured techniques of juxtaposition and multiple point of view challenge the reader to reestablish a coherence of meaning from fragmentary forms.” The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 1991

24. What is Modernism? • International tendency in the arts (literature, music, architecture, film, dance…) • Rejection of tradition, Anti-Victorian • Experimental, fragmented, non-representational, anti-realist • New narrative techniques: stream of consciousness, interior monologue • Themes: psychological, self-alienation,-realisation, emancipation, tries to represent human subjectivity • Goals: Make art more vivid & authentic • Effect on the reader: challenging, unsettling, disturbing

25. Value Differences in the Modern World

26. What events/trends/theories do you associate with these dates? • 1900 • 1929 • 1939

28. Scientific Revolution • Albert Einstein’s Principle of Uncertainty • In quantum mechanics: increasing the accuracy of measurement of one observable quantity increases the uncertainty with which another may be known • Quantum theory • Explains the nature of matter and energy on the atomic and subatomic level

30. Modernity & Film • Kinetoscope 1893-95 • Thomas Edison in 1891 patent; 1893 demo of 35mm film • Andrew Holland opened 1st peep-show parlor on Broadway April 1894, with Kinetoscopes for individual viewers; 25 cents for 16-second film viewed individually • Vaudeville Theaters 1895-1905 • Louis and Auguste Lumiere in Paris 1895Edison purchased rights to the Vitascope 1896 • Nickelodeon 1905-15 • urban working-class storefront theaters showing movies for 10 cent. • Edwin S. Porter's photoplay The Great Train Robbery,1903. The 300 vaudeville theaters offered a variety of entertainment for 50 cents • by 1910, 26 mill. attended 10,000 movie theaters each week for 10 cents. • 1915-1925 Rise of Classical Hollywood Narrative Film 

32. Modernism = W – worldly  MODERNITY M – metropolitan D – democratic stylistic  personal emancipation sexual

33. Characteristics of Modernism in Literature • Meaning comes from the individual’s perspective and is personalized; • A single story might be told from the perspective of several different people, with the assumption that the “truth” is somewhere in the middle - relativism

34. Inner psychological reality or “interiority” is represented • Stream of consciousness—portraying the character’s inner monologue

35. Characteristics of Modernism in Literature • No longer seen as transparent, allowing us to “see through” to reality; • But now considered the way an individual constructs reality; • Language is “thick” with multiple meanings and varied connotative forces.

36. Characteristics of Modernism in Literature • Emphasis on the Experimental • Art is artifact rather than reality; • Organized non-sequentially • Experience portrayed as layered, allusive, discontinuous, using fragmentation and juxtaposition. • Ambiguous endings—open endings which are seen as more representative of reality.