Society and the Novel [and the poetry and the drama] in the 20 th century American

1. Society and the Novel [and the poetry and the drama] in the 20th century American Luciano Cabral American Literature I uerjundergradslit.wordpress.com

2. 1925 1952 1939 1930

3. 1937 1917 1949

4. US Population Growth • Beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing to the present, novels have provided American readers with maps for living in a rapidly expanding and evolving country. As the population grew and moved across the landscape, new and established Americans read stories that depicted the opportunities, values, and challenges that the complexity of being or becoming American presented to individuals. While peoples in all times and places have needed maps and narratives, this need has been especially compelling in the vast immigrant nation of the United States in the last two centuries. • Between 1880 and 2000, over eighty million people left their countries, cultures, languages, and loved ones to travel extraordinary distances to a country about which they knew little or nothing and typically had many misconceptions but where they hoped to make a new life and prosper. Every individual and family who underwent this passage had their particular stories of struggle, failure, or success. Even for those born on American soil, it was often necessary to travel to create a better life.

6. US Society and Fiction • In spite of their wide variety of forms, subjects, and narrative methods and styles, the novels of the United States in the twentieth century nearly always have had a degree of pedagogical intent, providing readers with insights into the nature of the time and place in which their American characters find themselves and how those conditions play crucial roles in their lives. Most of these novels teach readers much about the American physical settings, history, politics, economics, and social conditions that are the contexts for the characters’ experiences.

7. 1900-1945 • By the end of the nineteenth century, the American novel had certainly come of age. Mark Twain and Henry James were major international figures while many others, including the “realists” Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, William Dean Howells, Harold Frederick, Sarah Orne Jewett, Hamlin Garland, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edward Bellamy, Henry Adams, George Washington Cable, and Rebecca Harding Davis, were also widely read and admired. In the 1890s, an important and influential group of novelists emerged on the scene that included the African Americans Charles Chesnutt, Francis Harper, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and Pauline Hopkins, the Jewish immigrant Abraham Cahan, and the Norwegian H. H. Boyesen, who were soon joined by the “naturalists”: Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, and Upton Sinclair. Many of these writers continued to be productive during the early decades of the new century.

8. World War I • When World War I began in Europe in 1914, the United States remained neutral until 1918. When Germany sank five American ships heading to France and England, President Wilson declared war. American forces made a crucial difference and enabled the Allies to attain victory in 1918, and America emerged from the war as a more powerful global military and economic power. • […] the thought and writing of Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, and Marx. Their theories raised questions about the legitimacy of religious beliefs, the viability of democracy, the possibility for fair economic conditions, and the existence of a personal God. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) expressed this sense of alienation with a vision of a collapsing modern world where religious values were seen as mere myths and where the events of everyday life had become futile and meaningless.

9. The Great Depression • When the stock market crashed in October 1929, the nation entered the decade of the Great Depression during which millions of Americans were reduced to poverty. With his The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck and others began to produce novels that directly addressed the widespread unemployment, hopelessness, and suffering. Labor unions and political activists, some of whom joined socialist organizations or the Community Party, sought more sweeping reforms. • Although it is commonplace that the international movement of modernism began in Europe and moved to America in the 1920s and 1930s, Quentin Anderson and others have argued that the intellectual roots of modernism can be found in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and in the writings and music of African American artists. In their fictions, modernist authors engaged controversial subjects like sex, race, ethnicity, class, addiction, and psychological problems that had previously been viewed as unsuitable for serious fiction. Such books also focused on characters who would have been deemed unacceptable in earlier works: criminals, the impoverished, the mentally disturbed, the physically impaired, and those with unconventional moral attitudes.

10. The Great Gatsby (1925) • Often considered the first American modernist novel, The Great Gatsby captures so much of the spirit and style of the 1920s. In tune with the new money, fast lives, and the youthful desire to escape family ties and social conventions, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel exposes an American world of wealthy men, impressive cars, ostentatious parties, and soaring ambitions. • The novel reveals Gatsby’s American dream to be a romantic self-delusion that leads to an American nightmare. • Near the end, Nick says: “I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all – Tom, and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life”. […] ““I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes – a fresh green breast of the new world . . . [it was] the last and greatest of all human dreams.”

11. Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying • Many modernist writers also employed new literary techniques to challenge readers to be more aware and attentive because they believed that serious literature should deepen a reader’s experience of life and convey valuable lessons. Adapting some of James Joyce’s methods in Ulysses, William Faulkner often employed the stream of consciousness technique of taking the reader inside a character’s mind to observe the illogical and erratic flow of perceptions, images, and ideas, thus requiring the reader to discover or create coherence and meaning from the apparent jumble of disconnected thoughts. He also used multiple narrators, four in The Sound and the Fury and fourteen in As I Lay Dying, to suggest that there are many different ways that people will perceive and interpret the same events and thereby to challenge the reader to formulate his or her own view from all of the various perspectives. • The seven narrators from Bundren family are AnseBundren, Addie Bundren, Cash Bundren, DarlBundren, Jewel Bundren, Dewey Dell Bundren and VardamanBundren. Other eight narrating voices are the voices of Whitfield, Vernon Tull, Core Tull, Dock Peabody, Samson, Armstid, Mosley, and Skeet MacGowan.

12. James Joyce’s Ulysses: Molly Bloom’sSoliloquy (1922) …I love flowers I’d love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven there’s nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying there’s no God I wouldn’t give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why don’t they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever they call themselves go and wash the cobbles off themselves first then they go howling for the priest and they dying and why why because they’re afraid of hell on account of their bad conscience ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they don’t know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on How the head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leap year like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a woman’s body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldn’t answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things […]

13. Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying • At the center of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying lies Addie Bundren, mother of five and wife of Anse, on her deathbed. The narrative follows the Bundrens’ nine-day journey to Jefferson to bury Addie near her people. In keeping with the connections between maps and stories, Jefferson is on the map of the imaginary Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi […]. • He gives voices to the inarticulate so that their feelings and psychological problems are accessible to us. The most intelligent of the children is the second son, Darl, who is devoted to Addie in spite of her seeming rejection of him and her favoritism toward his younger brother Jewel, who is actually the child that resulted from Addie’s affair with the minister, Reverend Whitfield. While Darl suspects that Jewel is illegitimate, he is never sure. Faulkner associates Darl with Hamlet because as brilliant as he is, he is unable to act. When Addie’s body attracts vultures, Darl finally takes action, setting fire to a barn where they parked the wagon, but Jewel saves the coffin. The family commits Darl over to an asylum.

14. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God • the most consequential social achievement of modernism in America was the Harlem Renaissance, or to use more inclusive terms, the New (or the Modern) Negro Renaissance. Just as jazz and the blues moved to the center of American culture in the modern period and came to be recognized as the most original American music, so too did writing by African Americans become a powerful presence in American literature in the 1920s and 1930s. With the intellectual leadership of W. E. B. Du Bois, who inspired assertiveness, a host of black writers, many based in New York City, published important fiction, essays, and poetry, and gave public readings and lectures. The novelists include Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Zora Neal Hurston, Nella Larsen, Ida B.Wells, Jessie Fauset, James Weldon Johnson, Sterling Brown, Wallace Thurman, Carl Van Vechten, George Schuyler, Arna Bontemps, Rudolph Fisher, Lillian Smith, and Walter White, among others.

15. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God • Her most powerful and recognized novel is Their Eyes Were Watching God. This is an autobiographical Bildungsroman that traces the life of Janie Crawford Killicks Starks Woods, who, like Hurston, was conceived when her mother was raped, and raised by her grandmother. • In her youth, Janie is an insecure young woman who accepts Jody’s verbal and physical abuse as the price of being a woman. Over the years, such behavior wears her down, but she finds a deeper spirit of resistance within her and frees herself from Jody’s control. In the most famous scene of the text, Janie and Jody are having one of their usual angry, public arguments on the porch of the store. Since she is now about forty years old, Jody has begun to berate her for her old age and unappealing figure even though she remains quite youthful. She recognizes that it is Jody who is feeling old and insecure, and waits until his insults go too far: “God almighty! A woman stay round uh store till she get old as Methusalem . . .! Don’t stand dererolli’ yo’ pop eyes widyo’rumphangin’ nearly to you’ knees!”