Fachbereich Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Sommersemester 2010
History of American Literature
Prof. Dr. Ralph J. Poole
Make It New:
Experience, Experiment, Modernism
Poetry:
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Edwin A. Robinson. "Miniver Cheevy" (1910)
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Robert Frost. "Mending Wall" (1914), "The Oven Bird" (1916)
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Ezra Pound. "To Whistler, American" (1912), "In a Station of the Metro" (1913), "A Pact" (1913)
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T.S. Eliot. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915)
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Carl Sandburg. "Chicago" (1916), "Grass" (1918)
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Wallace Stevens. "Anecdote of the Jar" (1923), "The Snow Man" (1923)
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William Carlos Williams. "The Red Wheel Barrow" (1923), "Young Sycamore", "This Is Just to Say" (1934)
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H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). "Helen" (1924)
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Marianne Moore. "Poetry" (1921), "To a Snail" (1924)
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Edna St. Vincent Millay. "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed" (1923) (1892-1950) "I, Being Born a Woman" (1923)
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E.E. cummings. "In Just-"; [l(a] (1922)
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Louise Bogan. "Women" (1922)
Short Story and Novel:
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Anzia Yezierska. "America and I" (1923)
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F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby (1925)
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John Dos Passos. Manhattan Transfer (1925)
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William Faulkner. "A Rose for Emily" (1930), "Barn Burning" (1938) (L), The Sound and the Fury (1929)
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Ernest Hemingway. "Hills Like White Elephants" (1927), The Sun Also Rises (1926)
Modernity / Modernism
• Already 17th century: discussion about what
is „modern“ and what is not
• „modern“ as emerging from Dark Ages into
‚light‘ Renaissance (“modernization”)
• Industrial Revolution 18th/19th century
 not practical: ALL of American literature
would be „modern“ in this sense
Modernism
• Difference between Romanticism and
Realism/Naturalism as redefinition of how to
look at history
• Modernism radically different: idea of “New”,
i.e. present
 present not defined by past
– Break with traditional forms of art
– But also: rediscovery of forgotten traditions
Sociopolitical Climate
• Post-WW I: military, politics, economy:
reactionary climate
• Hostility to new social and artistic ideas
• Many writers left for Europe: freedom to
discover new standards and techniques of art
• Technical refinement of Europe mixed with
subject matter of America  shocking the
genteel classes
Sources and Inspirations
• Freud (psychoanalysis)
• Einstein (relativity)
• French symbolism (Baudelaire (“modernité” as art
that uses material and experience of modern life,
heroism of the present), Mallarmé, Verlaine)
• Yeats, Proust, Joyce
• Avant-Garde (military term, radical, violent,
revolutionary): -isms such as Dadaism, Futurism,
Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism
Modernism: “Make It New” (Pound)
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International movement in Western arts ca. 1900-1950
Rejection of tradition and hostile attitude toward immediate past
Experimentalism: “tradition of the new”
Analytical interest in personality
Attempt to express irrational/unconscious (in painting: Chirico, Dali; in writing
Joyce, Stein)
Abstraction, Fragmentation, Multiperspectivism
Stream of consciousness to present characters
Cultural relativism: primitivism (African elements in Picasso’s paintings or O’Neill’s
plays), anthropology (Eliot)
Myth: structural principle of Eliot’s “Waste Land”, Pound’s Cantos, Joyce’s Ulysses
Style: dependence on image (poetry), insistence on spareness and precision in
language
Most promiment: Joyce, Yeats (Irish), Woolf (English), Conrad (Polish-British), Eliot
(Anglo-American), Pound, Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald (American expatriates),
Faulkner, O’Neill (American)
3 Phases of Modernism
1. Rupture: Avant-Garde: explosion of conventions,
refusal of established traditions; from Europe 
international, aesthetic strategies remain valid
until far into the 20th century (from 1890)
2. Consolidation: fixations and differentiation of early
modernist tendencies (from 1910)
3. Reflection: “classic modernism”, questions of
canonization, which artist and which work
represent modernism? (after WWI)
Radical Individualism as Concern
"The deepest problems of modern life derive
from the claim of the individual to preserve
the autonomy and individuality of his
existence in the face of overwhelming social
forces, of historical heritage, of external
culture, and of the technique of life.“
Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental
Life" (1903)
Art out of Explosions
"Art in its execution and direction is dependent on the time in
which it lives, and artists are creatures of their epoch. The
highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents
the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which has been
visibly shattered by the explosions of last week ... The best
and most extraordinary artists will be those who every hour
snatch the tatters of their bodies out of the frenzied cataract
of life, who, with bleeding hands and hearts, hold fast to the
intelligence of their time.“
Richard Huelsenbeck, "First German Dada Manifesto“, 1918
The “Mythic Method”:
re-contextualization of the individual from received social heritage
"In using the myth, in manipulating a
continuous parallel between contemporaneity
and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method
which others must pursue after him ... It is
simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of
giving a shape and a significance to the
immense panorama of futility and anarchy
which is contemporary history.“
T. S. Eliot, "Ulysses, Order, and Myth" (1923)
Armory Show
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Arrival of modernist art as shock for America
Shock as threat or liberation
Shock has a date: 1913 – Armory Show
Avant-Garde art exhibition in an old munitions
storage
• See: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MUSEUM/Armory/galleryI/tour.i.html
Marcel Duchamp, Nu descendant un escalier no. 2” (1912)
Romanticism:
William Etty (c. 1825)
Georgia O’Keefe, “Radiator Building—Night, New York" (1927)
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
• Genius / eccentricity /
madness
• Mentor of artists (e.g. Eliot)
• Distinguished translator
(from Latin, Provencal,
Chinese, Japanese)
• London, Paris, Rome
• Political and economic
obsessions
 anti-Semitism, treason
 hospitalization as
criminally insane
Pound "to get to something prior in time even as one is
MAKING IT NEW"
• Exploring the cultures
of the world from its
beginning
• Retrieving the best that
had been done
• Displaying the best in a
way to “make it new”
Pound and Imagism
• New poetry: objective, adjective-free, lean,
hard
• The “image” is to present “an intellectual and
emotional complex in an instant of time”
 immediate, intensified perception of a felt
impression finds its equivalent in an
intensified, reductive verbal image.
Imagism / Objective Correlative
Pound:
IN A STATION OF THE METRO
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bow.
Eliot:
• “objective correlative”: "The only way of expressing emotion
in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in
other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events
which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such
that when the external facts ... are given, the emotion is
immediately evoked."
Cantos
• Three published 1917
• Eventually reaching 117 until death
• Vast epic in free verse related by personae, e.g.
Ulysses, whose identities Pound assumes
• Many themes, e.g.
– need for a “clean” economy (its opposite signified by
“usura”), if culture is not to die
– desirability of order, tradition, authority, hierarchy in
society
– detestation of war
Ezra Pound, Canto I
And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on tha swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, so winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller,
Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day's end.
Sun to his slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean,
Came we then to the bounds of deepest water,
To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities
Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever
With glitter of sun-rays
Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven
Swartest night stretched over wretched men there.
The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place
Aforesaid by Circe.
Here did they rites, Perimedes and Eurylochus,
And drawing sword from my hip
I dug the ell-square pitkin;
Poured we libations unto each the dead,
First mead and then sweet wine, water mixed with white
flour.
Then prayed I many a prayer to the sickly death's-head;
As set in Ithaca, sterile bulls of the best
For sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods,
A sheep to Tiresias only, black and a bell-sheep.
Dark blood flowed in the fosse,
Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, of brides
Of youths and at the old who had borne much;
Souls stained with recent tears, girls tender,
Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads,
Battle spoil, bearing yet dreory arms,
These many crowded about me; with shouting,
Pallor upon me, cried to my men for more beasts;
Slaughtered the heards, sheep slain of bronze;
Poured ointment, cried to the gods,
To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine;
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Unsheathed the narrow sword,
I sat to keep off the impetuous impotent dead,
Till I should hear Tiresias But first Elpenor came, our friend
Elpenor,
Unburied, cast on the wide earth,
Limbs that we left in the house of Circe,
Unwept, unwrapped in sepulchre, since toils urged other.
Pitiful spirit.And I cried in hurried speech:
"Elpenor, how art thou come to this dark coast?
Cam'st thou afoot, outstripping seamen?"
And he in heavy speech:
"Ill fate and abundant wine. I slept in Circe's ingle.
Going down the long ladder unguarded,
I fell against the buttress,
Shattered the nape-nerve, the soul sought Avernus.
But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, unburied,
Heap up mine arms, be tomb by sea-bord, and inscribed:
A man of no fortune, and with a name to come.
And set my oar up, that I swung mid fellows."
And Anticlea came, whom I beat off, and then Tiresias
Theban,
Holding his golden wand, knew me, and spoke first:
"A second time? why? man of ill star,
Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region?
Stand from the fosse, leave me my bloody bever
For soothsay."
And I stepped back,
And he stong with the blood, said then: "Odysseus
Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas,
Lose all companions." And then Anticlea came.
Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus,
In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer.
And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outward and away
And unto Circe.
Venerandam,
In the Creatan's phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite,
Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, orichalchi, with golden
Girdles and breast bands, thou with dark eyelids
Bearing the golden bough of Argicida. So that:
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
• Dominant figure between
the wars
• The Waste Land (1922)
together with James Joyce's
Ulysses (1922) central texts
of modernism
• Original text “tamed” by
Pound (comments,
annotations, abbreviations)
• British subject 1927
• Nobel prize 1948
The Waste Land
• Pound: “the justification of the ‘movement’ of our modern experiment
since 1900”
• Richness of interpretations (e.g. allusions to Grail Legend of Fisher King
(Christ) who reigns over infertile land; spiritual infertility as analogue to
sexual debility; today we live in in an apocalyptic nightmare “falling
towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal”, ancient
blind prophet Tiresias (incorporating both genders) merges with Fisher
King to shore up “these fragments” of our culture against chaos)
• Multiple sources, styles, voices, forms
• The poem itself as “waste land”: landscape of forgotten things, objects,
situations, events
• Tradition and reality as “waste land” (garbage dump) to choose from
• Oscillation between degeneration and regeneration, decreation and
recreation
The Waste Land
1922
T.S. Eliot
For Ezra Pound
il miglior fabbro.
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I. The Burial of the Dead
II. A Game of Chess
III. The Fire Sermon
IV. Death By Water
V. What the Thunder Said
The Waste Land
I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
Lost Generation: Gertrude Stein,
Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald
Gertrude Stein coined the term “lost
generation”: disillusionment of
American literary expatriates,
esp. after First World War
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
• Most important novels The Sun
Also Rises (1923); A Fairwell to
Arms (1929); For Whom the Belll
Tolls (1940)
• Depiction of modern world as
stripped of illusion,
psychologically and physically
dangerous, morally ruined
Hemingway
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Narrative method: simplicity of diction and sentence structure, showing
characters’ feelings as “sequence of fact and motion that made the emotion” not
by mere assertion, irony not symbolism
Themes: love and loss, passion and sex, war and crime; search for happiness,
fulfillment, gratification; cult of masculinity, violence of blood sports (social rituals:
hunting, bull fight, drinking) (but like himself womanizers who are often tragic,
depressive, death-ridden, prone to suicide (1961))
Iceberg-Theory: “The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth
of it being above water”.
“I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eights of it
under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and
it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show.”
 the most important things lie beneath the surface of the page (gaps, omissions,
etc.)
 fatal consequence for surface interpretation
The Sun Also Rises
• Mottos:
“You are all a lost generation”
– Gertrude Stein in conversation
“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the
earth abideth forever … The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down,
and hasteth to the place where he arose …”
– Ecclesiastes
• Ex-soldier Jake Barnes in Europe amongst group of
expatriates (all wounded either physically or psychologically),
represents the rupture of his generation through his body:
injury to genitals and impotence through war  reassertion
through male rituals = healing rituals; experience as
substitute for lost masculinity/destroyed body
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLr5gXl6OmA&feature=related
Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940):
“The Jazz Age”
The Great Gatsby (1925)
• Jay Gatsby as representative of
nouveau riches
• Roaring 1920s: after shock of WWI,
now booming economy, but also
Prohibition and organized crime
• Fatal believe in piling up wealth and
material symbols (incl. beautiful
woman = Daisy) as means of
redeeming past
• Collapse of Great American Dream
(murdered), empty, tragic heart of
the self-made man
• Story narrated by Nick Carraway,
who is like Gatsby a war veteran from
Midwest where he returns to in end
• Symoblism: Valley of ashes - The
downfall of the American dream
Cover of first edition
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTQv
DCYY5E8&feature=related (beginning)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II1Pm
hWCzDs (party)