Modernism
(Prentice Hall Literature : The American Experience 688-701)
What is the relationship between place and literature?
 Cities grew giving America urban sophistication and with it, all its attendant ills,
over-crowding, poverty, crime, racism, and anonymity.
 Small towns suffered from the exodus to the cities. Young men who’d been
exposed to the sophistication of Europe in WWI could not re-acclimate
themselves to small town life. (“How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm, after they’ve
seen Paree (Paris)?” from a popular song of the times) Small towns also suffered economic
failure during the Dust Bowl. These events led to the loss of small-town
traditions and disenchantment with small-town values. Boys who’d been raised
on family values, Christian morals, a belief in the superiority of the Western
world-view experienced a shattering of their beliefs when WWI showed them
what humans, even American humans could do to one another (trench warfare
and mustard gas).
How did these ideas affect writers of the time?
 The Lost Generation: some writers became so disenchanted with America and its
traditional ideals that they left the country and gathered in Paris with Gertrude
Stein who named them “the lost generation.” Among these expatriates were F.
Scott Fitzgerald, e e cummings, and Ernest Hemingway. These writers gave
American literature an injection of European sophistication and worldliness that
tended to temper our optimism with the resignation of the old world, while at the
same time, infusing it with new life in the form of new styles and formats like
“stream of consciousness” and e e cummings’ convention-smashing free- verse
poems.
o Stream-of-consciousness broke with the traditional way of telling a story
from beginning to end. Its disconnectedness mirrored the fragmentation
of Modern society. It showed artistically how Modern life did not adhere
to rules of logic or cause and effect in the ways we expected it to. The
chaotic nature of life began to undermine our confidence, our happiness,
our security in life.
o e e cummings’ refusal to adhere to traditional conventions illustrates the
Modern desire for new ways of dealing with the universe.
 City-dwelling writers showed the emptiness and hollowness of the glitz of city
life and its inability to soothe the war-frayed nerves of its young men.
 Small-town writers began to feel betrayed by the traditional values that had failed
to prepare them for post-WWI life, so they mocked the pettiness of small-town
life ignorant of the wider world.
 While some white writers fled to Paris, African-American writers congregated in
Harlem, establishing the flowering of their voice in the Harlem Renaissance.
What values, attitudes, and ideas grew from these events?
 Disillusion with old ideas and ideals
o Traditional wisdom could not help us cope with the new conditions postWWI
 Wider cultural awareness
o You can’t unlearn some things, and once we’d been exposed to other
cultures, they became a part of us and showed up in our literature.
 Greater democratization
o We begin to hear from new sections of the growing middle-class
population: women, African-Americans, immigrants.
 Fragmentation of experience
o War, the stress of urban life, and the speed of change left people with
feelings of uncertainty, imbalance, and a sense of discontinuity. Young
men left America to fight in Europe with an idea of the nobility of the
Western cause, of the superiority of the righteous and returned feeling
betrayed by such “lies.” Their women, who had not had the same
experiences, could not relate to them, thus husbands were alienated from
their wives and children. This rift was destined to widen as America
continued to engage in war on a global scale, reaching a critical point with
the Vietnam War.
How were these forces expressed in literature?
 New forms and styles, like stream-of-consciousness and free verse, were
employed, demanding more effort from readers than past forms. Authors often
left out transitions between events—suggesting a disconnect between cause and
effect, omitted exposition—suggesting alienation and uncertainty, and left
plotlines unresolved—suggesting the chaotic nature of modern life. They also
shuttered between inner and outer realities—questioning the source of reality,
objective reality or subjective reality.
 In Modernist works, author’s themes became even more indirect requiring a
reader to discover them through interpretation. Authors used symbols and images
to suggest meanings rather than making statements that explain meanings.
Readers had to pay close attention, ask more questions, forges more connections
for themselves.
 A tone of irony marks Modern works. Authors were painfully aware of the gap
between the worlds as it was and the world as it ought to have been. Unlike
Realists, their satirical humor was not designed to provoke change, but rather to
emphasize the irony of modern life in order to cope with it (the resignation
Emerson warned against).
 Writing became less flowery with shorter hard-edged sentences reflecting a
journalistic style.
 This new world required new images, metaphors for the way we live. Allusions
became more obscure due to the growing field from which we drew them (effect
of having been exposed to more cultures during the war). Writers no longer
expected readers to be familiar with the works they alluded to. It was up to the
reader to make some sense out of the work , even if they did not have the same
experiences from which to develop an understanding of the author’s purpose. It
didn’t matter. Life was fragmented, and our feelings of disorientation within the
obscurity of a poem mirrored that fragmentation.
 Writers became teachers in the sense that they had to help their readers to know
how to read Modern works, how to make the connections, fill in the blanks, listen
to new rhythms, and appreciate new images. In this way, readers adapted to the
new style and these actions are what we expect students to do. Thus, the literary
critic became an invaluable interpreter between reader and writer. Of course, this
need for an “interpreter” turned many main-stream readers off and they dismissed
high art for popular art fostering the sense of alienation and fragmentation of the
Modern era.
Contemporary Literature
Differences in Tone
Modernist
Contemporary
Detached, unemotional
Emotional
Serious irony
Humorous irony
Concern with individual in isolation
Concern with connections between people
No heroes
antiheroes
Anti-hero: a protagonist who has the opposite qualities of a hero; he or she may be
insecure, ineffective, cowardly, sometimes dishonest or dishonorable, most often a failure