American Studies
Camelia Elias
background
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Causes of World War 1
Militarism
Imperialism
Alliance System
Nationalism
history
1914
 JUNE 28
 Archduke Franz Ferdinand
was assassinated
 JULY 28
 Russia declared war on
Serbia
 AUG 3
 Germany declared war on
France
1915
 FEB 18
 Germany began its
attempted blockade of
Britain
 APR 22
 The Germans were the first
to use poisoned gas
 MAY 23
 Italy declared war on
Austria Hungary
1916
 JUNE 4
 Russia began an offensive
in eastern Galicia (Poland)
 AUG 27
 Italy declared war on
Germany
 SEPT 15
 The British army makes
use of tanks
1917
 FEB 1
 Germany began
unrestricted submarine
warfare
 APR 6
 The US declared war on
Germany
 NOV 7
 The Bolsheviks seized
power in Russia
 DEC 9
 Jerusalem fell to the Allies
1918
 JUNE 15
Austria- Hungary fought its last offense
 JUNE 23
The Allies occupied Murmansk, Russia
 NOV 9
Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany abdicated
 NOV 11
Germany signed an armistice
modernism
 began somewhere bet. 1850 and 1915
 ended between 1914 and 1950
 it was a movement only in retrospect
influences
 late capitalism
dominated by industrialization and technology
shaken by WWI
 spiritual climate
ambivalent, exhilarating and exalting because
of humankind’s increasing momentum and
endless prospects
frustrating and alienating because of the
discrepancy between the human spirit and
technological civilization
modernist expressions
 modernist art is at once an expression
of and protest against the process of
modernization
 a willingness (even desire) to challenge
people’s preconceived notions about
art, values, life in order to “shake them
up”
anti-modern, anti-urban, anti-industrial,
anti-“progress,” anti-traditional middle-class
values
double perspectives
 dualist view:
optimism/pessimism
confidence/feelings of doom
irrationality/intellectualism
chaos/order
Victorianism/American realism
 belief in:
predictable universe presided over by a
benevolent God
the universe is governed by immutable natural
laws
humankind arrives at a unified and fixed set of
truths
insistence on preserving absolute moral
standards based on the distinction between
human/animal
modernist reactions
 restructuring fragmented concepts
 merging things previously held to be mutually
exclusive
 manifested in paradox, cinematic montage
 breaking up Victorian binary systems
 shift toward the belief that subject and object are
linked and that the subject cannot see, describe,
or transmit an object without changing it
modernist beliefs
 findings of natural and human sciences
are universally and timelessly true
 science is inherently progressive
 the workings of the mind can be
scientifically revealed
 aesthetic judgments are radically
individual
modernist beliefs
 root justification of moral judgments must
be scientific
 works of art are self-contained worlds
 personal identity is refashioned out of
experience
 art is the principal vehicle for fashioning
meaning in a world where meaning must
be constantly re-created
Philosophy
 a fundamentally new
conception of time
 eternity rejected in
favor of here and now
 MAKE IT NEW
writing strategies
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prioritize space (spatial form) over time-bound
narrative
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use of allusion and verbal collage as a result of
attempting a radical compression of time
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collapse meaning into a moment of time
characteristics 1
 attempts to efface the author
 emphasis on identity
 locating or recovering the essential self
 split between inner and outer self
 objective reality exists, but is distorted by
subjectivity
characteristics 2
 depiction of individual consciousness
attempt at new realism
 detachment
 irony
 fragmentation of perception
 cosmopolitanism
characteristics 3
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technology
urbanism
predominance of metaphor
elimination of omniscient narrator
stream of consciousness
the unconscious
emphasis on connotation over
denotation
reaction of modernist writers
 take in the objectives of existing sciences
 distinguish new objects which belong to a
potentially scientific domain or have the
truth value of disinterested natural
description
 largely abandon any pretension to primary
truth
Freud’s influence (1856-1939)
 sharp opposition between
conscious surfaces and
unconscious depths
 heavy influence of the
unconscious
 psychoanalysis stresses the
common foundation of all
cultures
e.e. cummings
C. Brâncusi: The
Kiss (1908; other
version 1916)
Matisse, Le Luxe (1907)
Gertrude Stein
(1874-1946)
biographical info
 born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania to a family of welleducated German-Jewish immigrants.
 1902 - moved to France during the height of artistic
creativity gathering in Montparnasse.
 1903-1912 - lived in Paris with her brother Leo, who
became an admired art critic.
 1907 - Stein met her lifelong partner, Alice B. Toklas
 after the success of her memoir "The Autobiography of
Alice B. Toklas" in the mid 1930s, Stein became rich in
her own right.
 she and her brother compiled one of the first collections
of Cubist and modern art.
Stein & Alice B. Toklas
Rue de Fleurus
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”
The Lost Generation
Pablo Picasso: Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906)
The Autobiography of
Alice B. Toklas, 1933
 “They always say . . . that my writing is
appalling but they always quote it and
what is more, they quote it correctly. . . .
My sentences do get under their skin, only
they do not know that they do.”
Everybody’s Autobiography, 1937
 “I was very much interested to know just what
they know about what is good publicity and what
is not. Harcourt was very surprised when I said
to him on first meeting him in New York
remember this extraordinary welcome that I am
having does not come from the books of mine
that they did understand like the Autobiography
but the books of mine that they did not
understand.”
Stein, interview 1934
 “People today like contemporary comforts,
but they take their literature and art from the
past. They are not interested in what the
present generation is thinking or painting if it
doesn’t fit the enclosure of their personal
comprehension. Present day geniuses can no
more help doing what they are doing than you
can help not understanding it, but if you think
we do it for effect and to make a sensation,
you’re crazy. It’s not our idea of fun to work
for thirty or forty years on a medium of
expression and have ourselves ridiculed.”
Stein, interview 1930
 ”Lack of popular success in America is the
last of my worries. I am working for what will
endure, not a public. Once you have a public
you are never free. No one who is ever to be
really great succeeds until he is past forty, be
he inventor, painter, writer or financial genius.
 All this foolishness about my writing being
mystic or impressionistic is so stupid. . . . Just
a lot of rot. I write as pure, straight,
grammatical English as any one, more
accurate, grammatically than most. There
isn’t a single one of my sentences that a
school child couldn’t diagram.”
—New York World
Transatlantic Interview, 1946
Picasso said, “You see, the situation is very
simple. Anybody that creates a new thing has
to make it ugly. The effort of creation is so
great, that trying to get away from the other
things, the contemporary insistence, is so
great that the effort to break it gives the
appearance of ugliness.” Your followers can
make it pretty, so generally followers are
accepted before the master. The master has
the stain of ugliness. The followers who make
it pretty are accepted. The people then go
back to the original. They see the beauty and
bring it back to the original.
The Making of Americans (1925)
FORM
 move toward abstraction  privilege the spatial
over the narrative form
 rhythms of repeated experience (write what you
know)
 dissolution of plot, character and mimesis
 rigorous control of material through authorial
consciousness
 formal demands:
 dismissal of the noun
 ignore the sentence
 produce abstraction
 revolutionize the Word
content
 derives a principle of contemporaneity
rather than developing sequence
 gives importance to the method rather
than the subject
 poetics is more important than subject
matter/theme
 devotion to the nature of sensation and
relation within the work itself
 emphasize authorial consciousness
American Modernism
was also a form of
regionalism (literary
key figure: ex.
William Faulkner)
Grant Wood:
American Gothic
(1930)
T.S. Eliot, 1955.
The Granger Collection, New York City
biographical info (1888-1965)
 American-English poet, playwright, literary critic, and
editor
 a leader of the modernist movement in poetry in such works as
The Waste Land (1922) and The Four Quartets (1943)
 exercised a strong influence on Anglo-American culture
from the 1920s until late in the century
 experimented with diction, style, and versification and
thus revitalized English poetry
 in a series of critical essays he shattered old orthodoxies
and erected new ones
 the publication of The Four Quartets led to his
recognition as the greatest living English poet and man
of letters
 in 1948 he was awarded both the Order of Merit and the
Nobel Prize for Literature
early years
 descended from a distinguished New England family
 His family allowed him the widest education available in
his time, with no influence from his father to be “practical”
and to go into business
 entered Harvard in 1906; he received a B.A. in 1909,
after three instead of the usual four years
 the men who influenced him at Harvard were George
Santayana, the philosopher and poet, and the critic
Irving Babbitt.
 From Babbitt he derived an anti-Romantic attitude
 1909–10 he was an assistant in philosophy at Harvard
early years 2
 spent the year 1910–11 in France, attending Henri
Bergson's lectures in philosophy at the Sorbonne
and reading poetry with Alain-Fournier
 the poetry of Dante, of the English writers John
Webster and John Donne, and of the French
Symbolist Jules Laforgue helped him to find his
own style
 1911-1914 back at Harvard reading Indian
philosophy and studying Sanskrit
 1914 he met and began a close association with
the American poet Ezra Pound
early publications
 Eliot was to pursue four careers: editor,
dramatist, literary critic, and philosophical
poet.
 he was probably the most erudite poet of
his time in the English language.
 his undergraduate poems were “literary”
and conventional.
 his first important publication, and the first
masterpiece of “modernism” in English,
was “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
Alfred J. Prufrock
 Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table. . . .
 Ezra Pound had printed privately a small
book, A lume spento, as early as 1908, but
“Prufrock” was the first poem by either of
these literary revolutionists to go beyond
experiment to achieve perfection.
Prufrock’s significance
 represented a break with the immediate
past as radical as that of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge and William Wordsworth in
Lyrical Ballads (1798).
 the appearance of Eliot's first volume,
Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917,
marks the date of the maturity of the 20thcentury poetic revolution.
comparisons
 the significance of the revolution is still disputed,
but the striking similarity to the Romantic
revolution of Coleridge and Wordsworth is
obvious: Eliot and Pound, like their 18th-century
counterparts, set about reforming poetic diction.
 Wordsworth thought he was going back to the “real
language of men”
 Eliot struggled to create new verse rhythms based on
the rhythms of contemporary speech
 Eliot sought a poetic diction that might be
spoken by an educated person, being “neither
pedantic nor vulgar.”
poetics
 the poet-critic must write “programmatic
criticism”
criticism that expresses the poet's own
interests as a poet, quite different from
historical scholarship, which stops at placing
the poet in his background
“Tradition and the individual talent” (1920)
 tradition, as used by the poet, is not a
mere repetition of the work of the
immediate past (“novelty is better than
repetition”)
 rather, it comprises the whole of European
literature from Homer to the present
the 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 for that
particular emotion; such that, when the
external facts, which must terminate in
sensory experience, are given, the
emotion is immediately evoked.”
Eliot's theory of the objective correlative
 used the phrase “objective correlative” in
the context of his own impersonal theory
of poetry;
 had an immense influence toward
correcting the vagueness of late Victorian
rhetoric by insisting on a correspondence
of word and object
later criticism
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Dante (1929)
Thoughts After Lambeth (1931)
The Idea of a Christian Society (1939)
Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948).
 “whether a work is poetry must be decided by
literary standards; whether it is great poetry must
be decided by standards higher than the literary”
Dante (1929)
 Eliot's criticism and poetry are so
interwoven that it is difficult to discuss
them separately
 the essay on Dante appeared two years
after Eliot was confirmed in the Church of
England (1927)
 in 1929 he also became a British subject
philosophical and religious phase
 the first long poem after his conversion
was “Ash Wednesday” (1930), a religious
meditation in a style entirely different from
that of any of the earlier poems
 “Ash Wednesday” expresses the pangs
and the strain involved in the acceptance
of religious belief and religious discipline
later poetry and plays
 Eliot's masterpiece is The Four Quartets
 it was issued as a book in 1943, though
each “quartet” is a complete poem.
 the first of the quartets, “Burnt Norton,”
had appeared in the Collected Poems of
1936.
 it is a subtle meditation on the nature of
time and its relation to eternity.
The Four Quartets (1943)
 Each of the poems was self-subsistent
 but when published together they were
seen to make up a single work
themes and images recurred and were
developed in a musical manner and brought
to a final resolution.
 The Waste Land
(1922)
The Waste Land , 1922
Thematics
 the poem expresses the disenchantment,
disillusionment, and disgust of the period
after World War I
 a series of vignettes, loosely linked by the
legend of the search for the Grail
they portray a sterile world of panicky fears
and barren lusts, and of human beings waiting
for some sign or promise of redemption
style
 highly complex
 erudite
 allusive
Eliot provided notes and references to explain
the work's many quotations and allusions
 exhibits meta-awareness
 relies on intertextuality
form & content
 the use of paratext (esp. footnotes and the wide
range of literary references) interferes with the
intended content:
 rendering of the universal human predicament of man
desiring salvation
 the manipulation of language
 mastering of the poetic phrase
 metrics
 modulations ranging from the sublime to the
conversational
structure
 five sections
 proceeds on a principle of “rhetorical
discontinuity” that reflects the fragmented
experience of the 20th-century sensibility of the
great modern cities of the West
 expresses the hopelessness and confusion of
purpose of life in the secularized city, the decay
of urbs aeterna (the “eternal city”).
 structure  concretizes the theme of
hopelessness and decay
 esp. through the poem's constant rhetorical shifts and
its juxtapositions of contrasting styles
unified theme
 The Waste Land is not a simple contrast of
the heroic past with the degraded present
 it is rather a timeless, simultaneous
awareness of moral grandeur and moral
evil