Modernism Revisited
The Definitive Statement of the American
Myth: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
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The Great Gatsby closes with Nick
mournful, ecstatic mediation on
America and its promises.
In the final pages of the novel,
Fitzgerald alludes to the sweep of
American history that appears in the
landscape itself.
He evokes the fresh virginal country
that Dutch sailors saw, the “orgastic”
wonder it conveyed – thus
reinforcing the magic of the
American promise.
But this promise has been betrayed.
The ideals that gave meaning to
American life
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Middle class ideals of thrift
The Protestant work ethic
Self-reliant perseverance
have been tragically betrayed.
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Still, Americans continue to strive
for them, for some past Romantic
ideal of Americanism while we
remain hopelessly rooted in a
compromised present.
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But the present is “no matter” we
continue to reach for those
“platonic” principles regardless of
the moral, spiritual landscape, “like
boat’s against the current.”
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We reach out because doing so,
gives us tragic grandeur.
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America will always reach out for the
green light.
America Looks in the Mirror
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Like Gatsby’s “Platonic conception of himself”, Americans always
thought of themselves in the Puritan ethic: as a people divinely
chosen, morally sound, and imbued with a restless and
ceaseless sense of optimism.
By the sheer force of our shared background, our will, our unique
spirit – our people - there was nothing we couldn’t do, no land we
could not conquer, no challenge we could not endure..
History at the turn of the century and through 1945 would shake
the foundations of American identity.
If Literary Nationalism was America’s obedient school boy, if
Romanticism was it’s rebellious teenager, then Modernism was
its soul-searching early adulthood.
Value Differences in the Modern World
Pre-Modern World
Modern World (Early 20th
Century)
Ordered
Chaotic
Meaningful
Futile
Optimistic
Pessimistic
Stable
Fluctuating
Faith
Loss of faith
Morality/Values
Collapse of Morality/Values
Clear Sense of Identity
Confused Sense of Identity and
Place in the World
You Will Recall That Modernism was
Influenced by Multiple Factors
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Intellectual currents
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Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
World War I – new ways to kill,
death on a massive scale
The Russian Revolution of
1917 (Communism)
New products and
technologies
The movies and movie culture
Prohibition
The Harlem Renaissance
The new role of women
The Modernist Temper
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Result on American Life
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Loss of faith in government
Loss of faith in business
Loss of faith in God
Loss of faith in peers and
elders
Rejection of tradition
NEW NEW NEW (“Keep it
New” – the “usable past”)
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Definitions of success
Definitions of gender roles
Definitions of morality
(amorality)
Definitions of values
The Modernist Timeline
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The period that began in chaos and
commotion in 1915 continued on the same
path until 1945.
Modernism marks one of the most eventful,
colorful, exhilarating, tragic, prosperous and
poverty-stricken phases of the American
experience.
Bookended by two of history’s most
Modernist Literature
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Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, published in 1900, set the tone for
Modernist sensibilities.
The narrative of a poor women who “does what she must” to overcome
her circumstances is indeed a tale of success, but it is a success
without affirming the conventional formula that virtue will be awarded
and vice will be punished (anti-Horatio Algier classic American
archetypes of hard work = wealth and honor). It dealings are more the
stuff of negotiations.
Likewise, the landscape of The Great Gatsby is populated by
characters constantly “on the make”, ambitious for money, or of
questionable character. Even the protagonist, who is described in
unrestrained Romantic proportions by a moral narrator, is later revealed
as a crook and a liar.
Gone was the Romantic notions of the nineteenth century – the icons
and heroes who taught us lessons of love and goodness.
Against a backdrop of ambiguity emerges artistic expressions that are
equally ambiguous, profoundly questioning, deeply focused on the role
of the individual
The Influences of Freud and Karl Marx
on Modernist Literature…
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Modernist writers concerned themselves with the inner being more than the
social being and looked for ways to incorporate these new views into their
writing.
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Modernist writers looked inside themselves for their answers instead of seeking
truth, for example, through formal religion or the scientific presuppositions that
realism and naturalism rested upon.
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Marxism instructed even non-Marxist artists that the individual was being lost in
a mass society.
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Though Marx analysis of human behavior opposed that of Freud, both seemed
to suggest a kind of predestination or determinism seemed better able to
explain the terrible things that were happening in the twentieth century.
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Some modern writers believed that art should celebrate the working classes,
attack Capitalism, and forward revolutionary goals, while others believed that
literature should be independent and non-political.
Shifts in the Modern Nation
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from country to city
from farm to factory
from native born to new citizen
introduction to “mass” culture (pop culture)
continual movement
split between science and the literary tradition
(“science vs. letters”)
The Spirit of Modernist Literature
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Conviction that the previously sustaining structures of human life, whether social, political,
religious, or artistic, had been either destroyed or shown up as falsehoods or fantasies.
Therefore, art had to be renovated.
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Modernist writing is marked by a strong and conscious break with tradition. It rejects
traditional values and assumptions.
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“Modern” implies a historical discontinuity, a sense of alienation, loss, and despair.
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It rejects not only history but also society. Poetry tended to provide pessimistic cultural
criticism or rejects social issues altogether.
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Writers exhibited a skeptical, apprehensive attitude toward pop culture; writers criticized
and deplored its manipulative commercialism.
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Literature, especially poetry, becomes the place where the one meaningful activity, the
search for meaning, is carried out; and therefore literature is, or should be, vitally important
to society. Imaginative vision is thought to give access to an ideal world, apart and above
reality, or to contain alternative, higher values than those reigning in the statehouse and the
marketplace, which could enrich life.
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Modernists believed that we create the world in the act of perceiving it.
Characteristics of Modernist Writing
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A movement away from realism into abstractions
A deliberate complexity, even to the point of elitism, forcing
readers to be well-educated to read these works
A high degree of self-consciousness
Questions of what constitutes the nature of being
A breaking with tradition and conventional modes of form,
resulting in fragmentation and bold, highly innovative
experimentation
A variety in content because with a stable external world in
question, subjectivity was ever more valued and accepted in
literature
Along with the social realist and proletarian prose of the 1920s
and 1930s came a significant outpouring of political and protest
poetry.
Modernist Techniques
The modernists were highly conscious that they
were being modern—that they were “making
it new”—and this consciousness is manifest
in the modernists’ radical use of a kind of
formlessness.
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Collapsed plots
Fragmentary techniques
Shifts in perspective, voice, and tone
Stream-of-consciousness point of view
Associative techniques
Writer’s of the Modernist Period
Sherwood Anderson
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Born in 1876, he grew up in a large,
working class family that struggled to make
ends meet.
He met a wealthy woman, got married and
started a family. Anderson rose through
the ranks of a mail order company and
eventually became the owner of a small
factory.
In 1912 he suffered a legendary
breakdown that changed his life
dramatically.
Anderson vanished for four days and was
eventually found wandering in a
cornfield. When he got his wits back, he
decided to leave his family to pursue a
writer’s life.
Death in 1941 – the ultimate modernist
joke –on the eve of a trip to South America
he was quaffing martinis when he
accidentally swallowed a toothpick. By the
time he reached the Panama Canal, he
was on his deathbed.
Anderson Legacy
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Regionalist, realist, naturalist,
prose stylist, primitivist, fictional
Freudian, the American D. H.
Lawrence, such are some of the
labels that have been attached to
Sherwood Anderson, with none
quite fitting.
Categorizing him has been
problematic partly because critics
have recognized only occasionally
that his genius resides in the short
story rather than in the novel or
autobiography
Almost everyone has agreed that
his masterpiece is Winesburg,
Ohio, a collection of 23 stories
published in 1919, but beyond
that, opinions have varied.
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It is now reasonably clear that
Anderson was an innovator,
making breakthroughs, particularly
in short fiction, in form, subject
matter, style, and characterization.
Anderson was a major influence
on the generation of American
writers who came after him. These
writers included Ernest
Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
and William Faulkner. Anderson
thus occupies a place in literary
history that cannot be fully
explained by the literary quality of
his work.
Anderson’s Work
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He published his first novel, Windy
McPherson’s Son, in 1916.
More novels followed, but he is most
remembered for his collection of
short stories known as Winesburg,
Ohio.
Anderson loved to write about
“grotesques.” That was his way of
describing people who are
undermined by their own illusions or
false dreams.
His work gained the respect and the
scorn of some of the biggest writers
and critics of the time. H.L.
Mencken said he was “America’s
most distinguished novelist.” Ernest
Hemingway lampooned him.
Anderson’s Style
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Prose style derived from everyday speech,
influenced American short story writing between
World Wars I and II.
Anderson was one of the first American writers to
use modern psychological insights, especially those
of the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud. Seen in
“the grotesques”
He pioneered and "open form," in which plot was
less important than expression of mood and
character, influential to Hemingway and Faulkner.
Anderson on his Work…
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“What was wanted I thought was form, not plot, an
altogether more elusive and difficult thing to come
at.”
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“It is my own language, limited as it is. I will have to
learn to work with it. There was a kind of poetry I
was seeking in my prose, word to be laid against
word in just a certain way, a kind of word color, a
march of words and sentences, the color to be
squeezed out of simple words, simple sentence
construction."
Anderson Stats
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GENRE: New Realism (Naturalism) – no one fully agrees
Rearranged time sequence (à la Ambrose Bierce, “…Owl Creek
Bridge”)
Concentrated on uneventful but emotionally compelling aspects
of daily existence (à la W.E.B. Du Bois, “On the Meaning of
Progress”)
Wrote simple, direct sentences
Transferred his point-of-view to outside observers
Stresses the dominance of form over content, and he sought to
write fiction that was distinct from life (purposely un-real)
Many subsequent writers, such as Hemingway and Faulkner,
were influenced by his style.
Focus: “Brother Death
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On the surface, “Brother
Death” appears a story of
family dynamics, the
sometimes stressed and
complex relationships between
the a married couple, between
parents and children, between
siblings.
But the piece is an
ALLEGORY of a force gripping
and forceful during the
Modernist period.
Recall that an allegory is an
extended metaphor. It is a
narrative that functions on both
a literal and figurative level. A
sort of story within a story
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Literary features:
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Increase in symbolism
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Emphasis of mood and
character over plot
Psychology (a burgeoning
science)
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What do the tree stumps
represent?
What do Don and Ted
represent?
Psychological warfare:
Struggle for power
Stream of consciousness (i.e.,
written equivalent of a
character’s thought processes)
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Abrupt insertion of italicized
dialogue that is actually
unspoken
Themes in “Brother Death”
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Old Aristocracy vs. Nouveau Riche (Greys vs.
Aspinwalhs)
Struggle for Power (John vs. Don)
Emerging Feminism (Mary Grey)
Literal Death vs Spiritual /Emotional Death (Ted vs.
Don)
Social classes in America
(symbolism)
Beauty in modern life (the oaks)
Young vs. Old
Guiding Questions
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5.
How do Ted and Mary combine the innocence of
childhood with maturity of adulthood?
Why are the mother and father working against
each other? In what ways are their backgrounds
different?
What do the trees represent to Louise AspinwahlGray? To John Grey? To Ted and Mary? To Don
Grey?
What statements does this story make about
power?
How can statements about power be applied to the
Modernist world?