Modernist states of mind:

- Alienation in the middle of the crowd and identity crisis

- Fragmentariness of perception: Cubism
- The existence of alternative realities: Surrealism

The ambivalence of modernism:

- Celebration of progress
- Nostalgia for past values

Surrealism-

Surrealism originated in the late 1910s and early '20s as a literary movement that experimented with a
new mode of expression called automatic writing, or automatism, which sought to release the unbridled
imagination of the subconscious. Officially consecrated in Paris in 1924 with the publication of the
Manifesto of Surrealism by the poet and critic André Breton (1896–1966), Surrealism became an
international intellectual and political movement. Breton, a trained psychiatrist, along with French poets
Louis Aragon (1897–1982), Paul Éluard (1895–1952), and Philippe Soupault (1897–1990), were
influenced by the psychological theories and dream studies of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and the
political ideas of Karl Marx (1818–1883). Using Freudian methods of free association, their poetry and
prose drew upon the private world of the mind, traditionally restricted by reason and societal
limitations, to produce surprising, unexpected imagery. The cerebral and irrational tenets of Surrealism
find their ancestry in the clever and whimsical disregard for tradition fostered by Dadaism a decade
earlier.

Stream of consciousness

Stream of consciousness = (in literature) technique that records the multifarious thoughts and feelings
of a character without regard to logical argument or narrative sequence. The writer attempts by the
stream of consciousness to reflect all the forces, external and internal, influencing the psychology of a
character at a single moment. The technique was first employed by Édouard Dujardin (1861–1949) in
his novel Les lauriers sont coupés (1888) and was subsequently used by such notable writers as James
Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. The phrase “stream of consciousness” to indicate the flow
of inner experience was first used by William James in Principles of Psychology (1890).

Modernism’s Second Generation:

The Jazz Age. American expatriates in Europe

- The “Roaring” Twenties: prosperity, frivolity, optimism and loosening morals (Tindall)
- Disillusionment and shock
- Challenge to the old values of progress, faith, reason and optimism
- 1931: Fitzgerald called the past decade of economic boom and high personality “The Jazz Age”
(an age of bootlegging, flappers and bohemians): a new lifestyle + a new life philosophy
- Lost Generation, a group of American writers who came of age during World War I and
established their literary reputations in the 1920s. The term is also used more generally to refer
to the post-World War I generation

1. Modernism in Fiction 1: The Lost Generation. E. Hemingway and F. Scott-Fitzgerald

- Great Gatsby (East Egg-conservative, aristocratic/ West Egg-new rich; social values; Valley of
Ashes-moral decay of the twenties/New York-loud, glittering; America of the 1920; new rich,
industrialism, businesses; life as a show, G is interested in appearances; the green light as the
American dream; rural Midwest/urban New York)

- The snows of K (stream-of-consciousness, self-critical approach in front of death, regret for

taking everything for granted; third person narration mingles with the first; Henry is a vehicle for
H to tell his experience of war)

2. Modernism in Fiction 2: W. Faulkner and the American South. Alternative Faulkners

- Sound and the fury: the clash between the new world emerging and the traditional one (North-
South); the fall of the Compsons; the concept of time(Benji) and human experience of time;
moral decay; Damuddy as the representative of the old South, the old generation and traditions;
Quentin as the representative of the old traditions and morals)

3. From Modernism to Postmodernism: Vladimir Nabokov. Cognitive approaches to Lolita

- The postmodern features of the novel

4. Postmodernity and Postmodernism. Postmodernist Self-Reflexive Fiction, the Literature of

Replenishment and the Worlds Next Door: K. Vonnegut, T. Pynchon. Mass Culture on a
Global Level: D. DeLillo
- Slaughterhouse five (the process of writing is described; conception of time; V departs from the
traditional construction of the novel with introduction, climax, etc; irony, the trauma of war,
insanity, free will, mockery of war, philosophy of acceptance; alienation)
- Entropy (consumerism)
- White noise (consumerism, technology, modern society and life; emigration; the power of
appearances and imagery and the palpable but elusive presence of death in the world;
capitalism; no conventional plot, no climax; modern man living in a mechanized age; parody of
the consumers- the Treadwells got lost in the supermarket; defamiliarization; stream of
consciousness )
 5. Representations of difference in fiction (S. Bellow, R. Ellison, T. Morrison, Alice Walker, G.
Vizenor, S. Alexie, M. H. Kingston, Paul Beatty). Recent Developments in American Fiction

- Looking for mr green

- The invisible man (racism; existentialism, individual existence in postwar America, ambiguity,
slavery, race relations)
- Beloved (slavery, Sweet Home-plantation, memory, identity, history, motherhood, flashbacks,
stream-of-consciousness monologues- 22 Sethe, 23 Denver, 24 Beloved)
- Everyday use (old/new mentality; traditions, modernity, African Americans were struggling to
redefine and seize control of their social, cultural, and political identity in American society.
There was also a greater attempt to recognize the contributions that African Americans had
already made in America’s long history; irony and humor, the meaning of heritage, the power of
education, quilts as a symbol of the black people)
- Almost browne
- The woman warrior (Chinese emigrants to America; the place of women in traditional Chinese
society, and the difficulty of growing up as a Chinese- American; individual versus community,
Chinese-Americans versus emigrants)
 Black/white; traditions, historical past, adaptation, slavery

6. Main Directions in American Drama (E. O’Neill, T. Williams, A. Miller). Glimpses into
Recent American Theater (Tony Kushner, Angels in America).

- A streetcar named desire (he development of many new forms of theatre, including modernism,
Expressionism, Impressionism, political theatre and other forms of Experimental theatre, as well
as the continuing development of already established theatrical forms like naturalism and
realism; Developments in areas like Gender theory and postmodern philosophy identified and
created subjects for the theatre to explore. These sometimes explicitly meta-theatrical
performances were meant to confront the audience's perceptions and assumptions in order to
raise questions about their society)

7. Main Trends in Twentieth Century American Poetry. Modernism. Confessional Poetry and
Formal experiment: Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath; J. Ashbery, G. Brooks, A. Rich. Poetry
and Protest: The Beat Generation (Allen Ginsberg). Recent Developments in American
Poetry: The Poetry Foundation Today