th 20

century American Literature

Modernism in Fiction: The Lost Generation

Modernism
(Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991]) "a general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and avant-garde trends in the literature (and other arts) of the early 20th century.... Modernist literature is characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th-century traditions and of their consensus between author and reader: conventions of realism ... or traditional meter. Modernist writers tended to see themselves as an avant-garde disengaged from bourgeois values, and disturbed their readers by adopting complex and difficult new forms and styles. In fiction, the accepted continuity of chronological development was upset by Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner, while James Joyce and Virginia Woolf attempted new ways of tracing the flow of characters' thoughts in their stream-of-consciousness styles. In poetry, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot replaced the logical exposition of thoughts with collages of fragmentary images and complex allusions..... Modernist writing is predominantly cosmopolitan, and often expresses a sense of urban cultural dislocation, along with an awareness of new anthropological and psychological theories. Its favoured techniques of juxtaposition and multiple point of view challenge the reader to reestablish a coherence of meaning from fragmentary forms."

Modernist trends
Impressionism Art Nouveau Post-Impressionism Expressionism Cubism, Futurism Symbolism Imagism Vorticism Dadaism Surrealism

Cubism
An early 20th-century school of painting and sculpture in which the subject matter is portrayed by geometric forms without realistic detail, stressing abstract form at the expense of other pictorial elements largely by use of intersecting often transparent cubes and cones.

Cubism, highly influential visual arts style of the 20th century that was created principally by the painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in Paris between 1907 and 1914. The Cubist style emphasized the flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane, rejecting the traditional techniques of perspective, foreshortening, modelling, and chiaroscuro and refuting time-honoured theories of art as the imitation of nature. Cubist painters were not bound to copying form, texture, colour, and space; instead, they presented a new reality in paintings that depicted radically fragmented objects, whose several sides were seen simultaneously.

Pablo Picasso, Les demoiselles dAvignon, 1907

Gertrude Stein (18741946).

Tender Buttons (1914) - prose poems (Objects, Food, Rooms) a translation of the art of the cubists into prose poems

OBJECTS
A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS. A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading. GLAZED GLITTER. Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover. The change in that is that red weakens an hour. The change has come. There is no search. But there is, there is that hope and that interpretation and sometime, surely any is unwelcome, sometime there is breath and there will be a sinecure and charming very charming is that clean and cleansing. Certainly glittering is handsome and convincing.

The stream of consciousness technique

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 douard Dujardin (18611949) in his novel Les lauriers sont coups (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). (The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001)

Groupwork
Comment briefly upon the relevance the following statement by Virginia Woolf has in relation to the stream of consciousness technique novel. Point out in what sense the latter differs from the Victorian novel: Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. (Modern Fiction, in V. Woolf, The Common Reader, 1925)

The ambivalence of Modernism

Celebration of progress Nostalgia for past values

Modernisms Second Generation: The Jazz Age

The Roaring Twenties: prosperity, frivolity, optimism and loosening morals (Tindall) Disillusionment and shock Challenge to the old values of progress, faith, reason and optimism

The Lost Generation

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1920): here was a new generation, grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken Gertrude Stein: You are all a lost generation 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

Defining the Twenties: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Echoes of the Jazz Age

It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire. A whole age was going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure. The precocious intimacies of the younger generation would have come about with or without prohibition they were implicit in the attempt to adapt English customs to American conditions.

Jazz
The word jazz in its progress toward respectability has meant first sex, then dancing, then music. It is associated with a state of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of big cities behind the lines of a war. To many English the War still goes on because all the forces that menace them are still active Wherefore eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. But different causes had now brought about a corresponding state in America though there were entire classes (people over fifty, for example) who spent a whole decade denying its existence even when its puckish face peered into the family circle. () The honest citizens of every class, who believe in a strict public morality and were powerful enough to enforce the necessary legislation, did not know that they would necessarily be served by criminals and quacks, and do not really believe it to-day. (Fitzgerald, Echoes of the Jazz Age)

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

This Side of Paradise (1920) The Beautiful and the Damned (1922) Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) The Vegetable (play, 1923) The Great Gatsby (1925) Tender Is the Night (1934) The Last Tycoon (1941)

The Great Gatsby: The Valley of Ashes

About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroads and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the form of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally, a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ashgrey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

The Great Gatsby: T. J. Eckleburg

But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic their retinas are one yeard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

1925 - In Our Time (stories) 1926 - The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta) 1929 - A Farewell to Arms 1932 - Death in the Afternoon 1933 - Winner Takes Nothing (stories) 1935 - Green Hills of Africa 1937 - To Have and Have Not 1940 - For Whom the Bell Tolls 1952 - The Old Man and the Sea 1964 - A Moveable Feast (posthumous)

The Hemingway hero

- Religion (perverted by events such as Francos regime in Spain, which Hemingway experienced directly) replaced by his own code of human conduct: a mixture of hedonism and sentimental humanism. - Carpe diem - Nada - Expressing himself in few words, oftern charged with meaning (the core of Hemingways minimalist fiction-writing style)

The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1938)

Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai "Ngaje Ngai," the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

THE MARVELLOUS THING IS THAT ITS painless," he said. "That's how you know when it starts." "Is it really?" "Absolutely. I'm awfully sorry about the odor though. That must bother you." "Don't! Please don't." "Look at them," he said. "Now is it sight or is it scent that brings them like that?"

Snow
It was snow too that fell all Christmas week that year up in the Gauertal, that year they lived in the woodcutter's house with the big square porcelain stove that filled half the room, and they slept on mattresses filled with beech leaves, the time the deserter came with his feet bloody in the snow. He said the police were right behind him and they gave him woolen socks and held the gendarmes talking until the tracks had drifted over.

But he had never written a line of that, nor of that cold, bright Christmas day with the mountains showing across the plain that Barker had flown across the lines to bomb the Austrian officers' leave train, machine-gunning them as they scattered and ran. He remembered Barker afterwards coming into the mess and starting to tell about it. And how quiet it got and then somebody saying, ''You bloody murderous bastard.''

She shot very well this good, this rich bitch, this kindly caretaker and destroyer of his talent. Nonsense. He had destroyed his talent himself. Why should he blame this woman because she kept him well? He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice, by hook and by crook.

He had traded it for security, for comfort too, there was no denying that, and for what else? He did not know. She would have bought him anything he wanted. He knew that. She was a damned nice woman too. He would as soon be in bed with her as any one; rather with her, because she was richer, because she was very pleasant and appreciative and because she never made scenes.

She didn't drink so much, now, since she had him. But if he lived he would never write about her, he knew that now. Nor about any of them. The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious.

"Molo," she called, "Molo! Molo! Then she said, "Harry, Harry!" Then her voice rising, "Harry! Please. Oh Harry!" There was no answer and she could not hear him breathing. Outside the tent the hyena made the same strange noise that had awakened her. But she did not hear him for the beating of her heart.