Fachbereich Anglistik und AmerikanistikSommersemester 2010

History of American Literature

Prof. Dr. Ralph J. Poole

Make It New: Experience, Experiment, Modernism

Poetry: • Edwin A. Robinson. "Miniver Cheevy" (1910)• Robert Frost. "Mending Wall" (1914), "The Oven Bird" (1916) • Ezra Pound. "To Whistler, American" (1912), "In a Station of the Metro" (1913), "A Pact" (1913)• T.S. Eliot. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915)• Carl Sandburg. "Chicago" (1916), "Grass" (1918)• Wallace Stevens. "Anecdote of the Jar" (1923), "The Snow Man" (1923)• William Carlos Williams. "The Red Wheel Barrow" (1923), "Young Sycamore", "This Is Just to Say" (1934) • H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). "Helen" (1924)• Marianne Moore. "Poetry" (1921), "To a Snail" (1924)• Edna St. Vincent Millay. "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed" (1923) (1892-1950) "I, Being Born a Woman" (1923)• E.E. cummings. "In Just-"; [l(a] (1922)• Louise Bogan. "Women" (1922)Short Story and Novel: • Anzia Yezierska. "America and I" (1923)• F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby (1925)• John Dos Passos. Manhattan Transfer (1925)• William Faulkner. "A Rose for Emily" (1930), "Barn Burning" (1938) (L), The Sound and the Fury (1929)• Ernest Hemingway. "Hills Like White Elephants" (1927), The Sun Also Rises (1926)

Modernity / Modernism

• Already 17th century: discussion about what is „modern“ and what is not

• „modern“ as emerging from Dark Ages into ‚light‘ Renaissance (“modernization”)

• Industrial Revolution 18th/19th century not practical: ALL of American literature

would be „modern“ in this sense

Modernism

• Difference between Romanticism and Realism/Naturalism as redefinition of how to look at history

• Modernism radically different: idea of “New”, i.e. present

present not defined by past– Break with traditional forms of art– But also: rediscovery of forgotten traditions

Sociopolitical Climate

• Post-WW I: military, politics, economy: reactionary climate

• Hostility to new social and artistic ideas• Many writers left for Europe: freedom to

discover new standards and techniques of art• Technical refinement of Europe mixed with

subject matter of America shocking the genteel classes

Sources and Inspirations

• Freud (psychoanalysis)• Einstein (relativity)• French symbolism (Baudelaire (“modernité” as art

that uses material and experience of modern life, heroism of the present), Mallarmé, Verlaine)

• Yeats, Proust, Joyce• Avant-Garde (military term, radical, violent,

revolutionary): -isms such as Dadaism, Futurism, Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism

Modernism: “Make It New” (Pound)• International movement in Western arts ca. 1900-1950• Rejection of tradition and hostile attitude toward immediate past• Experimentalism: “tradition of the new”• Analytical interest in personality• Attempt to express irrational/unconscious (in painting: Chirico, Dali; in writing

Joyce, Stein)• Abstraction, Fragmentation, Multiperspectivism• Stream of consciousness to present characters • Cultural relativism: primitivism (African elements in Picasso’s paintings or O’Neill’s

plays), anthropology (Eliot)• Myth: structural principle of Eliot’s “Waste Land”, Pound’s Cantos, Joyce’s Ulysses• Style: dependence on image (poetry), insistence on spareness and precision in

language• Most promiment: Joyce, Yeats (Irish), Woolf (English), Conrad (Polish-British), Eliot

(Anglo-American), Pound, Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald (American expatriates), Faulkner, O’Neill (American)

3 Phases of Modernism

1. Rupture: Avant-Garde: explosion of conventions, refusal of established traditions; from Europe international, aesthetic strategies remain valid until far into the 20th century (from 1890)

2. Consolidation: fixations and differentiation of early modernist tendencies (from 1910)

3. Reflection: “classic modernism”, questions of canonization, which artist and which work represent modernism? (after WWI)

Radical Individualism as Concern

"The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.“Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903)

Art out of Explosions"Art in its execution and direction is dependent on the time in which it lives, and artists are creatures of their epoch. The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week ... The best and most extraordinary artists will be those who every hour snatch the tatters of their bodies out of the frenzied cataract of life, who, with bleeding hands and hearts, hold fast to the intelligence of their time.“Richard Huelsenbeck, "First German Dada Manifesto“, 1918

The “Mythic Method”:re-contextualization of the individual from received social heritage

"In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him ... It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.“T. S. Eliot, "Ulysses, Order, and Myth" (1923)

Armory Show

• Arrival of modernist art as shock for America• Shock as threat or liberation• Shock has a date: 1913 – Armory Show• Avant-Garde art exhibition in an old munitions

storage• See: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MUSEUM/Armory/galleryI/tour.i.html

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MUSEUM/Armory/entrance.html

Marcel Duchamp, Nu descendant un escalier no. 2” (1912)

Romanticism: William Etty (c. 1825)

Georgia O’Keefe, “Radiator Building—Night, New York" (1927)

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)• Genius / eccentricity /

madness• Mentor of artists (e.g. Eliot)• Distinguished translator

(from Latin, Provencal, Chinese, Japanese)

• London, Paris, Rome• Political and economic

obsessions anti-Semitism, treason hospitalization as criminally insane

Pound "to get to something prior in time even as one is MAKING IT NEW"

• Exploring the cultures of the world from its beginning

• Retrieving the best that had been done

• Displaying the best in a way to “make it new”

Pound and Imagism

• New poetry: objective, adjective-free, lean, hard

• The “image” is to present “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”

immediate, intensified perception of a felt impression finds its equivalent in an intensified, reductive verbal image.

Imagism / Objective CorrelativePound:IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;Petals on a wet, black bow.

Eliot:• “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 of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts ... are given, the emotion is immediately evoked."

Cantos

• Three published 1917• Eventually reaching 117 until death• Vast epic in free verse related by personae, e.g.

Ulysses, whose identities Pound assumes• Many themes, e.g. – need for a “clean” economy (its opposite signified by

“usura”), if culture is not to die– desirability of order, tradition, authority, hierarchy in

society– detestation of war

Ezra Pound, Canto I And then went down to the ship,Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, andWe set up mast and sail on tha swart ship,Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also Heavy with weeping, so winds from sternwardBore us out onward with bellying canvas,Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller,Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day's end.Sun to his slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean,Came we then to the bounds of deepest water,To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled citiesCovered with close-webbed mist, unpierced everWith glitter of sun-raysNor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heavenSwartest night stretched over wretched men there.The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the placeAforesaid by Circe.Here did they rites, Perimedes and Eurylochus,And drawing sword from my hipI dug the ell-square pitkin;Poured we libations unto each the dead,First mead and then sweet wine, water mixed with white flour.Then prayed I many a prayer to the sickly death's-head;As set in Ithaca, sterile bulls of the bestFor sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods,A sheep to Tiresias only, black and a bell-sheep.Dark blood flowed in the fosse,Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, of bridesOf youths and at the old who had borne much;Souls stained with recent tears, girls tender,Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads,Battle spoil, bearing yet dreory arms,These many crowded about me; with shouting,Pallor upon me, cried to my men for more beasts;Slaughtered the heards, sheep slain of bronze;Poured ointment, cried to the gods,To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine;.

Unsheathed the narrow sword,I sat to keep off the impetuous impotent dead,Till I should hear Tiresias But first Elpenor came, our friend Elpenor,Unburied, cast on the wide earth,Limbs that we left in the house of Circe,Unwept, unwrapped in sepulchre, since toils urged other.Pitiful spirit.And I cried in hurried speech:"Elpenor, how art thou come to this dark coast?Cam'st thou afoot, outstripping seamen?"

And he in heavy speech:"Ill fate and abundant wine. I slept in Circe's ingle.Going down the long ladder unguarded,I fell against the buttress,Shattered the nape-nerve, the soul sought Avernus.But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, unburied,Heap up mine arms, be tomb by sea-bord, and inscribed:A man of no fortune, and with a name to come.And set my oar up, that I swung mid fellows."

And Anticlea came, whom I beat off, and then Tiresias Theban,Holding his golden wand, knew me, and spoke first:"A second time? why? man of ill star,Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region?Stand from the fosse, leave me my bloody beverFor soothsay."And I stepped back,And he stong with the blood, said then: "OdysseusShalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas,Lose all companions." And then Anticlea came.Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus,In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer.And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outward and awayAnd unto Circe.Venerandam,In the Creatan's phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite,Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, orichalchi, with goldenGirdles and breast bands, thou with dark eyelidsBearing the golden bough of Argicida. So that:

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

• Dominant figure between the wars

• The Waste Land (1922) together with James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) central texts of modernism

• Original text “tamed” by Pound (comments, annotations, abbreviations)

• British subject 1927 • Nobel prize 1948

The Waste Land• Pound: “the justification of the ‘movement’ of our modern experiment

since 1900”• Richness of interpretations (e.g. allusions to Grail Legend of Fisher King

(Christ) who reigns over infertile land; spiritual infertility as analogue to sexual debility; today we live in in an apocalyptic nightmare “falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal”, ancient blind prophet Tiresias (incorporating both genders) merges with Fisher King to shore up “these fragments” of our culture against chaos)

• Multiple sources, styles, voices, forms• The poem itself as “waste land”: landscape of forgotten things, objects,

situations, events• Tradition and reality as “waste land” (garbage dump) to choose from• Oscillation between degeneration and regeneration, decreation and

recreation

The Waste Land1922T.S. Eliot

For Ezra Pound il miglior fabbro.

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I. The Burial of the Dead II. A Game of ChessIII. The Fire SermonIV. Death By WaterV. What the Thunder Said

The Waste LandI. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

April is the cruellest month, breedingLilacs out of the dead land, mixingMemory and desire, stirringDull roots with spring rain.Winter kept us warm, coveringEarth in forgetful snow, feedingA little life with dried tubers.Summer surprised us, coming over the StarnbergerseeWith a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,And I was frightened. He said, Marie,Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.In the mountains, there you feel free.I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

Lost Generation: Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald

Gertrude Stein coined the term “lost generation”: disillusionment of American literary expatriates, esp. after First World War

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)• Most important novels The Sun

Also Rises (1923); A Fairwell to Arms (1929); For Whom the Belll Tolls (1940)

• Depiction of modern world as stripped of illusion, psychologically and physically dangerous, morally ruined

Hemingway• Narrative method: simplicity of diction and sentence structure, showing

characters’ feelings as “sequence of fact and motion that made the emotion” not by mere assertion, irony not symbolism

• Themes: love and loss, passion and sex, war and crime; search for happiness, fulfillment, gratification; cult of masculinity, violence of blood sports (social rituals: hunting, bull fight, drinking) (but like himself womanizers who are often tragic, depressive, death-ridden, prone to suicide (1961))

• Iceberg-Theory: “The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water”.

• “I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eights of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show.”

• the most important things lie beneath the surface of the page (gaps, omissions, etc.)

• fatal consequence for surface interpretation

The Sun Also Rises• Mottos:

“You are all a lost generation” – Gertrude Stein in conversation

“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever … The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose …” – Ecclesiastes

• Ex-soldier Jake Barnes in Europe amongst group of expatriates (all wounded either physically or psychologically), represents the rupture of his generation through his body: injury to genitals and impotence through war reassertion through male rituals = healing rituals; experience as substitute for lost masculinity/destroyed body

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLr5gXl6OmA&feature=related

Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940): “The Jazz Age”

The Great Gatsby (1925)• Jay Gatsby as representative of

nouveau riches• Roaring 1920s: after shock of WWI,

now booming economy, but also Prohibition and organized crime

• Fatal believe in piling up wealth and material symbols (incl. beautiful woman = Daisy) as means of redeeming past

• Collapse of Great American Dream (murdered), empty, tragic heart of the self-made man

• Story narrated by Nick Carraway, who is like Gatsby a war veteran from Midwest where he returns to in end

• Symoblism: Valley of ashes - The downfall of the American dream

Cover of first edition

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTQvDCYY5E8&feature=related (beginning)

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II1PmhWCzDs (party)