Modernism: 1910-1940

Pablo Picasso “Portrait of Dora Maar”

American Modernism

The greatest single fact about our modern American writing is our writers' absorption in every last detail of their American world together with their deep and subtle alienation from it.

- Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds, 1942

Modernism

• Reaction to World War I– Response to a sense of social breakdown– Development of cubism and surrealism in the visual arts– International perspective on cultural matters

• The Jazz Age and The Great Depression– Investigation of the excesses of the “Roaring 20s”– Consideration of class and trauma as raised by the Great Depression

• View of the world as “fragmented”– The usual connective patterns are missing: morals and frameworks are

compromised– Artist’s self-consciousness about questions of form and structure– Stylistic innovations, disruption of traditional syntax and form– “These fragments I have shorn against my ruin” (The Wasteland)

The Lost Generation

• Coming out of the destruction of World War I, many artists and intellectuals were disillusioned with American politics and culture. Many of them left America to live abroad, particularly in Paris

• Among the expatriate writers were Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald

Scientific Thought Sets the Stage for a New Era

Before Modernism

• Aristotelian concept of man as a social and rational animal

• Tabula Rasa “Blank Slate”

• Newton's law of motion

• Governments exist for the benefit of their citizens

Modernism

• Darwin's theory of Evolution

• Carl Jung’s belief of the collective unconscious

• Einstein’s theory of relativity -- time is no longer uniform or absolute

• Marx’s concept of government perpetuating ideology to benefit itself

Art

• Artists should be the creator rather than the preserver of traditional styles.

• One example of radical innovation during this time period includes Pablo Picasso’s cubism, a style of painting that abandons realism.

The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting. (Ezra Pound)

Literature

• Authors explored characters’ psyches through stream of consciousness and interior monologue (Thanks Freud!)

• Authors mixed slang with elevated language and also experimented with free verse.

• During this time period we also see an emphasis placed upon the non-linear– disconnected images and plot.

An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose. (Langston Hughes)

Themes of Modern Literature

• Collectivism versus individualism• Anxiety regarding the past• Historical discontinuity• Disillusionment • Violence and alienation• Decadence and decay• Loss and despair• Breakdown of social norms and cultural sureties• Race and gender relations• Sense of place, local color