MODERNISM 1914 1945 WA RS PROSPERITY DEPRESSION RECOGNIZED

MODERNISM 1914 -1945: WA RS , PROSPERITY, & DEPRESSION

RECOGNIZED NOT ONLY IN LITERATURE, BUT ALSO • • architecture philosophy psychology anthropology painting music sculpture the sciences

A MOVEMENT OF CULTURAL CRISIS Exciting! Disquieting!

BRUTAL REALITY OF MODERN WAR PROMISE OF AN AMERICAN HERO DISILLUSIONMENT http: //www. loc. gov/ pictures/item/2005683713/

MODERNIST PARADIGM (PATTERN OR WORLD VIEW) • Loss of faith in dependable, predictable, orderly universe • Loss of certainty of truth • Man feels alone in an uncertain world • Rejection of tradition (particularly artists) • Life seems absurd: failure of reason, tradition, moral systems

TECHNOLOGY • Record player, motion picture with sound, radio = greater sense of connectedness • BUT ALSO = manipulative commercialism! skepticism and apprehension about pop culture • Gap grows between better-off and worse-off Americans

GREATEST TECHNOLOGICAL INFLUENCE: AUTOMOBILE • Reshaped American structure of industry and occupation; many jobs created • Cities change shape • Suburbs & highways

BUT Constant movement and lack of tradition = “rootlessness of American life” Tocqueville (French social commentator)

THE GREAT DEPRESSION • 1929 stock market crash • Struggle to restore nation’s economical structure

CLASH OF VALUES “Traditionalist Americans—believing in work ethic, social conformity, duty, and respectability—attempted to control social and private behavior according to a model of white, Protestant, small-town virtues… -

CLASH OF VALUES arrayed against them were newly articulate groups: immigrants, minorities, youth, woman, and of course, artists, arguing for a diversity of styles of life. ” -Norton Anthology of American Literature

FREEDOM FOR WOMEN Middle class man had sexual freedom Now woman demand sexual liberation (thanks to job opportunities, 19 th Amendment)

OTHER DEMANDS: • Education • Professional work • Mobility • Any social benefits men already have (i. e. the right to voice an opinion in conversation)

WOMEN’S DRESS Long, heavy, cumbersome

SHORT, LIGHT, EASILY WORN (FREEING)

AFRICAN AMERICANS IN AMERICAN CULTURE • Job opportunities in North lead to Great Migration • Faced racism and segregation • BUT better off economically and socially • Increase in personal freedom • Harlem Renaissance

EXISTENTIAL PHILOSOPHY • Man has no ‘nature’ so he must create himself • No inclination toward good or evil at birth we are all potential • Man creates himself by means of choices • Man feels alone in a world without meaning • We must turn inward to seek truth in a fragmented and chaotic world

BREAKDOWN OF TRADITIONAL SOCIETY UNDER PRESSURES OF MODERNITY • • Skepticism Alienation Irrationalism Doubt as to the value of human existence

MODERNISM IN ART • New York Armory show of 1913 shocks and causes an uproar • “conviction that previously sustaining structures of human life, whether social, political, religious, or artistic, had been either destroyed or shown up as falsehoods or fantasies” • Fragmented and abstract is more true to life

Marcel Duchamp Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 French

Walter Kuhn Morning American

D. Putnam Brinley The Peony Garden American

Wassily Kandinsky Improvisation No. 27 (Garden of Love) Russian

Henri Matisse Goldfish and Sculpture French

John Marin Broadway, St. Paul’s Church American

Albert Pinkham Ryder Moonlit Cove American

PHOTOGRAPHY: SOCIAL REALISM Dorothea Lange Migrant Mother Series, 1936 Florence Owens Thompson and children (subject) Caption: Destitute peapickers in California; a 32 year old mother of seven children. February 1936.

Caption: Migrant agricultural worker's family. Seven hungry children. Mother aged thirty-two. Father is native Californian. Nipomo, California

Caption: "Nipomo, Calif. Mar. 1936. Migrant agricultural worker's family. Seven hungry children. Mother aged 32, the father is a native Californian. Destitute in a pea pickers camp, because of the failure of the early pea crop. These people had just sold their tent in order to buy food. Most of the 2, 500 people in this camp were destitute. "

MODERNIST MUSIC: IGOR STRAVINSKY • The Rite of Spring • Riot in Paris where premiered, 1913 • Attributes: dissonance (disharmony) and discontinuity

MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE • “Form follows function” • Glorifying buildings as machines (simple and industrialized) • Steel and glass materials • Efficient to maximize productivity (identical floors)

WALTER GROPIUS HOUSE LINCOLN, MASSACHUSETTS 1938

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT FALLINGWATER MILL RUN, PA 1936 AND 1939

Shreve, Lamb and Harmon The Empire State Building New York City 1929 -1931

MODERNIST WRITING • “represents the breakdown of traditional society under the pressures of modernity” (Norton) • Often interprets modernity as an experience of loss • Generalization, abstraction, fragmentation • Stream-of-consciousness

THEMATIC FEATURES • Focus on form rather than meaning • Breaking down of limitation of space and time • Breakdown of social norms and cultural values • Despairing individual in the face of an unmanageable future • Disillusionment

THEMATIC FEATURES • Rejection of history and the substitution of a mythical past • Need to reflect the complexity of modern urban life • Importance of the unconscious mind • Interest in the primitive and non-western cultures • Impossibility of an absolute interpretation of reality • Overwhelming technological changes

FORMAL FEATURES OF POETRY • Free verse • Allusions and multiple association of words • Borrowing from other cultures and languages • Unconventional use of metaphor • Importance given to sound to convey “the music of ideas”

IMAGISM • Concentrates on presentation of words or “word pictures” • Expresses essence of object, person, or incident without explanation • Spare, clean, presentation of an image • Freeze a moment in time to capture moment • Everyday language • Shies away from traditional poetic patterns

“THE RED WHEELBARROW” WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens

“THIS IS JUST TO SAY” WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold

WORKS CITED Baym, Nina, ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 5 th ed. New York: Norton, 1999. Print. “Disillusion, Defiance, and Discontent. " Prentice Hall Literature: Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2002. 704 -713. Print.

WORKS CITED Brooker, Peter, ed. Modernism/Postmodernism. London: Longman, 1992. Print. Hassan, Ihab and Hassan, Sally, eds. Innovation/Renovation: New Perspectives on the Humanities. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. Print. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Print. Lodge, David, ed. Modernism, Antimodernism, and Postmodernism. Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 1977. Print. Wilde, Alan. Horizon of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism and the Ironic Imagination. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. Print