Modernism in America

 

Modernism a twentieth-century movement which takes new aspects of literature, as concerned with the changing situation of the society, into account.  Modernism as a “creative violence" deviates from the literary tradition and turns the holistic and taken-for- granted literary concepts into new internal and mental trends

American Modernism                                                                                                                                  

1. -It was a response to sense of morals breakdown
2. -sees the world as fragmented
3. -point of view is remote/detached from subject
4. -  the subject of modernist works asks what is the purpose of literature /what is the use for art in a world falling apart.

The reasons behind modernism

1. Industrialization
2. WW1
3. Roaring twenties
4. Karl Max and Sigmund Freud

 

. Characteristics of Modernism in Literature

1. *Inner psychological reality or “interiority” is represented : Stream of consciousness—portraying the character’s inner monologue .
2. No longer seen as transparent, allowing us to “see through” to reality;*
3. But now considered the way an individual constructs reality;*
4. Language is “thick” with multiple meanings and varied connotative forces.*
5. Emphasis on the Experimental *
6. Experience portrayed as coated, allusive, discontinuous, using fragmentation and combination.

TECHNIQUES IN MODERNIST WORKS

COLLAPSED PLOTS It will seem to begin arbitrarily, to advance without explanation, and to end without resolution, consisting of vivid segments juxtaposed without cushioning or integrating transitions.

FRAGMENTARY TECHNIQUES The idea of order, sequence, and unity in works of art is sometimes abandoned because they are now considered by writers as only expressions of a desire for coherence rather than actual reflections of reality. The long work will be an assemblage of fragments, the short work a carefully realized fragment.  Some modernist literature registers more as a collage.  This fragmentation in literature was meant to reflect the reality of the flux and fragmentation of one’s life.

 SHIFTS IN PERSPECTIVE, VOICE, AND TONE Modern fiction tends to be written in the first person or to limit the reader to one character’s point of view on the action.  This limitation accorded with the modernist sense that “truth” does not exist objectively but is the product of a personal interaction with reality.  The selected point of view was often that of a naïve or marginal person—a child or an outsider—to convey  better  the reality of confusion rather than the myth of certainty.

STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS  Stream-of-consciousness is a literary practice that attempts to depict the mental and emotional reactions of characters to external events, rather than the events  themselves, through the practice of reproducing the unedited, continuous sequence of thoughts that run through a person’s head, most usually without punctuation or literary interference.

  ASSOCIATIVE TECHNIQUES  Modernists sometimes used a collection of seemingly random impressions and literary, historical, philosophical, or religious allusions with which readers are expected to make the connections on their own.

The lost generation was a group of writers and thinkers who chose to live abroad in the wake of the WW1 as they pursued their creative impulses .The term refers to the spiritual and existential hangover .the artists of this movement struggled to find some meaning in the world . they rejected the post WW1 values  .they all believed in a loss of morals . the generation was lost in the sense that its inherited values were  no longer relevant in the post ZZ1 era .this include writers such as :

1/ F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), 
Fitzgerald's secure place in American literature rests primarily on his novel The Great Gatsby (1925), a brilliantly written, economically structured story about the American dream of the self-made man. The protagonist, the mysterious Jay Gatsby, discovers the devastating cost of success in terms of personal fulfillment and love. Other fine works include Tender Is the Night (1934), about a young psychiatrist whose life is doomed by his marriage to an unstable woman . Fitzgerald captured the glittering, desperate life of the 1920s; This Side of Paradise was heralded as the voice of modern American youth. His second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), continued his exploration of the self-destructive extravagance of his times.

Fitzgerald's special qualities include a dazzling style perfectly suited to his theme of seductive glamour

2/ Ernest Hemingway  (1899-1961 Ernest Hemingway, whose career could have come out of one his adventurous novels. The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a short poetic novel about a poor, old fisherman who heroically catches a huge fish devoured by sharks, won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953;  Hemingway is arguably the most popular American novelist of this century. His sympathies are basically apolitical and humanistic, and in this sense he is universal. His simple style makes his novels easy to comprehend." Hemingway often involved his characters in dangerous situations in order to reveal their inner natures.

, Hemingway wrote of war, death, and the "lost generation" of cynical survivors. His characters are not dreamers but tough bullfighters, soldiers, and athletes. If intellectual, they are deeply scarred and disillusioned.

His best novels include The Sun Also Rises, about the demoralized life of expatriates after World War I; A Farewell to Arms, about the tragic love affair of an American soldier and an English nurse during the war; For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), set during the Spanish Civil War.

William Faulkner (1897-1962) 
 The best of Faulkner's novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), two modernist works experimenting with viewpoint and voice to probe southern families under the stress of losing a family member; Light in August (1932), about complex and violent relations between a white woman and a black man; and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), perhaps his finest, about the rise of a self-made plantation owner and his tragic fall through racial prejudice and a failure to love.

Depression-era literature

Depression era literature was blunt and direct in its social criticism. John Steinbeck (1902–1968 . His style was simple and evocative, winning him the favor of the readers but not of the critics. Steinbeck often wrote about poor, working-class people and their struggle to lead a decent and honest life. The Grapes of Wrath, considered his masterpiece, is a strong, socially-oriented novel that tells the story of the Joads, a poor family from Oklahoma and their journey to California in search of a better life.