Norton Anthology of American Literature

Introduction to 1914-1945

 

AMERICAN LITERARY MODERNISM:

"Among literary conflicts, perhaps three related issues stand out":

1.) "The question of how engaged in political and social struggle a work of literature ought to be."

2.) "A second conflict involved the place of the popular in serious literature."

3.) "A third conflict centered on tradition versus authenticity."

 

OTHER CONCEPTS:

1.) Communism (Marx)

2.) Self-Expression and Psychology (Sexuality and Freud)

3.) Harlem / Harlem Renaissance

4.) Science versus Letters

5.) The Great Depression and F.D.R.

 

"TERMINOLOGY" OF MODERNISM:

“Literature produced under the influence of the modern temper.”

Broadly: “a catchall phrase for any kind of literary production in the interwar period that deals with the modern world.”

Narrowly: “it refers to work that represents the breakdown of traditional society under the pressures of modernity.”

“Much modernist literature of this sort (which critics now call ‘high modernism’) is actually antimodern: it interprets modernity as an experience of loss.”

“As one can tell from its title, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land -- the great poem of the movement -- represents the modern world as a scene of ruin.”

"Modernism began as a European response to the effects of World War I, which were far more devastating on the Continent than they were in the United States."

 

"PHILOSOPHY" OF MODERNISM:

“At the heart of the modernist aesthetic lay the conviction that the previously sustaining structures of human life, whether social, political, religious, or artistic, had been either destroyed or shown up as falsehoods or fantasies."

"To the extent to that art incorporated such a false order, it had to be renovated”:

 

FEATURES OF MODERNISM:

“Thus a key formal characteristic of the modernist work . . . is its construction out of fragments. The long work is an assemblage of fragments, the short work a carefully realized fragment.”

“Modernist literature is notable for what it omits -- the explanations, interpretations, connections, summaries, and distancing that provide continuity, perspective, and security in traditional literature.”

“A typical modernist work":

 

"READING" MODERNISM:

“In practice, as opposed to theory, most modernist literature retains a degree of coherence, but the reader has to dig the structure out.”

“This is why the reader of a modernist work is often said to participate in the actual work of making the poem or story.”

“In the aftermath of modernism, with the pastiche, satire, and distortions of postmodernism, this work looks more traditional than it did in its own time.  Modernist works desired coherence and unity, where postmodernism has given up.  Often, the modernist work is structured as a quest for the very coherence that, on its surface, it seems to lack.”

“Because patterns of searching appear in most of the world’s mythologies, many modernist works are unified by reference to myth.”

"Christianity appears among world myths as the basis of Western civilization; and the modern world for some comes into being when circumstances seem to show Christianity to be only a myth, a merely human construction for creating order out of, and finding purpose in, meaningless flux."

“The search for meaning, even if it does not succeed, becomes meaningful in itself.”

“Literature, especially poetry, becomes the place where the one meaningful activity, the search for meaning, is carried out; and therefore literature is, or should be, vitally important to society.”

“The subject matter of modernist writing often became, by extension, the poem or the literary work itself.”

“Ironically -- because this subject matter was motivated by deep concern about the interrelation of literature and life -- the subject often had the effect of limiting the audience for a modernist work.”

"The difficulty of this new type of writing also limited the appeal of modernism . . . Nevertheless, over time, the principles of modernism became increasingly influential."

 

MODERNIST WRITERS:

“With a stable external world in question, subjectivity was ever more valued and accepted in literature."

“Emphasized the concrete sensory image or detail as the direct conveyor of experience.”

“Relied on the reference (allusion) to literary, historical, philosophical, or religious details of the past as a way of reminding readers of the old, lost coherence.”

“Vignettes of contemporary life, chunks of popular culture, dream imagery, and symbolism drawn from the author’s private repertory of life experiences are also important.”

“A work built from these various levels and kinds of material may move across time and space, shift from the public to the personal, and open literature as a field for every sort of concern.”

“The inclusion of all sorts of material previously deemed ‘unliterary’ in works of high seriousness involved the use of language that would previously have been thought improper, including representations of the speech of the uneducated and the inarticulate, the colloquial, slangy, and the popular.”

“The traditional educated literary voice, conveying truth and culture, lost its authority; this is what Ernest Hemingway had in mind when he asserted that the American literary tradition began with Huckleberry Finn.”

 

MODERNIST PROSE WRITERS:

“Prose writers strove for directness, compression, and vividness.  They were sparing of words.”

“The average novel became quite a bit shorter than it had been in the nineteenth century.”

“The modernist aesthetic gave new significance to the short story, which had previously been thought of as a relatively slight artistic form.”

("Poems, too, became shorter; modernist poets struggled to write long poems but the principles of unity or organization that had enabled long poems to be written in previous eras were not available to them.")

“ . . . modern fiction preferred suggestion”

“ . . . modern fiction tended 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.”

 

REGIONS:

1.) The Midwest:

2.) The Southwest:

3.) California:

4.) The West:

5.) New England:

6.) The South:

7.) Harlem:

8.) The Whole Nation (specific works):