AMERICAN MODERNISM

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AMERICAN MODERNISM

• Definitions and representatives

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Definitions

• A period that ended in 1940s
• Unlike romanticism or classicism does not refer
  to the qualities of the works of art in a given
  period
• Underlines their break with the past
• Connected with the loss of legitimacy of public
  authority
• The arts took onto themselves more of the job of
  defining the human horizon
• The consequence of the transformation of society
  brought about by industrialism and technology in
  the course of the nineteenth century
• The pressures of modernity were most intensely
  felt in the great urban centers of Europe such as
  Vienna, Paris, Berlin where the extravagant or
  shocking works of modernism were fist produced

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A climatic change in human consciousness and
historic practices

• Modernism was in most countries an
  extraordinary compound of the futuristic and the
  nihilistic, the revolutionary and the
  conservative, the naturalistic and the
  symbolistic, the romantic and the classical. It
  was a celebration of a technological age and a
  condemnation of it an excited acceptance of the
  belief that the old regimes of culture were over,
  and a deep despairing in the face of that fear a
  mixture of convictions that the new forms were
  escapes from historicism and the pressures of the
  time with convictions that they were precisely
  the living expressions of these things.
• 
  Bradbury and MacFarlane

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Sociology of Postmodernism Scott Lash

• Not only contemporary arts but contemporary
  social practices generally, can be understood in
  terms of modernism . modernism registers a
  fundamental break with the assumptions of
  modernity.

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Sociology of Postmodernism Scott Lash

• Aesthetic modernism and its social correlates
  must be understood as a fundamental
  transformation of this project that includes not
  only both a deepening and an undermining of
  Enlightenment rationality, but also the
  transmutation and renewed development of
  instrumental rationality.."

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Sociology of Postmodernism Scott Lash

• Modernism is a three-dimensional configuration
  ...involving a disruption of Enlightenment
  rationality, a new departure in instrumental
  reason, in which former principles of unity and
  transcendence are replaced by principles of
  plurality and immanence, and a deepening of
  Enlightenment rationality."

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European and American Modernisms

• The legacy of 19th-century American writers
• How the individual human beings can define
  themselves through their own inner resources and
  create their own vision of existence without help
  from family, fellow citizens, or tradition
• A moral dilemma of how to escape this danger
• A danger posed by the fact that the relationships
  with one's fellows were defined in monetary
  terms, rather than in familial, communal or
  national
• The early American modernists were far less
  concerned with an acute awareness of the profound
  changes in society than their European
  counterparts

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Differences

• American modernists echoed the mid -19th-century
  focus on the attempt to "buid a self"
• European modernists encountered a climatic
  historical change, a painful realization that
  the Western civilization was more and more
  dominated by the search for profits

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Differences

• American modernists were already postmodern
  before they were modern
• Randolph Bourne in his essay Transnational
  America connects the new cosmopolitan ideal with
  a sudden jump from medievalism to
  post-modernism

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Representatives

• Henry James furnished the most important link
  between modernism and the generation of his
  father and Emerson
• The first to appropriate modernist European
  culture for the use of American individualism
• The first to step beyond the horizon open to most
  of the 19th-century writers who had no such faith
  in the powers of art
• James believed in the capacity of art to sustain
  and create a civilization on its own

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Representatives

• Henry James was determined to represent
  individual consciousness as triumphing over the
  acquisitive impulses of the self and society
• Jamess use of the point of view technique,
  which would culminate in the modernists
  experimentation with the stream of
  consciousness narrative

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Representatives

• Henry Jamess followers
• The early American modernists from the beginning
  of the twentieth century
• Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, T.S.Eliot, William
  Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens
• The second Generation of the 1920s Fitzgerald,
  Hemingway, Faulkner, Dos Passos
• Questions of identity
• The significance art had in the world
• Saw themselves apart from a nation who was
  preoccupied with business

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Paradoxes Surrounding American Modernism

• The material practices from which intellectual
  and aesthetic modernism drew its stimulus
• - the machines
• - the new transport and communication systems
• - skyscrapers and bridges
• The incredible instability and insecurity that
  accompanied rapid innovation and social change

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Cultural Milieu

• The USA and especially Chicago, should be
  regarded as the catalyst of modernism after 1870
  
• Lack of traditionalist resistance
• Popular acceptance of broadly modernist
  sentiments
• The works of artists in the USA rather less
  important as the avant-garde of social change
• Fierce class and traditional resistance to
  capitalist modernization in Europe
• The intellectual and aesthetic movements of
  modernism in Europe - the spearhead of social
  change a political and social role for the
  avant-garde broadly denied them in the USA until
  1945

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Chicago

• Revolt against the genteel tradition of the
  nineteenth century
• Literary magazines The Dial
• Margaret Andersons Little Review
• Harriet Munroes Poetry
• T. S. Eliots The Love Song of J. Alfred
  Prufrock

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The Chicago Renaissance

• Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis
• The Illinois poets
• Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters and Vachel
  Lindsay
• The Congo
• Poetrys editor Harriet Munroe saw it as a
  return to the healthier open-air conditions and
  immediate personal contacts, in the art of the
  Greeks and of primitive nations

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The City of New York

• Scarcity of land
• Great influx of immigrants
• A cosmopolitan base for the new modernist
  developments
• The modernist magazines Liberator, Smart Set,
  Others, Glebe, Seven Arts, New Republic, The
  Freeman, The Nation, The Masses, Little Review,
  The Dial.

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Development of American Theater

• Greenwich Village a huge and definite Monmartre
  of America
• New theatre groups
• Provincetown (Greenwich Village) Players
• The Washington Square Players
• Helped not only the diffusion of European and
  especially German modernist techniques but helped
  the creation of a distinctly American drama and
  theatre

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Literary Salons

• Alfred Stieglitzs Little Gallery of the
  Photo-Secession attracted the most brilliant
  young critics in NY Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo
  Frank, Randolph Bourne, Lewis Mumford
• Gertrude Steins salon in Paris
• The literary circle around Ezra Pound in London

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Modernist Painting in the US

• Alfred Stieglitz
• Georgia O'Keeffe
• Armory Show, 1913, staged the first American
  exhibitions of Matisse, Toulouse Lautrec,
  Rousseau, and Picasso

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American Modernist Art
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Philosophical Roots

• Literary forms appropriate to modern life
• The urgent necessity to discover new meanings and
  create new forms in a world that had lost shape
  and meaning for many
• Relied on philosophers like William James and
  John Dewey who were convinced that 'knowing' grew
  out of concrete experience

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William James

• The individualized self, which I believe to be
  the only thing properly called self, is a part of
  the content of the world experienced. The world
  experienced (otherwise called the "field of
  consciousness") comes at all times with our body
  as its center, center of vision, center of
  action, center of interest. Where the body is is
  'here' when the body acts is 'now' what the
  body touches is 'this' all other things are
  'there' and 'then' and 'that William James

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William James

• Insisted that the Victorian practice of radically
  separating the higher rational faculties from
  the lower instinctual ones made no sense
• Believed that the mind must be conceived of as
  functionally integrated. Once the mind, guided by
  its passions, had chosen which perceptions to
  bring to consciousness, it might proceed to
  formulate abstract concepts based on them, but in
  doing so, it necessarily introduced further
  distortions.
• The initial raw sensory experience is the closest
  we could come to knowing reality each
  application of the intellect, however valuable it
  might be for practical purposes, took us further
  from the truth

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William James

• Human beings are doomed forever to
  epistemological uncertainty
• For his contemporaries this was a horrible
  revelation
• To him it was infinitely exciting, it banished
  the closed, deterministic universe of 19th
  century positivism
• In favour of an open (pluralistic) universe
  governed by change and chance where the process
  of discovery would be continuous

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William James Influence

• The writers concentrated on sensual presentations
  of images and scenes
• Avoided direct authorial intrusion
• Used irony as a distancing device
• Employed mythic and archetypal patterns - journey
  motifs, Grail quests, or struggles between
  fathers and sons

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William James Influence

• Created unexpected levels of meaning thus turning
  the modernist writing into a writing in which,
  nothing is one thing
• It is writing which is centered on the individual
  consciousness, which celebrates spontaneity,
  authenticity, and the probing of new realms of
  personal experience.

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John Dewey

• Wrote against the dichotomy between intellect and
  experience, thought and action
• The writers influenced by him
• - focused on society as a whole
• - emphasized the elimination of social barriers
• - tried to combine together reason and emotion
  in the service of programmatic social aims

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James and Deweys Influence

• The two trends tended to diverge
• They have reflected the frequent preoccupation of
  American modernists with pragmatic empiricism and
  democratic pluralism
• Opposed to the tendency of Modernists in
  war-ravaged Europe to focus on apocalyptic
  experience and a coexistent cult of the
  irrational

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Franz Boas

• The most influential
• The Mind of Primitive Man - a direct attack on
  another of the fundamental Victorian dichotomies,
  the one between civilization and savagery
• Asserted that the so-called savage people were
  fully capable of logic, abstraction, aesthetic
  discrimination and the inhibition of biological
  impulses

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Franz Boas Influence

• No more any reason for insisting on the
  superiority of the European perspective
• This would finally do away with the cultural and
  scientific props of racism in the USA
• The cult of the primitive
• Harlem Renaissance
• Black is Beautiful writings of the 60s

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Primitivism
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The Jazz Age

• "Jazz was the symbol of the age because of its
• spontaneity, its creation of a cooperative
• method, and its assumption of an emphatic
• community. It authorised a distrust of
• rationalism, a celebration of sensuality, a
• separateness from conventional society, and a
• belief in improvisation and authenticity of
• feeling - ideology of blacks and whites. Bigsby

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The Jazz Singer
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The Jazz Age

• An age of the desperate celebration of
• youth and its simultaneous disillusionment
• Fitzgerald considered the Jazz Age a result of
• America's unexpected energy in the war
• American lifestyle and American fashion began
• to invade Europe, which was tired of suffering
• and longing to have a good time

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The Lost Generation Writers

• Disillusionment bred by the new business culture
  and the First World War
• Malcolm Cowley, Exiles Return, the discourse of
  exile
• Exiles and Émigrés Studies in Modern Literature,
  Terry Eagleton
• Michael Seidel, Exile and the Narrative Discourse
  slightly parochial because they remained
  limited to English language

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The Lost Generation Writers

• Disillusioned with America
• Cultivated a romantic self-absorption
• A deliberate retreat into private emotions
• Finding no nucleus to which we could cling, we
  became a small nucleus ourselves and gradually
  fitted our disruptive personalities into the
  contemporary scene. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The
  Crack-Up
• Experts in tragedy, suffering and anguish
• Characters who are dispirited, disillusioned and
  moody.
• A new generation, grown up to find all Gods
  dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man
  shaken..." This Side of Paradise F. Scott
  Fitzgerald

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The Lost Generation

• Radically different because of the traumatic
  experience of the First World War
• Malcom Cowley called the War the extinction of
  the fittest
• In the artistic imagination of the time it
  became a nightmare dominated by the idea of death