Modernism

Modernism is about experiment -> ‘make it new’ (Ezra Pound). Form becomes important. Emotion is different from the emotion in 19th-century novels (where the relation with the social world is explored). Modernism is about the subjective inner world of the individual. -> a shift.

Why the change of focus?

- a new perception of space and time, a feeling of being uprooted

- cosmopolitanism

- the rapid development of technology

- industrialization, the decline of the rural way of living.

Modernism = a kind of rebellion against the ‘old regime’. + political unrest (nationalist movements, assassinations)

Modernism or Modernisms? Modernism – associated with different cities: Vienna, Paris, London; associated with particular figures, all of whom came out with manifestoes.

American Modernism

At the end of the 19th century, USA was the leading country in technological development. All the empires were intact (with the exception of the Ottoman empire). In America there was nothing to fight against, nothing to oppose. Paradoxically, America should have been the centre of Modernism. Through the whole 19th century: a business culture. Modernism could not play the role of social avant-garde and suggest a new way of life. It was rather a continuation of the rebellion against the business culture of America (this rebellion started with Henry James who was preoccupied with the point of view, with the consciousness of one single character, with form).

Modernism ended with WWII.

The 1950s – The Beat Generation.

American Modernist writers and poets:

1st generation: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, W. C. Williams

2nd generation: Hemingway, Fitzgerald.

Cities of American Modernism:

1) Chicago -> Sherwood Anderson (who introduced the ideas of Freud in American literature). The Chicago Renaissance – in the early years of the 20th c.). Literary magazines. The Illinois poets.

2) New York -> Alfred Stieglitz. Literary salons. Literary magazines.

The philosophy of Modernism -> going back to primary sensations.

Philosophical ideas that influenced American Modernism:

1. William James: The idea that there is no one single truth. When we perceive the world (raw sensations), all our perceptions are processed through our minds and the result is a different world picture on the basis of experiences. The idea that there is no single truth came to explain the changes in the world. The writers turned to the inner world of the characters, their emotions.

2. John Dewey -> internalizing the social.

3. Franz Boas – father of contemporary anthropology. According to him – no difference between the minds of ‘primitive’ and ‘civilized’ people. This idea influenced the writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

American Modernism – other influences:

1. Jazz – it was experimental, a celebration of the sensual.

2. WWI -> the Lost Generation. Nothing changed after the war, so many young people died in vain. -> The realization that there could be no tomorrow, things are precarious, there’s nothing to fight for, to believe in -> the Roaring 20s: hedonistic enjoyment -> becoming expatriates.