Modernist Literature

Early 1900s - 1945

Modernist Literature

• The Modernist Age spans some of the most tumultuous events in our recent history:• World War I• The Rise of Nazism, Fascism, Socialism,

Communism• The Great Depression• The Holocaust• World War II• The Dawn of the Nuclear Age

Modernist Literature

• The Modernists felt that life was bleak, hopeless, meaningless and that God (if He even existed) allowed us to move through life without any hope of finding purpose or meaning.

• Visualize a maze . . .

Modernist Literature

• Characteristics of Modernist Literature: • Characters feel lost or betrayed by God or Life • Imagery of Emptiness and Cyclical Motion• Motifs of mindless repetition• Common Themes:• Everything is meaningless . . . (Book of Ecclesiastes)• Absence of Logic or Justice • Sin seems to go unpunished; evil prevails• Man has been forsaken by God

Modernist Literature

Carl Sandburgfrom “The People, Yes!” The people will live on.The learning and blundering people will live on.They will be tricked and sold and again soldAnd go back to the nourishing earth for

rootholds,The people so peculiar in renewal and comebackYou can’t laugh off their capacity to take it.The mammoth rests between his cyclonic

dramas. The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,

is a vast huddle with many units saying:“I earn my livingI make enough to get by

and it takes all my time.If I had more timeI could do more for myselfand maybe for others.I could read and studyand talk things overand find out about things.It takes time.I wish I had the time.”

The people is a tragic and comic two-face:Hero and hoodlum: phantom and gorilla

twist-ing to moan with a gargoyle mouth: “Theybuy me and sell me . . . it’s a game . . .sometime I‘ll break loose . . .”

Modernist Literature

Carl Sandburgfrom “The People, Yes!” The people will live on.The learning and blundering people will live on.They will be tricked and sold and again soldAnd go back to the nourishing earth for

rootholds,The people so peculiar in renewal and comebackYou can’t laugh off their capacity to take it.The mammoth rests between his cyclonic

dramas. The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,

is a vast huddle with many units saying:“I earn my livingI make enough to get by

and it takes all my time.If I had more timeI could do more for myselfand maybe for others.I could read and studyand talk things overand find out about things.It takes time.I wish I had the time.”

The people is a tragic and comic two-face:Hero and hoodlum: phantom and gorilla

twist-ing to moan with a gargoyle mouth: “Theybuy me and sell me . . . it’s a game . . .sometime I‘ll break loose . . .”

Modernist Literature

Let’s look at two initial examples:

• Ezra Pound’s “In a station of the metro” and listen for imagery of Modernism,

moving around the maze meaninglessly.

• E. E. Cumming’s “Anyone lived in a pretty how town” and listen for the characterization of Modernist Man and those who rebel against it.