AMERICAN MODERNISM

Definitions and representatives

 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 2

Definitions

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."

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 10 sustain and create a civilization on its own

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 13 social change

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 avant14 garde broadly denied them in the USA until 1945

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 16

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 18 distinctly American drama and theatre

Literary Salons
Alfred Stieglitzs Little Gallery of the PhotoSecession 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 24 us further from the truth

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 25

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 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 migrs: 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

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