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Prüfungsvorbereitung­ Hochschule

Modern and Contemporary American Literature

13.754 / ~25 sternsternsternsternstern_0.2 Christian B. . 2017
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Prüfungsvorbereitung
Literaturwissenschaft

Uned, Madrid

9, Gloria, 2015

Christian B. ©
14.50

0.22 Mb
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ID# 69986







UNIT 1: A NATION’S COMING OF AGE

PRESENTATION: CLUES OF THE PERIOD


The United States at the turn of the century

Beginning of 20th C > rejected former beliefs and values and searched for new ones.

US had been engaged in a Civil War > initiated significant social and economic changes > nation was still to undergo profound transformation in their public and private affairs.

Important intellectual landscape of 19th C:

  • Darwin’s On the origin of Species and The Descent of Man

  • Marx’s Das Kapital.

  • Freud’s The interpretation of dreams

  • Einstein’s General theory of Relativity. His scheme of time, space and matter quickly took ground among intellectuals and artists alike.

  • Frazer’s The golden Bough: A study in Magic and Religion > religious and folkloric systems held by several civilizations. Religious beliefs as cultural phenomena

  • Freud and Frazer stressed the irrational.

  • Postulates of Enlightenment interrogated and progressively abandoned (particularly those which perceived world through reason, capable of achieving universal / eternal truths through science and gnosis)

  • Authoritative voices and institutions characterized the pre-Modernist age

    • Rejected the authority of the imperfect establishments

    • Set out to replace lost references.

    • Modernists authors understood the subject as fragmented in the psyche, and deconstructed its deceptive wholeness of being.

    • They challenged notion of life as a line

  • Industrialization and technology transformed life (American railway system, 1st skyscraper, Henry Ford + assembly line, 1st movie theatre .)

    • Mass society under way

    • Life became faster > Automobiles provided Americans mythical power and freedom, instead of entrapping them like the machines represented in late 19th century works.

  • Turn of the century = consolidation of a nation.

    • Intellectual’s affirmation of an American culture.

      • V. W. Brook’s book American Coming of Age can be considered a new “American scholar” address to his generation, similar to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s in the previous century.

  • Disappearing frontier in its double role: as economic factor and as myth.

    • Closing of the frontier in the 1890s = “running out of West”.

      • 19th C > nation immersed in industrialization + mechanization > threatened pastoral image that the Americans had about themselves.

      • Myth of the frontier articulated in gender-class-ethnic terms > masculine, middle-class and white

        • Progress in the conquest of rights for women and minority groups.

    • American Dream parallel in fantasy of open land + harmonious relationship between humans and nature.

  • American literature of 20thC would mirror disintegration of such fantasy + efforts to cope with its disappearance.

  • American process of national definition = isolation from European and world affairs

    • Until American’s involvement in WWI in 1917.

      • Intellectual ruin found counterpart in the physical ruin of people and places.

      • War intensified horror + lack of confidence in institutions and metanarratives.

      • Questioned human capacity to organize / direct life through reason.

      • Marxism came to the front in the American 1930s; Freudian psychology progressively became highly popular and Catholicism became an apt option for others.

    • Dissolution of America’s sense of itself observed in Realist and Regionalist trends of 19th C literature.

    • Materialism defied Jeffersonian ideal (agrarian, America-as-a-virgin-land utopia)

    • The economic landscape was changing radically.

Literary Modernism(s) in America

  • Sense of loss and uncertainty + need for spiritual relief concerned with quests

    • Doomed search for sense + logic in the face of a chaotic perception of experience.

  • The modern mind not born with 20th C > but with end of religion as organic reference of human existence.

    • Human rationality questioned itself and the world around, challenging 19th C moralism and conventionality.

    • That critical age of revision was called Modernism > It reshaped moral val.....

  • Realism > from 19th C

  • High Modernism > Extreme formal innovations in American letters, especially narrative.

  • Naturalism > Extreme Realism> environmental interests + Calvinist underlayer of American culture. Sense of imprisonment in America’s progress. Portrayal of human beings deprived of free will allowed authors to retreat from making moral judgments.

  • Modernism > necessity to break away with old social and artistic values > search for new modes of expression that best accounted for modernity and modern life

    • Revision of myths that had constructed culture and art of the US.

    TEXT ANALYSIS: SHERWOOD ANDERSON’S REVOLT

    Approaching Anderson’s “Hands”

    • Belonged to a generation of Midwestern writers who remained traditionalist but proved to be rebels

      • They portrayed small-town life + examined elemental struggles.

    • One of the first American authors to become aware of the implications in the work of Freud.

    • He influenced Hemingway, Faulkner and Steinbeck.

    • Winesburg, Ohio > new understanding of the short story form > transition of narrative techniques to modern era

    • His writing dealt with the individual’s painstaking search for meaning and certainty in small communities.

    • The realism of characters, speech and manners of a struggle for integration and compassion surpassed the temporal and geographical limits that configured the setting of the work.

    • He deplored age of the machine > pursued plainer states of being.

    • Winesburg, Ohio > widely condemned when first publised.

    • Described + reported life in a small Midwestern town in unconventional way

      • Novel” structured around series of connected stories, independent but conceived as a whole

        • He explored psychological dimensions of his characters.

    • The small town of Winesburg represents a microcosm.

    • Revolt from the village > myth of a harmonious existence in small communities evolved from pioneering days

      • Expected values of friendliness / honesty = fallacy that disguised hypocrisy, hostility, bigotry and frustration.

    • Hands” illustrated social atmosphere of the US in the early century + defined the modern short story

  • Winesburg, Ohio” > The form invites us to reflection: it hints at a totality while such totality is rendered in terms of fragmentation and isolation.

    • The different fragments of the global picture participate in the same spatial and temporal setting

    • The narrative voice that embraces the fragments offers an effect of wholeness

    • But sense of disconnection by reserving a separate chapter for each one.

    • Representative of what Forrest Ingram called the short story cycle

      • Design that combines individuality of each story and the totality to which they belong.

      • Anderson felt dissatisfaction with pressing demands of conventional storytelling, or poison plot, especially those concerning the writing of short stories.

      • What he wanted was form, not plot

      • Writing whort stories he could write withour full dedication

      • Oral tradition of storytelling > to release narrative from strict framings of plot and structure, and give familiar, small-town air about the events narrated (but far from idyllic ima.....

    • Anderson advanced the American modernism.

    • Fragmentary design of WO = alienation of modern existence / tragic loneliness of individual in a world without certainties.

      • Individual story, dedicated to one character with his own private loneliness and tragedy.

      • Inhabitants = detached, disconnected from other villagers or institution (family, church, town hall .).

      • Narrative strategy of telling each story from one personal perspective emphasized idea of disconnection, as well as of a godless existence.

      • Charaters = grotesque > misfits who cannot find their own place.

      • Failure of communication perceived in each story.

      • He deals with pathetic inability to express one’s necessities and anxieties.

  • George Willard functions as a connecting element between stories

    • He is present in each of them + acts as a sort of confessor of every other character.

    • His presence resembles the role of the literary author.

    • George Willard’s = reporter in the local newspaper > example of irony (assumed role as source and articulator of communication)

  • Theory of the grotesque > Author depicts an old dying man who recollects the people he has known along his life.

    • Grotesque = human beings that capture one truth from life and live by it in utter isolation, unable to share it with other people.

    • Exaggeration of characterizing features.

    • Wing (character) > fragile and frustrated: his very name suggests the frailness and entrapment of a bird, as does the final scene where he picks up crumbs from the floor.

  • .....

  • Key Terms

        • Authorial address, death-in-life theme, epiphany, fragmentariness, grotesque, heterodiegetic, Jeffersonian ideal, modernism, poison plot, revolt from the village, short story cycle, wasteland.


    HANDS – Summary + analysis

    • Widely condemned when first published > subject of homosexuality, unmentionable

    • Anderson, as a naturalist, thought sex should be given its proper place in the picture of life

  • Today, however, Anderson's treatment of Wing Biddlebaum's problem seems very delicate.


    Wing Biddlebaum

    • The old man, who is described as fat, frightened, and nervous, seems too ineffectual to be dangerous.

    • Bald forehead — his nervous hands fiddle about arranging non-existent hair — suggests his loss of strength and virility.

    • Even the description of the former teacher's caressing of his students sounds quite possibly innocent.

    • The picture of Adolph Myers with the boys of his school is similar to the dream which Wing tries to describe to George, a "pastoral golden age" in which clean-limbed young men gathered about the feet of an old man who talked to them.

      • Wing hasn't been allowed to realize this dream > his creative impulse, to mold his students, has become thwarted.

      • Because a half-witted boy imagined unmentionable things, Adolph Myers was driven from a Pennsylvania town in the night. "Keep your hands to yourself," the saloon keeper had roared. Anderson is obviously criticizing the cruelty of a society which persecutes anything it doesn't understand.

      • Ironically, people of Winesburg are proud of Wing's nervous hands — which have picked 140 quarts of strawberries in a day. Production such as this the town can understand + acclaim. Similarly, Anderson felt the mercenary world hadn't sympathized with his longing to write fiction, but had rewarded his .....

  • As Wing kneels on the floor, he is described as being "like a priest engaged in some service of his church." This image, plus the old man's persecution by society and his desire to show his love for others by the laying on of his hands, may make Wing seem to be a Christ-like figure; but, if so, Anderson is suggesting that Christ is misunderstood and defeated in the modern world.


    Setting = night (like in many of the Winesburg stories) > suggests dark misery of the lives of Anderson's characters.


    Although "Hands" is the story of Wing Biddlebaum, we are also introduced to George Willard

    • Young reporter who appears in many of the Winesburg tales

    • Like Wing, George has creative impulses, but at this point, as Wing tells George, "You are afraid of dreams. You want to be like others in town here . . . You must begin to dream . . . You must shut your ears to the roaring of the voices."

    • George is afraid to be different.

    • He has wondered, for example, about Wing's secret, has realized that there is something wrong in Wing's life, but has decided, "I don't want to know what it is."

    • As the book develops, George will get more involved with other people, will begin to get below the surface of life, and will decide to be different and flee Winesburg so that he can become a writer.

    Neither Wing Biddlebaum nor George Willard is ever called by a single name.

    • This repetition encourages the reader's objectivity toward the characters.

    Personification > Changed sentence > "He raised the hands [changed from "his hands"] to caress the boy."

    • Wing's hands = a personification with a will of their own > helplessness of a man contro.....

  • French Symbolist poets (Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine) had major influence on American poetry and prose of the day.

    • Poet = visionary agent, able to transcend real world + suggest world beyond through evocative power of language.

    • Suggestive capacity of language through metaphor and metonymy

    • Musicality of words

    • Elaborate language > fluidity and rhythm of the music

    • Sought impressions instead of descriptions and accounts

    • Synestesia (experience described in terms of another)

    • Symbolists > surrealist approach to art.

    • Imagists > searched for the immediacy and impression left by images

      • Image = way of seeing + new thing seen

  • Clarity of expression conveyed by the precise image

  • Intense juxtapositions to liberate the poem from time limits and space limits.

  • Eliot and Pound > exposed to rhythmic patterns of romance languages (Eliot > French / Pound > Italian)

  • Frost influenced by the Latin syntactic structures of the eclogues and georgic poetry

  • African-American poets (Hughes .) > used their inherited rhythms and speech + incorporated syncopated rhythms of jazz to their compositions.


    This Modernist openness to non-native forms of expression led to an interest in Orientalism

    • The Japanese haiku tradition made strong impact European and American writers in search of new sounds and forms.

    • Chinese ideograms supplied pictorial quality of .....


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