Literary History 2018

• Naturalism insists on the determinism of the environment (both natural and social) on the individual.

• contradicts not only the Romantic credo, but also the political convictions dominant in the US.

• Naturalism insists on an unsparing and merciless depiction of daily „life among the lowly.“

• The meticulous description of details: To be as truthful as possible in the representation, every single detail adds to the impression of accuracy and authenticity

• as the environment is the shaping force of man‘s fate, this environment has to be described as detailed as possible in order to dramatize its impact.

• naturalistic authors use a limited omniscient authorial voice, since a totally omniscient voice would suggest a degree of control and knowledge.

• the anti-hero is born, as any genuine heroism would undermine the determinism inherent in Naturalism.  

• While Naturalism can thus be considered „un-American“ in its philosophy, its preoccupation with the common man aligns it with other American values – equality and democracy.
• "If man is at the mercy of powers and forces beyond his/her control, then s/he cannot be made responsible for what is happening; nor can s/he be expected to become the source of any kind of resistance"
• The only way to create some kind of „connection“ between the individuals exposed to those outside forces is empathy, which, ironically, is a predominantly Romantic concept.      
• the „sensationalistic“ aspects of naturalistic sujéts (Prostitutes, Muggers, criminals, psychopaths) are also in the tradition of the Gothic and Romanticism.
• driving force is social criticism, the determinism that informs Crane’s and Zola’s philosophies limit the impact of human intervention against the very conditions they so mercilessly portray and unveil

• Stephen Crane is one of the most influential naturalists of his time.
• “There is a sublime egotism in talking of honesty. I, however, do not say that I am honest. I merely say that I am as nearly honest as a weak mental machinery will allow. This aim in life struck me as the only thing worth while. A man is sure to fail at it, but there is something in the failure.“

• „The Outcasts of Poker Flat“ shows the protagonists mercilessly exposed to the forces of nature – and the most ‘heroic’ of them dies. Life in view of the naturalist is just what the last line of the story indicates: A game where you can easily lose, no matter who you are.  
• Many of London‘s most important works describe the fight of survival of man in nature
• In contrast to the works of Crane and London, Theodore Dreiser‘s novels are set in urban environments, which exert an influence as overpowering as that of nature.
• As Dreiser, Frank Norris sketches the (unwholesome) influences of capitalism on the individual

• Naturalism, Regionalism, Feminism and Realism are reactions against both the literary style of Romanticism and the genteel value system of Victorianism, although they do so with different agendas and different goals in mind

• In contrast to Naturalism‘s rather bleak and determinisitic outlook, Realism strives to represent / negotiate the reality of American life mostly in the form of a dialogic structure and an educational agenda.

• For Realism, the intersubjective / dialogic communication about truth is what literature has to reflect.

• Thus dialogue – both in the story, and between the story and the reader – form a basic ingredient of realism

• Realism has thus a didactic motivation

• The narrator is almost completely pushed into the background; the reader must find out about the truth in a dialogue with the text, which an omniscient narrator would undermine.

• inner processes of protagonists form the main focus of realist texts

• the process of learning becomes essential in a more open and contingent world (learning your social roles, and to read your environment)

• the environment and its detailed depiction are important: Not, however, to show its inescapable power, but to learn how to decipher it, and to react accordingly.

• the dialogic negotiation of both other human beings and the world around them is not always successful
• the misreading of either one can have fatal consequences
• Winterbourne„misreads“Daisy Miller repeatedly – although he is considerably attracted to her – and Daisy misreads him as well as the cultural context
• The attempts to decipher Daisy Miller run like a red thread through the story
• The attempt to negotiate what he saw as a clash of the almost incompatible cultural values of „old“ Europe and the „new“ US: European finesse, experience, class stratification, decadence vs. US American democracy, innocence, parochialism and self-assurance
• allegorical dimension to its characters 

• Some see modernity‘s beginnings: at the end of the Renaissance, with the beginning of European colonialism
• Others see it co-extensive with the advent of the Enlightenment
• Others consider it to start at the end of the 19th century, with industrialization and the dramatic increase of technology.
• many connote with modernity an all-encompassing subjection of the individual
• others describe it as an all-encompassing liberation of the individual
• as the age of an unprecedented individuation and restless individualism that subverts social ties, but also sheds social restrictions.  

• With the concept of modernism – which has remained as vague as that of modernity – what is described are an array of aesthetic reactions to modernity, which are as contradictory and heterogeneous as modernity itself.

• If any common denominator exists between the different concepts of modernities and modernisms, it is expressed in Ezra Pound‘s demand: „Make it new!“

• radical break with everything that went before
• Modernism conceives of itself as a radical rupture with history, not only as far as art (or art history) itself, but also as far as Victorian values and world-views are concerned.
• In its search for new means to express the new experiences the modern life-world provides, it is strongly influenced by new technologies, but also by new subjects that offer themselves
• Thus, not only the rising influence of the camera and photography can be felt, but also new sujets for art itself.
• American modernists have also been termed „Skyscraper Primitives.“

• American Modernism can be differentiated into two branches:
  An ‘avant-garde‘ one, and one that is more a radicalization of Naturalism.

• While Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, and Ezra Pound might be assembled amongst the former,
  the works of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald might be subsumed in the latter group.

• As its predecessors Realism and Naturalism, Modernism arrives at America’s shores from Europe.

• One of the pivotal occasions that willrevolutionize the American art landscape 
• Though it is strongly criticized by both the press and the public, it has an enormous influence on the American scene
•  Americans are for the first time exposed to avant-garde European modernism comprising Dada, Cubism, Symbolism, and Neo-Impressionism
• Consequences: metalevels, making fun of previous paintings; creation of uproar and shock but also enormously influential

• Photographer Alfred Stieglitz is instrumental in familiarizing the American art scene with European modernist art in his Studio 291 in New York.

Georges Braque, Marcel Duchamps, Pablo Picasso

• Seemingly inconspicuous objects are taken out of the flow of time and their context.
• They are seen in a new way; in fact what is important is not so much the object itself, as its new, almost virgin act of perception.
• They are thus also freed from their familiar context, from the sedimentation of meaning they have acquired over time
• Modernism thus embarks upon defamiliarization.

• Gertrude Stein‘s repetitive famous sentence is not addressed to those with faulty hearing devices.
• It is designed to remind the reader that this object – the rose – is so swamped with connotations (as a symbol of love, as an allegory of perfection, the queen of flowers) that we are hardly able to see the single and singular object anymore.

Here is how Gertrude Stein describes an apple in her collection of „still lives,“ Tender Buttons (1914):

    „Apple plum, carpet steak, seed clam, coloured wine, calm seen, cold cream, best shake, potato, and no gold work with pet, a green seen is called bake and change sweet is bready, a little piece please.“

• Almost like the „rays“ of Cubism, very personal, idiosyncratic connotations shed a „new light“ on what to most readers would seem like an ordinary object without any significance.
• Cubism itself is strongly influenced by new achievements in serial photography

• Although the poetry of modernism is highly experimental, most of them avoid metaphors, which threaten to take away attention from the „thing itself.“

• While the works of Williams and Stein – though experimental and difficult – are informed by a democratic spirit, the oeuvre of Ezra Pound is more „elitist“ in its character, especially when he later turns to Vorticism, trying, as Cubism, to capture movement in an image. 

• Imagism drives at even more clarity than Cubism-inspired modernism.
• The Imagists write succinct verse of dry clarity and hard outline in  which an exact visual image makes a total poetic statement.
• Imagism is a successor to the French Symbolist movement but, whereas Symbolism has an affinity to music, Imagism seeks analogy with sculpture.
• Williams and Pound are usually considered Imagists.

1. To use the language of common speech, but to employ the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.
2. We believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free verse than in conventional forms. In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea.
3. Absolute freedom in the choice of subject.
4. To present an image. We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous. It is for this reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real difficulties of his art.
5. To produce a poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite. 
6. Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry.

• The one figure that the American modernists had to grapple with was Walt Whitman.
• His innovative poetry, as well as his democratic spirit, made him the overpowering figure for many later poets, including Williams, Pound, and Allen Ginsberg.

• Omnivorous Whitman: in his attempt not to leave out a single aspect or persona from his democratic enterprise, some of Whitman’s poems approach the quality of lists, which some commentators have compared to shopping lists or phone book entries
• Whitman Disillusioned: A later, disillusioned Whitman, however, must concede that the urbanization and the unbridled „pursuit of happiness“ have strongly discredited his democratic and individualistic ethos.

• One of the most „non-experimental“writers of modernism is Ernest Hemingway.
• Having learnt his craft as a journalist, Hemingway’s style has been described with the help of the „Iceberg Theory“:
  As an iceberg, Hemingway’s ultra-sparse prose unveils only about 20% of what it has to say; the rest is hidden beneath.
• Hardly any story illustrates this more than his short story „A Cat in the Rain,“ where the drama surrounding the appearance and disappearance of a little kitten carries the load of an comprehensive marriage crisis.

• Among the most important English authors are: W. H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.
• In its English variety, too, Modernism comprises many different styles:
  From the sometimes breathtaking language plays of James Joyce’s Ulyssesvia the austere style of Auden, to the epic poems of Eliot (The Waste Land) the grotesque aesthetics of Beckett (Waiting for Godot) and the feminist aesthetics of Woolf.
• Experimentation and individualism become virtues, where in the past they had been discouraged Victorian values. Modernism is set in motion through a series of cultural shocks.
• The first of these great shocks is the Great War, which ravages Europe from 1914 through 1918, known as the “War to End All Wars.”

• Writers who adopt the Modern point of view often do so quite deliberately and self-consciously: a central preoccupation of Modernism is with the inner self and consciousness
• In contrast to the Romantic world view, the Modernist cares rather little for Nature, Being, or the overarching structures of history. 
• Instead of progress and growth, the Modernist intelligentsia sees decay and a growing alienation of the individual. 
  The machinery of modern society is perceived as impersonal, capitalist, and antagonistic to the artistic impulse.
• Leading up to the First World War, Imagist poetry dominates the scene, sweepingprevious aesthetic points of view under the rug. The Imagists, among them Ezra Pound, seek to boil language down to its absolute essence.

• Minimalist language: a lessening of structural rules and a kind of directness that Victorian and Romantic poetry seriously lacked. 
• Dreaminess or Pastoral poetry are abandoned in favor of this cold, mechanized poetics.
• Imagist poetry is almost always short, unrhymed, and noticeably sparse in terms of adjectives and adverbs. It tries to avoid metaphor at all costs.
  At some points, the line between poetry and natural language becomes blurred (Whitman)
• Potential subjects for poetry are now limitless, and poets take full advantage of this new freedom. 
• while what is happening can be called a “democratization of sujets", the strongly experimental style creates a certain aesthetic mandarinism.

• Eliot picks up where the Imagists left off, while adding some of his own peculiar aesthetics to the mix.
• His principal contribution to twentieth century verse is a return to highly intellectual, allusive poetry.
• He looks backwards for inspiration, but he is not at all nostalgic or romantic about the past.
• Eliot’s productionsare entirely in the modern style
• One of the distinguishing characteristics of Eliot’s work is the manner in which he seamlessly moves from very high, formal verse into a more conversational and easy style.
• Yet even when his poetic voice sounds very colloquial, there is a current underneath, which hides secondary meanings
• pioneer of the ironic mode in poetry: deceptive appearances hiding difficult truths.

• As the outbreak of WWII constitutes something like the end of the modernist movement, it might be fitting to finish the overview of Modernism with W.H. Auden’s poem „1 September, 1939.“
• In it, the sadness of historical lessons not learned, a highly individualized aesthetics, as well as the attempt to transcend the individual point of view in creating a new public sphere are crystallized into one poem
• In the light of what will happen immediately afterwards, the last lines of the poem almost sound like the last cries of Modernism

• post-war prosperity and conformity
• race barrier still exists
• popular culture: TV enters the living room
• the golden age of American churches
• conservatism and family values
• the baby boom, new housing styles
• Immense increase in prosperity
• consumer culture
• creation of Suburbia
• Eisenhower Years 1952-60

• 50’s counter-culture
• Rockn’n’Roll: youth culture (Elvis)
• sex and drugs: The Beat Generation 

• another, highly individual form of expression – the poetry of the personal “I”
• this style of writing emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s and is associated with poets such as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton
• the confessional poetry of the mid-20^thcentury dealt with subject matter that previously had not been openly discussed in American poetry
• Private experiences with and feelings about death, trauma, depression and relationships were addressed, often in an autobiographical manner
• the confessional poets were not merely recording their emotions on paper
• craft and construction extremely important to their work
• some of their treatment of the poetic self was groundbreaking and shocking to readers

• strongly influenced by the confessionalist poetry of Robert Lowell
• combine very personal outlooks with social topics such as the role of women in the frontier myth or as mothers

• after WWII, modernist art comes back to Europe
• once imported from Europe to the US, starting with the famous Armory Show in 1917, where the US public was confronted for the first time with the works of Picasso, the cubists, modern returns as “Abstract Expressionsm”