American Literature

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American Literature
030533/4/5, 5th Dec. 2006
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Lecture Ten

• The American Modernism
• (I)
• (1914 - 1945)

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• Part One Introduction
• I. The background of producing modernism
• Charles Darwins The Origin of Species (1859)
  radically altered the nineteenth century romantic
  view that nature, especially human nature, was
  benign.
• Herbert Spencer and the "Gospel of Wealth" or
  Social Darwinism reconciled individualism with
  capitalism by suggesting that the interests of
  each citizen as well as the interests of the
  state are served by free economic expansion.
• The work of Marx, and Freud, as well as other
  great intellectual explorers and rebels had
  mounted an assault against orthodox religious
  faith that lasted into the twentieth century.
• World War I in particular deepened doubt and
  reauthorized disillusionment.
• Another source of disillusionment was the rapid
  transformation of American society that
  accelerated with World War I.

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• II. Modernism? http//www.newadvent.org/cathen/104
  15a.htm
• Modernism is a cultural movement that generally
  includes the progressive art and architecture,
  design, literature, music, dance, painting and
  other visual arts which emerged in the beginning
  of the 20th century , particularly in the years
  following World War I. It was a movement of
  artists and designers who rebelled against late
  19th century academic and historicist tradition,
  and embraced the new economic, social and
  political aspects of the emerging modern world.
• The avant-garde movements that followed-including
  Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism,
  Futurism, Expressionism, Constructivism, De
  Stijl, and Abstract Expressionism-are generally
  defined as Modernist.

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• Modernism in literature is not easily summarized,
  but the key elements are experimentation,
  anti-realism, individualism and a stress on the
  cerebral rather than emotive aspects.
• The work of Modernist writers is characterized by
  showing the disenchantment, dislocation, and
  alienation of men in the world, and by the
  emphasis on experimentation and formalism and
  objectivism which are, in most cases, a reaction
  to the cataclysm known as the Modern Age.
• Among American writers, the best-known Modernists
  are T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound, F.Scott Fitzgerald,
  Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and so on.

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• III. The Schools of American Modernism
• Modern poetry experiments in form (Imagism)
• Prose Writing modern realism (the Lost
  Generation)
• Novels of Social Awareness
• The Harlem Renaissance
• The Fugitives and New Criticism
• The 20th Century American Drama

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Part Two Modern poetry experiments in form
(Imagism)
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• I. Imagism
• It is a Movement in U.S. and English poetry
  characterized by the use of concrete language and
  figures of speech, modern subject matter,
  metrical freedom, and avoidance of romantic or
  mystical themes, aiming at clarity of expression
  through the use of precise visual images.
• It grew out of the Symbolist Movement in 1912 and
  was initially led by Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and
  others.
• The Imagist manifesto came out in 1912 showed
  three Imagist poetic principles direct treatment
  of the thing(no fuss, frill, or ornament),
  exclusion of superfluous words(precision and
  economy of expression), the rhythm of the musical
  phrase rather than the sequence of a
  metronome(free verse form and music).

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• Pound defined an image as that which presents an
  intellectual and emotional complex in an instant
  of time, and later he extended this definition
  when he stated that an image was a vortex or
  cluster of fused ideas, endowed with energy.
• There existed great influence of Chinese poetry
  on the Imagist movement. Imagists found value in
  Chinese poetry was because Chinese poetry is, by
  virtue of the ideographic and pictographic nature
  of the Chinese language, essentially imagistic
  poetry.

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• II. The Major Representatives of the Modern
  Poetry
• Ezra Pound (1885- 1972)
• T.S.Eliot (1888 - 1965)
• Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955)
• William Carlos Williams (1883 - 1963)
• Robert Frost (1874 - 1963)
• E.E.Cummings (1894 - 1963)

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?. Ezra Pound (1885 - 1972)
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• 1. His Life
• Born in Idaho in 1885 and raised in Pennsylvania,
  Ezra Pound spent most of his life in Europe and
  became one of the 20th century's most influential
  -- and controversial -- poets in the English
  language.
• Pound was undoubtedly a genius. Before he
  graduated from university, he had mastered 9
  languages as well as English grammar and
  literature. After college in Pennsylvania and a
  brief stint as a teacher, in 1908 Pound travelled
  to Venice and then to London, where he refined
  his aesthetic sensibilities and edited the
  anthology Des Imagistes (1914).
• Pound championed the likes of T. S. Eliot,
  William Carlos Williams and James Joyce and,
  influenced by Chinese and Japanese poetry,
  advocated free meter and a more economical use of
  words and images in poetic expression, leading
  the Imagist Movement of poetry.

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• He moved to Paris in 1920 and got acquainted with
  Gertrude Stein and her circle of friends (which
  included Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso),
  then settled in Italy in 1924.
• Enamored with Benito Mussolini, Pound made
  anti-American radio broadcasts during World War
  II. He was arrested as a traitor in 1945 and
  initially confined in Pisa. He was then sent to
  the U.S., where he was deemed mentally unfit to
  stand trial for treason.
• Pound was confined for 12 years in a hospital
  (actually prison) for the criminally insane in
  Washington. During this time he translated works
  of ancient Greek and ancient Chinese literature.
  While in prison, he was awarded a prestigious
  poetry prize in 1949 for his last Cantos.
• In 1958 he returned to Italy, where he continued
  to write and make translations until he died in
  1972.

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• 2. His works
• Pound wrote 70 books and over 1500 articles in
  his life.
• His major work of poetry is The Cantos, a long
  poem which he wrote in sections between 1915 and
  1945.
• 3. His masterpiece The Cantos
• In this poem, he traces the rise and fall of
  eastern and western empires, the destruction
  caused by greed and materialism.
• He deplores the corruption of America after the
  heroic time of Jefferson,
• The last part, produced from his own suffering,
  is the most moving.

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• 4. His poetic features
• Ezra Pound is often considered as the poet who is
  most responsible for defining and promoting a
  modernist aesthetic in poetry. His critical
  theories have great influence on many important
  American and British poets.
• Throughout the 1920s, he was much involved in
  most of the major artistic movements. He was the
  leader of the Imagist school in poetry. He
  believed that good poetry was based on images
  rather than ideas.
• As an imagist himself, he advocated and followed
  the imagist credo, writing succinct verse of dry
  clarity and hard outline in which an exact visual
  image made a total poetic statement.
• His technique came from classical Chinese and
  Japanese poetry. On one hand the stressed
  clarity, precision, and economy of language. On
  the other hand, Pound mused the traditional rhyme
  and meter in order to, as Pound put it, compose
  in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the
  sequence of metronome.

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• A Chinese imagistic poetry
• Autumn
• Evening crows perch on old trees wreathed with
  withered vine,
• Water of a stream flows by a family cottage near
  a tiny bridge.
• A lean horse walks on an ancient road in western
  breeze,
• The sun is setting in the west,
• The heart-broken one is at the end of the Earth.
• ?????
• ???
• ????????,????????,
• ????????,????,???????

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• There are nine nouns or nominal phrases placed in
  the first three lines in isolation from each
  other.
• To appreciate the poem you should link the scenes
  produced through these words up in your
  imagination by way like montage in movie art. So,
  a vivid picture like a story will be displayed in
  your mind In sight of the beautiful scenery with
  withered vine, old tree, crow returning home at
  dusk, small bridge, river and households, a man,
  accompanied by west wind and a thin horse on the
  ancient road, is suffering from homesickness

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• 5. In a Station of the Metro
• The apparition of these faces in the crowd
• Petals on a wet, black bough.
• ?????????????,
• ??????????????

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• About the poem
• The Metro is the underground railway of Paris.
• The word apparition, with its double meaning,
  binds the two aspects of the observation
  together
• Apparition meaning appearance, in the sense of
  something which appears, or shows up something
  which can be clearly observed.
• Apparition meaning something which seems real but
  perhaps is not real something ghostly which
  cannot be clearly observed.

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• The poem is an observation of the poet of the
  human faces seen in a Paris subway station. It
  looks to be a modern adoption of the Japanese
  haiku.
• He tries to render exactly his observation of
  human faces seen in an underground railway
  station. He sees the faces, turned variously
  toward light and darkness, like flower petals
  which are half absorbed by, half resisting, the
  wet, dark texture of a bough.
• Repeating it, you can have a colorful picture,
  also you can feel the beauty of music through
  its repetition of different vowels and
  consonants, such as /p/ and /au/. Especially the
  repetition of /e/ in the second line emphasize
  its sense of music.

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• In this brief poem, Pound uses the fewest
  possible words to convey an accurate image,
  according to the principles of the Imagists.
  Pound wrote an account of its composition, which
  claims that the poems form was determined by the
  experience that inspired it, evolving organically
  rather than being chosen arbitrarily.
• Whether truth or myth, the piece has become a
  famous document in the history of Imagism.

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• Homework
• Search for Fitzgeralds personal information and
  report to the class.
• Read his masterpiece The Great Gatsby and give a
  simple summary.