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The Birth of American Modernism

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Title: The Birth of American Modernism


1
The Birth of American Modernism
  • (1910-1930)

2
Introduction to Modernism
  • CA Standard LRA 3.5 c Analyze recognized works
    of American literature representing a variety of
    genres and traditions.
  • Objectives
  • Review American literary movements of the 18th
    and 19th Centuries.
  • Define Modernism and explain its causes.

3
Genealogy of Ideas
  • Colonialism the Revolutionary Period
  • (Beginnings-1800)
  • Puritan Morality
  • Total Depravity
  • Unconditional Election
  • Limited Atonement
  • Irresistible Grace
  • Perseverance of the Saints
  • Enlightenment
  • Science begins to question religious authority
    (Truth discovered through reason rather than
    faith)
  • American Revolution
  • America as the birth of an idea, Alexis de
    Tocqueville.
  • Democracy of individual freedoms (freedom from
    the bourgeois or ruling classes, and/or royalty).

4
Genealogy of Ideas
  • Romanticism Transcendentalism
  • (1800-1860)
  • Birth of an American Literary Identity separate
    from Europe
  • A reaction to Enlightenment (Truth through
    reason).
  • Romantics found truth through the beauty of
    nature, death.
  • The principle of God (as essence) is felt through
    nature.
  • Transcendentalism is a reaction to formalized
    religion representing a form of spirituality.
  • Transcendentalism involves the ability to
    transcend physical principles for a higher
    spiritual plane.
  • Transcendentalism is based on an idea of basic
    human goodness underlying all people as opposed
    to Puritan Calvinism. (Emerson).
  • Transcendentalism based on Calvinism explores the
    darker sides of romantic issues such as death or
    human suffering (Poe).

5
Genealogy of Ideas
  • Realism and Regionalism
  • (1860-1910)
  • The Civil War (testing the nationality of the
    Constitution)
  • Romantic/Transcendental ideas are displaced by
    realism (depictions of everyday life).
  • The development of regional literature in the
    local vernacular (rather than formal English).
  • Issues of inequality become prominent.
  • The rise of industrialism.

6
Genealogy of Ideas
  • American Modernism
  • (1910-1945)
  • WWI A brutal assault on the orderly
    civilization of the nineteenth century
    (Lathbury, 2006, p. 7).
  • WWI Meaningless violence to many Americans
  • Mechanisticfirst sight of the technology of
    killing (without seeing the face of the enemy)
  • Belief in human reason shaken.
  • Multiple perspectives on the traditional
  • Picasso
  • Arnold Schoenberg
  • T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, James Joyce, e.
    e. cummings
  • Abandonment of convention
  • The Roaring Twenties (Jazz Rhythms . . .
  • The Great Depression
  • The Harlem Renaissance

7
  • World War I . . . destroyed faith in progress,
    but it did more than thatit made clear to
    perceptive thinkers . . . that violence prowled
    underneath mans apparent harmony and
    rationality.
  • --William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of
    Prosperity

8
What is American Modernism?
  • A cultural movement marked by cynicism and
    disillusionment that was that was influenced by
    historical events at the birth of the 20th
    Century beginning with World War I.

9
Subversion of Social Norms/Cultural Sureties
  • Subversion is rebel, overthrow, or undermine
    something.
  • Women were given the right to vote in 1920.
  • Hemlines raised Margaret Sanger introduces the
    idea of birth control.
  • Karl Marxs ideas flourish the Bolshevik
    Revolution overthrows Russias czarist government
    and establishes the Soviet Union.
  • Writers begin to explore these new ideas.

10
Theme of Alienation
  • Alienation the feeling of being turned away or
    rejected.
  • Sense of alienation in literature
  • The archetypal character belongs to a lost
    generation
  • (Gertrude Stein)
  • The antihero suffers from a dissociation of
    sensibilityseparation of thought from feeling
    (T. S. Eliot)
  • American Dream as a Dream deferred
  • (Langston Hughes).

11
Valorization of the Antihero
  • The antihero Demonstrates the uncertainty felt by
    individuals living in this era.
  • Examples include Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby,
    Lt. Henry in A Farewell to Arms

12
Urbanscapes
  • Life in the city differs from life on the farm
    writers began to explore city life.
  • Conflicts begin to center on society.

13
Summary
  • Modernism can be defined as _______.
  • Its attitude __________________. It was a result
    of ___________________. Features of __________
    include ________, _______, _________ and
    ____________.
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