1

American Literature 1900-1945

Major Cultural and Political Directions
Social Darwinism
O coined in the late 19th century
O humans, like animals and plants, compete in a struggle for existence in which natural selection results in
survival of the fittest
O Some social Darwinists: governments should not interfere with human competition by attempting to
regulate the economy or cure social ills such as poverty
O advocate a laissez-faire political and economic system competition and self-interest in social and
business affairs
O Social Darwinist - applied loosely to anyone who interprets human society primarily in terms of biology,
struggle, competition, or natural law (a philosophy based on what are considered the permanent
characteristics of human nature)
O sociologist Herbert Spencer coined the phrase survival of the fittest to describe the outcome of
competition between social groups.
O In Social Statics (1850) and other works: through competition social evolution would automatically
produce prosperity and personal liberty unparalleled in human history
O United States: Spencer gained considerable support among intellectuals and some businessmen, incl.
steel manufacturer Andrew Carnegie (visit to the United States in 1883)
O the most prominent American social Darwinist of the 1880s William Graham Sumner
Progressivism
O U.S. Legislative Reforms
the early 20th century
combat social problems such as dangerous working / living conditions > industrialization &
urbanization
O Progressives turned to government to achieve their goals; national in scope: included both Democrats and
Republicans.
O embraced four types of reform:
Economic--"Monopoly
Structural and Political--"Efficiency (Taylorism)
Social--"Democracy"
Moral--"Purity
O curb corporate power / end business monopolies
O wipe out (political) corruption
O democratize electoral procedures,
O protect working people / bridge the gap between social classes.
O Examples:
Elkins Act (1903): railroads prohibited from giving secret rebates and charging discriminatory
rates
Meat Inspection Act (1906):inspection required for cattle, sheep, goats, and hogs sold for meat in
interstate or foreign commerce.
Pure Food and Drug Act (1906): requirement to use pure ingredients and list them on packaging.
Federal Farm Loan Act (1916): Congress provides long-term credit at low interest for farmers.
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18th Amendment (1919): Prohibition (outlawed alcoholic drinks) [repealed in 1933 - 21st
Amendment]
19th Amendment (1920): Women are given the right to vote etc.
O 1890s - 1910s: affected local, state, and national politics; also left a mark on journalism, academic life,
cultural life, and social justice movements
O Most of these reforms - triggered by investigative/muckraking journalism & writers associated with this
movement:
Lincoln Steffens: The Shame of the Cities (1904) & The Struggle for Self-Government (1906)
Thorstein Veblen: The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)
Ray Stannard Baker: Following the Color Line (1908)
Theodore Dreiser: The Financier (1912) & The Titan (1914)
Upton Sinclair: The Jungle (1906)
Educator John Dewey: emphasized a child-centered philosophy of pedagogy (known as
progressive education)
Progressivism in the Cities and States
O 1889 - Jane Addams founded Hull House
center for welfare work in Chicago
championed the causes of labor reform, public education, and immigrants rights
Addamss book - Twenty Years at Hull House
O Initiated the social settlement movement, which originated in cities in the 1890s
O There were 100 settlement houses in 1900, 200 in 1905, and 400 in 1910.
O provided nurseries, adult education classes, and recreational opportunities for children and adults
O Many reforms were first implemented at the state level:
Elimination / regulation of child labor; by 1907: 30 states abolished child labor
cutting workers hours, particularly women (Muller v. Oregon 10 h day)
Establishing a minimum wage; endorsement of workmens compensation (an insurance plan to
aid workers injured on the job) and an end to homework (piecework done in tenements).
O support from a broad section of the middle classeditors, teachers, professionals, and business leaders
who shared common values.
Progressivism at the National Level
O major goal: government regulation of business:
antitrust laws to eliminate monopolies
lower tariffs
graduated income tax
system to control currency
O Spokespersons: President Theodore Roosevelt (New Deal) [1901-1909],
Progressive Party (ies)
O name of three distinct political parties in U.S. history
O first Progressive Party: known colloquially as the Bull Moose Party
founded by Theodore Roosevelt, after a bitter fight for the Republican presidential nomination
among the president William H. Taft, the Wisconsin senator Robert M. La Follette, in 1912. Taft
won the internal elections but the Democrat Woodrow Wilson won the presidential ones.
ended in 1917, as most of the partys members joined the Republican Party
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O Second progressive party: 1924 - a liberal coalition, frustrated by conservative domination of both major
parties the League for Progressive Political Action (popularly called the Progressive Party)
Senator La Follette for president and Montana Democratic Senator Burton K. Wheeler for VP
O third Progressive Party - 1948 by dissident Democrats
nominated ex-VP Wallace for president and Idaho Democratic senator Glen H. Taylor for vice
president
Supported by the Communist Party; accused of being communist-dominated during the ensuing
Cold War, stopped playing a political role after the 1948 elections.
End of 19
th
Century Beginning of 20
th
Century Journalism: Yellow & Muckraking
Yellow journalism
O pejorative reference to journalism that features scandal-mongering, sensationalism, jingoism or other
unethical or unprofessional practices (by news media organizations / individual journalists)
O originated during the circulation battles between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William
Randolph Hearst's New York Journal (1895 approx.1898)
O can refer specifically to this period
O Both papers were accused by critics of sensationalizing the news in order to drive up circulation,
although the newspapers did serious reporting as well.
O The New York Press coined the term "Yellow Journalism" in early 1897 to describe the papers of
Pulitzer and Hearst.
O The newspaper did not define the term, and in 1898 simply elaborated, "We called them Yellow because
they are Yellow."[1]
O Pulitzer: newspapers were public institutions with a duty to improve society, and he put the World in the
service of social reform.
O During a heat wave in 1883, World reporters went into the Manhattan's tenements, writing stories
about the appalling living conditions of immigrants and the toll the heat took on the children.
O Stories headlined "How Babies Are Baked" and "Lines of Little Hearses" spurred reform and
drove up the World's circulation
O Hearst read the World while studying at Harvard University and resolved to make the Examiner as bright
as Pulitzer's paper.[7].
O Under his leadership, the Examiner devoted 24 percent of its space to crime, presenting the stories
as morality plays, and sprinkled adultery and "nudity" (by 19th century standards) on the front
page
O also increased its space for international news
O sent reporters out to uncover municipal corruption and inefficiency
O discovered that indigent women were treated with "gross cruelty" in a San Francisco Hospital.
The entire hospital staff was fired the morning the piece appeared
O Both were Democratic / sympathetic to labor and immigrants (a sharp contrast to publishers like the New
York Tribune's Whitelaw Reid, who blamed their poverty on moral defects) / both invested enormous
resources in their Sunday publications
O functioned like weekly magazines, going beyond the normal scope of daily journalism
O included the first color comic strip pages
O Pulitzer and Hearst are often credited (or blamed) for drawing the nation into the Spanish-American War
with sensationalist stories or outright lying.
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O In fact, the vast majority of Americans did not live in New York City, and the decision makers who did
live there probably relied more on staid newspapers like the Times, The Sun or the Post.
O The most famous example of the exaggeration: apocryphal story that artist Frederic Remington
telegrammed Hearst to tell him all was quiet in Cuba and "There will be no war." Hearst responded
"Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war."
Investigative/Muckraking Journalism
O 1880 Henry Demarest Lloyd - a series of articles exposing corruption in business and politics:
The Story of a Great Monopoly (1881) &
The Political Economy of Seventy-Three Million Dollars (1882) in the Atlantic Monthly
Making Bread Dear (1883) & Lords of Industry (1884) in the North American Review.
O Articles caused a stir & Lloyd - described as the first American investigative journalist.
O Nellie Bly - another important pioneer in investigative journalism
+ an eighteen year old reporter with the Pittsburgh Dispatch
+ first-hand tales of the lives of ordinary people
+ often obtained this material by becoming involved in a series of undercover adventures: worked in a
Pittsburgh factory to investigate child labour, low wages and unsafe working conditions.
Nelly Bly (contd)
+ interested in writing about social problems & suggested ways that they could be solved.
+ 1887 recruited by Joseph Pulitzer to write for his newspaper, the New York World; wrote about poverty,
housing and labour conditions in New York
+ feigned insanity to get into New York's insane asylum on Blackwell's Island. Bly discovered that
patients were fed vermin-infested food and physically abused by the staff.
+ Another early example of investigative journalism: Jacob A. Riiss work.
+ 1899 - Scribner's Magazine published a series of articles by Riis entitled How the Other Half
Lives.
+ December 1899 - Benjamin Flower established The Arena (magazine) specialized in this type of
journalism.
+ articles on poverty, sweatshops, slum clearance, unemployment and child labour
+ proclaimed that his intention was to create a movement that would "agitate, educate, organize and
move forward, casting aside timidity and insisting that the Republic shall no longer lag behind in
the march of progress."
+ Investigative journalism became a movement in 1902
+ magazines such as McClure's Magazine & Everybody's Magazine joined Arena in the struggle for social
reform.
+ magazines became extremely popular & other mainstream publications - Cosmopolitan & the
Saturday Evening Post began publishing articles exposing corruption in politics and business.
+ By 1906 - combined sales of the ten magazines that concentrated on investigative journalism reached a
total circulation of 3,000,0000.
+ Some of these journalists used the material they had obtained and turned them into novels:
+ Charles Edward Russell wrote several novels based on journalistic research and each one sold
over 30,000 copies
+ Upton Sinclair was the most successful of these novelists;The Jungle and The Brass Check, were
both best-sellers with sales of over 100,000.
+ Writers and publishers associated with this movement (1900 1914) included:
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+ Frank Norris
+ Ida Tarbell
+ Charles Edward Russell
+ Lincoln Steffens
+ David Graham Phillips
+ C. P. Connolly
+ Benjamin Hampton
+ Upton Sinclair
+ Thomas Lawson
+ Alfred Henry Lewis
+ Ray Stannard Baker
+ President Theodore Roosevelt - initiated legislation that would help tackle some of the problems
illustrated by these journalist (Pure Food and Drugs Act [1906] & the Meat Inspection Act [1906])
+ Following their attack (initiated by David Graham Phillips in Cosmopolitan) on some of Roosevelts
political allies, he called them muckrakers /muckraking journalism:
+ "the man who could look no way but downward with the muck-rake in his hands; who would
neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth on
the floor."
Populism
O agrarian movement of the late 19th century
O developed mainly in the area from Texas to the Dakotas
O grew into a Farmer-Labor political coalition
O began during the economic depression of the 1870s: sharp decline in the income of farmers / their living
and operating costs were rising.
O The farmers began to organize; a large numbers of them joined the National Grange, the Farmers'
Alliances etc
O cooperative organizations purposes:
O lower farmers' costs by selling supplies at reduced prices
O loaning money at rates below those charged by banks
O building warehouses to store crops until prices became favorable
O taking political action to achieve these goals.
O By 1891, movement gained sufficient strength; the alliances joined the Knights of Labor a.o. the
People's Party; members called Populists
O Principal objectives:
O free coinage of silver
O issuance of large amounts of paper currency (inflationary measures tended to raise farm prices &
enable farmers to pay off their debts)
O to replicate their cooperative system on a national scale
Objectives (contd)
to lower transportation costs by nationalizing the railroads
to achieve a more equitable distribution of the costs of government by means of a graduated
income tax
to institute direct popular elections of U.S. senators
to inaugurate the 8-hour workday.
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Populist influence peaked in 1896 when William Jennings Bryan, a Democrat who sympathized with the
Populists' agenda, won his party's presidential nomination.
The Populists endorsed Bryan, sacrificing their independent identity.
After he was defeated, the Populist Party faded steadily from the political scene, disappearing about 1908
Populist movement exercised a profound influence on subsequent U.S. political life: almost all the
original Populist demands eventually enacted into law
philosophical movement that has had a major impact on American culture from the late 19th century to
the present
calls for ideas and theories to be tested in practice
all claims about truth, knowledge, morality, and politics must be tested as such
critical of traditional Western philosophy, especially the notion that there are absolute truths and absolute
values
Ongoing efforts to improve society, through such means as education or politics = problem-solving
approach
emphasis on connecting theory to practice
pragmatists denial of absolutes, moreover, challenged the foundations of religion, government, and
schools of thought
pragmatism influenced developments in psychology, sociology, education, semiotics (the study of signs
and symbols), and scientific method, as well as philosophy, cultural criticism, and social reform
movements
three most important pragmatists: American philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and
John Dewey
Socialism
E The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Socialism:
political and economic theory that advocates a system of collective or government ownership and
management of the means of production and distribution of goods.
Usually contrasted to capitalism whose basic tenet is the sanctity of private property.
Also, capitalism stresses competition and profit, whereas socialism calls for cooperation and
social service.
broader sense socialism - often used loosely to describe a wide array of economic theories:
E those that hold that only certain public utilities and natural resources should be owned by
the state -- those holding that the state should assume responsibility for all economic
planning and direction.
Innumerable differing socialist programs over the past 150 years; the only common & immutable
aspect: the establishment of cooperation in place of competition.
E late 18th and early 19th cent. as a reaction to the economic and social changes associated with the
Industrial Revolution:
huge discrepancies in terms of income between the factory owners & the workers;
E first theorist who may properly be called socialist was Franois Nol Babeuf (1760 - 1797)
came to prominence during the French Revolution (17891799);
the doctrine of class war between capital and labor later to be seen in Marxism.
E Other socialist writers following Babeuf seemed more moderate: "utopian socialists, such as:
Comte de Saint-Simon:
E production and distribution be carried out by the state ;
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E leaders of society would be industrialists who would found a national community based
upon cooperation and who would eliminate the poverty of the lowest classes.
Charles Fourier,
Robert Owen.
E both believed that social organization should be based on small local collective
communities rather than the large centralist state of Saint-Simon.
E All three: cooperation rather than competition they implicitly rejected class struggle.
E early 19th cent.: numerous utopian communistic settlements founded on the principles of
Fourier and Owen - in Europe and the United States; e.g. New Harmony & Brook Farm.
E socialist thinking has deep roots in the U.S.
E Early and mid-19th cent.: the utopian socialists were followed by politically oriented thinkers: Louis
Blanc (a system of social workshops [1840] that would be controlled by the workers themselves with the
support of the state); anarchist Pierre Joseph Proudhon & insurrectionist Auguste Balnqui;
E the 1840s: communism came into use; it denoted a militant leftist form of socialism:
Proponents: tienne Cabet, Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels:
E Collective ownership of goods;
E A movement that advocated class struggle and revolution to establish a society of
cooperation.
E Other varieties of socialism continued to exist alongside Marxism:
Christian socialism: England; Frederick Denison, Maurice & Charles Kingsley;
E establishment of cooperative workshops based on Christian principles.
Ferdinand Lassalle, founder of the first workers' party in Germany (1863):
E achieving socialism through state action in individual nations, as opposed to the Marxian
emphasis on international revolution.
E Through the efforts of Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, Lassalle's group was
brought into the mainstream of Marxian socialism.
By the 1870s, socialist parties sprang up in many European countries, and they eventually formed
the Second International.
E 1870s: increasing improvement of labor conditions + the apparent failure of the capitalist state to weaken
major schism over the issue of revolution:
nearly all socialists condemned the bourgeois capitalist state; however, the means to react against
it constituted a matter of dispute among socialists:
E a large number: more expedient / efficient to adapt to and reform the state structure; these
were called GRADUALISTS / EVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISTS / EVOLUTIONISTS.
E In 1898, Germany: Eduard Bernstein denied the inevitability of class conflict; he
called for a revision of Marxism that would allow an evolutionary socialism;
E orthodox Marxists, anarchists & syndicalists believed in the absolute necessity of violent
struggle REVOLUTIONISTS.
E E.G. Bernstein's chief opponent, Karl Kautsky, insisted that the German Social
Democratic party adhere strictly to orthodox Marxist principles.
E revisionism made progress in other countries:
Great Britain:
E the Fabian Society (founded in 1884) set forth basic principles of evolutionary socialism
that later became the theoretical basis of the British Labour Party.
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E Guild socialism + principles of William Morris (aesthetic and ethical aims) - had influence
on British thought, but the Labour party, with its policy of gradualism, represented the
mainstream of British socialism.
the United States, the ideological issue led to a split in the Socialist Labor party, founded in 1876
under strong German influence, and the formation (1901) of the revisionist Socialist Party, which
soon became the largest socialist group in the U.S.
Russia / Soviet Union:
E the Russian Social Democratic Labor party divided into the rival camps of Bolshevism
and Menshevism.
E revolutionary opponents of gradualism, the Bolsheviks, who seized power in the Russian
Revolution of 1917 and became the Communist party of the USSR.
E Russian Communists founded the Comintern in order to seize leadership of the
international socialist movement and to foment world revolution
E most European Socialist parties, including the mainstream of the powerful German party,
repudiated the Bolsheviks.
E After 1917, revolutionary socialism, or communism, and evolutionary, or democratic,
socialism were two separate and frequently mutually antagonistic movements.
American Socialism
E Andrew Carnegie about the general late nineteenth-century American attitude toward the socialists:
They were "a parcel of foreign cranks whose communistic ideas" were "the natural growth of
unjust laws of their native land.; the best cure for foreign "isms" was exposure to American
democracy. [Andrew Carnegie, Triumphant Democracy: or Fifty Years' March of the Republic
(1886), p. 348; qtd. in Howard H. Quint - The Forging of American Socialism: Origins of the
Modern Movement (1964)]
E According to capitalists such as Carnegie, socialists complaints had nothing to do with American
realities, which had managed to go beyond the stage of undemocratic, unequal participation of citizens in
the life of the Republic.
E However, the United States in the 1870's possessed a rich socialist tradition: prior to the Civil War and as
early as the seventeenth century:
several religious, secular, and perfectionist communitarian settlements, modeled on Owens /
Fouriers principles. (Quint 5)
activities of the German radicals who flocked to the United States during the 1840's, such as
Wilhelm Weitling, Joseph Wedemeyer, and Friedrich Sorge (Quint 6-7).
Howard H. Quint - The Forging of American Socialism: Origins of the Modern Movement (1964)
E The impulse to reform society through peaceful means, in order to make it conform to eighteenth-
century-derived natural law resurged in 1880s 1890s; e.g.:
Nationalist movement, which ensued upon the publication of Edward Bellamy utopian novel,
Looking Backward;
the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth and the Social Democracy of America.
(Quint 6)
E The roots of these movements may, however, be found in revised Puritan ideals, such as evangelicalism.
Howard H. Quint - The Forging of American Socialism: Origins of the Modern Movement (1964)
E The history of the socialist movement in the late 19
th
beginning of 20
th
centuries U.S. is very complex:
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The platforms differed widely, from Marxist principles only to equal civil rights (equal suffrage,
womens liberation, etc.);
1880s 1890s: confrontations between marxists / lassalleans, a.o. and the trade unions; very
rarely have there been consistent efforts to unite trade unions into the existing socialist parties /
groups; membership in the socialist groups was also contingent on economic prosperity. (Quint
6-37)
1900s: union & socialist agendas overlap & unite under the leadership of Eugene V. Debs; he
received 2.83% of the popular vote in 1908 election, 5.99% of the popular vote in 1912. Debs
received no electoral votes in either of the campaigns. (Quint 137 143)
Howard H. Quint - The Forging of American Socialism: Origins of the Modern Movement (1964)
Lecture 2
Industrialization. International Exhibitions. The Gilded Age.
New Trends in American Photography, Painting, and Architecture.

E The Machine Age (1865-1900)
Production by machine rather than by hand
Involvement of an increasing proportion of the work force in manufacturing
Production concentrated in large, intricately organized factories
Technological innovation, emphasizing new inventions and applied science
Expanded markets, no longer local and regional in scope
Nationwide transportation network (railroad) & communications network (telegraph & telephone)
Capital accumulation for investment in expansion of production
Large enterprises and specialization in all forms of economic activity
Increase in the size and predominance of cities
E Telegraph
E In 1837 the first electrical telegraph instruments were invented by Samuel Morse in the United States and
by Sir Charles Wheatstone and Sir William F. Cooke in Britain. Morse sent the first public telegraph
message in 1844. Pictured here is the original Morse receiving device.
E Iron and steel--central to development of American industry
Andrew Carnegie--built the steel industry with a mill that integrated all stages of refinement
process (from ore to finished rails)
Railroad growth fueled industrial development. Over 100,000 miles of track were laid between
1877 and 1893, doubling the U.S. network
E Standardization of gauge (width of tracks set at 4 feet, 8 1/2 inches) encouraged
development
E Time zone adoption allowed co-ordination of systems (U.S. divided into four zones)
E Adoption of steel rails, bearing heavier loads
E Massive grants of American land (131 million acres from federal government, 49 million
acres from states)
E Transcontinental Railroad
E Locomotives from the eastern and western United States are depicted here meeting in Promontory, Utah,
where crowds gathered to watch the joining of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads on May 10,
1869. This first transcontinental railroad opened the West to supplies and resources from the East and
served as the chief means of transportation for settlers in the West
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E Oil & John D. Rockefeller
First oil derrick drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859
Rockefeller organized Standard Oil Co. and bought out smaller refiners
Organized trusts to combine companies, reduce competition, and increase profits
E Organization of American Labor
Legalized by Commonwealth v. Hunt in 1842, labor unions tended to be small and limited to
skilled trades
Labor strife arose in the 1870s with frequent strikes: Haymarket Massacre, Chicago, 1886 (bomb
killed 7 & wounded 70), Homestead Strike in Pennsylvania, 1892 (seven deaths), Pullman Strike,
1894 in Chicago (stopped railroad traffic & required federal intervention)
E Labor organizations
Knights of Labor (1869). Sought to create one big union of all workers, skilled and unskilled.
Opposed to strikes
American Federation of Labor (1886). Organized by Samuel Gompers. Focused on higher wages,
shorter hours, and safer working conditions
Eugene Debs and American Railway Union (1892). Socialist approach that viewed government
and owners as enemies of workers
E Utopian Economic Plans
Henry George Progress and Poverty(1879)--inequality's source: rising land values. Single land
tax proposed to end monopolies and bring social progress
Edward Bellamy Looking Backward(1888)--extremes of wealth and poverty need to be countered
with socialist state free of vicious competition
Henry Lloyd Wealth Against Commonwealth(1894)--aggression of trusts, particularly
Rockefeller's, would lead to economic slavery. Cooperation with the government owning and
operating the means of production would produce equality
E New Issues for Labor
machines and new procedures (assembly line) reduced demand for labor
employers cut costs: hiring large numbers of women and children
E By 1900, 20% of all manufacturing workers were women (up from 11% in 1870).
E By 1900, 13% of all textile workers were younger than 16.
E Working conditions resulted in 25,000 deaths in industrial accidents per year
Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (NYC)- 1913: 146 deaths
72,000 railroad workers killed between 1900 and 1917
E Court cases
1. Lochner v. New York (1905), Supreme Court ruled that 60-hour work week limit was unconstitutional
2. Muller v. Oregon (1908), Court reversed Lochner and limited women's working hours to 10 per day.
19
th
Century Exhibitions
E mass production of interchangeable parts (begun with the manufacture of firearms) special purpose
machine tools would cut and shape an endless number of parts to make whole guns, locks, clocks, and
sewing machines in mass quantities.
E less elegant / less durable than those made by skilled craftsmen
E Less expensive and more widely available suitable to the developing democratic consumer economy.
E Such American-made products - the hit of the first Worlds Fair - The Crystal Palace Exhibition, London,
1851
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E Other significant exhibitions:
E The Centennial International Exhibition, Philadelphia, 1876
E The World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago,1893
The Crystal Palace Exhibition, London, 1851
Interior of the Crystal Palace
Sir Joseph Paxton, an English landscape gardener and greenhouse architect, designed the Crystal Palace to house
the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. The Crystal Palace, constructed entirely of cast iron and glass,
expanded notions of architectural beauty. As the largest structure to be built from prefabricated units up to that
time, it also was a landmark of architectural design, anticipating later industrial construction.
E The assembly line
E Manufacture from interchangeable elements was named the American System in Europe
E Ford Assembly Line
E These people work on an assembly line at Ford Motor Company. In 1913 American automobile pioneer
Henry Ford instituted the assembly line process, in which each worker performs only one specialized
task, in order to speed production.
The Centennial International Exhibition, Philadelphia,1876
E The Corliss Steam-Engine, a major exhibit in the Hall of Machinery at the 1876 Centennial Exposition.
E It powered all the exhibits in the Machinery Hall
E The 1876 Centennial. Machinery Hall, an interior view. The great Corliss Engine, one of the chief
wonders of the Exhibition, was built in Providence, R.I. and brought to Philadelphia in 65 freight cars.
Steam engines, sneered Leslie's Weekly of Great Britain, offered nothing in comparison with the great
Corliss Engine. In the foreground are locomotives.
The Gilded Age
E Term coined by Mark Twain & Charles Dudley Warner in The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873)
E 18761914: intense economic development
the Second Industrial Revolution: greatest economic, territorial, industrial, and population
expansion in American history
explosion of commerce and heavy industry, supported by mercantilist economic policies
stems from the middle of the nineteenth century with the growth of railways and steam ships
E continued development of the American West:
catalyzed dramatic social changes
created a number of immensely wealthy businessmen the "Robber Barons
galvanized the American Labor Movement.
E Generally considered to begin with the 1876 election of President Rutherford B. Hayes
E Technology: many advancements in technology; 1860 1890: 500,000 patents (>ten times the number of
the previous seventy years)
E Urbanization - direct result from Industrialization. Big factories would be located in cities to have a
central location for workers.
E the rise of yellow journalism
E Corruption ruled supreme in the political system; President Andrew Jackson's "spoils system; multitude
of scandals (the Credit Mobilier incident)
Influential people: Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller
E Transportation Revolution: railroads increase the economic growth of the country.
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E Immigration: millions of immigrants (>religious persecution, bad economies etc); 1865 1890: approx.
10 million immigrants; corrupted politicians felt attracted toward using the immigrants votes in winning
elections
E Modern labor unions were born: National Labor Union (Baltimore, 1866)
Construction Technology & Architecture (1)
E Journalists and editors celebrate the new urban culture emerging in the United States at mid-century
E Several commentators criticize the slavish dependence of American architects on classical or medieval
styles
E E.g.: Christian Examiner: instead of attempting to breathe life into the dry bones of a by-gone age, our
architects should strive to make their buildings subservient to the uses and wants of to-day. (T.C.Clark,
Architects and Architecture, Christian Examiner 49 (September 1850): 286. See Emersons Self-
Reliance(1841)
E Horatio Greenough:
E 180552. b. Boston, grad. Harvard, 1824, and studied in Italy under Thorvaldsen.
E American sculptor and writer. A protege of Washington Allston.
E Greenough is admired now for his writings, in which he heralded the modern concept of
functionalism in architecture.
E man-made designs, like those found in nature, should follow the function of the structure.
This "form follows function" concept implies that the actual beauty of a building is
relative to the degree to which it meets the demands of its function
E the majesty of the essential; eliminated superfluous adornment
E expression of utilitarianism & materialism: the iron grid + the invention of the elevator (Otis, 1851)
the skyscraper
E the invention of this grid - a cultural context timber technology; stages:
E stick of lumber
E balloon frame
E BALLOON FRAME AND TRADITIONAL FRAME. (Above top) Framing plan of two-story balloon
frame house, with 2" x 4" studs and corner posts of two 2" x 4"'s nailed together (from James H.
Monckton's The National Carpenter and Builder, New York, 1873); (Above bottom) framing plan ofr
"English style" cottage, with 4" x 8" beams and 4" x 6" and 3" x 6" studs, mortise and tendon joints (from
William H. Ranlett The Architect, a Series of Original Designs, New York, 1847
Construction Technology & Architecture (9)
technology came from Europe, with the Crystal Palace
America to adapt cast iron for multistorey construction; the skyscraper - New York (SoHo)
19
th
Century Painting Academic Art
Academic Art - painting and sculpture produced under the influence of the European Academies, where
many artists received their formal training.
Characterized by:
highly finished style
use of historical or mythological subject matter
moralistic tone.
Neoclassical Art (mid 18
th
century early 19
th
century) - closely associated with the Academies
severe, unemotional form of art
back to the style of ancient Greece and Rome.
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rigidity as a reaction to the Rococo style & Baroque style.
rise of Neoclassical Art - part of a general revival of classical thought; some importance in the American
and French revolutions.
"Academic Art" is associated particularly with the French Academy and its influence on the Salons in the
19th century.
Artists: Bouguereau & Jean-Leon Gerome
Adolphe William Bouguereau (1825-1905)
I accept and respect all schools of painting which have as their basis the sincere study of nature, the
search for the true and the beautiful. As for the mystics, the impressionists, the pointillists, etc., I don't
see the way they see. That is my only reason for not liking them.
Studied under Franois-Edward Picot.
Bouguereau's many students: Cecilia Beaux, Frank Bicknell, Eanger Irving Couse, Louis Dessar,
Elizabeth Bouguereau, Gaines Donoho, Eurilda France, Ellen Day Hale, Anna Klumpke, Lawton Parker,
Edward Redfield, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Mary MacMonnies and Thomas Anshutz.
Jean-Lon Grme (1824-1904)
Studied under Paul Delaroche and Charles Gleyre.
Students: Dagnan-Bouveret, Lecomte du Nouy, Thomas Eakins, Frank Boggs, Frederick Bridgman,
Kenyon Cox, Julian Alden Weir, Dennis Miller Bunker, William DeLeftwich Dodge, Alexander
Harrison, Robert Lee MacCameron, Siddons Mowbray, Harper Pennington, William Picknell, Julius
Stewart, Abbott Thayer, Douglas Volk, Wyatt Eaton and Lawton Parker.
specializes in Orientalism.
Academic Realism = actual (historical) events
The Barbizon School - France, Mid-19th Century
group of landscape artists working in the region of the French town of Barbizon, a village on the outskirts
of the Forest of Fontainebleu, southeast of Paris, in the 1840s and 1850s .
rejected the Academic tradition, abandoning theory in an attempt to achieve a truer representation of the
countryside
considered to be part of the French Realist movement
Inspired by Constable, who had led the way in making landscape painting a faithful rendering of nature,
the Barbizon painters sought to paint nature directly.
helped establish landscape and themes of country life as vital subjects for French artists.
fostered an interest in visible reality
helped establish landscape and themes of country life as vital subjects for French artists.
fostered an interest in visible reality
often considered to have been forerunners of the Impressionists, who took a similar philosophical
approach to their art.
Thodore Rousseau (French, 1812-1867) - the founder of the group.
Other members of the group were:
Jean-Baptist Corot (French, 1796-1875)
Narcisse Diaz de la Pea (French, 1807-1876)
Constant Troyon (French, 1810-1865)
Jules Dupr (French, 1811-1889)
Jean-Franois Millet (French, 1814-1875)
Charles-Franois Daubigny (French, 1817-1878)
14

Gustave Courbet (1819-1877)
leader of the Realist movement
departed radically from the more controlled, idealized pictures of the Neoclassical/ the Romantic school
portray the life and
emotions, not of aristocrats but of humble peasants
realistic urgency.
Romanticism
E Late 18th Century to Mid 19th Century
E Another reaction against Neoclassicism
E deeply-felt style which is individualistic, beautiful, exotic, and emotionally wrought.
E The United States - the leading Romantic movement: the Hudson River School
Winslow Homer (1836 - 1910)
E an American landscape painter and printmaker, most famous for his marine subjects
E one of the foremost painters in 19th century America
E mostly known for his watercolors and his paintings of the Civil War
Thomas Eakins (1844-1916)
E American realist painter
E one of the foremost of the 19th century
E independent of contemporary European styles
E the first major artist after the American Civil War (1861-1865) to produce a profound and powerful body
of work drawn directly from the experience of American life
E lifelong interest in scientific realism
E scenes and people observed in the life around him in Philadelphia, particularly domestic scenes of his
family and friends
E delineated the anatomy of the human body
E profound influence, both as a painter and as a teacher, on the course of American naturalism
The Ash Can School/Ashcan School
E a realist artistic movement
E came into prominence in the United States during the early twentieth century
E America's first artistic rebellion of the 20th century
E Name: reference to their brand of realism drawn from the city streets
E Other names: Apostles of Ugliness, the Revolutionary Gang
E best known for works portraying scenes of daily life in poor urban neighborhoods
E movement most associated with a group known as The Eight/ The Ash Can Painters
E Members: Robert Henri, Arthur B. Davies, Maurice Prendergast, Ernest Lawson, William Glackens,
Everett Shinn, John French Sloan, and George Luks.
E The Eight exhibited as a group only once - the Macbeth Gallery, 1908
E work very diverse in terms of style and subject matter.
E Others: photographer Jacob Riis
E this frequent, although not total, focus upon poverty and the daily realities of urban life at that time
prompted critics to consider them on the fringe of modern art.
E Everyday life in the city was dealt with, not only as art, but as a contemporary standard of beauty.
E These artists viewed:
E the paintings of Whistler as elitist (appealing only to a select few)
15

E the paintings of the visionaries as too private in meaning
E the subjects of the impressionists as irrelevant to modern city life
E the late seascapes of W. Homer as escapist.
Lecture 3
Regionalism & Realism.
The Civil War. Post-bellum Magazines. Realism & The Genteel Tradition.
The Civil War (1861-65)
Pivotal, traumatic, most potent event of 19th century American political and social history
turning point for intellectual life
fatal blow to romanticism and idealism.
The actual Civil War was, most of the time, while in progress and after Robert Edward Lee (commander
in chief of the Confederate army in the Civil War) surrendered to Ulysses Simpson Grant (commander in
chief of the Union forces) at the Appomattox (central Virginia, near Lynchburg) Court House on April 9,
1865, mythicized:
the incipient myth of the legendary South and the democratic progressive North, sending men to a
fratricide combat.
wars aftermath, the retrospect nostalgia, the art industry (songs, sculptures, poetry, fiction,
movies, theatrical and television shows), the dream factory representing the conflagration as a
heroic, noble sword-and-roses panorama.
underneath the Civil Wars romantic veneer: grim realities - mass killing, maiming.
for some the war reinforced romantic and sentimental tendencies
for others provoked a more realistic outlook on life
Some 3 million men served in the military and 630,000 died of wounds or disease.
In the Union army: one of every nine soldiers died / in the South: one out of every four. Fifty
thousand of the survivors lost one or more limbs.
The impact of the war as slaughter penetrated behind the lines: homes were turned into headquarters,
churches into hospitals, and civilians into partisans.
Most of Americas promising young writers and artists did not participate in the Civil War. This served
as a psychic wound that dogged their consciences and influenced their art.
The trials of the Civil War buttressed (reinforced) the realistic assault on feminine sentimentalism
and decorous idealism
The Civil War - Revelations of the Carnage
Frenchman Louis Daguerres discovery (1839): sunlight could be used to make precise images on
chemically treated metal plates.
By the onset of the Civil War, the quality of photography had improved enormously.
Matthew Bradys platoon of skilled assistants & hundreds of other photographers covered the war
providing visual evidence of the facts of war.
People were awoken to the grim reality of the war in Bradys New York gallery, during the fall of 1862.
photographers occasionally repositioned their subjects or retouched negatives to heighten the emotional
impact, the public at the time naively proclaimed: it is impossible for the photography to lie.
The truth was that the romantic, abstract image of the war turned into a detailed representation of reality.
Hand drawn illustrations reinforced the written accounts of the war in newspapers
16

Dozens of sketch artists, or specials, joined the armies in the field and sent their pencil
drawings to New York, where engravers traced them onto wood blocks for printing in the weekly
illustrated magazines.
accurate and nonpartisan in depicting the war.
they stripped soldiering of its romantic veneer and revealed its underlying dreariness and pain.
Winslow Homer also an artist-war correspondent, the most talented (essentially self-taught and
adamantly unacademic: I paint it exactly as it appears! ).
austere, uncompromising devotion to fact
subdued emotion
recognition that real life brimmed with poetry; no need for false emotion
contributing regularly to Harpers Weekly
drawings appear often in Harpers Weekly: accurate record of camp life. Critics: they are
manly, rugged, vigorous
his best war painting, Prisoners from the Front (1866).
New Public Discourse: Postbellum Magazines
E many new magazines catering to the broad pool of urban middle-class readers
E focused on the daily concerns and experiences of city life.
E Putnams Monthly [Israel Putnam, American Revolutionary War general, 1718-1790]; new journal of
literature and the arts based in New York City
1853 - Charles F. Briggs (ex-sailor turned writer of popular novels about Manhattan life; editor of Putnams
Monthly)
used the publication to promote a metropolitan cultural sensibility.
Local reality is a point of utmost importance.
Readers weary of fiction that paints only the gentle, the grieving, and the beautiful.
Instead of extravagances of sentiment and action, impossible exploits, writers and artists should
provide veritable and veracious representations of everyday life. (Charles F. Briggs )
Grahams Monthly similar concerns:
Charles Godfrey Leland (journalist, folklorist, and essayist). The editor of Philadelphias
Grahams Monthly (1856): the most fervent celebrant of the triumph of the real during
the 1850s
Young writers were urged to escape from the confines of polite convention, to write about
what they see, not about what they read.
Graham would not print effeminate (handkerchief poetry, mawkish [over-sentimental]
fiction)
Instead of puling [whimpering] pathos, sentimental transcendentalism, and vague
reverie Leland solicited virile writers who displayed a keen appreciation and
observation of life.
[Charles G. Leland, Editors Easy Task, Grahams 53 (1858): 553; To
Readers and Correspondents, Grahams 51 (July 1857): 82;50 (May 1857): 468-469]
Regionalism
E Between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century.
E nature and the limitations it imposes
E remote and inaccessible settings
E the setting - a character in itself
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the character of the district or region described & in focus
E character types/ stereotypical
E The characters are marked by:
adherence to the old ways
dialect
personality traits central to the region
E Narrator:
educated observer from the world beyond
sympathetic, ironic distance
mediator between the rural folk of the tale and the urban audience
E Plot: very little happens
E Stories revolve around the community and its rituals
E antipathy to change
E nostalgia for an always-past golden age
E acceptance in the face of adversity (in women's local color fiction)
E Thematic tension / conflict: urban ways v. old-fashioned rural values; often symbolized by the intrusion
of an outsider or interloper who seeks something from the community.
E Dialect: establish credibility and authenticity of regional characters.
E Detailed description: understanding of the region
E use of a frame story in which the narrator hears some tale of the region
E NEW ENGLAND: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, Sarah Orne Jewett.
E SOUTH: Grace Elizabeth King, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Kate Chopin, Alice Dunbar-Nelson,
George Washington Cable
E MIDWEST: Hamlin Garland (Main-Travelled Roads 1899), Zona Gale.
E WEST: Bret Harte, Mark Twain
Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909)
born in South Berwick, Maine, and educated at Berwick Academy
New England countryside, Maine
A White Heron(1886)
The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)
The Country of the Pointed Firs
coast town of Dunnet, eastern Maine
Loose structure: series of sketches on the people and landscape of Dunnet
Nature a character of its own:
(E.g. on the next slide: description of the place)
() the rocky shore and dark woods, and the few houses which seemed to be securely
wedged and tree-nailed in among the ledges by the Landing. These houses made the most
of their seaward view, and there was a gayety and determined floweriness in their bits of
garden ground; the small-paned high windows in the peaks of their steep gables were like
knowing eyes that watched the harbor and the far sea-line beyond, or looked northward
all along the shore and its background of spruces and balsam firs. When one really knows
a village like this and its surroundings, it is like becoming acquainted with a single
person.
Characters: types defined in terms of nature / the place inhabited; narrators sometimes ironic attitude:
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E.g.: Mrs. Todd was an ardent lover of herbs, both wild and tame, and the sea-breezes blew into
the low end-window of the house laden with not only sweet-brier and sweet-mary, but balm and
sage and borage and mint, wormwood and southernwood. If Mrs. Todd had occasion to step into
the far corner of her herb plot, she trod heavily upon thyme, and made its fragrant presence
known with all the rest. Being a very large person, her full skirts brushed and bent almost every
slender stalk that her feet missed.
With most remedies the purchaser was allowed to depart unadmonished from the kitchen, Mrs.
Todd being a wise saver of steps
Hamlin Garland (1860-1940)
E political twist to the regionalist genre:
advocate for reforms in farm policies
powerful portrayals of tension between urban city folks and the worn-down farmers struggling to
scratch out a living on the plains
E from a farming family who moved progressively westward from Wisconsin to Iowa and then to the
Dakotas
E short stories that were collected in Main-Travelled Roads (1891) and Other Main-Travelled Roads (1910)
E critical theory of "veritism," set forth in the essay collection Crumbling Idols (1894)
E letter to Eldon C. Hill, dated February 14, 1939, in which Garland explained how he came to use the
word "veritism":
Garland's tone was harsher than Howells' treatment of the "smiling aspects of life (see next slides
on Howells), but at the same time it was not the brutal naturalism of Zola.
E "You ask about my use of the word veritist. I began to use it in the late nineties. Not being at that time a
realist in the sense in which the followers of Zola used it, I hit upon the word veritist which I may have
derived from Veron. In truth I was an impressionist in that I presented life and landscape as I personally
perceived them but (since) I sought a deeper significance in the use of the word, I added which subtended
verification. I sought to verify my impressions separated by an interval of time. I thought to get away
from the use of the word realism which implied predominant use of sexual vice and crime in the manner
of Zola and certain German novelists. () I found as Whitman told me he had found in the life of the
average American a certain decorum and normality. As a veritist I have recorded my perceptions.
E The role of a veritist:
"I use the word veritist because the word realist no longer suffices. The veritist chooses for his
subject the probable, not the normal."
Moreover, the veritist portrayed native themes and was not interested in historical romances nor
in superficial love stories. Not shrinking from the sordid elements of life, the veritist stated truth
and nothing but the truth.
E Thus, he portrayed the immediate present, American life of a given locale in an effort to create a genuine
American literature through the depiction of a region's characters, customs, and rituals.
E Features of Hamlin Garland:
To be discussed next time, with a particular focus on the excerpts selected and included in the
Lecture 3 / 4 handout.
Incipient Realism Theoretical Aspects 1860s
E E.g.: Thomas Wentworth Higginson : A Letter to the Young Contributor (1862) (discoverer of Emily
Dickinson) in The Atlantic Monthly
* deplored the sentimental dream world of romantic fiction
19

* urged that American literature concern itself with the actual, commonplace world of today
* it should depict experience as it is rather than as we might wish it to be

Howellsian Realism (1880s 1900s)
E William Dean Howells (1837 1920)
The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)
Editha Harpers Monthly (1905)
Criticism and Fiction (1891) THEORY: morality and pedagogical illustration
Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading: An Impersonal Explanation (1899) ,,_____,,
To be discussed in terms of:
Genteel, Theoretical/Literary Creed,
Feminine/Weak Realism
The Genteel Tradition
E The genteel:
1. having good taste, refinement, elegant, fashionable
2. excessively refined, polite / gentle: ME gentil < OFr, of noble birth < L gentiles, of the same
gens, in LL, of a good family < gens / gens - gentes:
in ancient Rome: a clan united by descent. through the male line from a common ancestor and
having both name and religious observance in common.
(Websters New World College Dictionary, 4
th
edition, 2001)
E 1913 - George Santayana: genteel tradition = the elite governing 19th century American taste and
sensibility
E 19th century American elite intelligentsia (writers, painters, architects, educators, ministers,
philosophers) characterized by:
E upper class
E intellectual environment descent
E safe social and economic status
E erudition
E scholarly authority (gentlemen by birth).
E Ironically called the Boston Brahmins
(Brahman: Hindi>Sans brhmana<Brahman, worship, prayer / 1.the supreme and eternal spirit of the
universe in Hinduism 2. a member of the priestly Hindu caste, which is the highest.)
The Boston Brahmins
E rich, old Boston families
E Looked to England for excellence and copied English literary styles,
E Considered Boston the thinking center of the American continent (the Hub: the center part of a wheel)
E Their Saturday Club met one Saturday a month for dinner. Gathered together were most of the
Americans whom educated foreigners wished to see.
E In 1857 the club started its own magazine, the Atlantic Monthly.
E Their membership included:
E Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
E Nathaniel Hawthorne
E Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
E John Greenleaf Whittier
20

E James Russell Lowell.
E Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
E encourages idealism and expresses it in sentimentalist fashion (e.g. Excelsior, Norton 4th
edition, Vol. I p.1478 [climb higher]).
E melancholy - essential meaninglessness of human endeavor.
E John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)
E A religious, regional poet writing about New England folk life.
E James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
E Didacticism and excessive literariness (nature as teacher-moralist in intellectual metaphoric style:
To the Dandelion (1845, Norton 4th edition, Vol. I, p.2015)
E English romantic tradition: Wordsworth (emotion recollected in tranquility [Lyrical Ballads];
emotion stimulated by nature and related outwards as moral lesson; introspection & meditation;
nature the teacher; transcendental value in nature; morally educative influence of nature /
Coleridge: transcendental reality of natural phenomena)
E used the arts [the liberal arts : literature, music, philosophy, etc. / as distinguished from the sciences; an
instrument for reinforcing the values of their own social class in the midst of spreading vulgarity and
ignorance
E usually Congregationalists (a Protestant denomination with a system of government in which each local
church governs itself)
E enforced the orthodox creed of the ideal (professor-poet James Russell Lowell) i.e. the 18th century
neo-classical assumption that the arts should esteem the beautiful, revere the past, reinforce social
stability, and uphold a chaste morality
E Contemporary painting: e.g. Washington Allston
Masculine & Feminine Realism
E John Greenleaf Whittier: poetry had become too detached from practical concerns. American culture had
become too emasculated. It showed no evidence of manly and vigorous exertionWe are becoming
effeminate in everything in out habits as well as in our literature. (Shi, 33)
E New currents in European literature reinforce the appeal of such a masculine realism.
E E.g.: 1830s, Honor de Balzac rebelled against romantics who spent their time smoking enchanted
cigarettes. (Shi, 33)
E professed a cold, skeptical materialism: Tell me what you have, and I will tell you what you
think. To George Sand: You look for a man as he ought to be; I take him as he is. (ibid.)
E meticulous description of houses, chairs, curtains, pictures, glassware
E detached, scientists manner of dissecting his characters.
E American perception of Balzac:
E Henry James: the father of us all
E Theodore Dreiser: attributed his own conception of life as a spectacle to the reading of Balzac.
E Women authors developed a distinctive brand of literary realism.
E 1853, Caroline Kirkland (prominent professional writer) wrote a long review-essay for the North
American Review meant to be an assessment of feminine fiction of the time
E popular women writers exchanged the cultivation of tenderness, piety, imagination, and fancy
for keen observation, powerful satire, knowledge of the world, strong common sense,
democratic principles.(qtd. in Shi, 35)
E Mid-19
th
century feminine writing:
21

E Still marked by a strain of pious moralism and nostalgic sentiment.
E Local color fiction questioned prevailing social assumptions and literary stereotypes.
E The first generation of female realists described familiar experiences of local life, in common
manner, shifting attention from the grand, remote, and fantastic themes of much romantic fiction.
E Examples:
E Alice Cary (1821-1871), Clovernook, or, Recollections of Our Neighborhood in the West (1852)
E Rose Terry Cooke (1827-1892), Love
E local color fiction
Regionalism & Local Color
E Local color (as compared to regionalism)
influence of romanticism and realism:
author frequently looks away from ordinary life
to distant lands, strange customs, or exotic scenes
nostalgia or sentimentality
but retains through minute detail a sense of fidelity and accuracy of description
exploitation of and condescension toward their subjects
W.D. Howells (1837 1920)
E chief editor of the Atlantic Monthly [1871-1881]
founded at Boston in 1857, by leading New England literary figures
named by Oliver Wendell Holmes, man of letters [1809-1894]
edited for the first four years by James Russell Lowell, poet [1819-1891],
contributed to by Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82], poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow [1807-
1882], Harriet [Elizabeth] Beecher Stowe [1811-1896] novelist, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin
[1852] etc.;
contending that it was the organ of no party or clique
Considered to be strongly abolitionist during the Civil War.
E accused of Brahminism, he was an adopted son of the Brahmins, but not so involved in politics and their
ideas.
W.D. Howells Critical Opinions
E Criticism and Fiction (1891)
in the direction of evolutionary criticism, influenced by Herbert Spencer and Hippolyte Taine :
E * literature is a product of the physical, social, and intellectual environment in which it is
found and can best be understood and interpreted in terms of its environment
* both literature and society are characterized by change for the better:
E society was not only advancing materially, but was achieving a greater humanitarianism
and a submersion of the primitive and bestial
E fiction was progressing internally, in form and technique, gradually evolving from crudity
and obviousness to subtlety, complexity;
E in subject matter it had increasingly devoted itself to a truthful and sincere account of the
affairs of mankind.
Aesthetic criterion:
I understand, that moods and tastes and fashions change; people fancy now this and now that;
but what is unpretentious and what is true is always beautiful and good, and nothing else is so.
Critique of contemporary writers:
22

He (the writer) is instructed to idealize his personages, that is, to take the life-likeness out of
them, and put the book-likeness into them. He is approached in the spirit of the pedantry into
which learning, much or little, always decays when it withdraws itself and stands apart from
experience in an attitude of imagined superiority
The canon:
Therefore I am not afraid to say now that the greatest classics are sometimes not at all great, and
that we can profit by them only when we hold them, like our meanest contemporaries, to a strict
accounting, and verify their work by the standard of the arts which we all have in our power, the
simple, the natural, and the honest.
Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading: An Impersonal Explanation (1899)
The novel = the supreme literary form, the fine flower of the human story
Beauty truth literary value:
By beauty of course I mean truth, for the one involves the other; it is only the false in art which
is ugly, and it is only the false which is immoral. The truth may be indecent, but it cannot be vicious, it
can never corrupt or deprave (). So I make truth the prime test of a novel. If I do not find that it is like
life, then it does not exist for me as art; it is ugly, it is ludicrous, it is impossible. I do not expect a novel
to be wholly true; I have never read one that seemed to me so except Tolstoy's novels; but I expect it to
be a constant endeavor for the truth, and I perceive beauty in it so far as it fulfills this endeavor.
E Truth & imagination:
The truth which I mean, the truth which is the only beauty, is truth to human experience, and human
experience is so manifold and so recondite, that no scheme can be too remote, too airy for the test. It is a
well ascertained fact concerning the imagination that it can work only with the stuff of experience. It can
absolutely create nothing; it can only compose. The most fantastic extravagance comes under the same
law that exacts likeness to the known as well as the closest and severest study of life.
E Novelists duties:
I believe, nevertheless, that the novelist has a grave duty to his reader; and I wish his reader realized that
he has a grave duty to the novelist, and ought to exact the truth of him. But most readers think that they
ought only to exact amusement of him.
to make the truest possible picture of life
He [the novelist] had better not aim to please, and he had still better not aim to instruct; the
pleasure and the instruction will follow from such measure of truth as the author has in him to
such measure of truth as the reader has in him.
Ethics:
If it is a work of art, it promptly takes itself out of the order of polemics or of ethics, and
primarily consents to be nothing if not aesthetical.
The novel can teach, and for shame's sake, it must teach, but only by painting life truly. This is
what it must above all things strive to do. If it succeeds, every good effect shall come from it:
delight, use, wisdom. If it does not succeed in this, no good can come of it.
We start in our novels with something we have known of life, that is, with life itself; and then we
go on and imitate what we have known of life. If we are very skilful and very patient we can hide
the joint.
W.D. Howells The Novelist
E The Rise of Silas Lapham
First serialized in Century Magazine, then publ. in book form in 1885
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Plot begins in 1875 when Silas is 55
Placed in Boston:
E South End (where the Lathams live, next most respectable district to)
E Beacon Hill (the Coreys, genteel)
E Back Bay ("on the water side of Beacon Street", becoming the fashion, where Latham
build the new house).
during the Grant Administration (Ulysses Simpson Grant, 18th president of the U.S. [1869-1877],
commander in chief of the Union Forces in the Civil War)
when the "robber barons" were taking over the country and its resources
E Bartley Hubbard comes to Lapham's office to interview him for the "Solid Men of Boston" series in The
Boston Events, the newspaper he is working for.
E He finds out about Lapham and his family:
E born in Vermont (1820)
E Father: Nehemiah
E fifty-five years old
E basic American roots: poor family, hard life, devoted parents, inferior in education but ambitious
for their children's advancement. Quiet, unpretentious, religious, of "sterling morality" ("taught
their children the simple virtues of the Old Testament and Poor Richard's Almanack)
E The all-American mother: hardworking, dedicated to the family, offering religious education to
her children.
E Source of wealth: a mineral paint discovered by his father "in a hole made by a tree blowing down."(p.9)
The paint is not just business for Silas. As his wife perceives "it was a sentiment, almost a passion."(p.47)
E Son, Bill, a lawyer in Dubuque (Iowa), one-twice judge of the Common Pleas (in some States a court
having original and general jurisdiction over civil and criminal trials)
E Nephew, graduated at Yale. Two daughters (Penelope, Irene, three years older than P.).
E Brothers: Willard-farm at Kankakee (?), Hazard Lapham & wife (Baptist preacher in Kansas), Jim (& 3
girls), milling business at Minneapolis, Ben and family (practicing medicine in Fort Wayne.
Silas Lapham:
E As a young man he tries his luck in Texas, returns after three months to parents, mother dies that winter,
father in spring. He buries them and moves to Lumberville; takes odd jobs starts business: worked at the
sawmills, ostler, drove the stagecoach, then bought it as his own business, hired the tavern stand, married,
discovered the value of the paint.
E Fights in the Civil War
E He is a Republican
E He is building a house on the water side of Beacon Street, in the fashionable area of the Back Bay. It will
be ready for occupancy in spring. meanwhile the Laphams lived at the unfashionable South End
(Nankeen Square) "where he had lived ever since the mistaken movement of society in that direction
ceased." (p.24)
E The reason why he is building in the Back Bay: the chance meeting and then social connection with a
rich Boston family (the Coreys) the Lapham mother and her two daughters had met while on a vacation
at "a rather wild little Canadian watering place on the St. Lawrence, below Quebec." (p.25)
E Concl: common place / middle-class American of those times.
Realism Main Features (summary)
E Present-day American life (no exoticism)
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E The world experienced by the author himself, portrayed without glamour.
E The normal expectancies of middle-class life in : settings, happenings, view point
E Focus on commonplace mediocrity, instead of the romantic extraordinary.
E Social orientation - the major problem is social adjustment of an individual to his community.
E Fundamental acceptance of the American myth. The good characters conform to the tenets of the
American dream, the bad characters are those mutilating and thwarting the dream.
E *An essentially optimistic view of life; human nature assumed to be fundamentally good; man possesses
free will.
E Donald Pizer: great diversity in subject matter; subjective and idealistic view of human nature and
experience; ethically idealistic novel.
Regionalism & Realism
+ Regionalism contributed to the reunification of the country after the Civil War and to the building
of national identity toward the end of the nineteenth century (1865-1900)
+ A variation of this genre is the "plantation tradition" fiction of Thomas Nelson Page and others.
Lecture 4
Progressivism, Populism, and Social Darwinism in Frank Norriss The Octopus (1901)
The Radical Novel: Upton Sinclairs The Jungle (1906)
Modern Regionalism: Willa Cathers O Pioneers! (1913) / My ntonia (1918).
Realism and Naturalism: General Assessment
E Frank Norris (1870 1902)
E Progressivism, Social Darwinism, Naturalism as Romantic Fiction
The Octopus (1901) Populism and Progressivism, Social Darwinism; San Joaquin Valley
(California); farms and farmers vs. Southwestern Pacific Railroad; anti-trust policy grounds
The Responsibilities of the Novelist(1903) Naturalism as Drama (romance) plus Social
Observation (Realism) > polemics with Howells.
E Upton Sinclair (1878 1968)
E Progressivism (muckraking), Socialism.
The Jungle (1906) muckraking, Socialism (solution provided at end of the novel), elements of
Naturalism (detailed, dramatic descriptions of physical misery: the Chicago meat packing
industry work, the slum, Ona Lukoszaite [Jurgis wife] death in childbirth), immigrant workers).
E Willa Cather (1873-1947)
E New Regionalism, Populism (nostalgia for country/farming life and the Frontier).
My ntonia(1918) Nebraska (Great Plains area), popular culture vs. high culture; immigrant
farmers, little town (Red Cloud) low middle class.
O Pioneers! (1913) the Frontier (Nebraska prairies)
Social Darwinism (summary)
E humans, like animals and plants, compete in a struggle for existence in which natural selection results in
survival of the fittest
E advocate a laissez-faire political and economic system competition and self-interest in social and
business affairs
E Social Darwinist - applied loosely to anyone who interprets human society primarily in terms of biology,
struggle, competition, or natural law (a philosophy based on, what are considered, the permanent
characteristics of human nature)
E Herbert Spencer
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E survival of the fittest to describe the outcome of competition between social groups.
E In Social Statics (1850) and other works: through competition social evolution would
automatically produce prosperity and personal liberty unparalleled in human history
E the most prominent American social Darwinist of the 1880s William Graham Sumner
Populism (summary)
E agrarian movement of the late 19th century
E developed mainly in the area from Texas to the Dakotas
E grew into a Farmer-Labor political coalition
E began during the economic depression of the 1870s: sharp decline in the income of farmers / their living
and operating costs were rising.
E Organisations: the National Grange, the Farmers' Alliances etc
E 1891, movement gained sufficient strength; the alliances joined the Knights of Labor a.o.
the People's Party; members called Populists
E Principal objectives:
free coinage of silver
issuance of large amounts of paper currency (inflationary measures tended to raise farm prices &
enable farmers to pay off their debts)
to replicate their cooperative system on a national scale
to lower transportation costs by nationalizing the railroads
to achieve a more equitable distribution of the costs of government by means of a graduated
income tax
to institute direct popular elections of U.S. senators
to inaugurate the 8-hour workday
E Populist influence peaked in 1896 when William Jennings Bryan, a Democrat who sympathized with the
Populists' agenda, won his party's presidential nomination.
E The Populists endorsed Bryan, sacrificing their independent identity.
E After he was defeated, the Populist Party faded steadily from the political scene, disappearing about 1908
E Populist movement exercised a profound influence on subsequent U.S. political life: almost all the
original Populist demands eventually enacted into law
Progressivism (summary)
E U.S. Legislative Reforms
the early 20th century
combat social problems such as dangerous working / living conditions > industrialization &
urbanization
E Progressives turned to government to achieve their goals; national in scope: included both Democrats and
Republicans.
E embraced four types of reform:
Economic--"Monopoly
Structural and Political--"Efficiency (Taylorism)
Social--"Democracy"
Moral--"Purity
E curb corporate power / end business monopolies
E wipe out (political) corruption
E democratize electoral procedures,
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E protect working people / bridge the gap between social classes.
Progressivism & Antitrust Laws
E E.g.: 1914, corporate practices are regulated, and labor unions are exempt from antitrust laws and receive
the right to strike. (Clayton Antitrust Act)
E found a spokesperson in President Theodore Roosevelt.
E Theodore Roosevelt: regulation was the only way to solve the problems caused by big business.
E A leading publicist for progressive ideals, Roosevelt became known as a trustbuster
E revived the Sherman Antitrust Act, vigorously enforcing it to break up large trusts that reduced
competition and controlled prices.
E also pursued a railroad monopoly, took on the meatpacking trust, and attacked oil, tobacco, and
other monopolies.
E Other presidents supporting / enforcing Progressivist reforms:
E Republican William Howard Taft, Roosevelts successor
E Democrat Woodrow Wilson (for details please see Lecture 1)
Investigative/Muckraking Journalism
(summary)
E 1880 Henry Demarest Lloyd - a series of articles exposing corruption in business and politics:
The Story of a Great Monopoly (1881) &
The Political Economy of Seventy-Three Million Dollars (1882) in the Atlantic Monthly
Making Bread Dear (1883) & Lords of Industry (1884) in the North American Review.
E Articles caused a stir & Lloyd - described as the first American investigative journalist.
E Nellie Bly - another important pioneer in investigative journalism
+ first-hand tales of the lives of ordinary people
+ often obtained this material by becoming involved in a series of undercover adventures.
+ social problems & suggested ways that they could be solved
+ Jacob A. Riis 1899, Scribner's Magazine published a series of articles by Riis entitled How the Other
Half Lives
+ December 1899 - Benjamin Flower established The Arena (magazine) specialized in this type of
journalism
+ Investigative journalism became a movement in 1902
+ magazines such as McClure's Magazine & Everybody's Magazine joined Arena in the struggle for social
reform.
+ Some of these journalists used the material they had obtained and turned them into novels:
+ Charles Edward Russell wrote several novels based on journalistic research and each one sold
over 30,000 copies
+ Upton Sinclair was the most successful of these novelists;The Jungle and The Brass Check, were
both best-sellers with sales of over 100,000.
+ Writers and publishers associated with this movement (1900 1914) included:
+ Frank Norris
+ Ida Tarbell
+ Charles Edward Russell
+ Lincoln Steffens
+ David Graham Phillips
+ C. P. Connolly
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+ Benjamin Hampton
+ Upton Sinclair
+ Thomas Lawson
+ Alfred Henry Lewis
+ Ray Stannard Baker
Frank Norris (1870 1902)
E 1899, Norris drew up the blueprint for a trilogy of novels with a purpose centered on the production of
wheat:
how it was raised in California, brokered (arrange deal/sale) and sold in Chicago commodity
markets, and shipped cross-country and around the world by railroad and steamship lines (modern
transport as part of/contributor to industrialization).
E The Epic of Wheat Trilogy:
The Octopus: A California Story (1901) - describes the raising of wheat in California; based on an
actual incident - a bloody shootout in San Joaquin Valley between wheat ranchers and a sheriffs
posse acting on behalf of the Southwestern Pacific Railroad.
The Pit (1903): wheat speculations within the Chicago Board of Trade.
Wolf, never written (died of a perforated appendix and peritonitis); the American-grown wheat
relieving a famine-stricken village in Europe.
The Octopus: A California Story (1901)
E one of the first American novels to examine monopolistic capitalism in detail (progressivism)
E The confrontation between San Joaquin Valley ranchers and the Southern Pacific Railroad, a powerful
trust (progressivism)
E San Joaquin Valley the southern part of the Great Central Valley
E Mussel Slough Facts:
E The ranchers had been farming land leased from the railroad
E Intending to buy the property at a cost of $2.50 to $5 an acre, they improved the land by building
extensive irrigation systems and soon were producing bumper crops
E the railroad announced the ranchers that the price for the land had risen to $40 an acre
E The ranchers organized armed resistance: 8 men were killed in a confrontation with the sheriffs
posse (May 10, 1880).
E Norris spent four months in San Francisco and the San Joaquin Valley doing field research
E Returned to New York in 1899 with a sheaf of notes, newspaper clippings, interviews, and visual
impressions
E The Octopus, completed in December 1900, represented his most ambitious novel.
E In general:
E western life (California) & the cycle of wheat production.
E More detailed (ignoring secondary themes and subplots):
E the railroads penetrating the economic life of the region
E a manifestation of the common contemporary occurrence of trusts monopoly.
E The Southern Pacific Railroad monopolized Californias agricultural economy by regulating:
E the ownership of land
E the stream of production and distribution
E The group of wheat ranchers not simple yeomen but land barons who preside over fiefdoms of wheat,
agrarian entrepreneurs (attached to land just by business)
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E Norris confuses matters when he casts them as the people victimized by the railroad.
E Besides the dramatic story (with a mystic-romantic subplot provided by the shepherd Vanamee-the 16
year old pastoral beauty Angle Varian) real / contemporary issues affecting Californian economy are
discussed:
E Foreign markets
E High freight rates
E Railroad regulation
E Ethnic prejudice toward Chinese, Mexican, and Portuguese laborers
E Worker unrests
E Blacklisting
E All play a role in the clash of interests between ranchers and railroads.
The Responsibilities of the Novelist (1903)
E journalistic essays posthumously published as a book
E selection to be sent by email
E Adapting Naturalism: realism + romance
E Similar concern with Howells as regards the novelists responsibility to take into account his novels
effect on the audience:
E I believe it can be proved that the successful novelist should be more than all others limited in
the nature and character of his work; more than all others he should be careful of what he says;
more than all others he should defer to his audience; more than all others--more even than the
minister and the editor--he should "feel his public" and watch his every word, testing carefully his
every utterance, weighing with the most relentless precision his every statement; in a word,
possess a sense of his responsibilities.
E The novelist should tell the Truth:
E How necessary it becomes, then, for those who, by the simple act of writing, can invade the
heart's heart of thousands, whose novels are received with such measureless earnestness--how
necessary it becomes for those who wield such power to use it rightfully. Is it not expedient to act
fairly? Is it not in Heaven's name essential that the People hear, not a lie, but Truth? If the novel
were not one of the most important factors of modern life, if it were not the completest expression
of our civilization, if its influence were not greater than all the pulpits, than all the newspapers
between the oceans, it would not be so important that its message should be true.
E Argued within the American tradition of human rights (natural law):
E The People have a right to the Truth as they have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. It is not right that they be exploited and deceived with false views of life, false
characters, false sentiment, false morality, false history, false philosophy, false emotions, false
heroism, false notions of self-sacrifice, false views of religion, of duty, of conduct, and of
manners.
A Plea for Romantic Fiction
E realism and romanticism = opposing forces
E naturalism = transcending synthesis
E Romance distinct from sentimentalism / Romanticism; naturalist genre.
E Romance--I take it--is the kind of fiction that takes cognizance of variations from the type of
normal life. Realism is the kind of fiction that confines itself to the type of normal life. According
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to this definition, then, Romance may even treat of the sordid, the unlovely--as for instance, the
novels of M. Zola.
E Criticism of the Howellsian type of realism:
E Realism stultifies itself. It notes only the surface of things. For it Beauty is not even skin-deep,
but only a geometrical plane, without dimensions of depth, a mere outside. Realism is very
excellent so far as it goes, but it goes no farther than the Realist himself can actually see, or
actually hear. Realism is minute, it is the drama of a broken teacup, the tragedy of a walk down
the block, the excitement of an afternoon call, the adventure of an invitation to dinner. It is the
visit to my neighbor's house, a formal visit, from which I may draw no conclusions. I see my
neighbor and his friends--very, oh, such very! probable people--and that is all. Realism bows
upon the doormat and goes away and says to me, as we link arms on the sidewalk: "That is life."
And I say it is not.
E The place of Romance:
E Romance does very well in the castles of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance chateaux, and
she has the entre there and is very well received. () And this very day, in this very hour, she is
sitting among the rags and wretchedness, the dirt and despair of the tenements of the East Side of
New York.
E Conclusion (1):
E Let Realism do the entertaining with its meticulous presentation of teacups, rag carpets, wall
paper and haircloth sofas, stopping with these, going no deeper than it sees, choosing the
ordinary, the untroubled, the commonplace.
E Conclusion (2):
E But to Romance belongs the wide world for range, and the unplumbed depths of the human
heart, and the mystery of sex, and the problems of life, and the black, unsearched penetralia of the
soul of man. You, the indolent, must not always be amused. What matter the silken clothes, what
matter the prince's houses? Romance, too, is a teacher, and if--throwing aside the purple--she
wears the camel's hair and feeds upon the locusts, it is to cry aloud unto the people, "Prepare ye
the way of the Lord; make straight his path."
Zola as a Romantic Writer
E Realism
is the smaller details of every-day life, things that are likely to happen between lunch and supper,
small passions, restricted emotions, dramas of the reception-room, tragedies of an afternoon call,
crises involving cups of tea. Every one will admit there is no romance here. The novel is
interesting--which is after all the main point--but it is the commonplace tale of commonplace
people made into a novel of far more than commonplace charm. Mr. Howells is not uninteresting;
he is simply not romantic.

E The Naturalist:
The naturalist takes no note of common people, common in so far as their interests, their lives,
and the things that occur in them are common, are ordinary. Terrible things must happen to the
characters of the naturalistic tale. They must be twisted from the ordinary, wrenched out from the
quiet, uneventful round of every-day life, and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama
that works itself out in unleased passions, in blood, and in sudden death. The world of M. Zola is
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a world of big things; the enormous, the formidable, the terrible, is what counts; no teacup
tragedies here.
E Naturalism:
Naturalism is a form of romanticism, not an inner circle of realism () These great, terrible
dramas no longer happen among the personnel of a feudal and Renaissance nobility, those who
are in the fore-front of the marching world, but among the lower--almost the lowest--classes;
those who have been thrust or wrenched from the ranks, who are falling by the roadway. This is
not romanticism--this drama of the people, working itself out in blood and ordure. It is not
realism. It is a school by itself, unique, somber, powerful beyond words. It is naturalism.
The Octopus: A California Story (1901)
E Norris particular romanticism-realism literary mix: e.g. the Vandemee subplot in The Octopus
Presley personifies Norris warring impulses: he dreams of producing an epic integrating the
romantic West of his imagination with the grim reality of the ranchers railroad company conflict
On one hand it was his ambition to portray life as he saw it directly, frankly, and through no
medium of personality or temperament. But, on the other hand, as well, he wished to see
everything through a rose-colored mist a mist that dulled all harsh outlines, all crude and violent
colors. (p. 7)
Norris himself tried to view life through both lenses simultaneously: the result is a blurred image.
E Naturalism applied to economics:
Norris perceives the economic confrontation mythically (i.e. symbolically and irrationally), as a
manifestation of the forces of life.
To survive individuals, who do not matter comparatively, have to align themselves with the most
beneficent forces (see Shelgrims, the head of the railroad, monologue in Chap. VIII)
E You are dealing with forces, young man, when you speak of Wheat and the Railroad, not
with men. (p.386)
E The laws of supply and demand and the life processes of nature and its product, he stresses, determine
personal destinies; there is an inexorable system of forces
E With Zola and Spencer, he concludes that the law of strife and struggle and the capacity of Nature (here:
wheat) to reconstitute itself ensures the greatest good for the greatest number.
The individual suffers, but the race goes on. (p.438)
E Norris contradiction:
the progressive fighting attitude of the land barons (engaged in a hopeless fight against the trust
monopoly, a classical progressive case) vs. Norris fatalistic naturalistic conclusion.
Upton Sinclair (1878 1968)
E Child of an alcoholic father and of poor parents; grandchild of wealthy grandparents with whom he often
lived in New York allowed him to see extremes in American society.
E Labeled by PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT as a MUCKRAKER, Upton Sinclair and his
colleagues in journalism worked to uncover the social and economic injustices in the AMERICAN CITY
at the turn of the century.
E His work as well as that of fellow INTELLECTUALS was printed in various SOCIALIST MAGAZINES
and JOURNALS, which captured the public eye.
E support for a plan to end poverty (during the Great Depression [1929-39]): Sinclair organized the End
Poverty movement in California
E movement brought him respect and prominence
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E narrowly lost a tight race for Governor of California in 1934, as a Democrat
E active in the SOCIALIST party and dedicated to SOCIAL REFORM throughout his life.
E his novel, The Jungle led to the passage of the PURE FOOD AND DRUG ACT (1906) and the MEAT
INSPECTION ACT (1906).
The Jungle (1906)
E After publishing the Civil War novel Manassas (1904), the editor of the Socialist journal (The Appeal to
Reason) wrote enthusiastically to Sinclair:
that since he had described the struggle against chattel slavery, he should do the same about wage
slavery (socialist shibboleth)
E Once he received the advance payment on the new novel, Sinclair spent seven weeks in the autumn of
1904 in the Packingtown district of Chicago, where the stockyard workers had just lost a strike.
E collected evidence as an investigative reporter/muckraker
E returned to Princeton, worked for three months, began serializing the novel in The Appeal to Reason
(1904) and in February, 1906, it was brought out by Doubleday, Page and Company, a non-radical
publishing house (see first slide on Upton Sinclair for the cover)
E after an investigating lawyer sent by the company had submitted a report substantiating Sinclairs
findings against the practices of the meat-packers.
E dedicated To the Workingmen of America > a proletarian novel in the tradition of the radical novel.
E The public reaction to the book was not what Sinclair expected.
his main aim had been to highlight the plight of the workers and present Socialism as an
alternative to capitalism's ills.
these aspects were overshadowed by the uproar over the unsanitary manufacturing practices in the
meat industry.
Sinclair lamented, "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach."
E Sinclair invested all of the nearly $30,000 he made from The Jungle into Helicon Home Colony
a utopian colony in New Jersey
four months later it burned down.
The Jungle (1906) Literary Features
E Sinclairs metaphor exploits his audiences assenting familiarity with the sensational tradition of
nineteenth-century sentimental melodramatic narrative.
E He used HISTORICAL FICTION to illustrate and condemn the atrocities he discovered through
INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING.
E Other prominent JOURNALISTS of the time also focused on these injustices, but he used first hand
observations to DETAIL his criticisms.
E The novel appears as an informative essay (footnotes and facts) imperfectly assimilated into the fictional
matter.
E Jurgis Rudkus evolution:
E Lithuanian peasant immigrant workingman in Chicago tramp criminal minor political
machine worker Socialist activist.
E political message: the 1880s city social and political structure pushes the immigrant worker
underground, first socially (tramp and criminal), then politically (Socialism as anti-establishment
during two decades of alternative Republican and Democrat presidency.)
E Melodrama in the extreme misery and death circumstances of the members of the family (see and identify
melodrama elements in Lecture 4 handout)
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The Jungle (1906) & Naturalism
E De-centered subject/protagonist Jurgis Rudkus
The naturalist text typically represents the determining impact of various social and natural forces
on its characters and diminishes the importance of consciousness as the cause of the actions it
records.
Such novels ask for interpretation in terms of the broad social, political, and historical contexts.
E The mechanics of capitalism leading to:
bodily disintegration (dismembering, figurative castrations, which the narrative records: the loss
of fingers; the loss of feet; the loss of ears broken off in the cold; and, most horrible of all, the loss
of little Stanislovas to rats.)
the feeling of entrapment: there seems to be no possible escape from the business-political
machine of human corruption.
E The factory, the police, and the Law belong to the same destructive racket.
These fears of bodily disintegration are coterminous in the novel with fears of entrapment
(Stanislovas cornered and eaten by rats in a dark cellar, Antanas drown in a mudpuddle, Jurgis
imprisonment).
E The socialist solution:
the spiritual savior defeating the evil mechanical materialism of the automaton
E Norris (The Octopus):
production/the corporation itself represented the transcendence of the material: the individual
suffers but the race goes on (wheat is the winner).
E Sinclair: the socialist solution is properly tuned to contemporary scientism: a paragon of rationality (to be
identified & discussed in / on Lecture 4 Handout)
The Jungle (1906) & Progressivism
E The critical perception of the Law in the brief description of Justice Callahan: corruption as the
illustration of a political career.
Growler Pat had given up holding city offices very early in his career--caring only for party
power, and giving the rest of his time to superintending his dives and brothels. Of late years,
however, since his children were growing up, he had begun to value respectability, and had had
himself made a magistrate; a position for which he was admirably fitted, because of his strong
conservatism and his contempt for foreigners.
The Jungle (1906) & Socialism
E Nicholas Schliemann, the socialist saviour, and American socialism
in the final chapters of the novel.
E Biographical influence:
autumn of 1902 Sinclair, desperately trying to publish his first novels and performing hack work
to keep his wife and newly-born son alive
rescued from this marginal existence by George D. Herron, a gentle-minded Socialist writer and
lecturer, who supported him financially and helped him discover Socialism.
E Much naturalist American literature has a decidedly socialist programme:
Jack London's The Iron Heel
John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath
Richard Wright's Native Son.
E The same can be said of the authors themselves.
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E Major difference between Norriss perception of capitalism as corporation and Sinclairs view on
corporate business:
the first is partially Darwinian in its acceptance of the abstract force of the corporation
the second is Socialist in his materialistic mathematically concrete analysis of the meat-packing
industry.
The Jungle (1906)
E check and compare major characteristics of American realism with Sinclairs journalistic + sentimental
melodramatic rendition of the immigrant working class in a factory
E difference Howellsian realism Sinclairs The Jungle:
Instead of moral exemplum and middle class / aristocracy environment Sinclair chose
political/social criticism and immigrants or working class milieu
Howells teaches moral lessons, Sinclair rebels and incites to reform [achieved in this case through
the passing of the Pure Food and Drug Law, 1906])
Willa Cather (1873 - 1947)
Willa Cather's classic pioneer novel
nineteenth-century pioneer life in Nebraska
traditional American pioneer values, such as hard work, self-reliance, and the refusal to submit to
adversity
My ntonia (1918)
E New Regionalism
Bohemian immigrant family stereotype
Local immigration stereotype: transition from urban Europe to the lonely virgin prairie (of
Nebraska)
E Elements of Populism: agrarian nostalgia for the rural Eden and nativism (Antonia as Earth Mother) as
racism: the concept of natural harmonies > the African American as a monster possessed by primeval
instinct.
E Cather's method (interviews)
she had purposely avoided any formal structuring because Jim Burden's memories (REALISM)
had to shape the narrative.
skirted the opportunity for melodrama
made up the story from the little everyday happenings that for the most part make up the bulk of
most people's lives (REALISM)
said that she was trying to create the other side of the carpet, the pattern that is supposed not to
count. There was no love affair, no courtship, no marriage, no broken heart, no struggle to
succeed.
E "I knew I'd ruin my material if I put it in the usual fictional pattern. I just used it the way I
thought absolutely true"
E picked the first-person narrative technique because she believed that novels of feeling, such as My
ntonia, were best told by a character in the story
E Novels of action, on the other hand, she said, should be told in the third person
E New regionalism novel:
Western high culture (Jim Burden, coming from the city, educated, mentioning Virgil as his
possible muse)
American low culture/popular culture (ntonia)
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E Structure: unconventional inclusion of the voices and tales of other storytellers
structure said to imitate the shape of ntonia's storytelling and to realistically reproduce the effect
and influence of all forms of art-high and low-on one's life
Naturalism
Social Darwinism, Scientific Materialism & Social Determinism:
Frank Norriss McTeague (1899),
Theodore Dreisers Sister Carrie (1900), Jack Londons Call of the Wild (1903),
Stephen Cranes Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893)
Naturalism Main Features
E naturalism was born in France in the 1880s with Zola appreciation that a novelist must be only a
scientist, an analyst, an anatomist and his work must have the certainty, the solidity, the practical
application of a work of science.
Characteristics :
E Lower class life
E Survival orientation. The middle class concern with status and social behavior is supplanted by
elemental drives of hunger, fear and sex among the have-nots who must battle simply to exist.
E Sordid language, settings and events of an animalistic environment.
E Deterministic philosophy: heredity & environment manipulate human destiny. Free will is an illusion.
E Denial of the American myth - a dispassionate, clinical study of the actuality encountered by the
underprivileged American
E Literary art should apply the techniques of the biological sciences.
E An essentially pessimistic, tragic view of life. Man as an organism buffeted by the exterior forces that he
never made and cannot govern.
E Move toward irrational man. The realists still believed that man was a creature of reason who could
solve his problems if he tried. The naturalists : no hope, man is driven by passions and appetites wholly
beyond control.
Frank Norris (1870 1902)
E Social Darwinism, Naturalism as Romantic (1870-1902) Fiction
The Responsibilities of the Novelist (1903) Naturalism as Drama (romance) plus Social
Observation (Realism) > polemics with Howells.
E SEE LECTURE 4 FOR DETAILS ON NORRISS THEORETICAL ESSAYS ON
NATURALISM!
McTeague (1899) an application of his theory on Naturalism as Romance plus Social
Observation.
E Frank Norriss message, as resulting from one of his novels, McTeague:
beneath the surface of our placid, everyday lives there is turbulence
the source of this violence beneath the surface placidity of life is the presence in all men of animal
qualities which have played a major role in mans evolutionary development but which are now
frequently atavistic and destructive.
E Norriss theme:
mans racial atavism (particularly his brute sexual desires) and mans individual family heritage
(alcoholic degeneracy in McTeagues case) can combine as a force toward reversion, toward a
return to the emotions and instincts of mans animal past
E Subversive of contemporary middle class values:
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Marriage as sex + the sexual tragedy of man and woman: caught up by drives and instincts
beyond their control or comprehension, they mate by chance.
Sex disruptive force, questioning the the sanctity of marriage; the love story ends
in chaos and destruction.
E tension between this deterministic aspect of Mc Teague and its humanistic element:
does not lie in McTeague as a fully developed tragic figure.
rather, it is contained in the theme that man can seldom escape the violence inherent in his own
nature, that mans attempt to achieve an ordered world is constantly thwarted by man himself.
E Norris devotes much attention to the element of order in the details of McTeagues life not only because
of his belief in the romance of the commomplace but because the destruction of that order is the source of
the tragic quality in McTeagues fall.
E The theme of McTeague is not that drunkenness leads to a tragic fall, but that tragedy is inherent in the
human situation given mans animal past and the possibility that he will be dominated by that past in
particular circumstances.
Jack London (1876-1916)
E Social Darwinism, Nietzschean blonde beast/ fight for supremacy, Racism, Socialism/Scientific
Materialism.
Call of the Wild (1903) environment (historical symbolical [the 1890s Gold Rush-the
Nietzschean Zarathustra/ bermensch myth] Klondike, Alaska).
The Iron Heel (1908) Socialist dystopia: Capitalism as Fascism.
Scientific Materialism
E connection between Darwins theory and socialism
E man and history are evolving toward a terrestrial paradise created by Promethean humanists.
Call of the Wild (1903)
E A romance/fable/parable of scientific theory: the doctrine of evolution.
E NARRATIVE STRUCTURE
The seven chapters of the novel are divided into four parts:
E first, Buck's life on the ranch and his kidnapping and travel to Alaska
E second, his runs with the French-Canadians and Scotsman
E third, his ordeal with the incompetents
E fourth, his stay with John Thornton and his return to the wild.
Structurally, the novel contains a conventional plot structure:
E an initial exposition (the beginning situation)
E an initiating circumstance that starts the whole string of events
E and then, in the tradition of the animal novel, a series of alarming episodes, each of which
presents a challenge to Buck and most of which involve death or wounding.
E Adversity highlighting the way from CIVILIZATION (Judge Millers ranch) to WILDERNESS (cold
and harsh Alaska and Yukon Territory as geographical suggestions of true human nature):
cheating and theft, the rope, the cage, the club, the other dogs fangs.
E Three (overlapping) levels of storytelling meanings:
Animal - gripping nature or dog story.
Human - an allegory of human psychology and behavior.
Myth: the story of the archetypical hero
E London as a thinker / artist = A WRITER OF FABLES AND PARABLES.
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Both forms are didactic: establish the validity of a particular moral truth by offering a brief story
in which plot, character, and setting are allegorical agents of a paraphrasable moral.
E The Call of the Wild, and White Fang: companion allegories of the response of human nature to heredity
and environment:
both Buck and White Fang begin their lives with a mixture of the primitive and the civilized in
their condition:
E Buck is raised in the Southland ( London's allegorical setting for civilization), but, like all
dogs, has an atavistic strain of wolf in his make-up.
E White Fang, though largely wolf and though bred in the Far North, contains an element of
the civilized through his part-dog mother.
The novels demonstrate the effects of a change in environment on the two dogs - dramatization of
a particular late nineteenth-century Darwinian formulation.
E the Call of the Wild and White Fang:
contain a strong element of the Christian parable within their beast fable emphasis on the
competitive nature of experience:
E both dog-characters respond positively to LOVE:
E Man hovers between the primitive and the civilized, and it is his capacity for love which
often determines which direction he will take.
E Dogs and men are types and the types themselves are moral in nature.
In Call, Charles, Hal, and Mercedes (the three "tenderfoot" Klondikers who buy Buck) are Vanity
and Ignorance, and John Thornton is Loyalty and Love.
The dogs in the story are even more clearly moral types--Laziness, Envy, Fear, Honesty, and so
on.
E Setting is allegorical in both works:
London exaggerates, for symbolic clarity, both the "softness" of the South and the competitive
animality of the North.
E Action is symbolic
within the clear lines of thematic movement of Buck's return to the primitive and White Fang's
engagement by civilization.
E It is not so much Darwin and Spencer who supply the thematic core of the two novels as Aesop and the
Bible:
Call of the Wild proposes the wisdom of the beast fable that the strong, the shrewd, and the
cunning shall prevail when, as is progressively true in this story, life is bestial.
White Fang endorses the Christian wisdom that all shall lie down together in peace when love
predominates.
E LITERARY TECHNIQUE:
unflinching descriptions of the raw and bloody brutality of nature, in scenes that are painful to
read:
E the vicious beating of Buck by a man in red
E the deaths of Curly, a naive and friendly Newfoundland killed by vicious huskies, and
Spitz, the untrustworthy lead dog killed by his own team
E the attack on the dog team by starved huskies
E the beating of Buck by Hal, one of the incompetents who buys the dog team.
People and creatures ineluctably caught in the grip of forces over which they have no control:
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E natural law
E economic imperatives
E and deep-seated psychological drives.
Romance:
E Myth: Buck listens to the ancestral voices of a long-dead but lingering past, calls that arise
from spirit and from instinct.
E The romantic dimension of the novel - also evident in the myth concluding in Buck's
transformation into "the Ghost Dog" (he fuses with the invisible ancestral past).
E Symbolism:
Mercedes possessions symbolize the different meanings of objects in the civilized and
uncivilized worlds.
Bucks traces: variously, his entrance into the wild, his superiority over the other animals, and,
finally, his breaking free from the group.
The club that breaks Buck in as a pack dog: the law of the uncivilized world.
Curlys death: the break with civilization.
Bucks killing of the Yeehat Indians: his final abandonment of life as a tame animal.
E Theme: recommended return from CIVILIZATION to WILDERNESS
Bucks remembering the hairy man (first call & second call) and answering the call of the
wild illustrate German naturalists Ernst Haeckel theory: "ontogeny recapitulated phylogeny."
E ontogeny: development of an individual to maturity: the development of an individual
from a fertilized ovum to maturity
E Phylogeny: the development of a group or species
This theory expresses the idea that the development of an animal embryo recapitulates the
evolutionary history of its species or group.
For Haeckel, this concept also pertained to humans beings
Jack Londons Socialism Nietzscheanism
E From The Call of the Wild (1903) to The Iron Heel (1906):
Buck = romantic, fable/parable, unconscious stage of Ernest Everhard
Ernest Everhard (The Iron Heel): introduced by London as a superman, a blond beast such as
Nietzsche described, and in addition he was aflame with democracy.
E F.Nietzsche the blonde beast:
Thus Spake Zarathustra:
E The Blonde Beast is the lion, the second stage in the Three Metamorphoses of the
spirit, above the obedient camel and the creative child.
The Genealogy of Morals, First Essay:
E One cannot fail to see at the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid
blond beast prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory; this hidden core needs to
erupt from time to time, the animal has to get out again and go back to the wilderness
(476 477)
E The blood-longing became stronger than ever before. He was a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the
things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a
hostile environment where only the strong survived. Because of all this he became possessed of a great
pride in himself, which communicated itself like a contagion to his physical being. It advertised itself in
all his movements, was apparent in the play of every muscle, spoke plainly as speech in the way he
38

carried himself, and made his glorious furry coat if anything more glorious. But for the stray brown on
his muzzle and above his eyes, and for the splash of white hair that ran midmost down his chest, he might
well have been mistaken for a gigantic wolf, larger than the largest of the breed.
E Londons opposition to the civilized, democratic solutions of the socialist leaders during his
Intercollegiate Socialist Society tour:
Between The Call of the Wild (1903) and The Iron Heel (1908) the Intercollegiate Socialist
Society lecture tour took place (1905 February 1906).
J. London met Socialist leaders who unrealistically thought that capitalism in the United States
will be soon peacefully voted out of existence.
London saw through these delusions: the capitalists, if threatened democratically (elections) will
resort to:
E violence
E and a W. J. Ghent feudalism as the most brutal dictatorship in the history of mankind.
This gave him the idea for The Iron Heel:
E The blonde beast Socialist Ernest Everhard was the political outcome of the
metaphysical Ghost Dog, Buck from The Call of the Wild.
E NO CONTRADICTION Socialism Nietzscheanism with London:
his Socialism was exotic, unorthodox, a political extension of his Nietzsche.
Social Determinism
E Naturalism as Social Determinism:
illustrated dramatically, in order to move the liberal middle-class reader to reform
the protagonists fall and willing elimination through suicide at different social levels
E Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1893) Maggie, the New York slum
E Sister Carrie (1900) George Hurstwood, Chicago business middle class
E House of Mirth (1905) Lily Barth, New York aristocracy
Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)
E Naturalism (social determinism)
Sister Carrie(1900) impact and entrapment of self by money (Charles Drouet, George
Hurstwood); city (Chicago, New York) working (Carrie Meebers sister and brother-in-law),
middle class.
E 1893 - the Chicago Exposition:
which marked the citys coming of age
one of the major attractions was the invention of engineer George Ferris, the Ferris wheel.
It represents a rising and falling motion, a mechanized repetition.
This mechanized repetition was also suggested by the created assembly line, and in domesticated
form by the rocking chair.
E THIS BECOMES AN IDENTIFYING SYMBOL FOR NATURALISM.
E Dreisers career: the world of 1900 shocked by Freuds sexual account of the dreaming human
imagination (The Interpretation of Dreams, publ.1900) to the 1929 collapse of American financial
dreamers on Wall Street (the Depression begins).
E Between those years Dreiser wrote five fundamental works: Sister Carrie (1900), An American Tragedy
(1925), A Gallery of Women (1929), Jennie Gerhardt (1911) and The Financier (1912)
39

E representing desire and ambition, business and sexuality in the social landscape of the American city : the
new business cities of Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia and New York, the centers of powerful
capitalism.
E Dreisers America is:
Urban
Capitalist
scaled to opportunity
not to fixed place (mobility and opportunity are the human and plot engines).
E His novels revolve around: the self-made woman or man-
men and women no longer in search of family life,
but linked to others only in the push of competition and the pull of sexual romance.
A temporary, provisional life, a society of invention, a world of hotels rather than homes, affairs
rather than marriages, roles instead of identity.
E the American self revealed by Dreisers prose is LABILE AND EXTERNALIZED.
There is a total lack of stability: Dreisers characters seem to avoid the trappings of identities
(home, family, lovers, work) by being continuously on the move.
In the absence of any strong continuity of character or identity, Dreiser locates his women and
men, changeable as they are, by means of what does remain fixed in social life: the array of social
types.
E A story by Dreiser is the account of the struggle to become an instance of a social type and to be known
and seen by others as that type.
It is an externally referenced identity: looking around to see who I am).
Uniforms and settings confirm the reality of the self : one of those people that you meet in
Hollywood; the type of woman who takes afternoon tea at the Waldorf; the type of businessman
who always stays at the second best hotel.
The group to which one belongs is the revealing set. Most of the dramas in Dreisers stories are
stirred by those characters who do not fit in, who do not belong.
Failed candidates for social identity (e.g. Jennie Gerhardt and her businessman lover, Lester
Cane: the formerly poor girl is not accepted as part of the stable upper-middle class because she is
a mistress and not a wife while her lover can no longer be accepted by either his family or his
associates unless he cast her off because he also does not match any longer what his set requires
him to be).
The Dreiserian character is only permitted to enter settings or social sets at the price of a stain that
marks him as not really present.
Thus, Dreiser DISCARDED THE TRADITIONAL PLOT OF THE SOCIAL NOVEL, WHICH
AIMED AT CONCLUSIONS BASED IN SOCIALLY STABLE PLACE AND MARRIAGE, IN
FAVOR OF RISE AND FALL.
E A favorite word of Dreisers is DRIFTING.
mere driftings of single persons within huge dimensions of impersonal force.
Environment in his work means not only the City as mass but also life itself as energy.
SOCIAL DETERMINISM + SOCIAL DARWINISM: Among the forces which sweep and
play throughout the universe, untutored man is but a wisp in the wind. Our civilisation is still in a
middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in
40

that it is not yet wholly guided by reason. On the tiger no responsibility rests. (CONTD ON
THE NEXT SLIDE)
E We see him aligned by nature with the forces of life--he is born into their keeping and without thought he
is protected. We see man far removed from the lairs of the jungles, his innate instincts dulled by too near
an approach to free-will, his free-will not sufficiently developed to replace his instincts and afford him
perfect guidance. He is becoming too wise to hearken always to instincts and desires; he is still too weak
to always prevail against them. As a beast, the forces of life aligned him with them; as a man, he has not
yet wholly learned to align himself with the forces. In this intermediate stage he wavers--neither drawn
in harmony with nature by his instincts nor yet wisely putting himself into harmony by his own free-will.
He is even as a wisp in the wind, moved by every breath of passion, acting now by his will and now by
his instincts, erring with one, only to retrieve by the other, falling by one, only to rise by the other--a
creature of incalculable variability.
E The consequences of the capitalist economic system for the self: improvised, rapidly changing relations.
It is a permanently redesignable society where the dreamer, the experimenter feels at home.
E Dreiser made an important contribution to the American mythography of the self (like Walt Whitmans
exemplary Democratic man). Dreisers is the exemplary actor-actress in a world that is economic rather
than political.
Stephen Crane (1871-1900)
E Naturalism: social environmental determinism.
Maggie, a Girl of the Streets(1893) New York slums; sweatshops; prostitution; brutality;
dipsomaniac mother; slums immorality: hypocritical middleclass ethics.
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893)
E early 1890s, Stephen Crane set out to reinvent the tenement novel
E inability to find a publisher for Maggie is an indication of his success -- especially when one considers
that at the time slum fiction was in vogue, and certain books about the poor were becoming veritable
bestsellers.
E the scandal of Crane's work was not its setting but, rather, his refusal to judge slum life according to
middle-class standards + defiance of slum fiction conventions
E The traditional novel of the poor was centered around a moral struggle and transformation
E The drama usually involved a battle to resist the bad influences of the slums and the pressures of
physical misery.
E Dime novels about slum girls would climax with a similar trial, but, of course, the heroine would
triumph.
E Most slum novels of the 1880s and 1890s focused on moral conflict and metamorphosis (pedagogical).
E The slum in these renditions is not so much a territory of strange habits and appearances as a den
of vice and moral decay.
E The slum novel is often elaborate in its description of moral transformation:
E The exploration of the experiences of sin and remorse is exhaustive; the lesson is not to be missed
E e.g. Cora (Edgar Fawcett, The Evil That Men Do (1889)), the good and honest woman from the
country, has no choice but to "mix" with bad people. As she puts it, "I can't get rid of 'em; I
sometimes wish I could.
E "The story chronicles its heroine's moral struggle and corruption: her temptations to vice
(numerous men try to seduce her; various loose women hammer away at the pointlessness of
virtue), her attempts to resist these temptations, her eventual yielding and fall into sin, her
41

remorse and shame, her complete moral demise (she becomes a defiant prostitute), and finally her
miserable death.
E The moral transformation at the center of a slum tale might also be for the good.
E Horatio Alger boy hero in Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York ( 1867), of course, swears
off his bad habits, gives up his "vagabond life," seeks out an education, and makes himself into "a
respectable man."
E Ethnographic detail is basically a digression in these stories
E devoted to Protestant moral exposition as well as social investigation
E touristic observations usually give way to reports of despicable living conditions.
E The plot of moral struggle
E accompanied by a general moral as well as social commentary on the slums
E E.g.: Townsend, A Daughter of the Tenements) [43]: Reverend Chapin: "The Bowery! . . . [T]he
Bowery presents . . . a microcosm. There is man in worldly condition from wealth to bitterest
poverty; in morals, from him who is devoting his life to following Christ's example among the
poor, to him to whom every crime and vice are familiar by practice." (Townsend 90)
E CRANES CORRECTION OF THE SLUM TALE:
E Not in the sentimental pedagogical tradition, Crane claimed that:
E "an artist has no business to preach
E he boasted to his friends that "you can't find any preaching in Maggie."
E he regarded the sentimental novels of his contemporaries as "pink valentines,"
E in a letter about Maggie he specifically derided Townsend Daughter of the Tenements:
E the absence of moralistic and social preaching and the acid rejection of Victorian >
unusual at that time.
E Maggie recounts the same basic tale as The Evil That Men Do
E also shares a compelling resemblance with Reverend Thomas de Witt Talmage's Night Sides of City Life
(1878) and Braces Dangerous Classes of New York -- depending on how one reads Maggie's death
scene.
E Like Maggie, Fawcett's heroine is a slum girl subjected to the hardships of violent parents and
menial labor; she is made love to and abandoned by a man, and she ends up as a prostitute and
then a corpse (Cora is murdered).
E According to Talmage, a fallen woman must choose between the cold garret of a sewing girl and
the East River; Brace includes a drawing of a woman who is about to throw herself in the same
river, which Maggie approaches in her last moments (perhaps to kill herself).
E Crane's ethnography is more profound than that of his contemporaries
E not simply because it is more prevalent or because it is uninterrupted by conventional moral and
social asides
E because he imagines the distinctive codes and values -together, the distinctive ethics -- that lie
behind the distinctive slum action.
E An action is largely incomprehensible on its face, and this is why the action in the slum novels of
the day can often appear exotic: it is unexplained; its cause is obscure; it has the ontological status
of either a genetic disease or a freak of nature.
E To understand an action, one must also know the ethics: the ethical code (so one knows whether it
is an observance or a violation) and the ethical values (so one knows why and how the actor
engages in the action).
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E Townsends book
E violence (beating up) is not explained
E just rendered as exotic and typical. Thats the way this slum phenomenon carries on.
E Jacob Riis: often acknowledges that the poor districts have their own "standards and customs. (How the
Other Half Lives, 1890)
E For Crane, it is not just the living conditions and the ways of the urban poor that are other; so is their
morality.
E Maggie is a kind of counterdemonstration. He takes an old tale and retells it: to get it right.
E It is as if Crane is saying to his colleagues, yes, you got the basic plot elements, the basic action correct,
but you completely misunderstand how it comes about.
E For Crane, the rough outline of the action is correct, but everything else is mistaken.
E The details of the sexual behavior are wrong: Maggie is not seduced, and not by a playboy of a
higher class; she falls in love with a tough.
E The significance of the sexual action is misinterpreted because the local ethical code is not understood: a
portion of Crane's Bowery has no prohibition against premarital sex.
E Finally, the girl's inner experience is misrepresented because her values do not correspond to those of the
middle class -- because, in particular, chastity is not an ethic for her:
E Maggie experiences no temptation and resistance to sin and no remorse for the act; rather, she is
attracted to a tough because he is, in her ethics, a moral exemplar.
Social Realism and Middle Class: Sinclair Lewis Babbitt (1922)
Modern Darwinism and the Novel of Manners: Edith Whartons The House of Mirth (1905)
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
E ten to - fourteen years older than the bitter Lost Generation
E writers more contemporary with him had produced the best of their work during the first two decades of
the century:
Theodore Dreiser
Willa Cather.
E Influenced by the late nineteenth century spirit of Utopian idealism
E.g: Edward Bellamys immensely popular Looking Backward, 2000-1887 [1888]
E depiction of an ideal socialistic society in the year 2000
E inspired the formation of many socialistic clubs and the Progressive political heritage of
the turn of the century when Lewis was coming to maturity.
Sinclair Lewis Babbitt (1922)
E Mirrors the confusion of formerly Midwest agricultural frontier little town whose traditional local values
are being converted to the industrial city/progressive standards in the post-Reconstruction Progressive era
(1890 1920) of rapid economical growth
Reconstruction: 1865 1877
his native Midwest: Sauk Center, Minnesota: an economy of scarcity is changed into one of
abundance
E Ensuing problem: how to integrate the pastoral into the urban.
E GENERAL CULTURAL THEMES
Little town middle class (also Main Street, 1920)
E middle class characters - the Good Citizen's League in Zenith:
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E real estate brokers, a physician, a banker, a coal merchant, a company executive, a
mattress manufacturer, newspaper owner.
American business enterprise.
Commercial culture.
E The state of Winnemac (H.L. Mencken sees Winnemac as exemplifying the "standardized chain-store
state" of the mid west. In his critical study of Sinclair Lewis Sheldon Grebstein notes that the "average
mid-western state called Winnemac" is an amalgamation of Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan) is
bounded by Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, and like them it is half Eastern, half Midwestern.
There is a feeling of New England in its brick and sycamore villages, its stable industries, and a tradition
which goes back to the Revolutionary War. Zenith (Sauk Centre), the largest city in the state, was
founded in 1792. But Winnemac is Midwestern in its fields of corn and wheat, its red barns and silos, and
despite the immense antiquity of Zenith, many counties were not settled until 1860. Sinclair Lewis,
Arrowsmith
E 1920s North American mentality:
urge toward normalcy and business as usual
fear of socialists, Reds, labor unrest
suspicion of foreigners and radical ideas
the suppression and denial of non-WASP culture:
E mid-20th century, the term referred to White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, became a common
designation for Americans of British heritage.
E American writers often equated WASPs with the dominant class in the United States.
the appeal of bohemianism
the lure of nature
the hypocrisy of Prohibition
E following the ratification of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States
in 1919
E ended in 1933 when the 18th Amendment was repealed.
the influence of the mass media and advertising in shaping public desires
the replacement of religion by science and technology
the conformity of the Solid Citizen
E Babbitts drama:
his wish for idealism
not able to understand/spot the former/latent spirit of pioneering and reform stifled by middle-
class conformity and corrupt political ambition
reveals an ambivalent, divided self: idealism and wish for genuine values vs. conformism.
E Underlying Babbitts conformism:
some genuine idealism and wish for change materialized in:
his failed love affair
political orientation
and almost breakaway from the Zenith community.
the end of the novel: his new, redeemed perception of truth.
I've never done a single thing I've wanted to in my whole life! I don't know 's I've accomplished
anything except just get along. I figure out I've made about a quarter of an inch out of a possible
hundred rods. Well, maybe you'll carry things on further. I don't know. But I do get a kind of
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sneaking pleasure out of the fact that you knew what you wanted to do and did it. Well, those
folks in there will try to bully you, and tame you down. Tell 'em to go to the devil! I'll back you.
Take your factory job, if you want to. Don't be scared of the family. No, nor all of Zenith. Nor
of yourself, the way I've been. Go ahead, old man! The world is yours! (addressing son)
Babbitt (1922) & the Critics
E Lewis in letter to critic Carl Van Doren (November, 1920):
planning the story of an Average Business Manin a city of four hundred thousand people
[like] (Minneapolis or Seattle)with its enormous industrial powerand menacing heresy
huntcrushing of anything threatening its commercial oligarchy
Similar to:
E Londons Iron Heel [1908]
E Lewis It Cant Happen Here [1935]: imagining capitalism as fascism.
E H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
American journalist, critic, and essayist
perceptive and often controversial analyses of American life and letters
one of the most influential critics of the 1920s and 1930s.
E on Babbitt:
A criticism of Americas conformist Puritanism, commercialism, moralism.
The real America > Lewis the first really national/American novelist, Babbitt the archetypal
Yankee.
Popular success proved by the coining of Babbitt and Babbittry as synonyms of middlebrow
conformist/m.
Sinclair Lewis Babbitt/Babbittry
E dictionary definition of Babbitt/Babbittry
A problem of reception > superficial public/canonic perception:
The Random House Dictionary of the English Language: College Edition, ed. Laurence Urdang,
New York: Random House, 1968, 97:
A self-satisfied person who conforms readily to middle-class attitudes and ideals []
E Actually Babbitt is the second character (in a mass of middle class conformism), after Paul Riesling, who
dangerously rebels against the Good Citizen's League mentality.
Babbitt (1922) & Realism
E objective representation of contemporary social reality
E Realism in the preliminary research method used by Lewis before writing Babbitt > full familiarization
with the field and the setting of the book:
through carefully recorded interviews
reading
listening to speeches
attending conventions
preparing full summaries of the plot and structure of the story
drawing maps of the imaginary Zenith and the floor plan for Babbitts house.
E Critics called Lewis a literary sociologist of American life:
Keen analytic description of social setting (e.g. the Athletic Club description) and character (e.g.
Conrad Lyte, real estate speculator).
Similar to the radical sociology of Thorstein Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899):
45

E Conspicuous consumption
E relation between status, money, and social competition.

E Social realism: qualities set forth by William Dean Howells (in his 1891 collection of critical essays
Criticism and Fiction):
Stories drawn from contemporary everyday life
E full accounting and depiction of middle-American life in the 1920s (Babbitts milieu:
family, company, club).
Familiar settings
E remarkable detail; Lewis described by critics as a notable photographer.
Believable characters
Ordinary, everyday, colloquial English
E faithful recorder of American speech sounds, patterns, and rhythms
Much dialogue as a means of self-revealing characters (no omniscient narrators)
E everyday conversation as a revelation of relationships and class
Limited point of view
E There is authorial intrusion in Babbit
E ironically critical: highlights middle class hypocrisy.
Satire & Style in Babbitt (1922)
E Babbittry; American middleclass regimentation:
Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, just as the priests
of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief and the senators who controlled
the Republican Party decided in little smoky rooms in Washington what he should think about
disarmament, tariff, and Germany, so did the large national advertisers fix the surface of his life,
fix what he believed to be his individuality. These standard advertised wares--toothpastes, socks,
tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters--were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first
the signs, then the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom.
E Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (BPOE; also often known as the Elks Lodge or simply The
Elks), is an American fraternal order and social club founded in 1868. It is one of the leading fraternal
orders in the U.S., claiming over one million members.
E Booster club: an organization that is formed to contribute money to an associated club, sports team, or
organization. Booster clubs are popular in American schools at the high school and university level.
E American middle class kitschy, degraded dream/romanticism satirized as undermined or taken over by
harsh technological economics realism:
For years the fairy child had come to him. Where others saw but Georgie Babbitt, she discerned
gallant youth. She waited for him, in the darkness beyond mysterious groves. When at last he
could slip away from the crowded house he darted to her. His wife, his clamoring friends, sought
to follow, but he escaped, the girl fleet beside him, and they crouched together on a shadowy
hillside. She was so slim, so white, so eager! She cried that he was gay and valiant, that she
would wait for him, that they would sail--Rumble and bang of the milk-truck.
(continued) Babbitt moaned; turned over; struggled back toward his dream. He could see only her
face now, beyond misty waters. The furnace-man slammed the basement door. A dog barked in
the next yard. As Babbitt sank blissfully into a dim warm tide, the paper-carrier went by
whistling, and the rolled-up Advocate thumped the front door. Babbitt roused, his stomach
46

constricted with alarm. As he relaxed, he was pierced by the familiar and irritating rattle of some
one cranking a Ford: snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah.
To George F. Babbitt, as to most prosperous citizens of Zenith, his motor car was poetry and
tragedy, love and heroism. The office was his pirate ship but the car his perilous excursion
ashore.
To them, the Romantic Hero was no longer the knight, the wandering poet, the cowpuncher, the
aviator, nor the brave young district attorney, but the great sales-manager, who had an Analysis of
Merchandizing Problems on his glass-topped desk, whose title of nobility was "Go-getter," and
who devoted himself and all his young samurai to the cosmic purpose of Selling--not of selling
anything in particular, for or to anybody in particular, but pure Selling.
E ADVERTISING as bogus/faker of reality:
Parody of the degraded, business/pragmatic vulgarized version of education and intellectual
values in newspaper advertising (next slide):
He snatched from the back of his geometry half a hundred advertisements of those home-study
courses which the energy and foresight of American commerce have contributed to the science of
education. The first displayed the portrait of a young man with a pure brow, an iron jaw, silk
socks, and hair like patent leather. Standing with one hand in his trousers-pocket and the other
extended with chiding forefinger, he was bewitching an audience of men with gray beards,
paunches, bald heads, and every other sign of wisdom and prosperity. Above the picture was an
inspiring educational symbol--no antiquated lamp or torch or owl of Minerva, but a row of dollar
signs. The text ran:
E $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $
E POWER AND PROSPERITY IN PUBLIC SPEAKING
E Parody of literary art as advertising in commercialized America: the poetry of industrialism:
() the poetry of industrialism, now there's a literary line where you got to open up new territory.
Do you know the fellow who's really THE American genius? The fellow who you don't know his
name and I don't either, but his work ought to be preserved so's future generations can judge our
American thought and originality to-day? Why, the fellow that writes the Prince Albert Tobacco
ads!
E ORATORY as PUBLIC LIFE:
Parody of public oratory as insubstantial and nationalistic (Americanness) as public life itself.
Nativism and demagogy:
E Babbit Chamber of Commerce dinner annual address: (next slide)
"'In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding
on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is
indistinguishable from any other decent business man; and I, for one, am only too glad that the
man who has the rare skill to season his message with interesting reading matter and who shows
both purpose and pep in handling his literary wares has a chance to drag down his fifty thousand
bucks a year, to mingle with the biggest executives on terms of perfect equality, and to show as
big a house and as swell a car as any Captain of Industry! But, mind you, it's the appreciation of
the Regular Guy who I have been depicting which has made this possible, and you got to hand as
much credit to him as to the authors themselves.
Parody of degraded religious middlebrow oratory:
E see novel for:
47

E Mike Mondays speech
E Intellectual oratory: Reverend John Dennison Drews speech
E alternative New Thought oratory: Mrs. Opal Emerson Mudges sermon
Impossible Dreams: Babbitt and Romance
E greatness of the novel:
not just a satire approaching critically social types, but also an existential examination of
Babbitts inner life marking his change and the insertion of drama with Paul Rieslings tragic,
violent breakaway from the Zenith society.
E a technologically highly developed city:
people do not communicate with technology and each other;
alienated from romance/idealism/pioneer-adventurer-frontiersman nostalgia. Babbitts nostalgia
due to such loss (next slide):
alienated from romance/idealism/pioneer-adventurer-frontiersman nostalgia. Babbitts nostalgia
due to such loss (next slide):
E Wish Id been a pioneer same as my grand-dad. But then, wouldnt have a house like
this
E Romance and business:Chum Frink
Know what I wanted to do as a kid? Know what I wanted to do? Wanted to be a big chemist.
Tha's what I wanted to do. But Dad chased me out on the road selling kitchenware, and here I'm
settled down--settled for LIFE--not a chance!
Know what I could 've been? I could 've been a Gene Field or a James Whitcomb Riley. Maybe
a Stevenson. I could 've. Whimsies. 'Magination. Lissen. Lissen to this. Just made it up:
Glittering summery meadowy noise
Of beetles and bums and respectable boys.
Hear that? Whimzh--whimsy. I made that up. I don't know what it means! Beginning good verse.
Chile's Garden Verses. And whadi write? Tripe! Cheer-up poems. All tripe! Could have written--Too
late!"
E Power and energy for business; no spiritual pathos (churches) or pioneer romance (citadels)
Zenith > the heroic city:
E THE towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and
cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. They were neither
citadels nor churches, but frankly and beautifully office-buildings.
E Babbitts ways of escape:
into the past American tradition and present > nature (Thoreauvian Transcendental)
bohemian (the Roaring 20s)
liberal Seneca Doanes (Progressive)
E fail.
E A chastened rebel (like Carol Kennicott in Main Street).
Edith Wharton (1862-1937) The House of Mirth (1905)
E Wharton born into the postCivil War Victorian era
inherited a domestic, often sentimental, literary tradition from her female predecessors:
E Harriet Beecher Stowe
E Louisa May Alcott
E Sarah Orne Jewett.
48

Acknowledged her debt to them but rejected the rose-coloured lenses through which some of
these writers saw the world (Backward, NW, 1002)
aimed instead for moral depth and ambiguity (more associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne).
E helped to transform nineteenth-century romantic literature into a twentieth-century realism
confronted directly and critically the pressing issues facing men and women at the turn of the
century
Her realism is:
E more uncompromising than William Dean Howells's
E more rooted in physical passion than James's.
E Wharton takes special interest in women:
In novels as different as The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country, she documents:
E the effects of an increasingly consumer-based culture
E shifting sexual relations
E changing urban & rural demographics on women of all classes.
E portraits of people negotiating the requirements of place and custom
tradition of the novel of manners
original contributions to the school of literary naturalism.
E characters, like those in Theodore Dreiser's and Frank Norris's fictions, are often trapped
by biology or circumstance.
E Whartons major theme:
the dispossession of the old New York aristocracy by the vulgar new rich (The Custom of the
Country, 1913; The Age of Innocence, 1920)
the action of The House of Mirth occurs in the first years of the 20th century, a few decades
beyond the dispossession of old New York.
distant offshoots of NY aristocracy, already tainted by the vulgarity of the new bourgeoisie, yet
contemptuous of it.
E Lily Bart descends from the hereditary non-mercantile society to that of the new investors (moneymaking
climbers).
The financial ruin of her father when she is 19 leaves her with one way of making a living: a
useful companion to women of wealth.
Next possibility: make a suitable marriage for money
E Social steps in Lilys decline:
The Trenors pretense of styles and values they actually violate
The Dorsets lower rung: no longer pretend to care about traditional styles and values.
Carrie Fisher frankly materialistic, a guide for the arrivistes ready to pay for social acceptance.
The Wellington Brys rich and feverishly on the make.
The Gormers also on the rise
Norma Hatch wealthy adventuress, not socially highly integrated
The milliners workshop
E defies the principles that give force to the two most famous narrative traditions that secure other
American classics:
the twin faiths in:
E the ability to control one's rise to riches and social success (Benjamin Franklin's
contribution)
49

E to attain self-sufficiency (the legacy of Ralph Waldo Emerson).
E In contrast Wharton's plot traces Lily Bart's wavering course toward poverty, loneliness, and death.
E Dual meanings of 'success: Seldons v. Lily Barths:
"Success?" She hesitated. "Why, to get as much as one can out of life, I suppose. It's a relative
quality, after all. Isn't that your idea of it? "My idea of it? God forbid!" He sat up with sudden
energy, resting his elbows on his knees and staring out upon the mellow fields. "My idea of
success," he said, "is personal freedom. "Freedom? Freedom from worries? "From everything--
from money, from poverty, from ease and anxiety, from all the material accidents. To keep a kind
of republic of the spirit--that's what I call success."
E The hypothesis proposed by Selden that 'personal freedom' is the only true 'success'.
Selden defines freedom for Lily as breaking away from 'all material accidents'--all of society's
stringent demands--in order to enter into 'the republic of the spirit'.
E commodification of young women in the marriage market: the full impact of late capitalism upon the
lives of women
The House of Mirth (1905) Modern Darwinism
E Three layers of language:
discourse of nineteenth-century evolutionists whose paradigm of physical determinism still held
sway.
up-to-the-moment metaphors suggestive of the forces of inertia:
E fascinated quasi-scientific historians like Henry Adams, who borrowed his vocabulary for
the depletion of mental energy from Kelvin's Second Law of Thermodynamics.
words descriptive of socially instilled habits > influence of:
E sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists such as mile Durkheim, William James,
John Dewey.
E Wharton on the Darwinist causes for Lily Bart's 'ineffectiveness":
she was perhaps less to blame than she believed. Inherited tendencies had combined with early
training to make her the highly specialized produce she was: an organism as helpless out of its
narrow range as the sea anemone torn from the rock. She had been fashioned to adorn and delight;
to what other end does nature round the rose-leaf and paint the hummingbird's breast? (301)
E Lily's inertia, her capitulation to the supersensual forces of entropy erasure of the distinctions between
the conscious state and the sedative pull of chloral:
But gradually the sense of complete subjugation came over her, and she wondered languidly
what had made her feel so uneasy and excited. She saw now that there was nothing to be excited
about--she had returned to her normal view of life. (323)
E the forces of habit:
socially imposed impulses that direct one's actions for good (Gus Trenor does not rape Lily) and
for ill (Selden's self-assurance that he is no slave to habit and thus free to tell his love to Lily,
belied by the ease with which he falls back into old patterns of doubt instilled in him by his class
and by his role as a male):
E To her surprise, Trenor answered the look with a speechless stare. With his last gust of
words the flame had died out, leaving him chill and humbled. . . . Old habits, old
restraints, the hand of inherited order, plucked back the bewildered mind which passion
had jolted from its ruts. (147)
E L.B.s social involution:
50

determined by the conflicting crisscrossing of her moral evolution:
E started by her love for Selden and the consequent assimilation of his republic of the
spirit principles
E and the social rules of her environment.
What she lacks: the capacity to tear herself away from the comfort and hedonic aspects of this
environment that traps and suffocates her through aesthetic and social addiction.
Thus: the way towards a new/authentic identity stops wavering in intentional accident.
E Wharton provides this diversity of signals about the source and nature of forces that appear cruelly to
limit, if not to crush, faith in one's unfettered freedom of the will Naturalism.
E The Independent at the time when the novel appeared:
questioned whether there should even be novels like Wharton's that suggest that 'environment' is
the reason her characters participate in society's 'refined ferocities, its sensual extravagances . . .
the tragedies which underlie its outward appearance of mirth and prosperity'.
this review notes perceptively that the fatalism Wharton projects in 1905 is different from the
fatalism practiced in 'the old days in Greece'. Never has 'fatalism been so emphasized as it is now,
particularly in fiction. The difference is that we lack pagan cheerfulness.'
The House of Mirth (1905) Realism & Verisimilitude
E Questioning the verisimilitude of The House of Mirth:
readers in 1905, telling the truth in the case of The House of Mirth:
E the accuracy with which Wharton brought into single focus the relations that linked Lily's
character, Lily's socially constituted conduct, and Lily's fate.
E some reviews never moved beyond fretting over the degree of 'realism' Wharton conveys by being:
'pleasant' or 'unpleasant', 'ethical' or 'unethical', 'didactically preachy' or impersonally
'impressionistic' in the treatment of her material.
the San Francisco Chronicle noted perceptively that Wharton had romanticized her story since in
'real life' Lily would become the mistress of a man she loathed but eventually tolerated.
E contemporaries of Wharton on 'truth-telling:
Olive Schreiners Woman and Labor: sociology of 'parasitism'.
E deplorable social condition causes the 'prostitution' of the 'fine lady' who--'clad in fine
raiment, the work of others' fingers'--is recognizable as Lily Bart on the brink of becoming
either 'kept wife [or] kept mistress'.
Paul Bourget -- preface he prepared for the 1908 French edition of The House of Mirth
E Frenchman who had travelled in the United States during the mid 1890s while gathering
notes for Outre-Mer
E He observes that Americans like to think theirs is a classless society, one based on
principles of complete equality for all citizens.
E this is not the case. Masked by the look of democracy, the United States consists of two
worlds in conflict: that of the aristocrats of great wealth and that of the general populace
which labours without guarantees of economic or social equality
E through Wharton's depiction of Lily's life as a 'social pageant', she breaks through the
masks to the truth regarding America.
Novel of Manners
E novel that describes in detail the customs, behaviors, habits, and expectations of a certain social group at
a specific time and place.
51

E Usually these conventions shape the behavior of the main characters, and sometimes even stifle or repress
them.
E struggle to fit into high society: proper and improper ways of acting / behaving
E tradition developed in England (17
th
century & continued throughout the 19
th
):
E Walter Scott, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James etc
E the place of women in society and the social effect of marriage
E America: Hannah Foster's The Coquette, Catherine Maria Sedgwicks novels, and even Kate
Chopin's The Awakening
E specific conventions in the 19th century:
E protagonist is usually a single woman looking to get married
E socio-economic class as a factor in marriage
E proper and improper way of acting within high society
E differences and relations between classes
E The end of the novel: either marriage or death of the female protagonist
The House of Mirth (1905)
E There were questions with regard to the possibility/ adequacy of such a genre:
In America, there were no official social classes
E Wharton adapted the form:
to better suit the New York society:
different kind of aristocracy -- elegant New York.
Class mobility as an important factor.
E Lily Bart: lower-class world v. her upper-class sensibilities
Wharton: spirit as genuine love suppressed by social norm assuring social and economic security.

American Modernism
Prerequisites
E World War I made the United States a world power
European nations tried to recover from the war, the United States had overseas territories, access
to markets, and plentiful raw materials.
Formerly in debt to European investors, the United States began to lend money abroad.
At home, the economy expanded:
E assembly-line production
E mass consumption
E easy credit
E and advertising characterized the 1920s.
E American zeal for reform waned; business and government resumed their long-term affinity.
E not all Americans enjoyed the rewards of prosperity.
E A mix of economic change, political conservatism, and cultural conflict the 1920s a decade of
contradictions.
World War I
E The Triple Alliance (Central Powers): Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy (to opt out of the alliance and be
replaced by the Ottoman Empire)
E The Triple Entente (Allied Powers): Britain, France, Russia.
52

The first wartime use of modern weapons with high range of efficiency leading to many casualties
(military and civilian: 37 million): machine guns, tanks, airplanes.
Europe had lost a generation of young men, its confidence, and stability
World War I - The American Reaction
E Antebellum intellectuals:
transformation of the American dream from religious mission to secular social and material
success: manifest destiny/city on a hill/New Jerusalem replaced by individual liberty and material
well-being. Service to man instead of service to God
1914 concludes a period of unprecedented material growth, domestic reform: the future is bright.
American intellectuals: their responsibility to lead the nation upward and onward (reform and
utopia)
Optimism, belief in the natural rights of man.

After / during the War:
E antebellum intellectual mythical vision - exploded.
E European nations behaved aggressively tribal:
they have reverted to the condition of savage tribes roaming the forests and falling upon each
other in a fury of blood and carnage to achieve the ambitious designs of chieftains clad in skins
and drunk with mead. (New York Times, August 2, 1914)
E American intellectuals engaged in the Progressive movement: stunned.
E Wilsons 1916 peace initiative:
A vision of a new world order.
Relations between nations would be governed by negotiation rather than war.
Justice to replace power.
E In a major foreign policy address (May 27, 1916), Wilson formally declared support for what he called
the League of Nations.
E Response:
Many American pacifist groups supported Wilsons efforts:
To commit national prestige to the cause of international peace rather than conquest
To keep the United States out of war.
E Actively opposed the war:
Carrie Chapman Catt (President of the National Women Suffrage Association)
Jane Addams (founder of the Womens Peace Party)
the nations Protestant clergy
Midwestern progressives [Robert La Follette, William Jennings Bryan, George Norris]
leading socialists: Eugene V. Debs
E April 1916: many of the countrys most prominent progressives and socialists joined hands in the
American Union against Militarism and pressured Wilson to continue pursuing the path of peace
E On December 16, 1916: Wilson sent a peace note to the belligerent governments
E Wilson initiated secret peace negotiations with both sides
E Speech before the Senate - January 22, 1917:
E reaffirmed his commitment to the League of Nations.
E peace without victory; only a peace between equals can last.
53

E listed the crucial principles of a lasting peace: freedom of the seas, disarmament, the right to self-
determination, democratic self-government, and security against aggression
E revolutionary change in world order; views rarely expressed by the leader of a world power.
E March 1916: a German submarine torpedoed a French passenger liner Sussex, there was heavy loss of
life, and a few injured Americans
E February 1, the United States broke off diplomatic relations with Germany.
E Wilson continued to hope for a negotiated settlement until February 25, when the British intercepted and
passed on to the president a telegram:
E The Zimmerman telegram: The German government tried to provoke a war between the United
States and Mexico. Foreign Secretary of the German Empire, Arthur Zimmermann, on January
16, 1917, to the German ambassador in the United States of America, Johann von Bernstorff. The
Telegram instructed Ambassador Eckardt that if the United States appeared likely to enter the war
he was to approach the Mexican government with a proposal for military alliance. He was to offer
Mexico material aid in the reclamation of territory lost during the Mexican-American War (1846-
48), specifically the American states of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
E Initially most intellectuals accept this attitude and support:
E The war
E The super-patriotism at home
E Some scholars (economists, political scientists) left their academic jobs and offered their expertise in
Washington. Others supported the American intervention in writing.
E John Dewey, a pacifist three months before the American participation (Creative Intelligence [collective
volume, 1917]: the observation of the practical consequences of believing in an idea should determine its
value.
E Scientific method, not force, should be the basis of belief.
E Immediately following the American April 1917 entrance into the conflict, starts publishing a series of
articles in New Republic arguing that war and his variety of pragmatism are compatible:
E Pacifism: emotional, idealistic, personal rather than social.
E Concrete action was to be taken as a practical, objective response to a specific
situation.
E J. Dewey - The Social Possibilities of War (the Independent, June 1918) another reason supporting the
intervention:
The general state of emergency & its accompanying spirit of private sacrifice for public ends
would hasten the advent of the socialization of the means of production and distribution.
This will lead to the central governments control over the private sector of the economy & the
kind of social and economic justice for which the Progressives had labored with only partial
success.
The end result of the mobilization effort: a permanent democratization of industry.
E Most American intellectuals followed Deweys reasoning.
E An exception: Randolph Bourne (1886 - 1918) - articles in Seven Arts:
War: a national tragedy.
Blamed the intellectuals who had rationalized the war.
While Europe was fighting America might have developed / clarified the meaning of democracy /
discover a true Americanism.
The whole era had been spiritually wasted.
54

Horrified by the role played by the American intellectuals encouraging war (turning it into a holy
crusade).
The instrumentalist/pragmatist approach (Deweys theory that ideals entail sacrifices) focused on
winning the war without considering whether the postwar world would be worse.
The problem with pragmatism: while effective in terms of practical means of fulfilling ideas it did
nor question or explain the very ideals: We suffer from a real shortage of spiritual values.
The old ideals crumble; new ideals must be forged.(Twilight of Idols, 1917)

At his death (1918) Bourne was experimenting with a vision of American society as a model to
replace belligerent nationalism with peaceful pluralism.
Still: no despair, cynicism, bitterness (as attributed to the lost generation) > the urgency to
create, not to resign.
E The first total war: the U.S.A. government had to pursue an unprecedented high degree of industrial
control and social regimentation.
E Labor shortage: expansion of production for the war, decrease of immigration, drafting (military
conscription).
E Result: considerable migration
E To the North (1916-1920) from the South (African-American and white)
E To the Southwest: Chicanos in agriculture, mining, railroad jobs from revolution-ridden Mexico.
E In the North: approx. 40,000 northern women hired as streetcar conductors, railroad workers,
metalworkers, munitions makers replacing men. Women in clerical work in the government war
bureaucracies. A million women engaged in war-related industries.
E Labor organizing (unions): 1916-1920: more than one million workers on annual strikes: asking for
higher wages & shorter hours. Industrial democracy becomes the battle cry of an awakened battle labor
movement.
E Patriotism & Democracy:
E 1917 Wilson set up the agency called the Committee on Public Information (CPI): to publicize &
popularize the war (war propaganda). Profound effect imparted to many:
E Deep love of country
E Sense of participation in a grand democratic experiment
E New spirit of protest
E Workers rally for industrial democracy
E Women fighting for suffrage
E African-Americans wishing to get rid of second-class citizenship status
E However, the war opened up new social & cultural divisions.
E Wartime Repression:
E early 1918 the CPI campaign: inflamatory advertisements - called on patriots to report on
neighbors, coworkers, and ethnics suspected of subverting the war effort.
E called on all immigrants, especially those from central, southern, and Eastern Europe, to pledge
themselves to 100 percent Americanism and to repudiate all ties to their homeland, native
language, and ethnic customs.
E aroused hostility to Germans by spreading lurid tales of German atrocities and encouraging the
public to see movies such as The Prussian Cur and The Beast of Berlin.
55

E Justice Department arrested thousands of German and Austrian immigrants whom it suspected of
subversive activities
E Congress passed the Trading with the Enemy Act requiring foreign-language publications to submit all
war-related stories to post office censors for approval.
E German American words were renamed
E German Americans became the objects of popular hatred: performances of Beethovens symphonies were
banned; libraries removed works of German literature from their shelves; Patriotic school boards in Lima,
Ohio, and elsewhere burned the German books in their districts
E German Americans risked being fired from work, losing their businesses, being assaulted in the street
E The anti-German campaign escalated into a general anti-immigrant crusade. Congress passed the
Immigration Restriction Act of 1917 (over Wilsons veto): all adult immigrants who failed a reading test
would be denied admission to the United States.
American Modernism Prerequisites and Background
E Productivity and Prosperity
E Mass Culture
E Political Conservatism
E Political Conflicts
E The Great Depression (1929-1940)
E The New Deal (1933-1940)
Productivity and Prosperity
E CAR PRODUCTION
Ford Assembly Line
early 20th century, the AUTOMOBILE INDUSTRY symbolized the potential of industrial
growth for the United States
1916 1929: annual car sales tripled; 9 million motorized vehicles on the road became 27 million
by the end of the 1920s
the popular black Model T.
E Assembly-line techniques: cut production costs cars less expensive & more available to average
citizens.
E The effects of auto production:
industries that made steel, glass, rubber, and petroleum.
exploration for oil new corporations, such as Gulf Oil and Texaco (the 1920s domestic oil
production grew by 250 % , as well as oil imports).
State-funded programs to build roads and highways the nations landscape.
isolated rural areas filled with tourist cabins and gas stations.
new suburbs with single-family homes on small plots of land arose at the outskirts of cities; the
construction industry soared.
new ways to distribute and sell products: advertising & the installment plan
E Industry produced new home appliances: refrigerators, washing machines & vacuum cleaners
E families spent larger portions of their incomes to buy these goods; items previously considered luxuries
now became necessities.
E chain stores, such as A&P, put local retailers out of business
E canned goods and commercial breads replaced homemade products
E advertising industry (appeared in the late 19th century): desire for consumer goods.
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E extensive credit CONSUMERISM.
E American corporations became larger: the end of the 1920s, 100 corporations controlled nearly half the
nations business
E Affected workers & agriculture
Mass Culture
E One symbol of the 1920s: the flapper
young woman with a bobbed haircut, short skirt, and makeup.
youthful rebellion, carefree attitudes, and female independence.
celebrating the Jazz Age of the 1920s
E the flapper represented much of what typified the Jazz Age of the 1920s:
youthful rebellion
female independence
exhibitionism
competitiveness
consumerism.
E Although a symbol of liberation, the flapper was in fact the ultimate consumer, dependent on a variety of
products: bobbed hairdos, short skirts, makeup, and cigarettes
E supported the industries of the 1920s: the beauty parlor, the ready-made clothing industry, cosmetic
manufacture, and tobacco production.
E Consumerism linked the carefree, adventurous mood of the Jazz Age with the dominance of large
corporations and their conservative values.
The Jazz Age - F.S. Fitzgeralds Echoes of the Jazz Age
E The ten-year period that, as if reluctant to die outmoded in its bed, leaped to a spectacular death in
October, 1929, began about the time of the May Day riots in 1919. When the police rode down the
demobilized country boys gaping at the orators in Madison Square, it was the sort of measure bound to
alienate the more intelligent young men from the prevailing order. We didn't remember anything about
the Bill of Rights until Mencken began plugging it, but we did know that such tyranny belonged in the
jittery little countries of South Europe. If goose-livered business men had this effect on the government,
then maybe we had gone to war for J. P. Morgan's loans after all.
E But, because we were tired of Great Causes, there was no more than a short outbreak of moral
indignation, typified by Dos Passos' Three Soldiers. Presently we began to have slices of the national
cake and our idealism only flared up when the newspapers made melodrama out of such stories as
Harding and the Ohio Gang or Sacco and Vanzetti. The events of 1919 left us cynical rather than
revolutionary, in spite of the fact that now we are all rummaging around in our trunks wondering where
in hell we left the liberty cap"I know I had it" and the moujik blouse. It was characteristic of the Jazz
Age that it had no interest in politics at all.
E It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire. (..) We
were the most powerful nation. Who could tell us any longer what was fashionable and what was fun?
() This was the generation whose girls dramatized themselves as flappers, the generation that corrupted
its elders and eventually overreached itself less through lack of morals than through lack of taste.
E A whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure. (..) The word jazz in its progress toward
respectability has meant first sex, then dancing, then music. It is associated with a state of nervous
stimulation, not unlike that of big cities behind the lines of a war. To many English the War still goes on
57

because all the forces that menace them are still active Wherefore eat, drink and be merry, for to-
morrow we die.
Mass Culture
E Leisure industries - turned to mass production as well:
E Rural / urban, Americans nationwide: mass-circulation magazines (full of advertising): The Saturday
Evening Post, Readers Digest, or The Ladies Home Journal.
E listened on the radio to the same popular music, comedy shows, and commercials, broadcast by new
radio networks such as National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and Columbia Broadcasting System
(CBS)
Sound Films
E not the first sound film, but one of the first successful sound movies of the Jazz Age:
Eugene Lauste made sound films 1910-1914
Edison made kinetophone films in 1913
Western Electric showed "The Audion" at Yale on Oct. 27, 1922, and made "Hawthorne in 1924
Warner made the Vitaphone short "The Volga Boatman" May 24, 1926, and released "Don Juan"
on August 6, 1926. F
Fox began releasing sound newsreels Jan. 21, 1927
E The "Jazz Singer" opens with young Jakie Rabinowitz, the son of a Jewish cantor, singing in a saloon.
His father demands that Jakie become a traditional cantor. Jackie runs away from home and becomes the
jazz singer Jack Robin, played by Al Jolson.
The Press
E On April 3, 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author of The Great Gatsby, married Zelda Sayre at the rectory
of St. Patricks Cathedral on Fifth Avenue at 50th Street in Manhattan. The wedding took place a week
after Scribners published Fitzgeralds first novel, This Side of Paradise.
E Zelda wore a dark blue suit and matching hat and carried a bouquet of orchids and white flowers. No
music played, no photographs were taken, and only four guests attended: two of Zeldas sisters, one with
her husband, and Scotts best man, Ludlow Fowler. Zeldas third sister and her husband arrived late and
missed the ceremony. There was no reception, but the newlyweds honeymooned at the midtown
Manhattan Biltmore Hotel.
Political Conservatism
E Warren G. Harding (1921 1923)
The 29th president of the United States
Died in office
Republican who endorsed conservative values in politics and economics
tended to favor big business in domestic policy and isolationism in foreign policy
President Warren G. Harding called normalcy a regular steady order of things.
E Many Americans of the 1920s endorsed conservative values in politics and economics
E Under presidents Harding and Calvin Coolidge, tariffs reached new highs, income taxes fell for people
who were most well off, and the Supreme Court upset progressive measures, such as the minimum wage
and federal child labor laws
E Both Harding and Coolidge tended to favor business.
E The business of America is business, Coolidge declared. This is a business country, and it wants a
business government.
58

E Republican presidents shared isolationist inclinations in foreign policy; the United States never joined the
League of Nations.
E Harding and Coolidge also endorsed pacifist policies:
1921 Harding organized the Washington Conference, a pioneering effort to reduce arms and avoid
an expensive naval arms race.
Attended by the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Italy, and other countries
the conference proposed destruction of ships and a moratorium on new construction.
In 1928, under Coolidge, the United States and France cosponsored the Kellogg-Briand Pact,
which renounced aggression and called for the end of war.
Useless in practice. However, it helped to establish the 20th-century concept of war as an outlaw
act by an aggressor state on a victim state.
E 1924 the U.S. Congress passed the National Origins Act, which limited immigration into the country
E Protests against unrestricted immigration came from organized labor, which feared the loss of jobs to
newcomers, and from patriotic organizations, which feared foreign radicalism
E set an annual quota on immigration and limited the number of newcomers from each country to the
proportion of people of that national origin in the 1890 population
E discriminated against the most recent newcomers, southern and eastern Europeans, and excluded Asian
immigrants almost entirely. Latin American immigration, however, was unlimited.
E Radical political activism waned, dimmed by the Red Scare of 1919
E Social criticism appeared in literary magazines such as The Masses; in newspapers such as the Baltimore
Sun, where journalist H. L. Mencken published biting commentary; and in popular fiction such as
Sinclair Lewiss novel Babbitt (1922), an assault on provincial values.
E Some intellectuals fled the United States and settled in Paris.
E Progressivism faded (most enduring vestige - the post-suffrage womens movement).
Political Conflicts
E split between urban and rural, modern and traditional, radical and reactionary
E Nativist, anti-radical sentiments: the Sacco-Vanzetti Case [Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian
immigrants (arrested in 1920; executed in 1927; their names cleared in 1977)]
E revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s: targeted Catholics, Jews, and immigrants, as well as African
Americans; thrived in the Midwest and Far West, as well as in the South
E religious fundamentalism: 1925 John T. Scopes (a Tennessee schoolteacher) tried for breaking a state law
that prohibited the teaching of the theory of evolution in schools
courtroom battle between traditionalism and modernism. Scopes was convicted, although the
verdict was later reversed on technical grounds
E battle over Prohibition:
Drys favored Prohibition and wets opposed it
The 18
th
Amendment enforced by The Volstead Act (1919)
organized crime entered the liquor business; rival gangs and networks of speakeasies induced a
crime wave.
By the end of the 1920s, Prohibition was discredited, and it was repealed in 1933.
E the conflict between wets and drys played a role in the presidential election of 1928.
E the Democratic candidate, Al Smith, governor of New York - a wet; represented urban, immigrant
constituencies
E Republican Herbert Hoover - engineer from Iowa, a dry; represented rural, traditional constituencies
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E Hoover envisioned a rational economic order in which corporate leaders acted for the public good;
promised voters a chicken for every pot and a car in every garage; won the elections before the Great
Depression.
The Great Depression (1929 1930s)
E Crash on the stock market
E shattered the economy: fortunes vanished in days; consumers stopped buying, businesses retrenched,
banks cut off credit, and a downward spiral began; unemployment reached 25% in 1933
E Credit / loans impossible to pay (particularly the farmers + the Dust Bowl)
E Hoover: the Government should not interfere; relied on private measures to solve it
spoke out against the New Deal (Franklin D. Roosevelts plan based on Governments
interference; won the 1932 presidential election)
E Vocabulary: Hoover blankets (newspapers), Hoover flags (empty pockets), Hoovervilles
(shantytowns)
E Franklin D. Roosevelt (1932-1945)
The New Deal (see Lecture on Progressivism)
Post- WWI American Intellectuals
E Disillusion with the war, not with the whole of American thought and tradition.
E One year after the Armistice (1918) The New Republic, the unofficial voice of the liberal intellectuals in
this period, published John Deweys The Discrediting of Idealism:
he acknowledges his being among the gullible who swallowed the cant [hypocritical clich] of
idealism as a sugar coating for the bitter core of violence and greed.
Nave optimism and fine phrases led Americans to the assumption that ideals would be served
by victory, while blinding them to such realities as the secret & cynical treaties among the other
Allies (which rushed the war)
reviving idealism by associating it with non-military forces like commerce, industry, science
E Targets of disillusion:
1. absurdity of using a war to end all wars, of instituting freedom with force (quickly apparent after 1918).
Deweys essay the following year: only the first in a long line of condemnations of Americas
intervention in the European conflict
E.G.: Revisionist histories:
E Harry Elmer Barnes Genesis of the World War (1926): Germany was not the solely
responsible one.
E Sidney B. Fays Origins of the World War (1928): Allied propaganda had distorted the
facts.
2. Internationalism: bitterness and pride. They vowed never again to commit their ideals and energies to
foreign causes. E.g.: the rejection of the Treaty of Versailles, including the League of Nations.
3. concern for the future of the Western World; frame of mind encouraged by Oswald Spenglers The
Decline of the West (1918) [American edition: 1926]
1. Western civilization was doomed by the rhythm of cultures to decline and perish just as had
ancient Greece and Rome
4. In the U.S. the end of 3 centuries of frontier provided an additional reason for uneasiness; the advent of
an urban-industrial civilization and the loss of pioneer vitality meant decline rather than progress: Henry
Adams (1838-1918) - The Education of Henry Adams (1907/1918):
1. modern world might be accelerating toward destruction rather than perfection
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2. evolution might bring retrogression ( The Dynamo and the Virgin).
3. the postwar mood made the Adamss book a bestseller.
5. Freudian theory: death instinct & assumption of the unhappiness of the civilized man (Beyond the
Pleasure Principle [1920])
E Expatriation or exile
Malcolm Cowley in Exiles Return (1934): the exiles were nostalgic, full of the wish to recapture
some remembered America
E The Russian Revolution of 1917: some intellectuals envied a country that apparently had not gone wrong;
many American intellectuals transferred their hopes for the common man to the red flag
E Relief and optimism
relief that the weaknesses of the old order were finally exposed. This offered some hope that
reconstruction and a better America are possible. The war had been a needed catharsis (Nash
43).
E Harold Stearns (expatriate cultural critic, edited Civilization in the United States (1922):
Wrongly perceived as a document of American intellectuals despair and alienation
Preface - constructive criticism:
E Hope lay in the rebelliousness of the young intellectuals. The war had opened their eyes:
showed them the frail foundations of the older generations beliefs.
E One found value, however, in the past in writers like Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and
Henry David Thoreau
E The American intellectuals of the 1920s believed they were vital enough to produce
cultural greatness.
E One could surpass the limitations of utilitarianism and gentility
E Experience was the solution; in Paris the American writers experienced otherness and in otherness they
could contemplate and live more truly their Americanness
E Goal: an American intellectual renaissance.
Post- WWI American Intellectuals -
A New Perception of Human Nature
The Leopold-Loeb Case
June 1, 1924: cold-blooded, unreasonable (no apparent motive), brutal murder (two highly intelligent,
highly educated, millionaire family young men kill a 14-year boy) shocks the American public: alert
them to the possibility that the traditional understanding of human nature (as controlled by some superior
ethical instance) no guarantee of socially acceptable behavior
Europe: discussion of the mind as a physiological mechanism, depleted of religious sense or romantic
aura, was well advanced
e.g. Jean Martin Charcot [1825-1893], French neurologist, considered the father of clinical
neurology. He specialized in the study of hysteria
Most famous of his students: Sigmund Freud
William James (1842-1910) published Principles of Psychology (1890):
Building on the insights of Charles Darwin (On the Origin of Species-1859).
A naturalistic [based on nature, anatomy] and functionalistic [practical, utilitarian] interpretation
of mental processes.
The mind: a physical organ. No innate ethical controlling guide to human behavior.
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this entirely biological conception of human nature - serious blow to the old dualistic view of the mind as
distinct from the body
E.g. functionalists: no basis for the Transcendentalist basic assumption that each man contained a
spark of divinity.
Shortly before World War I psychology began to have considerable impact on the way American
intellectuals conceived of human nature.
Determinants of human behavior:
Ancient, inherited instincts.
The endocrine glands.
Heredity
The Environment (Behaviorism): title coming from the book Behavior: An Introduction to
Comparative Psychology (1914) and Behaviorism (1925) by John B. Watson.
Watson was inspired by Pavlovs results and applied them to human beings
developed the idea of the hollow man / lacked the capacity for self-direction
Man responds to external stimuli as a dog salivates at the sound of the bell announcing food
mechanistic conception of the mind.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
E impact on American intellectual history of the 1920s comparable to Darwins in the late 19th century
E Unlike behaviorism: minds not hollow
E core of Freuds theory: the libido strongly influenced thought and behavior
E continuous conflict between the ego and the id over the direction of the individual
E with the aid of ideals and ethics (the superego), reason attempted to control the destructive energy of the
unconscious.
E The Leopold-Loeb case illustrated this theory; Clarence Darrow, the defense lawyer of the two
murderers used the testimony of prominent psychiatrists focusing the trial on the mental condition of the
murderers: the unconscious impulses that determined the actions (Darrow called them emotions).
E The vogue of Freudian psychology in the United States began in 1909 when Freud came to lecture at
Clark University at the invitation of its president, the eminent educational psychologist G. Stanley Hall.
Modernist Music, Art & Literature.
Gertrude Stein
Modernist Music & Art
E Non-harmonic tones & dissonant chords:
Arnold Schoenbergs Pierrot Lunaire (1912)
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinskys The Rite of Spring (1913)
Nick LaRocca & the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (1922)
George Gershwins Rhapsody in Blue (1924)
E Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)
creator of the twelve-tone system of musical composition
Painted & exhibited his work with a group of artists in the circle of the Russian painter Wassily
Kandinsky
composed Pierrot Lunaire (1912)
E accompanying chamber ensemble employs a different combination of instruments for each
of the 21 poem-based songs of the cycle
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E the vocal soloist uses the Sprechstimme (German for speech voice), or Sprechgesang
(speech song), a blend of speech and song
E Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (1882-1971)
first performance of The Rite of Spring (1913)
unconventional choreography
harsh dissonances
driving, asymmetrical, shifting rhythms of the music
E hostile uproar so noisy that the dancers could not hear the orchestra
E later concert performances were well received.
E Chicago jazz bands:
Nick LaRocca & the Original Dixieland Jazz Band
E first recorded in 1922
E Concerts in New York, then London
North Side of Chicago:
E White musicians: Mugsy Spanier, Bunny Berigan, Wingy Manone
South Side of Chicago:
E Black musicians: Jimmy Noone, Lovie Austin, Johnny Dodds, and Louis Armstrong
E the 1920s: the big bands; popular in the 1930s and early 1940s period known as the swing era
E George Gershwin
both popular and classical forms
E Rhapsody in Blue (1924)
E Concerto in F (1925)
E opera Porgy and Bess (1935)
Modernist Art Exhibitions
E 1913, New York - the Armory Show, officially known as The International Exhibition of Modern Art
E The emblem of the Armory Show, an uprooted pine tree, was taken from the Massachusetts flag carried
into battle during the Revolutionary War
E shock and outrage triggered by Duchamp's Nude Descending the Staircase and Matisse's Luxury & the
other cubists
E Predecessors:
E the 1908 exhibition of the Eight, seen as the American predecessor to the Armory Show
E Alfred Stieglitzs shows at the Little Galleries of Photo-Secession, known as '291 (for its address
at 291 5th Avenue).
E championed artists like Czanne, Matisse, and Picasso as well as early American
modernists: John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Oscar Bluemner, and Abraham Walkowitz
E over half the exhibitors at the New York show were American
Cubism:
E Pablo Picasso & Georges Braque; 1907-08
E ambiguous sense of space through geometric shapes that flatten and simplify form
E spatial planes that are broken into fragments,
E forms that overlap and penetrate one another
E onset in Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
E painting of women composed of jagged shapes, flattened figures, and forms borrowed from African
masks
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E Derived from Czannes passage: a device in which one physical object is allowed to penetrate another
physical object
E defied the laws of physical experience
E encouraged artists to view paintings as having an internal logicor integritythat functions
independently of, or even contrary to, physical experience
E freedom from material reality in artistic imagination
Cubism - two phases:
E Analytical cubism (until 1912)
fragments the physical world into intersecting geometric planes and interpenetrating volumes
E Synthetic cubism (through 1915)
synthesizes (combines) abstract shapes to represent objects in a new way.
E synthesis of two modern-art styles: cubism and futurism
William Carlos Williams:
E creating "an atmosphere of release, color release, release from stereotyped forms, trite subjects"
E "There had been a break somewhere, we were streaming through, each thinking his own thoughts, driving
his own designs toward his selfs objectives . . . The poetic line, the way the image was to lie on the page
was our immediate concern . . . I had never in my life before felt that way. I was tremendously stirred"
Georgia OKeeffe (1887-1986)
E Although O'Keeffe handled her subject matter representationally, the starkly linear quality, the thin, clear
coloring, and the boldly patterned compositions produce abstract designs
E the details are so enlarged that they become unfamiliar and surprising.
American Modernism (1914-1930)
E Art as insight into truth.
E Aesthetic form takes precedence over content.
E Ethical ideal: a personal commitment, exercised through the aesthetic.
E Aesthetic ideal: the insistence on the autonomy of art, as a self-sustaining realm fully satisfying the artist,
the World at large being now incapable of so doing.
E Modern condition results from placing Enlightenment optimism in doubt (progress)
E disjunction between the REAL and the IDEAL, between the world that was to have emerged from the
Enlightenment (rational, humanistic, enlightened) and the world that actually emerged (disrupted,
corrupt, irrational, money oriented, leading to WW I)
E The Social is converted into the Personal: dilemmas seen as personal; not social.
Modernism Stages
E Source> Art Bermans Preface to Modernism (1994)
E 3 stages:
Early Modernism (end of 19
th
beginning of 20
th
century)
Midmodernism (1900s 1910s)
High Modernism (1920s 1930s)
E No clear-cut stages; qualitative changes yet noticeable.
Early Modernism
E Optimism replaced with cynicism, objective analysis, despair.
E Mainly paintings: impressionism; Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Czanne.
E Essence of an art object is both the perception of it and the meaning inherently erupting from that
perception.
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E Perception (and NOT reason) is cognition.
E opposition to Empiricism, Realism, Naturalism:
E words/colors do not mark reality, they express it subjectively
E one knows only what one says > language is cognition > the issue of point of view is essential >
the world appears differently from one author to another
E Democratic capitalism has totally individualized the ego.
E Meaning is on the surface of language, not behind language.
E The Platonic realm of ideas (so important for Romantics) is replaced by unformed linguistic energy.
E Modernist art reveals an aesthetic state.
MIDMODERNISM
E The subject matter of art and literature becomes:
the everyday
the little town
the brief love affair
the single day
E The characters play minor roles
E One discovers NOT general/encompassing values BUT what one personally values.
VALUE= a mode of behavioral motivation.
E Personal ethical value is the result of personal choice negated by an unethical/non-exemplary
environment (e.g. Whartons House of Mirth).
E Authenticity and opposition to the crowd = attributes of the modernist author/protagonist.
E Art is the alternative to conformism (e.g. pointillism, fauvism; Steins and Pounds styles)
E transcendence exists as awareness of its absence; experience can not be transcended.
E Humans are not entirely dual (reason vs. physical/instinctive): mind and matter overlap.
High Modernism
E The escape from
religious orthodoxy
a morality grounded in theological metaphysics
monarchy
an art whose subject matter has been determined by such limits
E Purpose set: liberate humanity.
E Art transcends the human limitations of the artist:
speech/written expression free of grammar
artistic representation freed from artistic convention
musical atonality as freedom from tonal structure.
E Only one area for the exercise of freedom: ART.
E The art object / text represents the artists psyche, not the world.
Theory based on the physiology of the senses (PHYSIOLOGY of sensation; realism: how we
perceive color and light as well as nature and real people)
E replaced by theory based on the universal cognitive and emotional structures of
mentality (PSYCHOLOGY of perception; impressionism)
E in turn replaced by theory based on the formation of mentality in individual self-
consciousness (selfhood)
E shift from the body-mind relation to the self-world relation.
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E Maximum freedom is gained only by knowing the conditions under which freedom can be maximally
exercised an exercise which is ART.
E The modernist search: for the particular in the universal NOT, like in classical aesthetic, the universal in
the particular.
E What is expressed is not the meaning, but a personal, particular meaning/vision.
E There are no imposed limits on the creative imagination. Limits are conventions. Vision is private.
E Art creates objects that offer a meaning INHERENT in their source: the artists IMAGINATION.
E Modern art: emotion and judgment are inseparable; individual interpretations of reality.
E Art in opposition to science (generating non-individual, consensual objective descriptions of reality).
Art claims a separate cognitive ground for itself.
E Lyricism/sensation/description takes precedence over epic, analysis, and explication.
E Interpretation is a form of truth: the individual minds organization of the world.
E Art = intentional configuration of materials in an arrangement designed to transmit a meaning whose
existence does not preexist the specific arrangement through which it is transmitted.
E Modernist art
opposes emotional reality to the middle-class factual one
replaces factual representation (superficial similarity to exterior/apparent reality) with deep
psyche ones (free imaginative process).
E Consequences: in painting > abstraction; in literature abstruseness.
E Imagination achieves complete AUTONOMY: in art nothing is now prohibited.
E The artwork is the most real of realities for the modernist.
E Self is transient, subjected to contingency. The modernist work is permanent.
The Modernist American Mindset
E Relativizing and anti/non-idealizing representation of humanity perceived as subjected to external forces
like:
Biology
Psychology
Economy
E = a response to the changes created by startling new theories about human life and
behavior:
E 1. Ch. Darwins (18091882) theory of evolution: human beings, rather than being the
center of a divinely created universe, were little better than animals at the mercy of their
own biology
E 2. Karl Marx (18181883): economic forces controlled human beings and determined
their actions and even their beliefs
E Sigmund Freud (18561939): human beings were not even in full control of their own
minds.
E These theories & the carnage of World War I discouraged peoples faith in humanity at large
E Modernist writers responded to the cultures destruction of faith in humanity (WWI) by dropping the
notions of heroism espoused by their parents and turning instead to irony.
E.g.: the end of the first chapter of A Farewell to Arms: At the start of the winter came the
permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven
thousand died of it in the army (4).
E placing Enlightenment optimism (progress) in doubt
66

E placing Enlightenment optimism in doubt (progress)
E disjunction between the REAL and the IDEAL, between the world that was to have emerged from the
Enlightenment (rational, humanistic, enlightened) and the world that actually emerged (disrupted,
corrupt, irrational, money oriented, leading to WW I)
E The Social is converted into the Personal: dilemmas seen as personal; not social.
E The art object / text represents the artists psyche, not the world; shift from the body-mind relation to the
self-world relation
E Art as insight into truth
E The old forms / aesthetic means were not suitable anymore as they could not transmit this new point of
view on the self & the world aesthetic innovation and radical experimentation:
stream-of-consciousness novels: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner
new, non-rhyming verse forms of h.d. and Ezra Pound
fragmentation > disbelief in a whole, universal, institutional story/theory of the world (the
government, the academy, a canon): Hemingways In Our Time, John Dos Passos U.S.A.; T.S.
Eliots The Waste Land etc.
E Ethical ideal: a personal commitment, exercised through the aesthetic.
E Aesthetic ideal: the insistence on the autonomy of art, as a self-sustaining realm fully satisfying the artist,
the World at large being now incapable of so doing.
Gertrude Stein (1874 1946)
E Tender Buttons (poetry, 1914)
E The Making of Americans (novel, 1925)
E Composition as Explanation (essay, 1926 -1927)
E studied at Radcliffe College with William James
E the relation mind-object never static, part of a developing FLUX, conclusions never fixed,
constantly under pragmatic test.
E took interest in automatic writing, the rhythmic tropes of memory
E moved to Paris (1903) to continue experiments in the form of imaginative writing. She moved toward a
form of tropic (moving) repetition and against the realistic noun i.e. against:
E chronological ordering of narrative
E chronological remembering
E Dissociative rhetoric: disrupting conventional uses of language
E Relational syntax: sentences are placed side by side without a linking adverb that might explain their
relationship, but the positioning makes a sense of its own.
E sacramental view of human creativity: words can vibrate.
E 1910 onward: tried to dissociate words from conventional context & to render them through inspired
perception.
E the new word - to express a new and purified perception of common reality = part of the inward journey
into the self tried by the early 20th century artists.
The Making of Americans (1925)
E A novel dealing with the social and cultural history of her own family.
E She devised an unconventional narrative form marked by a simplification and fragmentation of plot.
E To evoke feeling and atmosphere she made radical innovations in syntax and punctuation, including the
employment of a flowing, rhythmic repetition of words to explore the consciousness of her characters.
67

E "continuous present" /"prolonged present" tense an accretion (accumulation and increase) rather than a
narration (no sequential plot development in its 250 pages ) of a family's existence
E tried to approach the spatial form: collage like constructs functioning by word associations
E Her aim: to turn temporal/historical perspectives into spatial structures
E Sometime then there will be a complete history of all repeating to completed understanding.
Sometime then there will be a complete history of every one who ever was or is or will be living.
Sometimes there will be a complete history of some one having loving repeating to a completed
understanding as being. Sometime then there will be a complete history of many women and
many men. (Stein, MOA, 269) History at the level of CONSCIOUSNESS not SOCIAL EVENT.
E Often as I was saying repeating is very irritating to listen to from them and then slowly it settles
into a completed history of them... Sometimes it takes many years of knowing some one before
the repeating in that one comes to be a clear history of such a one. Sometimes many years of
knowing some one pass before repeating of all being in such a one comes out clearly from them...
This is now more description of the way repeating slowly comes to make in each one a completed
history of them (MOA, 292) Knowledge of CONSCIOUSNESS requires patience for the slow
perception of FLOW and ACCRETION (i.e. increase) (not causal/chronological progress).
Composition as Explanation (1926 - 1927)
E first public attempt to explain herself.
E Written as a lecture for the Oxford and Cambridge literary societies.
E By turns quirky (unusual), repetitious, and familiarly recondite (obscure/esoteric), it nevertheless
attempted to trace her development and to clarify her aims.
E about Czanne: "in composition one thing was as important as another thing
No metaphor, no symbolism, no learned allusions, no background information

E Like a cubist collage, Stein's composition creates its effect, not by representing the external event but by,
so to speak, pasting up metonymically (associative) by related items as a Picasso collage may place its
"subject" in the corner and place primary emphasis on a calling card or a newspaper page.
Cubist Collage Metonymy
E e.g.: A Box (Tender Buttons)
Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye
comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle. So then the order is that a white way of
being round is something suggesting a pin and it is disappointing, it is not, it is so rudimentary to
be analysed and see a fine substance strangely, it is so earnest to have a green point not to red but
to point again.
redness = embarrassment
question = attempt to repair rudeness
search, painful cattle = shopping for a gift; cattle = leather object
white way.. = ordered it to the clerk (making notes) who does not find it and suggests
something else (pin)
it is disappointing not what she wanted, but then at a closer look it seems adequate
The pin / piece of jewelry has green stones
not red i.e. meant to erase initial rudeness & to allow for a new start (point again)
E everyday, casual activity (buying a gift) rendered in terms of subjective consciousness perceptions:
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inner suggestions of color, forms, movement and the immediate associations stirred in the human
mind/soul/psyche.
Freedom of expression necessary as grammar orders and limits communication for exterior needs
(utility oriented).
The artist has anyway this problem: how to express via stuff that is commonly used for practical
communication inner states, sensibility.
E Modernists are very rigorous about this focus one interiority perceived as uniquely authentic as opposed
to historical outer experience of political / intellectual / traditionally artistic discourse (embellishing real
human perception of life).
Composition as Explanation (1926 - 1927)
E The repetition-permutation pattern:
repetition generates meaning
not use words that have definite associations
Repetition as a form of defamiliarization
E "beginning again and again and again is a natural thing"
Modernist Fiction I & II:
(non-chronological; thematic)
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)
Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
The Modernist American Mindset (Revision)
E Culturally produced, on stages, by relativizing and anti/non-idealizing representations of humanity:
Biology
Ch. Darwins (18091882) theory of evolution: human beings, rather than being the center of a divinely
created universe, were little better than animals at the mercy of their own biology
Psychology
Sigmund Freud (18561939): human beings were not even in full control of their own minds.
Economics
Karl Marx (18181883): economic forces controlled human beings and determined their actions and even
their beliefs
E These theories & the carnage of World War I diminished peoples faith in humanity at
large
E Modernist writers responded to the cultures destruction of faith in humanity (WWI) by dropping the
notions of HEROISM espoused by their parents and turning instead to IRONY.
E.g.: the end of the first chapter of A Farewell to Arms, where WAR as heroic fight is replaced by
statistics : At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera.
But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army (4).
E placing Enlightenment optimism in doubt (progress)
E disjunction between the REAL and the IDEAL, between the world that was to have emerged from the
Enlightenment (rational, humanistic, enlightened) and the world that actually emerged (disrupted,
corrupt, irrational, money oriented, leading to WW I)
E The Social is converted into the Personal: dilemmas seen as personal; not social.
E The art object / text represents the artists psyche, not the world; shift from the mind (reason)-ordering-
body unit to the three dimensional (spiritual, personal, social)Self.
69

E Art as individual insights into truths.
E The old forms / aesthetic means were not suitable anymore as they could not transmit this new point of
view on the self this leads to aesthetic innovation and radical experimentation:
stream-of-consciousness novels: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner
new, non-rhyming verse forms of H.D. and Ezra Pound
fragmentation > disbelief in a whole, universal, institutional story/theory of the world (the
government, the academy, a canon): Hemingways In Our Time, John Dos Passos U.S.A.; T.S.
Eliots The Waste Land etc.
E Ethical ideal: a personal commitment, exercised through the aesthetic.
E Aesthetic ideal: the insistence on the autonomy of art, as a self-sustaining realm fully satisfying the artist.
Ernest Hemingway (1899 1961)
E 18 years old - reporter for The Kansas City Star.
E left his reporting job after only a few months and tried to join the United States Army
E failed the medical examination due to poor vision
E joined the Red Cross Ambulance Corps , and was assigned for the Italian front, as an ambulance driver.
E All the while Hemingway tried to get as close to combat as possible
E 8 July 1918: wounded delivering supplies to soldiers; hit by an Austrian trench mortar shell that left
fragments in his legs, and also by a burst of machine-gun fire
E later awarded the Silver Medal of Military Valor (medaglia d'argento) by the Italian government for
dragging a wounded Italian soldier to safety in spite of his own injuries.
E 1920s: settled in Paris, France, worked for the Toronto Star
E Sherwood Anderson gave him a letter of introduction to Gertrude Stein.
E She introduced him to the "Parisian Modern Movement" located in the Montparnasse Quarter the
beginning of the American expatriate circle, also known as The Lost Generation
E G. Stein & Ezra Pound exercised a certain influence in this circle, on Hemingway including
E received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea
E received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954
E rare cult-like popularity during his lifetime
E July 1961: committed suicide at his home in Ketchum, Idaho with a shotgun.
The Sun Also Rises / Fiesta (1926)
E Hemingway considered using The Lost Generation as the title for the novel.
E Steins coinage une generation perdue (A Moveable Feast)
E The eventual title given the novel, The Sun Also Rises, was not chosen until the typescript
E Many members of Hemingways generation felt betrayed, lured into a bloody and pointless war by the
sentimental nationalism of an older generation more concerned with outdated ideals and crass profit than
with their own sons lives
E The Lost Generations primary response to the war was a profound disillusionment and a loss of faith in
their parents values, which had led inevitably to the wars devastation.
E The novels title is taken from the Old Testament, specifically Ecclesiastes (1:47), which is also the
books second epigraph:
E One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever
The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he aroseThe wind
goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the
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wind returneth again according to his circuits All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not
full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.
E In a letter to his editor, Hemingway explained that he meant for The Sun Also Rises to be tragedy and that
the earth was the storys hero.
E the troubles of Hemingways beleaguered generation are necessarily temporary.
E he wanted to "emphasize the optimistic idea of progress of life's cycle" (Svoboda, Frederic J., and
Joseph J. Waldmeir, eds. Hemingway: Up in Michigan Perspectives, 1995: 106).
E Although Hemingway changed the original title of Fiesta to the one known, British editions of the novel
have used the title of Fiesta from its original publication to the present.
E Many contemporary readers admired the characters and wanted to emulate their behavior
E Yet, Hemingway (according to his later comments) saw the characters as sadly damaged people rather
than role models.
E Major themes:
E the damage done to Hemingways generation by the institutionalized violence of World War I.
E Jake, who is the most obviously injured character in the novel, tells Georgette, I got hurt in the
war (17) and later thinks to himself, Well, it was a rotten way to be wounded and flying on a
joke front like the Italian (31).
E He tells Brett that what happened to me is supposed to be funny (26)
E The unheroic character of the war.
E Loss of faith in traditional values:
E there is no genuine love story in the novella
E the only stable quality mentioned is that of aficionado:
E genuine passion for the deadly game of death involved by bullfighting.
E Jake is not a genuine Roman Catholic
E Fighting in the war is not about heroism.
E The bullfight:
E invokes many of the elements traditionally associated with Hemingways best work: the test of
courage, grace under pressure, machismo, the ability to withstand pain, and loss and death.
E The Spanish, or Mediterranean, tradition of the bullfight evolved from an ancient ritual in which
the bull was both worshipped as a god and sacrificed.
E Animal rights activists opposed the practice even in the 1920s, because of the cruelty involved for
both the bull and the horses, which were often fatally gored as their riders (or picadors)
approached the bull to stab him with their pics and weaken him in preparation for his final
confrontation with the matador.
E In his nonfiction Hemingway vigorously defended bullfighting and insisted that it be considered a
ritual and a tragedy:
E i.e. a repetition of the drama of authentic life: fighting for dignity in front of unavoidable
death
E Not a sport, since after all the bull has no chance and is invariably killed.
E The attraction of the bullfight lies purely in how the animal is killed: ideally the matador (a
Spanish word for killer) must courageously risk death by coming as close as possible to the
deadly horns of the bull in order to kill the animal.
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E The matador, then, in Hemingways view, is a performance artist who exorcises the audiences
fear of mortality by first inviting death and then triumphing over it as he becomes a killer before
the audiences eyes.
E Spain is associated with both:
E the positive values of the bullfight and the fishing trip
E and the negative value assigned to Jakes moral lapse
E Paris is linked with what Hemingway perceived as decadence:
E homosexuality, financial irresponsibility, and sexual carelessness, typified by Bretts behavior and
Cohns treatment of Frances.
E Paris had a large expatriate community in the 1920s
E The citys beauty and its growing importance as a center of literary and visual arts attracted many
would-be artists.
E rampant postwar inflation: the exchange rate made it cheaper for Americans to live in Paris than
in the United States
E rising American stock market in the decade before the Great Depression also made many
Americans wealthy, making overseas travel affordable
E France was also an attractive refuge at that time for Americans who enjoyed drinking.
E In America in 1920, the ratification of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution made it
illegal to manufacture, sell, or transport alcoholic beverages throughout the United States.
E Nine months later, that same year, Congress passed the Volstead Act, better known as
Prohibition, which provided for the enforcement of the amendment.
E France and the other countries of Europe had no such laws.
E Change of gender roles:
began to change dramatically in Western culture during the 1920s
in part as a result of World War I
tireless campaigning by countless suffragists American women became eligible to vote when
the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified on August 26, 1920.
women began to wear shorter skirts and cut their hair short:
E an action F. Scott Fitzgerald memorialized in the short story Bernice Bobs Her Hair.
Thus was born the flapper, also sometimes referred to as the New Woman
the New Woman smoked, drank, and used birth control
she might go to college, although few women went on to work, and she enjoyed an unprecedented
new sexual freedom
Brett Ashley in a conversation between Jake Barnes and Robert Cohn:
She is a drunk, I said. She is in love with Mike Campbell , and she is going to marry him. Hes
going to be rich as hell some day. I dont believe shell ever marry him. Why not? I dont
know. I just dont believe it. Have you known her a long time? Yes, I said. She was a V.A.D.
in a hospital I was in during the war. She must have been just a kid then. Shes thirty four
now. When did she marry Ashley? During the war. Her own true love had just kicked off with
the dysentery. You talk sort of bitter. Sorry I did not mean to. I was just trying to give you the
facts. I dont believe she would marry anybody she didnt love. Well, I said, Shes done it
twice. I dont believe it. Well, I said, dont ask me a lot of fool questions if you dont like the
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answers. I didnt ask you that. You asked me what I knew about Brett Ashley. I didnt ask
you to insult her. Oh, go to hell.
E Modernism and waste land as bareness:
Modernism as vision of barren contemporary post-war humanity --
The Sun Also Rises / Fiesta (1926) -- Modernism & Authenticity
E The novel inspired its first readers to search for "real talk" within its pages, to validate the "work" of the
novel by undertaking roman a clef criticism and literary biography
A desire for narrative authenticity informs the text both thematically--with its recurring attention
to "real" expression, literary and otherwise--and formally, with its sharp focus on the mechanics
of reproducing "real" expression.
much of-the "fake talk" recorded in the novel concerns itself with "real work" including the work
of recording talk--readers can be certain that bohemians do indeed speak "in tough
understatements from the sides of their mouths." (M. Cowley 9)
E Robert Cohn:
falls short of this standard not so much because he is Jewish, but because Cohn's ideas are
derivative, arrived at secondhand via the washed-up criticism of Henry Louis Mencken (1880 -
1856) most prominent newspaperman, book reviewer, and political commentator or the quixotic
travel narratives of William Henry Hudson (1841 1922).
At one point in the novel, Harvey Stone says of Mencken, "He's written about all the things he
knows, and now he's on all the things he doesn't know" .
Elsewhere, Jakes says of Cohn's infatuation with William Henry Hudson (1841-1922):
E "The Purple Land" is a very sinister book if read too late in life. It recounts splendid
imaginary amorous adventures of a perfect English gentleman in an intensely romantic
land, the scenery of which is very well described. For a man to take it at thirty-four as a
guide-book to what life holds is about as safe as it would be for a man of the same age to
enter Wall Street direct from a French convent, equipped with a complete set of the more
practical Alger books. Cohn, I believe, took every word of "The Purple Land" as literally
as though it had been an R.G. Dun (my note: the first commercial reporting agency in
America, 1841) report.
Jake and his friend Bill Gorton leave Paris by train to go fishing in the Basque country of Spain
(Burguete). At Burguete, over morning coffee drunk leisurely before setting off for a day of fishing in the
Irati River valley, Bill tells Jake why he hasnt made it yet as a writer:
"You know what you are?" Bill asks. "You're an expatriate. Why don't you live in New York? ...
Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the
newspapers.... You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake
European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex.
You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes"
The novel thematizes literary authenticity in countless ways
But as in Hemingway's article on Left Bank bohemians (American Bohemians in Paris, Toronto
Star Weekly: 25 March 1922), always returns to the question of a writer's lifestyle.
one is either a bohemian who writes (authentic) or a would-be writer who dabbles in
bohemianism (inauthentic). One works, the other talks.
His expatriate status and wide-ranging interests notwithstanding, Jake never mimics; not once does he
wallow in decadence in spite of his seeming excesses.
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Jake's solid, authentic expression stands out against Cohn's fretful inauthenticity; of the two, Jake is
portrayed as the real American writer.
In Pamplona he proves again his authenticity as a real aficionado (devotee of bullfighting).
Ironically, he must travel from Paris to Pamplona for us to recognize his authenticity fully as it is
there that his authenticity comes under intense scrutiny.
At the Hotel Montoya, we witness Jake's induction into a quasi-religious order of true believers:
Aficion means passion. An aficionado is one who is passionate about the bull-fights.... Somehow
it was taken for granted that an American could not have aficion. He might simulate it or confuse
it with excitement, but he could not really have it. When they saw that I had aficion, and there
was no password, no set questions that could bring it out, rather it was a sort of oral spiritual
examination with the questions always a little on the defensive and never apparent, there was this
same embarrassed putting the hand on the shoulder, or a `Buen hombre.' But nearly always there
was the actual touching. It seemed as though they wanted to touch you to make it certain.
The Hotel Montoya thus serves as a secular version of the cathedrals Jake visits in order to pray or to
seek penance
The priestly "Montoya could forgive anything of a bull-fighter who had aficion.... For one who
had aficion he could forgive anything" [137].
The hotel provides sanctuary for those with "aficion," the semantic equivalent of "authenticity" in
the novel's Spanish. (15)
Aficion sets apart the "buen hombre" ("[a]ll the good bull-fighters" stay at Montoya's [136]) from
those who practice false flattery, or, even more damning, indulge in showy, "false aesthetics"
(219).
discussing authenticity in terms of aesthetics (or an "oral spiritual examination"): aficion is a difficult
code, but it can be learned.
The Sun Also Rises suggests that cultural practices do not depend on what one is--if an American can
show aficion, anyone can--but on what one believes in with passion.
Literary Influences
E Gertrude Stein influenced Hemingway to experiment with automatic writing and free association to
stimulate his writing:
techniques similar to the free-writing taught today in composition classes
when he first brought her some poems and the beginning of a novel to read, she responded bluntly
(Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas): There is a great deal of description in
this, she said, and not particularly good description. Begin over again and concentrate, she said
(Stein 262)
After reading a draft of Big Two-Hearted River, she told Hemingway, remarks are not
literature (Stein 270) and advised him to cut the introductory material (published after his death
as On Writing) from the beginning of the story.
also strongly encouraged him to give up his job as a reporter for the sake of his art.
E Ezra Pound, whom he once called the man who taught me to distrust adjectives (A Moveable Feast,
134)
E T.S. Eliot, from whom he claimed to have learned the art of allusion (Death in the Afternoon, 139)
E All modern literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn, (Hemingway,
Green Hills of Africa: 22)
E Hemingway himself may have owed his use of vernacular American English to Twain.
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E Stephen Cranes The Red Badge of Courage (1895): how to write about war in an honest, naturalistic
way rather than in the overblown, sentimental Victorian style.
Much popular American fiction was written in a sweetly sentimental late-Victorian prose that
seemed stale and laughable after the horror and disillusionment of World War I. Frances Hodgson
Burnetts 1886 classic Little Lord Fauntleroy is typical of this flowery style.
Technique
E Hemingways style: short declarative sentences, a preference for simple, often one-syllable words, and an
emphasis on the concrete rather than the abstract
E the importance of the concrete: Death in the Afternoon
I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you
really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put
down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion
that you experienced
modernist source of these literary principles:
O Steins ideas about natural, authentic, continuous / prolonged present (Composition as
Explanation, 1926)
O Pounds definition of the image [An Image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional
complex in an instant of time. (A Retrospect, 1918)
E.g.: descriptions Pamplona (Passage 3 in the handout):
After a while we came out of the mountains, and there were trees along both sides of the road, and a
stream and ripe fields of grain, and the road went on, very white and straight ahead, and then lifted to a little rise,
and off on the left was a hill with an old castle, with buildings close around it and a field of grain going right up
to the walls and shifting in the wind (continued on the next slide).
(no qualifiers; descriptive)
I was up in front with the driver and I turned around. Robert Cohn was asleep, but Bill looked and
nodded his head. Then we crossed a wide plain, and there was a big river off on the right shining in the sun from
between the line of trees, and away off you could see the plateau of Pamplona rising out of the plain, and the
walls of the city, and the great brown cathedral, and the broken skyline of the other churches. In back of the
plateau were the mountains, and every way you looked there were other mountains, and ahead the road stretched
out white across the plain going toward Pamplona. We came into the town on the other side of the plateau, the
road slanting up steeply and dustily with shade-trees on both sides, and then levelling out through the new part of
town they are building up outside the old walls. We passed the bull-ring, high and white and concrete-looking in
the sun, and then came into the big square by a side street and stopped in front of the Hotel Montoya.
Repetitions: mountains; white; road; fields of grain; river(s); trees
Steins use (and theory on) repetition (conveying moods).
nouns very rarely used in conjunction with adjectives: concreteness & presentness
E except for the image of the white road, overlapped on the white bull-ring (dissociative
rhetoric: adjective dissociated from noun/uncanny)
Does the description transmit any state of mind?
Hemingways technique was analogous with the modernist poetic doctrines of impersonality and the
objective correlative
T. S. Eliot in an essay on Hamlet (1919) : The way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by
finding an objective correlative; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events
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which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which
must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
Emotional states objectified in external reality symbols/images.
Technique The Concrete
E Hemingway wrote something very similar in a letter to his father from Paris in March 1925:
he was trying not to express opinions on life but to make an experience come alive for the reader
through factual description (Selected Letters 153).
E In 1942, in his introduction to Men at War:
A writers job is to tell the truth. His standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his
invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be
(xiv).
Technique Truth vs. truths
E Emphasis on contingency in constructing various statements / facts as truths impossible to have an
omniscient narrator replaced with the first-person, unreliable one:
E E.g.: Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very
much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact
he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and
shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton. (). In his last year at Princeton he read too
much and took to wearing spectacles. I never met any one of his class who remembered him. They did
not even remember that he was middleweight boxing champion. (contd on the next slide)
E (..) I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together, and I always had a
suspicion that perhaps Robert Cohn had never been middleweight boxing champion, and that perhaps a
horse had stepped on his face, or that maybe his mother had been frightened or seen something, or that he
had, maybe, bumped into something as a young child, but I finally had somebody verify the story from
Spider Kelly. Spider Kelly not only remembered Cohn. He had often wondered what had become of
him.
Technique The Omission Theory / Principle
E The theory of omission:
I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for
every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg.
It is the part that doesnt show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there
is a hole in the story (Conversations with Ernest Hemingway. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, 125).
I sometimes think my style is suggestive rather than direct (..) The reader must often use his
imagination or lose the most subtle part of my thought (article reprinted in Linda Wagner-
Martin, 275).
A Moveable Feast: in writing the short story Out of Season (published in In Our Time), he had
described an actual fishing trip that went wrong because of a drunken guide, but had left out the
real-life aftermath, the guides suicide after he was fired as a result of Ernests complaints:
E This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you
omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something
more than they understood (75)
E E.g. (fragment 5 in the handout):
E "Let's get two bottles," I said. The bottles came. I poured a little in my glass, then a glass for Brett, then
filled my glass. We touched glasses. "Bung-o!" Brett said. I drank my glass and poured out another. Brett
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put her hand on my arm. "Don't get drunk, Jake," she said. "You don't have to. "How do you know?
"Don't," she said. "You'll be all right. "I'm not getting drunk," I said. "I'm just drinking a little wine. I
like to drink wine. "Don't get drunk," she said. "Jake, don't get drunk. "Want to go for a ride?" I said.
"Want to ride through the town? "Right," Brett said. "I haven't seen Madrid. I should see Madrid. "I'll
finish this," I said.
Down-stairs we came out through the first-floor dining-room to the street. A waiter went for a
taxi. It was hot and bright. Up the street was a little square with trees and grass where there were
taxis parked. A taxi came up the street, the waiter hanging out at the side. I tipped him and told
the driver where to drive, and got in beside Brett. The driver started up the street. I settled back.
Brett moved close to me. We sat close against each other. I put my arm around her and she rested
against me comfortably. It was very hot and bright, and the houses looked sharply white. We
turned out onto the Gran Via. "Oh, Jake," Brett said, "we could have had such a damned good
time together. Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton.
The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me. "Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?"
E What is omitted from the fragment above?
E What are the words / phrases that may indicate an omission?
Technique
E Hemingways tight linguistic economy set limits on:
false experience
rhetorical impulse.
E The tight style complements a tragic stoicism. This manner of writing is a kind of existential realism:
seems to derive directly from experience but implies acquaintance with a new historical condition
leading to a world of trauma, awareness of nada:
E all meaning lost except that which can be arduously reconstructed.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896 1940)
E Catholic
E dropped out from Princeton in 1917 to enlist in the United States Army when the US entered World War
I
E war ended shortly after Fitzgerald's enlistment
E 1920s: made several excursions to Europe, notably Paris and the French Riviera, and became friends with
many members of the American expatriate community in Paris, notably Ernest Hemingway
E Died of a heart attack when 44
The Great Gatsby (1925)
E Documentary Info (Where in the novel have you encountered these?):
Prohibition: May 19, 1919 - the National Prohibition Act passed in Congress outlawed
alcoholic drinks and began the age of Prohibition in America
The fixing of the 1919 World Series:
E World Series, major league baseball's annual championship series
E in 1919 the Cincinnati Reds beat the Chicago White Sox in eight games. The following
year, seven White Sox players were accused of fixing, or intentionally losing, the series in
return for bribes from professional gamblers.
The Great Gatsby (1925) Documentary Info
E the Teapot Dome case:
greatest political scandal of Warren Gamaliel Harding's administration (1921-1923)
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In 1921 Harding had been induced by Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby to sign an order that
transferred control of the naval oil reserves stored at Teapot Dome near Casper, Wyoming, and at
Elk Hills, California, from the Navy Department to the Department of the Interior. In 1922
Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall leased the Elk Hills reserves and the Teapot Dome fields
without competitive bidding. The Senate investigation that began in 1923 revealed that Fall had
received more than $400,000 from oil companies for his services.
E World War I (1914 / 1916 1918)
The Great Gatsby (1925)
E The American Dream
The 1920s perversion of the American Dream: moral success and the frontier experience leading
to organized crime:
Hopalong Cassidy: Henry Gatz carries this wild western book about cowboys with him that
belonged to his son as a child. Inside Gatsby had written a daily schedule and listed plans for self-
improvement. The book's pages are tattered and worn.
Benjamin Franklin: compare schedules.
E Gatsby as a young boy (September 12, 1906):
Rise from bed ... ... ... ... 6.00 A.M. Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling ..... 6.15-6.30 " Study
electricity, etc ... ... ... 7.15-8.15 " Work ... ... ... ... ... . 8.30-4.30 P.M. Baseball and sports ... ... ...
. 4.30-5.00 " Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it 5.00-6.00 " Study needed inventions ...
..... 7.00-9.00 "
GENERAL RESOLVES No wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable] No more
smoking or chewing Bath every other day Read one improving book or magazine per week Save
$5.00 {crossed out} $3.00 per week Be better to parents (174)
E Fitzgerald's world view in The Great Gatsby is, in part at least, of a piece with the spirit of the United
States in the 1920s:
strange mixture of cynicism and outraged idealism, of despair and hysterical vitality.
E Primary reason: World War I.
For the preceding two generations there had been a feeling that civilization was at last outgrowing
war. Soon there would be no more wars.
At the same time poets and philosophers yearned for the nobility and self-sacrifice (romantic
notions of the Genteel Tradition) that they believed war produced (see World War I & American
intellectuals, in Lecture 9)
E Average Americans at this time were opposed to war and to any further involvement with Europe.
willing to experiment with new sexual freedom and to drink bootleg liquor, but politically they
opposed any sort of governmental activity that might limit business freedom.
When President Coolidge (1923-1929) told them that the business of the country was business,
they agreed wholeheartedly. For most Americans at this time getting rich seemed the natural
purpose of life.
E Yet, in the excitement of all this business-oriented vitality, many Americans, especially the young and
the educated, shared with many Europeans a belief that Western civilization was at an end.
The war had shattered the smug Victorian belief that civilization was constantly progressing.
For the first time, a major world power, Russia, was controlled by communists. There were
unsuccessful socialist revolutions in Germany and in Italy, and the English lived in fear of one.
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In the United States there were paralyzing strikes and a series of bombings. Federal authorities
responded with mass arrests and deportations.
E On the right, the German thinker Oswald Spengler argued in The Decline of the West (1918-1922) that:
cultures had an approximate life span of one thousand years and that Western culture, which
began in the tenth century A.D., was now dying.
believed that while the forms of government and social structure might survive this death, the
values of the culture ceased to provide meaning for the lives of the people.
The decadent West was concerned primarily with money and was falling under the control of the
financially successful.
E Fitzgerald thought Spengler accurately explained the international situation at the beginning of World
War II.
Spengler believed that German militarism would play a dominant role in the last stages of
Western civilization.
Fitzgerald died expecting that the Nazis would easily conquer a decadent England and France and
that the United States would fight the Germans in South America.
E Similar point of view: T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland (1922)
E Both had a profound influence on F. S. Fitzgerald
E In 1940 Fitzgerald claimed to have read Spengler while writing The Great Gatsby and to have been
permanently affected by him.
however The Decline of the West was not translated into English until 1926
Fitzgerald did not read German.
The least attractive explanation for this discrepancy: Fitzgerald realized that his novel could be
taken as Spenglerian and decided to claim that the resemblance was intentional.
The more likely explanation is that Fitzgerald read descriptions and analyses of Spengler's work
in magazines, and later remembered incorrectly that he read Spengler before he actually did.
E Fitzgerald admired Eliot greatly and sent him a copy of The Great Gatsby.
E Eliot responded: the book was "the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James."
E Eliot's approval may have been based partially on the fact that the novel is saturated with symbols and
images from The Wasteland.
E What these works have in common is the belief that life in modern Western civilization has become
meaningless. There are no genuine spiritual values remaining.
Please illustrate Spenglers and Eliots influence with fragments from the handout from
American modernist fiction
E Gatsby's version of the American Dream (Where in the handout?):
about only two things: money and Daisy.
The dream is misguided, and it fails.
His pathetic belief that if he can only reconstruct some point in the past everything will be all
right reflects modern man's continuing search for meaning in a culture that no longer has
meaning.
Through Gatsby's experience Fitzgerald is describing what the American Dream has become in
his time. The American Dream, one of the last and finest fruits of Western culture, has become
dead (and deadly) materialism.
E There is no AUTHENTIC LOVE in The Great Gatsby , like in The Sun Also Rises :
Daisy Tom (money)
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Nick Jordan (erotic attraction)
Daisy Gatsby (misapprehended money desire complex)
Tom Myrtle (sex, money, social position)
George Wilson Myrtle (love meeting interest)
E Gatsbys adolescent dream (the end) - American dream/basic premises of AMERICAN CHARACTER:
both failed due to the permutations of mans capacity for wonder, from the Puritan (William
Bradfords vision of Mount Pisgah in Of Plymouth Plantation)/adventurers dream (John Smith)
via Ben Franklins and Emersons moral and spiritual versions of awakening to the modern
materialistic one.
E Gatsby is a Faustian man who has found nothing in his experience to match his longings. Nick, Gatsby's
counterpart--the observer who tells Gatsby's story--has not been destroyed by his own efforts, as Gatsby
has, but he is alone in a wasteland with no dreams and no hopes.
E Certainly the larger issue it raises is universal: Can anything in real human experience live up to human
hopes and human imagination? Are any of us, with our dreams, really very different from Gatsby? >
UNIVERSAL MEANING
Literary Technique
E Influenced by Joseph Conrad (1857 1924):
no comment; ideas suggested through characters, images, evocation of objects and experiences.
E Influenced by James Joyce (1882 1941) / Ulysses (1922):
suspension of chronology
E Gatsbys and Daisys past are revealed through cinematic flash-backs via non-creditable /
subjective narrators: Gatsby and Jordan Baker;
E juxtaposition of events; universalizing experience through mythical reference:
E Gatsbys story critically revises national myths like that of the frontiersman (Dan
Cody suggests William Frederick Cody (1846 1917) , the legendary Buffalo Bill)
and the American dream but also problematically discusses human condition in
point of time/history (see final book passage).
Influenced by Henry James (1843 1916):
E impersonal narration; the first person narrator, Nick Carraway, is objective and morally
correct; one objectifies the narrative self via fictional narrator (by constructing a
referential balanced point of view, as Conrad did in his Marlow stories). One obtains a
recording serene, elegiac voice
E aural and visual symbolism:
e.g. Daisys moneyed voice, Dr. T.J.Ecklebergs eyes
E sometimes combined with cinematic technique:
close-ups of Gatsbys and Tom Buchanans houses, flash backs in Gatsbys and Jordan Bakers
memories
E modernist too as sheer artistic means of reaching the readers sensitivity (like the use of non-referential
color and atonal sound in modernist painting and music).
E Images, symbols:
e.g. the green light across the bay; the super eyes of Dr. Eckleberg),
E associations instead of authorial commentary intrusions:
see attempt at classical omniscience in the first draft, eliminated and replaced by aesthetic
suggestions and dialogue, concerning Nick Carraways character : I told myself that I was
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studying it all like a philosopher, a sociologist, that there was a unity here that I could graspa
new facet, elemental and profound.
This thought is rendered in the last version of the book suggestively through action and dialogue.
E.g.: Technology and its deadly effects suggested through the recurrent appearance of cars and
car/train accidents
STYLE
E Actual perception instead of intellectual reconstruction.
E Symbols: billboard of Doctor Eckleberg, last paragraph
E Alternate stylistic strain:
juxtaposing passages of romantic wonder with those suggesting disenchantment at a deeper level.
E.g. the descriptions of New York combining pastoral nostalgia with contempt for commercial
values > Nick: a city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built out of
non-olfactory money. / He sees a great flock of white sheep turn the corner.
E Absence of clich and jargon
E Evoking the essence of a character in a single epithet/phrase suggesting associations (Baudelaires
symbolism):
Daisys voice full of money / Tom Buchanan body: capable of enormous leverage a cruel
body
William Faulkner
(1897-1962)
E Born in New Albany, Mississippi his work reflects the history & the culture of the South as a whole:
Oxford, town in Lafayette County, state of Mississippi -- the model for the fictional town of
Jefferson
Lafayette County the model for his Yoknapatawpha County
E World War I: rejected by the U.S. Army because of his height
Joined the Canadian and then the Royal Air Force, but did not take part in much wartime actions
E 1949: the Nobel Prize for Literature
E 2 Pulitzer Prizes:
1955: A Fable
1963: The Reivers
E 2 National Book Awards:
1951: Collected Stories
1955: A Fable.
E Excerpt from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech:
I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because
he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last
worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be
one more sound; that of his puny inexhaustible voice still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe
that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among
creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and
sacrifice and endurance.
E the humanist side of American modernism
The Sound and the Fury, 1929
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E Three types of inadequate relation to EXPERIENCE (Benjy, Quentin, Jason & other Compsons) in
stream of consciousness technique
E + an adequate one (Dilsey) in classical omniscient narrative technique
E "I aint done nothing to him." Luster said. "He was playing there, and all of a sudden he started bellering.
What you want to get her started for, Dilsey said, Whyn't you keep him out of there. He was just looking
at the fire, Caddy said. Mother was telling him his new name. We didn't mean to get her started. I knows
you didn't, Dilsey said. Him at one end of the house and her at the other. You let my things alone, now.
Dont you touch nothing till I get back. "Aint you shamed of yourself." Dilsey said. "Teasing him." She
set the cake on the table. "I aint been teasing him." Luster said. "He was playing with that bottle full of
dogfennel and all of a sudden he started up bellering. You heard him." "You aint done nothing to his
flowers." Dilsey said. "I aint touched his graveyard." Luster said.
E What section of the novel does this fragment belong to?
E Explain stream of consciousness
E What is / are the referent(s) for the personal pronouns written in green? What is their role?
E WHEN THE SHADOW OF THE SASH APPEARED ON THE curtains it was between seven and eight
oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to
me he said, Quentin, I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excrutiatingly apt that
you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs
no better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you
might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no
battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and
despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
E What section of the novel does this fragment belong to?
E Explain stream of consciousness
E Discuss / explain the bits in green
E When I finished my cigar and went up, the light was still on. I could see the empty keyhole, but I
couldn't hear a sound. She studied quiet. Maybe she learned that in school. I told Mother goodnight and
went on to my room and got the box out and counted it again. I could hear the Great American Gelding
snoring away like a planing mill. I read somewhere they'd fix men that way to give them women's voices.
But maybe he didn't know what they'd done to him. I dont reckon he even knew what he had been trying
to do, or why Mr Burgess knocked him out with the fence picket. And if they'd just sent him on to
Jackson while he was under the ether, he'd never have known the difference. () Well, like I say they
never started soon enough with their cutting, and they quit too quick. I know at least two more that
needed something like that, and one of them not over a mile away, either.
E What section of the novel does this fragment belong to?
E Explain stream of consciousness
E Explain the phrases written in green.
E When I finished my cigar and went up, the light was still on. I could see the empty keyhole, but I
couldn't hear a sound. She studied quiet. Maybe she learned that in school. I told Mother goodnight and
went on to my room and got the box out and counted it again. I could hear the Great American Gelding
snoring away like a planing mill. I read somewhere they'd fix men that way to give them women's voices.
But maybe he didn't know what they'd done to him. I dont reckon he even knew what he had been trying
to do, or why Mr Burgess knocked him out with the fence picket. And if they'd just sent him on to
Jackson while he was under the ether, he'd never have known the difference. () Well, like I say they
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never started soon enough with their cutting, and they quit too quick. I know at least two more that
needed something like that, and one of them not over a mile away, either.
E What section of the novel does this fragment belong to?
E Explain stream of consciousness
E Explain the phrases written in green.
E Eight oclock, Dilsey said. She ceased and tilted her head upward, listening. But there was no sound
save the clock and the fire. She opened the oven and looked at the pan of bread, then stooping she paused
while someone descended the stairs. She heard the feet cross the diningroom, then the swing door opened
and Luster entered, followed by a big man who appeared to have been shaped of some substance whose
particles would not or did not cohere to one another or to the frame which supported it. His skin was dead
looking and hairless; dropsical too, he moved with a shambling gait like a trained bear. His hair was pale
and fine. It had been brushed smoothly down upon his brow like that of children in daguerrotypes. His
eyes were clear, of the pale sweet blue of cornflowers, his thick mouth hung open, drooling a little.
E What section of the novel does this fragment belong to?
E What kind of narrative is there in this excerpt?
E Who is the big man? Comment on the phrases / sentences written in green.
E Doomed and knew it, accepted the doom without either seeking or fleeing it. Loved her brother despite
him, loved not only him but loved in him that bitter prophet and inflexible corruptless judge of what he
considered the family's honor and its doom, as he thought he loved but really hated in her what he
considered the frail doomed vessel of its pride and the foul instrument of its disgrace; not only this, she
loved him not only in spite of but because of the fact that he himself was incapable of love, accepting the
fact that he must value above all not her but the virginity of which she was custodian and on which she
placed no value whatever: the frail physical stricture which to her was no more than a hangnail would
have been. Knew the brother loved death best of all and was not jealous, would (and perhaps in the
calculation and deliberation of her marriage did) have handed him the hypothetical hemlock. Was two
months pregnant with another man's child which regardless of what its sex would be she had already
named Quentin after the brother whom they both (she and the brother) knew was already the same as
dead, when she married (1910).
E What section of the novel does this fragment belong to?
E What kind of narrative is there in this excerpt?
E What are the referents for he, she and Quentin?
E Source of dramatic tension and focal point of various perspectives: Caddys surrender to Dalton Ames
E The sequence of events is not caused by her acts but by the significance which each of her brothers
attributes to it
E As a result: the four sections appear quite unrelated even though they repeat certain incidents and are
concerned with the same problem: Caddys loss of virginity.
E Each of the sections is static, but through their reading the plot reveals progressively.
E There is no development of either character or plot in the traditional manner.
E The consciousness of a character is the agent illuminating and being illuminated by the central situation
E fixing the structure while leaving the central situation ambiguous forcing the reader to reconstruct the
story and to apprehend its significance for himself
E The reader recovers the story while he is grasping the relation of Benjy, Quentin, and Jason to it.
E With respect to the plot the 4 sections are inextricably connected, but with respect to the central situation
they are quite distinct and self-sufficient.
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E As related to the central focus, each of the 1st 3 sections presents a version of the same facts which is at
once the truth and a complete distortion of the truth; e.g:
E I went along the fence, to the gate, where the girls passed with their booksatchels. "You, Benjy." Luster
said. "Come back here." You cant do no good looking through the gate, T. P. said. Miss Caddy done gone
long ways away. Done got married and left you. You cant do no good, holding to the gate and crying. She
cant hear you. What is it he wants, T. P. Mother said. Cant you play with him and keep him quiet. He
want to go down yonder and look through the gate, T. P. said. Well, he cannot do it, Mother said. It's
raining. You will just have to play with him and keep him quiet. You, Benjamin. Aint nothing going to
quiet him, T. P. said. He think if he down to the gate, Miss Caddy come back. Nonsense, Mother said.
I could hear them talking. I went out the door and I couldn't hear them, and I went down to the gate,
where the girls passed with their booksatchels. They looked at me, walking fast, with their heads turned. I tried
to say, but they went on, and I went along the fence, trying to say, and they went faster. Then they were running
and I came to the corner of the fence and I couldn't go any further, and I held to the fence, looking after them and
trying to say.
E Benjys voice silenced in terms of plot; his missing Caddy will lead to his running after one of the girls;
the daughters family & his own family would misinterpret his intentions taken to Jackson (see slide
11 & Jasons perception and interpretation of the event).
E The month of brides, the voice that breathed She ran right out of the mirror, out of the banked scent.
Roses. Roses. Mr and Mrs Jason Richmond Compson announce the marriage of. Roses. Not virgins like
dogwood, milkweed. I said I have committed incest, Father I said. Roses. Cunning and serene. If you
attend Harvard one year, but dont see the boat-race, there should be a refund. Let Jason have it. Give
Jason a year at Harvard.
E Quentins version of Caddys story
E ONCE A BITCH ALWAYS A BITCH, WHAT I SAY. I SAYS you're lucky if her playing out of
school is all that worries you. I says she ought to be down there in that kitchen right now, instead of up
there in her room, gobbing paint on her face and waiting for six niggers that cant even stand up out of a
chair unless they've got a pan full of bread and meat to balance them, to fix breakfast for her. And Mother
says, "But to have the school authorities think that I have no control over her, that I cant--" "Well," I says,
"You cant, can you? You never have tried to do anything with her," I says, "How do you expect to begin
this late, when she's seventeen years old?" () "Sure," I says, "I never had time to be. I never had time to
go to Harvard like Quentin or drink myself into the ground like Father. I had to work. But of course if
you want me to follow her around and see what she does, I can quit the store and get a job where I can
work at night. Then I can watch her during the day and you can use Ben for the night shift."
E Jasons version of Caddys story via Quentins (Caddys daughter)
E "They deliberately shut me out of their lives," she says, "It was always her and Quentin. They were
always conspiring against me. Against you too, though you were too young to realise it. They always
looked on you and me as outsiders, like they did your Uncle Maury. I always told your father that they
were allowed too much freedom, to be together too much. When Quentin started to school we had to let
her go the next year, so she could be with him. She couldn't bear for any of you to do anything she
couldn't. It was vanity in her, vanity and false pride. And then when her troubles began I knew that
Quentin would feel that he had to do something just as bad. But I didn't believe that he would have been
so selfish as to--I didn't dream that he--" "Maybe he knew it was going to be a girl," I says, "And that one
more of them would be more than he could stand.
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E Their mothers version via Jasons; what is it that Quentin (Caddys brother) did and proved to be
selfish?
E each of the 1st 3 sections presents a version of the same facts which is at once the truth and a complete
distortion of the truth
the theme of the novel, as revealed by its structure, is: the relation between the act and mans
apprehension of the act, between the event and the interpretation.
It is a matter of shifting perspective: for each man creates his own truth. This does not mean that there is
no truth, or that truth is unknowable. It only means that truth is a matter of the hearts response and the
minds logic MODERNISM
Dilseys responses seem to be nearest to it, as humanly round and really moral.
American Modernism II
- Experiments in the Novel / Short Story.
John Dos Passos (1896-1970).
Jean Toomer (1894 1967)
Anzia Yezierska (c. 1880 1970)
Common feature: avant-garde experimentation (thematic & formal)
John Dos Passos (1896-1970)
three volume sequence of novels The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), The Big Money (1936) -
published together in 1937 as U.S.A
The Big Money (1936)
Experimented with:
Juxtaposition
rapid cutting
fragmentation, owing a good deal to the cinema techniques of Eisenstein and Griffith.
Other devices:
Simultaneity
pluralized narration
intersection of documentary material with personal stories
tracing the growth of the history of the United States from its optimistic and progressive hopes at the turn
into the 20th century, through the crisis year 1919, when Woodrow Wilsons hopes began to fail, and so
to the crass materialism of the 1920s
background material is divided into : Camera Eye, Biography, Newsreel
NEWSREEL LXVIII
WALL STREET STUNNED
This is not Thirty-eight but it's old Ninety-seven You must put her in Center on time MARKET
SURE TO RECOVER FROM SLUMP
Decline in Contracts
POLICE TURN MACHINE GUNS ON COLORADO MINE STRIKERS KILL 5 WOUND 40
sympathizers appeared on the scene just as thousands of office workers were pouring out of the buildings
at the lunch hour. As they raised their placard high and started an indefinite march from one side to the
other, they were jeered and hooted not only by the office workers but also by workmen on a building
under construction
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THE CAMERA EYE (51)
at the head of the valley in the dark of the hills on the broken floor of a lurched over cabin a man halfsits
halflies propped up by an old woman two wrinkled girls that might be young chunks of coal flare in the hearth
flicker in his face white and sagging as dough blacken the caved-in mouth the taut throat the belly swelled
enormous with the wound he got working on the minetipple the barefoot girl brings him a tincup of water the
woman wipes sweat off his streaming face with a dirty denim sleeve the firelight flares in his eyes stretched big
with fever in the women's scared eyes and in the blanched faces of the foreigners without help in the valley
hemmed by dark strikesilent hills the man will die (my father died, we know what it is like to see a man die) the
women will lay him out on the rickety cot the miners will bury him ()
covers 1920-29
chronicle of Americas failure in the post-war period
failure is presented through the unabashed pursuit of wealth, prestige and power at the expense of
political freedom, equality of economic opportunity and human dignity
Dos Passos did not see the novel as a linear structure, moving by progression of character and incident,
but as a montage of people and activities: e.g. Mary French
MARY FRENCH
Mary French had to stay late at the office and couldn't get to the hall until the meeting was almost over.
There were no seats left so she stood in the back. So many people were standing in front of her that she couldn't
see Don, she could only hear his ringing harsh voice and feel the tense attention in the silence during his pauses.
When a roar of applause answered his last words and the hall filled suddenly with voices and the scrape and
shuffle of feet she ran out ahead of the crowd and up the alley to the back door.
Don was just coming out of the black sheetiron door talking over his shoulder as he came to two of the
miners' delegates. He stopped a second to hold the door open for them with a long arm. His face had the flushed
smile, there was the shine in his eye he often had after speaking, the look, Mary used to tell herself, of a man
who had just come from a date with his best girl. It was some time before Don saw her in the group that gathered
round him in the alley. Without looking at her he swept her along with the men he was talking to and walked
them fast towards the corner of the street.
His comparison between the new novel structure and a tableau clarifies his intention:
I have paid a good deal of attention to painting. The period of art I was very much interested in
at that time was the 13th and the 14th centuries. Its tableaux with large figures of saints
surrounded by a lot of little people just fascinated me. I tried to capture the same effect in words.
the narrative method and authorial choice in the trilogy must be seen in light of Dos Passos aim of
creating a new kind of fiction to couple history with fiction, to keep up a contemporary commentary on
historys changes, always as seen by some individuals ears, felt through some individuals nerves and
tissues.
Ethnic Modernisms
Ethnic version of high & low modernism;
Ethnic versions of modernism one major concern of the late 20
th
century Americanists (e.g. Werner
Sollors);
Research undertaken showed that the Europe-centered / -modelled version of American
modernism only one of the developments of the time.
There were various indigenous factors, which have not been influenced by European
developments, and which have played an important role in the constitution and dissemination of
various discourses which evince a modernist sensibility.
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Hence., the terms: (ethnic) modernisms (plural instead of singular).
Ethnicity at the end of 19
th
beginning of 20
th
century: defined by displacement, migrancy, and
homelessness (Caparoso Konzett, 2002)
Topics that permeate the fiction written by ethnic writers;
These topics modernist; may also be encountered in the fictions of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and
Faulkner, as well as in the poems written by Ezra Pound;
The reasons and nuances which may be found in the texts written by ethnic Americans different,
albeit similar, to those encountered in the canonical writers listed above.
Konzett Caparoso, Delia. Ethnic Modernisms: Anzia Yezierks, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, and the
Aesthetics of Dislocation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
One of the major differences: while the experiences of exile, alienation, various other forms of
dislocation appear race-neutral in canonical (white) American writers of the period, the same topics are
infused with concerns about ethnic / national identity in texts written by hyphenated authors.
Caparoso Konzett argues that the experience of dislocation described by most of the canonical writers of
the period, such as, for instance, Henry James in American Scene, has also been triggered by the changes
in American urban social structure brought about by 1890s 1910s large number of immigrants to the
U.S. as well as by movements of African-American population from the rural areas of the South to the
large cities of the North (e.g. New York, Chicago, etc.)
Such ethnic writers take issue with the discourse of high modernism (race / gender / ethnicity blind)
hybrid narrative / poetic forms.
E.g.: Yezierska Yinglish (deliberate mixture of Yiddish and English), deliberately literary +
new definition given to the experience of immigration / national body;
Jean Toomer African-American vernacular & jazz-modelled patterns + novel
interrogation of the meaning of black / negro.
Overall topic: non-synchronicity of cultures (Old / New World; urban North / rural South, etc.)
modernist narrative of (teleological) progress is questioned.
Without the subsequent creation of new traditions (e.g. E. Pounds and T.S. Eliots recourse to
classical models)
ethnic modernist writers situate themselves beyond any collective constraints (ethnic group /
mainstream nationalism) they are transnational in perspective.
In Caparoso Konzetts terms: these writers' modernism = a provisional search for community and
identity in a radically mobile and migratory reality. (12)
Anzia Yezierska (c. 1880 1970)
Hungry Hearts (1920, short stories)
Salome of the Tenements (1923, novel)
Children of Loneliness: Stories of Immigrant Life in America (1923)
Bread Givers (1925, novel)
Arrogant Beggar (1927, novel)
Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950, memoir).
Modernist no so much in formal technique as in the way she questions and redefines the meaning(s) of
cultural identity (as defined at the time).
Further details regarding ethnic issues in the chapter uploaded on the yahoo group.
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Her modernism better understood in relation to J. Deweys modernist approach to American social
realities of the time & his emphasis on the need for reforms removal of all cultural / economic barriers
America as a democratic whole.
Yezierskas modernism: redefinition of (American) democracy in relation to ethnic / immigrant
experience and identity.
Experiments in language and fictional / narrative patterns (e.g. reworking of slum melodrama or
any other high / low literary generic conventions).
Harlem Renaissance
1920s early 1930s; centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City
Alternative names: the New Negro movement, the Negro renaissance, the New Negro renaissance
Primarily a literary movement + music, theater, art and politics (Du Bois and N.A.A.C.P., Marcus
Garveys Back to Africa movement
Examples: Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Bill Robinson, Florence
Mills, Josephine Baker, Ethel Waters, Paul Robeson, Roland Hayes, Aaron Douglass, Louis Armstrong,
Bessie Smith, and Duke Ellington.
Factors involved:
1919 return of highly decorated Black 369th Infantry, which marched from the docks, down
Broadway, and through Harlem, led every step of the way by James Europe's jazz band;
the "Red Summer" of 1919 approx. 25 race riots in all sections of the country;
poverty, particularly in the South;
Emergence of a black middle class > increased education and job opportunities following the
Civil War (Du Bois, for instance, was a Harvard graduate)
New political agenda advocating racial equality Du Bois and N.A.A.C.P. (the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1909) as opposed to Booker T.
Washingtons viewpoint with respect to the role & position of the African Americans in the U.S.
(see The Atlanta Exposition Address v. The Souls of Black Folk); Marcus Garveys Back to
Africa movement
Jazz and blues /the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and fiction of Charles W. Chestnutt national
recognition; + Claude MacKay & James Weldon Johnson (The Autobigraphy of an [Ex-] Colored
Man)
Milestones for the new movement:
MacKays Harlem Shadows (1922) [the first black writer to be published by a mainstream,
national publisher Harcourt, Brace & Company)
Jean Toomers Cane (1923)
Jessie Fausets There is Confusion (1924).
Three events:
March 1924 the National Urban League dinner meant to celebrate the new black literary
talents & to introduce them to the white audience; special issue of the Survey Graphic dedicated
to Harlem edited by Alan Locke & featured black writers.
1926 the publication of Carl Van Vechtens Nigger Heaven [white novelist] Harlems exotic
nightlife + a return to the primitive promise; exotic/jazzed abandon:
Savages! Savages at heart! And she had lost or forfeited her birthright, this primitive birthright
which was so valuable and important an asset, a birthright that all the civilized races were
struggling to get back to-this fact explained the art of a Picasso or a Stravinsky. To be sure, she,
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too, felt this African beat--it completely aroused her emotionally--but she was conscious of
feeling it. This love of drums, of exciting rhythms, this naive delight in glowing colour--the
colour that exists only in cloudless, tropical climes--this warm, sexual emotion, all these were
hers only through a mental understanding. With Olive these qualities were instinctive. . . . Why,
Mary asked herself, is this denied me? (Carl Van Vechten 113)
1. Autumn 1926 a group of young black writers produced Fire!
2. Aim: disseminate artistic representations of African American experience.
4. James Weldon Johnson's description of reactions to Harlem:
1. It is known in Europe and the Orient, and it is talked about by natives in the interior of Africa. It
is farthest known as being exotic, colourful, and sensuous; a place of laughing, singing, and
dancing; a place where life wakes up at night. This phase of Harlem's fame is most widely known
because, in addition to being spread by ordinary agencies, it has been proclaimed in story and
song. And certainly this is Harlem's most striking and fascinating aspect. New Yorkers and people
visiting New York from the world over go to the night-clubs of Harlem and dance to such jazz
music as can be heard nowhere else; and they get an exhilaration impossible to duplicate. () A
visit to Harlem at nightthe principal streets never deserted, gay crowds skipping from one place
of amusement to another, lines of taxicabs and limousines standing under the sparkling lights of
the entrances to the famous night clubs, the subway kiosks swallowing and disgorging crowds all
night longgives the impression that Harlem never sleeps and that the inhabitants thereof jazz
through existence.
(
James W. Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Atheneum, 1968; originally
published, 1930, pp. 160-161).
5. The exotic image comes from Blacks themselves and from white sympathizers:
1. Shuffle Along (1921) - popular musical, written and directed by four BlacksFlournoy Miller,
Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, and Aubrey Lyles
2. Put and Take (1921) Irving C. Miller, who also produced Liza (1923)
3. Chorus girls such as Florence Mills and Josephine Baker
4. Primitivism & dancing Langston Hughes & Z.N. Hurstons How It Feels to Be Colored Me;
5. Sherwood Anderson - Dark Laughter (1925): joyful laugh at the unhappy whites who repress
their sexual drives / desires.
6. Home to Harlem (1928) Claude McKay,.
7. Rudolph Fisher in The Walls of Jericho (1928) and Wallace Thurman in The Blacker the Berry
(1929): night club scenes as clichs of Black life.
6. W.E.B. DuBois (in The Crisis) questioned these representations of blackness since, to him, they seemed
to have incorporated whites stereotypes about blacks.
7. Factors contributing to the Harlem Renaissance decline:
1. The Great Depression NAACP & the Urban League focused on economic and social matters;
2. The 1935 Harlem riot.
3. COMMON FEATURES to all the writers and artists involved:
4. the attempt to find an artistic expression for the African American experience
5. some common themes as follows:
8. identity through identification with an ancestral past:
1. Jean Toomer Cane, "Natalie Mann"
2. Counte Cullen -"Heritage"
3. Langston Hughes - "The Negro Speaks of Rivers.
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1. identification is not by all means problematic: European / American / African heritage?
2. the assertion of African past posed several problems since African-Americans were
generally associated in the imaginary of the mainstream with a continent rather than
specific African tribes / nations (as historically was the case); e.g.: L. Hughes - Afro-
American Fragment.
2. sense of alienation = impossibility to achieve a sense of belonging < difficulty in relating oneself at a
personal level to the Black heritage + exclusion & marginalization from the European heritage:
E.g.: McKay's "Outcast" & "The White House
3. protests against oppression:
Walter White's novel The Fire in the Flint (1924)
Claude McKay's "The Lynching.
Toomer's "Blood-Burning Moon" and "Kabnis" (Cane)
Sometimes indirectly by showing how it causes Blacks to turn against themselves: Jean Toomers
"Natalie Mann - middle-class Negroes have to liberate themselves from restrictive morality of
Anglo Saxons (Protestants).
ALL ABOVE modernist themes.
VARIETY OF EXPRESSION: black vernacular/ African-American experience + modernist
experimentation.
wide range of narrative forms and techniques (re)writing traditional / new forms of:
poetic realism, historical romance, genteel realism, folk romance, folk realism, and satire.
POETIC REALISM AND HISTORICAL ROMANCE
Search for identity and usable past two literary forms:
Poetic realism Jean Toomers Cane:
psychological approach to the modern black artist;
experimental in form;
Freudian themes preoccupied with the theme of the repressed self);
represents a synthesis of the concerns of writers of the Lost Generation and the
Harlem Renaissance, and his work embodies the tensions of modern science and
folk tradition, of psychoanalytic technique and Afro-American music, of
mysticism and Afro-American spirituality (Bernard W. Bell - The Afro-American
Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989,
p.96)
Historical romance - Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder (retelling of a heroic legend in a
traditional form).
GENTEEL REALISM: ASSIMILATIONISM, NATIONALISM, OR BICULTURALISM
Walter White, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen - more emphasis on class than color;
> family background and education: second-generation members of the middle-class black
intelligentsia.
focus on the morals and manners of well-educated members of black high society introduced
the novel of manners & genteel realism.
FOLK ROMANCE: PASTORALISM, PRIMITIVISM, AND ANCESTRALISM
the Afro-American pastoral focused on the near rather than remote past ; celebrated urban as well
as rural settings; elevated social outcasts and plain folk to heroic stature, and attacked the
repressive forces of Western civilization (e.g.: social conformity and racism.
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primitivism & ancestralism: romantic longing for a freer, more innocent time and place was born:
a time and place where the rhythms of life were closely linked to nature and one's essential
humanity was unquestioned;
international scope of the concept of ancestralism : the Ngritude movement of Caribbean and
Francophone West African writers; coined in 1939 by Aim Csaire in Journal of a Return to My
Native Country (long narrative poem), and popularized in 1948 by Lopold Senghor in New
Anthology of Black and Malagasian Poetry.
E.g.: Festus Claudius Mc Kay (1899-1948); Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)
a more intense personal search for modern forms of ancestralism, of continuity of the folk
tradition.
unaffected language, bold explorations of the economic, spiritual, and sexual drives behind the
violence of black male-female relationships, and emphasis on the color and caste problems of
black lovers.
FOLK REALISM: RELIGION, MUSIC, HUMOR, AND LANGUAGE
James Langston Hughes (1902-67); Countee Porter Cullen (1903-46)
the novels of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen focus on the everyday life of ordinary
churchgoing black folk
representative rather than marginal or allegorical types;
their characters are less idealized, their settings less exotic, and their plots less melodramatic;
Aim: the truth of a particular environment and the social rituals of common folk rather than for
the truth of the world at large and the life-style of street people and migrants.
SATIRIC REALISM: THE VICES AND FOLLIES OF THE FOLK AND BLACK BOURGEOISIE
several black writers of the Harlem Renaissance turned to comedy and satire for models to depict
the ordinary experience of blacks;
Rudolph Fisher (1897-1934); George Samuel Schuyler (1895-1977); Wallace Thurman (1902-34)
Jean Toomer (1894 1967)
- Mixed ethnic and racial background;
- High middle class family.
- "I am not a romanticist, I am not a classicist or a realist, in the usual sense of these terms. I am an
essentialist. Or, to put it in other words, I am a spiritualizer, a poetic realist." (Toomer, early draft of his
autobiography).
- - transcendence of the soul and the attainment of spiritual truth through intuition.
- - he tried "to lift facts, things, happenings to the planes of rhythm, feeling, and significance. . . . to clothe
and give body to potentialities." (Toomer qtd. in Bell 97)
- Cane
- three major parts from a highly poetic to a heavily dramatic form.
- Part 1 - focus on the Southern past and the libido /the rural thesis
- Part 2 - emphasis on the centers of commerce and the superego/the urban antithesis
- Part 3 - a synthesis of the earlier sections with Kabnis representing the black writer who
finds it difficult to resolve the tension between the two.
- Images and symbols; shifting rhythm of syntax and diction
- Fragments of spirituals and work songs
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- Aspiration to a higher level of consciousness that went beyond conditioning social circumstances.
- In Part 1 - Gothic imagery of ten poems and six impressionistic sketches of Southern women (Georgian
countryside).
- Each of the women is involved in a bizarre incident; each is dominated by a divine sexual
impulse; and each sketch reveals a contrast between personal desires and social conventions
unity of life and imminence of spiritual rebirth (see Fern)
- Part 2 - District of Columbia and Chicago;
- its seven sketches and five poems continue the poet-narrator's quest to reconcile himself to his
heritage as a black American artist.
- focus on the perversion of the will and emotions when they are enslaved by the genteel mores of
society. When freely and fully realized, the mind and body function as a spiritual unit.
- Spirituals, folk songs, jazz, poetry, and dance are Toomer's symbols for the attainment of this
goal.
- Part 3 - third-person omniscient narrative voice; dramatic form;
- the inability of Ralph Kabnis to reconcile himself to the blood and soil that symbolize his ethnic
and national identities.
- he confesses being strongly influenced by two approaches to literature:
- Euro-American writers and works that used regional matter in a poetic manner, especially Robert
Frost's poems and Sherwood Anderson 's Winesburg, Ohio.
- impressed by the self-conscious art of the Imagists. "Their insistence on fresh vision and on the
perfect clean economical line was just what I had been looking for. I began feeling that I had in
my hands, the tools for my own creation." (Toomer qtd. in Bell 101)
- With Negroes also the trend was towards the small town and then towards the city--and industry and
commerce and machines. The folk spirit was walking in to die on the modern desert. That spirit was so
beautiful. Its death was so tragic. Just this seemed to sum up life for me. And this was the feeling I put
into Cane. (404)


- I am at once no one of the races and I am all of them. I belong to no one of them and I belong to all....
Heredity and environment will combine to produce a race which will be at once interracial and unique. I
may be the turning point for the return of mankind, now divided into hostile races, to one unified race,
namely, to the human race. ("Crock of Problems" 58-59)
- When I come up to Seventh Street and Theatre, a wholly new life confronts me.... For it is jazzed,
strident, modern. Seventh Street is the song of crude new life. Of a new people. Negro? Only in the
boldness of expression. In its healthy freedom. American.
- New definition for African American identity, which however avoids binary oppositions &
essentialized ethnic factors ethnic modernism.
Modernist Poetry
Ezra Pound: A Retrospect, In a Station of a Metro, The Cantos (I)
William Carlos Williams: The Red Wheelbarrow, Paterson
Wallace Stevens:Anecdote of the Jar,Study of Two Pears
Ezra (Weston Loomis) Pound
(1885 1972)
E born in Hailey, Idaho, United States
E 1908: settles in London; meets William Butler Yeats (his secretary for a while), Ford Madox Ford and T.
E. Hulme (Imagism), among many
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E 1920: moved to Paris
E 1924: moved to Rapallo, Italy
E World War II: supported Mussolinis government; publicly against the American involvement into the
war; Axis propaganda speeches on Italian radio
E 1945: turns in to U.S. forces; to be stand charges of treason; kept in a cage for 25 days in Pisa the
Pisan Cantos
E Insanity plea: St. Elisabeth Hospital (1946 - 1958)
E 1949: Pisan Cantos won the first Bollingen Prize from the Library of Congress.
Imagism
E Anglo-American movement developed in the pre- World War II years
E Critical reaction against the poetry of the immediate past in England and America:
As subjective, impressionistic
As decadent Romanticism
Both typical of the Victorian era (Imagist opinion)
E sources of inspiration were, chronologically, of two sorts:
Ancient: Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Chinese, and Japanese
Modern: French.
E Not all imagist poets were affected by the same literatures
each poet was the product of a particular combination of sources, and the chief source varied with
the individual.
E Yet the platform on which the imagists eventually took their stand was a harmonious structure based on
these principles:
Hardness of outline
Clarity of image
Brevity
Suggestiveness
Freedom from metrical laws.
E FRENCH ORIGIN SCHEMA:
Parnassianism (against Romanticism; for concreteness; the Word not ideas)
Symbolism (more spiritual)
E NATIVE ORIGINS
1908: Thomas Ernest Hulme founded the Poets Club, and although none of the poets who
became officially the imagists were members of this early group, it was at its meetings that the
first experimental imagist poems were read and discussed, among these being Hulmes own
poems.
E Hulme wrote a great deal, but most of his writing was in the form of brief notes, intended solely for his
own reference
E Died in 1917, in the First World War
E Herbert Read edited for publication the bulk of these notes
1924, Speculations (London: Kegan Paul; New York: Harcourt, Brace)
E another collection of brief fragments - arranged by the same editor, and published under the title "Notes
on Language and Style", first as an article in the Criterion (Vol. III, No. XII, July 1925)
E main tendencies of Hulme's thought: ANTI-HUMANISTIC
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we have reached the end of a humanistic period (which began, of course, with the Renaissance);
humanism is a disease, a weakness which carries within itself the seed of its own destruction
inevitable result of humanism is romanticism, and the exaltation of the individual
to the humanistic attitude he opposes the religious = "way of thinking," which may find
expression in myth, but which at the same time is independent of myth; an attitude based upon a
belief in absolute values, in the light of which "man himself is judged to be essentially limited and
imperfect "A man is essentially bad, he can only accomplish anything of value by discipline -
- ethical and political. Order is thus not merely negative, but creative and liberating" new
classicism (as opposed to romanticism).
imagination vs. fancy
E Hulme limits imagination to the realm of the emotions, and fancy to the realm of finite
things
E Fancy must be the "weapon" of the modern poet; it enables the poet to create the
PHYSICAL IMAGE = the very basis of poetic expression:
E "Visual meanings can only be transferred by the new bowl of metaphor; prose is an
old pot that lets them leak out. . . . . Fancy is not mere decoration added on to plain
speech. Plain speech is essentially inaccurate. It is only by new metaphors, that is,
by fancy, that it can be made precise."
1909: Hulme made the acquaintance of F. S. Flint, who had been writing a series of articles in
advocacy of vers libre a new dining-and-talking society (unnamed), which thereafter held
regular meetings on Thursday evenings at a restaurant in Soho (the Latin Quarter of London)
E The Egoist, London May 1, 1915: F. S. Flint brief article entitled The History of
Imagism:
I think that what brought the real nucleus of this group together was dissatisfaction with English
poetry as it was then (and is still, alas!) being written. We proposed at various times to replace it
by pure vers libre; by the Japanese tanka and haikai; we all wrote dozens of the latter as an
amusement; by poems in a sacred Hebrew form ... by rhymeless poems like Hulmes Autumn,
and so on. In all this Hulme was ringleader. He insisted too on absolutely accurate presentation
and no verbiage.... There was also a lot of talk and practice among usof what we called the
Image. We were very much influenced by modern French Symbolist poetry.
Autumn
A touch of cold in the Autumn night --

I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.
April 22, 1909: Ezra Pound joined the group
the group died a lingering death at the end of its second winter
E its discussions had a sequel:
1912: E. Pound published at the end of his book, Ripostes, the complete poetical works of T. E.
Hulme:
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E five poems, thirty-three lines
E + a preface:
"As for the future, Les Imagistes, the descendants of the forgotten school of 1909
(previously referred to as the School of Images) have that (Hulmes poetry) in their
keeping."
E same year: Pound had become interested in modern French poetry
had broken away from his old manner
invented the term Imagisme to designate the aesthetics of Les Imagistes.
E Imagism as a Movement:
British magazines:
E English Review, 1909, editor Ford Madox Hueffer (editor Ford Madox Ford)
E Poetry Review & Poetry and Drama (1912-1914; editor Harold Monro)
E The Chapbook: A Monthly Miscellany (1919) & The Egoist. An Individualist Review
(1914 1919), editors R. Aldington, H.D., T.S. Eliot
Anthologies:
E Des Imagistes: An Anthology. New York: Albert and Charles Boni; London: Poetry
Bookshop, 1914
Editors not indicated
no preface to explain the technique or to indicate the ideals of the poets.
E Some Imagist Poets, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1915; 1916: preface, unsigned, written almost entirely by Amy Lowell
1917, editor: Amy Lowell; preface written, but unsigned, by Richard Aldington.
E Amy Lowells preface (1915) = the official imagist credo; Pound was no longer a member of the group
six articles/poetic rules:
E Use the language of common speech, employing always the right word.
E Create new rhythms (free verse is recommended) to express the individuality of the poet.
E Have absolute freedom in the choice of the subject of the poem.
E Present images, and not vague generalities.
E Write hard and clear, not blurred and indefinite, poetry.
E Use concentrated poetic expression.
the official imagists were: Richard Aldington (British), Hilda Doolittle (signed H. D., American),
John Gould Fletcher (American), F. S. Flint (British), D. H. Lawrence (British), and Amy Lowell
(American)
imagism as a movement ended with the publication of the fourth anthology in April 1917.
American magazine: Poetry: A Magazine of Verse,1912 , 1913, editor Harriet Monroe
E Vol. I, nr. 6, March 1913:
the principles of imagism: printed over the signature of F. S. Flint in what
purported to be an interview with an imagist but which as a matter of fact was
merely a statement by E. Pound
in the same number, appeared "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste, signed by Pound
himself.
in the "interview" the four cardinal principles of Imagism are set forth as:
1. "Direct treatment of the 'thing,' whether subjective or objective
2. "To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
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3. "As regards rhythm, to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a
metronome."
4. To conform to the "doctrine of the image" -- which the author says has not been defined for
publication, as it does not concern the public and would provoke useless discussion.
E Pounds definition of the image (same issue):
that which represents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd
Petals on a wet, black bough.
What is the thing in this poem?
Explain the intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time in relation to this poem.
Imagism
E The origins of the name image and derivatives (summary):
E. Pound did not start the discussion of "the image; it was T. E. Hulme.
Pound was the first to employ the derivatives of this term in print:
Pound introduced them:
E to England in the preface to Hulme's poems (Ripostes, 1912)
E to America in the November 1912 issue of Poetry (Chicago), wherein appeared three
poems by Richard Aldington, with a biographical note classifying him as an "imagiste."
E January 1913 issue of Poetry, Pound contributed some literary notes from London:
E "The youngest school here that has the nerve to call itself a school is that of the
Imagistes."
E same issue: three poems signed "H. D., Imagiste."
E Pound, acting as Poetry's London representative, obtained the poems from
Aldington and H. D. and sent them to Chicago
Vorticism
E 1914 Pound started finding Imagism too limiting turned to Vorticism:
established by Wyndham Lewis (British painter, novelist, and journalist, 1882-1957) in 1914.
avant-garde movement in British art drawing on futurism, cubism, and expressionism
celebration of German aesthetics and the principles of energy, visual violence, and dynamism
represented by the journal Blast, edited by Lewis
E For Pound: energy and emotion expressed in pure form. The image was now defined as:
a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a vortex (a whirling mass of
something, especially water or air, that draws everything near it toward its center), from which
and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.
The Cantos (1915 1970)
E 116 poems
E Critical interpretation of the evolution and involution of European culture and history
E Included elements of autobiography coded in classical myth
E How the substantial, harmonious classical culture decayed / emptied into chaotic mechanical modernity.
E Pound modeled the Cantos on Greek and Latin classical culture:
E Homer ( The Iliad, The Odyssey)
E Dante (The Divine Comedy).
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E The composition was to be polyphonic (Gk. poluphnia multiplicity of sounds) rather than symphonic
(Via Latin and Greek sumphnia harmony, literally sounding together), developing cyclically and
spirally rather than in a straight narrative line. (see Arnold Schoenbergs Pierrot Lunaire and Marcel
Duchamps Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending A Staircase analogies)
E epic ambition -> inclusion of:
E History dramatized
E The documentary combined with the romantic
E The statistical info (Homer example) & hero-worshipping (idem)
E The heroic man lives in and produces a just and/ or heroic epoch when man is in tune with a natural
universe full of vital forces, intuited directly as factual experiences, but expressed as myths.
E Like Whitmans Leaves of Grass (1855) the Cantos grew with Pounds life and art experience its
provisional aspect:
E suggested by titles of the Cantos series and their contents:
E the first words of Canto I: And then
E the first volume of the Cantos was A Draft of ,
E the last volume was Drafts and Fragments
E the working title was Cantos of a Poem of some Length.
Canto I (1925)
E Pound used a Latin version of Homer's Odyssey by Andreas Divus (dated 1538):
On the metre and syntax of a 1911 version of the Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer, Pound made
an English version of Divus' rendering of the Nekuia (Gr. Poetry: journey to the Underworld)
episode (11
th
book of the Odyssey):
E Odysseus and his companions sail to Hades in order to find out their future.
E Odysseus - an heroic explorer cultivating the gods and acting significantly (great deeds) in search of
knowledge
a metaphor of classicism as meaningful and balanced
an allegory of Pound at the beginning of his poetical journey, a voyage of the artists self and a
world history discovery to meet love (Aphrodite) and temptation (Circe) as forgetfulness / erotic
sensuality
E apparent senseless structure of the poem is the result in the belief in the authenticity of live art as life: a
multifarious flux, an open form
E Journey to the underworld, seeking direction from the dead
symbolic intention > it goes back to the original ground of knowledge > a respectful enquiring
relation with nature and with the human past, gained through submission (see his following the
ritual [poetry, art] indicated by Circe) > we ascend to the source of Western literature and wisdom
in order to get our bearings [Tiresias, Divus, Dartona Cretensis (the Cretan)].
The Cantos as epic of knowledge. Suggested in lines 70-74: the Sirens, Circe, Aphrodite >
sensory, carnal, visionary knowledge.
E Odysseus = first-person speaker of the Canto; Pound protagonist and author
E Pound, the poet, engaged in this journey to the past and back, to the present in order to create original and
substantial art
E Odysseus sails on his appointed voyage past the Sirens to Circes enchantment (dangers of being
swallowed by tradition), leading to a worshipful encounter with Aphrodite (aesthetic revival)
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E first part of Canto I: on its symbolic level Pounds answer to the raised question for the relationship
between the present and the past
It is the past that influences and maybe determines the present and it is the past that shall be asked
for knowledge to lead us
Elphenor here = our debt to the past our responsibility to cherish and take care of that what is
the past = our tradition rejection of modernity
The past and the present are not mutually exclusive;
The past as the motoric force of the present; if the present stands still it is because weve lost our
sensitivity to the past and forgot its value and meaning.
E initiatory rites of Proserpina / Persephone:
daughter of Demeter and Zeus who was abducted by Hades, king of the underworld; she spent
half the year in the underworld and half the year on earth with her mother; her return to earth
symbolized the arrival of spring; the branch [golden bough] was held up to her as an offering
such an offering symbolized the golden bough bearers understanding of her polarity (good and
evil): to enter the darkness was to return to the light (a necessarily cyclic universe)
Necessary to regain cultural past: contribute to the present.
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
E Graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School; studied pediatrics at the University of
Leipzig in Germany
E By late 1912, Williams had returned to Rutherford & set up a private practice
E prolific writer, and for much of his life he published a book at least every two years
E friend with the avant-garde modern artists Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp
E found modern art very inspiring; involved in the 1913 "Armory Show"
E 1950: public recognition of his writing the National Book Award in poetry for the third volume of
Paterson.
E 1953: won the Bollingen Prize (awarded by Yale University for achievement in American poetry, see E.
Pound)
E in 1963 (after his death): won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Pictures from Brueghel.
Poetic Principles
E use of simple, direct language
E avoided complexity and obscure symbolism: All this/ was for you, old woman./ I wanted to write a
poem/ that you would understand. (January Morning, 1938)
E Four poetic qualities:
1. the use of commonplace subjects and themes; the poet must write about things people can respond
to, things people have seen and know literature should not stand separate from its readers
2. the poets duty to write about real events or objects in a language that all people could understand,
with an ear for the way people actually speak
E called his language "the American idiom"
E stressed repeatedly that it was different from formal English it allowed for speech
patterns that could violate grammatical rules
E Experimented with short poems that were fragments of speech on individual moments,
thoughts, feelings, or images ["This Is Just To Say" (1934): I have eaten/ the plums/ that
were/ in the icebox...]
3. specificity:
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E objected to traditional poetry that talked in generalities / aboutness (Williamss term)
e.g.: poems that treated love, death, anger, and friendship as abstractions rather than as
real things/everydayness
E coined the phrase "No ideas but in things" trend called OBJECTIVISM, in response to
E. Pounds Imagism:
4. a prose passage from the volume Spring and All (1923):
E in great works of the imagination a creative force is shown at work making objects which
alone complete science and allow intelligence to survive
E works of artmust be real, not realism but reality itself.
E the poets responsibility to write about his or her locale; poetry should be local Williams assumed and
actively engaged with modernity, did not reject it.
E only by knowing a small fragment of life thoroughly could anyone hope to understand the total picture of
human existence:
e.g. Paterson: the town of Paterson, New Jersey industrialized New Jersey; nature, represented in the poem
by the Passaic River and its well-known falls, met with industry in the town of Paterson, where the falls provided
waterpower to the area
E each object, each sensation, and each word has equal validity and equal reality, and each contains a
storehouse of energy
E no abstractions or overt symbols
E no conventional poetic forms; the subject dictates the form continually experimented with free verse.
E scarce literary / cultural allusions or quotations (e.g.Paterson)
William C. Williams & High Modernism
E Pound:
highbrow aestheticist European modernism>
Eurocentrism>
focus on art as superior realm of truth >
nostalgia for classical culture (Latin and Greek) in opposition to modernity perceived as
capitalism (The Cantos).
E Williams:
low brow, locally engaged modernism >
interest in the local American language & culture (urban as little town America, his 1880s
Rutherford, New Jersey: Paterson & In the American Grain)
responds to Imagism maintaining a long transatlantic correspondence with Pound:
resisted Pounds urgings to go to Europe; clung to his native industrial New Jersey
E References to canonical writers:
Eliot: a means to affirm standard hierarchies
Williams: dehierarchization and relativism as he was a:
E post-romantic, an American, and a modern (Elizabeth Gregory, Quotation and Modern
American Poetry: Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads, 1996)
E post-romantic: the romantic principle of originality includes an implicit hierarchy, by which those things
not considered original are rated secondary
Williams: a relativist reworking of the romantic model, by denying the relevance of the
hierarchies in which they might be ranked secondary
E modern and American:
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both involve similar and implicit contradictions and hierarchies:
Modern: suggests a welcome of the present and of the new=not just a break with outdated ways
but a break with sustaining traditions as well
American: the descendants of American immigrants have experienced double allegiances, to the
Old World and to the New.
E T. S. Eliot responds to his haunting sense of cultural secondariness by reaffirming hierarchy + denying
his low position within it >
obscured his work's New World origins (particularly emphatically in the notes to The Waste Land,
1922)
Renounced his American citizenship
E William Carlos Williams:
attempted to exorcise his sense of cultural secondariness by denying the relevance of the
hierarchies through which such rankings are made
extends the critique of hierarchy to challenge the notion of hierarchy per se:
E asserting instead a democratic value that obviates rank +
E working with a relativist scheme that reinterprets the secondary into value.
E this kind of valuation does not rename the secondary as primary, since that would
defeat the point: America cannot replace Europe; the European and the American are
mutually informative, not so distinct as old/new parallels suggest.
while Williams does feature the American most prominently in his work, European influences
past and current are honored as well (e.g. borrowings from the surrealists).
E Williams's work, like that of Eliot, exhibits the double allegiance of the American modernist poet toward:
the European literary past (and the hierarchies it represents)
the American literary present.
E In Williamss case both sides flourish
Paterson (Book I, 1946; Book II, 1948; Book III, 1949; Book IV, 1951; Book V, 1958) : the
poem's take on standard hierarchies fluctuates apparent in its treatment of gender and of
filiation:
E both literal and metaphoric
E a specific preoccupation with gender structures + wider interest in the reworking of all
hierarchies.
E.g.: the acknowledgement of the feminine: in the letters from Cress, in Mme Curie, and in the
quotation of Sappho
E Paterson is Williams's response to T. S. Eliots and E. Pounds poetry, and to the statement he
understood their poets to have made in emigrating (place of residence and poetry being intimately
connected in Williams's view):
T. S. Eliot and E. Pound: retreat into the comforts of nostalgia
Instead of trying to develop a new system of valuation to replace the hierarchic structure that rated
American modernists secondary, Eliot and Pound attempted to deny their Americanness and to
claim a secure position within the standard hierarchy.
The Red Wheelbarrow (1923)
so much depends
upon

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a red wheel
Barrow

glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
E Example of objective imagism:
effort to devise a verbal representation of a thing in nature
E Highlighted the sensuous values of the rain-glazed barrow and the chickens NOT JUST A SCENE
FROM NATURE.
E metrical composition of rigorously selected images in a symmetrical pattern:
sixteen words measured into four two line stanzas of three and one words each
E so much depends: in Emersons terms he reflects that human civilization depends on the interrelated
forces of the machine (the wheelbarrow lever), the natural force of fertility (rain), and animal life (the
chicken: source of food and symbol of fertility).
E Sensuous and aesthetic life is given to the traditional wooden barrow transformed by the red paint and the
rain water glazing its surface the poetic image as a unique reality
E Renewal of language by placing words and images in fresh contexts that would cleanse them of
conventional symbolic associations to reveal new meanings and relationships.
Paterson (1946-1958)
E Theme stated in the Preface:
Rigor of beauty is the quest. But how will you find beauty when it is locked in the mind past all
remonstrance?
E The five books of the poem: various ways by which man tries to unlock his mind to find beauty:
Book I: The Delineaments of the Giants how the schemes and plots of the past have become
dead history.
Book II: Sunday in the Park how the present tires to find beauty in mere self-indulgence.
Book III: The Library how the present seeks escape in history and philosophy.
Book IV: The Run to the Sea how the present finds beauty in its posterity.
Book V: untitled and dedicated to Toulouse-Lautrec only beauty that persists is art.
E The poem proceeds from the trials that end in failure in the first three books to the trials that succeed in
the last two.
E The first three books show the vitality of particular people and make the point that personal striving for
only oneself ends in despair and failure
E The last two books show that the best personal vitality leads away from the person to the perpetuation of
life and to art
E Not only does the entire poem flow from negative to positive, so do the rhythms of each book:
Each book has three sections, the first showing the striving, the second the failure, the third the
continuation of life in resignation.
E dominant symbol throughout the book:
Paterson, the single man who is all men, as a city contains many people yet has unity in being a
place and in having a name (only one man like a city).
E Other symbols:
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the river , the stream of life
the falls on the river, the concentration of energies
the sea, the end of the river, death, dissolution into nature
the dogs are people in general
the library is the past, beautiful but of no real help to the present
the unicorn, both male and female, is the persistence of life
the unicorn tapestries in The Cloisters in New York City are the permanence of art.
Wallace Stevens (1879-1975)
E born in Reading, Pennsylvania
E spent most of his adult life working for an insurance company in Connecticut
E first book of poetry, Harmonium, was published in 1923
E two more major books of poetry during the 1920s and 1930s
E three more in the 1940s
E received the National Book Award in 1951 and 1955
E won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955.
Poetic Principles
E Everydayness transformed by art into miracles / the miraculous
E In an age that had rejected religious belief poetry had to satisfy mans need for spiritual sustenance:
Poetry / Exceeding music must take the place / Of empty heaven and its hymns (The Man
With the Blue Guitar)
E The acts of poetic perception and creation = analogous to the religious experience
E searched for ways to celebrate the world releasing him from the malady of the quotidian.
E the poem: an unparaphrasable reality, existing wholly within its language and elevating poet and reader
to a state of transcendence.
E Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942):
the criteria for the formation of the ultimate poem / the supreme fiction that enables man to
accept himself and his world on their own terms:
the supreme fiction: a poem which all men could behold, stripped of its antecedents (a new
epiphany, nor God revealed, but man centered, and revealing man).
Wallace Stevens (1879-1975)
E His aesthetics:
reality is a combination of the physical world and imagination
the action of mans imagination upon his surroundings constitutes his sense of the world and,
finally the world itself.
the poet is continuously engaged in the process of imposing order on his world by putting his
perceptions into words; he has a rage for order:
E Lets see the very thing and nothing else / Lets see it with the hottest fire of sight.
(Credences of Summer)
E In an imperfect & changing world the order that the poet establishes through the poem is only a
momentary, unstable order, with disintegration inherent to it.
E The poet, who is himself changing, can see an object one moment in one way and a moment later see it in
another way (Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird)
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E the poem: not a revelation of truth, but one truth among many, revealed through the interaction of the
seeing eye of the imagination and the images he perceives: We live in a constellation / Of patches and of
pitches, / Not in a single world. (July Mountain)
E The poet as mythmaker:
unites himself and the world, celebrates himself as indispensable part of the process
his fluent mundo is a world only fully realized when it is imaginatively heightened by words
THE POET: creative center of vision, transforming the ordinary world by his touch.
Anecdote of the Jar (1923)
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around; no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
E The jar:
an efficient, useful industrial produce
no trace of nature or humanity
a visual blank surveillance point
E The possessive power of the eye the material turned into the poetical via artistic vision (Emersons poet
healing ophtalmia: the transparent eyeball)
E Seclusion from the commercial materialistic energies of the age:
E The jar is artificial, but it gets poetical solidity as perceived by the poets eye in opposition to its
environment.
Study of Two Pears (1942)
I
Opusculum paedagogum.
The pears are not viols,
Nudes or bottles.
They resemble nothing else.

II
They are yellow forms
Composed of curves
Bulging toward the base.
They are touched red.

III
They are not flat surfaces
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Having curved outlines.
They are round
Tapering toward the top.


IV
In the way they are modelled
There are bits of blue.
A hard dry leaf hangs
From the stem.

V
The yellow glistens.
It glistens with various yellows,
Citrons, oranges and greens
Flowering over the skin.

VI
The shadows of the pears
Are blobs on the green cloth.
The pears are not seen
As the observer wills.
E an exercise in freeing the world of conventional meaning, reducing the pears to "blobs:
begins by resisting the impulse to see the pears through analogy with familiar objects, which
would domesticate them, rob them of their uniqueness: "The pears are not viols, / Nudes or
bottles. / They resemble nothing else."
E the temptation to think of them in terms of paintings of pears is also resisted: "They are not flat surfaces /
Having curved outlines
E the result is to convert them to form and color: "yellow forms / Composed of curves" . . . "touched red" . .
. "round / Tapering toward the top.
E The farther from the conventional descriptions of pears the poem retreats, the more unpearlike the objects
become
They reveal uncharacteristic "bits of blue," and the pear-yellow now "glistens with various
yellows, / Citrons, oranges and greens.
The final stage in this reduction is that of a formlessness in which the object loses its familiar look
and resists the mind's attempt to dictate its appearance or meaning:
E The shadows of the pears / Are blobs on the green cloth. / The pears are not seen / As the
observer wills.
Properly obscure, the pears are now presumably ripe for the "early" or "first" seeing, a result not
of the will or intelligence but of what Stevens (in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction) calls
"candid" seeing, an "ever-early candor" by which "Life's nonsense pierces us with strange
relation."
James Langston Hughes (1902-67)
E first volumes of verse The Weary Blues ( 1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927)
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E Hughes published seventeen volumes of verse, eleven plays, three collections of short stories, four
collections of the folk wisdom of Jesse B. Semple, several anthologies, librettos, and radio scripts,
numerous books for children, and articles, as well as two novels: Not Without Laughter ( 1930) and
Tambourines to Glory ( 1958).
E Not Without Laughter is the story of a black boy growing up in Stanton, a small Kansas town, in the
1920s; he chooses Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Frederick Douglass as his heroes
E Tambourines to Glory is a comic novel about the attitude of simple black urban folk toward religion
(131-33)
E The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain
E We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves
without fear or shame. If white people are please we are glad. If they are not, it doesnt matter.
We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. () If colored people are pleased, we are glad. If they
are not, their displeasure doesnt matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we
know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.
E Emphasis on the validity of the individual vision = modernist.
E New ethnic / national identity ethnic modernism; see definition of blackness in The Negro
Speaks of Rivers.
E In the same essay he formulates his position on the black aesthetic:
E the impasse = the hegemony of American white culture (figured as the "racial mountain") over
representations of "race.
E he particularly finds middle class black artists, who have been taught through their education and
social milieu to emulate white culture, denying their racial identity and heritage.
E Working class blacks, on the other hand, are the repositories of an authentic black culture, since
they "still hold their own individuality" and can furnish black artists with the proper subject
(black life) and expressive forms (jazz, blues, spirituals, folk music).
E E.g.: Mother to Son
E one of the variants of ethnic modernisms of the 1920s 1930s.
E the chief responsibility of the black writer: to produce a racial literature drawn from African American
life and culture.
E idealistic conception of spiritual freedom in the land of Jim Crow, and of the future "temples,: art as a
way to gain equal citizenship in the U.S.
E version of the high modernist belief in the transfigurative power of art.
E Formal experiments in poetry: jazz inflections /rhythms in poetry (repetitions & variations on a theme)
E Part of the Harlem Renaissance.