Twentieth Century American

Literature

American Modernisms

Presented by Dr. Grant Bain

University of Arkansas

Today’s Workshop

Learn brief historical context for American

modernism.

Sample some works by major poets and fiction

writers of the movement.

Discuss the relationship between modernism and

the Harlem Renaissance

Historical Context

Advances in science and technology

Major shifts in political structures

Changing religious institutions and beliefs

Crisis of representation

Characteristics of Modernism

Fragmentation

Alienation

Experimentation

Modern Themes in Traditional Verse

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

American Modernist Poetry

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

American Modernist Poetry

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

LET us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the

sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted

streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question….

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

More Eliot

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the

window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on

the window-panes

Licked its tongue into the corners of the

evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from

chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell

asleep.

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the

street,

Rubbing its back upon the window panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you

meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of

hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

The Waste Land: The Most Eliot

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches

grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket

no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Onl

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from

either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Modernism and Popular Art

You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember

Nothing?”

I remember

Those are pearls that were his eyes. 125

“Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?”

But

O O O O that ShakespeherianRag—

It’s so elegant

So intelligent

Ragtime

-Came from African American communities around St. Louis, MO in the late 1800’s

-Syncopated or “ragged” rhythm

Scott Joplin

American Modernist Fiction

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

“Caddy held me and I could hear us

all, and the darkness, and something I

could smell. And then I could see the

windows, where the trees were

buzzing. Then the dark began to go in

smooth, bright shapes, like it always

does, even when Caddy says that I

have been asleep.”

“Because if it were just to hell; if that

were all of it. Finished. If things just

finished themselves. Nobody else

there but her and me. If we could just

have done something so dreadful that

they would have fled hell except us. I

have committed incest I said Father it

was I”

American Noir Fiction

Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and

bony, his chin a jutting V under the

more flexible V of his mouth. His

nostrils curved back to make another,

smaller, V. His yellow-grey eyes were

horizontal. The V motif was picked

up again by thickish brows rising

outward from twin creases above a

hooked nose, and his pale brown hair

grew down—from high flat

temples—in a point on his forehead.

He looked rather pleasantly like a

blond Satan.

-The Maltese FalconDashiell Hammett (1891-1964)

The Dark Side of Nostalgia

Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941)

“Wing Biddlebaum, forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts, did not think of himself as in any way part of the life of the town where he had lived for twenty years. Among all the people of Winesburg but one had come close to him. With George Willard, son of Tom Willard, the proprietor of the New Willard house, he had formed something like a friendship. George Willard was the reporter on the Winesburg Eagle and sometimes in the evenings he walked out along the highway to Wing Biddlebaum's house. Now as the old man walked up and down on the veranda, his hands moving nervously about, he was hoping that George Willard would come and spend the evening with him. After the wagon containing the berry pickers had passed, he went across the field through the tall mustard weeks and climbing a rail fence peered anxiously along the road to the town. For a moment he stood thus, rubbing his hands together and looking up and down the road, and then, fear overcoming him, ran back to walk again upon the porch on his own house.”

-“Hands”

Ernest Hemingway

The girl was looking off at the line of hills.

They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.

‘They look like white elephants,’ she said.

‘I’ve never seen one,’ the man drank his beer.

‘No, you wouldn’t have.’

‘I might have,’ the man said. ‘Just because you say I wouldn’t have doesn’t prove anything.’

Ernest Hemingway

It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,’ the man said. ‘It’s not really an operation at all.’

The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.

‘I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It’s just to let the air in.’

The girl did not say anything.

‘I’ll go with you and I’ll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it’s all

perfectly natural.’

‘Then what will we do afterwards?’

‘We’ll be fine afterwards. Just like we were before.’

‘What makes you think so?’

‘That’s the only thing that bothers us. It’s the only thing that’s made us unhappy.’

The girl looked at the bead curtain, put her hand out and took hold of two of the strings of

beads.

‘And you think then we’ll be all right and be happy.’

‘I know we will. Yon don’t have to be afraid. I’ve known lots of people that have done it.’

‘So have I,’ said the girl. ‘And afterwards they were all so happy.’

Ernest HemingwayBut if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say

things are like white elephants, and you’ll

like it?’

‘I’ll love it. I love it now but I just can’t think

about it. You know how I get when I worry.’

‘If I do it you won’t ever worry?’

‘I won’t worry about that because it’s perfectly

simple.’

‘Then I’ll do it. Because I don’t care about

me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t care about me.’

‘Well, I care about you.’

‘Oh, yes. But I don’t care about me. And I’ll

do it and then everything will be fine.’

‘I don’t want you to do it if you feel that way.’

The girl stood up and walked to the end of the

station

We can have everything.’

‘No, we can’t.’

‘We can have the whole world.’

‘No, we can’t.’

‘We can go everywhere.’

‘No, we can’t. It isn’t ours any more.’

‘It’s ours.’

‘No, it isn’t. And once they take it away, you

never get it back.’

‘But they haven’t taken it away.’

The Harlem Renaissance

Broad term for the outpouring of literary production and experimentation by African American writers during the early decades of the twentieth century.

Called the Harlem Renaissance because New York’s Harlem was a vital center of black artistic life, although many artists lived and worked elsewhere.

Harlem Renaissance Poetry

Claude McKay (1889-1948)

“America”

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,

And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,

Stealing my breath of life, I will confess

I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.

Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,

Giving me strength erect against her hate,

Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.

Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state,

I stand within her walls with not a shred

Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.

Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,

And see her might and granite wonders there,

Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,

Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.

Harlem Renaissance Poetry

Langston Hughes (1902-

1967)

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers”

I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Harlem Renaissance Fiction

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-

1960)

“Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it’s some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don’t know nothin’ but what we see. So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.”

-Their Eyes Were Watching God

Harlem Renaissance Fiction

Richard Wright (1908-1960)

“Goddamnit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain't. They do things and we can't. It's just like livin' in jail.”

“I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em...I didn’t want to kill,” Bigger shouted. “But what I killed for, I am! It must’ve been pretty deep in me to make me kill! I must have felt it awful hard to murder … What I killed for must’ve been good!”

-Native Son

Conclusion

Greatly expanded what could be written and how

authors could write it.

Introduced many new voices to the American

literary scene.

Set the standards for today’s literary production.

Further Reading

American Modernist Writers

Poets

Carl Sandburg

Ezra Pound

Wallace Stevens

Fiction Writers

Gertrude Stein

F. Scott Fitzgerald

John Steinbeck

Djuna BarnesFlannery O’Connor

Harlem Renaissance Writers

Poets

Meredith Brooks

Jean Toomer

George Schuyler

Fiction Writers

James Weldon Johnson

James Baldwin

Jean Toomer

Nella Larsen

Rudolph Fisher