Modernism+-+2nd+Period


media type="custom" key="4510350" width="10" height="10"  The term Modernism commonly refers to those forward looking architects, designers and artisans who, from the 1880s on, forged a new and diverse vocabulary principally to escape Historicism, the tyranny of previous historical styles. In literature, one of the most renowned Modernist writers of his time is [|Ernest Hemingway]. media type="custom" key="4502810" width="10" height="10"What makes Hemingway a modernist? In modernist fiction, characters are generally on some type of quest. They are preparing to recompose themselves, to live all they can, to find meaning in a disordered and confused world. The Victorian age of rationality and progress has been replaced by a loosely moralistic generation easily seduced by transitory pleasures, a generation with very little ambition, motivation, or regard for the consequences of their actions.

What most modernist writers are trying to do, especially Hemingway, is to show the surface disorder of their surroundings, but also to imply that there exits a certain underlying unity. They attempt to depict the various ways in which their characters can become honorable and dignified in a dishonorable and undignified world. In regards to content, modernist writers are attempting to make their work new, bold, and original.

Hemingway does just that in his simplistic writing style, personalized by crispness, laconic dialogue, and emotional understatement. He does not give way to lengthy geographical and psychological description, developing a forceful prose style characterized by simple sentences with few adverbs or adjectives. His writings are concise, dialogues vivid, and descriptions straightforward and modest. He relates a story in the form of straight journalism, but because he is a master of transmitting emotion without embellishment, the product is even more powerful. A great deal has been written about Ernest Hemingway’s distinctive style. Ever since he began writing in the 1920’s, he has been the subject of lavish praise and sometimes savage criticism. He has definitely not been ignored.

Hemingway's writings and personal life have exerted a profound influence on American writers of his time. Many of his works are regarded as classics of American literature, and some have been made into motion pictures.

media type="custom" key="4502412" width="7" height="7"I was born and schooled in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago where the Protestants had wide lawns and narrow minds. My mother fit well into that category; she was domineering and narrowly religious. My father was an outdoorsman who loved to camp and hunt and fish the woods and lakes of Northern Michigan. Many a times we camped and hunted and fished and spent the summer days at Windemire, our second home on Walloon Lake in Michigan. I fell in love with nature and adventure. In high school I found my second love, my passion to write. At seventeen I wrote for the //Kansas City Star// and perfected my journalism. Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.
 * Ernest Hemingway Autobiography **

World War I began shortly thereafter, and [|my writing career] was put on hold. The Italian Army promised adventure. I volunteered in an ambulance unit and then transferred to the infantry. Serving in the front was dangerous but thrilling all the same. In 1918 while running an errand I was shot by a mortar fire and badly wounded. Despite my pain, I saw another injured soldier and carried him to safety. When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you, but then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you. I was two weeks shy of nineteen when I knew it had happened to me. I then spent the next six months in the Red Cross hospital in Milan when I met the woman who changed my life. Agnes von Kurowsky was a Red Cross nurse in Milan and was seven years my senior. To my joy she accepted my marriage proposal and we planned to wed after my recovery. But she changed her mind. To my devastation, she engaged herself to an Italian officer. Rejection was sharp and stung my injured heart. From then on I learned to protect myself from future hurt. I learned to build relationships with potential wives so no woman would abandon me again as I would abandon her before she abandons me. I would always have someone.media type="custom" key="4502822" width="10" height="10"

After the war in 1919 I returned to Oak Brook and spent the summer in my Michigan cottage to fish again. In 1920 I moved to Canada to live with friends and took on reporting for the //Toronto Star Weekly//. From time to time I found myself in Chicago and I met my first wife, Hadley Richardson. We married September of 1921. By November, the //Toronto Star// commissioned me as the foreign correspondent and I packed my bags for Paris. While there I came across American novelist Sherwood Anderson. He was genius in short stories and influential in American fiction. Anderson quickly wrote letters introducing me to Gertrude Stein and other famous writers. Stein adopted me as her protege and exposed me to the "Parisian Modern Movement" in the Montparnasse Quarter. It was the beginning of the "Lost Generation," our group of expatriate writers and artists. I joined the group and drew my ideas from the war. Aimlessness and the loss of moral virtue defined the "Lost Generation." The war destroyed the idea that if you acted virtuously, good things would happen. Good men went to war and died or returned home physically and mentally wounded, and their faith in moral guideposts were no longer standing...they were "Lost."

Among my American contemporaries in the circle were also Sylvia Beach, Lincoln Steffens, John Dos Passos, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald. Sylvia Beach opened a language bookstore and lending library called Shakespeare and Company in Paris. She reeled in French and American readers and published James Joyce's //Ulysses// in 1922. Lincoln Steffens was an American journalist and made his own style known as muckraking. He wrote to show the poor condition of urban life and the fraud in big businesses and government, a common theme in the Modern era. John Dos Passos was a social revolutionary who often wrote of the United States as two nations, one rich and one poor. In his novels he tests many different writing techniques, including newspaper clippings, autobiography, biography, and fictional realism to unfurl the sensations of American culture. Kay Boyle was another social activist and championed integration and civil rights. She thought politically and wrote politically and educated politics. She was a woman who knew when to stand her ground, frowning upon nuclear weapons and American involvement in the Vietnam War. Inspired by T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane wrote poetry that was traditional in form and archaic in language and often traveled further than the ironic despair of Eliot's poetry. He has long been admired by poets and has influenced several pieces of art. Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein greatly influenced me to try my hand in creative work. Ezra Pound was a driving force in the area of modernist poetry. He used Imagism, stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language and drew musical tones into poetry, different from the traditional metronome. Pound was among the first to succeed with free verse in long compositions and became at the time the center of the Modernist movement. He was experimental poetry. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald were quite the pair. Despite their frequent bickering, F. Scott Fitzgerald produced one of the greatest works of American literature, //The Great Gatsby//. His usual themes centered on youth and promise opposed to despair and old age. I came to be fairly fond of Fitzgerald but very irrated with his wife. The lady was crazy and destructive to Fitzgerald's promising potential. Zelda frequently grew bored from her lack of interest in her husband's writings and often interrupted his work. She was the source of his misery.

In 1927 I divorced Hadley and converted to Catholicism to marry Pauline Peiffer, a fashion writer of //Vogue// and //Vanity Fair//. After 1927 I alternated my stay in Key West, Florida, Spain, and Africa. While my winters were spent in the Florida sun, I hunted my summers in Wyoming. Wyoming was the most beautiful country I had seen in the American West and deer, elk, and grizzly bear were in abundance. In 1934 I bought the boat Pilar and sailed the Caribbean. My period in Spain was rugged. In this frame of my life my health was deteriorating. I braved Influenza, severe toothaches, hemorrhoids, kidney trouble from fishing, a gashed finger from a punching ball, lacerations on my limbs from a ride on a runaway horse through the Wyoming forest, and a broken arm from a car accident. Some injuries were partly due to my adventures. My adventures brought me close to death on several accounts. During the Spanish Civil War, my hotel room was perpetuated by open fire, and in 1954, I survived an airplane crash in Uganda. I then survived a taxi accident in a blackout. Danger always followed my adventures.

media type="custom" key="4509758" width="10" height="10"In 1939 I moved to Cuba and divorced Pauline for Martha Gellhorn. The onset of World War II facsinated me just the same as the first, and I reported for the United States First Army. I refitted the Pilar and took to the waters to hunt down German submarines. My marriage with Martha was falling apart. Then when my body grew tired of the excitement of war, I moved near Havana, Cuba, where I could unleash my zeal to fish. I was a man of the outdoors and spent my free time fishing, hunting, and watching bullfighting. My fondness to sporting prompted much of my work to be based on grace under pressure. In March 1946 I married my fourth wife, Mary Welsh. Headaches, high blood pressure, weight problems, and diabetes began dominating my life. In the 1940s my companions William Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, James Joyce, Gertude Stein, and my long time editor and friend, Max Perkins, all passed away. I succumbed to depression. In 1958, I moved to Ketchum, Idaho. The remaining three years of my life were spent there.

[|In last notes], to high school students of the twenty-first century, [|Modernism] was a movement of people, culture, experience, and history. It was a time that straddled the Roaring Twenties, Great Depression, Dust Bowl in America and two world wars. Its defining culture was a culture of change and experimentation. People experienced more grief and poverty than your generation ever will and two world wars shaped the moral integrity of mankind. To not understand this historic movement is to neglect your identity of being American. Art, science, and literature all underwent great innovation and invention. A study of this literature is a search into the roots of human character and the history of a people who represent ultimate grace under pressure.

 During the twenties, [|Hemingway] became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work, //The Sun Also Rises// (1926). Equally successful was //A Farewell to Arms// (1929), the study of an American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, //For Whom the Bell Tolls// (1940). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, //The Old Man and the Sea// (1952), the story of an old fisherman's journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.

**Prominent Writers and Thinkers**

Other renowned Modernist writers at the time were T.S. Eliot, Hilda Doolittle, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, E.E. Cummings, Djuna Barnes, and William Carlos Williams.

media type="custom" key="4504580" width="10" height="10"[|T.S. Eliot] significantly developed modernism with his role as an expatriate effecting a "reconciliation with America" in "The Dry Salvages." His techniques of juxtaposition, aggregation of images, symbolism, use of multiple literary allusions, and influence of Dante are all worth attention, as is his use of "free verse" and many various poetic forms. He has a defining musicality to his verse and use of verbal repetition as well as clusters of images and symbols. Eliot incorporates symbolism into his writings to express the themes of time, death-rebirth, levels of love, attitudes toward women, and the quest motif on psychological, metaphysical, and aesthetic levels. His relations between geographic place and vision, between the personal, individual talent and the strong sense of tradition shapes a voice that resonates with the "new American" of Modernism.

Hilda Doolittle was an American poet, novelist and memoirist best known for her association with the early 20th century //avant-garde// Imagist group of poets such as Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington. The Imagist model was based on the idioms, rhythms and clarity of common speech, and freedom to choose subject matter as the writer saw fit. Doolittle's later writing developed on this aesthetic to incorporate a more female-centric version of modernism. Her writings have served as a model for a number of women poets working in the modernist tradition; including the New York School poet Barbara Guest, the Anglo-American poet Denise Levertov, the media type="custom" key="4504608" width="10" height="10"Black Mountain poet Hilda Morley and the //Language// poet Susan Howe.

Paul Lawrence Dunbar is known for its colorful language and use of dialect, and a conversational tone, with a brilliant rhetorical structure. He wrote a dozen books of poetry, four books of short stories, five novels, and a play. He is unique in that not only was he a proponent of new modernist techniques, but he was African American and fresh out of slavery. He therefore wrote with a touch of African American dialect and also served as a model of eventual racial tolerance.

[|William Faulkner] is known for his experimental style with meticulous attention to diction and cadence. Faulkner made frequent use of " stream of consciousness " in his writing, and wrote often highly emotional, subtle, cerebral, complex, and sometimes Gothic or grotesque stories of a wide variety of characters—ranging from former slaves or descendants of slaves, to poor white, agrarian, or working-class Southerners, to Southern aristocrats. He published thirteen novels, numerous short stories and wrote two volumes of poetry. While his work was published regularly starting in the mid 1920s, Faulkner was relatively unknown before receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. Since then, he has often been cited as one of the most important writers in the media type="custom" key="4504614" width="10" height="10"history of American literature.

[|Robert Frost] addresses moral iconoclasm and was a leading figure in the Modernist movement. Unlike Eliot or Pound, Frost favored traditional metrics and forms of poetry. He also composed his poetry by using the language and experiences of his everyday life; however the beauty of Frost ’s poetry lies in its layers of ambiguities and deeper meanings hidden behind these everyday themes. Another aspect of Robert Frost ’s poetry was that he liked to read his poems out aloud. Throughout his life he visited many universities giving poetry readings, in which he would also comment on his poems and life in general.

E.E. Cummings's early work was based upon the Imagist experiments of Amy Lowell. Later, his visits to Paris exposed him to Dada and surrealism, which in turn permeated his work. Cummings also liked to incorporate imagery of nature and death into much of his poetry. While some of his poetry is free verse, many have a recognizable sonnet structure with an intricate rhyme scheme. A number of his poems feature a typographically exuberant style, with words, parts of words, or punctuation symbols scattered across the page, often making little sense until read aloud, at which point the meaning and emotion become clear. Cummings, who was also a painter, understood the importance of presentation, and used typography to "paint a picture" with some of his media type="custom" key="4504600" width="10" height="10"poems.

Djuna Barnes played an important part in the development of twentieth century modernist writing. She comments on the status of the human subject in the early twentieth century as it straddles the legacies of Enlightenment rationalism and Darwinism revelations. She prompts issues of gender, race, and sexuality--issues prominent of the time and genuinely modern. Her ornate and historically marginalized texts engage in philosophical narratives that privilege some sort of animal consciousness. Barnes practiced much modernistic experimentation, drawing to unusual, sometimes grotesque subjects and writing based on her extraordinary life. She was the last surviving member of the first generation of English-language modernists when she died in New York in 1982.

[|William Carlos Williams] was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He sought to renew language through the fresh, raw idiom that grew out of America's cultural and social heterogeneity, at the same time freeing it from what he saw as the worn-out language of British and European culture. Williams tried to invent an entirely fresh form, an American form of poetry whose subject matter was centered on everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people. He then came up with the concept of the variable foot evolved from years of visual and auditory sampling of his world from the first person perspective as a part of the day in the life as a physician.

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​ ​**Historical Context **

**The Period Between the Two World Wars**  ​The United State's traumatic "coming of age" is characterized by many historians as the period between the two world wars, "despite the fact that U.S. direct involvement was relatively brief (1917-1918) and its casualties many fewer than those of its European allies and foes" ([|Historical Context of Modernism]). As a result of the effects of war, Americans returned to their homeland but could never regain their innocence after being shocked and permanently changed. media type="custom" key="4503862" width="10" height="10"


 The world wars changed Americans' lives because from their experiences in the world, many of them began to yearn for a modern, urban life. Even though innovation emerged from agriculture such as new farm machines including the planter, harvester, and binder, which all had drastically reduced the demand for farm jobs and increased productivity, farmers were poor. Business interests played a large role in determining crop prices because of its influence on unrestrained market forces: Effective workers' unions and government subsidies for farmers had not yet become established. "The chief business of the American people is business," President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed in 1925, and most agreed.

Soon after, however, the succussful prospered beyond their wildest dreams during the postwar "Big Boom," where businesses flourished. Americans of the "Roaring Twenties" broke from the contemporary and began to fall in love with other forms of modern entertainment. Moviegoing became a weekly activity for most people. Although Prohibition -- "a nationwide ban on the production, transport, and sale of alcohol instituted through the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution" -- began in 1919, jazz music, cocktails, and daring modes of dress and dance proliferated in underground "speakeasies" and nightclubs. Dancing, automobile touring, radio, and moviegoing were emerging national crazes. American women, in particular, felt liberated. They became resolutely modern during World War I as many of them left farms and villages for homefront duty in American cities. New characteristics of women included short ("bobbed") hair, wearing short "flapper" dresses, and, as a result of the momentous 19th Amendment to the Constitution passed in 1920, gloried in the right to vote. Seeing themselves in a new light, they began to take public roles in society and boldly spoke their minds.

The savage war brought upon the western youths a sense of anger and disillusion. They held the older generation responsible, and feared the difficult postwar economic conditions that, ironically, allowed Americans with dollars -- like writers Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway -- to live abroad handsomely on very little money. Traditional values began to erode as intellectual currents, particularly Freudian psychology and to a lesser extent Marxism (like the earlier Darwinian theory of evolution), implied a "godless" world view. This propelled the imagination of young artists and writers when Americans abroad absorbed these views and brought them back to the United States where they took root. William Faulkner, a 20th-century American novelist, and virtually all American fiction writers after World War I, for example, employed Freudian elements in all their works.

The literary portraitist Gertrude Stein aptly identifies young Americans of the 1920s as "the lost generation," despite their outward modernity, gaiety, and unparalleled material prosperity. The individual lost a sense of identity without a stable, traditional structure of values. The supportive, secure family life; the eternal and natural rhythms of nature that guide the planting and harvesting on a farm; the familiar, settled community; the moral values indicated by religious observations and beliefs; and the sustaining sense of patriotism-- all seemed undermined by World War I and its aftermath. The extravagance and disillusionment of the lost generation was illustrated by numerous novels, notably Hemingway's //The Sun Also Rises// (1926) and Fitzgerald's //This Side of Paradise// (1920). The symbol of spiritual renewal was portrayed in T.S. Eliot's influential long poem //The Waste Land// (1922), where Western civilization is depicted by a bleak desert in desperate need of rain.

"The lost generation" encountered another misfortune during the [|Great Depression of the 1930s]which affected most of the population of the United States. Workers became unemployedmedia type="custom" key="4504300" width="10" height="30" and factories closed; banks and businesses failed; farmers could not pay off their debts and, as a result, lost their farms because they were unable to harvest, transport, or sell their crops. The once "breadbasket" of America turned into a dust bowl due to the midwestern droughts. John Steinbeck's //The Grapes of Wrath// (1939) vividly portrays the journey many farmers embarked upon from the Midwest to California in search of jobs. One-third of all Americans were out of work at the peak of the Depression. Shanty towns, soup kitchens, and armies of hobos -- unemployed men illegally riding freight trains -- became part of national life. The radicals in America asserted that the Depression was a punishment for the sins of excessive materialism and loose living. They believed the dust storms that blackened the midwestern sky constituted an Old Testament judgment: the "whirlwind by day and the darkness at noon."

Modernism became one of the greatest enemies of Biblical Christianity and was also referred to as Christian Liberalism. Christian Liberalism has caused more harm to Protestant denominations and institutions in the twentieth century than any other heretical movement. What is Christian Liberalism? Christian Liberalism is part of a broader religious, political, and cultural movement in first Europe and then America which stresses a secular humanistic world view. The reason that historians and theologians refer to Christian Liberalism as Modernism is the fact that Christian Liberals have bought into and adopted the modern secular world view. They have adapted their teachings to reflect the spirit of this age.

[|Ernest Hemingway FAQ].media type="custom" key="4510304" width="10" height="10"

[|Modernism Encyclopedia Article]

[|American Literature]

[|Modernism in Literature]

[|Modernism and Experimentation]