外语学院研究生思语论坛之美国文学文化系列讲座. from modernism to...

外语学院研究生思语论坛之美国文学文化系列讲座

From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Overview of the American Literary Styles & Their Context from the 20th Century to Today

Dr. Jacqueline RomeoEmerson College & the University of Massachusetts, Boston

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American Literary Periods and Styles

Colonial Period Age of Reason Romanticism Transcendentalism RealismNaturalism Modernism Postmodernism

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REALISM

Mid-19th-century French movement in literature.•Emphasized the use of Scientific Method: a method of observation and hypothesis to suggest solutions to problems.•Today, it generally means the surface details of things that appear life-like, or theatre that seeks to give the appearance of everyday reality.

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Influences:

• August Comte (1798-1857): Father of Sociology.

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Influences:

• August Comte (1798-1857): Father of Sociology.• Charles Darwin (1809-1882): The Origin of Species (1859),

survival of fittest, humankind in evolutionary process, importance of heredity and environment.

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Influences:



• Karl Marx (1818-1883): Scientific method in economics and politics, all human behavior analyzed in terms of class struggle.

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Influences:



• Karl Marx (1818-1883): Scientific method in economics and politics, all human behavior analyzed in terms of class struggle.

• Sigmund Freud (1856-1939): Scientific method for the study of human behavior. Psychology: what motivates people to behave as they do, interest in interior personality, dreams: The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).

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“Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.”

- William Dean Howells

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The Local Color Movement (1865-1880)

The second half of the 19th century saw America becoming increasingly self-conscious. Americans wanted to know what their country looked like, and how the varied races which made up their growing population lived and talked.

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Example: Western Regionalist Writers

Described for the Easterner how the men and women of the West were like them, but dressed differently, spoke differently, and had different social ways.

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In the West,

“There are fantastic deserts, mile deep canyons, mountains high enough to bear snow the year round, forests with trees as wide as a man can stretch and wider, villages where the only woman was the town whore, camps where the only currency was gold-dust.”

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Bret Harte (1836-1902)

Editor, beginning in 1868, of The Overland Monthly, San Francisco, in which he published the stories “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” and the poem “Plain Language from Truthful James,” also known as “The Heathen Chinee.”

Mark Twain (1835-1910)

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Principles of American Realism

What do you already know?

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• Insistence upon and defense of “the experienced commonplace”

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• Character more important than plot.

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• Character more important than plot.• Attack upon romanticism and romantic

writers.

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writers.• Emphasis upon morality often self-realized

and upon an examination of idealism.

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writers.• Emphasis upon morality often self-realized

and upon an examination of idealism.• Concept of realism as a realization of

democracy.19

Identifying Characteristics of Realistic Writing

1. The purpose of writing is to instruct and to entertain. Realists are pragmatic, relativistic, democratic, and experimental.

2. The subject matter of Realism is drawn from "our experience,” —it treated the common, the average, the non-extreme, the representative, the probable.

3. The morality of Realism is intrinsic, integral, relativistic—relations between people and society are explored.

4. The style of Realism is the vehicle which carries realistic philosophy, subject matter, and morality. – Emphasis is placed upon scenic presentation,– de-emphasizing authorial comment and evaluation. – rejects the omniscient point of view.

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Realistic Techniques

1. Settings thoroughly familiar to the writer2. Plots emphasizing the norm of daily

experience3. Ordinary characters, studied in depth4. Complete authorial objectivity5. Responsible morality; a world truly reported

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What is the difference between Realism and Naturalism?

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American Naturalism

An extension or continuation of Realism with the addition of pessimistic determinism.

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American Naturalism

“…no more than an emphatic and explicit philosophical position taken by some Realists... (that position being one of) a pessimistic, materialistic determinism.”

- George J. Becker

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American Naturalism

Includes all the characteristics of Realism, as well as the following:•The characters (who are representative of humankind) must be seen as biological phenomena whose behaviors are strictly determined by HEREDITY and ENVIRONMENT (influence of Darwin).•Highly deterministic (fatalistic), life is portrayed as brutal and ugly, where characters have no sense of free will.

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Subject Matter of Naturalism:

• Raw and unpleasant experiences which reduce characters to "degrading" behavior in their struggle to survive.

• Characters are mostly from the lower middle or the lower classes—poor, uneducated, and unsophisticated.

• Milieu is the commonplace and the unheroic.• Life is usually the dull round of daily

existence.

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• But the naturalist discovers in these characters qualities usually associated with the heroic or adventurous.– Acts of violence and passion leading to

desperate moments and violent death.

• The suggestion is that life on its lowest levels is not so simple as it seems to be.

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• There is discussion of fate and “hubris” that affect a character.

• Generally the controlling force is society and the surrounding environment.

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Concept of a Naturalistic Character:

• Conditioned and controlled by environment, heredity, chance, or instinct.

• Have compensating humanistic values which affirm their individuality and life– Their struggle for life becomes heroic and they

maintain human dignity.

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Concept of a Naturalistic Character:

• Naturalists attempt to represent the intermingling in life of the controlling forces and individual worth.

• They do not dehumanize their characters.

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Selected Authors of Naturalism

• Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (1842-1913[?]) • Kate Chopin (1851-1904)• Stephen Crane (1871-1900)• Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)• Frank Norris (1870-1902)• Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856-1915)

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American Modernism

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World War I (1914-1918)

• U.S. does not enter until 1917• Americans thought European affairs were not

relevant to their lives• U.S. role in WW I establishes us as a world

power• War far more devastating for Europe than

America• War brings sense of uncertainty and

disillusion

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1920s

• Time of great change and energy• 1919 – 19th Amendment gives women the right to vote• 19th century innovations become available to the

middle class:– Electricity, telephone

• New innovations:– Record players, movies (with sound in 1929)– Henry Ford’s assembly line (1920) – cars available to the

masses• Prohibition of 1919 led to bootlegging, speakeasies,

and the development of “gangster” culture

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1920s

• Also a time of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration

• Changes in demographics:– Country city– Farms factories– Native-born Americans new immigrants– Migration of Southern blacks to the cities of the

North• Frenzied decade known for opulence, progress,

optimism came to a screeching halt with the stock market crash of 1929

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1930s: Decade of Recovery

• 1929 crash leaves 25% of the American workforce unemployed

• Global economic crisis leads to est. of dictatorships in Europe:– Franco, Mussolini, Hitler

• 1932 – election of FDR, who initiates liberal reforms:– Social security, welfare, unemployment insurance

• Prosperity does not fully return until WWII – increase in industry

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Essentials of Modernism

• Begins as a European movement after WW I

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• Begins as a European movement after WW I• Sense of despair and loss after the war

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• Begins as a European movement after WW I• Sense of despair and loss after the war• Society is getting worse

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• Begins as a European movement after WW I• Sense of despair and loss after the war• Society is getting worse• The world is incomprehensible

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• Begins as a European movement after WW I• Sense of despair and loss after the war• Society is getting worse• The world is incomprehensible• There are no solutions to problems – more

questions than answers

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• Begins as a European movement after WW I• Sense of despair and loss after the war• Society is getting worse• The world is incomprehensible• There are no solutions to problems – more

questions than answers• Breakdown of traditional values

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“... the greatest single fact about our modern American writing is our writers' absorption in every last detail of their American world together with their deep and subtle alienation from it.”

— Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds, 1942

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“Defining modernism is a difficult task. ... A historical definition would say that modernism is the artistic movement in which the artist's self-consciousness about questions of form and structure became uppermost. …”

Heath Anthology, Vol. 2, 4th ed., pp887-888.

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Characteristics of Modernism

• Stylistic innovations—disruption of traditional syntax and form.

• Artist's self-consciousness about questions of form and structure.

• Obsession with primitive material and attitudes.

• International perspective on cultural matters.

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Characteristics of Modernism

• The artist is generally less appreciated but more sensitive, even more heroic, than the average person.

• Artist challenges tradition and reinvigorates it.

• A breaking away from patterned responses and predictable forms.

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Contradictory Elements

• Democratic and elitist.• Traditional and anti-tradition.• National jingoism and provinciality versus the

celebration of international culture.• Puritanical and repressive elements versus

freer expression in sexual and political matters.

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Modernism & the Self

• In this period, the chief characteristic of the self is one of alienation. – Character belongs to a “lost generation”

(Gertrude Stein)– Suffers from a “dissociation of sensibility”

(T. S. Eliot)– Has “a Dream deferred” (Langston Hughes).

• Alienation led to an awareness about one’s inner life.

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Key Terms in Modernism

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1. Existentialism

A philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of individual experience in a hostile or indifferent universe, regards human existence as unexplainable, and stresses freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of one’s acts.

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2. The Problem of Radical Freedom

Derives from the existential belief in absolute freedom—the idea that men can literally do anything and are totally responsible for their own actions. Of course in a world with infinite choices and no clear guide for action, this freedom can be terrifying, leading to Existential Panic.

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3. Existential Panic

A condition in which the individual, completely aware of his freedom and his responsibility, is overwhelmed by that awareness and cannot act. It can also be defined by the panic caused when one cannot discover his purpose or value in the universe.

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Jean ToomerCrimson Gardens. Hurrah! So one feels. The bare-back rider balances agily on the applause which is the tail of her song. Orchestral instruments warm up for jazz. The flute is a cat that ripples its fur against the deep-purring saxophone. The drum throws sticks. The cat jumps on the piano keyboard. Hi diddle, hi diddle, the cat and the fiddle. Crimson Gardens . . hurrah! . . jumps over the moon. Crimson Gardens! Helen . . O Eliza . . rabbit-eyes sparkling, plays up to, and tries to placate what she considers to be Paul's contempt. She always does that . . Little Liza Jane. . . Once home, she burns with the thought of what she's done. She says all manner of snidy things about him, and swears that she'll never go out again with him along. She tries to get Art to break with him, saying, that if Paul, whom the whole dormitory calls a nigger, is more to him than she is, well, she’s through.

—From “Bona and Paul”

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4. Stream of Consciousness:

A technique used by modernist authors thatsought to simulated the associative quality of human thought through the neglect of punctuation and traditional sentence structure. Thoughts progress across the page in a continuous stream.

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T. S. EliotLet 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.

—“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

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5. Ambiguity

Used by modernist authors, especially poets to get at a sense of uncertainty in the universe. Often evoked through symbolism, ambiguity occurs when a statement, image, symbol or action has no definite meaning.

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6. Indeterminacy

Much like ambiguity, indeterminacy occurs when one action, image, symbol or statement is so full with possible meaning, it becomes impossible to select which one is the right one.

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Robert FrostWhose woods these are I think I know.His house is in the village though;He will not see me stopping hereTo watch his woods fill up with snow.My little horse must think it queerTo stop without a farmhouse nearBetween the woods and frozen lakeThe darkest evening of the year.He gives his harness bells a shakeTo ask if there is some mistake.The only other sound's the sweepOf 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.

—“Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”

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7. Absurd Hero:

The outlook of the absurd hero is this: determined to continue living with passion even though life appears to be meaningless. The absurd hero does not look back in regret or forward with hope—he or she simply accepts life as it is and keep going in accordance with a personal code.

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8. Alienation:

Quite simply the sense of being completely disconnected from, rejected by and even repulsed by one’s culture—including one’snation, religion, and social class.

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Robinson Jeffers

But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption

Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master.

There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught—they say—God, when he walked on earth.

—“Shine Perishing Republic”61

9. Misogyny

In many ways modernism is a reaction against Romanticism, that would include the Romantic idealization of the feminine. Many male modernist writers work with an outright hostility toward the feminine, seeing it as the voice of society (an empty realm of superficial value).

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10. Feminism

Belief in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.

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11. Deracination

Rootlessness. The sense of being disconnected from the land, the earth, what is natural.

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John Dos Passos

The young man walks fast by himself through the crowd that thins into the night streets: feet are tired from hours of walking; eyes greedy for warm curve of faces, answering flicker of eyes, the set of a head, the lift of a shoulder, the way hands spread and clench . . . .

—From USA Trilogy

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12. Fragmentation

An extremely important modernist concept,characterized by the effects of an increasingly industrial world on the individual.

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AMERICAN POSTMODERNISM

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Postmodernism is everywhere.

Postmodernism

• Began as academic category concerned with certain developments in the arts.

• Became a descriptive term for all sorts of proposed shifts and changes in contemporary society and culture.

• By mid-1980s, postmodernism became a catch-all phrase for just about anything.

Postmodernism is NOT

• a school of thought• a unified intellectual movement with a

definite goal or perspective• does not have a single dominate theoretician

or spokesperson

The Frankfurt School

• One of the most explicit linkages between philosophy and postmodernism

• The Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in Germany beginning in 1924

• Worked in art history, linguistics, philosophy, economics, psychology, and theology in order to interpret art

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• Established а radically new method of analyzing literature:– Moved away from aesthetics (the study of beauty) – Towards explanations that took social,

psychological, and especially economic factors into consideration

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• Theodor W. Adorno• Georg Lukacs• Мах Horkheimer• Herbert Магcuse• Walter Benjamin• Erich Fromm

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Primary Concern• To find answers to the crisis of the spirit

that modernist artists revealed in their work

• The guiding thread of all of their analyses was the diagnosis of the ruined, pathological world of the early 20th century

• Analyzed under the triumphant twin shadows of full-blown industrial capitalism and National socialism

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Other Postmodernist Critics• Jacques Lacan• Michel Foucault• Roland Barthes• Jacques Derrida

All were academically trained in philosophy, used substantially the works of philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Каrl Маrх, Martin Heidegger, оr G.W.F. Hegel

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Postmodern is a flexible term. It can mean:• An actual state of affairs in society.• The set of ideas which tries to define or

explain this set of affairs.• An artistic style, or an approach to the making

of things.• A word used in many different contexts to

cover many different aspects of the above.

Postmodernism is not a THING, but a set of concepts and debates.

There are identifiable themes that run consistently through the different versions of postmodernism.

Postmodern Themes• They propose that society, culture, and lifestyle are today

significantly different from what they were 100, 50 or even 30 years ago.



• They are concerned with concrete subjects like the developments in mass media, the consumer society, and information technology.




• They suggest that these kinds of development have an impact on our understanding of more abstract matters, like meaning, identity and even reality.




• They suggest that these kinds of development have an impact on our understanding of more abstract matters, like meaning, identity and even reality.

• They claim that the old styles of analysis are no longer useful, and the new approaches and new vocabularies need to be created in order to understand the present.

Prehistory of postmodernism

Post=afterModern=current, up-to-date How is it possible to be after the modern?

Generally Postmodernism reached its height in

the 1980s and 1990s

PREHISTORY

1870sJohn Watkins Chapman used it to describe painting that went beyond French Impressionists, like Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir.

August Renoir

Claude Monet

Van Gogh

Paul Gauguin

1917Rudolf Pannwitz (German writer) spoke of nihilistic, amoral new “postmodern men” who had broken away from old established values of modern European civilization.

1947Arnold Toynbee (British historian) took up the idea of a “postmodern age” in his A Study of History, the period after the modern age (1475-1875). The modern was regarded by Toynbee as a time of social stability and progress. Since 1875, however, Western civilization with the growth of industrialized cities, had been troubled by social turmoil, anxiety, and revolution.

1957 Bernard Rosenberg (American cultural historian) names the new circumstances of life and society at the time “postmodern,” such as the rise of technological domination and the development of a mass culture of universal “sameness”.

Current Roots of American Postmodernism: 1964Leslie Fiedler (American literary critic) described a “post”- culture which rejected the elitist values of highbrow modern art and literature. 1968Leo Steinberg (American art critic) noticed a change in contemporary visual art from an interest in the representation of nature to the flat representation of man-made images. Whereas modern art had been concerned with visual or emotional truth, Pop art was interested in artificiality.

POP ART

Claes Oldenburg

Andy Warhol

Roy Lichtenstein

Inspirations for Pop Art

Pre-historic postmodernism and current postmodernisms OVERLAP:•The belief that we have entered a “new” phase in history with its own unique characteristics.•An important distinction can be made between theories of postmodernism in society and those in the arts.

GENERAL POSTMODERN THEMES: • An erosion of conventional distinctions between high and

low culture.• Fascination with how our lives seem increasingly

dominated by visual media.• A questioning of ideas about meaning and communication

and about how signs refer to the world.• A sense that definitions about human identity are changing

or ought to change.• Skepticism about the stories we tell to explain “the human

race,” and about the idea of progress.

Modernity and Modernization

Another name for the Modern Age is “modernity,” which is connected to the idea of modernization. Modernization suggest updating something, or bringing something into line with what are seen as present day fashions and needs.

Endless ProcessDynamic of constant and rapid change has been accelerating since the Industrial Revolution.

IN OR AFTER MODERNITY?

The society we live in can be interpreted as the result, or intensification, of the key features of modernity…

For this reason, some versions of postmodernism have not seen it as a break from modernism, but as an extension of it.

EXAMPLE: Television

Sometimes seen as a symbol for postmodernism itself.Television today with its satellite broadcasts, channel surfing, live reports from war zones, etc. seems like a unique innovation. But also can be seen as a product of the rise of mass media that began in the last quarter of the 19th century.

DEBATE CONTINUES:Whether postmodernism is:• Split from an older era• Part of endless cycle of change, or • Just another aspect of the Modern Age

(perhaps with a genuine postmodern period to come).

Re: earlier uses of (pre-history) postmodernity, two main categories emerge:

1. Postmodernism as a social and economic event

(spread of mass industry) 2. Cultural matter (matter of changes in the arts)

But doesn’t the social, economic and cultural inform each other?

Are they necessarily separate categories?

Sometimes.

Distinction between postmodernism and postmodernity • Postmodernism refers to artistic and cultural

developments.• Postmodernity refers to social conditions and the mood

that these conditions give rise to.

Sometimes these distinctions are adhered to in postmodern theory and sometimes not.

Postmodernism usually does service to both, so for consistency I will use the practice of “postmodernism” to refer to BOTH.

So far… We have… • Looked at postmodernism in generally negative

terms.• Looked at some of the confusions that which

continue to surround it despite, or because of, its popularity.

• Indicated some of the general trajectory of postmodern theory.

• Made some suggestions about what postmodernism is not.

• AVOIDED one clear, single definition of what it is.

If you call something postmodern:• You are placing it in a certain category or

framing it in a certain way.• You are bringing an idea to it, rather than

discovering quality in it. • Thus, linking the term to a set of ideas about

the world and our relationship to it.

POSTMODERN ARCHITECTURE

WHAT IS MODERNITY?

Characteristics of modernism:

• Progress• Optimism• Rationality• The search for absolute knowledge in science,

technology, society and politics• The idea that gaining knowledge of the true self was the

only foundation for all other knowledge.• Foundations of modernism found in 17-18th century

ENLIGHTENMENT period or “Age of Reason.”

MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE

Modernism

Postmodernism

Compared to POSTMODERNIST ARCHITECTURE

Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) and Learning from Las Vegas (1972)

Rejection of International Style

Venturi said, Do not be intimidated by modernist orthodoxy: Must be new, original, have structure, plan, function (“form follows function”).Instead architecture should evoke many levels of meaning & have combinations of loci (points of view).Multiple referents for a multicultural world.“Less is a bore”

Stata Center, MIT

Modernism

Postmodernism

Characteristics of Postmodern Literature

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Irony, playfulness, black humor

Postmodern fiction as a whole could be characterized by the ironic quote marks, that much of it can be taken as tongue-in-cheek

Example: Thomas Pynchon provides prime examples of playfulness, often including silly wordplay, within a serious context: The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas, Wendell "Mucho" Maas, Genghis Cohen, Dr. Hilarius

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Intertextuality

Since postmodernism represents a decentered concept of the universe in which individual works are not isolated creations, much of the focus in the study of postmodern literature is on intertextuality: the relationship between one text (a novel for example) and another or one text within the interwoven fabric of literary history.

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PASTICHE (Fr. for “imitation”)

• A technique that combines a variety of styles, genres, and story lines to create a new form; or

• An imitation of the style of, or using assorted ideas from, another artist: the ideas are “recombined” as a work which could have been made by the original artist.

• Distinct from a forgery; more like a parallel or borrowed artwork.

Metafiction Essentially writing about writing and making

the artificiality of art or the fictionality of fiction apparent to the reader and generally disregards the necessity for “willful suspension of disbelief.”

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Historicity

Refers to works that fictionalize actual historical events or figures.The characteristic of having existed in history.

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We no longer have faith in the great all-encompassing, wide-ranging supernarratives. (The system of thought—in religion, political ideologies, philosophy—that have grounded us in the past.)

• META: Greek for between, with, after…• In epistemology (theory of knowledge), the prefix

meta- is used to mean about (its own category).

• Metanarrative: a “grand theory,” a narrative about narratives.

• Metanarratives legitimize other narratives by encapsulating generally held views of a society. They speak a society’s particular “truth.”

Instead, in the postmodern world we have many different narratives vying for our attention.

Creating a crisis of legitimation…Who has the answers?Whose beliefs are valid?What’s right and wrong”

Does this mean postmodernism is relativistic?

If you don’t accept one universal standard, does it mean you have no standards?

Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804)

CATAGORICAL IMPERATIVE:If you want to know if an act is moral, you should be willing to put it to the test: it should be an act that you would be willing to have all humankind do.

But if you don’t believe in the “categorical imperative” does it mean that you don’t believe in any imperative?

Just because postmodernists don’t believe in metanarratives doesn’t mean that they don’t believe in any narratives.

But how does one decide what narratives to believe in?

Re: the sublime

Modern sublime continues to offer pleasure and solace in the form of nostalgic sublime. It cannot shake its longing for the merely beautiful. It takes an art form out of what is unpresentable.

Re: the sublime

Postmodern sublime puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; denies the solace of good forms and the consensus of taste which make it possible to share a nostalgia for the unattainable. The enemy is consensus constrained by taste and so can never go beyond the beautiful.

US Postmodernist Writers• John Barth• Thomas Pynchon• Kurt Vonnegut Jr.• Joseph Неllеr• Norman Mailer • Don DeLillo• Donald Barthelme• John Ashberry• Paul Auster

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Ethnicity and Postmodernism

• African American:- Toni Morrison- Toni Cade Bambara- Alice Walker

• Native American:- Louis Erdrich- Sherman Alexie

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Ethnicity and Postmodernism

• Hispanic:- Sandra Cisneros- Gloria Anzaldua- Rudolfo Anaya

• Asian American:- Amy Tan- Maxine Hong Kingston- David Henry Hwang

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外语学院研究生思语论坛 之美国文学文化系列讲座. from modernism to...

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外语学院研究生思语论坛之美国文学文化系列讲座. from modernism to...