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American Literature

1900-1945

Survey Course Instructor:


Mihai Mîndra
Close Reading (1)

 "Commonplace? The commonplace is just


that light, impalpable, aerial essence which
they've never got into their confounded books
yet. The novelist who could interpret the
common feelings of commonplace people
would have the answer to 'the riddle of the
painful earth' on his tongue."
Close Reading (2)
 “In eleven long years John Bergson had made but
little impression upon the wild land he had come to
tame. It was still a wild thing that had its ugly
moods; and no one knew when they were likely to
come, or why. Mischance hung over it. Its Genius
was unfriendly to man. The sick man was feeling
this as he lay looking out of the window, after the
doctor had left him, on the day following Alexandra's
trip to town. There it lay outside his door, the same
land, the same lead-colored miles. He knew every
ridge and draw and gully between him and the
horizon. To the south, his plowed fields; to the east,
the sod stables, the cattle corral, the pond,--and
then the grass.”
Close Reading (3)
 “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 that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.
On the tiger no responsibility rests. 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”.
Close Reading (4)

 “There is stupid being in every one. There is


stupid being in every one in their living.
Stupid being in one is often not stupid
thinking or stupid acting. It very often is hard
to know it in knowing any one. Sometimes
one has to know of some one the whole
history in them, the whole history of their
living to know the stupid being of them”.
Close Reading (5)
 "Wait a minute." Luster said. "You snagged on that nail again.
Cant you never crawl through here without snagging on that nail."
Caddy uncaught me and we crawled through. Uncle Maury said
to not let anybody see us, so we better stoop over, Caddy said.
Stoop over, Benjy. Like this, see. We stooped over and crossed
the garden, where the flowers rasped and rattled against us. The
ground was hard. We climbed the fence, where the pigs were
grunting and snuffing. I expect they're sorry because one of them
got killed today, Caddy said. The ground was hard, churned and
knotted.
Keep your hands in your pockets, Caddy said. Or they'll get
froze. You don't want your hands froze on Christmas, do you.
"It's too cold out there." Versh said. "You dont want to go out
doors."
Lecture 9

Modernist Music, Art


& Literature.

Gertrude Stein
Modernity Modernism
Modernist Music & Art
 Non-harmonic tones & dissonant
chords:
 Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912)
 Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky’s The Rite of
Spring (1913)
 Nick LaRocca & the Original Dixieland Jazz Band
(1922)
 George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924)
Modernist Music & Art
 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)
 accompanying chamber ensemble employs a
different combination of instruments for each of
the 21 poem-based songs of the cycle
 the vocal soloist uses the Sprechstimme
(German for “speech voice”), or Sprechgesang
(“speech song”), a blend of speech and song
Modernist Music & Art
 Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (1882-1971)
 first performance of The Rite of Spring (1913)
 unconventional choreography
 harsh dissonances
 driving, asymmetrical, shifting rhythms of the music
  hostile uproar so noisy that the dancers
could not hear the orchestra
 later concert performances were well received.
Modernist Music & Art
 Chicago jazz bands:
 Nick LaRocca & the Original Dixieland Jazz Band
 first recorded in 1922
 Concerts in New York, then London
 North Side of Chicago:
 White musicians: Mugsy Spanier, Bunny Berigan,
Wingy Manone
 South Side of Chicago:
 Black musicians: Jimmy Noone, Lovie Austin,
Johnny Dodds, and Louis Armstrong
 the 1920s: the big bands; popular in the
1930s and early 1940s  period known as
the swing era
Modernist Music & Art
 George Gershwin
 both popular and classical forms
 Rhapsody in Blue (1924)
 Concerto in F (1925)
 opera Porgy and Bess (1935)
Modernist Art Exhibitions
 1913, New York - the
Armory Show, officially
known as The
International Exhibition
of Modern Art
 The emblem of the
Armory Show, an
uprooted pine tree, was
taken from the
Massachusetts flag
carried into battle during
the Revolutionary War
Modernist Art Exhibitions
 shock and outrage triggered by Duchamp's Nude
Descending the Staircase and Matisse's Luxury &
the other cubists
 Predecessors:
 the 1908 exhibition of the Eight, seen as the
American predecessor to the Armory Show
 Alfred Stieglitz’s shows at the Little Galleries of
Photo-Secession, known as '291‘ (for its address at
291 5th Avenue).
 championed artists like Cézanne, Matisse, and
Picasso as well as early American modernists: John
Marin, Marsden Hartley, Oscar Bluemner, and
Abraham Walkowitz
 over half the exhibitors at the New York show
were American
Cubism:
 Pablo Picasso & Georges
Braque; 1907-08
 ambiguous sense of
space through
geometric shapes that
flatten and simplify
form
 spatial planes that are
broken into fragments,
 forms that overlap and
penetrate one another
 onset in Picasso's Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon
 painting of women
composed of jagged shapes,
Pablo Picasso - Les Demoiselles flattened figures, and forms
d'Avignon borrowed from African
masks
 Derived from Cézanne’s
passage: a device in which
one physical object is
allowed to penetrate
another physical object
 defied the laws of physical
experience
 encouraged artists to view
paintings as having an
internal logic—or integrity—
that functions
independently of, or
even contrary to,
physical experience
P. Picasso -- Girl with Dark Hair  freedom from material
reality in artistic
imagination
Cubism - two phases:
 Analytical cubism (until

1912)
 fragments the
physical world into
intersecting
geometric planes and
interpenetrating
volumes
 Synthetic cubism
(through 1915)
 synthesizes
(combines) abstract
shapes to represent
objects in a new way.
Pablo Picasso
Woman with a Mustard Pot (1910)
 synthesis of two modern-art styles:
cubism and futurism
William Carlos Williams:
 creating "an atmosphere of
release, color release, release
from stereotyped forms,
trite subjects"
 "There had been a break
somewhere, we were streaming
through, each thinking his own
thoughts, driving his own designs
toward his self’s 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"

Marcel Duchamp
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912)
Marcel Duchamp: Bride Stripped Bare
by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-1923)

Upper panel: the bride; Lower panel: the


Bachelors.

The “love machine” as suffering: sepa-


rated and mechanized by desire.
Francis Picabia
Dances at the Spring (1912)

Henri Matisse Luxury, II (1907-08)


Representation of nature – radically
different from the romantic / realist ones

Charles Sheeler
Landscape (1913)
Alfred Maurer
Autumn, 1912
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-
1986)
 Although O'Keeffe handled
her subject matter
representationally, the
starkly linear quality, the
thin, clear coloring, and the
boldly patterned
compositions produce
abstract designs
 the details are so enlarged
that they become
unfamiliar and
surprising.

Red Poppy No. VI, 1928.


Ram's Head, White Hollyhock and
Litte Hills

Jack-in-the-Pulpit IV, 1930


American Modernism (1914-1930)
 Art as insight into truth.
 Aesthetic form takes precedence over
content.
 Ethical ideal: a personal commitment,
exercised through the aesthetic.
 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.
American Modernism (1914-1930)

 Modern condition results from placing


Enlightenment optimism in doubt (progress)
 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)
 The Social is converted into the Personal:
dilemmas seen as personal; not social.
Modernism – Stages
 Source> Art Berman’s Preface to
Modernism (1994)
 3 stages:
 Early Modernism (end of 19th – beginning
of 20th century)
 Midmodernism (1900s – 1910s)
 High Modernism (1920s – 1930s)
 No clear-cut stages; qualitative
changes yet noticeable.
Early Modernism

 Optimism replaced with cynicism, objective


analysis, despair.
 Mainly paintings: impressionism; Van Gogh,
Gauguin, and Cézanne.
 Essence of an art object is both the perception
of it and the meaning inherently erupting from
that perception.
 Perception (and NOT reason) is
cognition.
Early Modernism
 opposition to Empiricism, Realism, Naturalism:
 words/colors do not mark reality, they express it
subjectively
 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
 Democratic capitalism has totally individualized the ego.
 Meaning is on the surface of language, not behind
language.
 The Platonic realm of ideas (so important for Romantics) is
replaced by unformed linguistic energy.
 Modernist art reveals an aesthetic state.
MIDMODERNISM
 Transition: Naturalism: scientific
objectivity
(E. Zola, St. Crane,
Th. Dreiser)

Psychological
Realism
(S. Lewis, E. Wharton)

Phenomenological
Subjectivism
(Henry James)
MIDMODERNISM
 The subject matter of art and
literature becomes:
 the everyday

 the little town

 the brief love affair

 the single day

 The characters play minor roles


MIDMODERNISM
 One discovers NOT
general/encompassing values BUT
what one personally values.
 VALUE= a mode of behavioral motivation.
 Personal ethical value is the result of
personal choice negated by an
unethical/non-exemplary environment
(e.g. Wharton’s House of Mirth).
MIDMODERNISM
 Authenticity and opposition to the crowd =
attributes of the modernist
author/protagonist.
 Art is the alternative to conformism (e.g.
pointillism, fauvism; Stein’s and Pound’s
styles)
 transcendence exists as awareness of its
absence; experience can not be
transcended.
 Humans are not entirely dual(reason vs.
physical/instinctive): mind and matter
overlap.
High Modernism
 The escape from
 religious orthodoxy
 a morality grounded in theological
metaphysics
 monarchy
 an art whose subject matter has been
determined by such limits
 Purpose set: liberate humanity.
High Modernism
 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.
 Only one area for the exercise of
freedom: ART.
High Modernism
 The art object / text represents the
artist’s 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)
  replaced by theory based on the
universal cognitive and emotional
structures of mentality (psychology of
perception; impressionism)
  in turn replaced by theory based on the
formation of mentality in individual
self-consciousness (selfhood)
 shift from the body-mind relation to the
self-world relation.
High Modernism
 Maximum freedom is gained only by knowing
the conditions under which freedom can be
maximally exercised an exercise which is
ART.
 The modernist search: for the
particular in the universal NOT, like in
classical aesthetic, the universal in the
particular.
 What is expressed is not the meaning, but
a personal, particular meaning/vision.
High Modernism
 There are no imposed limits on the creative
imagination. Limits are conventions. Vision
is private.
 Art creates objects that offer a meaning
inherent in their source: the artists’
imagination.
 Modern art: emotion and judgment are
inseparable; individual interpretations of
reality.
 Art in opposition to science
(generating non-individual, consensual
objective descriptions of reality).
High Modernism

 Art claims a separate cognitive


ground for itself.
 Lyricism/sensation/description takes
precedence over epic, analysis, and
explication.
 Interpretation is a form of truth: the
individual mind’s organization of the
world.
High Modernism
 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.

 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).
 Consequences: in painting > abstraction; in
literature abstruseness.
High Modernism
 Imagination achieves complete
autonomy: in art nothing is now
prohibited.
 The artwork is the most real of realities
for the modernist.
 Self is transient, subjected to
contingency. The modernist work is
permanent.
Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946)

Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein, late 1890's


Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946)

 Tender Buttons (1914)


 The Making of Americans (1925)
 “Composition as Explanation” (1926
-1927)
Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946)
 studied at Radcliffe College with William
James
 the relation mind-object never static, part of
a developing flux, conclusions never fixed,
constantly under “pragmatic” test.
 took interest in automatic writing, the
rhythmic tropes of memory
Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946)
 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:
 chronological ordering of narrative
 chronological remembering
Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946)
 Dissociative rhetoric: disrupting
conventional uses of language
 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.
Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946)
 sacramental view of human
creativity: words can “vibrate”.
 1910 onward: tried to dissociate words
from conventional context & to render
them through inspired perception.
 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)
 A novel dealing with the social and cultural
history of her own family.
 She devised an unconventional narrative
form marked by a simplification and
fragmentation of plot.
 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.
The Making of Americans (1925)
 "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
 tried to approach the spatial form: collage
like constructs functioning by word
associations
 Her aim: to turn temporal/historical
perspectives into spatial structures
The Making of Americans (1925)

 “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.
The Making of Americans (1925)
 “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 (not causal/chronological
progress).
“Composition as Explanation”
(1926 - 1927)
 first public attempt to explain herself.
 Written as a lecture for the Oxford
and Cambridge literary societies.
 By turns quirky, repetitious, and
familiarly recondite, it nevertheless
attempted to trace her
development and to clarify her
aims.
“Composition as Explanation”
(1926 - 1927)
 about Cézanne:
"in composition
one thing was
as important as
another thing“
 No metaphor, no
symbolism, no
learned allusions,
no background
information

The Sea at L'Estaque, oil on canvas by Paul Cézanne, 1878–


79; in the Picasso Museum, Paris.
“Composition as Explanation”
(1926 - 1927)
 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.

The Sunblind, Synthetic Cubist collage on canvas with


crayon by Juan Gris, 1914; in the Tate Gallery, London.
Cubist Collage – Metonymy
 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”.
Cubist Collage – Metonymy
 “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”)
Cubist Collage – Metonymy
 everyday, casual activity (buying a gift) rendered in
terms of subjective consciousness perceptions:
 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.
 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)
 The repetition-permutation
pattern:
 repetition generates meaning
 not use words that have definite
associations
 Repetition as a form of
defamiliarization
 "beginning again and again and
again is a natural thing"
G. Stein - Summary
Sacramental view of
human creativity (locus of epiphany): Relation mind-object never static,
part of a developing flux
journey into the self & others

Against “the Continuous /


realistic noun” prolonged Dissociative Relational Repetition –
present rhetoric syntax permutation

Defamiliarization

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