4. szakmódszertan tétel.

Bakay Júliától. Hagytam benne mesét is, hogy érthető legyen. Sok példát, ki melyiket ismeri/tudja megjegyezni könnyen. Töröljetek belőle
bátran. Átbújtam a 400 oldalas könyvet, ennyi értelmeset találtam benne. Hajrá!

Modern American literatures (modernist poetry and prose; women's modernism, the
Harlem Renaissance)

 American modernism is an artistic and cultural movement in the United States beginning at the turn
of the 20th century. American modernist literature was the dominant trend in American literature
between World War I and World War II.

 Writers were looking for new ways of writing and new topics, expressing their feelings
about living in the modern age, some of them positively, some negatively.

 There were many experiments, more and more complicated styles. Many movements
appeared; together they might be called “modernism”.

 The scenario:

This new writing had become much more than local-color regionalism. The settlement of the
frontier had been an enormous national task, an act of making culture grow on arid plain and prairie.
In 1890 land mass was officially filled from coast to coast, the frontier no longer open. The new
frontier was the city where immigrants in massive numbers from Southern and Eastern Europe joined
internal migrants driven off the land by the agricultural depressions of the 1880s. America was now a
continent webbed by railroads and modern communications with rising urban conglomerates, growing
industry, commerce and technology. Towering skyscrapers rose, great department stores appeared,
the yellow press spread everywhere. Beneath the general patina of wealth and social aspiration, the
massive changes of post-Civil War America were becoming apparent in every walk of life.

 Reform was needed

 As the United States became a great commercial empire ruled by multimillionaires, scandals
and massive fortunes, from oil, railroads, steel, money itself…generated need and passion for
reform.
 Firsts were the so-called muckrakers = “trágyagereblyézők”.
 "muckraking literature," the new reporting and fiction (about conflicts..) that had been
emerging since 1879

 The 1890s was a cultural milestone when the religious, social and moral faiths of an older
America began to shift toward a twentieth-century vision.
 The writers of the 1890s were, both in Europe and America, a generation that broke free of
Victorianism and the American Genteel Tradition. They felt themselves standing at the end
of one era and about to enter another. “We are about to enter the dark. We need a light.”
 these writers were the first to articulate an age shaped by the harsh impact of modern
industrial life and the scientific ideas emerging to interpret it.
 at the turn of the century it seemed better abroad
 in the Rooseveltian age , the truth for the moment was that, however assertively American an
American writer felt, the best place to carry forward that assertion was probably abroad. At
the start of the century, the American arts had almost no artistic confidence, no certainty of
direction, no strong aesthetic feeling and no pride in the creative past.

 By 1913 it was obvious that a new and "modern" generation of writers and painters was
coming to birth in an America just beginning to accept the avant-garde…

 THE LOST GENERATION. 1920s

 Many American modernists addressed numerous contemporary topics, such as race -relations,
gender and the human condition and became expatriated in Europe during this time, often
becoming stalwarts in the European movement.
 This is a group of writers who felt alienated to the world. They wrote about young people
who do not find any pleasure in everyday life or becoming rich.
 Gertrude Stein called these postwar writers, drinkers and wounded young people "the lost
generation," and the phrase stuck, and so did the vision of a world of lost spirits.
ex.
 Ezra Pound
 active in London, stirred the lively literary scene there into a comparable spirit and
played a central part in starting the English-language movements
 Pound is one of the great modern poets and a fundamentally important critic. His
importance lies not just in his own poetry at its best or in critical essays, but also in his
general influence and guidance
 major role in…
 Anglo-American poetry
 The literary movement that developed between about 1912 and the end of the
I920s in London had links and parallels with the extraordinary outburst of
poetic activity that was taking place in America .
 Here too Pound was a prime mover. Without him, it seems totally unlikely
that two disparately formed traditions-the British and the American-would
have come temporarily together in a volatile mixture that would completely
radicalize them both.
 Making it new
 widely attributed to Ezra Pound and assumed to be the slogan he used
to lead the charge for the modernist literary movement of which he was
a champion.
 This entailed for the modern artist an avant-garde responsibility, a
break with mediocre social values and the commercialism of culture, an
urgent enterprise in Making It New.
 Imagism
 Imagism was to become a central theory of twentieth-century poetry primarily
because it concentrated a general Modernist direction into a reasonably clear
set of precepts
 Broadly, imagism is a neosymbolist theory.
 The image collision occurs simultaneously, it produces the pictorialism of
Chinese ideogram or Japanese haiku
 Vorticism
 a British artistic movement of 1914–15 influenced by cubism and
futurism and favouring harsh, angular, machine-like forms.

 T. S. Eliot, also influential, in London.

 Bridged the space between the British and American traditions

 Gertrud Stein also very influential

 In the years before the First World War, Stein constructed a remarkable if often
bewildering bridge between American writing and the most experimental aspects
of French painting;
 in the years after the war, her flamboyant personality, her wealth, her active part
in the expatriate scene of Paris in the stylish and agonized 1920s, all helped make
her a major influence.
 Few writers have ever had such impact on their successors. Influenced Hemingway
and Faulkner;
 during the 1920s the expatriation of an important part of an entire literary generation
turned her Paris apartment into a place of aesthetic pilgrimage where writers
absorbed the advice, the literary education and the artistic milieu she could offer
 It became apparent that she represented a major aspect of European Modernism
passed on much of value to Americans, arguing that the Modern movement was
especially crucial to the natural experimentalism of the American arts

 WORLD WARS

 American writers or would-be writers who served in Europe, either as combatants or as

members of the various ambulance corps.
 the war imprinted itself across the writing of the 1920s
 for many American writers, the war marked a cutoff point from the past, an ultimate symbol
for the dawn of modernity.
 In the new mood of nihilism and decadence, the spirit of aesthetic revolt nevertheless survived
despite the waning of political radicalism so they continued the revolt of bohemia and the
large-scale expatriations and experiments of the 1920s-until the bubble of the Jazz Age
 popular themes:
 the psychological wounds and scars of the war experience. ex. Hemingway’s
accounts of war in Europe: “A Farewell to Arms” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls”
 the 1930s economic crisis in America
 echoing the mid-19th-century focus on the attempt to "build a self"—a theme
illustrated by Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.
 madness and its manifestations. ex. Hemingway's The Battler and Faulkner's That
Evening Sun.
 Two generations. Two generations of 1912 and 1919 so close in age, yet so divided in
experience, launched a major era of American writing.
 The prewar generation was largely founded in the poetry of Pound and Eliot, Frost and
Doolittle, Marianne Moore, Conrad Aiken, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, in fiction
Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson..
  The postwar generation included Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos,
William Faulkner, E. E. cummings, , Kenneth Burke… and many more. The later
emphasis shifted decisively toward the novel, so that by the end of the 1920s both
American poetry and American fiction were established on a radical course.
 If a sense of purposelessness, decadence, cultural emptiness and political failure pervades
the new American fiction of the 1920s, postwar developments made their contribution too
 With the crash of October 1929 the whole remarkable episode seemed to end and the
"Twenties" were over.

 ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899–1961) is probably the most famous representative.

His writing style is very plain, however, his stories and novels are sometimes
compared to an iceberg (you only see its one eighth; the rest is hidden below the
surface). His novelette The Old Man and the Sea (1952) earned him the Nobel Prize
for literature. The moral of the story can be summed up as “a man can be destroyed,
but not defeated”. The Sun Also Rises is about a group of young people who drink,
have love affairs and attend bullfights, all these without any mental satisfaction.

 NOVELTY VS NOSTALGIA

 America modernized and in so doing swept away many of the values ordinary Americans
thought central to the meanings of their national life.
 As the economy shifted its center from production to consumption, as the focus moved from
country to city, as credit ran free and personal spending boomed, as new technologies brought
autos, telephones, radios and refrigerators to the growring numbers of middle-class homes,
change moved at an ever-faster pace.
 The age that challenged innovation and looked back nostalgically to the rural past also saw
massive new technological advances, the airplane, the interstate highway, sound in movies,
the high-rise sophisticated excitement of the cities. There was a tension between nostalgia and
novelty…
 The American novel of the I920s explored to the full this mixture of experimental
excitement about the new and anxious awareness of historical loss. None showed it more
than 
 SCOTT FITZGERALD
 "The Crack-Up" draws a close analogy between the historical development of the I920s,
from early euphoria to trauma. The Depression of 1929 becomes the crisis of his
generation as they face their own economic, spiritual and psychic over-expenditure, and it
leads to total crack-up.
 well known for The Great Gatsby (1925). It is a short novel about Nick Carraway,
who meets a mysterious rich man named Jay Gatsby. Gatsby spends time throwing
lavish parties; however, this does not make him feel happy. The book shows the
negative aspects of high society in the roaring twenties.

 HARLEM RENAISSANCE

 Modernist literature allowed for the development of regional trends within American literature,
including the Harlem Renaissance and southern modernism*. The movement was connected to a
vogue for African American culture, as seen in the popularity of Jazz music.
  The Harlem Renaissance marked a rebirth for African American arts, centralized in the Harlem
area of New York.
 1890s …black experience began to find shape in literature
 Up to the 1890s, the most powerful writing by blacks had taken the form either of slave
narratives or found expression in songs or oral folktales
 Paul Laurence Dunbar, born in Ohio, with his collections of dialed verse like Lyrics of
the Lowly Life (1896), became the first black poet of reputation.
 Charles W. Chesnutt, also from Ohio, whose stories and novels dealing with political
violence against blacks, made him the first important black fictionalist.
 The griefs of slave life are left behind as they begin to explore the contemporary tensions of
the "new negro" in white society. Thus they lead the way to the debates about black
consciousness  turns eventually into the "Harlem Renaissance" of the 1920s.
 1920s
 writers of this movement used modernist techniques to represent African American life, for
instance incorporating the rhythms of Jazz music and dialects of African American
culture into poetry and prose.
 Jean Toomer's Cane signaled the beginnings of the Harlem Renaissance of black
writing.
 other key figures: Alain Locke, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston,
Jean Toomer
 much later, 1960s black activists inspired by the early Harlem Renaissance movements.. ex.
Imamu Amiri Baraka –among the most aggressive ones

 WOMEN
 women writers are in quest of a female literary past. With the establishment of journals and
presses dedicated to the work of women writers, efforts have been made to define a feminist
usable past, a legacy of writing by women offering an alternative to the male-dominated
canon.
 Interest in the distinctive vision of women, the quest for a "woman's voice". In the poetry of
women (from Bradstreet to Dickinson) a self can be heard beneath the woman's voice, molded
by the experience of being a woman and yet reaching for comprehension and expression
beyond gender.
 some of the main figures:
 Anne Bradsmeet, Mary Rowlandson
 Harriet Beecher Stowe was one of the many women writers who largely dominated
American popular literature, shaping general taste and moral sentiment  helped
bring women writers of succeeding generations toward the center of American fiction
and has helped give confidence to their themes, subject matter and moral emphasis
 Mary E. Freeman in her grimly detailed portraits of New England life, fostered a
feminine sensibility
 Emily Dickinson and Kate Chopin, who had slowly been making their way into the
standard anthologies without apparent attention to their gender, suddenly became
central exhibits in the defense of an art by and for women.
 Kate Chopin's book is certainly a tale of women's changing self-perception. The
Awakening (1899)-dismissed in its day as "gilded dirt," rightly praised now as "the
first aesthetically successful novel to have been written by an American woman"-is a
reminder that 1890s writing is often a transitional writing that allows the unexpressed
to express itself, lets the repressed be spoken.
  Poets like Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath resist "ladylike" writing,
they reflect the political concerns of their time by using a distinctive feminine voice in
American poetry, enriching it with all that is available to an other-than-male vision.

 Much later, in the 1960s, through large-scale meetings, organizations like the National
Organization for Women (NOW) and journals like Ms. magazine, this newly conscious
"minority" appears and fights again.

 *SOUTHERN RENAISSANCE (southern renaissance)

 The South was not the only region to develop its literary potential in the years before the
Second World War, but its success was the most remarkable, enduring into the 1940s and
beyond as a celebrated "southern Renaissance."
 main figures: Ellen Glasgow (her theme the collapse of the elite classes in the South.),
Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor and
Eudora Welty made the South for several years the center of the nation's literary
achievements.
 WILLIAM FAULKNER. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is a short story
about a man suffering from reverse ageing. William Faulkner is one of the most
important writers of the American South. He situated his writings in the fictional
Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi. In his books, he concentrates on the fall of
the Southern aristocracy. His texts are often very demanding, the reader does not
know who says what. He wrote The Sound and the Fury, Light in August or
Absalom, Absalom!.

 Chicago renaissance. Natives’ movement

 In the years up to 1920, it seemed that the major representatives of the native line were
Vachel Lindsey, Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters. All were Illinois-born voices
from the land of Lincoln and all expressed the Chicago spirit
 Dreiser, Anderson and these three poets above confirmed was that there really was a
"Chicago Renaissance" which was playing its vigorous part in the nation's literary
development
Sources:

primary source:

The book. https://analepsis.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/from-puritanism-to-

postmodernism.pdf

but also:

http://www.gym-karvina.cz/userfiles/231/american_literature.pdf
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g09w5r?turn_away=true

http://people.unica.it/fiorenzoiuliano/files/2016/04/A-Brief-History-of-American-Literature-
Wiley-Blackwell-2011.pdf