Modern American Literature |
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ENG 221: Major American Authors By the end of this unit, you should:
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complete these assignments on or before the dates in bold.
Updated March 8, 2002
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AnnouncementsWe end our tour of American literature with a look at works written in the modern era, from poetry that Robert Frost wrote near the beginning of the twentieth century to literature written in the last few decades. Among these works is A Streetcar Named Desire, the first example of drama we have seen. Remember, your final portfolios are due at 8 a.m. Monday, April 15, and your presentations will take place during the week of April 30. Think FastBelow are some writing exercises designed to help you master the knowledge and skills covered in this unit.
DiscussionHistoryBy Sarah Wright
The modern era has been a time of great changes in the United States. World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II devastated the American people. Yet there were also times of prosperity, such as the "Golden Twenties" and the decade after World War II. America has also seen many great leaders during the past century: Woodrow Wilson, Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John Kennedy. These leaders dealt with war, depression, and the threat of Communism, but still managed to protect the interest of the people and the ideals of America. Another topic that is synomous with modern America is technology. As far back as 1920, when radio broadcasting began, Americans thrived on technology. People of this era made immense and sometimes overwhelming technological advancements, including the inventions of television, portables, modern computers, the Internet, and CD players. Modern American history changed from decade to decade and continues its rapid evolution into the twenty-first century. The Roaring Twenties, or the Jazz Age, can be described as the era of "flaming youth," in which young adults appreciated having a good time and challenged society. Conventions that had been passed from generation to generation were suddenly unpopular, and a new way of life, set with rapid changes, formed. Relationships between the sexes grew relaxed, and instead of "calling on someone," a person "picked up his date." Motion pictures became popular during this era. Thirteen thousand movie houses existed in the United States by 1912. Radio was extremely popular, since it reached more people than movies did. In 1926, the National Broadcasting Company was created. Sports thrived during this time, at least partly because radio brought the games to the homes of millions of people. This era witnessed many of the great sports players, including all-around athlete Jim Thorpe, football player Harold "Red" Grange, baseball star Babe Ruth, golfer and runner Babe Zaharias, and many others. The Twenties can also be described as the Age of the Consumer. Advertisement, in the areas of print and radio, reached a new level, as producers tried to make their goods look more attractive than their competitors'. The automobile had an important impact on America's economy during the Twenties. By 1929, an average American family owned one car. A major force behind the success of the automobile was Henry Ford, who gave America the Model T and the moving assembly line. The Twenties were definitely an era of prosperity, but this high could not last forever. On October 29, 1929 the Stock Market crashed, and the value of stocks plummeted. The Great Depression, the decade that followed the Jazz Age, was one of turmoil and poverty. Jobless, penniless, starved people struggled through this decade with hopes that the end of the depression was just around the corner. It was not until President Roosevelt's New Deal came into effect that the light indicating the end of the darkness began to shine for many people. Under the New Deal, the U.S. government set up many programs and agencies, including the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC), the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Most people labeled the New Deal a success, since considerable recovery took place, and the Roosevelt administration had a sense of optimism. The Second New Deal set up the Social Security Act of August 1935 and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). After a few years the New Deal began to wind down and lose its impact on the economy. In 1939, when World War II broke out, orders from European countries poured in American companies, causing a increase in business. This increase helped the American economy revive and stay on its feet. The United States played a role in World War II even before 1941, helping England and France by shipping supplies, but not until the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7 did America officially enter the war. World War II had major effects on the economy, resulting in factory conversion to wartime products and the rationing of meat, sugar, shoes, and other items. Social changes included increased marriage rates. Many young couples felt the need to establish formal bonds before the men went to risk their lives in the war. The number of women in the work force also increased during this time. By 1944, 6.5 million additional women began working outside the home. World War II brought to life the atomic bomb, which devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. This event marked the beginning of the nuclear weapons race, which remains a threat today. The year 1945 brought an end to the war, but the effects of it--the millions of lives lost, the new threat of Communism, and the potential of nuclear attack--would remain a factor in American society and politics for years to come. Postwar society during the 1950's was a time of the baby boomers and re-established domesticity. Family life and the security of marriage were important to most Americans, so people began building families. The threat of Communism unnerved the security of Americans. Truman announced his foreign policy of containment, designed to control this threat. The fear of Communism was so great that Americans believed rumors. Senator Joseph McCarthy, who claimed to know of prominent Americans who had ties to communism, used Senate hearings as his own personal scaffold to eliminate opponents and create a name for himself. The 1960's and 1970's were decades well remembered even today. The Bay of Pigs crisis, Vietnam War, assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and civil rights movment played an important part in the minds and lives of Americans. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963 and was assassinated in 1968. Civil rights riots broke out all over America. The younger generation protested the wasteful war in Vietnam. The space program was launched into high gear, as America viewed it as a race to establish itself as leader of the free world. In the 1970s, the Watergate scandal and the oil crisis added to the stress and concerns of Americans. The Cold War remained a threat to America, which viewed the Soviet Union as its major enemy. The past thirty years have been about change--change in technology, minorities, women, the economy. It seems that the past presidents--Reagan, Bush, and Clinton--have wanted to make everyone happy. Special interest groups increasingly dominate the political scene. American technology has exponentially grown to reach heights people fifty years ago would not have dreamed of. Although America has no flying cars or a space station on Mars, the rate at which technology grows is overwhelming. Perhaps the biggest accomplishment in technology in the past few years is the Internet, a worldwide computer network used for entertainment, commerce, education, and communication. Even into the twenty-first century, America will continue to change and grow, creating more history for people to learn about. Because this history is so recent, another twenty years may well change how we interpret it in the future. LiteratureBy Steven Byrd Whereas previous American literary periods were best defined by certain stylistic conventions or popular schools of thought, the modern period of American literature is better defined by the traditions it broke rather than any tradition it created. Set into motion by rapid changes in the fabric of American life, it produced literature fraught with tension, struggling with deep universal questions yet never coming up with fully reliable answers. It was during this period of drastic change and drastic art that American literature finally came into its own in academia. The works of Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and other major American authors were finally being taught in universities as subjects of scholarly study. This newfound interest in American writing, along with the intriguing nature of the country’s literature at the time, helped cement America’s literary reputation as an important artistic tradition the world over. The early 20th century saw many American writers rebelling against long held social norms to an unheard of degree, abandoning many of the value systems and tightly held worldviews that had influenced American society and art since the birth of the nation. Change was the norm of the time as new advances in technology, radical new social theories, and two brutal world wars changed the face of the world forever. The violence of both World War I and World War II was unprecedented and terrible, and these two conflicts help to shatter all illusions of the romanticism of war. Industrialization and urbanization became even larger factors in American society as the nation moved further from its agricultural roots into a new existence as a large factory nation that lived by the products it produced rather than the food it grew. Social theorists, seeking to understand this new, urban world, began to apply Darwin’s theories of natural selection to social systems. Science developed at an exponential rate, teaching humanity more about themselves and the world around them. Such swift, unbounded changes disoriented Americans, sowing a deep distrust in the old institutions that had guided American life for so long. Many of America’s artists began to question what they could trust in this new world. The church, the family, the government, nothing seemed to give sufficient answers to the horrible questions that been raised by the changes of this time. It was this new uncertainty, this complete ambiguity that became the true style of this time. No literary genre typified the Modern period as much as poetry, and no phrase summed up Modernist poetry so well as Ezra Pound’s poetic command “Make it New!” Perhaps drawn to poetry's impromptu nature and its emotionally dense language, many of the era’s greatest writers were poets, and they gave modern American poetry as distinct a voice as Walt Whitman had given it decades before. The modern poets, in some way or another, all sought to make their poetry something new, something different that the literature that had come before them. From the intricate poetic constructions of Robert Frost to the challenging stylistic innovations of such experimental writers as e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens, Modernist poetry showed a deep dissatisfaction with tradition. Frost’s poems, such as “The Road Not Taken” and “Design," wrestled with the question of a seemingly hostile world and the issue of free will versus determinism, all in the form of strict verse and elaborate nature imagery. Focusing more on stylistic exploration, e.e. cummings’ poems challenged readers by intentionally subverting the very rules of grammar that the English language was built upon, presenting a new style of poetry that dealt less with conscious topics and more with associations and dreamlike images. William Carlos Williams, a former pediatrician, became a celebrated poet. His poems such as “This Is Just to Say” and “The Red Wheel Barrow," with their simple styles and seemingly absent subject matter, set the stage for a quiet poet’s revolt against unquestioning convention, be it literary, social, or logical. Other poets of the time sought to make their poems intentionally difficult reading in an attempt to draw the reader into the work. T.S. Eliot, along with Pound, turned to ancient Greek and Latin texts for inspiration as they attempted to understand their very modern world around them while maintaining a connection to the classics of the past. Eliot's most famous work, The Waste Land, expressed a bleak view of the post-World War I world in puzzling language, rich with obscure allusions, attempting to force the reader to be an active part of the poetry process. Similarly, Wallace Stevens, the insurance salesman turned acclaimed poet, rejected even the artist’s life, despite writing some of the most acclaimed poetry of this time. His poems, such as “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” were written in his own idiosyncratic, intricate, precisely phrased inner language of symbols and metaphors, making for both challenging and stunning reading. Prose underwent a similar revitalization, as novelists and short story writers felt the same need to create new modes of communication that had pushed poets to such artistic heights. The anti-heroic war tales of Ernest Hemingway were both controversial yet wildly acclaimed by the reading public. One of the most famous prose writers of the period, Hemingway had served as an ambulance driver during World War I before he began his literary writing career. Through novels such as A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway brought the many bloody battlefields that he had seen firsthand to American readers. His novels and short stories often dealt frankly with the gross realities of war, while he subtly manipulated his simple, journalistic prose style to express his own bleak view of the world around him, a world outside of simple cause and effect relationships, lacking both logic and philosophy. Similarly, the novels and prose works of William Faulkner reflected the Modernist movement, showcasing disjointed images, multiple points of view, complex sentences, and stream-of-consciousness narration as newly accepted literary tools to describe the world. His most famous novel, the complex The Sound and the Fury, featured as one of its narrators a mentally handicapped man-child, Benji. The work of these writers and their contemporaries expressed a new view of the post-war world, a world capable of both amazing technology and incomprehensible cruelty. It was a world of newfound ambiguities, a world with no clear center and no clear distinction between good and evil, black or white. However, the rebellion of the period was not limited simply to the realms of philosophy or art. Social change was also a very powerful force during this time, as minorities who had previously stood silent seized this rebellious time as an opportunity to speak up and be heard. This new social consciousness worked its way quickly into literature. The so-called “Harlem Renaissance” of the 1920’s was a powerful movement of New York-based African-American writers who attempted to create for their race, so recently enslaved, a powerful literary tradition in this new America. Led by two very different young men--Countee Cullen, the classically trained and British influenced “proper” poet, and Langston Hughes, raised on jazz music and black spirituals--the Harlem Renaissance sought to give African-Americans a strong, clear voice with which they could express themselves. Its effects can still be felt in all urban poetry to this day. Others challenged gender biases, as female writers such as Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Willa Cather shattered stereotypes of women as second-class citizens, either directly through their work or indirectly by their sheer presence on the literary scene. Still other writers saw class issues as paramount and wrote about the complications of America’s new financial landscape, both for the new elite and the newly poor. John Steinbeck’s novels, such as Cannery Row and Of Mice and Men, were stern examinations of the hardships of tenant farmers in California, while F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic American novel The Great Gatsby laid bare the wide gap between society’s wealthy elite and everyone else. Americans literature’s discontentment with all of the old facets of life was rapid in growing and comprehensive in scope. Out of this distrust of society’s institutions, a new focus on the individual was born. Indeed, it now seemed as if one’s own reason, untouched by society’s influence, was the only reliable authority on any question of importance, a theme that can be seen over and over again in the literature of the time. Writers now looked inside themselves to answer their own question about religion, sexual mores and any other issue. In a period in danger of dissolving itself into generality, with its vast blending of literary styles and dealings with a variety of topics, this introspection is the true hallmark of the modern period. By attempting to rethink their relationship to society and social institutions, the artists shifted the focus of the art from merely recording the world in which they lived to saying something about that world, as well. Think AgainChoose one of the topics below and respond to it in a clear, thorough, detailed, and insightful 500-word essay. Include each essay in your portfolio.
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