Modernism in American Literature

1. MODERNISM IN
AMERICAN LITERATURE
By
Zia Ur Rahman
Ph.D.Scholar in English Literature

2. Introduction
• Modernism was a cultural wave and artistic movement that grew strength
first in Europe in the early 20th century and then swept to the united states.
• In America Modernism was fueled by two factors:
• Domestic Shifts
• Increase in city life (industrialization)
• Advancement in Technology and in its effect on the way of life (techno culture n postmodern
terms)
• Economic Boom/Big Boom
• International Shifts
• The World War 1
• Western youth was rebelling, angry and disillusioned with the war. They held the older generation
as responsible.
• Intellectual currents like Freudian psychology and Marxism implied a “godless” worldview and led to
the breakdown of traditional views.
• The World Depression of 1930s
• It affected most of the population of the US.Workers lost their jobs and facories shut
down,busiesses failed,farmers unable to harvest
• Modernism impacted music, art and literature by:
• radically undoing the traditional forms
• Expressing a sense of modern life as a sharp break from the past and its rigid
conventions.(Jazz Age)

3. Modernism in American Literature
• Like the English writers, the Americans too experimented with
form(setting,narrative techniques,plot structure), content(they
could and should write about anything-no subject too dignified
or undegnified) and style in different genres of literature.
• Following are these experiments inform content and style in
different genres:
• 1.Poetry
• Emily Dickenson and Walt Whitman are thought to be the mother and father
of the modernist movement in America.
• Both changed the world of poetry in mid 19th century with profoundly different
styles.
• Strictly American expressions.Not the English models.
• Their readiness to tell the truth regardless of how dangerous it could be
• I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!
• The sense of anonymity

4. Continued….
• Walt Whitman is known as the father of free verse in America. His collection, the
leaves of grass open with “Song of Myself”
• I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
• And what I assume you shall assume,
• For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
• Ezra Pound was the pioneer of the Imagist movement. He had resided in
London and met there the British modernists.
• Imagist poets wrote shorter poems and choose there words vey carefully so that their
work could be rich and direct.
• His two lines poem, in a station at Metro sums up the movement:
• The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
• invites the reader to relate urban life to the natural world

5. Continued…
• TS Eliot is another American who experimented with these forms.
• His poem , The Love Song of J.Alfred Profrock tries to revel that modern life
provides no answers to the questions of life:
• Let us go then, you and I,
• When the evening is spread out against the sky
• Like a patient etherized upon a table
• His other poems like Hallow Men and the Waste Land as the titles suggest
disallusionment.
• The War Poets/Trench Poets shifted the attention towds the state of the
world.
• Poets like Wilfred Owen (What passing bells for those..),Seigfred Sasson and
Issac Rosenberg through imagery of different types revealed the realities of war.
• Other poets like Robert Frost, ee comings,Wallace Stevens and William
Carlos Williams also contributed.
• Ee comings experiments with style and language…

6. Continued…
• 2-Fiction
• In fiction too experimented with viewpoint and form. Also more realistic
writings.
• Earnest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” and “The Sun also Rises” were
reprentatives of the era.
• Hemingway wrote of war, death, and “the lost generation”
• F.Scott Fitzgerald’s the Great Gatsby is also a representaive of this age.
• The story is presented in Fragments, from multiple points of view and no central
authority.It destroys the conventional forms of language by deliberately breaking rules
of syntax and structure.
• William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is written in the stream of
consciousness technique
• It revels te racial and class differences.

7. Conclusion
• The American modernist literature highlighted innovation
in the form of language, narration, and style which
definitely has close link wih modernity.
• Thematically, the works are enriched with contemporary
issues such as war, late capitalism, science and
psychology.