MIDTERM ESSAY EXAMENGLISH 2328DAIGLEPLEASE ATTACH YOUR ESS.docx

MIDTERM ESSAY EXAM
ENGLISH 2328
DAIGLE
PLEASE ATTACH YOUR ESSAY TO THE ASSIGNMENT
FILE ON THE HOME PAGE. PLEASE ATTACH AS A WORD
FILE (OR .RTF).
General Instructions:Write an essay of at least 750 words
(including quotations from the poems and short stories that you
use as support) on ONE of the numbered topics below. If you
use sources in your response (even those I have provided for
you), be sure to cite them, using MLA format. Quotations from
the textbook require only a page number. You should choose
different poems or short stories than those you used in your
reading responses for Volume D. The three examples should be
by different authors.
All stories and poems must come from Volume D of the
textbook.
To prepare for the midterm, you will need to read the
introduction to Volume D, "American Literature Between the
Wars: 1914-1945," especially the following sections: "American
Versions of Modernism" (D: 13-16) and "Modernism Abroad
and On Native Grounds" (D: 16-18).
The midterm will require you to apply ideas from the
introduction to specific short stories (fiction) or poems written
during this time period (1914-1945).
stories or poems by the writers that I
assigned for the reading responses, as long as you choose
different poems or short stories (fiction) than you chose for
your reading responses.
included in the course if there had been more time: Amy Lowell

(imagist poet), Wallace Stevens (poet), T. S. Eliot (poet--short
poems only), E. E. Cummings (poet), John Dos Passos (fiction
writer), Ernest Hemingway (fiction writer), Thomas Wolfe
(fiction writer), John Steinbeck (fiction writer).
biographical introductions to the writers since most of these
introductions discuss the author's work in a general way
responded to, reading other authors is a good way to expand
your knowledge and create original responses. If you use some
of the same authors, be sure to choose different poems or
stories.
not have the textbook, please check the table of contents
provided on the home page.
· The paper should be in essay form with an introduction, body
paragraphs, and a conclusion (not a collection of reading
responses--no sub-headings).
· You should use quotations from the reading selections as
support for your general ideas. Your examples must show that
you have read the literature that you are discussing, not just the
author's biography.
· Do not use long poems or novels as examples, since I want
you to discuss the reading selections specifically, not just a
short part of a longer work. Do not use The Waste Land by T. S.
Eliot.
· A brief overview isn't adequate. Again, you must show that
you read the selection (poem or story) carefully.
WRITE ABOUT ONLY ONE OF THE FOLLOWING TOPICS.
1 Define modernism, using quotations from the introduction to
Volume D of The Norton Anthology of American Literature or
from one of the Modernist Manifestos (D: 335-350) (1499-
1513). Then, apply your definition to at least three reading
selections (poetry or fiction), using quotations from the reading

selections that reveal the work's (poem or story) modernist
attributes. Each reading selection should be by a different
writer. Please note that the manifestos themselves do not
qualify as poetry or fiction, though it's fine to use them as part
of your discussion of modernism. You must still have three
examples that are fiction or poetry (not non-fiction prose).
"Some writers rejoiced while others lamented; some anticipated
future utopias while others believed that civilization had
collapsed; but the period's most influential voices believed that
old forms would not work for new times, and were inspired by
the possibility of creating something entirely new" (D: 6).
(Everything following this quotation will help you write your
essay.)
This quotation seems important: "At the heart of high modernist
aesthetic lay the conviction that the previously sustaining
structures of human life, whether social, political, religious, or
artistic, had been destroyed or shown up as falsehoods, or, at
best, arbitrary and fragile human constructions" (D: 14).
The section called "American Versions of Modernism" (D: 13-
16) will help you choose writers to include.
2. During the 1920's African American writers began to make
significant contributions to American literature, especially
during the Harlem Renaissance. Choose at least three poems or
stories (fiction) from this literary movement to discuss, perhaps
applying the ideas in Langston Hughes' essay The Negro Artist
and the Racial Mountain(D: 348-50) or from the discussion in
the textbook introduction. Many of the writers of the Harlem
Renaissance are also modernists, so you may wish to quote from
one or more of the modernist manifestos as well. (Note: "How It
Feels to Be Colored Me" is an essay, not a short story, so it
doesn't count as fiction, though you may use it to illustrate an
idea that does appear in fiction or poetry.)
Useful quotation from the introduction to Volume D:
The Harlem Renaissance sparked arguments between those who
wanted to claim membership in the culture at large and those
who wanted to stake out a separate artistic domain; between

those who wanted to celebrate rural African American lifeways
and those committed to urban intellectuality; between those who
wanted to join the American mainstream and those who,
disgusted by American race prejudice, aligned themselves with
worldwide revolutionary movements; between those who
celebrated a "primitive" African heritage and those who rejected
the idea as a degrading stereotype. (D: 8)
See D: 7-8 for a discussion of changes for African Americans
during this time period (the Great Migration out of the South,
the gathering of artists, musicians, and writers in Harlem in the
1920s, the publication of two major journals of opinion, The
Crisis and Opportunity).
3. In the section called "Modernism Abroad and On Native
Grounds," the editors say that "[m]any writers chose to identify
themselves with the American scene and to root their work in
specific regions" of the country (D: 17). Discuss at least three
poems or short stories (fiction) by three different authors that
chose to focus on a particular part of the United States. In your
paper, you should show how these writers combine modernism
and regionalism. Again, you may wish to use quotations from
this introductory material, but you should also use quotations
from the literature (poems or stories) themselves. (Note:
Usually "specific regions" means parts of the U. S. away from
urban literary centers--the West, Midwest, South, New England,
etc.) This section includes many examples, so you may want to
choose three of them (see D: 17).
4. Women writers also became more prominent during this time,
despite the fact that "to some extent, male modernists tried to
define their movement by defining women out of it" (1082, 6th
edition). In the 7th edition, the editors assert that "the
increasing prominence[of women writers]. . . generated a
backlash from some male modernists, who asserted their own
artistic seriousness by identifying women writers with the
didactic, popular writing against which they [male writers]
rebelled" (1189). Discuss at least three poems or short stories

by three different women writers, showing how their work fits
into the literary trends of the era. Do not use Mina Loy's
"Feminist Manifesto" as one of your choices, since it is not a
poem or short story.
See D: 7 for a discussion of changes for women.
Note: In previous semesters, several students have had to
rewrite their essays because they didn't follow instructions
regarding their choices of poetry and fiction (short stories). It's
a good idea to let me know your choices before you write the
essay so that I can help you.
A FEW WRITERS FROM VOLUME D:
AMY LOWELL (1874-1947)
The Caputured Goddess
Venus Transiens
Madonna of the Evening Flowers
September,1918
St Louis
New Heavens for old
WALLACE STEVENS (POET)
The Snow Man
A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock
Sunday Morning
Anecdote of the Jar
Peter Quince at the Clavier
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
The Idea of Order at Key West
Of Modern Poetry
The Plain Sense of Things
T.S. ELIOT (POET-SHORT POEMS ONLY)
The Hollow Men

Journey of the Magi
Four Quartets
Burnt Norton
E.E. CUMMINGS (POET)
O Sweet Spontaneous
Buffalo Bill’s
The Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
My father moved through dooms of love
Pity this busy monster, manunkind
JOHN DOS PASSOS (FICTION WRITER)
U.S.A
The Big money
Newsreal LXVIII
The camera eye (51)
ERNEST HEMINGWAY (FICTION WRITER)
The snow of kilimanjaro
THOMAS WOLFE (FICTION WRITER)
The lost Boy
JOHN STEINBECK (FICTION WRITER)
The leader of the People
Introduction to Volume D
URL:
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/naal8/section/volD/o
verview.aspx
1914-1945
Overview
The Two Wars as Historical Markers
· The two world wars (World War I, 1914–1918, and World War
II, 1939–1945) bracket a period during which the United States
became a fully modern nation. Both wars mobilized the
country’s industries and technologies, spurred their
development, and uprooted citizens.

World War I left many Americans distrustful of international
politics and committed to steering the nation back to prewar
modes of life. Many were wary of the growing influence of
socialist and Communist ideas, which they associated with labor
unions and immigrant radicals. Congress enacted sweeping
exclusionary immigration acts in 1924, radically curtailing the
flow of immigrants into the country.
· For other Americans, World War I ushered in more
progressive forms of political and social life. Women and racial
minorities gained some civil liberties and some new social
freedoms during this period, though they still faced
discrimination.
· Political, social, and cultural life in the United States was
transformed by the stock market crash of 1929, which led to an
economic depression with a 25 percent unemployment rate. This
economic catastrophe was known as the Great Depression.
· The Great Depression did not fully end until the United States
entered World War II in 1941. The war unified the country
politically and revitalized industry and employment. The United
States emerged from World War II as a major industrial and
political power.
· The literature of the modern period reflects the nation’s
attempts to come to terms with the many meanings of
modernity. Some writers celebrated modern developments while
others lamented them. Most writers believed that old literary
forms would not work for new times and were inspired by the
possibility of creating something entirely new.
· Writers of the period debated the uses of literary tradition.
Some wanted to honor traditional forms and language and to
include allusions to canonical works of the past. Others saw
such homage as imitative or old-fashioned. Still others used
literary tradition oppositionally—alluding to canonical
literature ironically or fracturing traditional literary formulas.
· Writers of the period also debated the place of popular culture
in serious literature. Some embraced popular forms while others
rejected them as cynical commercialism.

· Another issue was the question of how far literature should
engage itself in political and social struggle. Some felt that art
should participate in the politics of the time, while others
believed that art should remain a domain unto itself.
Changing Times
The 1920s saw ideological debates pitting adherents to small-
town values such as the work ethic, social conformity, duty, and
respectability against internationally minded radicals and
affluent young people who argued for more diverse, permissive,
and tolerant lifestyles.
· The social codes governing sexual behavior became less
restrictive. These social changes found their most influential
theorist in Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, inventor of the
practice of psychoanalysis and an important developer of the
concept of the “unconscious.”
· Women gained the right to vote in 1920 and found new
freedoms in educational possibilities, professional
opportunities, geographic mobility, and sexuality.
· Around 1915, as a direct result of the industrial needs of
World War I, job opportunities opened up for African
Americans in the factories of the North. Many left the South for
Northern cities in what came to be known as the “Great
Migration.”
· Even though African Americans faced racism, segregation, and
racial violence in the North, a black American presence soon
became powerfully visible in urban cultural life. The Harlem
Renaissance—an outpouring of innovative cultural production
by African Americans centered in Harlem, a neighborhood of
New York City—was one manifestation of this development.
· Class inequality generated intellectual and artistic debate
during the modern period. Following the rise of the Soviet
Union, the American left increasingly drew its intellectual and
political program from the tenets of German philosopher Karl
Marx, who located the roots of human behavior in economics
and believed that industrialized societies were divided by an
antagonistic relationship between capital and labor.

· Americans who thought of themselves as Marxists in the 1920s
and 1930s were usually subjected to government surveillance,
suspicion, and occasionally violence.
Science and Technology
· Access to electricity, and to modern appliances designed to
make communication and domestic work more efficient,
expanded dramatically in American homes during the interwar
years.
· Devices for recording and playing music, the radio, and
motion pictures brought mass popular culture into being.
· Automobiles became affordable for more Americans and
transformed ordinary people’s mobility, the structure of
American industry, and national topography.
· Scientists during the interwar period made important
discoveries about the size and shape of the universe, as well as
the nature of time and space. The increased specialization of
science as a discipline sometimes made these discoveries
difficult for ordinary people to understand and led to rifts
between literary intellectuals and scientists.
The 1930s
· The Great Depression was not limited to the United States but
was a worldwide phenomenon. It fostered social unrest that led
to the rise of fascist dictatorships in Europe.
· Many Americans began to question the efficacy and justice of
free-enterprise capitalism.
· Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in 1932 and instituted
a “New Deal” designed to combat the Depression. He
inaugurated liberal reforms such as social security, job creation
acts, welfare, and unemployment insurance.
· The dire economic situation in the United States produced a
significant increase in Communist party membership among
Americans during the 1930s. Many supporters of Communism
later felt disillusioned and betrayed by the brutality of Soviet
Communism under Josef Stalin. Some of these left-wing
activists became staunch anti-Communists after World War II.
American Versions of Modernism

· In literary contexts, the term “modernism” is a catchall for any
kind of literary production in the interwar period that dealt with
the modern world.
· Literary critics often designate as “high modernism” work that
represents the transformation of traditional society under the
pressures of modernity and that breaks down traditional literary
forms in doing so. Many high modernist texts interpret
modernity as an experience of loss and represent the modern
world as a scene of ruin.
· As a movement, modernism involved many art forms and
media, including sculpture, painting, dance, and music, as well
as literature.
· High modernist works are characterized by their construction
out of fragments—fragments of myth or history, fragments of
experience or perception, fragments of previous artistic work.
For the modern artist or writer, the political, social, and
aesthetic structures that had organized human experience
previously no longer seemed viable in the modern world. Order,
sequence, and unity did not seem to them to convey reality.
Instead, they emphasized discontinuity, discordance, and
fragmentation as more representative of the modern experience.
· Modernist literature often conveys fragmentation through
abrupt shifts in perspective, voice, and tone and through a
reliance on sometimes obscure symbols and images rather than
clear statements of meaning.
· Some modernist literature draws on structures and fragments
borrowed from earlier world literature, mythologies, and
religions. For some writers, these references to earlier texts
expressed profound truths. Other writers alluded to literary
traditions ironically.
· Many modernist works are self-reflexive, or concerned with
their own nature as art. In this way, they foreground the search
for meaning and query the role of art and the perception of art
in the production of meaning.
· Faced with making sense of fragments and intuiting
connections left unstated, the reader of a modernist work is

often said to participate in the creative work of making the
poem or story.
· Despite their concern with involving the reader in the
production of meaning, modernist literature reached only a
limited audience. Many readers found it difficult to understand
the meaning of these texts’ fragmentation and to parse their
often obscure allusions to other texts or traditions.
· Some major publishers sought out the works of modernist
writers to publish alongside more conventional bestsellers.
Many more modernist writers found publication in the so-called
“little magazines,” which were magazines with very small
circulations. The number of little magazines in the period was
in the hundreds.
Modernism Abroad and on Native Grounds
· High modernism was a self-consciously international
movement, and many of its leading American exponents lived as
permanent or temporary expatriates in Europe. Gertrude Stein,
Ezra Pound, H. D., and T. S. Eliot all left the United States
permanently, while Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, Claude McKay, Katherine Anne Porter, Nella
Larsen, Robert Frost, and Eugene O’Neill, among others, spent
significant periods of time abroad.
· Modernist writers claimed to find climates more hospitable to
artistic achievement and high culture in Europe, though they
seldom thought of themselves as deserting their nation. Instead,
they believed they were bringing the United States into the
larger context of European culture. Many continued to write
works that were overtly “American” in theme.
· Regionalism continued to be an important force in American
literature. An especially strong center of regional literary
activity emerged in the South.
· The history of race in the United States was central to the
specifically national subject matter to which many American
modernists remained committed.
· The Harlem Renaissance brought African American writers
like Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston

into particular prominence.
· Women writers faced a backlash after their prominence in the
nineteenth century. Some male modernist writers asserted their
own seriousness by identifying women writers with the didactic,
popular writing against which they rebelled. But women still
emerged who associated themselves with the important literary
trends of the era. Many of these writers concentrated on
depictions of women characters or women’s thoughts and
experiences, yet few labeled themselves feminists.
Drama
· Although theatrical productions had been a part of American
life since the eighteenth century, drama only emerged as a
branch of contemporary literature—rather than a stepchild of
popular entertainment—between 1910 and the latter part of the
1920s. It was at this point that drama began to conceive of itself
as a literary form.
· Innovations in American theater are often launched in reaction
against the popular productions mounted on Broadway.
Playwrights Susan Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill were launched
off Broadway.
· Musical comedy emerged as a distinctively American dramatic
form in the interwar period.
· During the Depression, social criticism became an important
dramatic theme, with political plays performed by many radical
groups.
EXTRA TO HELP:
(STORIES I DID NOT USE YET)
Question 1
F.T. Marinetti:
From Manifesto of Futurism
Willa Cather:
From The Novel De’meuble’

Langston Hughes:
From The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain
Question 2
HARLEM RENAISSANCE
Claude McKay:
The Harlem Dancer
The Lynching
Africa
America
Zora Neale Hurston:
The Eatonville Anthology
The Gilded Six-Bits
Jean Toomer:
Cane
Fern
Portait in Georgia
Blood-Burning moon
Langston Hughes:
Mulatto
Words like Freedom
Silhouette
I,To
Vagabonds
Sterling Brown:
He Was a Man
Master and Man
Break of Day
Countee Cullen:
Heritage

Uncle Jim
Question 4
Sherwood Anderson:
Mother
Adventure
Katherine Anne Porter:
Flowering Judas
Marianna Moore:
To a Snail,
What are Years?
The Paper Nautilus
Ezra Pound:
A Virginal
The Cantos
To Whistler American
Portrait d’une Femme

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