2130_American Lit Module 2 _Introduction
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American Lit between 1914 - 1945. Understanding the times when this literature was written will help you understand the WHY of the literature. Source: American Literature Anthology
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2130_American Lit Module 2 _Introduction
- 2. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company • The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1920) • The Immigration Act of 1924 • The Great Migration (c. 1910–1930) • The first Red scare (1919–1920) • The stock market crash (1929) • The Great Depression (c. 1929–1939) The Two Wars as Historical Markers
- 3. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company • “The two wars . . . bracket a period during which the United States became a fully modern nation” (NAAL 6). • Literary modernism – tradition vs. innovation – serious vs. popular literature – politics vs. aesthetics The Two Wars as Historical Markers
- 4. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Changing Times
- 5. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Changing Times
- 6. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Changing Times
- 7. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Changing Times
- 8. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Changing Times
- 9. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Changing Times
- 10. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Changing Times
- 11. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Changing Times
- 12. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Changing Times
- 13. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Changing Times
- 14. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Science and Technology
- 15. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company The 1930s
- 16. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company The 1930s
- 17. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company The 1930s
- 18. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company The 1930s
- 19. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company The 1930s
- 20. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company The 1930s
- 21. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company • “Modernism” refers to artistic works that – represent the transformation of traditional society under the pressures of modernity – break down traditional literary forms – depict the modern world not as a triumph of human civilization but as an experience of loss – call into question the religious, political, social, and artistic conventions of the past – interpret the world as disparate fragments rather than an integrated whole Literary and Artistic Modernism
- 22. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Literary and Artistic Modernism
- 23. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Literary and Artistic Modernism
- 24. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Literary and Artistic Modernism
- 25. Visit the StudySpace at: http://wwnorton.com/studyspace For more learning resources, please visit the StudySpace site for The Norton Anthology of American Literature. This concludes the Lecture PowerPoint presentation for American Literature 1914–1945 An Introduction
Editor's Notes
- During the period of literary history that falls between 1914 (the beginning of World War I) and 1945 (the end of World War II), the United States grew and changed in radical ways. U.S. participation in World War I signaled a massive development in foreign policy and integrated the United States into the world of international politics more than ever before. The aftermath of the war also had a major impact on domestic affairs. For example, American women’s efforts to win the right to vote—which came in 1920 with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution—were “given a final push by women’s work as nurses and ambulance drivers during the war” (NAAL 4). But even though (or perhaps because) World War I had made the United States a major player on the world scene, in 1924 a draconian immigration law was passed that “prohibited all Asian immigration and set quotas for other countries on the basis of their existing U.S. immigrant populations, intending thereby to control the ethnic makeup of the United States” (NAAL 4). During the same period, the American landscape was transformed by the internal migration of two million African Americans from the rural South to urban centers in the Northeast, West, and Midwest. Another aftereffect of the war that was both international and domestic in nature is the rise of the international Communist movement. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the birth of the Soviet Union, American leftists looked to socialism and communism as models for the labor movement in the United States. Many Americans were intensely suspicious of European-style socialism, and the first Red scare of the twentieth century took place during this time, a generation earlier than the McCarthyism that took hold following World War II. The stock market crash of 1929 and the decade-long Great Depression that followed it were also events both international and domestic in scope: As unemployment in the United States reached a high of twenty-five percent during the Depression years, international trade dropped off by fifty percent.
- All of the various changes and developments that took place in the United States between the two world wars are evidence of “the irreversible advent of modernity” (NAAL 6). The aspects of social and political modernity that are laid out in the previous slide have their counterpart in literary modernism, which is better defined as a series of conflicts rather than as a homogeneous set of characteristics. “One conflict centered on the uses of literary tradition. To some, a work registering its allegiance to literary history—through allusion to canonical works of the past or by using traditional poetic forms and poetic language—seemed imitative and old-fashioned. To others, a work failing to honor literary tradition was bad or incompetent writing . . . A related conflict involved the place of popular culture in serious literature. Throughout the era, popular culture gained momentum and influence. Some writers regarded it as crucial for the future of literature that popular forms, such as film and jazz, be embraced; to others, serious literature by definition had to reject what they saw as the cynical commercialism of popular culture . . . Another issue was the question of how far literature should engage itself in political and social struggle. Should art be a domain unto itself, exploring aesthetic questions and enunciating transcendent truths, or should art participate in the politics of the times?” (NAAL 6).
- Thomas Hart Benton’s 1931 painting City Activities with Subway provides a great shorthand for understanding the radical social changes that took place during the interwar period. Discuss with your students what they see in this painting that reflects these changes (for example, the urbanization of America, greater independence and sexual freedom for women, advances in technology, and so on). As explained in the “Changing Times” section of the volume introduction—and in the following slides—three of these major changes are in the areas of gender and sexuality, race, and class.
- Suffragists Audre Osborne and Mrs. James Stevens. As mentioned earlier, the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution officially gave women the right to vote. Unofficially, the amendment also opened up new arenas for women to explore—politically, sexually, artistically, and socially.
- December 11, 1926, Chicago, Illinois. These two young women illustrate the era's penchant for both fun and recklessness by doing the Charleston on a rooftop ledge at Chicago's Sherman Hotel. Their playful posturing also bespeaks the risks that women were taking in an era of greater opportunity.
- 1920s, Greenwich Village, New York. A young woman hangs a poster to advertise the Greenwich Village Halloween Ball, at which Paul Whiteman (the “King of Jazz”) is to perform. Like the previous photograph, this image captures the newfound sense of freedom and possibility that many women were experiencing following the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
- An audience at Harlem's Cotton Club, a popular nightclub, watches a performance. April 18, 1934. The increasing mainstream popularity of African American artists, writers, and performers in cities like Chicago and New York during the interwar period is a complex phenomenon to account for, stemming from a movement toward racial equality on the one hand and an escalation in racially motivated violence that contributed to the Great Migration of two million African Americans from the South on the other.
- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, The Bement Miles Pond Company. A general view of the plant and some of its workers. “Class inequality, as well as American racial divisions, continued to generate intellectual and artistic debate in the interwar years. The nineteenth-century United States had been host to many radical movements—labor activism, utopianism, socialism, anarchism—inspired by diverse sources. In the twentieth century, especially following the rise of the Soviet Union, the American left increasingly drew its intellectual and political program from the Marxist tradition” (NAAL 8).
- The Industrial Workers of the World attracted working-class men and women frustrated with low wages and long hours. It also attracted writers, artists, and intellectuals who were sympathetic to socialist movements across the world.
- Gastonia, North Carolina, April 5, 1929. This photo shows a group of female textile strikers attempting to disarm a National Guard trooper, who had been ordered to the Loray Mills in an effort to stop the serious rioting that took place following the strike. As evidenced in this photograph, labor struggles often turned violent, with strikebreakers (both military and civilian) brought in to end labor protests and return disgruntled workers to their jobs.
- The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, (1931–32). By Ben Shahn. “A defining conflict between American ideals and American realities for writers of the 1920s was the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian immigrants, not Communists but avowed anarchists; on April 15, 1920, they were arrested near Boston after a murder during a robbery. They were accused of that crime, then tried and condemned to death in 1921; but it was widely believed that they had not received a fair trial and that their political beliefs had been held against them. After a number of appeals, they were executed in 1927, maintaining their innocence to the end. John Dos Passos and Katherine Anne Porter were among the many writers and intellectuals who demonstrated in their defense; several were arrested and jailed. It is estimated that well over a hundred poems . . . along with six plays and eight novels of the time treated the incident from a sympathetic perspective” (NAAL 9).
- July 26, 1937, New York. “There she is, boys . . .” Attorney Samuel Leibowitz points out the Statue of Liberty to the four freed Scottsboro boys, shortly after their arrival in New York City from Decatur, Alabama. “Like the Sacco-Vanzetti case in the 1920s, the Scottsboro case in the 1930s brought many American writers and intellectuals, black and white, together in a cause—here, the struggle against racial bias in the justice system. In 1931, nine black youths were indicted in Scottsboro, Alabama, for the alleged rape of two white women in a railroad freight car. They were all found guilty, and some were sentenced to death. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed convictions twice; in a second trial one of the alleged victims retracted her testimony; in 1937, charges against five of the youths were dropped. But four went to jail, in many people’s view unfairly. American Communists were especially active in the Scottsboro defense; but people across the political spectrum saw the case as crucial to the question of whether black people could receive fair trials in the American South” (NAAL 9).
- Ford Adds to Your Pleasure. Poster ca. 1920. “Technology played a vital, although often invisible, role in all these events, because it linked places and spaces, contributing to the shaping of culture as a national phenomenon rather than a series of local manifestations . . . The most powerful technological innovation [was] the automobile . . . Automobiles put Americans on the road, dramatically reshaped the structure of American industry and occupations, and altered the national topography as well. Along with work in automobile factories themselves, millions of other jobs— in steel mills, parts factories, highway construction and maintenance, gas stations, machine shops, roadside restaurants, motels—depended on the industry. The road itself became—and has remained—a key powerful symbol of the United States and of modernity as well. Cities grew, suburbs came into being, small towns died, new towns arose according to the placement of highways, which rapidly supplanted the railroad in shaping the patterns of twentieth-century American urban expansion. The United States had become a nation of migrants as much as or more than it was a nation of immigrants” (NAAL 10).
- Brokers line up to throw themselves out of the window after the stock market crash of October 1929. Contemporary American cartoon. One of the defining features of the interwar period is the stock market crash of 1929 and the resulting depression. “The suicides of millionaire bankers and stockbrokers”—parodied in this cartoon—“made the headlines, but more compelling was the enormous toll among ordinary people who lost homes, jobs, farms, and life savings in the stock market crash. Conservatives advised waiting until things got better; radicals espoused immediate social revolution” (NAAL 11).
- These depression-era shacks in an undated photograph by Philip Gendreau fill the abandoned land in the old Central Park reservoir of New York City. Homeless squatters hit hard by the depression had few housing choices. Notice the opulent apartment buildings in the background. The contrast between wealth and poverty in New York City, and elsewhere, is underscored in this photograph.
- November 16, 1930, Chicago. Notorious gangster Al Capone attempts to help unemployed men with his soup kitchen “Big Al's Kitchen for the Needy.” The kitchen provides three meals a day consisting of soup with meat, bread, coffee, and doughnuts, feeding about 3,500 people daily at a cost of $300 per day. Such social “safety nets” became increasingly important during the Great Depression.
- A man walks past a farmhouse in a dust storm at the height of the Dust Bowl. Ca. 1937.
- Migrant family walking on the highway from Idabel, Oklahoma to Krebs, Oklahoma. Photo by Dorothea Lange, 1938.
- One social safety net was the Civilian Conservation Corps, a public works project funded by the federal government that employed out-of-work Americans to rebuild the national infrastructure. Pictured here is the Roscommon Branch Station, Michigan, October 10, 1934.
- This list of the features of modern art and literature is neither exhaustive nor entirely coherent, but it’s a good place to start differentiating between the modernist literature of the twentieth century and the realism/naturalism of the late-nineteenth century. Not every work of modernist art or literature displays all of these qualities, and some work emphasizes one aspect more than the others. The works of art featured in the following slides provide a starting point for discussing the nature of modernism.
- Georges Braque’s Still Life With Guitar (ca. 1918–19) provides a great opportunity for talking about modernist fragmentation. Where is the guitar in this still life? Why does Braque opt to “take apart” a guitar and represent its scattered fragments rather than depict it as a unified whole? How does it force us to think about the guitar differently by viewing it in fragments?
- Pablo Picasso’s 1937 painting Weeping Woman is a prime example of Cubist art. Discuss with your students how Picasso has broken down the image of the woman into various fragments from different perspectives (for example, the left eye is from three-quarter view and the right eye is viewed straight on, while the mouth is in profile) and then reassembled those fragments. Why does Picasso do this? How is he forcing us to see this woman anew? How does this new vision of a typical subject—a portrait of a woman—reflect the concerns of modernism described on the earlier slide?
- Wassily Kandinsky’s In Blue (1925) takes modernist aesthetics even further than the Braque and Picasso paintings in the previous two slides. In his effort to break down the world into fragments, has Kandinsky completely removed all reference to the natural world? Can your students identify any recognizable images (the sun? a mountain? a tower?), or is it all a mass of shapes? What is Kandinsky trying to achieve with this radical conception of the world as (nonrepresentational?) fragmentary shapes?