overview , part 2.

 The large cultural wave of Modernism, which gradually emerged in Europe and the United States in the early years of the 20th century, expressed a sense of modern life through art as a sharp break from the past, as well as from Western civilization's classical traditions. Modern life seemed radically different from traditional life -- more scientific, faster, more technological, and more mechanized. Modernism embraced these changes. In literature, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) developed an analogue to modern art. A resident of Paris and an art collector (she and her brother Leo purchased works of the artists Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Pablo Picasso, and many others), Stein once explained that she and Picasso were doing the same thing, he in art and she in writing. Using simple, concrete words as counters, she developed an abstract, experimental prose poetry. The childlike quality of Stein's simple vocabulary recalls the bright, primary colors of modern art, while her repetitions echo the repeated shapes of abstract visual compositions. By dislocating grammar and punctuation, she achieved new "abstract" meanings as in her influential collection Tender Buttons (1914), which views objects from different angles, as in a cubist painting: A Table A Table means does it not my dear it means a whole steadiness. Is it likely that a change. A table means more than a glass even a looking glass is tall.Meaning, in Stein's work, was often subordinated to technique, just as subject was less important than shape in abstract visual art. Subject and technique became inseparable in both the visual and literary art of the period. The idea of form as the equivalent of content, a cornerstone of post-World War II art and literature, crystallized in this period. Technological innovation in the world of factories and machines inspired new attentiveness to technique in the arts. To take one example: Light, particularly electrical light, fascinated modern artists and writers. Posters and advertisements of the period are full of images of floodlit skyscrapers and light rays shooting out from automobile headlights, moviehouses, and watchtowers to illumine a forbidding outer darkness suggesting ignorance and old-fashioned tradition. Photography began to assume the status of a fine art allied with the latest scientific developments. The photographer Alfred Stieglitz opened a salon in New York City, and by 1908 he was showing the latest European works, including pieces by Picasso and other European friends of Gertrude Stein. Stieglitz's salon influenced numerous writers and artists, including William Carlos Williams, who was one of the most influential American poets of the 20th century. Williams cultivated a photographic clarity of image; his aesthetic dictum was "no ideas but in things." Vision and viewpoint became an essential aspect of the modernist novel as well. No longer was it sufficient to write a straightforward third-person narrative or (worse yet) use a pointlessly intrusive narrator. The way the story was told became as important as the story itself. Henry James, William Faulkner, and many other American writers experimented with fictional points of view (some are still doing so). James often restricted the information in the novel to what a single character would have known. Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury (1929) breaks up the narrative into four sections, each giving the viewpoint of a different character (including a mentally retarded boy). To analyze such modernist novels and poetry, a school of "new criticism" arose in the United States, with a new critical vocabulary. New critics hunted the "epiphany" (moment in which a character suddenly sees the transcendent truth of a situation, a term derived from a holy saint's appearance to mortals); they "examined" and "clarified" a work, hoping to "shed light" upon it through their "insights."

an overview , part 1.

Many historians have characterized the period between the two world wars as the United States' traumatic "coming of age," despite the fact that U.S. direct involvement was relatively brief (1917-1918) and its casualties many fewer than those of its European allies and foes. John Dos Passos expressed America's postwar disillusionment in the novel Three Soldiers(1921), when he noted that civilization was a "vast edifice of sham, and the war, instead of its crumbling, was its fullest and most ultimate expression." Shocked and permanently changed, Americans returned to their homeland but could never regain their innocence. Nor could soldiers from rural America easily return to their roots. After experiencing the world, many now yearned for a modern, urban life. New farm machines such as planters, harvesters, and binders had drastically reduced the demand for farm jobs; yet despite their increased productivity, farmers were poor. Crop prices, like urban workers' wages, depended on unrestrained market forces heavily influenced by business interests: Government subsidies for farmers and effective workers' unions had not yet become established. "The chief business of the American people is business," President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed in 1925, and most agreed. In the postwar "Big Boom," business flourished, and the successful prospered beyond their wildest dreams. For the first time, many Americans enrolled in higher education -- in the 1920s college enrollment doubled. The middle-class prospered; Americans began to enjoy the world s highest national average income in this era, and many people purchased the ultimate status symbol -- an automobile. The typical urban American home glowed with electric lights and boasted a radio that connected the house with the outside world, and perhaps a telephone, a camera, a typewriter, or a sewing machine. Like the businessman protagonist of Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbitt (1922), the average American approved of these machines because they were modern and because most were American inventions and American-made. Americans of the "Roaring Twenties" fell in love with other modern entertainments. Most people went to the movies once a week. Although Prohibition -- a nationwide ban on the production, transport, and sale of alcohol instituted through the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution -- began in 1919, underground "speakeasies" and nightclubs proliferated, featuring jazz music, cocktails, and daring modes of dress and dance. Dancing, moviegoing, automobile touring, and radio were national crazes. American women, in particular, felt liberated. Many had left farms and villages for homefront duty in American cities during World War I, and had become resolutely modern. They cut their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short "flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1920. They boldly spoke their mind and took public roles in society. Western youths were rebelling, angry and disillusioned with the savage war, the older generation they held responsible, and difficult postwar economic conditions that, ironically, allowed Americans with dollars -- like writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound -- to live abroad handsomely on very little money. Intellectual currents, particularly Freudian psychology and to a lesser extent Marxism (like the earlier Darwinian theory of evolution), implied a "godless" world view and contributed to the breakdown of traditional values. Americans abroad absorbed these views and brought them back to the United States where they took root, firing the imagination of young writers and artists. William Faulkner, for example, a 20th-century American novelist, employed Freudian elements in all his works, as did virtually all serious American fiction writers after World War I. Despite outward gaiety, modernity, and unparalleled material prosperity, young Americans of the 1920s were "the lost generation" -- so named by literary portraitist Gertrude Stein. Without a stable, traditional structure of values, the individual lost a sense of identity. The secure, supportive family life; the familiar, settled community; the natural and eternal rhythms of nature that guide the planting and harvesting on a farm; the sustaining sense of patriotism; moral values inculcated by religious beliefs and observations -- all seemed undermined by World War I and its aftermath. Numerous novels, notably Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) and Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise (1920), evoke the extravagance and disillusionment of the lost generation. In T.S. Eliot's influential long poem The Waste Land (1922), Western civilization is symbolized by a bleak desert in desperate need of rain (spiritual renewal). The world depression of the 1930s affected most of the population of the United States. Workers lost their jobs, and factories shut down; businesses and banks failed; farmers, unable to harvest, transport, or sell their crops, could not pay their debts and lost their farms. Midwestern droughts turned the "breadbasket" of America into a dust bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for California in search of jobs, as vividly described in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939). At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens, shanty towns, and armies of hobos -- unemployed men illegally riding freight trains -- became part of national life. Many saw the Depression as a punishment for sins of excessive materialism and loose living. The dust storms that blackened the midwestern sky, they believed, constituted an Old Testament judgment: the "whirlwind by day and the darkness at noon." The Depression turned the world upside down. The United States had preached a gospel of business in the 1920s; now, many Americans supported a more active role for government in the New Deal programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Federal money created jobs in public works, conservation, and rural electrification. Artists and intellectuals were paid to create murals and state handbooks. These remedies helped, but only the industrial build-up of World War II renewed prosperity. After Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, disused shipyards and factories came to bustling life mass- producing ships, airplanes, jeeps, and supplies. War production and experimentation led to new technologies, including the nuclear bomb. Witnessing the first experimental nuclear blast, Robert Oppenheimer, leader of an international team of nuclear scientists, prophetically quoted a Hindu poem: "I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds."

modern connect.

here are the links provided for you to get more of an understanding about modernism and the inspirations behind it.




american literature :site 1.


american modernity:site 2.


this is a video that tells a little bit about modernism and the orgins of it.


hope you enjoy.




-the MS team.

modernism.

what is modernism ? we've told you many times here,but it is something you can never learn too much about,in order to grasp and understand the literature and concepts you have to analyze and understand the broadness of the writing,art,and poetry. it captivates us and makes us think. So for you to think , here are a few links located in the post above for you to enjoy.We hope you will appericate modernist culture as much as we do.






-the MS team.

modern literature , a background story.

Modernist literature is an opening up of the world in all of its forms - theoretically, philosophically, aesthetically, and politically. Before Modernism, the world was thought of in a Realist's fashion - an image in reading of which projects the world in an objective fashion.

Modernist writing, however, takes the reader into a world of unfamiliarity, a deep introspection, a cognitive thought-provoking experience, skepticism of religion, and openness to culture, technology, and innovation. 

the belief in a cyclical time also brings about free will and a cognitive exploration of the subconscious because the reader can climb inside the mind, away from the body and feel free to explore the inner working of one's mind and one's subconscious.

Modernist literature brought about openness in the ways in which authors wrote novel, poetry, and short story.

Politically, Modernist literature questioned and brought to life the changes within society. Life, in the nineteenth-century, took a shift from the country to the city, from the individuality in production to mass production, and from land to factory.

There was a permanent revolutionary shift in development, creation, and the belief in life. With the views of Carl Marx, a shift from capitalism began to take place. Because of the social and economic shifts which took place during this time - electronics, machinery, mass commodity - capitalism and the rise of the bourgeoisie eradicated feudalism and brought momentous forms of communication, transportation, and production. 

Modernist literature encompasses the thematic fingerprints of a rebellious, questioning, disbelieving, meditative, and confident type of form, which was conceived out of a change in the belief of humanity, the mind, a God, and the self brought on by the shift from capitalism to an ever-increasing society of revolutionary changes. 








-the MS team.

conversations,modernly.

today at MS we sat down with poet William Carlos Williams poet who is a physician as well.
we got to speak with him briefly about his life and his works.


a little overview of Williams , 
williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, a community near the city of Paterson.His father, William George Williams was an immigrant, and his mother, Raquel Monsantos was born in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. He attended a public school in Rutherford until 1896, then was sent to study at Château de Lancy near Geneva, Switzerland, the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, France, for two years and Horace Mann School in New York City.in 1906  he spent the next four years in internships in New York City and in travel and postgraduate studies abroad  at the University of Leipzig where he studied pediatrics.






MS: hello Dr.Williams , how are you today?


Williams:quite fine,thank you.


MS:what started your passion for poetry being that you are in the medical field?


Williams:well i am friends with various artists,authors,and poets through them i learned and understood the true passion of poetry.


MS:interesting.what was your first peice of work and do you remember?


Williams:of course! what writer or anyone in their respectful field of work forget their first time doing something that they learn or studied and loved to do, it was called "Between Walls" I beileve published in 1916.the poem was connected to my work in the hospital and described it in a somewhat vague way. i tried to be as simple but thought provoking as possible since it was my first peice of work.


MS:that is great,the poem here is a team favorite.Do you consider yourself a modernist poet or somewhat of a realist ?


Williams:I beileve you can say that, I try to connect my life experiences to my poems to make them as real for when you read them you can also imagine and realize. I want my readers to know that I do not write simply because I can but , because I love to do it.


MS:We also understand that you wrote a host of short stories , plays and autobiographies etcetera.How did you find time to juggle two extremely demanding careers?


Williams:yes,that is correct. I don't always consider my careers as jobs, its what i do on my spare time,both the medical and writing side. I do not think that I would eventually choose one over the other because they both satisify me.


MS:Are you a big fan of the literature used in other modernist works?




Williams: I wouldn't exactly call myself a big fan,but i do not use it in my work, as far as the classical examples and usage of foreign languages.I use what I call "The Local" meaning that I use and cite examples from the things happening and evolving around me. I dont want to define myself as a classical writer,I feel that i am a more timeless write , not to boast or brag , but i do want my work to be remembered for years to come.




MS:very well, did you beileve that you would garner the success that you did for the "The Red Wheelbarrow"?


Williams:Well, i did have a bit of faith , but you can never be too sure about how someone else views your work from their point of view. I wanted to write about the current times and connect my writings as a purely American experience. I do not like to write about the same thing , time and time again. its okay to change up sometimes.




MS:How do you use your experiences to help connect to the young writers you mentored and possibly others you may have influence that you haven't tutored ?


Williams:I Encouraged them to be as real as possible and write what they felt and connect to soicety and life and what they do. I don't always approve of the forms that some might write in, but I do beileve that every has a voice and want to persue a career in writing. its a truly beautiful thing.




MS:that it is , thank you Mr.Williams for allowing us a peice of your valued time to sit down and talk with us and it is greatly appericated and we here at MS wish success with the continuation of your careers.




Williams:Thank you for asking me too,and same to you as well. keep on writing !






there you have it modernists,one of the greats.
we hoped you have enjoyed reading the interview and if you want to know more about William Carlos Williams click on the link below.


click here.


enjoy.


-the MS team.

black was modern too.

the black arts movement was a cutural moment that was a synonym to modernism. both inherently and overtly political in content, the Black Arts movement was the only American literary movement to advance "social engagement" as a sine qua non of its aesthetic. The movement broke from the immediate past of protest and petition (civil rights) literature and dashed forward toward an alternative that initially seemed unthinkable and unobtainable: Black Power.

Although the movement was a cry for blacks to move ahead in American society , it also allowed a gateway for writers of color to become nationally recongized for their works and as well gave them a forum to the world to understand the struggles of the 1960s from before. 

The movement spawned writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, LeRoi Jones,Nikki Giovanni,etc. the culture itself was a birthchild of the modernist genre and how vivid,boldly,and captivating the authors and poets wrote and how they felt.

Modernism was exactly that, it is a movement of free-thinking,new ideas,and freshly written theories.

The Black Arts movement was exactly that ,

here are a few excerpts to understand only a glimpse of what it was all about.

We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks

"We real cool. We

Left School. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon."

Knoxville Tennessee by Nikki Giovanni

"I always like summer
Best
you can eat fresh corn
From daddy's garden
And okra
And greens
And cabbage
And lots of
Barbeque
And buttermilk
And homemade ice-cream
At the church picnic
And listen to
Gospel music
Outside
At the church
Homecoming
And go to the mountains with
Your grandmother
And go barefooted
And be warm
All the time
Not only when you go to bed
And sleep"

and if you want to look at more about black arts heres a link for you to enjoy.

click here.

-the MS team.