Literary Modernism was a response to a "sense of social breakdown (reaction to WWI);

- the world was perceived as "fragmented : out of fragments, life was fragmented;
the point of view was remote/detached from the subject
the poetry was very allusive
authors/artists wondered about the role of literature, poetry, art,
Some characteristics found in literary works:

Alienation from society and loneliness Fear of death and the appearance of death
Procrastination/An inability to act Inability to feel or express love
Agonized recollection of the past Man creating his own myths within his mind to fall back upon

Formal features of narrative:

Experimental nature
Lack of traditional chronological narrative (discontinuous narrative)
Break from traditional forms (fragmentation)
Moving from one level of the narrative to another
A number of different narrators (multiple narrative points of view)
Self-reflexive about the act of writing and the nature of literature
(meta-narrative)
Use of interior monologue technique
Use of the stream-of-consciousness technique
Focus on a characters consciousness and subconscious

Major themes:
violence and alienation - rejection of history
- historical discontinuity - race relations
- decadence and decay - unavoidable change
- loss and despair - sense of place, local color

I. The Lost Generation

Paris still maintained its reputation as the capital of bohemian culture.

=> famous for its philosophical intrigues and artistic inspiration, its avant-garde tastes and flamboyant personalities. During the inter-war period
Montparnasse became the center of the citys artistic community, its bars and cafs resounding to the pulse of hot jazz music and intellectual debate.
=> different from the austere materialism of American cities (mainly New York and Chicago),
=> The Parisian cultural scene was more permissive of literature which confronted established mores and codes of behavior;
The lost generation
= > group of U.S. writers who established their literary reputations in the 1920s. The term stems from a remark made by Gertrude Stein to Ernest
Hemingway, You are all a lost generation.
=> characterized by doomed youth, hedonism, uncompromising creativity, and woundedboth literally and metaphoricallyby the experience of war.
=>lost in the sense that its inherited values were no longer relevant in the postwar world and because of its spiritual alienation from a United States that
seemed to its members to be hopelessly provincial, materialistic, and emotionally barren.

Ernest Hemingway
- born Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago. He graduated from high school and worked as a reporter for the Kansas City Star.
- served as a volunteer ambulance driver for the Italian Red Cross during World War I.
- Hemingway began working for the Toronto Star; he became the European correspondent and moved to Paris. There, he became friends with the poet Ezra Pound,
the writer Gertrude Stein,
- reputation began to grow both as a journalist and as an author of fiction. His novel The Sun Also Rises, published in1926, established him as one of the preeminent
writers of his day.
- traveled to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance. His novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, based on his experiences in Spain,
it is the story of Robert Jordan, an American volunteer who is sent to join a guerrilla band => dialogue, flashbacks, and stories, the cruelty and inhumanity stirred up by
the civil war.
- received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Old Man and the Sea (1952), awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.
- his characters plainly embody his own values and view of life. The main characters of The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls are
young men whose strength and self-confidence nevertheless coexist with a sensitivity that leaves them deeply scarred by their wartime experiences.
- War a symbol of the world, complex, filled with moral ambiguities, and offering almost unavoidable pain, hurt, and destruction. To survive in such a world, and
perhaps emerge victorious,=> the Hemingway code.=> honor, courage, endurance, and dignity,.
- STYLE:
=> prose extremely spare, succinct, and very direct
=> his speakers tend to give the impression that they are leaving a tremendous amount unsaid. =>Wished to strip his own use of language of
inessentials, ridding it of all traces of verbosity, embellishment, and sentimentality.
=> as objective and honest as possible -> describing using short, simple sentences from which all comment or emotion has been eliminated. These
sentences are composed largely of nouns and verbs, have few adjectives and adverbs, and rely on repetition and rhythm for much of their effect.
=> The resulting concise, concentrated prose ,unemotional -> conveying great irony through understatement.
The Sun Also Rises
The novel portrays the lives of the members of the so-called Lost Generation, a group of men and women whose early adulthood was consumed by World War I.
The Great War set new standards for death and immorality in war, and it shattered many peoples beliefs in the traditional values of love, faith, and manhood. Without
these long-held notions to rely on, members of the generation that fought and worked in the war suffered great moral and psychological aimlessness. The futile search
for meaning in the wake of the Great War shapes The Sun Also Rises. Although World War I is seldom mentioned in the novel, it hangs like a shadow over its
characters. Jake Barnes and his friends and acquaintances believe in very little; they are always restless, always wandering, looking for a constant change of scenery,
as if looking for an escape. There is a sense that Jake and his generation don't belong anywhere.
Major Themes in The Sun Also Rises
The Aimlessness of the Lost Generation
No longer able to rely on the traditional beliefs that gave life meaning, the men and women who experienced the war became psychologically and morally
lost, and they wandered aimlessly in a world that appeared meaningless.
Male Insecurity
World War I forced a radical reevaluation of what it meant to be masculine. The prewar ideal of the brave, stoic soldier had little relevance in the context of
the brutal trench warfare of the war. Survival depended far more upon luck than upon bravery. Traditional notions of what it meant to be a man were thus
undermined by the realities of the war.

John Dos Passos

- reputation rests primarily on his trilogy U.S.A.
- early works were portraits of the artist drawing back from the shock of his encounter with a brutal world; among these was the bitter antiwar novel Three Soldiers
(1921).
- Gradually, his early subjectivism was subordinated to a larger and tougher objective realism.
Manhattan Transfer (1925):
- paints a panorama of the entirety of New York City, captures the rhythm of the Jazz Age.
- the narrative is fragmented , interspersed with newspaper headlines and song lyrics and aesthetic vignettes.
- no single dominant character; the characters sparkling with hope in one scene quickly lose their luster in anotherthe city always wins.
- the city is viewed as a deconstructed totality, fragmented into various angles and vantage points, like a film. The writers reliance on visual imagery and famed
skipping of transitions suggest the shots and jump cuts of cinema; => of documentary flavor.
- the objective and the subjective, the macro and the micro continually collide and interact; both the city and the characters who inhabit it are constantly in flux.
- used the stream-of-consciousness technique, and reinforced the histories of his fictional characters with a sense of real history conveyed by the interpolated devices
of newsreels, (impressionistic collections of slogans, popular song lyrics, newspaper headlines and extracts from political speeches).
- employed this experimental cut-up techniqueweaving together various elements, including newsreel headlines, fiction, biography, and autobiographyto present a
fast-paced portrait of what he saw as a society in decline, painting a vast landscape of American culture during the first decades of the twentieth century. Y
- another dimension is provided by his camera-eye technique: brief, poetic, personal reminiscences. This fragmented style reflects the Lost Generation's uncertainty
and search for self in a world where the future was no longer guaranteed.
- U.S.A. trilogy describes the eternal, and often unsuccessful, quest for the American dream. U.S.A. Main Themes in Manhattan Transfer
Capitalism
More than anything else, Manhattan Transfer can be read as a fervent critique of American capitalism.
Love
Most of the characters in the novel are searching, in one way or another, for love. Dos Passos suggests, through his writing, that what unifies the disparate
characters of his vast tapestry is a need to love and be loved.
War
World War I obviously plays a major role in Manhattan Transfer; however, the returning soldiers in the novel are not so much haunted by memories of the
war -- as dismayed at their homecoming (few jobs, and the battle that really matters in New York is between classes, not between nations).
The Press
Major historical events are communicated through newspaper headlines in Manhattan Transfer. Newspapers are one of the ways in which characters in the
novel and inhabitants of the city are connected: the text of the various newspapers creates a network that connects one moment to another, unifying the
characters, historical events, and subplots into a cohesive whole.
The City
The city is a character in itself, perhaps the hero of the novel, a tragic hero.

The Harlem Renaissance

- the name given to the cultural, social, and artistic explosion that took place in Harlem between the end of World War I and the middle of the 1930s.
- Harlem was a cultural center, drawing black writers, artists, musicians, photographers, poets, and scholars. Many had come from the South, fleeing its oppressive
caste system in order to find a place where they could freely express their talents.
- The Renaissance was more than a literary movement: It involved racial pride, fueled in part by the militancy of the "New Negro" demanding civil and political rights.
- incorporated jazz and the blues, attracting whites to Harlem speakeasies, where interracial couples danced. While it may have contributed to a certain relaxation of
racial attitudes among young whites, perhaps its greatest impact was to reinforce race pride among blacks.
- as a literary, artistic, and intellectual movement, kindled a new black cultural identity. I

Langston Hughes
- his African-American themes made him a primary contributor to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.
- poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" was published in The Crisis magazine and was highly praised.
- his poem The Weary Blues won first prize in the Opportunity magazine literary competition, and Hughes also received a scholarship to attend Lincoln University, in
Pennsylvania.
- His first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926. The book had popular appeal and established both his poetic style and his commitment to black
themes and heritage. => among the first to use jazz rhythms and dialect to depict the life of urban blacks in his work.
- He published a second volume of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew, .
- is first novel, Not Without Laughter.
- known for his insightful, colorful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties. He wrote novels, short stories and plays, as well as poetry,
and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing,
- refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that
reflected their actual culture, including both their suffering and their love of music, laughter, and language itself.

Zora Neale Hurston

- folklorist and anthropologist , recorded the stories and tales of many cultures, including her own African-American heritage.
- collection of folk tales Mules and Men (1935).
- in the mid-1930s, Hurston explored the fine arts through a number of different projects, and wrote several plays, including The Great Day and From Sun to Sun.
- her first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine, . Two years later, she received a Guggenheim fellowship, which allowed her to work on what would become her most famous
work: Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
I- published her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road.
Their Eyes Were Watching God
This novel is the story of Janie Crawford's search for love, told in the form of a frame. In the first few pages, Janie returns to her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, after
nearly two years absence. Her neighbors are curious to know where she has been and what has happened to her. Janie tells her story to her friend Pheoby Watson,
and after the story is over, the novelist returns to Janie's back steps. Thus, the story, which actually spans nearly 40 years of Janie's life, is "framed" by an evening
visit between two friends. The story that Janie tells is about love how Janie sought love in four relationships.
The most prevalent theme in the novel is Janie's search for unconditional, true, and fulfilling love. She experiences different kinds of love throughout her life.
As a result of her quest for this love, Janie gains her own independence and personal freedom, which makes her a true heroine in the novel. Because Janie strives for
her own independence, others tend to judge her simply because she is daring enough to achieve her own autonomy.
Hurston created the character of Janie during a time in which African-American female heroines were uncommon in literature. In 1937 when the novel was originally
published, females experienced fewer opportunities than they do today. Hurston chose to portray Janie as a strong, independent woman, unlike most African-
American females during her time. Perhaps Hurston characterized Janie as capable and courageous to empower her readers and to show them that opportunities do
exist for all women; they just have to embrace them.

Jean Toomer
-b poet, playwright, novelist, and short-story writer.
- His most famous work, Cane, => hailed by critics for its literary experimentation and portrayal of African-American characters and culture; it was an inspiration for
many Harlem Renaissance writers.
- Sparta, Georgia. The location inspired him to write Cane (1923), a novel that uses a mix of poems and stories to address the realities and emotions of the African-
American experience. The bookconsidered a masterpiecebecame an emblem and harbinger of the Harlem Renaissance, and is also considered an example of
modernist literature. H
- Later works he produced, many unpublished, did not focus on African Americans;
The book's experiments with form brought respect from people around the world for its characters, including rural Negroes who acted from habit and superstition;
women who were treated as objects in a culture that itself was struggling with its history of having been slaves; and intellectuals who sought to reconcile their love of
their own race with the degradation in which they were forced to live.
- writing has been praised extensively by critics; some have argued that his "mysterious brand of Southern psychological realism has been matched only in the best
work of William Faulkner." Others maintain that Toomer is the first poet to unite folk culture and the elite culture of the white avant-garde and is without doubt the
most important Black poet.
Regarding his use of language, critics have pointed out that The meaning of Cane is implicit in the arabesque pattern of imagery, the subtle movement of symbolic
actions and objects, the shifting rhythm of syntax and diction, and the infrastructure of a cosmic consciousness.
Nella Larsen
- Critics have noted that Larsens racial ambivalence was exemplified by her attempts to negotiate two very separate worlds and commented on Larsens
simultaneous expressions of racial pride and detachment.
Her first novel, Quicksand (1928), is about a young, headstrong biracial woman who seeks love, acceptance, and a sense of purpose.
- Quicksand combines autobiography and fiction to produce what has been considered a critique of a society in which self-expression and autonomy are not allowed,
especially for [black] women.
- the main character of the novel, Helga Crane, is a mulatta, born to a Danish mother and West Indian father. Cranes quest for both a cultural/racial and
personal/sexual identity takes her, as it did Larsen, first to the South, where Crane teaches at Naxos, an all-black college, then to Chicago and New York City, and
ultimately to Denmark and back to New York. The episodic construction of the novel parallels Cranes search for changes in her emotional and psychological states
by moving to different geographical locations. But, No single place measures up to her expectations and needs, and as a result, Helga travels from place to place
searching for something in the external world that will bring her inner peace, satisfaction, and happiness. Scholars have pointed out that The Harlem segments
[of Quicksand] contain a richly detailed portrait of place with a specific cultural context, the emergence of modern black New York. One of the main themes is that of
racial identity, of ideas of conflict with heritage and a quest for place or identity. Helgas two visible heredities become the sign of her dual cultural allegiances and
her often contradictory impulses.
- Passing (1929), continues to address the problem of the marginal black woman of the middle class who is both unwilling to conform to a circumscribed existence
in the black world and unable to move freely in the white world. The very choice of passing as a symbol or metaphor or deliverance for women reflects Larsens
failure to deal with the problem of marginality. Her second novel, Passing (1929), centers on two light-skinned women, one of whom, Irene, marries a black man and
lives in Harlem, while the other, Clare, marries a white man but cannot reject her black cultural ties. In Passing, Larsens main character, Clare Kendry, is able
to pass as a white woman and thus achieve middle-class status because she is married to a white man. The conflict of the novel, however, revolves around a
renewed friendship between Kendry and her childhood friend Irene Redfield. Through Redfield, who is involved in middle-class black society in Harlem, Kendry
rediscovers her black cultural roots. Ironically, both women have participated in a kind of passing: Kendry into the white world, Redfield by adopting the values of white
middle-class America.

Richard Wright
- was among the first black American writers to protest white treatment of blacks, particularly in his novel Native Son (1940) and in his autobiography Black Boy (1945).
-volume of novellas, Uncle Toms Children.
- His novel Native Son (1940) is about a poor black young man, Bigger Thomas, accidentally kills a white girl, and in the course of his ensuing flight his meaningless
awareness of antagonism from a white world becomes intelligible. I.
B- lack Boy (1945) is a moving account of Wrights childhood and young manhood in the South, depicting the extreme poverty of his childhood, his experience of white
prejudice and violence against blacks, and his growing awareness of his interest in literature.
- The Outsider (1953), acclaimed as the first American existential novel, warned that the black man had awakened in a disintegrating society not ready to include him.
Among his polemical writings of that period was White Man, Listen! (1957), which was originally a series of lectures given in Europe, and Eight Me (1961).
- American Hunger, which narrates Wrights experiences after moving to the North, was published posthumously in 1977.
Native Son
Wright wanted his readers to understand the devastating effects of the social conditions in which the main character, Bigger, was raised; he was not born a violent
criminal; he was a native son, a product of American culture and the violence and racism that permeated it.
Main Theme: Racism (Oppressed and Oppressors)
Wrights exploration of Biggers psychological corruption offers a new perspective on the oppressive effect racism had on the black population in 1930s
America. He and his family live in cramped conditions, enduring socially enforced poverty and having little opportunity for education. Biggers resulting
attitude toward whites is a combination of powerful anger and powerful fear. He conceives of whiteness as an overpowering and hostile force that is set
against him in life. The whites fail to perceive Bigger as an individual, and to him, the whites are all the same, frightening and untrustworthy. Throughout the
novel, Wright illustrates the ways in which white racism forces blacks into a pressured and dangerous state of mind. An important idea that emerges from
Wrights treatment of racism is the terrible inequity of the American criminal justice system of his time. Drawing inspiration from actual court cases of
the1930s, he portrays the American judiciary as an ineffectual pawn caught between the interests of the media and the driving ambition of politicians. The
outcome of Biggers case is decided before it ever goes to court: in the vicious cycle of racism, a black man who kills a white woman is guilty regardless of
the factual circumstances of the killing. Bigger receives neither a fair trial nor an opportunity to defend himself.
Black Boy is an autobiography of Wrights early life, and it examines Richard's tortured years in the Jim Crow South from 1912 to 1927. In each chapter, Richard
relates painful and confusing memories that lead to a better understanding of the man, a black, Southern, American writer who eventually emerges. Although Richard,
as the narrator, maintains an adult voice throughout the story, each chapter is told from the perspective and knowledge that a child might possess. Black Boy marks
the culmination of Richard Wrights best-known period; Black Boy is both profoundly American and a distinctly black chronicle. It is the chronicle of the authors
alienation, not only from white society, but also from his own people. Tragedy is what comes of an individual's efforts to overcome the human condition. The tone of
the book, as opposed to its content or structure is what makes it unique: the tone of the Blues. It is lyrical and ironic, and it follows the reality of pure tragedy; it accepts
all that has happened and creates art from the pain of suffering.
Main Themes in Black Boy
Racism
Black Boy explores racism as a subtle/menacing problem knit into the very fabric of American society. The critique of racism in America includes a critique
of the black community itselfspecifically the black community that is unable or unwilling to educate Richard properly.
Individual vs. Society
Richard is intensely individual and constantly expresses a desire to join society on his own terms. In this regard, he struggles against a dominant white
cultureboth in the South and in the Northand against his own black culture, as neither culture knows how to handle a brilliant, strong-willed, self-
respecting black man.
The Redemptive Power of Art
Wrights experiences of reading and other uses of his imaginative faculties sustain his idea that life becomes meaningful through creative attempts to make
sense of it.

Thomas Wolfe
- the novel Look Homeward, Angel.=> Wolfe on the literary map as one of America's most promising young novelists.
'Look Homeward, Angel is a thinly disguised autobiography and a portrait of the early twentieth-century American South.
- The novel was considered striking and important, in the American romantic tradition, meant to contain Wolfe's own "American experience" as represented by his alter
ego, Eugene Gant.
It is important to understand the novel within its time and place. It is a novel with a strong sense of autobiography, a Bildungsroman (novel of development), an
attempt at a comprehensive display of life in the American South from 1900 to 1920, and a response to the modernist movement of American writers who were living
and writing in Europe.
- a Guggenheim Fellowship and published a second short novel, Web of Earth, and began preparations for several other works: K-19, No Door (a short novel) and a
collection of three short novels.
Wolfe's editor wanted him to write a follow-up to the story of Eugene Gant, the protagonist of Look Homeward, Angel, and in the summer of 1934, ignoring Wolfe's
objections, the manuscript of Of Time and the River was sent to Scribner publishing house.
- Wolfes fiction is characterized by an intense consciousness of scene and place, together with an extraordinary lyric power. In Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time
and the River, Wolfe was able to imbue his life story and the figures of his parents with a lofty romantic quality with epic overtones. Powerful emotional evocation and
literal reporting are combined in his fiction, and he often alternates between dramatically effective episodes of recollection and highly charged passages of rhetoric.

William Faulkner
- was profoundly affected by his family.
- His first novel, Soldiers Pay (1926), set in a Southern setting, was an impressive achievement, stylistically ambitious and strongly evocative of the sense of
alienation experienced by soldiers returning from World War I to a civilian world of which they seemed no longer a part.
- Sartoris (1929) was Faulkners first important work, in which he begins his Yoknapatawpha saga. It is Faulkners imaginative re-creation of the tragedy of the
American South, written so that each novel works with the others to clarify and redefine the characters. The novel introduces families that reappear in many of
Faulkners novels and stories: the Sartoris and Compson families, representing the land-owning, aristocratic Old South; and the Snopes clan, representing the
ruthless, commercial New South.
- The Sound and the Fury (1929) is generally considered Faulkners masterpiece. It was followed by As I Lay Dying (1930), that uses the multiple stream-of-
consciousness method to tell the story of a family of poor whites intent on fulfilling the mothers deathbed request for burial; Absalom, Absalom (1936), which centers
on the Sutpen family. Absalom, Absalom!, a profoundly Southern story, is constructed by a series of narrators with sharply divergent self-interested perspectives, and
is considered Faulkners supreme modernist fiction, focused above all on the processes of its own telling.
-One of the main themes is mans relation to the past, and most of his characters struggle to achieve a significant and meaningful relationship with the past.
In Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner offers an in-depth examination of mans reliance on the past and of the extent to which man is responsible for the past, attempting to
connect or show the relationship between mans present actions and those of the past.
- Faulkners work has been appreciated for its experimental manner, contemporary themes and the often used stream-of-consciousness technique, for his
extraordinary structural and stylistic resourcefulness, for the range and depth of his characterization and social notation, and for his persistence and success in
exploring fundamental human issues in intensely localized terms.
The Sound and the Fury uses the stream-of-consciousness method (where the author lets his thoughts flow freely), creating a different manner of thought in each of
its four sections. The novel records the breakdown of the Compson family, suggesting a breakdown of the southern ways of the past. It is a story told in four chapters,
by four different voices, and out of chronological order; each section takes place in a single day; three sections are set in 1928 and one in 1910. The first three
chapters of the novel consist of the thoughts, voices, and memories of the three Compson brothers, captured on three different days. The brothers are Benjy, a
severely retarded thirty-three-year-old man, speaking in April, 1928; Quentin, a young Harvard student, speaking in June, 1910; and Jason, a bitter farm-supply store
worker, speaking again in April, 1928. Faulkner tells the fourth chapter in his own narrative voice, but focuses on Dilsey, the Compson familys devoted Negro cook
who has played a great part in raising the children.
The Compsons are one of several prominent names in the town of Jefferson, Mississippi. Their ancestors helped settle the area and subsequently defended it during
the Civil War; however, since the war, the Compsons have gradually seen their wealth, land, and status crumble away.
Main Themes in The Sound and the Fury
The Corruption of Southern Aristocratic Values
The first half of the nineteenth century saw the rise of a number of prominent Southern aristocratic families such as the Compsons, families who espoused
traditional Southern values both for men and for women. The Civil War and Reconstruction devastated many of these once-great Southern families
economically, socially, and psychologically. Faulkner claims that in the process, the Compsons, and other similar Southern families, lost touch with the
reality of the world around them and became underwent a process of self-absorption, which corrupted the core values these families once held dear and
left the newer generations completely unequipped to deal with the realities of the modern world.
Resurrection and Renewal
Three of the novels four sections take place on or around Easter, 1928. Faulkners placement of the novels climax on this weekend is significant, as the
weekend is associated with Christs crucifixion on Good Friday and resurrection on Easter Sunday. A number of symbolic events in the novel could be
likened to the death of Christ (the decline of the Compson family in general), but the Easter weekend also brings the hope of renewal and resurrection.
The Failure of Language and Narrative
Faulkners decision to use four different narrators highlights the subjectivity of each narrative and casts doubt on the ability of language to convey truth or
meaning absolutely. Benjy, Quentin, and Jason have vastly different views on the Compson tragedy, but no single perspective seems more valid than the
others. Even the final section, with its omniscient third-person narrator, does not tie up all of the novels loose ends.

John Steinbeck
- His experience among the working class of California lends authenticity to his depiction of the lives of laborers, who are the central characters in many of his novels.
- first novel, Cup of Gold. He achieved his first success with Tortilla Flat (1935), an affectionate and gently humorous story about Mexican-Americans. The novel In
Dubious Battle (1936), a classic account of a strike by agricultural laborers and the pair of Marxist labor organizers who engineer it, is the first Steinbeck novel that
displays the striking social commentary that characterizes his most significant works.
-Of Mice and Men (1937) received great acclaim; it is a tragic story about a strange and complex bond between two migrant laborers.
- The Grapes of Wrath (1939), won Steinbeck a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Grapes of Wrath chronicles the migration of a dispossessed family (the
Joad family) from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California, in search of jobs, land, and a better future, and critiques their subsequent exploitation by a ruthless system of
agricultural economics. Considered Steinbecks masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath is a story of human unity and love as well as the need for cooperative rather than
individualistic ideals during hard times.
- With the end of World War II and the move from the Great Depression to economic prosperity in the United States, Steinbecks work softened somewhat. While they
still contain the elements of social criticism that mark his earlier work,
- the highly controversial East of Eden, the novel Steinbeck referred to as the big one, set in Californias Salinas Valley.
- Steinbeck's enduring legacy is the naturalistic, proletarian-themed novels that he wrote during the Depression. He received the Nobel Prize for literature
Main Themes in Of Mice and Men:
The Predatory Nature of Human Existence
Of Mice and Men teaches a grim lesson about the nature of human existence. Nearly all of the characters admit, at one time or another, to having a
profound sense of loneliness and isolation. The characters are rendered helpless by their isolation, and yet, even at their weakest, they seek to destroy
those who are even weaker than them.
Fraternity and the Idealized Male Friendship
The men in Of Mice and Men desire to come together like brothers; they want to live with one anothers best interests in mind, to protect each other, and to
know that there is someone in the world dedicated to protecting them. However, the world is too harsh to sustain such friendly relationships.
The Impossibility of the American Dream
Most of the characters in Of Mice and Men admit, at one point or another, to dreaming of a different life, although circumstances have robbed most of them
of these wishes.

American Drama

Eugene ONeill
- through his experimental and emotionally probing dramas, he addressed the difficulties of human society with a deep psychological complexity.
- his play Beyond the Horizon won the Pulitzer Prize. Critics saw in this early work a first step toward a more serious American theater. ONeills poetic dialogue and
insightful views into the lives of the characters held his work apart from the less sober playwriting of the day.
- The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1922) follow the lives of two men through personal struggles and their search for identity.
- Despite (or because) of the death f family and the breakdwn of hi first marriage, he went on to create a number of penetrating and insightful views into family life and
struggle. Desire Under the Elms (1924) was the first full-length play in which O'Neill successfully evoked the starkness and inevitability of Greek tragedy that he felt
in his own life. Drawing on Greek themes of incest, infanticide, and fateful retribution, he framed his story in the context of his own familys conflicts. It is the story of a
lustful father, a weak son, and an adulterous wife who murders her infant son. Because of the sparseness of its style, its avoidance of melodrama, and its total
honesty of emotion, the play was acclaimed immediately as a powerful tragedy and has continued to rank among the great American plays of the 20th century.
- The Great God Brown dealt with a major theme that he expressed more effectively in later plays: the conflict between idealism and materialism. The play was
significant for its symbolic use of masks and for the experimentation with expressionistic dialogue and action; the play is rich in symbolism and poetry, as well as in
daring technique, and it became a forerunner of avant-garde movements in American theatre.
O'Neill's innovative writing continued with Strange Interlude (1928), a play revolutionary in style and length (techniques new to the modern theatre included spoken
asides or soliloquies to express the characters hidden thoughts).
-Mourning Becomes Electra - used the moral and physical entanglements similar to Greek drama to express the complexities of family life (it represents his most
complete use of Greek forms, themes, and characters). Based on the Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus, it was itself three plays in one, set in the New England of the Civil
War period, retaining the forms and the conflicts of the Greek characters: the heroic leader returning from war; his adulterous wife, who murders him; his jealous,
repressed daughter, who avenges him through the murder of her mother; and his weak, incestuous son, who is driven by his sister to suicide.
-Long Day's Journey into Night brought to light an agonizingly autobiographical play. It is straightforward in style but shattering in its depiction of the agonized
relations between father, mother, and two sons. Spanning one day in the life of a family, the play strips away layer after layer from each of the four central figures,
revealing the mother as a defeated drug addict, the father as a man frustrated in his career and failed as a husband and father, the older son as a bitter alcoholic, and
the younger son as a tubercular, disillusioned youth with only the slenderest chance for physical and spiritual survival.
- He saw the theatre as a valid forum for the presentation of serious ideas. Imbued with the tragic sense of life, he aimed for a contemporary drama that had its roots
in the most powerful of ancient Greek tragedies. His plays were written from an intensely personal point of view, deriving directly from the scarring effects of his
familys tragic relationships--his mother and father, who loved and tormented each other; his older brother, who loved and corrupted him and died of alcoholism in
middle age; and O'Neill himself, caught and torn between love for and rage at all three.
ONeill redefined the theater by abandoning traditional divisions into acts and scenes (Strange Interlude has nine acts, and Mourning Becomes Electra takes nine
hours to perform), by using masks such as those found in Asian and ancient Greek theater, by introducing Shakespearean monologues and Greek choruses and by
producing special effects through lighting and sound. He is generally acknowledged to have been America's foremost dramatist.

Tennessee Williams
- His first critical acclaim came in 1944 when The Glass Menagerie won prestigious New York awards.
- His plays were heavily criticized because he openly addressed taboo topics. In the 1970s, Williams wrote plays, a memoir, poems, short stories and a novel. Critics
have claimed that Williams genius was in his honesty and in the perseverance to tell his stories.
His major play, A Streetcar Named Desirewon a Pulitzer Prize. It is a study of the mental and moral ruin of Blanche Du Bois, a former Southern belle, whose genteel
pretensions are no match for the harsh realities symbolized by her brutish brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski.
- Camino Real, a complex work set in a mythical, microcosmic town whose inhabitants include Lord Byron and Don Quixote, was a commercial failure, but his Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof , which exposes the emotional lies governing relationships in the family of a wealthy Southern planter, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize and was
successfully filmed, as was The Night of the Iguana (1961), the story of a former minister who became a tour guide.
- belongs to the tradition of great Southern writers who have invigorated literary language with the lyricism of Southern English. Like Eugene O'Neill, hewanted to
challenge some of the conventions of naturalistic theatre.
-Williams' play explores ways of using the stage to depict the interior life and memories of a character. The projections use film-like effects and the power of
photography in a theatrical setting. In The Glass Menagerie, Williams' skillful use of the narrator and his creation of a dream-like, illusory atmosphere help to create a
powerful representation of family, memory, and loss. The play is replete with lyrical symbolism. The glass menagerie, in its fragility and delicate beauty, is a symbol for
Laura. By writing a "memory play," Tennessee Williams freed himself from the restraints of naturalistic theatre. The theme of memory is important for Amanda, as
memory is a kind of escape. For Tom, the older Tom, who narrates the events of the play, memory is the thing that cannot be escaped, for he is still haunted by
memories of the sister he abandoned years ago.
The play renders the story of a declassed Southern family living in a tenement; it is about the failure of a domineering mother, Amanda, living upon her delusions of a
romantic past, and her cynical son, Tom, to secure a suitor for Toms crippled and painfully shy sister, Laura, who lives in a fantasy world with a collection of glass
animals. The Glass Menagerie is loosely autobiographical, as the characters all have some basis in the real-life family of Tennessee Williams.
The action of The Glass Menagerie takes place in the Wingfield family's apartment in St. Louis, 1937. The events of the play are framed by memory - Tom
Wingfield is the play's narrator, and usually smokes and stands on the fire escape as he delivers his monologues. His dilemma forms a central conflict of the play, as
he faces an agonizing choice between responsibility for his family and living his own life.
Major Themes in The Glass Menagerie
Escape: each character feels trapped and would like to escape
Responsibility to Family: in his/her own way, each character feels a sense of responsibility (and this becomes a source of tension in the play)
Abandonment: the characters also experience a strong sense of abandonment
Illusion and Reality
Memory

American Poetry

In poetry, the modernist elements can be discussed in terms of four major subheadings:
modern or new experiments in form and style
new themes and word-games
new modes of expression (the most striking element)
the complex and open-ended nature of the themes and meanings.

Modernism includes many different ways of expressing ideas and feelings:

the imagist way of presenting just concrete images for the readers to understand the idea and experience the feelings themselves
the symbolist way of presenting things in terms of deeply significant symbols of ideas and feelings for readers to interpret them intellectually
the realist way of truly reflecting the reality of the world
the naturalist way of going to the extreme of realism by showing the private, psychological, fantastic and the neurotic
the impressionistic way of presenting unrefined first impression of everything by the observer
the expressionistic way of probing deep into ones own psyche and trying to express the hidden and deepest feelings, as in confessional poems
the surrealist way of imposing the mood of madness, intoxication and neurosis to excite the illogical language of the unconscious.
- Modernism includes all such experimentations in the technique of expression.
- The use of new and wide range of subjects, themes and issues: traditional poetry had to be limited to subjects of universal significance, general human appeal, and
so on, even when the poems were romantically personal on their surface; in modernist poetry, we read poems about any topic and theme.
- Modernist poems tend to be multiple in themes: single poems are about many things at the same time (the poet does not disclose - as in traditional poems - what the
one and precise meaning of the poem is; that is why the reader has to work with many possible themes and meanings in the same poem; it is important to find logical
support for the theme or themes that he finds in the poem).
- Modernist poems also display a multiplicity of styles: in the form, style, stanza, rhythm and such other technical devices of poetry, old traditions have been
demolished and new experiments are tested (e. e. cummings) - blank verse poems, pictorial poems, remixed rhythms, etc. (the old metrical systems, rhyme-schemes,
and traditional symbols and metaphors are no longer dominating; each poet makes his/her own rules.

Robert Frost
- was an American poet who was much admired for his depictions of the rural life of New England, his command of American colloquial speech, and his realistic verse
portraying ordinary people in everyday situations.
-became an enthusiastic botanist and acquired his poetic persona of a New England rural sage during the years he and his family spent at Derry. All this while he was
writing poems, outlets showed little interest in them.
- The collection Mountain Interval (1916) continued the high level established by his first books, and his reputation was further enhanced by New Hampshire (1923),
which received the Pulitzer Prize.
- The poems in Frosts early books, especially North of Boston, differ radically from late 19th-century Romantic verse with its ever-benign view of nature, its didactic
emphasis, and its slavish conformity to established verse forms and themes. Lowell called North of Boston a sad book, referring to its portraits of inbred, isolated,
and psychologically troubled rural New Englanders. These off-mainstream portraits signaled Frosts departure from the old tradition and his own fresh interest in
delineating New England characters and their formative background.
- The natural world, for Frost, wore two faces. Early on he overturned the concept of nature as healer and mentor in a poem entitled Storm Fear, a grim picture of a
blizzard as a raging beast that dares the inhabitants of an isolated house to come outside and be killed. In such later poems as The Hill Wife and Stopping by
Woods on a Snowy Evening, the benign surface of nature cloaks potential dangers, and death itself lurks behind dark, mysterious trees.
- In his final volume, In the Clearing, filled with the stubborn courage of old age, Frost portrays human security as a rather tiny and quite vulnerable opening in a thickly
grown forest, a pinpoint of light against which the encroaching trees cast their very real threat of darkness.
-most commonly investigated human contacts with the natural world in small encounters that serve as metaphors for larger aspects of the human condition. Some
poems are portraits of the introspective mind possessed by its own private demons, as in Desert Places, which could serve to illustrate Frosts celebrated definition
of poetry as a momentary stay against confusion:
- widely admired for his mastery of metrical form, which he often set against the natural rhythms of everyday, unadorned speech. => was never an enthusiast of free
verse and regarded its looseness as something less than ideal, although he occasionally employed it; his determination to be new but to employ old ways to be
new set him aside from the radical experimentalism in the early 20th century.
- Frost mastered the blank verse (i.e., unrhymed verse in iambic pentameter) for use in such dramatic narratives as Mending Wall and Home Burial; his chief
technical innovation in these dramatic-dialogue poems was to unify the regular pentameter line with the irregular rhythms of conversational speech. Frosts blank
verse has the same terseness and concision that mark his poetry in general.
- criticized for being overly interested in the past, and too little concerned with the present and future of American society because of the absence in his poems of
meaningful references to the modern realities of industrialization, urbanization, and the concentration of wealth, or to such familiar items as radios, motion pictures,
automobiles, factories, or skyscrapers. => singer of sweet nostalgia and a social and political conservative who was content to sigh for the good things of the past.
- praised for the universality of his themes, the emotional authenticity of his voice, and the austere technical brilliance of his verse.
- Taking his symbols from the public domain,,eveloped an original, modern idiom and a sense of directness and economy Although he avoids traditional verse forms
and only uses rhyme erratically, Frost is not an innovator and his technique is never experimental. Frosts theory of poetic composition ties him to both centuries. Like
the 19th-century Romantics, he maintained that a poem is never a put-up job.... It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a loneliness. It is
never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness.
- Frosts regionalism lies in his realism: his protagonists are individuals who are constantly forced to confront their individualism as such and to reject the modern world
in order to retain their identity. Frosts use of nature is closely tied to this regionalism; what he finds in nature is sensuous pleasure; he is also sensitive to the earths
fertility and to mans relationship to the soil (pastoral quality of his poems).
Ezra Pound
-his first book of poems, A lume spento. I
- As leader of the Imagist movement of 191214, successor of the school of images, he drew up the first Imagist manifesto, with its emphasis on direct and sparse
language and precise images in poetry, and he edited the first Imagist anthology, Des Imagistes (1914).
In imitation of French avant-garde movements, Pound invented the term Imagisme; he stated the three tenets of imagism in 1913:
1. Direct treatment of the thing, whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not the sequence of a metronome.
Pounds emphasis on direct treatment suggests the influence of painting as a model. His desire to avoid unnecessary words and his championing of free verse share
something of symbolisms aspiration towards pure poetry, although Pound believed that he was breaking away from symbolism by rejecting its emotionalism.
- his verse took on new qualities of economy, brevity, and clarity as he used concrete details and exact visual images to capture concentrated moments of experience.
His search for laconic precision owed much to his constant reading of past literature, including Anglo-Saxon poetry, Greek and Latin classics, Dante, and the 19th-
century French authors as Thophile Gautier and Gustave Flaubert. Like his friend T.S. Eliot, Pound wanted a modernism that brought back to life the highest
standards of the past.
-Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, ranged from close observation of the artist and society to the horrors of mass production and World War I. The poem is a compelling
critique of the modern age; more specifically, it is about the plight of the artist, in the modern world. The poem juxtaposes images as emotional and intellectual
complexes; meaning develops not through direct authorial statement but by engaging the reader in a continual process of interpretation. The postwar context is
significant - sections IV and V contain one of the most negative and moving chants against war in modern literature. One of the main themes is the relation between
the increasingly complex and allusive form and content among modern writers and the increasing isolation and alienation of the artist in the modern world.
=> Pound turned his main attention to his epic Cantos, which he worked on for the remainder of his life.
The Cantos
- are fragmentary and formless despite recurring themes and ideas; they record Pounds own private voyage through Greek mythology, ancient China and Egypt,
Byzantium, Renaissance Italy, the works of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and many other periods and subjects, including economics and banking and various
aspects of his own memory and experience.
Main Themes in Pounds Poems:
The Importance of Aesthetics and Art: Pound made it a point to celebrate art, literature, and beauty in his poetry (particularly in "Hugh Selywn
Mauberley). In this poem, Pound criticizes mass culture, expressing his belief that modern writers, painters, and other artists are creating work for the
wrong reasons.
Imagism: He placed significant value on clarity and economy of language. Pound felt that classic poetry, namely Greek and Roman, presented many
model examples of Imagism, and he also praised the verbal economy of traditional Japanese and Chinese poetry.
Economics: In his later career, Pound became increasingly obsessed with economics, especially when he moved to Italy and embraced fascism in the
years leading up to World War II. The theme of economics is evident in a number of Pound's later poems, particularly the Cantos.
Love: An overwhelming number of Pound's poems revolve around a theme of love, as he explores different ways that love can be powerful.
Nature: Pound often uses unexpected natural metaphors to reflect on people, business, and society. By frequently including nature into his work, Pound
alludes to his love of aesthetics and beauty.
History: Pound explores history quite often in his poems. He valued history because he recognized how much it influenced the present, and he blamed
bad historical precedents for all the societal corruption he describes in his poetry.
Journey: Many of Ezra Pound's poems center on the process of making a journey, whether metaphorical or physical, to accomplish some sort of goal.

William Carlos Williams

-succeeded in making the ordinary appear extraordinary through the clarity and discreteness of his imagery.
-champions the American idiom and the "local"--either the urban landscape or one's immediate environment. He pays close attention to ordinary scenes (some purely
descriptive; others as compositions as in visual art), the working class and poor. ==> artist's need to destroy or deconstruct what has become outworn and to
reassemble or recreate with fresh vision and language.
He uses his experience as a doctor, married man and father, son and friend, in some of the poems, fiction, and plays. In addition, he demonstrates the need to
discover rather than impose order on reality.
He sometime views the poem as "a machine made out of words."
- experimenting in shorter poems with innovative line breaks, speaking voices, and a kind of stripped-down language. => his departure from tradition was all the more
radical.
-first book, Poems (1909), a "conventional" work, "correct in sentiment and diction," preceded the Imagist influence. But in The Tempers (1913), as scholars claim,
Williams's "style was directed by an Imagist feeling, though it still depended on romantic and poeticized allusiveness." And while Pound drifted towards increased
allusiveness in his work, Williams stuck with Pound's tenet to "make it new."
- known as an experimenter, an innovator, => in comparison to artists of his own time who sought a new environment for creativity , lived a remarkably conventional
life.
- domestic in focus, his poetry is remarkable for its empathy, sympathy, its muscular and emotional identification with its subjects.
- a had no interest, he said, in the "speech of the English country people, which would have something artificial about it"; instead he sought a "language modified by
our environment, the American environment.
- "The volume Spring and All (1923) was heavily influenced by Eliots The Waste Land, and although it viewed the same American landscape as did Eliot, it interpreted
it differently. Williams "saw his poetic task was to affirm the self-reliant, sympathetic consciousness of Whitman in a broken industrialized world, but unlike Eliot, who
responded negatively to the harsh realities of this world, Williams saw his task as breaking through restrictions and generating new growth."
- meeting Pound had measurably affected Williams's early life, the appearance of Eliot's The Waste Land marked important changes in his mid-career. Though some
of Williams's finest poetry appeared in the 1923 Spring and All, he did not release another book of poems for nearly ten years. " Instead wrote prose. And in it he
concentrated on one subject in particular: America.

Wallace Stevens
-explored the interaction of reality and what man could make of reality in his mind.
- his first book, sold fewer than 100 copies but received some favorable critical notices; In it he introduced the imaginationreality theme that occupied his creative
lifetime, making his work so unified that he considered three decades later calling his collected poems The Whole of Harmonium. =>displayed his most dazzling
verbal brilliance in his first book; he later tended to relinquish surface lustre for philosophical rigour. - In Harmonium appeared such poems as Le Monocle de Mon
Oncle, Sunday Morning, => all were frequently republished in anthologies.
- Harmonium also contained Sea Surface Full of Clouds, in which waves are described in terms of such unlikely equivalents as umbrellas, French phrases, and
varieties of chocolate, and The Comedian as the Letter C, in which he examines the relation of the poet, or man of imagination, to society.
- when Stevens was sixty his best writing still lay before him in the form of extended meditative sequences, quasi-philosophical in their ruminative wanderings but
marked always by a vivid sense of the absurd and a darting, whirling inventiveness that took delight in peculiar anecdotal examples.
- perfected what had been, in effect, the work he had been producing all along a meta-poetry that took delight in commenting upon its own making. At the same
time, he began to grow interested in putting his thoughts on aesthetics together in prose sentences,
-In his seventies, he began to write a poetry of late old age, in which a sense of the disembodied, the purely mental, gave rise to a discourse that had grown newly
austere, solemn, and strange even to its author.
Capturing so exuberantly yet so flawlessly the mind at play with an extravagance most often associated with youthful pleasure, with the sheer delights of the sensual
body, Stevens preferred to mask his very great sensual satisfactions by suggesting that his doings were in fact all a highly proper set of speculations on "the
imagination."