48 c class #4
- 1. Spelling Error #3 Using “accidently” instead of “accidentally.” There are quite a few words with -ally suffixes (‚incidentally‛), and these should not be confused with words having -ly suffixes (‚independently‛). Accidently makes it into some dictionaries but it’s regarded as a variant. It’s wise to avoid variants if you can, because some people will ELIT 48C become more concerned about Class 3 your spelling than what you’re selling.
- 2. AGENDA • Modern Manifestos o Pound o Cather o Williams o Hughes • Literary and Artistic Modernism o Trends in movements
- 3. Ezra Pound was an American expatriate living in Europe. He Pound was hugely influential in the circle of other expatriate writers and artists not only for his own work as a poet but also for the advice that he offered to other writers. ‚A Retrospect‛ is Pound’s manifesto on Imagism, a school of poetry that argued for the central—if not defining— place of the image in modern poetry.
- 4. • An “Image” is that which Is Ezra Pound offering a presents an intellectual radical new vision of and emotional complex poetry, or are his in an instant of time. comments simply good • It is better to present one advice for writers of any Image in a lifetime than kind? to produce voluminous works. What do you find • Use no superfluous word, radical in Pound’s no adjective which does approach as laid out in not reveal something. ‚A Retrospect‛? — from “A Retrospect”
- 5. In a Station of the Metro The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. One of Pound’s most famous Imagist poems is ‚In a Station of the Metro.‛ Does he practice what he preaches in ‚A Retrospect‛ in this poem? After reading this poem, are you inclined to think differently about the advice Pound offers in ‚A Retrospect‛? After reading an Imagist poem, do you think that ‚A Retrospect‛ is offering something more than just general advice for writers?
- 6. Willa Cather Willa Cather was born in the Midwest but spent most of her career as a novelist in cosmopolitan cities such as London and New York. In ‚The Novel Démeublé,‛ Cather implicitly asks what nineteenth-century novelists can teach twentieth-century writers. In so doing, she rejects realist novels as mere ‚amusement‛ and looks to ‚American romances‛ such as Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter for inspiration.
- 7. There are hopeful signs that The realist literature of an some of the younger writers earlier tradition was are trying to break away from mere verisimilitude, committed to the and, following the ‚verisimilitude‛ that Cather development of modern here rejects. What is Cather painting, to interpret offering in the place of imaginatively the material and social investiture of verisimilitude? their characters; to present their scene by suggestion What does it mean ‚to rather than by enumeration. interpret imaginatively‛ and —from ‚to present . . . by suggestion “The Novel Démeublé” rather than by enumeration‛?
- 9. William Carlos Williams So far, all of the manifestos that we have read are serious invectives. Yet, here we encounter the playfulness in Williams’s Spring and All. Given the playful, ironic, and humorous tone of Williams’s manifesto, it may be difficult to tell how deadly serious he is about his vision for modern poetry.
- 10. It is spring! but miracle of miracles a miraculous miracle has gradually taken The language from Spring place during these and All invokes both the seemingly wasted eons. creation story in the book of Through the orderly Genesis and the theory of sequences of evolution. unmentionable time EVOLUTION HAS REPEATED Why does Williams do this? ITSELF FROM THE BEGINNING. And how does he make both —from Spring and All religion and science serve ‚the meaning of ‘art’‛?
- 11. Langston Hughes Many modernist writers supported the idea that artists and writers should be fiercely committed to their personal vision regardless of what the market, critics, or other writers said. In ‚The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,‛ Langston Hughes argues that an artist’s racial identity complicates this commitment to personal vision in ways that white writers had not fully appreciated.
- 12. There’s a tension in the statement I am ashamed for the between individual choice (‚An artist black poet who says, “I must be free to choose what he want to be a poet, not does‛) and a manifesto-like a Negro poet,” as prescription of what African- though his own racial world were not as American poets must do (‚I am interesting as any other ashamed for the black poet who says world . . . An artist must . . .‛). be free to choose what he does, How does Hughes encourage black certainly, but he must writers to embrace their heritage also never be afraid to without telling the that they must do what he might write in a certain way to be choose. considered successful writers? —from “The Negro In what way is this essay not about Artist and the Racial art at all, but about racism and the Mountain” self-hatred that it breeds in an oppressed population?
- 13. Literary and Artistic Modernism • “Modernism” refers to artistic works that o represent the transformation of traditional society under the pressures of modernity o break down traditional literary forms o depict the modern world not as a triumph of human civilization but as an experience of loss o call into question the religious, political, social, and artistic conventions of the past o interpret the world as disparate fragments rather than an integrated whole
- 14. This list of the features of modern art and literature is not exhaustive, but it is 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.
- 15. Georges Braque’s Still Life With Guitar (ca. 1918–19) 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?
- 16. Pablo Picasso’s 1937 painting Weeping Woman How has Picasso broken down the image of the woman into various fragments from different perspectives 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?
- 17. Wassily Kandinsky’s In Blue (1925) In his effort to break down the world into fragments, has Kandinsky completely removed all reference to the natural world? Can you identify any recognizable images, 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?
- 18. Homework • Post #4: Pass • Read My Antonia (1918) Book I Introduction Chapters 1-10