Appunti completi di letteratura anglo-americana III, Università della Calabria

MODERNISMO

American modernism is a trend of philosophical thought arising from the changes in culture and society in the age of modernity. It is a break with the past and the concurrent search for new forms of expression, so, it derives from a rejection of Enlightenment thinking, seeking to better represent reality in a new, more industrialized world. This movement fostered a period of experimentation in the arts from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, particularly in the years following World War I, because, the enormity of the war had undermined humankind's faith in the foundations of Western society and culture, and postwar Modernist literature reflected a sense of disillusionment and fragmentation. In this context, American modernism marked the beginning of American art as distinct and autonomous from European taste, by breaking artistic conventions that had been shaped after European traditions until then. American modernism benefited from the diversity of immigrant cultures. Artists were inspired by African, Caribbean, Asian and European folk cultures and embedded these exotic styles in their works. One of the twentieth century's defining features is radical artistic experiment. The boundary-breaking art, literature, and music of the first decades of the century are the subject of the topic "Modernist Experiment. In fact, literature, during this period, is characterized by the search for an authentic response to a much-changed world. For example, one of the most important writing in this period is "The waste Land" written by Eliot With, its fragmentary images and obscure allusions, the poem is typical of Modernism in requiring the reader to take an active role in interpreting the text. In this poem we can find the search for redemption and renewal in a sterile and spiritually empty landscape.

In the visual arts the roots of Modernism are often traced back to painter Edouard Manet, who, beginning in the 1860s, broke away from inherited notions of perspective, modeling, and subject matter. The avant-garde movements that followed-including Impressionism, Post- Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Constructivism, de Stijl, and Abstract Expressionism-are generally defined as Modernist. Over the span of these movements, artists increasingly focused on the intrinsic qualities of their media-e.g., line, form, and colour.

Among the leading aesthetic innovators of this era were the cubist Pablo Picasso and the futurist Marinetti.

MODERNISMO CARATTERISTICHE

In literature, Literary Modernism has its origins in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mainly in Europe and North America. Modernism', in a broader sense, is modern thought, character, or practice breaking away from the rules and traditions. First of all, a new emphasis on impressionalism and subjectivism which focus on how we see rather what we see. In modern literary text emphasizes on colloquial language rather than formal language. A new liking for fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives are obvious in modernist literary texts. For example- Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot are superb example of fragmented forms.

Thus, modernism originated from the corruption, decadence and frustrations in the post-war psyche of the western people marks off from the previous literary tradition that got reduced to cold formalism and traditionalism.

MODERNITY

Modernity, the self-definition of a generation about its own technological innovation, governance, and socioeconomics. More specifically, modernity was Document shared on www.docsity.com Downloaded by: maria_bonasera1 (mariabonasera4@gmail.com)associated with individual subjectivity, scientific explanation and rationalization. There is little consensus as to when modernity began. In general, modernity was exemplified by the period of two world wars and succeeded by postmodernism.

MODERN

This term is used to underine the end of Medieval Era, its refers to make a distinction between old and ancient era from the Roman Empire to our days.

MARINETTI

Poet, novelist, dramatist, Marinetti was the leader of Italian Futurism, the main movement of revolutionary avant-garde. Speed, words in freedom, war, and revolution are the words that best represent the life of Marinetti, who was called "caffeina d'Europa" (caffeine of Europe), because he was always ready to excite the Old Continent with some novelties In 1905 he founded the magazine Poesia (Poetry), a tool for Italian Symbolism, which in 1909 served as the official organ for a new poetic movement, Futurism.

MANIFESTO FUTURISMO

is a manifesto written by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and published in 1909. Marinetti expresses an artistic philosophy, Futurism, which was a rejection of the past, and a celebration of speed, machinery, violence, youth and industry; it also advocated the modernization of Italy.

The limits of Italian literature at the end of the 19th century, its lack of strong contents, its quiet and passiveness are fought by futurists, and their reaction includes the use of excesses in order to prove the existence of a dynamic surviving Italian intellectual class. In this period futurists need to confirm that Italy is present, has an industry, has the power to take part in the new experience, and will find the superior essence of progress in its major symbols: the car and its speed. Also, during this movement there was an exaltation of the war that was defined as the World's Only Hygiene, because it can destroy the old world, fundamental prerequisite to be able to build a totally new one.

• A key focus of the Futurists was the depiction of movement, or dynamism. The group developed a number of novel techniques to express speed and motion, including blurring, repetition, and the use of lines of force. This last method was adapted from the work of the Cubists and the inclusion of such lines became a feature of Futurist images. The main idea in this movement was to change old conception of culture, inadequate and too slow for modern civilization .-

LANGSTON HUGHES

The Modernist Period in American Literature occupied the years shorty after the beginning of the twentieth century. During this period, The African American cultural movement influenced many black writers, one of them being Langston Hughes. He is usually considered to be one the most prolific and most recognized black poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Many scholars and critics refer to him as a "poet laureate of American African experience". His poems picture Document shared on www.docsity.com Downloaded by: maria_bonasera1 (mariabonasera4@gmail.com)the daily life and struggles of the common Black people. Hughes uses poetry to convey the messages of equality, racial justice, and democracy. He celebrates the history, folkways, and real lives of his people. An important theme in his poems such as "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", "Mulatto" and "I too" is the BLACK PRIDE, so, encourages black people to celebrate black culture and embrace their African heritage, Langston Hughes always urges his people to love themselves no matter how other people treat them or think of them. (In the United States, it was a direct response to white racism especially during the Civil Rights Movement 20 century). He uses the language, themes, and forms of expressions that are clear and familiar to his people.

• The poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," connects the African American race to ancient rivers, Hughes stresses the historical existence of the African race and their movement through time .-
• "I Too", "Mother to Son" etc. All these poems depict injustice suffered by Blacks and their hope for social equality-
• The concept of the "American Dream" is an integral part of the American identity. It is the set of ideals which gives equal opportunities to every American, without considering his race or color-
• In Hughes' poetry, he would try to bring out the sound, cadence, and the rhythms from blues and jazz music. He would also use humor loneliness to imitate the sound of blues and jazz music with words-

ELIOT

T.S. Eliot, the 1948 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, American-English author, was one of the most influential poets writing in English in the 20th century. Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 26, 1888. He lived in St. Louis during the first eighteen years of his life and attended Harvard University. Then in London, Eliot came under the influence of his contemporary Ezra Pound, who recognized his poetic genius at once, and assisted in the publication of his work in a number of magazines, most notably "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Poetry in 1915. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917, and immediately established him as a leading poet of the avant-garde, but with the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, Eliot's reputation began to grow. Also, it's important to stress that like their 18th-century counterparts William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge who helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature (so the importance of imagination, the poet that has the ability to penetrate in the heart of thing, the language should be simple) Eliot and Pound set about reforming poetic diction. Whereas Wordsworth thought he was going back to the "real language of men," Eliot struggled to create new verse rhythms based on the rhythms of contemporary speech.

THE SCARED WOOD

is a book of critical essays written by T.S. Eliot and published in 1920. In it, Eliot discusses several of the issues of Modernist writings of the period. The central essay in The Sacred Wood is "Tradition and the Individual Talent."

'Tradition and the Individual Talent' was first published in 1919 in the literary magazine The Egoist. It was published in two parts, in the September and December issues. In this essay Eliot introduces the idea of TRADITION. From the beginning Eliot makes it clear that he is using the term tradition as an adjective to explain the relationship of a poem or a work to the works of dead poets and artists. He regrets that in our appreciation of authors we hardly include their connections with those living and dead and about our tendency to insist ... those aspects" of a writer's work in which "he least resembles anyone else". Thus, he critiques our appreciation of the writer is derived from exhumation of the uniqueness of the work and argues that a poet or artist should be valued in relation to the dead poets and artists. At the same time, it is important to note that with the term "tradition" he does not refer to a legacy of writers which can be handed down from a generation to another generation, but he argues that the writer or the poet must develop a sense of the past, this does not mean that the past cannot be altered but underlines how the past [is] altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. So, Eliot emphasizes both the way that tradition shapes the modern artist and the way that a "really new" work of art makes us see that tradition anew.

In the second part of the essay Eliot talks about the poet's responsibility. The poet is not supposed to compose poetry which is full of his personal emotions so, he refuses the idea that poetry is the expression of poet's personality and regrets the Wordsworth's view that poetry is recollection of feeling, because according to Eliot ""it is a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences . . . it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. For him, the emotion of art is impersonal, and the artist can achieve this impersonality only by and being conscious of the tradition.

THE LOVE SONG OF ALFRED PRUFROCK

T.S. Eliot started writing 'Prufrock' in 1910. It was published in the 1915 issue of 'Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. He opens the poem with the epigraph from Canto 27 of the Inferno, so from Divina Commedia. In this epigraph we find the voice of Guido Montefeltro that answered at Dante, who wants to know why Guido ended up so far down in Hell. But with his answer Guido shows himself as selfish because he is concerned about his reputation. A choice of this epigraph suggests that "Prufrock" might not be a poem about good people, but about bad ones pretending to be good and who is singing his "love song," might be concerned about his reputation like Guido.

This poem is an investigation of the disturbed consciousness of the typical modern man who is overeducated, powerful, anxious, and emotionally artificial. The poem is a variation of the dramatic monologue, an exposition of the moods and conflicts of the mind of Prufrock. It is an analysis of the mind of the lover who is unable to take a decision about making the proposal to the lady he loves, he is unable to express his inner state so the poem highlights the dilemma and indecisiveness as well as the squalor and barrenness of modern urban civilization. Thus, we can note that Eliot's Love Song does not sing in praise of love. The title of the poem is ironic. The point of calling this poem a Love Song lies in the irony that it will never be sung; that Prufrock will never dare to voice what he feels".