Working (Modern) Man

Early Modernism in America fiction marks the birth of several major new literary styles and techniques -- stream-of-consciousness (though Joyce and Woolf were practicing the technique even before them), a focus on first-person narratives, and an obsession with ambiguity, with a purposeful obtuseness that was lacking in the much clearer, much more deliberately clear work of earlier centuries -- while it also the advancement and adaptation of several older techniques, dialect and regionalism becoming particularly prevalent focuses. Writers, coming out of World War I and very similar experiences, had witnessed the certain "truths" of the old world topple in a mere matter of years, as new movements in politics, economics, art and philosophy emerged from the fire and challenged everything everyone had once held dear.

Hence, why the themes in these works deal so much with the overturning of the old and the introduction of the new. In Faulkner's "Barn Burning," the old certainty of relationships between landed, working tenants and their landlords if spat upon entirely by the Snopes' patriarch, who has no respect for his landlords, property, or even his children. He is a new type of nihilistic, self-destructive monster. Similarly but contrarily, Fitzgerald covers the prevalence of property in his story "Babylon Revisited," deals with this lost generation's desperate attempts to cover up their newfound emptiness by overindulging in the extravagences of the past, all the while knowing their consumptive natures are only dooming them all the more certainly.

Old issues of race and provincialism were likewise challenged by writers such as Porter and Hurston, who did not, as writers of old had, identify themselves based solely on these criteria. Nor did they reject them, though, opting instead to embrace those aspects of them that made them unique and actually examine them. After all, with the old assumptions and stereotypes attached to race and region gone, there was all the more reason to dig into these labels to find the truth waiting behind them.

These concers, as well as the unique style of the writing, lend this period of fiction a very distinct shade, one that is particularly philosophical. All in all, a very rich time in the history of American literature.

More Poetry Than America Could Shake a Stick At

Goodness, but that's a lot of poetry; practically every major American poet from the early 20th century and some going on into the later half, too. From the sentimental, sometimes maudlin homespun poetry of Robert Frost to the modernist styling of T.S. Eliot and Stevens, all the way to the bizarre, clipped and frenetic works of E.E. Cumming, there's no doubt that this week's studies examined the width and breadth of American poetry and styles. Most interesting to note, though, is the debt that these poets owe their forebears (no doubt this is by design).

For in the works of these poets, especially in their contrasts one with the other, we can see that there is a distinct shift from the more traditional, Eurpoean classical styles to a Modernist, America style. But without the knowledge we have of Dickinson, Whitman and others, we would not be so well aware of just where this particularly American tradition first arises. No doubt these two giants' influence had much to do with the development of their torchbearers' work; the similarities in style between Stevens and Dickinson, for instance, are so close as to be identical in some instances. This survey of development in American literature has always been one of the most interesting parts of this curriculum, and nowhere more than here, where the juxtaposition of old-fashioned poets of the new age and the avant garde poets of said age reveals the debt they both owe to their literary ancestors.