... his conversion was 'Ash Wednesday' (1930), a religiou

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Camelia Elias
American Studies
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background

• Causes of World War 1
• Militarism
• Imperialism
• Alliance System
• Nationalism

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history

• 1914
• JUNE 28
• Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated
• JULY 28
• Russia declared war on Serbia
• AUG 3
• Germany declared war on France

• 1915
• FEB 18
• Germany began its attempted blockade of Britain
• APR 22
• The Germans were the first to use poisoned gas
• MAY 23
• Italy declared war on Austria Hungary

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• 1916
• JUNE 4
• Russia began an offensive in eastern Galicia
  (Poland)
• AUG 27
• Italy declared war on Germany
• SEPT 15
• The British army makes use of tanks

• 1917
• FEB 1
• Germany began unrestricted submarine warfare
• APR 6
• The US declared war on Germany
• NOV 7
• The Bolsheviks seized power in Russia
• DEC 9
• Jerusalem fell to the Allies

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1918

• JUNE 15
• Austria- Hungary fought its last offense
• JUNE 23
• The Allies occupied Murmansk, Russia
• NOV 9
• Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany abdicated
• NOV 11
• Germany signed an armistice

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modernism

• began somewhere bet. 1850 and 1915
• ended between 1914 and 1950
• it was a movement only in retrospect

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influences

• late capitalism
• dominated by industrialization and technology
• shaken by WWI
• spiritual climate
• ambivalent, exhilarating and exalting because of
  humankinds increasing momentum and endless
  prospects
• frustrating and alienating because of the
  discrepancy between the human spirit and
  technological civilization

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modernist expressions

• modernist art is at once an expression of and
  protest against the process of modernization
• a willingness (even desire) to challenge peoples
  preconceived notions about art, values, life in
  order to shake them up
• anti-modern, anti-urban, anti-industrial,
  anti-progress, anti-traditional middle-class
  values

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double perspectives

• dualist view
• optimism/pessimism
• confidence/feelings of doom
• irrationality/intellectualism
• chaos/order

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Victorianism/American realism

• belief in
• predictable universe presided over by a
  benevolent God
• the universe is governed by immutable natural
  laws
• humankind arrives at a unified and fixed set of
  truths
• insistence on preserving absolute moral standards
  based on the distinction between human/animal

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modernist reactions

• restructuring fragmented concepts
• merging things previously held to be mutually
  exclusive
• manifested in paradox, cinematic montage
• breaking up Victorian binary systems
• shift toward the belief that subject and object
  are linked and that the subject cannot see,
  describe, or transmit an object without changing
  it

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modernist beliefs

• findings of natural and human sciences are
  universally and timelessly true
• science is inherently progressive
• the workings of the mind can be scientifically
  revealed
• aesthetic judgments are radically individual

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modernist beliefs

• root justification of moral judgments must be
  scientific
• works of art are self-contained worlds
• personal identity is refashioned out of
  experience
• art is the principal vehicle for fashioning
  meaning in a world where meaning must be
  constantly re-created

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Philosophy

• a fundamentally new conception of time
• eternity rejected in favor of here and now
• MAKE IT NEW

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writing strategies

• prioritize space (spatial form) over time-bound
  narrative
• use of allusion and verbal collage as a result of
  attempting a radical compression of time
• collapse meaning into a moment of time

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characteristics 1

• attempts to efface the author
• emphasis on identity
• locating or recovering the essential self
• split between inner and outer self
• objective reality exists, but is distorted by
  subjectivity

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characteristics 2

• depiction of individual consciousness
• attempt at new realism
• detachment
• irony
• fragmentation of perception
• cosmopolitanism

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characteristics 3

• technology
• urbanism
• predominance of metaphor
• elimination of omniscient narrator
• stream of consciousness
• the unconscious
• emphasis on connotation over denotation

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reaction of modernist writers

• take in the objectives of existing sciences
• distinguish new objects which belong to a
  potentially scientific domain or have the truth
  value of disinterested natural description
• largely abandon any pretension to primary truth

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Freuds influence (1856-1939)

• sharp opposition between conscious surfaces and
  unconscious depths
• heavy influence of the unconscious
• psychoanalysis stresses the common foundation of
  all cultures

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e.e. cummings
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C. Brâncusi The Kiss (1908 other version 1916)
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Matisse, Le Luxe (1907)
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Gertrude Stein(1874-1946)
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biographical info

• born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania to a family of
  well-educated German-Jewish immigrants.
• 1902 - moved to France during the height of
  artistic creativity gathering in Montparnasse.
• 1903-1912 - lived in Paris with her brother Leo,
  who became an admired art critic.
• 1907 - Stein met her lifelong partner, Alice B.
  Toklas
• after the success of her memoir "The
  Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" in the mid
  1930s, Stein became rich in her own right.
• she and her brother compiled one of the first
  collections of Cubist and modern art.

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Stein Alice B. Toklas
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Rue de FleurusBeinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, Yale University
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Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose
The Lost Generation
Pablo Picasso Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906)
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The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933

• They always say . . . that my writing is
  appalling but they always quote it and what is
  more, they quote it correctly. . . . My sentences
  do get under their skin, only they do not know
  that they do.

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Everybodys Autobiography, 1937

• I was very much interested to know just what
  they know about what is good publicity and what
  is not. Harcourt was very surprised when I said
  to him on first meeting him in New York remember
  this extraordinary welcome that I am having does
  not come from the books of mine that they did
  understand like the Autobiography but the books
  of mine that they did not understand.

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Stein, interview 1934

• People today like contemporary comforts, but
  they take their literature and art from the past.
  They are not interested in what the present
  generation is thinking or painting if it doesnt
  fit the enclosure of their personal
  comprehension. Present day geniuses can no more
  help doing what they are doing than you can help
  not understanding it, but if you think we do it
  for effect and to make a sensation, youre crazy.
  Its not our idea of fun to work for thirty or
  forty years on a medium of expression and have
  ourselves ridiculed.

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Stein, interview 1930

• Lack of popular success in America is the last
  of my worries. I am working for what will endure,
  not a public. Once you have a public you are
  never free. No one who is ever to be really great
  succeeds until he is past forty, be he inventor,
  painter, writer or financial genius.
• All this foolishness about my writing being
  mystic or impressionistic is so stupid. . . .
  Just a lot of rot. I write as pure, straight,
  grammatical English as any one, more accurate,
  grammatically than most. There isnt a single one
  of my sentences that a school child couldnt
  diagram.
• New York World

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Transatlantic Interview, 1946

• Picasso said, You see, the situation is
  very simple. Anybody that creates a new thing has
  to make it ugly. The effort of creation is so
  great, that trying to get away from the other
  things, the contemporary insistence, is so great
  that the effort to break it gives the appearance
  of ugliness. Your followers can make it pretty,
  so generally followers are accepted before the
  master. The master has the stain of ugliness. The
  followers who make it pretty are accepted. The
  people then go back to the original. They see the
  beauty and bring it back to the original.

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The Making of Americans (1925)

• FORM
• move toward abstraction ? privilege the spatial
  over the narrative form
• rhythms of repeated experience (write what you
  know)
• dissolution of plot, character and mimesis
• rigorous control of material through authorial
  consciousness
• formal demands
• dismissal of the noun
• ignore the sentence
• produce abstraction
• revolutionize the Word

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content

• derives a principle of contemporaneity rather
  than developing sequence
• gives importance to the method rather than the
  subject
• poetics is more important than subject
  matter/theme
• devotion to the nature of sensation and relation
  within the work itself
• emphasize authorial consciousness

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American Modernism was also a form of regionalism
(literary key figure ex. William Faulkner)
Grant Wood American Gothic (1930)
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T.S. Eliot, 1955.The Granger Collection, New
York City
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biographical info (1888-1965)

• American-English poet, playwright, literary
  critic, and editor
• a leader of the modernist movement in poetry in
  such works as The Waste Land (1922) and The Four
  Quartets (1943)
• exercised a strong influence on Anglo-American
  culture from the 1920s until late in the century
• experimented with diction, style, and
  versification and thus revitalized English poetry
• in a series of critical essays he shattered old
  orthodoxies and erected new ones
• the publication of The Four Quartets led to his
  recognition as the greatest living English poet
  and man of letters
• in 1948 he was awarded both the Order of Merit
  and the Nobel Prize for Literature

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early years

• descended from a distinguished New England family
• His family allowed him the widest education
  available in his time, with no influence from his
  father to be practical and to go into business
• entered Harvard in 1906 he received a B.A. in
  1909, after three instead of the usual four years
• the men who influenced him at Harvard were George
  Santayana, the philosopher and poet, and the
  critic Irving Babbitt.
• From Babbitt he derived an anti-Romantic attitude
  
• 190910 he was an assistant in philosophy at
  Harvard

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early years 2

• spent the year 191011 in France, attending Henri
  Bergson's lectures in philosophy at the Sorbonne
  and reading poetry with Alain-Fournier
• the poetry of Dante, of the English writers John
  Webster and John Donne, and of the French
  Symbolist Jules Laforgue helped him to find his
  own style
• 1911-1914 back at Harvard reading Indian
  philosophy and studying Sanskrit
• 1914 he met and began a close association with
  the American poet Ezra Pound

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early publications

• Eliot was to pursue four careers editor,
  dramatist, literary critic, and philosophical
  poet.
• he was probably the most erudite poet of his time
  in the English language.
• his undergraduate poems were literary and
  conventional.
• his first important publication, and the first
  masterpiece of modernism in English, was The
  Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

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Alfred J. Prufrock

• Let us go then, you and I,When the evening is
  spread out against the skyLike a patient
  etherized upon a table. . . .
• Ezra Pound had printed privately a small book, A
  lume spento, as early as 1908, but Prufrock was
  the first poem by either of these literary
  revolutionists to go beyond experiment to achieve
  perfection.

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Prufrocks significance

• represented a break with the immediate past as
  radical as that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and
  William Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads (1798).
• the appearance of Eliot's first volume, Prufrock
  and Other Observations, in 1917, marks the date
  of the maturity of the 20th-century poetic
  revolution.

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comparisons

• the significance of the revolution is still
  disputed, but the striking similarity to the
  Romantic revolution of Coleridge and Wordsworth
  is obvious Eliot and Pound, like their
  18th-century counterparts, set about reforming
  poetic diction.
• 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
• Eliot sought a poetic diction that might be
  spoken by an educated person, being neither
  pedantic nor vulgar.

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poetics

• the poet-critic must write programmatic
  criticism
• criticism that expresses the poet's own interests
  as a poet, quite different from historical
  scholarship, which stops at placing the poet in
  his background

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Tradition and the individual talent (1920)

• tradition, as used by the poet, is not a mere
  repetition of the work of the immediate past
  (novelty is better than repetition)
• rather, it comprises the whole of European
  literature from Homer to the present

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the objective correlative

• The only way of expressing emotion in the form
  of art is by finding an objective correlative
  in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a
  chain of events which shall be the formula for
  that particular emotion such that, when the
  external facts, which must terminate in sensory
  experience, are given, the emotion is immediately
  evoked.

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Eliot's theory of the objective correlative

• used the phrase objective correlative in the
  context of his own impersonal theory of poetry
• had an immense influence toward correcting the
  vagueness of late Victorian rhetoric by insisting
  on a correspondence of word and object

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later criticism

• Dante (1929)
• Thoughts After Lambeth (1931)
• The Idea of a Christian Society (1939)
• Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948).
• whether a work is poetry must be decided by
  literary standards whether it is great poetry
  must be decided by standards higher than the
  literary

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Dante (1929)

• Eliot's criticism and poetry are so interwoven
  that it is difficult to discuss them separately
• the essay on Dante appeared two years after Eliot
  was confirmed in the Church of England (1927)
• in 1929 he also became a British subject

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philosophical and religious phase

• the first long poem after his conversion was Ash
  Wednesday (1930), a religious meditation in a
  style entirely different from that of any of the
  earlier poems
• Ash Wednesday expresses the pangs and the
  strain involved in the acceptance of religious
  belief and religious discipline

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later poetry and plays

• Eliot's masterpiece is The Four Quartets
• it was issued as a book in 1943, though each
  quartet is a complete poem.
• the first of the quartets, Burnt Norton, had
  appeared in the Collected Poems of 1936.
• it is a subtle meditation on the nature of time
  and its relation to eternity.

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The Four Quartets (1943)

• Each of the poems was self-subsistent
• but when published together they were seen to
  make up a single work
• themes and images recurred and were developed in
  a musical manner and brought to a final
  resolution.

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• The Waste Land
• (1922)

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The Waste Land , 1922

• Thematics
• the poem expresses the disenchantment,
  disillusionment, and disgust of the period after
  World War I
• a series of vignettes, loosely linked by the
  legend of the search for the Grail
• they portray a sterile world of panicky fears and
  barren lusts, and of human beings waiting for
  some sign or promise of redemption

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style

• highly complex
• erudite
• allusive
• Eliot provided notes and references to explain
  the work's many quotations and allusions
• exhibits meta-awareness
• relies on intertextuality

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form content

• the use of paratext (esp. footnotes and the wide
  range of literary references) interferes with the
  intended content
• rendering of the universal human predicament of
  man desiring salvation
• the manipulation of language
• mastering of the poetic phrase
• metrics
• modulations ranging from the sublime to the
  conversational

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structure

• five sections
• proceeds on a principle of rhetorical
  discontinuity that reflects the fragmented
  experience of the 20th-century sensibility of the
  great modern cities of the West
• expresses the hopelessness and confusion of
  purpose of life in the secularized city, the
  decay of urbs aeterna (the eternal city).
• structure ? concretizes the theme of hopelessness
  and decay
• esp. through the poem's constant rhetorical
  shifts and its juxtapositions of contrasting
  styles

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unified theme

• The Waste Land is not a simple contrast of the
  heroic past with the degraded present
• it is rather a timeless, simultaneous awareness
  of moral grandeur and moral evil