American Literature: Modernism and Postmodernism

Posted on Apr 29, 2024 in Physics

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway’s fiction depicts an absurd, meaningless world. His characters are antisocial and individualistic. They reject conventional society and take refuge in vigorous, risky physical activity. Facing death and danger alone, they feel close to the ultimate truth about existence, which is futility and ultimate absurdity. The world of Hemingway’s fiction is extremely masculine, dominated by men. Women are problematically portrayed, appearing as aggressive and vampiric or else as weak and fragile. But males are quite problematic as well; they are solipsistic, self-isolated, unable to find roots and affection, or to establish meaningful bonds with others. Interpersonal relationships are usually doomed by miscommunication and by a fatalistic feeling that they do not matter after all (e.g., The Sun Also Rises). Hemingway’s style is spare, characterized by its absolute economy of language, detail, and situation. Verbosity is rejected as inauthentic. The truth is bare, lean, and impacting. As a result, his fictions are very elliptical, at times barely fleshed out. He uses mostly simple declarative sentences. His style was described as journalistic, possibly learned when he worked as a reporter for the Kansas City Star. Novels from the 1920s include A Farewell to Arms. Although the early fiction is focused on individualistic heroes, in the 1930s there is a usual defense of social engagement and a concern with community, e.g., To Have and Have Not. Later works return to the solitary protagonists (The Old Man and the Sea).

Beat Writers

The Beat Generation shows a more extreme form of social dissent than either Jewish or Southern writers. It comes from a youth deviant subculture, that of beats or hipsters of the 1950s. The hipsters were drop-outs: they rejected the work-a-day world, consumer society, conventionality, and regimentation. They were often linked to the world of theater, art, and music (especially jazz). Hipsters concentrated in the bohemian neighborhoods of large American cities, but the most important communities were in San Francisco and in NYC. Their sense of disaffection and rebelliousness makes them displaced, dislocated from the rest of society. The intellectual antecedents of the beats are a series of apostles of free sex and of instinctual liberation, such as D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller. The expression “beat” was supposedly coined by Jack Kerouac in 1952. It meant both the beat of jazz music and the beatific joys of Oriental mysticism. Beat attitudes can already be found in the work of a few writers in the early 1950s. The movement gathered strength and visibility in the mid-to-late 1950s, particularly after the publication of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, a sort of manifesto of the beat lifestyle and literature. After Kerouac’s success, the beat hipster subculture becomes the object of media attention and films.

Key Figures

Novelists: Jack Kerouac (On the Road)
Poets: Allen Ginsberg (Howl, Kaddish)
Thinkers: Paul Goodman (Growing Up Absurd)

Characteristics

The beat took jazz as a model for writing. Beat literature is the most modernist and experimental of the post-war period, featuring automatic writing, stream of consciousness, and maximal fragmentation.
Their main goals in literature, like in life, were liberation, authenticity, and experience.
In search of these goals, they turned to Oriental mysticism, which they regarded as a path to liberation, authenticity, and self-knowledge.

Characteristics of the 1960s

The 1960s in American literature were characterized by:

Experimentalism: A mixture of high and low culture, a new hybrid style of writing which is a mix of popular and modernist literature.
Imitation and Pastiche: Meta-literature, absurdity, a strong sense of fatalism, black humor.
Uncertainty and Undecidability: A considerable component of uncertainty and undecidability, reflecting the belief that reality is unknowable (e.g., John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49).

Posthuman Literature and Digital Culture

Posthuman literature is determined by the media. Media would not only communicate content but also shape structures of perception and ways of understanding reality and of writing about it. Another symptom of postmodernity was the information society, the appearance of computing and computer culture, the early developments of which were between the 1930s and 1940s. In the post-war period, there was a development of early computers. Computers can be seen as external brains; they separate language, logical processing, and computation from humans. They externalize interiority, materialize the self, and mechanize subjectivity. They simulate the human, and as a consequence, there was an impossibility to distinguish humans from machines: a frequent literary and cinematic topic since the 1970s. Computers blow boundaries between inside and outside, human and non-human, with life, affect, and thought distributed along human and non-human chains of connections. Everything has been digitized, reduced to bytes. Digital culture affects literature in three ways:

Computer-generated (assisted) literature: (e.g., Alison Knowles’ House of Dust)
Computer-based literature: Uses or imitates digital capabilities (e.g., Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl)
Literature that describes a digitized environment: Cyberpunk science fiction (e.g., William Gibson’s Neuromancer, featuring male loners as protagonists, set in the low depths of society, with a precise, incisive, carefully crafted style).

Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk is a subgenre of dystopian science fiction characterized by:

Urban settings: Decaying, post-industrial cities ridden with crime and populated by marginal subcultures.
Corporate control: Societies controlled by economic interests (multinationals) and crime syndicates. No governments or control mechanisms, no social cohesion.
High technology and social polarization: A vision of the present in fast-forward; high technology juxtaposed with social polarization and a lack of civic responsibility or sense of community.
Protagonists: Hackers who have fallen in disgrace with some criminal association or multinational. Technologically modified bodies, often fatalistic endings.

According to Fredric Jameson, cyberpunk is the supreme literary expression of late capitalism itself. It mixes fascination with social decay and criticism of some trends in contemporary societies (deregulation, social Darwinism).

William Faulkner

William Faulkner was the most experimental of the modernist fiction writers. The history, landscape, and people of the South, and particularly of Mississippi, his native state, are the main themes and settings for his fiction. Hence, his work provides an unusual combination of localism, with local color themes such as the wilderness and rural life, and modernism—subjectivism, formal fragmentation, and experiments with narrative voice and perspective. The Mississippi that appears in Faulkner’s work reflects its real social conditions: poverty, underdevelopment, and isolation. However, it is also a slightly mythologized land. Just like Gabriel García Márquez, who set his stories and novels in the imaginary town of Macondo, Faulkner set his fiction in an imaginary geography: the county of Yoknapatawpha, capital Jefferson. (It was Faulkner who influenced García Márquez.) Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha is a symbol for the South as a whole. Through the (imaginary) people, history, and legends of this imaginary county, Faulkner intends to give a picture of the history and conflicts of the South. The decay of Southern society after the war is a theme dear to Southern literature. In general, Southern literature is nostalgic for the sort of pre-war society portrayed in novels and films such as Gone with the Wind. Faulkner does share this kind of nostalgia, but he also shows that the legendary Southern past was not merely heroic and idyllic; it was flawed by violence.

Faulkner is an exponent of the tradition of psychological horror represented as well by Edgar Allan Poe. Because of the combination of localism with psychological horror, he has been called a writer of “Southern gothic.” Mixed with such tragic seriousness, there is in Faulkner considerable humor (this is a frequently forgotten aspect of his work). It shows particularly in his 1940s work and in a cycle of novels dedicated to the Snopes family: The Hamlet (1940). Faulkner’s irony can occasionally be glimpsed in his famous short story, “A Rose for Emily” (1930).

Faulkner had a long and fruitful career. He wrote more than thirty titles—mostly novels with some interesting short-story collections such as Go Down Moses. Although he wrote continuously right until the end of his life, his most important works were published between the late 1920s and the early 1940s.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) claimed his writing was about “the flight of the rocket”—the provisional title for his novel The Beautiful and Damned. Like this quote indicates, his literary universe is the glittering, fast-moving world of the upper classes enjoying “the jazz age”—the era of hedonism and economic prosperity that followed World War I. Scott Fitzgerald’s work chronicles the rise of new fortunes in this period. He is also one of the first writers to report the rise of a new form of popular culture (the cinema) and of a new class of people associated with it.

The “touch of disaster” appears in Fitzgerald’s 1920s works in the violence, brutality, and/or indifference on the part of the rich towards people who suffer or are somehow disadvantaged (for example, in The Great Gatsby). In his later novels and short stories, this topic becomes more obvious. The world of money, leisure, parties, and dissipation which his characters inhabit is the setting for trajectories of personal disintegration, addiction, and mental disease. This, in a way, mimes Fitzgerald’s own personal life, which also had a touch of disaster in it. He was a great success early in his career, with novels like This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Great Gatsby (1925). But as he grew older, both the public and the critics turned their back on him. By the late 1930s, his stories were poorly paid, and all of his early work was out of print. The end of his life was marked by his losing fight with alcoholism, depression, and bankruptcy. In addition, his wife, Zelda, was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1931.

Fitzgerald was a great stylist. He was highly praised by Gertrude Stein, who said he was the only writer of his generation who “wrote in sentences.” The beauty of his language contrasts with the moral squalor his works often describe and condemn.