EN210 Guthrie FA 2013 Exam 2 Review MODERNISM THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE The test will be some combination of multiple choice passage identification short essay All major biographical information provided in the NAAL for the following authors Important terms ideas and concepts discussed in class and on Powerpoints Blackboard Poetry Significant lines discussed in class What happens in the poem What is the poem doing How does it express the concerns of its author and or Modernism or Harlem Renaissance American Literature 1914 1945 13 18 21 22 World War I ushered in more progressive forms of political and social life Women and racial minorities gained some civil liberties and some new social freedoms during this period though they still faced discrimination Political social and cultural life in the United States was transformed by the stock market crash of 1929 which led to an economic depression with a 25 percent unemployment rate This economic catastrophe was known as the Great Depression The Great Depression did not fully end until the United States entered World War II in 1941 The war unified the country politically and revitalized industry and employment The United States emerged from World War II as a major industrial and political power Another issue was the question of how far literature should engage itself in political and social struggle Some felt that art should participate in the politics of the time while others believed that art should remain a domain unto itself The social codes governing sexual behavior became less restrictive These social changes found their most influential theorist in Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud inventor of the practice of psychoanalysis and an important developer of the concept of the unconscious Women gained the right to vote in 1920 and found new freedoms in educational possibilities professional opportunities geographic mobility and sexuality Around 1915 as a direct result of the industrial needs of World War I job opportunities opened up for African Americans in the factories of the North Many left the South for Northern cities in what came to be known as the Great Migration Even though African Americans faced racism segregation and racial violence in the North a black American presence soon became powerfully visible in urban cultural life The Harlem Renaissance an outpouring of innovative cultural production by African Americans centered in Harlem a neighborhood of New York City was one manifestation of this development Class inequality generated intellectual and artistic debate during the modern period Following the rise of the Soviet Union the American left increasingly drew its intellectual and political program from the tenets of German philosopher Karl Marx who located the roots of human behavior in economics and believed that industrialized societies were divided by an antagonistic relationship between capital and labor Americans who thought of themselves as Marxists in the 1920s and 1930s were usually subjected to government surveillance suspicion and occasionally violence Science Technology access to electricity design in ways to communicate devices for recording music motion pictures developed The Great Depression was not limited to the United States but was a worldwide phenomenon It fostered social unrest that led to the rise of fascist dictatorships in Europe Many Americans began to question the efficacy and justice of free enterprise capitalism Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932 and instituted a New Deal designed to combat the Depression He inaugurated liberal reforms such as social security job creation acts welfare and unemployment insurance mainly communist membership Literary critics often designate as high modernism work that represents the transformation of traditional society under the pressures of modernity and that breaks down traditional literary forms in doing so Many high modernist texts interpret modernity as an experience of loss and represent the modern world as a scene of ruin Modernist literature often conveys fragmentation through abrupt shifts in perspective voice and tone and through a reliance on sometimes obscure symbols and images rather than clear statements of meaning Some modernist literature draws on structures and fragments borrowed from earlier world literature mythologies and religions For some writers these references to earlier texts expressed profound truths Other writers alluded to literary traditions ironically The history of race in the United States was central to the specifically national subject matter to which many American modernists remained committed The Harlem Renaissance brought African American writers like Countee Cullen Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston into particular prominence EN210 Guthrie FA 2013 Women writers faced a backlash after their prominence in the nineteenth century Some male modernist writers asserted their own seriousness by identifying women writers with the didactic popular writing against which they rebelled But women still emerged who associated themselves with the important literary trends of the era Many of these writers concentrated on depictions of women characters or women s thoughts and experiences yet few labeled themselves feminists T S Eliot The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock This poem the earliest of Eliot s major works was completed in 1 9 1 0 or 1 9 1 1 but not published until 1 9 1 5 It is an examination of the tortured psyche of the prototypical modern man overeducated eloquent neurotic and emotionally stilted Prufrock the poem s speaker seems to be addressing a potential lover with whom he would like to force the moment to its crisis by somehow consummating their relationship But Prufrock knows too much of life to dare an approach to the woman In his mind he hears the comments others make about his inadequacies and he chides himself for presuming emotional interaction could be possible at all The poem moves from a series of fairly concrete for Eliot physical settings a cityscape the famous patient etherised upon a table and several interiors women s arms in the lamplight coffee spoons fireplaces to a series of vague ocean images conveying Prufrock s emotional distance from the world as he comes to recognize his second rate status I am not Prince Hamlet Prufrock is powerful for its range of intellectual reference and also for the vividness of character achieved The Waste Land The first section of The Waste Land takes its title from a