Topic Clusters

American Literature between the Wars, 1914–1945
War and Modernity

In the first half of the twentieth century, cataclysmic events triggered revolutions in the arts and literary culture. The First World War, which killed tens of millions of people and devastated the European landscape like nothing in the previous thousand years, was followed soon after by the rise of Fascism and Communism, a worldwide economic collapse, and German Nazism in the 1930s. After waves of social turmoil and persecutions, an even bloodier world conflict began in 1939. But there also were many upheavals of other sorts, and an amazing acceleration of technological change and scientific discovery. Between 1900 and 1945, the Western world replaced balloons and gliders with intercontinental aircraft, fighter jets, and ballistic missiles. It leapt from telegraph to radio and television, from ineffectual medicines to modern surgery and antibiotics, from conventional pyrotechnics to atomic weapons.

Intellectual and aesthetic upheavals were just as dramatic. Quantum mechanics, relativity, new models of creation, and the extent of the universe challenged old paradigms of intellectual life carried over from classical physics and Renaissance dialectics. An endless tide of motives arose for regarding life as utterly transformed, and for creating literature that responded to this turbulent newness. The “isms” of the late nineteenth century, which favored answers and grand overviews, were replaced by movements and experiments often energized by doubt and shock. A rising anxiety pervaded that human experience was too vast and diverse, and changing too quickly, for the artist to achieve any broad and stable perspective, or arrive at any lasting moral description or definition. The first half of the twentieth century abounded with manifestos that questioned everything—even the worth of manifestos. Futurism, which flourished briefly before World War I, proposed that every traditional structure of expression, including grammar and syntax, inevitably collapses under the pressure of modernity—the speed, power, and whirlwind changes of a mechanized, electrical, chemical, and technological world. Accelerated life required accelerated art. Dadaism, which experienced many permutations from the war years to the end of the century, celebrated the futility of trying to make sense of the world at a time when mass-marketed and enforced absurdities ruined millions of lives. When the madness of war and the economic euphoria of the 1920s ended suddenly in a worldwide depression, such movements were challenged by a widespread demand for a revived and modernized realism and naturalism, an art for the common man and woman, for a crisis not of speed and change, but of want.

Whether or not they affiliated themselves with specific fashions or movements, many American writers came to think of modern life as a headlong rush into the unimaginable. Such a perspective challenged the traditional Victorian idea of the author as an inspired and informed artist who achieves dominion over experience, and even speaks as prophet, such as Emerson, Thoreau, Stowe, Whitman, and Du Bois. Even naturalistic authors who flourished at the end of the nineteenth century (such as Crane and Chopin) had gravitated toward answers and doctrines that the next generation would come to doubt. The modernist writer, instead, became a searcher.

General Issues and Questions

1. To glimpse the emergence of the modernist sensibility, compare the Edwin Arlington Robinson poems in NAAL with those of Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. These New Englanders’ verse presents a world from which faith is absent. But tonal and thematic differences between Robinson on the one hand, and Stevens and Moore on the other, can be dramatic. How would you describe these differences? In Robinson’s world, the forces that doom us are knowable, and the ironies that shadow our destinies are predictable. The works of Stevens and Moore take us into a labyrinth. These poems enact a world that cannot be “known” in the same way as Robinson’s, in which constant searching and imagining are required to make poems and to construct a life. How are such differences reflected in the language and style of these poets?
   
2. When we look at minority contributions to American literary modernism, our understanding of the era becomes more complex. Pound, Stevens, Eliot, Millay—these early-twentieth-century poets create an aura of aristocracy through the allusiveness and elegance of their verse. Review the “Game of Chess” section of Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” the setting of Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” or the opening of Pound’s Cantos, and these qualities become clear. Eliot’s famous essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” became a nearly sacred text during the era of “high modernism.” What aspects of human experience are sidelined in Eliot’s description of what modern writers should read, quarrel with, or select as subjects and themes? Such literary taste and underlying assumptions challenged the work of American minority writers. Understanding the historical and cultural predicament white modernist writers emphasized, and proficient in literary traditions, American minority authors also knew that modernism showed little interest in social and political injustice. How can we read the work of Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, and other minority writers as part of a dialogue with that complacency? Where do we see that challenge implicit in the traditions they favor, and in their literary style?
   
3. Take a look at work by the following artists, bearing in mind that between the wars the art world experienced as much fragmentation and upheaval as the world of literature. Sample the mood, tone, and experimentation in works by artists in the following categories:
   
   

   -	Cubism: Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso
   -	Surrealism: Giorgio De Chirico, Salvador Dali, Man Ray, René Magritte
   -	Realism: Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, Diego Rivera

   
   Where do you see similar experimentation among the modernist writers in NAAL? If cubism, for example, offers us variant views of the same subject in the same moment, which American poets and prose writers make a similar attempt on the printed page? Which poems suggest a cubist array of views of one important visual or psychological experience? If you wanted to describe F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Louise Bogan, Hart Crane, or other strongly visual writers as having some affinity to new ways of seeing in the visual arts, what parallels would you suggest, and why?
   
4. After World War I, it became fashionable to describe some of the emerging American authors as psychological “casualties” of the conflict, whether or not they were actually in combat. Several of these authors were for a time expatriates, living in London or Paris or elsewhere in Western Europe, seeking perspectives and a level of intellectual companionship they believed were scarce at home. The conflicted mood of France, England, and Germany, a kind of elegiac festivity, compared favorably to the bumptious obliviousness that these writers sensed in the American heartland. They expressed the woundedness of the West, a collective yearning for healing, solace, and a new beginning. Which writers in Volume D seem to you to fit such a pattern, and which do not? Among the writers who portray a struggle for self-realization or moral rebirth, which ones seem rooted in the American landscape? Which seem to be stateless, or cultural and intellectual wanderers? Do race or social class play a part in the distinction between writers who valorize place and those who lack, distrust, or reject that kind of connection?
   
5. As the modernist literary world grew increasingly self-conscious and scholastic, authentic expression became harder to distinguish and describe. Which of the stories from this period seem to you more authentic as representations of experience—stories that have a ring of social or psychological truth? Which seem less so, and why?