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Housekeeping:

• Have a WONDERFUL (and safe) Spring Break
• I may have intermittent access to email during Spring Break (i.e. I may not be able to get right back to you)

Readings for Today: 

• Flannery O'Connor "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" 
• Faulkner "A Rose for Emily" 

Agenda:

Modernism and the Question of Regional Heroes

With realism, we see a deeper focus on who the hero is (rather than what the hero does). With the rise of American Modernism, authors (and readers) question the existence of a hero altogether. After all, how can we identify a hero apart from the heroic quest? And if the heroic quest is a myth, are heroes mythes as well?

Visualizing Modernism 

Classical Art and Romantic Art often visualize the heroic quest. Jacques-Louis David's paintings characterize both eras. 

"The Oath of the Horatii" (1786)

"The Tennis Court Oath" (1792)

Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass (1801)

Notice the shift from the balanced composition of the Classical era (with it's Classical subjects) to the drama of the Romantic era, with it's storm clouds and unresolved diagonal lines. However, both of these styles capture the heroic narrative within a single image. 

By contrast, Modern Art often breaks away from clear representations of the heroic. It moves towards abstraction, like this Jackson Pollock painting:

Jackson Pollock, Blue Poles, 1952, National Gallery of Australia

Or this abstract painting:

Hans Hofmann, The Gate, 1959–60

These abstract paintings seem to exist in a world apart from virtues or ideals like heroism.

Other modernist art takes a highly symbolic view of reality, such as the fragmented cubism of Pablo Picasso:

Pablo Picasso's Guernica, 1937, protest against Fascism

"Guernica" depicts the nightmare of the Spanish Civil War. The action here could be cast as heroic (or anti-heroic), but it's difficult to create any sort of traditional narrative with these fragmented images. Instead we have a collision of many different messages simultaneously.

Modernism makes similar moves in literature. The heroic narrative is undermined or reassembled in new and startling ways that make us question our ideas about reality. After all, if you and I perceive the world differently, is there a "reality" at all?

As science, especially science around the atom, began to change our perception of reality, it also began to change Modernist Art. 

The Rise of Regional Modernism in America

T.S. Eliot was associated with the Modernism movement largely centered in Europe(like Henry James, he became a British citizen and renounced his American citizenship). This artistic era may be defined like this:

The Modernist Period in English Literature occupied the years from shortly after the beginning of the twentieth century through roughly 1965. In broad terms, the period was marked by sudden and unexpected breaks with traditional ways of viewing and interacting with the world. Experimentation and individualism became virtues, where in the past they were often heartily discouraged. Modernism was set in motion, in one sense, through a series of cultural shocks. The first of these great shocks was the Great War, which ravaged Europe from 1914 through 1918, known now as World War One. At the time, this “War to End All Wars” was looked upon with such ghastly horror that many people simply could not imagine what the world seemed to be plunging towards. The first hints of that particular way of thinking called Modernism stretch back into the nineteenth century. As literary periods go, Modernism displays a relatively strong sense of cohesion and similarity across genres and locales. Furthermore, writers who adopted the Modern point of view often did so quite deliberately and self-consciously. Indeed, a central preoccupation of Modernism is with the inner self and consciousness. In contrast to the Romantic world view, the Modernist cares rather little for Nature, Being, or the overarching structures of history. Instead of progress and growth, the Modernist intelligentsia sees decay and a growing alienation of the individual. The machinery of modern society is perceived as impersonal, capitalist, and antagonistic to the artistic impulse. War most certainly had a great deal of influence on such ways of approaching the world. Two World Wars in the span of a generation effectively shell-shocked all of Western civilization.

Back state-side, modernism developed in several different ways, including regional modernism. This brand of modernism takes a different, often cynical, look at regional character. It emphasizes regional actions and regional voice (colloquialisms). It also tends to exposes the (often ignored) negative aspects of regional life. It is very different from the Modernist aesthetic of artists like Eliot, but it stems from the same world view (and thus lands in roughly the same stylistic movement). Regional modernism, like that of O'Connor and Faulkner, also borrows the psychological emphasis and symbolism of Modernism.     

"The Life You Save May Be Your Own": The Great Heroic Lie

Summarize the plot of this story in three sentences. What happens?

Group Work:

Break into groups and see how this action fits, or doesn't fit into the heroic quest narrative.

THEN

Analyze the characters involved in the narrative. What does the story tell us about them (their motivations and intentions)? How do these characters reflect a REGIONAL identity? 

"A Rose for Emily": Killing Romance

If you think J. Alfred Prufrock's romantic fantasies were twisted, Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" really kills the American romance! :)

Group Work:

Identify FIVE literary devices that Faulkner uses in this story. Use the Online Resources  page to help you define these devices. How does Faulkner's symbolic writing style resemble the visual art above?