Heritage Sectional Exam 6
Late 1800's to the Present

Modern Art in Europe and the United States (c. 1870-1965)

"The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art"--Jackson Pollock

Modern inventions have effects that appear in art

GOALS!!!

HUMOR

PARADOX

"TRIP-YOU-UP"

Foundations of Modern Art: Manet and the Painting of Modern Life

Edouard Manet, Gare Saint-Lazare, 1873, cf. Monet

Focus on our inability to see clearly

The eye is imperfect!

Individual subjectivity in modern industrial life

WHAT IS THE ROLE OF SUBJECTIVITY?

Everyday Life

Passing Moments

TOWARD REALISM

Away from IDEALIZATION

dissolution of subject into reality

Industralization

Alienation with impressionist action (ephemeral)

Loneliness

Confusion of Identity

how modern society takes away the individual's identity

Manet, Bar at the Folies-Bergere, 1880-81

ORIGIN of MODERN ART

COLOR

USAGE OF LIGHT

Expressionistic Vs. Formalistic

Expressionistic: Roots in Romanticism

Subject could be uninteresting

Colors and use of canvas

Formalistic: Roots in Neoclassicism

Logical/Analytical

Lines, Geometry, Angles

The Modern Breaks down those forms

Purpose: Escape previous Standards

Color

Bold Brush Strokes

Make it clear that its a painting

Modern Art makes 2D space apparent and doesn't lie to the viewer.

QUESTIONING DIMENSIONALITY

Focus on Feeling, Not Subject

The 20th Century and the Rejection of Naturalism: Expressionism vs. Formalism

Post Impressionism

Vincent Van Gogh

Instead of trying to reproduce what I have before my eyes, Ise color more arbitrarily so as to express myself forcibly

Starry Night, 1889

Romantic Sensibility

Colors = Emotions

Uninterested in naturalism/realism

Self-Portrait, 1880s

inner sensation: color=life!

Paul Cezanne

see in nature the cylinder, the sphere, the cone

Mont Ste. Victoire, 1904

Formalism

Distant Neoclassical influence

Cool Palette

Analytical painting

Fading distance

Still Life with Plaster Cupid, c. 1895

collapsed space

2D canvas expresses 2D art.

Boy in a Red Vest, 1888-90

Fauvism

Henri Matisse

What I am after, above all, is expression. Expression, to my way of thinking, does not consist of the passion mirrored upon a human face or betrayed by a violent gesture. Thw whole arrangement of my picture is expressive.

Mme. MAtisse (Green Stripe), 1905

Fauves=Wild Beasts

use of color in a new manner

Joy of Life, 1905-6

Utopian Painting

Color is free from responsibility

Nudes are flat

Embrace the artificial nature of painting

Cubism

Tactile Use of Space

Volumetric Compression

Attempt to compress 3D to 2D using lines and angles

Back TOWERS over FRONT

Concern with multiple views

RELATIVITY

Non-Eucldean Geometry

Pablo Picasso

Gertrude Stein, 1906-7

Portrait of Kahnweiler, 1910

Analytic Cubism

Take traditional genres and alter the forms

Dull Colors

Focus on Structure

Painting is collapsing onto the 2D plane

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907

a field of broken glass

Angles, lines, planes, geometry

drinking turpentine and spitting fire

There is no such thing as abstract art, you must start with something

Young Maidens/Prostitutes

A Brothel

African Influence

the Influence of African Scpture on Cubism

The Old Guitarist, 1903

Politics and Poverty

The Family of Saltimbanques, 1905

Collagee and Assemblage

Playing with Deapth Perception

Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912

Makes Space Subjective

Fools the Eye

Guitar, Sheet Music and Glass, 1912

Art is cutting and pasting

Cubist Assemblage

Art is a lie that tells the truth

Maquette for Guitar, 1912

Guernica, 1937

25 ft. Long

Quasi-Cubism

Political Mural

Symbolism Rich

Bull

Fashism and Spanish Tradition

Left

Senistre in Latin

The Fashists are on the left and the dying are dispersed throughout

Light

Technology

Death

Relates to the reality of the situation

Lantern

Wisdom

Horse

Beast of Burden

Communism

Everyday Worker

Commemoration of the Nazi bombing of Guernica Spain

Franco allowed Hitler to test his bombs

Loss, pain, agony in real scene

Not Beautiful, but HORRIFYING

There is little hope in Reality

Little color

Somber Mood/ Reflective Emotions amidst the horrors

Wassuky Kandinsky

ABSTRACTION

Improvisation 28, 1912

Largely unconscious, spontaneous expressions of inner character, non-material in nature

Composition IV, 1911

BREAK AWAY

WWI

Disolusion of Artists: Thw world had reverted from its progress

Playing with Perception

Different, unrecognizable subject

Freud's unconscious mind

Piet Mondrian

Composition 10 in Black and White, 1915

Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue, 1921

De Stijl (Dutch for "The style")

Neoplasticism

Broadway Boogie-Wogie, 1942-43

Dynamic Equillibrium

Rethinking the Art Object: The Avant-Garde Challenge to Painting

Readymade

Marcel Duchamp

Fountain, 1917

Artist was trying to fly in the face of commonly held belief

Appropriation

Rrose Selavy, 1919

Sex.

LHOOQ, 1919

Dirty Joke

Dadaism

Raoul Hausmann

ABCD: Portrait of the Artist, 1923-4

Hannah Hoch

Cut with the Kitchen Knife

Metaphysical Painting

Giorgio De Chirico

The Enigma of a Day, 1914

TheSong of Love, 1914

Abdre Breton, Man Ray, Max Morise and Yves Tanguy

Exquisite Corpse, 1928

Andre Masson

Automatic Drawing, 1924

Surrealist Found Object

Breton

Poem=object, 1937

Alberto Giacometti

Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object), 1934

Salvador Dali

The Persistence of Memory, 1931

hand colored photographs of the subconscious

Time hangs heavy

SURREALISM

Frida Kahlo, Two Fridas, 1939

Breton: The promises of fantasy are filled with great splendor by reality itself

an indeed feminine art, that is to say at the same time the most pure and the most pernicious: a ribbon tied around a bomb.

Kahlo: I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.

I am ALONE

INDIVIDUALISM

The Return to Painting Across the Atlantic: Post-war American Art

Neo Dada

Pop

Reproduction

Symbol of Society

Consummerism

Reproducibility

Action painting, Gesture painting, Abstract Expressionism

Film

REVOLUTION?

Edison Kinetoscope

Peep Show

The novelty of amusement

Early films depicted reality or fantasy to promote enjoyment

A Slice of Life

Rival appeals of reality and fantasy

film becomes the Dream Factory

COLLECTIVE EXPERIENCE

Makes you think

Realism in film

Film Asthetics: Theme is our relationship to physical reality

Mise en Scène

the arrangement of scenery and stage properties

Whats on film?

What is not?

Speed of Image

Camera Angles

Music

Shapes emotional response

The z-axis

diagonalize for more action

Ethics?

Does the filmmaker have negative effects on culture or those whom he films?

exploitation of subject?

Taking movies away is socially catastrophic

Does violence in movies numb us to violence in real life?

Montage

the process or technique of selecting, editing, and piecing together separate sections of film to form a continuous whole.

Editing to create meaning

Baraka (1992)

globalization montage

Citizen Kane (1941)

capitalist montage

Battleship Potemkin (1925)

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

The UNTOUCHABLES

Baby carriage train station clip

The Kuleshov Effect

The implication is that viewers brought their own emotional reactions to this sequence of images, and then moreover attributed those reactions to the actor, investing his impassive face with their own feelings.

juxtapose to create effects

Contemporary Art

1970's

BADED ON GENRE OF ART, NOT SUBJECT

Reevaluating the Medium of Painting

Photorealism

Gerhard Richter

Betty, 1991

Reading, 1994

photography has influenced the way we see

The antithesis of painting

Chuck Close

Self Portrait, 1969

Roy, 1994

I wanted to translate from one flat surface to another. In fact, my learning disabilities controlled a lot of things. I don't recognize faces, so I'm sure it's what drove me to portraits in the first place.

Richard Estes

Supreme Hardware Store, 1970's

Telephone Booths, 1967

Goal: Evoke a sense of indifference/impersonal.

Abstraction

Gerhard Richter

Station, 1985

REJECTION of photorealism

Getting out of the Gallery

Earth Art

Robert Smithson

Spiral Jetty, 1970

1500 spiral of black basalt rocks in Great Salt Lake

Spiral is a symbol of entropy

looks like a growing, living thing coming out of the lake

PHYSICAL experience

70's: Freedom

art that cannot be made commercial

are they hypocritical?

Site Specifity

Christo & Jeanne Claude

Running Fence, 1972-76

Raised 3.2 Million

60 Skilled Workers and 350 Students

24 Miles of white Nylon Pannels

18' high

Examples in other parts of world

Berlin governmental building

POLITICAL statement?

Industrial Sculpture

Gordon Matta Clark

Splitting: Four Corners, 1974

a team of artists saw a derelict suburban home in two and tilt the house

demolished afterward

TEMPORAL

Questioned Role of architecture

video, photos, installation of readymades play

Feminism and the Body

Judy Chicago

Georges Sand, 1973

Female Rejection, 1974

When I created this painting, its pulsing form scared me. I had never seen an image from the female point of view that was both strong and sexual

Dinner Party, 1973-9

I started thinking that women have never had a last supper but they have had dinner parties. Lots and lots of dinner parties where they facilitated conversation and nourished people

Critical Response:

Awesome. one of the most ambitious works of art made in the post war period, which succeeds as few others have

Outrageous libel on the female imagination

The Advent of Installation

Lynca Benglis

Poured Latex, Polyurethane and lead sculputures

Contraband, 1969

Quartered Meteor, 1969

Female Emotion

Performance

Joseph Beuys

I like America and America Likes Me, 1974

Spent days in a room with a coyote. After flying to new york, he was swathed in felt and loaded into an ambulance, then driven to the gallery where the "action" took place without having touched American soil

possibly an anticolonial statement?

I wanted to isolate myself, insulate myself, see nothing of America other than the coyote

TEMPORAL

Video

Vito Acconci

Following Piece, 1969

selected a person and followed them until he or she disappeared into a private place where he could not enter

Bizzare

Anthropology

Bruce Nauman

Pinch Neck, 1968

16mm color film with sound

Walking in an exaggerated manner around perimeter of a square, 1968, 16mm black and white silent film

1980 to Present

Questions of Originality

Photography

Photocollage

Barbara Kruger

Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground), 1989

Untitled (Your Gaze hits the side of my face), 1981

Installation, 1991

I think I developed language skills to deal with threat. Its the girl thing to do, you know, instead of pulling out a gun

Pop Art

Appropriation

Yasumasa Morimura

Portrait (Van Gogh), 1985

Daughter of Art History, 1990

Making fun of art

juxtapose two subjects to create reaction

Cindy Sherman

Untitled Film Stills Series, 1977-78

Untitled (After Raphael, 1989

I didnt want to make high art, I had no interest in using paint, I wanted to find something that anyone could relate to without knowing about contemporary art. I wasnt thinking in terms of precious prints or archival quality; I didn't want the work to seem like a commodity

Commodity Art

New Twist on Readymade

Jeff Koons

Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988

Baloon Dog, 1994-2000

Puppy, 1992

It's about celebration and childbood and color and simplicity, but its also a Trojan horse. Its a trojan horse to the whole body of artwork.

Damien Hirst

For the Love of God, 2007

Gay Identity and the AIDS epidemic

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Untitled (Placebo), 1992

My work is all my personal history. I can't separate my art from my life

Untitled (Perfect Lovers) 1991

The scariest thing I have ever done. I wanted to face it. I wanted those two clocks right in front of me. ticking.

died of aids in 1996 at age 39.

This refusal to make a static form, a monolithic sculpture, in favor of a disappearing, changing, unstable, and fragile form was an attempt on my part to rehearse my fears of having Ross disappear day by day right in front of my eyes.

Constructed and Deconstructed Identities

Betye Saar

Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972

she wanted to transform a negative, demeaning figure into a positive, empowered woman

Kara Walker

Installation, 1995

Three Strains of Modernism

Progress and Uncertainty

Pogress in the 20th Century

The Nation-State

Technology and Science

Confidence in Progress

Uncertainty in the 20th Century

The Great War

Theory of Relativity

Quantum Physics

Freud: the Unconscious Mind

Evolution and Religion CLASH

The Response of MODERNISM

All art from the past must be destroyed

Basic assumptions in art, music, and literature are overturned

The new languages for art were unquestionably and unapologetically difficuly. To this day, few people understand Finnegans Wake. Avant Garde art became detached from music's ordinary public and hence abstracted from a base in society

Creators must look straight ahead

Abstract MUSIC::Abstract Art

ATONALITY

Enormous Complexity

Art Music: The Problem

The Most striking aspect of art music is in the 20th century is its stylistic diversity

Confusing:

So how do we come to terms with so many sounds and styles?

There are new musical grammars...whole new languages!

Her horizions, New SCALES

Penatonic

Whole Tone

Octatonic

Synthetic Scales

Quarter Tone

Quartal and secundal harmony, poly-tonality

Return to Modes

The Twelve Tone System of Schoenberg

First Strain of Modernism

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

The Other Arts:

Symbolist poetry

Impressionistic Painting

Art of Fleeting Experience

Color, Feeling, Shapes

NO THEORY! Pleasure is law

Whole Tone Scale

Reflections in the Water (1905)

No center of Gravity

Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (1894)

Paints a picture

Feeling

pleasure and color

Nuages ("Clouds") (1899)

From Nocturnes (1899)

Global Exchange => NEW IDEAS!

Seconf Strain of Modernism

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1918)

Music = Drug

Music is the Opiate of the Masses

The Rite of Spring

Primitivism

To look Forward

Paul Gaugin

Henri Rousseau

Piece is about a pegan culture sacrificing a young virgin

MUSIC CAUSED A RIOT!

Russia: Melting of Snow (VIOLENT)

Dissonance=Growing Nature (Vines, Trees, etc)

Traditional Melody reconstructed and deconstructed

Combined major chords and playing percussively

The Primacy of Rhythm

OFFSET STRONG BEATS for SHOCK factor

Seen later in Jazz and Rock

Dance of the Earth

Building Intensity and clashescontrast with abrupt scilence

The Sacrifice

Intense with clashing and shock

Loud volume

Repetition

Petroushka (1911)

Polytonality

Third Strain of Moderism

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)

Praeludium, Suite Op. 25 (1925)

Expressionism

Piano Piece Op. 11, no. 1

Extreme Emotion

The Scream, Edvard Munch, 1893

Shadow of Freud

Subconscious looms over music

Transfigured Night (1899)

Night from Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21

Tewlve Tone System

SERIALISM

Lacks gravitational center like abstract art

CREATORS MUST LOOK STRAIGHT AHEAD

Music after 1945

Experimentalism

an act, the outcome of which is unknown

Sound before interpretation

Postmodernsim

composers pick and choose from modernist and many other styles in order to achieve their expressive ends

NOT ANTI MODERN

Musical Time vs. Experienced Time

How have changing attitudes toward time throughout history been reflected in music?

How do the concepts of past present and future apply to music?

How does some music suggest timelessness while other music is closed and bounded?

How does music structure time? and vice versa?

Time Passing

Proposition: WE USE MUSIC TO EXPLORE NEW WAYS OF EXPERIENCING TIME

Old music: Linear Music

20th Century: More exploration

New music reflects the schizophrenia of our existence and the breakdown of linear time.

New Ways of Organizing Time

Claude Debussy: Nuages

Charles Ives: The Rockstrewn Hills Joun the People's Outdoor Meeting

Igor Stravinsky

The Rite of Spring

Subtopic

Anyon Webern: ORchestral Piece, Op. 10

Edgard Varese: Musique Concrete (reel to reel)

Milton Babbitt (1916-2011)

RCA Mark II Synthesizer

REFLECTIONS for piano and synthesized sounds

The Composer as a Specialist

The composer should isolate himself from society

Music for MUSICIANS

The Search for New Sounds

John Cage (1912-1992)

4'33" (1952)

A Graphic Score

Henry Cowell

The Banshee

Conlon Nancarrow

Studies for Player Piano

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007)

Klavierstuck IX (1961)

The form is based on Fibonaci proportions and the Golden Mean

The Sound imitates the technology of the day

About the terrifying precision of the Nazi German army

Helicopter Quartet

Gavom Bryars

"Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet"

Pre-recorded, processed, enriching musical and textual implications

Like DADA ART

TOTALLY Changes the context

Minimalism

Philip Glass

Mad Rush

Time slows down! and Speeds up!

Glasspiece No. 1

Steve Reich

Clapping Music

Process

It's gonna Rain

Minimal material repeated maximally

REACTION TO MODERNISM

Jazz: American Creative Music

Origins

The DNA of Jazz

Field Hollers, Work Songs, The Blues

Call and response

Penatonic, minor scale

Scott Joplin and Ragtime

Left hand = march

Right hand = syncopation

POLYPHONY

African Drumming

Improvised with musicians playing around a melody/idea

The Blues

The Crossroads and Robert Johnson

Mournful and whaling

Basic 12-bar form

4 chords

W.C. Handy "Father of the Blues" (form)

The blues is a feeling

New Orleans Jazz

Louis Armstrong

West-end Blues

Dixieland Jazz

Polyphonic

Strong Downbeats

Two-beat rhythm

Joe King Oliver and his creole jazz band

Dippermouth Blues

The Jazz Age:

New Orleans to Chicago to New York

Chicago

increasing number of soloists

sax emerges

string bass replaces tuba

Black and Tan Clubs, The South Side

New York

guitar replaces banjo

The Harlem Renaissance

Center of Black Intellectualism

Cotton Club, Savoy Ballroom, Apollo Theater

Two Great sSingers

Billie Holliday

Ella Fitzgerald

SCAT

The Swing Era

THANKS TO PROHIBITION

Teens fueled this music

World War II, America's Popular Music

Dancing

Benny Goodman, the King of Swing

Classically Trained

Big Bands, Sophisticated Arrangements, Conductor is important

Bebop

An artistic revolution in reaction to Swing's cleched commercialism

Music by musicians for musicians

MODERNISM IN JAZZ

Result of whites taking over swing music.

ALL BLACK MOVEMENT

JAZZ after BEBOP

MODAL JAZZ

free jazz

Experimentalism

Fusion

Monk

The Early Modern in Literature

William Buttler Yeats (1865-1939)

Chronology

1690

The Battle of the Boyne (river)

Protestants defeat Catholic forces in Ireland

1691

The Battle of Aughrim

English domination over Ireland sealed by victory

Yeats was born at Sandymount, Dublin, Ireland on the 13th of June, 1865

Yeats wanted Irish Independence from England, but he was descended from the English people who had colonized Ireland

1916

the Easter Uprising:

Irish Republicans rebel against English Domination

a small force of rebels staged an uprising in Dublin. The rebellion lasted no more than a week, but there was considerable loss of life and massive damage to property, the center of the city being virtually destroyed. The British responded by trying and sentencing to death fifteen of the leaders. Yeats was in London during the action.

1919-1921

Irish War for Independence from England

1922-1923

Irish Civil War

1923

Yeats awarded the Noble prize for literature

Modernism in Poetry

What makes his poems modern? or Not?

Maude Gonne

Love of Yeats who rejected him

In December of 1891 Yeats’s poems of imagined love would be substituted by poems of real emotional experience and longing when the twenty-two year old beautiful and independently wealthy English woman Maude Gonne called at the Yeats residence. . . .Yeats fell instantly, hopelessly, and irrevocably in love. . . . Though he laid instant and passionate siege to her, she rejected his efforts continually, and though she did, he loved her, for the rest of his life. In August of 1891, Yeats proposed marriage to her for the first time. Of course, she flatly rejected him, and hurt him deeply, as is reflected in one of his most memorable love poems.

When You Are Old (1891)

non-modern

The Easter Uprising (1916)

Amidst WWI, Ireland Uprises

Execution of leaders made Yeats angry

While initially furious with the actions of the rebels, like many of his countrymen, he changed his mind as a result of the executions, which perhaps more than any other gesture would hurtle Ireland towards a full-scale guerilla war with Britain for independence. Among those executed was Maude Gonne’s drunken, former husband, John MacBride, “the drunken vainglorious lout,” who by his death more than his life, in Yeats’s eyes, now attains heroic status

Easter 1916 (1916)

I have met them at close of dayComing with vivid facesFrom counter or desk among greyEighteenth-century houses.I have passed with a nod of the headOr polite meaningless words,Or have lingered awhile and saidPolite meaningless words,And thought before I had doneOf a mocking tale or a gibeTo please a companionAround the fire at the club,Being certain that they and IBut lived where motley is worn:All changed, changed utterly:A terrible beauty is born.

Yeats is saying here that, before the Easter Uprising, he thought that these Irish Catholic guys were fools, wearing motley, the clothes of court jesters. And when he ran into them, he would use the experience to come up with a funny story that he could tell-his Anglo-Irish buddies about these Catholic clowns when he got to the club that night. Here, you see Yeats’s class-status showing and his Anglo-Irish (not Irish Catholic) orientation on Irish politics. But the Easter Uprising changes all this for him.

Gyres

The world was changing

FLUX

Yeats saw the great energies in the world being, as Heraclitus believed, in constant flux. These he represented by a pair of cones, the pointed ends touching to form an imaginary spindle. One cone represented centrifugal (or expanding) energy and its opposite centripetal (contracting energy). The cones spun in opposite directions and each in turn became the stronger or more dominant of the two as the other slowed down

Yeats believed in reincarnation

In January 1919, as the world attempted to settle again after the Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Yeats was struck by the feeling that the underlying order of the world was shifting, irrevocably. He saw the human soul, along with history itself, as moving through an eternal cycle of incarnations or phases and seized upon the image of a spinning cone or gyre as an image best able to represent his thinking

The Second Coming (1919)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

End of the cycle (Pegan, Christian, ...what's next?)

He sensed around him what he felt was the end of an objective and scientific age, which to him included Christianity, and the emergence of a new subjective and violent era. The new orders emerging, democracy and possibly communism were to his thinking anti-thetical to the world orders that had gone before. The poem “The Second Coming” takes the great Christian concept – that of the longed for second coming of Christ – and universalizes it into the coming of a new, mysterious – and possibly malevolent – Messiah

Intellectually Challenging

Modernist

distrubing

Leda and the Swan (1923)

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.

Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Genesis of Trojan War (Zeus raping Leda)

Zeus, according to the Greeks, assumed the form of a swan and descended from Olympus in order to mate with the mortal woman Leda. One of the products of this union was Helen of Troy.

Yeats’s use of this form to describe a rape is shocking. But he’s also describing an annunciation, a coming together of human and god through a bird.

Yeats also reduces the whole Iliad to 14 lines.

Old order is over, new movement is beginning

Yeats’s mediation on the rape of Leda by Zeus was in keeping with his sense of one order being over and a new order about to begin. He wrote “Leda and the Swan” in 1923. He felt a new movement about to initiate itself into the world, which he later identified as fascism, a movement he remarked, “from above, preceded by some violent annunciation.

Italian Sonnet with english rhyme scheme

14 lines, an octave and a sestet, also called a Petrarchan sonnet, with some Shakespearean or English features.

Symbol of LOVE

What Characterized Modernism in Poetry?

intellectual, allusive, distrubing, shocking, questioning, sharp edged imagery, density

James Joyce (1882-1941)

Modernism in Fiction

Dubliners (1906-1907, completed; 1914, published)

The Dead (1914)

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-1915)

Autobiographical Novel

Ulysses (1922)

Quintessential work of high modernism

Stream of consciousness

disorder and indeterminancy

Unification

The MYTHIC method

One day now is equivalent to one year in the past

What Characterizes Modernism in Fiction?

intellectual, allusive, distrubing, shocking, questioning, sharp edged imagery, density

Modernism captures the way that our minds move – the way that we only half focus on what goes on around us in the external world. At the same time that you are half focused on this lecture, your mind darts off in different directions – to memories, plans for the future, daydreams. Modernists render this flow into fiction.

Told from the point of view of Gabriel Conroy, and it takes place on an evening when he goes to a dinner and dance at the house of his two elderly aunts during the Christmas season. On this evening, Gabriel get three jolts from encounters with women that don’t go according to his expectations, first with the servant Lily, then with his colleague Molly Ivors, and finally with his wife Greta. Each of these encounters disturbs Gabriel, and the last one causes him to think – it brings him to an epiphany, of a realization about an important truth about life.

By subjectivity, I mean that fiction with modernism takes an inward turn. In “The Dead,” after an initial passage from the point of view of the servant-girl Lily, everything in the story comes to us from the point of view of one character: Gabriel Conroy. We are inside Gabriel’s head the whole time.

Who is right in this interaction? Gabriel Conroy or Molly Ivors?

“-- I have a crow to pluck with you.
-- With me? said Gabriel.
She nodded her head gravely.
-- What is it? asked Gabriel, smiling at her solemn manner.
-- Who is G. C.? answered Miss Ivors, turning her eyes upon him.
Gabriel colored and was about to knit his brows, as if he did not understand, when she said bluntly:

--O, innocent Amy! I have found out that you write for The Daily Express. Now, aren’t you ashamed of yourself?
--Why should I be ashamed of myself? asked Gabriel, blinking his eyes and trying to smile.
--Well, I’m ashamed of you, said Miss Ivors frankly. To say you’d write for a rag like that. I didn’t know you were a West Briton.

A look of perplexity appeared on Gabriel’s face. It was true that he wrote a literary column every Wednesday in The Daily Express, for which he was paid fifteen shillings. But that didn’t make him a West Briton surely. . . . He wanted to say that literature was above politics. But . . . He could not risk a grandiose phrase with her. He . . . murmured lamely that he saw nothing political in writing reviews of books.”

James Joyce here “attributes his own experiences to Gabriel . . . Joyce . . . wrote book reviews, just as Gabriel Conroy does, for the Daily Express. Since the Daily-Express was pro-English, [Joyce] had been teased for writing for it during his frequent visits to the house of David Sheehy, M.P.. One of the Sheehy daughters, Kathleen, may well have been the model for Miss Ivors, for she wore that austere bodice and sported the same patriotic pin”

What is Gabriel's attitude toward the West of Ireland?

hatred -- Wild Side

“--O, Mr. Conroy, will you come for an excursion to the Aran Isles this summer? We’re going to stay there a whole month. It will be splendid out in the Atlantic. . . . It would be splendid for Gretta too if she’d come. She’s from Connacht, isn’t she?-- Her people are, said Gabriel shortly.-- But you will come, won’t you? said Miss Ivors”

Gabriel “is a little ashamed of [his wife’s] having come from the west of Ireland. He cannot bear to think of his dead mother’s remark that Gretta was ‘country cute,’ and where Miss Ivors says of Gretta ‘She’s from Connacht, isn’t she?’ Gabriel answers shortly, ‘Her people are.’ He has rescued her from that bog. Miss Ivors’s suggestions . . . that he spend his holiday in the Aran Islands (in the west) upsets him; it is the element of his wife’s past that he wishes to forget. Gabriel’s attitude is that as you move east, people get more civilized, and as you move west, they get more wild, primitive.

What is the Lass of Aughrim

“-- And why do you go to France and Belgium, said Miss Ivors, instead of visiting your own land?
--Well, said Gabriel, it’s partly to keep in touch with the languages and partly for a change.
-- And haven’t you your own language to keep in touch with—Irish? asked Miss Ivors.
-- Well, said Gabriel, if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language.”

Is Irish Gabriel’s language? He’s an Irish Catholic, so Irish is the language of his ancestors, but after the British came to Ireland, the Irish gradually gave up their language for English. So Gabriel doesn’t know Irish. He likes learning European languages, but he doesn’t want to learn Irish. As the conversation continues, Miss Ivors pushes Gabriel to the point where he admits that he is sick of his own country. “Gabriel [is] made uneasy with this attitude, but he clings to it defiantly unto the ending.

Unknown to him, it is being challenged by the song, ‘The Lass of Aughrim.’ Aughrim is a little village in the west, not far from Galway. In a later scene, Gabriel watches his wife as she listens to this song.

The Lass of Aughrim (also known as Lord Gregory)

If you be the lass of Aughrim
As I am taking you mean to be
Tell me the first token
That passed between you and me.

The rain falls on my yellow locks
And the dew it wets my skin;
My babe lies cold within my arms:
Lord Gregory let me in.
Oh Gregory, don’t you remember
One night on the hill,
When we swapped rings off each other’s hands,
Sorely against my will?
Mine was of the beaten gold,
Yours was but black tin;

A peasant woman with her baby in her arms comes to the castle of Lord Gregory, who has seduced and abandoned her. She stands in the rain with her baby and begs to be let in, but he (or his mother in some versions) leaves her and the baby outside to die.

John Huston's The Dead (1987)

What can fiction do better than film?

Get into someone's mind

What parallels do you find between the song The Lass of Aughrim and the story that Gretta tells Gabriel?

loneliness, left alone, INDIVIDUALISM

What does Gabriel Realize? What is the nature of his epiphany?

And now Gabriel and Gretta go to the Hotel Gresham [and Gabriel is really looking forward to being alone with her, away from the children for one night. But while he is] fired by his living wife, Gretta is drained by the memory of her dead lover”

“The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.”

The cliché runs that journeys westward are towards death, but the west has taken on a special meaning in the story. Gretta Conroy’s west is the place where life had been lived simply and passionately. The context and meaning of the sentence suggests that Gabriel is on the edge of sleep, and half-consciously accepts what he has hitherto scorned, the possibility of a trip to Connaught. What the sentence affirms, at last, on the level of feeling, is the west, the primitive untutored, impulsive country from which Gabriel had felt himself alienated before; in the story, the west is paradoxically linked also with the past and the dead.

Gabriel’s self-abandonment is not unlike Michael Fury’s, and through Gabriel’s mind runs the imagery of Calvary. He imagines the snow on the cemetery at Oughterard

Gabriel “thinks of Michael Fury who, Gretta has said, died for her, and envies him his sacrifice for another kind of love than Christ’s. To some extent Gabriel is dying for her, in giving up what he has most valued in himself, all that holds him apart from the simple people at the party.

Gabriel, who had been sick of his own country, finds himself drawn inevitably into a silent tribute to it . . . Ireland is shown to be stronger, more intense than he.”

High Modernism

William Faulkner: THE BEAR (1942)

How does the style of realism differ from modernism in fiction

Modern is confusing

Stream of consciousness

non-linear treatment of time

Creates questions

No real character introduction

How does the literature of the 1920s differ from that of the 30's? How did the Depression affect literature?

Formal innovation (1920's)

Social Realism (1930's)

Real lives with economic struggles

The influence of 20s and 30s thinkers

Influences on subjectivity in Modernism

Einstein's theory of relativity

no absolute simultaneity

odd time structure (non-linear)

Heisenberg Unvertainty Principle

presence of observer changes experiment

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

Psychoanalysis

Details in High Modernism

Paragraph 2: “He was sixteen”: Who is “he”?
We don’t get his name until part 3 of the story (page 2155 – not for twenty pages is the boy named): Ike.
Where are we? When is this taking place?
When is this story taking place?

Subjective: The reader of modernism must assemble clues in the text; modernism puts this burden on the reader.

“He was sixteen. For six years now he had been a man’s hunter. For six years now he had heard the best of all talking. It was of the wilderness, the big woods, bigger and older than any recorded document: -- of white man fatuous enough to believe he had bought any fragment of it, of Indian ruthless enough to pretend that any fragment of it had been his to convey; It [that is, the talk] was of the wilderness, the big woods . . . bigger than Major de Spain and the scrap he pretended to, knowing better; older than old Thomas Sutpen of whom Major de Spain had had it and who knew better; older even than old Ikkemotubbe, the Chickasaw chief, of whom old Sutpen had had it and who knew better in his turn.
It [that is, the talking] was of the men, not white or black nor red but men, hunters, with the will and hardihood to endure and the humility and skill to survive, and the dogs and the bear and deer juxtaposed and reliefed against it, ordered and compelled by and within the wilderness in the ancient and unremitting contest according to the ancient and immitigable rules which voided all regrets and brooked no quarter…”

The wilderness” the agent of the action here. The wilderness is the one doing the ordering and the compelling of the “men . . . And the dogs and the bear and deer” that are “juxtaposed and relief against it”: The wilderness is in charge here. And notice the strange word “reliefed”: Faulkner has made an adjective out of a noun here: A “relief” is a sculpture in which the forms are raised from a flat surface. So the relation between the wilderness and the living beings here is like a work of art.

STYLE: Circularity, Repetition (ANAPHORA) repetition of initial phrase

Nature in THE BEAR

Nature is BIG. EPIC. Eilderness is of MYTHIC proportion

Nature equalizes race and humanity in general

Those who buy and sell are stupid. Land is untamable

Nature cannot be possessed. It is IN CHARGE

juxtaposed to men

How is the Hunt more than a hunt?

Whisky drinking is a ritual like communion

“There was always a bottle present, so that it would seem to him that those fine fierce instants of heart and brain and courage and wiliness and speed were concentrated and distilled in that brown liquor which not women, not boys and children, but only hunters drank, drinking not of the blood they spilled but some condensation of the wild immortal spirit, drinking it moderately, humbly even, not with the pagan’s base and baseless hope of acquiring thereby the virtues of cunning and strength and speed but in salute to them.”

Drinking to respect animals. A salute to the dead.

“Still a child, with three years then two years then one year yet before he too could make one of them, each November he would watch the wagon [. . .] depart for the Big Bottom, the big woods. To him, they were going not to hunt bear and deer but to keep yearly rendezvous with the bear which they did not even intend to kill…for two November weeks he would merely make another minor one, along with his cousin and Major de Spain and General Compson and Walter Ewell and Boon and the dogs which feared to bay it and the shotguns and rifles which failed even to bleed it, in the yearly pageant-rite of the old bear’s furious immorality.”

Annual ritual

The hunt is a yearly pageant rite: It’s religious. It’s like a religious ritual of a primitive people. Modernists are interested in the energies of so-called primitive religions. There’s an energy in traditional peoples that moderns want to tap into. Here, it’s as though the bear is a totem-animal of a tribe of hunter-gatherers.

They never intend to kill the bear. Killing it would mean owning nature, which is impossible

How is the bear more than a bear?

Immortality

“[The Bear is] not even a mortal beast but an anachronism indomitable and invincible out of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life which the little puny humans swarmed and hacked at in a fury of abhorrence and fear like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant; -- the old bear, solitary, indomitable, and alone; widowered and childless and absolved of mortality—old Priam reft of his old wife and outlived all his sons.”

Yearly peagant rite

Primitive religion and energy

INTELLIGENCE

He seems to have led Ike back to his things. He seems to be very intelligent, able to lead the lost boy back to the tree where he left his things. It is as if he is a magic bear, as if he is the god of this sacred precinct. If the bear is a god, then this is an epiphany, the appearance of a god to a mortal, like Athena’s coming down from Olympus in the Iliad.

Mythicical

“the leaving of the gun was not enough. He stood for a moment—a child, alien and lost in the green and soaring gloom of the markless wilderness. Then he relinquished completely to it. It was the watch and the compass. He was still tainted. He moved the linked chain of the one and the looped thong of the other from his overalls and hung them on a bush and leaned the stick beside them and entered it.”

What does Ike have to do to enter the precinct of the Bear? He has to surrender not only his gun but also his compass and watch. Until he does this, “He was still tainted.” Nature is represented as a sacred precinct, almost like a religious shrine or inner sanctum that one may only enter after purifying oneself. Here, Ike has to put aside the tools of civilization to enter this sacred precinct.

human characteristics

Bear is similar to the King of Troy

Past: When humans were one with nature

The bear seems to be a hold-out from the past. He represents a time when humans were part of nature, before they began to “hack at” nature with civilization. In fact, the bear seems to be symbolic of nature itself, of the wilderness, and all it represents to humans, and particularly to Americans. Nature is at first something wild to be hacked at and civilized, but then later (after we have destroyed it), nature or the wilderness is something we long for.

What is modernist about Faulkner's style in THE BEAR?

Impressionistic

WE make the mistake

“When he realized he was lost, he did as Sam had coached and drilled him: made a cast to cross his backtrack. He had not been going very fast for the last two or three hours, and had gone even less fast since he left the compass and watch on the bush. So he went slower still now, since the tree could not be very far; in fact, he found it before he really expected to and turned and went to it. But there was no bush beneath it, no compass nor watch”

The Bear's 5 Part Structure:

Part 1 culminates in Ike’s seeing the bear.Part 2: Lion comes and is tamed by Sam.Part 3: The bear-hunt: Old Ben, Lion, and Sam Fathers all die. Lion’s funeral.Part 4: Ike reads the commissary ledgers and decides to repudiate his inheritance.Part 5: Ike returns to the woods for one final time before the timber company moves in.

Myth-criticism

less interested in the specific qualities of a given work than in those features of its narrative structure or symbolism that seem to connect it to ancient myths and religions

Ike by age sixteen and Sam are the best hunters, and both have opportunities to kills the bear – Why don’t they?

[I]f we consider old Ben’s death as symbolizing man’s destruction of the wilderness[,] [t]hen the deed cannot be performed by Ike or Sam, for it would be essentially vicious, done in violation of the rules by men ignorant or disrespectful of the rules [. . .] Old Ben is not merely an extraordinary bear representing the wilderness and impervious to all but the most skillful or improper attacks. He is the totem animal, the god who can never be bested by men [. . . ] but only by a non-human Boon with Lion, the instrument fashioned by the high priest.

FREUD

conscious mind is just the tip of the iceberg. Ther subconscious mind is the supplies us with out motivations, rational or not. The UNCONSCIOUS works through SYMBOLS.

Carl Jung

The collective Unconscious:

According to Freud, the conscious mind of the individual is like the tip of the iceberg: just a small part of the mind compared to the vast, unconscious mind. According to Freud, we find evidence of the existence of the unconscious mind in our dreams. Dreams contain symbols that, if interpreted, give us some insight into the desires that we have repressed. And while Freud developed a theory of the unconscious mind of the individual, Karl Jung developed the theory of the collective unconscious: This is the repository of our racial member – the unconscious of a whole people or even of the whole human race.

Universal Patterns

Archetypes are believed to be the products of unconscious patterns that have been ‘hardwired’ into the brain over the course of human evolution (although some argue that these are purely the products of cultural conditioning). They are found in the themes of myths (e.g. death and rebirth), characters in literature (e.g. heroes and villains), and imagery in dreams (e.g. eyes and teeth).

Since they are unconscious, they only appear through studying the common patterns which emerge across cultures and countries.

Universal Archaetypes