Spelling Error #3

ELIT 48C

Class 3

Using “accidently” instead of “accidentally.”

There are quite a few words with -ally suffixes (‚incidentally‛), and these should not be confused with words having -ly suffixes (‚independently‛). Accidentlymakes it into some dictionaries but it’s regarded as a variant. It’s wise to avoid variants if you can, because some people will become more concerned about your spelling than what you’re selling.

AGENDA• Modern Manifestos

o Pound

o Cather

o Williams

o Hughes

• Literary and Artistic Modernism

o Trends in movements

• Author Introduction

o F Scott Fitzgerald

Ezra Pound

Pound was an American expatriate living in Europe. He was hugely influential in the circle of other expatriate writers and artists not only for his own work as a poet but also for the advice that he offered to other writers. ‚A Retrospect‛ is Pound’s manifesto on Imagism, a school of poetry that argued for the central—if not defining—place of the image in modern poetry.

• An ―Image‖ is that which

presents an intellectual

and emotional complex

in an instant of time.

• It is better to present one

Image in a lifetime than

to produce voluminous

works.

• Use no superfluous word,

no adjective which does

not reveal something.

—

from ―A Retrospect‖

Is Ezra Pound offering a radical new vision of poetry, or are his comments simply good advice for writers of any kind?

What do you find radical in Pound’s approach as laid out in ‚A Retrospect‛?

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

One of Pound’s most famous Imagist poems is ‚In a Station of the Metro.‛ Does he practice what he preaches in ‚A Retrospect‛ in this poem?

After reading this poem, are you inclined to think differently about the advice Pound offers in ‚A Retrospect‛?

After reading an Imagist poem, do you think that ‚A Retrospect‛ is offering something more than just general advice for writers?

QHQ: Pound• Q: How does Ezra Pound’s manifesto help give a

more concrete definition to modernist poetry?

• Q: How does Ezra Pound’s ‚A Retrospect‛ criticize traditional poetic verses?

• Q: If Pound presents his beliefs of what makes good poetry, why didn’t he include a List Of Do’s?

Willa Cather Willa Cather was born in the Midwest but spent most of her career as a novelist in cosmopolitan cities such as London and New York. In ‚The Novel Démeublé,‛ Cather implicitly asks what nineteenth-century novelists can teach twentieth-century writers. In so doing, she rejects realist novels as mere ‚amusement‛ and looks to ‚American romances‛ such as Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter for inspiration.

There are hopeful signs that some of the younger writers are trying to break away from mere verisimilitude, and, following the development of modern painting, to interpret imaginatively the material and social investiture of their characters; to present their scene by suggestion rather than by enumeration.

—from ―The Novel Démeublé‖

The realist literature of an earlier tradition was committed to the ‚verisimilitude‛ that Cather here rejects. What is Cather offering in the place of verisimilitude?

What does it mean ‚to interpret imaginatively‛ and ‚to present . . . by suggestion rather than by enumeration‛?

QHQ: Cather

• Why must the novelist, according to Willa Cather, learn to write, and then unlearn it?

• Is it more valuable to use our knowledge of literature to continue to recreate and celebrate the novel in the fashion it has existed or to attempt to ‚develop *it+ into *something+ more varied and perfect?‛

William Carlos Williams So far, all of the manifestos

that we have read are serious invectives. Yet, here we encounter the playfulness in Williams’s Spring and All. Given the playful, ironic, and humorous tone of Williams’s manifesto, it may be difficult to tell how deadly serious he is about his vision for modern poetry.

It is spring! but miracle of

miracles a miraculous

miracle has gradually taken

place during these

seemingly wasted eons.

Through the orderly

sequences of

unmentionable time

EVOLUTION HAS REPEATED

ITSELF FROM THE BEGINNING.

—from Spring and All

The language from Spring and All invokes both the creation story in the book of Genesis and the theory of evolution.

Why does Williams do this?

And how does he make both religion and science serve ‚the meaning of ‘art’‛?

QHQ: Williams

• Question: After reading William Carlos Williams’s From Spring and All, what exactly is newness? How can Williams make such a claim that the Earth is new, while I see it as a subjective measurement of living?

Langston Hughes

Many modernist writers supported the idea that artists and writers should be fiercely committed to their personal vision regardless of what the market, critics, or other writers said. In ‚The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,‛ Langston Hughes argues that an artist’s racial identity complicates this commitment to personal vision in ways that white writers had not fully appreciated.

I am ashamed for the black poet who says, ―I want to be a poet, not a Negro poet,‖ as though his own racial world were not as interesting as any other world . . . An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.

—from ―The Negro Artist and

the Racial Mountain‖

There’s a tension in the statement between individual choice (‚An artist must be free to choose what he does‛) and a manifesto-like prescription of what African-American poets must do (‚I am ashamed for the black poet who says . . .‛).

How does Hughes encourage black writers to embrace their heritage without telling them that they mustwrite in a certain way to be considered successful writers?

In what way is this essay not about art at all, but about racism and the self-hatred that it breeds in an oppressed population?

QHQ: Hughes

• Q: Is it fair for Langston Hughes to accuse the young

poet, who wants to be seen as ―a poet–not a

Negro poet,‖ of wanting to be white?

• Question: Was Langston Hughes segregating Negro

writers from other writers by suggesting to limit their

prose to racial issues?

Literary and Artistic Modernism

• ―Modernism‖ refers to artistic works that do some or all of the following: o represent the transformation of traditional

society under the pressures of modernity

o break down traditional literary forms

o depict the modern world not as a triumph of human civilization but as an experience of loss

o call into question the religious, political, social, and artistic conventions of the past

o interpret the world as disparate fragments rather than an integrated whole

This list of the features of modern art and literature is not exhaustive, but it is a good place to start differentiating between the modernist literature of the twentieth century and the realism/naturalism of the late-nineteenth century.

Not every work of modernist art or literature displays all of these qualities, and some work emphasizes one aspect more than the others. The works of art featured in the following slides provide a starting point for discussing the nature of modernism.

Georges Braque’s Still Life With Guitar (ca. 1918–19)

Where is the guitar in this still life? Why does Braque opt to ‚take apart‛ a guitar and represent its scattered fragments rather than depict it as a unified whole? How does it force us to think about the guitar differently by viewing it in fragments?

Pablo Picasso’s 1937 painting Weeping Woman

How has Picasso broken down the image of the woman into various fragments from different perspectives and then reassembled those fragments. Why does Picasso do this? How is he forcing us to see this woman anew? How does this new vision of a typical subject—a portrait of a woman—reflect the concerns of modernism described on the earlier slide?

Wassily Kandinsky’s In Blue (1925)

In his effort to break down the world into fragments, has Kandinsky completely removed all reference to the natural world?

Can you identify any recognizable images, or is it all a mass of shapes? What is Kandinsky trying to achieve with this radical conception of the world as (nonrepresentational?) fragmentary shapes?

F Scott Fitzgerald

1896-1940

A novelist and short-story writer, F. (Francis) Scott Fitzgerald was one of the greatest American writers of the 20th Century.

The Great Gatsby, is one of the most penetrating descriptions of American life in the 1920s.

Fitzgerald came from two widely different families. He had early on developed an inferiority complex in a family where the ‚black Irish half … had the money and looked down on the Maryland side of the family who had, and really had … ‘breeding,’‛ (Scott Donaldson: Dictionary of Literary Biography.) Out of this divergence of classes in his family background arose what critics called F. Scott's ‚double vision.‛ He had the ability to experience the lifestyle of the wealthy from an insider's perspective, yet never felt a part of this clique and always felt the outsider.

Read The Great Gatsby: ALL

Post # 4 Choose One

Write a character sketch of Daisy or Tom or Jordan, focusing on the

recurring ―tag‖ used to describe them. Daisy leans forward and talks

in a low voice; Tom is restless and hulking; Jordan balances

something on her chin almost in an athletic stance. What is

Fitzgerald’s purpose in thus describing them?OR Discuss how the reunion of Daisy and Gatsby signals both

the beginning and the end of Gatsby’s dream and of his

success.

OR Trace the recurring image of eyes, and ascertain the

purposes of those images. Consider blindness on any level aswell as sight.OR Your own QHQ

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