 Opposition
Modern/Ancient  important in
the Renaissance
 During the Middle Ages:
 Time  theological interpretation (TOPOI:
memento mori, fortuna labilis, theatrum
mundi)
 TM: “humans are actors who unwittingly play
the roles assigned to them by divine
Providence” (Calinescu 19)
 Economically and culturally static society
 Sense
of unrepeatable time
 HISTORICAL TIME, linear and irreversible vs
mythical and recurrent time
 Ancient/modern; classic/modern;
classic/romantic; classic/gothic
 Romanticism (XVIII century): idea of beauty
loses its aspects of transcendence — becomes
historical
 Historical
category: scientific and
technologic progress, colonial expansion, the
industrial revolution, the cult of reason, of
action and of success
 Aesthetic
Concept: romantic beginnings that
later inclined “toward radical antibourgeois
attitudes. It was disgusted with the middle
class scale of values and it expressed its
disgust through the most diverse means:
 rebellion, anarchy, apocalypticism to
aristocratic self—exile” (Calinescu 42)


All documents that I have read lead to the conviction that
for Poe the United States was nothing more than a vast
prison which he traversed with the feverish agitation of a
being made to breathe a sweeter air,--nothing more than a
great gas-lighted nightmare,--and that his inner, spiritual
life, as a poet or even as a drunkard, was nothing but a
perpetual effort to escape the influence of this unfriendly
atmosphere. In democratic societies public opinion is a
pitiless dictator; do not ask of it any charity, any
indulgence, any elasticity whatever in the application of
its laws to the manifold and complex cases of moral life. It
could be said that from the impious love of liberty a new
tyranny has been born, the tyranny of animals, or
zoocracy, which in its ferocious insensibility resembles the
Juggernaut.
Some have gone even further, and joining the dullest
incomprehension of his genius to the ferocity of bourgeois
hypocrisy, have outdone themselves in insults;1



I repeat my conviction that Edgar Poe and his country were not
on the same level. The United States is a young and gigantic
country, naturally jealous of the old continent.
Proud of its material development, abnormal and almost
monstrous, this newcomer in history has a naïve faith in the
omnipotence of industry; it is convinced, like some unfortunate
persons among us, that it will succeed in devouring the Devil.
Time and money have such a great value there! Material
activity, disproportionately emphasized to the point of being a
national mania, leaves little room in their minds for things
which are not of this world. Poe, who was of good stock and
who moreover maintained that the great misfortune of his
country was the lack of an aristocracy of birth, since, as he said,
among a people without an aristocracy the cult of the Beautiful
could only become corrupt, diminish and disappear,--who charged
his fellow citizens, in their costly and pretentious luxury, with all
the symptons of bad taste characteristic of upstarts,--who
considered Progress, the great modern idea, as the fatuous
dream of simpletons, and who called the alleged improvements
in houses eyesores and rectangular abominations,--Poe was an
exceptionally solitary mind.
 Modernity:
“recognition of tradition’s
irrelevancy to the specific creative task the
modern artist is faced with” (Calinescu 58)
 Nostalgia
for the loss of an aristocratic past
and regret for the triumph of a vulgar,
materialistic present
Narrative text: a text in which an agent tells a
story in a particular medium (language, imagery,
sound, or a combination thereof — movie)
 Story vs fabula
Story: a fabula presented in a certain manner
Fabula: a series of logically and chronologically
related events that are caused or experienced by
actors / content that is worked into a story/
series of events
FABULA is made of events, actors, time and
location
Event: transition from one state to another
Actor: agent that performs actions (Bal 2004)

 The
events (fabula) are arranged in a
sequence which can differ from the
chronological sequence
 …
 A choice is made from among the various
‘points of view’ from which the elements can
be presented. The resulting FOCALIZATION,
the relation between “who perceives” and
what is perceived, “colours” the story with
subjectivity.
 PERSPECTIVE= the placing of the point of
view in a specific agent (Bal 80)

No age can ever have been as stridently sexconscious as our own; those innumerable books
by men about women in the British Museum are a
proof of it. The Suffrage campaign was no doubt
to blame. It must have roused in men an
extraordinary desire for self-assertion; it must
have made them lay an emphasis upon their own
sex and its characteristics which they would not
have troubled to think about had they not been
challenged. And when one is challenged, even
by a few women in black bonnets, one
retaliates, if one has never been challenged
before, rather excessively. V. Woolf, A Room
 Sexual
struggle: shaping element in
modernist and postmodernist literature
 Women’s unprecedented invasion of the
public sphere
 Romantic movement: concerns about
imaginative autonomy, sexual freedom and
political revolution: struggle for suffrage
1855—
 Male anxiety about paternal influence
becomes sexualized
 “The
New Woman“
 The Cause (Suffrage): social, aesthetic,
familial, economic impact
 Male—authored dystopias, female—authored
utopias about sexual battle (18)
Sexual battle: new reading of Modernity,
traditionally seen as: “the long withdrawing
roar” of the Sea of Faith
Darwin — Freud — Discontents fostered by
Industrial civilization (Marx)


The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Intellectual and social crisis related to the new
place of women in society.
 Modernist formulations of social breakdown
employed images of male impotence and female
potency



From the Futurist manifesto: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Noi siamo sul promontorio estremo dei secoli!... Perché
dovremmo guardarci alle spalle, se vogliamo sfondare le
misteriose porte dell'impossibile? Il Tempo e lo Spazio morirono
ieri. Noi viviamo già nell'assoluto, poiché abbiamo già creata
l'eterna velocità onnipresente. Noi vogliamo glorificare la guerra
- sola igiene del mondo - il militarismo, il patriottismo, il gesto
distruttore dei libertari, le belle idee per cui si muore e il
disprezzo della donna. Noi vogliamo distruggere i musei, le
biblioteche, le accademie d'ogni specie, e combattere contro il
moralismo, il femminismo e contro ogni viltà opportunistica e
utilitaria.
 Effect
of his studies: reimagining of female
desire
 1910s: dissemination of birth control
information: disengaged reproduction from
sexuality
 35: “Modernist texts describe explicitly
sexual duels between characters who tend to
incarnate female voracity and male
impotence”
 Ford
Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
 James Joyce, Ulysses
 T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
 Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
 DH Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
 William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
5
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, 10
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie, 15
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

















E. Hemingway, The Lady Poets
(1924)
 1.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
 2. Aline Kilmer
 3. Sara Teasdale
 4. Zoe Akins
 5. Lola Ridge
 6. Amy Lowell

Norman Mailer, Advertisement for Myself 1959:

I have a terrible confession to make---I have nothing to say about
any of the talented women who write today. Out of what is no
doubt a fault in me, I do not seem able to read them. Indeed I
doubt if there will be a really exciting woman writer until the
first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale. At the risk of
making a dozen devoted enemies for life, I can only say that the
sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat,
Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish,
fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquille in mannequin's
whimsy, or else bright and stillborn. Since I've never been able to
read Virginia Woolf, and am some. rimes willing to believe that it
can conceivably be my fault, this verdict may be taken fairly as
the twisted tongue of a soured taste, at least by those readers
who do not share with me the ground of departure--that a good
novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls.'"
 Thus,
towards the end of the eighteenth
century a change came about which, if I
were rewriting history, I should describe
more fully and think of greater importance
than the Crusades or the Wars of the
Roses.
 The middle-class woman began to write.
 (V. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own)
 P.
142:
 American artists felt simultaneously
rebellious towards british tradition and
emasculated by their alienation from the
authority of that tradition.
 143: Leslie Fiedler defined the XIX century
American struggle of High Art and Low as a
mythic “battle of the sexes” in which the
serious male author believed himself to be
“condemned to neglect and poverty to a
culture simultaneously commercialized and
feminized”
 Avant
garde male writers: anti—commercial
attitude —— >Economic dependence on
women
 through private patronage
 p. 147: Yeats and Joyce/lady Gregory;
Lawrence/Lady Ottoline Morrell and Mabel
Dodge Luhan; T.S. Eliot /May Sinclair
 Through entrepreneurial female editors
(Harriet Monroe, Jane Heap, Margaret
Anderson)
 Through female mentors: Amy Lowell, G.
Stein. Natalie Barney, Peggy Guggenheim
Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return ( Ne
w York: Viking Press, 1934) p.6
 It
was the new era of installment buying and
universal salesmanship. The
younger writers couldn't buy luxuries even on
the installment plan. They
didn't want to advertise or sell them or write
stories in which salesmen were
the romantic heroes. Feeling like aliens in th
e commercial world, they sailed for Europe.
Cowley 1934: 236
 It
suggests evasion and cowardice and flight
from something that ought to be
faced. Yet there is no real shame in
retreating from an impossible situation or
in fleeing from an enemy that seems too
powerful to attack. Many writers of
the 1920s regarded our commercial society
as an enemy of that sort and
believed that their only hope lay in finding a
refuge from it.
Structures of the Jazz Age: Mass Culture, Progressive Education, and
Racial Discourse in American Modernism
By: Chip Rhodes

Since Puritan-inspired repression was
the real enemy, the most radical act for the
bohemians was self-gratification.