Ministry of higher and secondary specialized

1.2 American Modernism and the Literature of the First Half of the 20th Century

Modernism, like romanticism and realism, was a global phenomenon, but its most striking manifestations are typically linked to Europe and the United States; that is, regions of the world where significant shifts in civilization affected nearly every facet of daily life. It emerged from romantic individualism and subjectivity, which can be traced back to Friedrich Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in which he draws a comparison between the industrial civilization of his time and the classical Greek civilization to arrive at a picture that would be a perfect description of the culture of the era around the turn of the century:An ingenious piece of machinery has replaced the zoophyte nature of the Greek states, where each individual lived independently and, when necessary, could become a whole individual, with the botched assembly of a large number of lifeless parts producing a collective mechanical life.Law and customs, the state and the church, were now in conflict; Work was separated from enjoyment, the means from the ends, and effort from reward. Man became nothing more than a tiny piece of the whole, which he was forever chained to; He never achieves inner harmony because of the constant, monotonous sound of the wheel he drives, and instead of imprinting humanity on his nature, he becomes merely the imprint of his occupation, of his science.(Schiller 35) Despite the fact that Schiller's work is regarded as a response to his disappointment resulting from the French Revolution, he precisely identifies
many issues that have been haunting western society since that time—mechanical civilisation, a lack of harmony with the environment, and the growing compartmentalization of knowledge—in addition to the movement from the countryside to the city, the growing role that time plays in human life (particularly the psychological effects of the contraction of time and space), the impact that the sciences.
In point of fact, life was rapidly changing. Science, particularly the scientific theories of Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and James Frazer, was one of the change agents.Freud drew attention to the human, "claiming that it was also part of nature rather than something divine," while Darwin shed new light on the domain that was traditionally occupied by religion by demonstrating that humankind may not be the result of divine creation but rather part of natural evolution. Frazer was an anthropologist who tried to figure out how mythology, magic, and rituals showed the ideas and beliefs of early people. People were constantly reminded by scientific advancements that they were living in a time of profound change. For instance, according to Kalaidjian, "H p H b b dynamos on display at the Great Exposition of 1900 that he would ‘see only an absolute fiat in electricity' defining the modern age" is one example. He goes on to say that, in addition to electricity, the modern era also saw the discovery of radio waves, X-rays, and radium, among other things (1).The "" could not remain unchanged by any of the above modifications. People were forced to seek a private sanctuary in subjectivity, frequently in its most extreme forms, as a result of them, which frequently resulted in its almost complete uprooting through the subversion of numerous accepted truths.“b b b ‘ ’ itself, if by normal we mean industrialized, Western modernity, with its timetables, p,, b b ’” (Howarth 9–10) reacted strongly to the substitution of new relations based on new phenomena for the traditional normality of communal life with its traditionally defined roles (Howarth 9–10). After that, the goal of modern art was to reclaim humanity's place in the world. And one way to do this was to emphasize non-normality, as in the famous International Exhibition of
Modern Art, also known as the Armory Show, which took place in New York in 1913 and was described as a "p" (Kalaidjian, 3).Because it defied tradition and regarded itself—and others—as the first modern nation, the United States of America was perhaps the country that best embodied these new trends. America was a country that really changed from being an agricultural and rural land at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when compared to the previous two centuries.industrial powerhouse Senator Beveridge was able to assert that "[t]he twentieth century will be American [...] The regeneration of the world, p, b" (qtd.) because of the rapid growth of its cities, which provided an ideal and ample space for all of the modernistic tendencies mentioned earlier. in 239 of Ruland and Bradbury.This American " was not just happening in the world of science and technology; it was also accompanied by similar trends in the human and social sciences. These trends attempted to apply the methods of hard sciences, like Darwinian biology with its evolutionary theory, in their own fields, like history. Pragmatism, which can be described as a uniquely American contribution to the investigation of reality, was born out of the general tendencies toward the real and the materialistic in philosophy. Despite the fact that William James, its founder and most significant representative, acknowledged that "[t]here is absolutely nothing new in the pragmatic method." Socrates knew how to do it well. It was applied methodically by Aristotle. By its means, they were "p," and it was only at the end of the "alized itself" that Locke, Berkeley, and Hume made significant contributions to truth. According to James, its essence was the endeavor of "interpreting each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences," or linking the abstract and the concrete.As a result, pragmatism directly reflected the developing nation's experimental, practical spirit, which was founded not on historical or metaphysical abstractions but on actual results that could be implemented right away. John Dewey held a position that was very similar to this one. For him, the most important thing about theory is that it can be used in real life. He was also involved in a lot of other things, like education, civil rights,
peace, and so on.Both people also became "of the new times," when tradition had
to give way to modernity.Literature produced works depicting attempts to come to terms with these phenomena, whereas modernism in science and technology was associated with the creation of new things and phenomena; works that looked at how they reflected human consciousness. As a result, we can find literary works that depict historical or sociological phenomena as individualized, fragmented (even to the point of being disjointed), or works that deviate from the treatment of broad ethical issues through elaborate descriptions of characters and their relationships to community or society.treatments for newly discovered existential conditions that are incomprehensible. The shift from Victorian morality, which was based on the need to follow socially accepted values, to extreme subjectivity and isolation in the writing of authors like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce may be the most illustrative example of this in British literature.Because the first signs of modernist consciousness appeared in the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman much earlier than in Britain, the transition in American literature was not as abrupt or extreme. This distinction could be compared to the differences between romantic writers from the United States and Great Britain. The American romantics were not as revolutionary as the British because the political and material conditions in the United States did not call for it. This was because the country had a democracy that was almost fully established, a large territory “p if problems occurred,” and relatively good working conditions in comparison to Britain, etc. Despite this, Whitman and Dickinson, early modernist poets in the United States, introduced new poetic expressions that were appropriate for the fragmented and fractured consciousness that resulted from the collapse of romantic attempts to "fuse" subject and object, nature and city.

Buckton-Tucker, Rosalind. “ he Angst of Alienation: The Case of Saul Bellow’s Herzog.” International Journal of Arts & Sciences, vol. 4, no. 14, 2011, pp. 211–219.