The Search For Meaning And Identity In American Modernism

Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Duisburg-Essen, language: English, abstract: This paper examines selected literature of the Modernist Era and the search for identity in and outside of the United States during this time. One of the characteristics of Modernism in America is the development of changing attitudes towards religion, and in particular Christianity, which was seen as the traditional religion that had, up until then, been a pillar of American beliefs. These changed attitudes ranged anywhere from questioning one’s religion or faith to having flat out aversions to even the idea of (any) God. (my emphasis) In the late 1800’s, under the influence of the idea of successful Manifest Destiny, and major advances in sciences and technology, people were generally high-spirited, grounded in their beliefs. They minded their own business, followed their goals and dreams. They witnessed, or even experienced abundance, and paid little attention to things that they felt did not concern them, including foreign affairs.

In The Search for Meaning: A Short History, Dennis Ford explores eight approaches human beings have pursued over time to invest life with meaning and to infuse order into a seemingly chaotic universe. These include myth, philosophy, science, postmodernism, pragmatism, archetypal psychology, metaphysics, and naturalism. In engaging, companionable prose, Ford boils down these systems to their bare essentials, showing the difference between viewing the world from a religious point of view and that of a naturalist, and comparing a scientific worldview to a philosophical one. Ford investigates the contributions of the Greeks, Kant, and William James, and brings the discussion up to date with contemporary thinkers. He proffers the refreshing idea that in today's world, the answers provided by traditional religions to increasingly difficult questions have lost their currency for many and that the reductive or rationalist answers provided by science and postmodernism are themselves rife with unexamined assumptions.

During the twenties, the SAI declined and the direction of Pan-Indian efforts shifted. Pan-Indian fraternal movements arose that were more in keeping with the spirit of the times than was reformism. Based in towns and cities, the fraternal orders and social clubs provided a means for urban Indians to retain or regain an Indian identity. The Indian New Deal, which radically changed governmental policy, provided a new context for Pan-Indianism.The author examines briefly developments since 1934. Her concluding chapter places the various Pan-Indian movements in historical perspective.The research for this study included extensive use of a wide variety of primary sources—journals published by 1he Indian groups, collections of documents and letters, governmental records, and interviews with Indians, anthropologists, and government officials." -- Publisher.

Encompassing writers from Edith Wharton, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot to Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser and Gertrude Stein, American Modernism: Cultural Transactions is a comprehensive and informative companion to the field of American literary modernism. This groundbreaking new book explores the changing patterns of American literary culture in the early years of the 20th century, in the aftermath of the great American Renaissance, when the United States was well on its way to becoming the most economically powerful and culturally influential nation in the world. It brings together some of the most eminent British and European scholars to investigate how the United Statesâ (TM)s unique cultural position is in fact the by-product of a range of cultural transactions between the United States and Europe, between the visual and the literary arts, and between the economic and aesthetic worlds. And it presents a stunning re-examination of the social, cultural and artistic contours of American modernism, from the impact of a liberal Scottish speaker on T.S. Eliotâ (TM)s considerations of Shakespeare to the generic hybridity of Edith Whartonâ (TM)s writing, from the influence of Oscar Wilde on Hart Crane to the effect of Anglo-European experimentalism on Native American fiction â " and much more. Through close textual and archival analysis, backed up with compelling historical insights, these nine new essays explore the nature and limits of American modernism. They address such topical issues as geomodernism, transnationalism and the nature of American identity; they examine the ways writers embraced or rejected the emerging modern world; and they take a fresh look at American literature in the broad context of international modernism.

Walter Benn Michaels’ Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism highlights that the search for identity is a mutual project of both nativism and Modernism and reveals how relevant racial identity is in American Modernism. While this is an important relationship in American Modernism, I argue that many recent studies following Michaels’ legacy of scholarship on race and nativism in modern American literature reduce individual authors’ projects, too often interpreting them all to have similar anxieties and desires for American racial identity and citing the presence of racial tropes as evidence of the authors’ own social and political arguments. Michaels set a precedent of overlooking the aesthetic in critical examinations of racial identity in American modernist texts, but I argue that aesthetic spaces are often the spaces where authors work through issues of race and identity and that aesthetics are crucial to understanding identity formation in many American modernist novels. Modernism is a movement that explores the idea that identity is not one-dimensional or whole, and I wish to illustrate a more kaleidoscopic view of racial aesthetics in American Modernism, exploring the complexity and variations of race presented by a variety of authors. Various American authors come to both Modernism and race in different ways and have unique projects and perspectives about racial identity. I wish to broaden the scope of conversation surrounding American Modernism and race, and I hope to illuminate the significance of examining the various and unique aesthetic elements at play in individual works of modern American fiction. I will examine works by Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Nella Larsen to argue that race and Modernism have a more complicated relationship than much scholarship acknowledges and that the nativist and racial language and themes presented by many American modernist writers can be read more richly according to the various narrative perspectives and projects of the writers using them.

From its trendy urban centers to its ancient deserts, Israel's history is based on the rich heritage of traditions and contradictions. It is known as a start-up nation, with hospitable and warm interpersonal relationships, and a steady high-ranked happiness level. Yet, its deep political disparities and past traumas ripple beneath the surface of its culture, with unyielding existential threats looming from its neighbors and from within its borders. The turbulent Israeli settingcharacterized by salient existential threats, issues of identity and dialectic world viewsserve as a magnifying glass for unravelling a variety of significant ways through which the human fundamental motivation to find meaning in life is manifested. Finding Meaning incorporates a conceptual framework for examining the post-modern, sociocultural Israeli scene that facilitates and triggers the search for meaning among its citizens. Combining theory, data, and illustrative case studies, this book unravels a variety of significant and fundamental manifestations of a quest for meaning under existentialist duress, carefully navigating the cultural context of post-modernist Israel. Written by experts in these areas, this book offers new insights into this quest by suggesting a new construct that weaves together the personal and cultural environment, highlights several key processes and dimensions that appear to characterize this search, and offers broad perspectives that contribute to the research at these intersections. Finding Meaning is a pioneering book with an insightful, innovative, and hopeful lens for academic, scholarly, and some lay readers interested in meaning and contemporary Israeli society.

Arguing that the contemporary commitment to the importance of cultural identity has renovated rather than replaced an earlier commitment to racial identity, Walter Benn Michaels asserts that the idea of culture, far from constituting a challenge to racism, is actually a form of racism. Our America offers both a provocative reinterpretation of the role of identity in modernism and a sustained critique of the role of identity in postmodernism. "We have a great desire to be supremely American," Calvin Coolidge wrote in 1924. That desire, Michaels tells us, is at the very heart of American modernism, giving form and substance to a cultural movement that would in turn redefine America's cultural and collective identity--ultimately along racial lines. A provocative reinterpretation of American modernism, Our America also offers a new way of understanding current debates over the meaning of race, identity, multiculturalism, and pluralism. Michaels contends that the aesthetic movement of modernism and the social movement of nativism came together in the 1920s in their commitment to resolve the meaning of identity--linguistic, national, cultural, and racial. Just as the Johnson Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded aliens, and the Indian Citizenship Act of the same year, which honored the truly native, reconceptualized national identity, so the major texts of American writers such as Cather, Faulkner, Hurston, and Williams reinvented identity as an object of pathos--something that can be lost or found, defended or betrayed. Our America is both a history and a critique of this invention, tracing its development from the white supremacism of the Progressive period through the cultural pluralism of the Twenties. Michaels's sustained rereading of the texts of the period--the canonical, the popular, and the less familiar--exposes recurring concerns such as the reconception of the image of the Indian as a symbol of racial purity and national origins, the relation between World War I and race, contradictory appeals to the family as a model for the nation, and anxieties about reproduction that subliminally tie whiteness and national identity to incest, sterility, and impotence.

Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture explores the emergence of what Nancy Bombaci terms «late modernist freakish aesthetics» - a creative fusion of «high» and «low» themes and forms in relation to distorted bodies. Literary and cinematic texts about «freaks» by Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers subvert and reinvent modern progress narratives in order to challenge high modernist literary and social ideologies. These works are marked by an acceptance of the disteleology, anarchy, and degeneration that racist discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries associated with racial and ethnic outsiders, particularly Jews. In a period of American culture beset with increasing pressures for social and political conformity and with the threat of fascism from Europe, these late modernist narratives about «freaks» defy oppressive norms and values as they search for an anarchic and transformational creativity.

"The Patient Particulars: American Modernism and the Technique of Originality is a literary history that focuses on four canonical texts - Stein's Tender Buttons (1914), Hemingway's In Our Time (1925), Williams's Spring and All (1923), and Moore's Observations (1924) - grouped together for the purpose of raising a question about the manner in which American literary modernism is traditionally described. Author Christopher J. Knight is interested in the way that the classical "covenant between word and world," now considered fractured, experienced undue pressure from the modernists' earlier project to bridge the gap. With respect to the texts named, Knight argues that there is an evinced desire to think of the work as a vertical, veridical act of discovery. There is, as such, an ambition to collapse representation into presentation and even revelation; an ambition that, while quixotic, is not without formal ("the technique of originality") and political consequences. These consequences are, in fact, the main focus of the book, and in turn, are brought forward to ask further questions about how we periodize American literary modernism(s)."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The modernist period was crucial for American literature as it gave writers the chance to be truly innovative and create their own distinct identity. Starting slightly earlier than many guides to modernism this lucid and comprehensive guide introduces the reader to the essential history of the period including technology, religion, economy, class, gender and immigration. These contexts are woven of into discussions of many significant authors and texts from the period. Wagner-Martin brings her years of writing about American modernism to explicate poetry and drama as well as fiction and life-writing. Among the authors emphasized are Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, William Carlos Williams, Mike Gold, James T. Farrell, Clifford Odets, John Steinbeck and countless others. A clear and engaging introduction to an exciting period of literature, this is the ultimate guide for those seeking an overview of American Modernism.