Modern Period: 1910-1945
Toward the Modern Age; Alienation and Literary Experimentation; The
New Negro Renaissance
As with other sections in
The Heath Anthology, the anthology
itself is a good place to begin class discussion, particularly in its use
of the term "modern." Attempts by the class to define this word
can lead to questions about where to locate the border between the past
and present--a question implied by the phrase "
Toward the
Modern Age"--and hence to questions about the uses of literary, historical,
and cultural classification systems. For example, how does the adjective
"modern" affect our reading of a particular text? What difference
does it make to read W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Booker T.
Washington as precursors of modern African-American literature instead
of reading them as descendants of and respondents to Frederick Douglass,
Harriet Jacobs, or Phillis Wheatley? Or as contemporaries of Edith Wharton
and Willa Cather? Groups of students could be asked to read writers collected
in just these different configurations to compare the various perspectives
that emerge.
These exercises suggest further experiments in classification and reclassification.
In the
Instructor's Guide entry for "A Sheaf of Political Poetry
in the Modern Era," Cary Nelson asks what difference the label "political"
makes in reading these poems--and by extension what difference the same
label would make to other texts, or what different labels would mean to
the texts in that same section. What if the poems of T. S. Eliot, Ezra
Pound, or Amy Lowell were labeled as primarily "political" rather
than "experimental" or "personal"? What is the effect
of encountering Langston Hughes in both the section on political poetry
and in the section on "The New Negro Renaissance"? Such questions
also involve the instructor in the process of critical re-evaluation and
reclassification, for as instructors we carry the biases and perspectives
of our own academic training and reading histories. For many of us, the
definition of the word "modern" in terms of literary history
almost automatically suggests the term "modernism." While for
many students all of the writers in these sections will be new, for others,
as for most instructors, certain names will leap out, but perhaps in unusual
or nontraditional places. If, as an instructor, you find it curious to
see Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot so separated in the table of contents, or
Pound next to Amy Lowell and Eliot in between E. E. Cummings and F. Scott
Fitzgerald, such a reaction can be brought into class discussion. These
reactions are one way of situating the instructor's reading history and
academic training in terms of the particular course, or providing a context
in which to evaluate and understand the instructor's expertise, and also
to illustrate the benefits offered by unsettling and re-examining traditional
patterns of thought.
In a way, these questions of how classification systems are formed--and
concomitant questions of how systems of literary and cultural evaluation
are formed--return us to the use of "regionalism" as a definitive
concept in multicultural pedagogy; the understanding that all classification
systems, methods of reading, and historical narratives are social constructions
connected to particular historical contexts serving various but equally
particular social, cultural, political, and psychological purposes. While
the idea of replacing the universal with the regional--or asserting the
universality of being regional--may seem new, it's a move comparable to
the project of modernism as traditionally understood: the effort to make
"Alienation and Literary Experimentation"--terms suggestive of
the marginality of the artist as social outsider--into what Eliot regarded
as the mainstream of literary tradition--what we refer to today as the
"canon." This paradoxical idea of the centrality of alienation
often holds an added irony for many students reading these now-canonical
high modernist texts for the first time in terms of their own sense of
alienation from these self-consciously difficult texts.
Rather than an
a priori assumption of the centrality of a certain
definition of modernism or the deductive approach outlined earlier, an
inductive approach that regards each text as regional turns student frustration
and puzzlement--essential parts of the learning process, after all--into
material for discussion rather than barriers to be overcome. Instead of
guessing ahead of time which writers certain students will find difficult,
which accessible, interesting, and boring, the various reading experiences
students bring into class, perhaps expressed in the form of a reading log,
can lead to questions of audience and purpose. "Alienation" can
begin with questions about how writers--all writers, both in the anthology
and in the chairs of the class--either consciously or unconsciously invite
and/or discourage various groups of readers. These questions lead to other
questions about the writer's purpose and strategies, an approach especially
though not excusively useful for the most self-consciously experimental
and difficult texts, like the work of the Objectivist poets.
Among these purposes and strategies are claims to universality. By beginning
with the assumption that all writers are regionalists, we move beyond the
idea that while certain groups of writers write for everyone, others represent
a special or local case. The writers of "The New Negro Renaissance,"
for example, are typical, not exceptional, in their attention to the specific
contours of particular cultural experiences: the place of African-Americans
in U.S. society; the role of the intellectual in the African-American community;
the experience of being members of a literary and cultural movement. From
this perspective, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and
Wallace Stevens are also regionalists, writing from particular cultural
positions to particular audiences. If the traditional high modernists claim
universality and cultural transcendence as part of their strategy, these
claims are just that-- strategies--and thus comparable with the strategies
and claims for universality of Kay Boyle, Langston Hughes, Theodore Dreiser,
or Edna St. Vincent Millay. Issues of race, gender, and class affect these
strategies in terms of the traditional assumptions they carry about centrality,
marginality, and importance: Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound are both gendered
writers; T. S. Eliot and Zora Neale Hurston are both writers who deal with
issues of race, as well as what constitutes a literary tradition.
Finally, questions of canonicity raise questions of influence; how later
writers and readers are affected by the poetic strategies and cultural
theories of earlier writers and the implications for reading implicit in
those strategies, issues that Eliot himself foregrounded as part of his
artistic project. If some students bring to class assumptions about the
inherent difficulty and obscurity of poetry, about the need to "interpret"
poetry, or even about what constitutes poetry, the consideration of these
writers as making various claims about what literature is, who should write
it and read it, and what its cultural purposes are, can help students construct
a genealogy of their own ideas about literature and reading and/or the
ideas they have encountered in previous English classes.
Issues and Visions in Modern America
The texts in this section continue to address the questions of assimilation,
confrontation, and transformation of the evolving myth of "Americanness"
raised in "New Explorations of An 'American' Self," focusing
particularly on the experiences of Native Americans, Asian-Americans, and
Southerners. This seemingly incongruous grouping highlights important issues
related to that myth: both how that myth is profoundly regional in definition
within the borders of the United States (where does the "All American"
live? What are the images associated with the idea of a "typical"
American town?) and how various immigrants' experiences became conflated
within that myth into a single archetypal immigrant's story, usually centered
on the arrival of European immigrants in New York. The poetry of anonymous
Chinese immigrants not only allows for an exploration of the experience
and challenges faced by Asian immigrants arriving in the American West,
traveling east to a new land against the traditional European myth of westward
expansion, but points out again the importance of recognizing the classroom
as region--whether it is located in the South, the West, the Midwest, or
the East; and paying attention to and making a subject of class discussion
the specific immigration histories the students bring with them as part
of their identities.
In addition to the continuing exploration of cultural assimilation and
resistance, the other major issue addressed in these selections is the
Great Depression, the collapse of the U.S. economic system that intensified
patterns of internal migration (from East to West and from South to North)
that continue to this day. As with immigration, class discussion can start
by investigating the images of the depression in the historical consciousnesses
of the class and asking students to explore their own relevant family histories.
Such explorations will inevitably raise questions of social class and work,
particularly as they relate to various educational institutions (community
colleges, regional public universities, research institutions), including
questions about the relation of a modern college education to the demands
of the marketplace. Thus, reading the work of Meridel LeSueur, Clifford
Odets, or Pietro Di Donato highlights not only questions about the role
of the artist and the purpose of art, but also the purpose of the college
literature course for students facing an increasingly competitive and uncertain
economic future. Such a discussion provides an important perspective for
considerations of canonicity in terms not just of creating demographically
representative curricula in an abstract sense but of classes that address
the concerns and ambitions of students by choosing groups of texts that
in their action and interaction reflect, amplify, complicate, and clarify
these concerns. Reading proletarian literature from the thirties in conjunction
with T. S. Eliot, for example, broadens the implications of both types
of texts and opens the paths of access to them as well.
