modernist literature is sub-genre of modernism, a predominantly European movement beginning in the early 20th century that was characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional aesthetic forms.
nonmodernist literature is everything else.
a collection of materials relating to nonmodernist literature of the early twentieth century.
So the internet is all abuzz about Baz Luhrmann’s 3D adaptation of The Great Gatsby and the film trailer for the project that just dropped.
While Gatsby is great and all, there are a LOT of other Jazz Age novels you could also check out. (Some of them are even by women!) In the video above, I give you four reading recommendations from the 1920s to sate your Jazz Age lust.
This Romantic-era Impressionist forefather, called the “painter of light”, was controversial during his life - he was admittedly talented, yet heavily criticized for what was perceived to be an excessive use of color and haze. Today, he is regarded one of the greatest landscape painters of all time, using pure paint and passion to depict the beauty - and sometimes destructive power - of nature. Turner’s technique and style apparently later influenced many Impressionists, including Claude Monet himself.
Two days too late for Turner’s bday, I have an article published about him, Louisa May Alcott, and the moral applications of art.
In the article, I explore the depiction of artworks in Little Women and some of Alcott’s lesser known texts. I sort through her weird hatred of Turner and try to parse why exactly she was so negative about the painter, given that her sister Abigail was famous in New England for copying his works and bringing them into art classrooms for study (a common practice in the late 19th century, since we lacked high-res photography, slide projection, and Google Art).
Here’s a small taste:
Describing Amy’s attempts [in Little Women] to copy masterpieces, a regular form of art study at the time, the narrator pillories artists including Rembrandt and Turner. “Oily brown shadows of faces, with a lurid streak in the wrong place, meant Rembrandt… Turner appeared in tempests of blue thunder, orange lightning, brown rain, and purple clouds, with a tomato-colored splash in the middle, which might be the sun or a buoy, a sailor’s shirt or a King’s robe, as the spectator pleased” (203-204)… In Alcott’s 1873 novel Work: A Story of Experience, the flighty Mrs. Stuart, “having just returned from Italy, affected the artistic”: “Madame was intent on a water-color copy of Turner’s ‘Rain, Wind, and Hail,’ that pleasing work which was sold upsidedown and no one found it out” (Alternative Alcott 250-251). Though “Rain, Wind, and Hail” is an apocryphal work, the title references one of Turner’s best known paintings, Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, a hazy, barely-specific evocation of a steam engine traveling through a mere suggestion of a landscape. Turner’s art in Work is a byword for false appreciation by those for whom art is an affectation; however, it is telling of Alcott’s attitude toward Turner that Mrs. Stuart is not the only one duped by the upside-down painting. The implication here is that Turner’s work is so devoid of realism that no one can tell its correct orientation – that, as with Amy’s copy, the work can be wrongly interpreted “as the spectator pleased.” His art is, the joke argues, inherently devoid of meaning.
today i presented for #SPS2012 - the Society for Pentecostal Studies - on a panel responding to the documentary film “Let the Church Say Amen,” a cool documentary following the lives of several individuals who attend a storefront pentecostal church in Washington, DC. following are my comments regarding the film [which you can watch on hulu for free, linked above].
Helga Crane was on the search for something. She spent the majority of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand trying to understand something about life, about love, which is to say, something about a material-spiritual way to be in the world. Her otherness, her non-whiteness, her mulatto-ness that was also, only and always her blackness sent her on paths across the United States. She also went to Denmark where she felt she had become, to use Frantz Fanon, an object in the eyes of the Danes. Crane returned to the States, to Harlem specifically, because she missed the faces of, and comfort from, black folks who did not make her feel like an objection, like a question, like a problem.
“Incited. That was it, the guidingprinciple of her life in Copenhagen. She was incited to make an impression, a voluptous impression. She was incited to inflame attention and admiration. She was dressed for it, subtly schooled for it. And after a little while she gave herself up wholly to the fascinating business of being seen, gaped at, desired.” —Nella Larsen
…It was midsummer night that had done that to him.
I continued reading, but Chapter 7 ist still moving me. It’s Tietjen and Valentine traveling in a foggy and warm midsummernight. The Fog is “absolutely level, absolutely silver”, like a silver sea with an “absurd moon” accompanying them.
Opposite the moon was a smirch or two of cloud; pink below, dark purple above; on the more pallid, lower blue of the limpid sky.
The two pictures by the romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich came into my mind: “Der Abend” (The Evening) and “Mann und Frau den Mond betrachtend” (Man and Woman Looking at the Moon). I don’t know, if I do FMF any justice in bringing up Friedrich, but as Tietjens is apparently quoting Heine it might be fine.
The warm night, the ongoing talking and arguing with Valentine it seems like, it’s changing something in Tietjens. While Valentine is on and off disappearing in the mist, Tietjens is sitting on the cart, singing and thinking. In the beginning of this scene, there is a clear distinction between him and Valentine:
He was Yorkshire and stolid: she south country and soft.
Tietjens sees himself as bureaucrat and mathematician despising everything which is „not theoretical enough“. First, he analyses the fog in a rather scientific or historical way (the Chinese, the Patagonians, the Greeks …), the longer the journey is, he realizes that, despite his knowledge, that fog is just water, he can see the fog’s colours like in a painting.
Actually, this mist was not silver, or was, perhaps, no longer silver: if you looked at it with the eye of the artist…With the exact eye! It was smirched with bars of purple; of red; or orange; delicate reflections: dark blue shadows from the upper sky where it formed drifts like snow…The exact eye: exact observation: it was a man’s work. The only work for a man. Why then were artists soft: effeminate: not men at all: whilst the army officer, who had the inexact mind of the schoolteacher, was a manly man? Quite a manly man: until he became an old woman!
The exact observation, the accurate scientific analysis is his world, where he feels home. For Tietjens, it’s a masculine world with rules, laws and natural scientific phenomenons. In opposition to this, there is an artistic, feminine world. No wonder, it’s a contradiction for Tietjens, that it’s the artists depicting the world in all details. Thus, an artist may be more accurate in his perception of the world as an officially learned schoolteacher. It seems, Tietjens needs this kind of black-and-white approach (masculine vs. feminine, science vs. arts) to keep his world stable. Expecially in a warm and kind of magic (Tietjens: „A silly word“) summer night, he just doesn’t want to commit that the new morning might bring some change to his world.
The sun!’ she said, pointing. Above the silver horizon was the sun.
All quotes Some Do not, Part I, Chp. 7
And yes, it’s like sssnakeling says: i really enjoy the read-along! ((I’d like to say one thing, I’m a non-native speaker, I haven’t written longish texts in English for ages, please ignore strange grammatical structures, wrong words etc. They’re just my humble thoughts.))
I am participating in nonmodernist’s Parade’s End read-along as best I can. This week, I managed to keep up with the read-along schedule, finishing section 5 of part 1 of Some Do Not… If you haven’t gotten through this part of the book, some of what I say below contains spoilers.
The things that interest me in this book are probably a bit atypical. I spend my life talking about sex and especially about how gender role stereotypes impact people’s ability to express their authentic sexual selves. So, what stood out to me while reading this first part of the book is the contrast between Sylvia, Valentine and how their sexuality is portrayed.
I guess we’re not supposed to like Sylvia. She’s seen by other characters as cruel and indolent. It’s revealed that she had an affair with a married man, got pregnant, and conveniently married Tietjens, who is (likely) not the father of her child. She then left Tietjens to have an affair with another man until she got bored and decided to return to him.
Typically, any woman who displays this type of sexual agency in literature will come to a bad end. She’s always portrayed as a whore, as selfish, and as deserving of whatever punishment is enacted upon her by other characters. Because I’m so tired of slut-shaming in real life, I really hope that Sylvia prevails. I wish she could fuck her way across Europe with no repercussions.
Valentine, on the other hand, is a feisty suffragette who is described as chaste and virginal — the opposite of Sylvia. Of course, I love feisty suffragettes, and I don’t really want to pit these two female characters against each other in some kind of battle for Tietjens. I laughed when I saw that other read-along members were tagging Team Sylvia or Team Valentine, but was also kind of sad that we would instinctually set women up as rivals or competitors rather than simply being glad that there were two interesting female characters to explore.
Both Sylvia and Valentine challenge conventional ideas about femininity in different ways, so I’m really interested to see how these characters develop.
I’m glad Laura wrote up some thoughts about female stereotypes at work in Parade’s End. I find that I spend so much time thinking about what would make interesting research material, or parsing Ford’s somewhat unique narrative style, that Idon’t pay a lot of attention to the gender dynamics at play. This is really unlike me,* and I’m starting to see that I’ve been ignoring some important stuff on the pages.
I also appreciate that she called out the female competition thing without directly attacking anyone about it. I think the hashtags began as a joke — I certainly encouraged them as a humorous way to get conversation flowing — but I do agree with her that it isn’t really fair to set them up as rivals or competitors only.
I haven’t read enough yet to know if Ford is specifically asking us to choose sides — though as with any love triangle-type plot, I’m sure there’s an element of that. Personally, I enjoy both characters thus far for different reasons, and I too am excited to see how they develop.
(*Full disclosure: I’m currently writing a thesis on misogyny and punishment in literary criticism, inspired specifically by the nauseating tendency of readers to deride and abuse female characters, in this case social climbers. I guess maybe I look for it so much in the course of my regular work that I’ve been unconsciously ignoring it here.)
