1. Spelling Error #3
Using “accidently” instead of
“accidentally.”
There are quite a few words
with -ally suffixes
(‚incidentally‛), and these
should not be confused with
words having -ly suffixes
(‚independently‛). Accidently
makes it into some dictionaries
but it’s regarded as a variant. It’s
wise to avoid variants if you
can, because some people will ELIT 48C
become more concerned about
Class 3
your spelling than what you’re
selling.

2. AGENDA
• Modern Manifestos
o Pound
o Cather
o Williams
o Hughes
• Literary and Artistic Modernism
o Trends in movements

3. Ezra Pound was an American
expatriate living in Europe. He
Pound was hugely influential in the
circle of other expatriate writers
and artists not only for his own
work as a poet but also for the
advice that he offered to other
writers. ‚A Retrospect‛ is
Pound’s manifesto on Imagism,
a school of poetry that argued
for the central—if not defining—
place of the image in modern
poetry.

4. • An “Image” is that which Is Ezra Pound offering a
presents an intellectual radical new vision of
and emotional complex
poetry, or are his
in an instant of time.
comments simply good
• It is better to present one advice for writers of any
Image in a lifetime than kind?
to produce voluminous
works.
What do you find
• Use no superfluous word, radical in Pound’s
no adjective which does approach as laid out in
not reveal something.
‚A Retrospect‛?
—
from “A Retrospect”

5. In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
One of Pound’s most famous Imagist poems is ‚In a Station of
the Metro.‛ Does he practice what he preaches in ‚A
Retrospect‛ in this poem?
After reading this poem, are you inclined to think differently
about the advice Pound offers in ‚A Retrospect‛?
After reading an Imagist poem, do you think that ‚A
Retrospect‛ is offering something more than just general
advice for writers?

6. Willa Cather Willa Cather was born in the
Midwest but spent most of her
career as a novelist in
cosmopolitan cities such as
London and New York. In
‚The Novel Démeublé,‛
Cather implicitly asks what
nineteenth-century novelists
can teach twentieth-century
writers. In so doing, she rejects
realist novels as mere
‚amusement‛ and looks to
‚American romances‛ such as
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter
for inspiration.

7. There are hopeful signs that The realist literature of an
some of the younger writers earlier tradition was
are trying to break away
from mere verisimilitude, committed to the
and, following the ‚verisimilitude‛ that Cather
development of modern here rejects. What is Cather
painting, to interpret offering in the place of
imaginatively the material
and social investiture of verisimilitude?
their characters; to present
their scene by suggestion What does it mean ‚to
rather than by
enumeration. interpret imaginatively‛ and
—from ‚to present . . . by suggestion
“The Novel Démeublé” rather than by
enumeration‛?

9. William Carlos
Williams So far, all of the manifestos
that we have read are
serious invectives. Yet,
here we encounter the
playfulness in Williams’s
Spring and All. Given the
playful, ironic, and
humorous tone of
Williams’s manifesto, it
may be difficult to tell how
deadly serious he is about
his vision for modern
poetry.

10. It is spring! but miracle of
miracles a miraculous
miracle has gradually taken The language from Spring
place during these and All invokes both the
seemingly wasted eons. creation story in the book of
Through the orderly Genesis and the theory of
sequences of evolution.
unmentionable time
EVOLUTION HAS REPEATED Why does Williams do this?
ITSELF FROM THE BEGINNING.
And how does he make both
—from Spring and All religion and science serve
‚the meaning of ‘art’‛?

11. Langston
Hughes
Many modernist writers
supported the idea that artists
and writers should be fiercely
committed to their personal
vision regardless of what the
market, critics, or other writers
said. In ‚The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain,‛ Langston
Hughes argues that an artist’s
racial identity complicates this
commitment to personal vision in
ways that white writers had not
fully appreciated.

12. There’s a tension in the statement
I am ashamed for the between individual choice (‚An artist
black poet who says, “I must be free to choose what he
want to be a poet, not does‛) and a manifesto-like
a Negro poet,” as prescription of what African-
though his own racial
world were not as
American poets must do (‚I am
interesting as any other ashamed for the black poet who says
world . . . An artist must . . .‛).
be free to choose
what he does, How does Hughes encourage black
certainly, but he must writers to embrace their heritage
also never be afraid to without telling the that they must
do what he might write in a certain way to be
choose. considered successful writers?
—from “The Negro In what way is this essay not about
Artist and
the Racial
art at all, but about racism and the
Mountain” self-hatred that it breeds in an
oppressed population?

13. Literary and Artistic
Modernism
• “Modernism” refers to artistic works that
o represent the transformation of traditional
society under the pressures of modernity
o break down traditional literary forms
o depict the modern world not as a triumph
of human civilization but as an experience of
loss
o call into question the religious, political,
social, and artistic conventions of the past
o interpret the world as disparate fragments
rather than an integrated whole

14. This list of the features of modern art and
literature is not exhaustive, but it is a good place
to start differentiating between the modernist
literature of the twentieth century and the
realism/naturalism of the late-nineteenth century.
Not every work of modernist art or literature
displays all of these qualities, and some work
emphasizes one aspect more than the others. The
works of art featured in the following slides
provide a starting point for discussing the nature
of modernism.

15. Georges Braque’s Still Life With Guitar (ca. 1918–19)
Where is the guitar in this still life? Why does Braque opt to ‚take
apart‛ a guitar and represent its scattered fragments rather than
depict it as a unified whole? How does it force us to think about the
guitar differently by viewing it in fragments?

16. Pablo Picasso’s 1937 painting Weeping Woman
How has Picasso broken down
the image of the woman into
various fragments from
different perspectives and then
reassembled those fragments.
Why does Picasso do this?
How is he forcing us to see this
woman anew? How does this
new vision of a typical
subject—a portrait of a
woman—reflect the concerns
of modernism described on the
earlier slide?

17. Wassily Kandinsky’s In Blue (1925)
In his effort to break
down the world into
fragments, has
Kandinsky completely
removed all reference to
the natural world?
Can you identify any recognizable images, or is it all a mass
of shapes? What is Kandinsky trying to achieve with this
radical conception of the world as (nonrepresentational?)
fragmentary shapes?

18. Homework
• Post #4: Pass
• Read My Antonia (1918) Book I
Introduction Chapters 1-10