1. Spelling Error #3
ELIT 48C
Class 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
become more concerned about
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
• Author Introduction
o F Scott Fitzgerald

3. Ezra
Pound
Pound was an American
expatriate living in Europe. He
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
presents an intellectual
and emotional complex
in an instant of time.
• It is better to present one
Image in a lifetime than
to produce voluminous
works.
• Use no superfluous
word, no adjective which
does not reveal
something.
—
from “A Retrospect”
Is Ezra Pound offering a
radical new vision of
poetry, or are his
comments simply good
advice for writers of any
kind?
What do you find
radical in Pound’s
approach as laid out in
‚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
some of the younger writers
are trying to break away
from mere verisimilitude,
and, following the
development of modern
painting, to interpret
imaginatively the material
and social investiture of
their characters; to present
their scene by suggestion
rather than by
enumeration.
—from
“The Novel Démeublé”
The realist literature of an
earlier tradition was
committed to the
‚verisimilitude‛ that Cather
here rejects. What is Cather
offering in the place of
verisimilitude?
What does it mean ‚to
interpret imaginatively‛ and
‚to present . . . by suggestion
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
place during these
seemingly wasted eons.
Through the orderly
sequences of
unmentionable time
EVOLUTION HAS REPEATED
ITSELF FROM THE BEGINNING.
—from Spring and All
The language from Spring
and All invokes both the
creation story in the book of
Genesis and the theory of
evolution.
Why does Williams do this?
And how does he make both
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. I am ashamed for the
black poet who says, “I
want to be a poet, not
a Negro poet,” as
though his own racial
world were not as
interesting as any other
world . . . An artist must
be free to choose
what he
does, certainly, but he
must also never be
afraid to do what he
might choose.
—from “The Negro
Artist and
the Racial
Mountain”
There’s a tension in the statement
between individual choice (‚An artist
must be free to choose what he
does‛) and a manifesto-like
prescription of what African-
American poets must do (‚I am
ashamed for the black poet who says
. . .‛).
How does Hughes encourage black
writers to embrace their heritage
without telling the that they must
write in a certain way to be
considered successful writers?
In what way is this essay not about
art at all, but about racism and the
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. F Scott Fitzgerald
1896-
1940

19. A novelist and short-story writer, F. (Francis) Scott Fitzgerald was
one of the greatest American writers of the 20th Century.
The Great Gatsby, is one of the most penetrating descriptions of
American life in the 1920s.
Fitzgerald came from two widely different families. He had early
on developed an inferiority complex in a family where the ‚black
Irish half … had the money and looked down on the Maryland
side of the family who had, and really had … ‘breeding,’‛ (Scott
Donaldson: Dictionary of Literary Biography.) Out of this
divergence of classes in his family background arose what critics
called F. Scott's ‚double vision.‛ He had the ability to experience
the lifestyle of the wealthy from an insider's perspective, yet never
felt a part of this clique and always felt the outsider.

20.  Read The Great Gatsby: ALL
 Post # 4 Choose One
Write a character sketch of Daisy or Tom or Jordan, focusing on the
recurring “tag” used to describe them. Daisy leans forward and talks
in a low voice; Tom is restless and hulking; Jordan balances
something on her chin almost in an athletic stance. What is
Fitzgerald’s purpose in thus describing them?
OR Discuss how the reunion of Daisy and Gatsby signals both
the beginning and the end of Gatsby’s dream and of his
success.
OR Trace the recurring image of eyes, and ascertain the
purposes of those images. Consider blindness on any level as
well as sight.
OR Your own QHQ
HOMEWORK