5. Trench Warfare and the Literary Imagination
What were the effects of trench warfare on the European
imagination?
• Wilfred Owen: “The Pity of War” — Owen’s poems drew
immediate attention for his horrifying descriptions of the war’s victims.
His intent is that the reader should share his horrific dreams.
• In the Trenches: Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western
Front — The horror of trench warfare is probably nowhere more
thoroughly detailed than in Remarque’s book. It sold more than a
million copies in Germany the first year of its publication in 1928.
6. • William Butler Yeats and the Specter of Collapse — Yeats
moved beyond the Symbolist movement and imagined a much darker
world. The specter of life in the new postwar era is insentient, pitiless,
and nightmarish.
• T.S. Eliot: The Landscape of Desolation — Eliot’s poetry
reflects both the erudition of a scholar and the depression of a
classicist. In the Waste Land he describes a world turned upside down,
a landscape of complete emotional and physical aridity.
• Discussion Question: How did the experience of World War I affect
attitudes about patriotism and heroism?
7. Escape From Despair: Dada in the Capitals
What is Dada?
• Dada was an international signifier of negation. It did not mean
anything, just as, in face of war, life itself had come to seem
meaningless. Dada came into being in Zurich, founded by a group of
intellectuals and artists escaping the conflict in neutral Switzerland.
Key figures in the movement are Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, and
Raoul Hausmann.
• Discussion Question: Why do the Dadaists reject language?
14. Russia: Art and Revolution
How did the arts respond to the Russian Revolution?
• Vladimir Lenin and the Soviet State — Lenin headed the most
radical of Russian postrevolutionary groups, the Bolsheviks. He was a
utopian idealist. But when his party did not succeed in free elections,
he dissolved the government and created the Politburo
• The Arts of the Revolution — Prior to the Revolution, avant-garde
Russian artists established their own brand of modern art. Kasimir
Malevich created Cubo-Futurism and then became engaged in
Suprematism. After the revolution Malevich was inspired by El
Lissitzsky and his piece, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, noting
that Suprematism should adopt a more “Constructive” approach to
reorganizing the world. Sergei Eisenstein was a revolutionary
filmmaker who created The Battleship Potemkin. Lev Kuleshov
developed a theory of montage.
18. Freud, Jung, and the Art of the Unconscious
How does Freudian psychology manifest itself in the Surrealist art
movement?
• Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents— In this book, Freud
wrote that the greatest impediment to human happiness was
aggression.
• The Jungian Archetype— Jung believed that the unconscious life
of the individual was founded on the collective unconscious, the innate,
inherited contents of the human mind. It manifests itself in the form of
archetypes, those patterns of thought that recur throughout history and
across cultures, in the form of dreams, myths, and the fairy tales.
19. • The Dreamwork of Surrealism — Andre Breton published the
Surrealist Manifesto and credited Freud with encouraging his own
creative endeavors. Max Ernst’s, The Master’s Bedroom, Its’ Worth
Spending a Night There is the first Surrealist work in the visual arts.
Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror addresses Surrealism’s most basic
theme – the self in all its complexity. A sense of self-alienation is
central to the work of Salvador Dali. Among the first paintings executed
under the influence of the Surrealists is The Lugubrious Game. A piece
by Alberto Giacometti, Suspended Ball, is the work that caused the
Surrealists to take serious interest in the possibilities of a Surrealist
sculptural project.
• Discussion Question: What is Freud’s basic thesis in Civilization and Its
Discontents?
39. Experimentation and the Literary Life:
The Stream-of-Consciousness Novel
What is the stream-of-consciousness style of writing?
• Joyce, Ulysses, and Sylvia Beach — No writer was more
influential in introducing the stream-of-consciousness narrative than
James Joyce and no novel better demonstrates its powers than his
Ulysses. Banned in both Britain and the United States, Sylvia Beach
agreed to publish Ulysses in an edition of 1, 000.
• Virginia Woolf: In the Mind of Mrs. Dalloway — Woolf argued
that women could realize their full potential only if they achieved both
financial and psychological independence from men. Mrs. Dalloway is
Woolf’s effort to examine for herself “an ordinary day” of a decidedly
different character from those in Ulysses.
• Marcel Proust and the Novel of Memory — It was Proust who
first imagined the novel as a mental space. Remembrance of Things
Past shows that it is the book and the acts of memory that it restores to
the present—and hence to the future--that time, in all its flux is finally
“regained.”
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Self-portrait as a Soldier . 1915. 27-1/4" × 24”.
Map: The Western Front, 1914-18.
Map: World War I, 1914-18.
John Singer Sargent. Gassed . An oil study. 1918-19. 7-1/2' × 20’.
What were the effects of trench warfare on the European imagination? The realities of trench warfare along the Western Front in northeast France and northwest Germany had an immense impact on the Western imagination. The almost unbounded optimism that preceded the war was replaced by a sense of the absurdity of modern life, the fragmentation of experience, and the futility of even daring to hope. How does Wilfred Owens’s “The Pity of War” reflect these feelings? What about William Butler Yeats’s poetry? Among the most powerful realizations of this condition is T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land . How does it depict modern love?
What is Dada? Many found the war incomprehensible, and they reacted by creating an art movement based on negation and meaninglessness: Dada. What beliefs did Dada’s sound poetry reflect? What role did chance operations play in their work? One of their most influential spokesmen, Marcel Duchamp, turned found objects into works of art, including the urinal Fountain , which he called ready-mades. What are ready-mades? How did the Dadaists use the technique of photomontage? Dada, finally, was an art of provocation, but in its very energy, it posited that the forces of creativity might survive.
Marcel Duchamp. Fountain . Replica of 1917 original made in 1963. 1917; 1963. Height: 14”.
Marcel Duchamp. Mona Lisa (L.H.O.O.Q) . Rectified Readymade: reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa altered with pencil. 1919.
Raoul Hausmann. The Art Critic . 1919-20. 12-1/2" × 10”.
How did the arts respond to the Russian Revolution? In Russia, political upheaval offered the promise of a new and better life. Led by Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik party envisioned an ideal utopian state in which society does away with government and life is lived upon the principle “From each according to his ability: to each according to his needs.” In the arts, Kasimir Malevich pursued an art he called Suprematism. What is Suprematism? How are its principles reflected in his Black Square ? Soon Malevich sought to apply these principles in more practical ways that might serve a social purpose—Constructivism, he called it. In film, Sergei Eisenstein’s new montage techniques were created to attract a largely illiterate audience through fast-paced editing and composition. What is montage?
Kasimir Malevich. Painterly Realism: Boy with Knapsack - Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension. 1915. 28" × 17-1/2”.
Kasimir Malevich. View of Malevich's works hanging in “0,10: The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting,” Petrograd, 1915. 1915.
El Lissitzsky. Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge . 1919.
How does Freudian psychology manifest itself in the Surrealist art movement? The era after the war was especially influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud, whose psychoanalytic techniques, especially that of free association, were employed to treat victims of shell shock. What is free association and what theories did Freud develop based on it? After the war, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle , he added to his theories the idea that humans might be equally driven by a death drive that begins to explain self-destructive and aggressive human behaviors, including war. Almost as influential as Freud was his colleague Carl Jung, who believed that the unconscious life of the individual was founded on a deeper, more universal layer of the psyche, which he called the collective unconscious. How does the collective unconscious manifest itself? In the arts, the discoveries of Freud and Jung manifested themselves in the Surrealist projects of André Breton and his colleagues. How did Breton define Surrealism? Breton reproduced the work of Max Ernst in the journals that he published. He recruited Picasso to the movement, as well as Picasso’s Spanish colleague Joan Miró. Miró in turn introduced Salvador Dalí to the movement. All of these artists, including sculptors like Alberto Giacometti and Meret Oppenheim, openly pursued the undercurrent of Freudian sexual desire that they believed lay at the root of their creative activity.
Sergei Eisenstein. Closer Look: Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin, "Odessa Steps Sequence.” 1925.
Sergei Eisenstein. Closer Look: Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin, "Odessa Steps Sequence.” 1925.
Sergei Eisenstein. Closer Look: Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin, "Odessa Steps Sequence.” 1925.
Sergei Eisenstein. Closer Look: Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin, "Odessa Steps Sequence.” 1925.
Sergei Eisenstein. Closer Look: Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin, "Odessa Steps Sequence.” 1925.
Sergei Eisenstein. Closer Look: Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin, "Odessa Steps Sequence.” 1925.
Sergei Eisenstein. Closer Look: Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin, "Odessa Steps Sequence.” 1925.
Sergei Eisenstein. Closer Look: Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin, "Odessa Steps Sequence.” 1925.
Sergei Eisenstein. Closer Look: Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin, "Odessa Steps Sequence.” 1925.
Sergei Eisenstein. Closer Look: Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin, "Odessa Steps Sequence.” 1925.
Sergei Eisenstein. Closer Look: Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin, "Odessa Steps Sequence.” 1925.
Max Ernst. The Master’s Bedroom, It’s Worth Spending a Night There (Letter from Katherine S. Dreyer to Max Ernst, May 25, 1920 ) . 1920. 6-3/8" × 8-5/8”.
Joan Miró. The Birth of the World . 1925. 8’ 2-3/4" × 6’ 6-3/4”.
Pablo Picasso. Girl before a Mirror . 1932. 64" × 51-1/4”.
Salvador Dali. The Lugubrious Game . 1929. 17-1/2" × 12”.
Salvador Dali. The Persistence of Memory . 1931. 9-1/2" × 13”.
What is the stream-of-consciousness style of writing? After the war, writers struggled to find a way to express themselves authentically in a language that the war had seemed to have left impoverished. The life of the unconscious was the subject of the stream-of-consciousness novel that rose to prominence in the same era, including James Joyce’s Ulysses , Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway , and Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu . What are the attractions of the stream of-consciousness style?
James Joyce. Sylvia Beach and James Joyce reading reviews of Ulysses. 1922.
Jacob Lawrence. Continuity & Change: Harlem and the Great Migration: The Migration of the Negro, Panel no. 60: And the migrants kept coming. 1940-41. 18" × 12”.
