Values feeling and intuition over reason, values the imagination over reality, C ivilization is bad - Nature is good,

educated sophistication is bad - Youthful i nnocence is good, individual freedom is important, Nature is the way to find God , progress is bad, Most settings are in exotic locales or the supernatural, Poet ry is the highest expression of the imagination, Lots of inspiration from myths and legends. American Romantic hero: Young (or at least acts young), Innocent and pure, Sense of honor higher than society s honor, Has knowledge of people and life based on a deep understanding, not based on education, Loves nature, Quests for a higher t ruth. The Centers of Modernism 1. Stylistic innovations - disruption of traditional syntax and form. 2. Artist's self-consciousness about questions of form and structure. 3. Obsession with primitive material and attitudes. 4. International perspective on cultural matters. Modern Attitudes 1. The artist is generally less appreciated but more sensitive, even more heroic , than the average person. 2. The artist challenges tradition and reinvigorates it. 3. A breaking away from patterned responses and predictable forms. Literary Achievements 1. Dramatization of the plight of women. 2. Creation of a literature of the urban experience. 3. Continuation of the pastoral or rural spirit. 4. Continuation of regionalism and local color. Modern Themes 1. Collectivism versus the authority of the individual. 2. The impact of the 1918 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. 3. The Jazz Age. 4. The passage of 19th Amendment in 1920 giving women the right to vote. 5. Prohibition of the production, sale, and consumption of alcoholic beverages, 1920-33. 6. The stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression of the 1930s and their impa ct. Modernism and the Self 1. In this period, the chief characteristic of the self is one of alienation. Th e character belongs to a "lost generation" (Gertrude Stein), suffers from a "dis sociation of sensibility" (T. S. Eliot), and who has "a Dream deferred" (Langsto n Hughes). 2. Alienation led to an awareness about one's inner life. Characters would cultivate the romantic self-absorption, experts in tragedy, suf fering and dispirited moody. There is no omniscient, reliable narrator, limited point of view. These are the characteristics of Modernist Novel: experimental and innovatory in form, concerned with consciousness introspection, analysis, weakening of experi ence, open ending, no omniscient reliable narrator, limited point of view, mythi cal archetypes. Novelist inherited the tradition of 19th c. concerned with the struggle between the naturalistic and spiritual, the lost generation. Hemingway art, his world is characteristically violent and brutal, the world of war, crime. Central themes are war, crime, love death. Hemingway s hero- male, white, copes simultaneously with the threats from the outs ide world and from his inner world-inner enemy-want to change but cannot succeed . His story has 2 characteristic forms: of initiation and that of test. This is no past and future what matters is the present, the moment outside of time. His ar t is a lyric art, not a dramatic art. The iceberg technique of writing, the read ers can read between the lines, all the words, are not necessary, to omit the un necessary words and leave only the tip of the iceberg and the readers should dis cover the meaning. Hemingway turned the profession of the writers into a sacred

one, the writer as a priest guardian of sacred truth. American Modernism covered a wide variety of topics including: racial relationsh ips, gender roles, and sexuality to name a few. It reached its peak in America i n the 1920s up to the 1940s. Celebrated Modernists include Ezra Pound, William C arlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, and while largely regarded as a romantic poet, Walt Whitman is sometimes regarded as a pioneer of the modernist era in America. Black writers need to be mentioned when talking about modernism in America, as t hey seem to have brought a breakthrough in literature and mentality, as far as t he self-esteem of Afro-Americans is concerned. The folk-oriented poetry of Sterl ing Brown and Langston Hughes, for example, written in a rhythm fit to be either sung or told as a story, melancholically describes the joyful attitude of AfroAmericans towards life, in spite of all the hardships they were confronted with. The protagonists of these poems are shown in such a light which offers insight into their cultural identity and folklore. An insight into culture and folklore is also a topic that prose deals with, such as, for example, Jean Toomer's Blood -Burning Moon and William Faulkner's That Evening Sun. Racial relations between blacks and whites, the gap between what was expected of each of the two and what the actual facts were, or, better said, prejudice in t he society of the time are themes dealt with in most of the modernist American l iterature, whether we speak about prose (Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Willia m Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway), or about drama Eugene O'Neill. In other words, su ch stereotypes as the lack of education, the poor use of the English language an d their portrayal in a dangerous light are not dealt away with, on the contrary, they are still present during the modernist period, as far as literature is con cerned. However, with Ernest Hemingway's The Battler, for example, there seems t o be a reversal of stereotypes. The Afro-American character in this short story proves out to be a kind, calculated and polite man, whose good manners and caref ully chosen vocabulary are easily noticeable from the first moment he appears in the story. Madness and its manifestations in the human being seems to be another favorite t heme of American modernist writers. Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, Ernest H emingway's The Battler and William Faulkner's That Evening Sun, all deal to a ce rtain extent with this topic. The modernist period also brought changes to the portrayal of gender roles and e specially to women's role in society. It is an era under the sign of emancipatio n and change in society, issues which reflect themselves in the literature of th e period, as well. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, for example, deals with such topics as gender interaction in a mundane society. Influenced by the first World War, American modernist writers, such as Ernest He mingway, offer an insight into the psychological wounds and spiritual scars of t he war experience. The economic crisis in America at the beginning of the 1930s also left a mark on the literary creations of the period, such as John Steinbeck 's The Grapes of Wrath. Nevertheless, all these negative aspects led to new hope s and aspirations, and to the search for a new beginning, not only for the conte mporary individuals, but also for the fictional characters in American modernist literature.