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Modernism was the happy, optimistic bandwagon that every writer just had to jump on. Okay, so only half of that statement is true. But we want you to watch the video, so we won't tell you which one it is.

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English Language

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English I EOC Assessment / Counterarguments
Reading Literature / Demonstrate knowledge of eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth century foundational works of American literature

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Transcript

00:05
Other Perspectives, a la Shmoop. If it feels like you've been reading lots
00:10
of stuff written by dead white guys in this course well, it's because you have been.
00:15
BUT while it may seem like Modernism was the sole domain of male milk bottles with
00:21
shoes.
00:22
There were actually many other writers from very different backgrounds who wrote between

00:28
1890 and 1955. Zora Neale Hurston was a black woman who hailed
00:33
from the South, although she later attended college and graduate school in New York City.
00:37
Her masterwork, the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, tells the story of Janie Crawford,
00:43
who survives not only two loveless marriages...
00:45
...but also the great Okeechobee hurricane of 1928...
00:53
a third husband who catches rabies and tries to kill her...
00:56
...and a murder trial. That Janie's a busy lady.
01:00
While Zora Neale Hurston is a recognized author today, she wasn't while she was alive, for
01:05
several reasons.
01:06
Not only was she African-American...
01:08
...and a woman...
01:11
...but the accurate representations of African-American dialects she included in her books were seen
01:17
as caricatures by many readers.
01:22
That's three strikes. She's out. Then there's Stevie Smith, a British writer
01:30
who wrote some of the best poetry of the twentieth century.
01:33
Unlike Hurston, she didn't have to die before people caught on to how awesome she was.
01:34
Smith became fascinated with death as a little girl, after she contracted tuberculosis and
01:39
had to go live at a sanatorium for several years.
01:42
Her brush with the Grim Reaper helped her produce poetry that not only gives a unique
01:47
spin to the Modernist anxiety we've seen throughout this course,
01:50
but is also quirky and hilarious in a really, really dark way.
01:57
We'll also be looking at Langston Hughes, a poet, novelist, and playwright of the Harlem
02:05
Renaissance.
02:06
No, that would be a Harlem Renaissance FAIR.
02:10
The Harlem Renaissance was a movement in the 1920s that saw an explosion of creativity
02:15
from African-Americans...
02:16
...especially those, like Hughes, who lived in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem.
02:27
Another author who lived in Harlem but who wrote in the years after the Harlem Renaissance
02:32
was James Baldwin.
02:34
His most famous book is the semi-autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain, which looks at
02:37
the role of the Christian church in the lives of African-Americans.
02:40
Baldwin took the traditional view of the Modernist discontent and connected it to social problems.
02:42
For him, poverty and drug abuse were far more devastating problems than the spiritual issues
02:48
that might have affected well-off men like T.S. Eliot or Thomas Hardy.
02:52
You'll find that Modernist literature is like a circus tent...
02:56
...big and roomy and with plenty of space for different writers from different backgrounds.
03:00
And, if you wanted to, you could fit a half dozen Modernist writers into a Volkswagen
03:05
bug.
Full Transcript