1. introduction main part

BOBONAZAROVA GULXAYO
HABIBULLA QIZI
ESHMAMATOVA NILUFAR
AZIZ QIZI
2.35 – O‘ZBEK

Theme: MODERNIST REVOLUTION ANGLO-AMERICAN MODERNISM

CONTENTS:

1.INTRODUCTION

2.MAIN PART:

2.1. British Modernism and the Great War
2.2. American Modernism and the Great War

2.3. Anglo-American modernism

3.CONCLUSION

4.REFERENCES

INTRODUCTION

The Great War was arguably the biggest public event in the first half of the twentieth century. It figured prominently in the last century’s canonical literature and became the literary war par excellence. As Steven Matthews (2004) argues, it “instigated radical changes in the form and content of literary texts in English” (p. 62). However, the representation of this war in the literature of its era, and especially in the war’s aftermath, was far from the merely objective or historical. Rather, the effects of this war on society and its individuals were an increasingly typical focus. The interrelationship between the individual and the larger social order was manifested in the interplay between the domestic, private lives of individuals and the public event of this war. While the novels written about the Great War in the 1920s within the Anglo-American literary canon do sometimes record its action, the larger social stance is usually more important than the historical or autobiographical dimensions. The war gets contextualized within a social atmosphere of loss, sickness, and sterility. Hence, it often becomes “the absent presence” that haunts the lives of its survivors and forms their outlook. It is used to symbolize aspects of the larger social order and cultural climate. It is the somberness and death that haunt T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (1922) and the alienation and communal cultural exhaustion in his “The Hollow Men” (1925). It is the essence of the modernist sensibility in terms of a sense of loss of traditional values, pessimism, metaphysical suspicion, and fragmentation. It destroyed typical notions of heroism and masculinity through mass slaughter and maiming of men. It created an apocalyptic cultural crisis and disrupted human relations. Malcolm Bradbury (2001) notes that “Directly or indirectly, the wound of war was everywhere in the post-war novel, explaining the note of sharp generational change, historical weariness, waste-land vision and rootless psychological tension so plain in much of the best fiction” (p. 145). Hence, if the war itself is pushed to the background and if the war action is secondary, more important is how characters mentally live the war or just live their lives during and after it. Within Anglo-American modernism, the subjective view of the horrible reality of the war, characters' reaction to the war, and the war's milieu are given the priority over any documentary value about the war the novels might have. Although this is not meant to denigrate the historical value of such novels, more important is the modernist view of reality the novels negotiate.
Critics who studied the Great War in literature have covered things like its apocalyptic, dehumanizing or ironic nature by way of assessing its impact and capturing the sensibility it effected. John Muller (1991) argues that one of the reasons why the Great War is probably unique is that “it raised the spectre that through some combination of aerial bombardment and gas or bacteriological poisoning the next large war could lead to world annihilation – the destruction of winner and loser alike” (p. 17). Alfred Bonadeo (1989) explains that “[t]he waste changed man into an inferior being, and the price he paid for valor and survival was degradation” as war “left many men physically alive but spiritually dead” (p. 2). Paul Fussell (1975) dwells on the ironies associated with this war, i.e. how the consequences were always incongruous with the expectations or how the cost was incongruous with an achievement. “Every war is ironic,” writes Fussell, “because every war is worse than expected” (p. 7). “But the Great War,” he continues, “was more ironic than any before or since. It was a hideous embarrassment to the prevailing Meliorist myth which had dominated the public consciousness for a century. It reversed the idea of progress” (p. 8). The war, Fussell argues, changed out conception of historical continuity because it disrupted a “seamless, purposeful ‘history’ involving a coherent stream of time…” (p. 21). However, and despite such insightful comments, these critics have not detailed the social context of the war and the interplay between the private experience of individuals and the public event of the war as represented in modernist war literature.
Samuel Hynes (1991) offers a more useful model in this regard. Discussing Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, he asserts that she wrote about “time, change, the irrevocability of loss, the ecstatic sharpness of the felt moment. But her novel is located in history, and like The Waste Land it has a historical vision” (p. 345). War for writers like Woolf and Eliot is part of their imagination and understanding of history, part of the lived reality of chaos, destruction, and fragmentation because they, Hynes writes, write about “no battle scenes, no heroes, and no victories; they pick up from the war only the dominating negative themes—the death of civilization and the loss of Eden, and the negative characters—the deranged victims, and the tyrannous Old Men. And they construct out of this heap of broken images the forms of the history of their own time” (p. 348). This means that these writers are more concerned with the cultural and social aftermath of the war than with the war itself. The war for them is a mere historical incidence with paramount ramifications. Hynes gives a useful division highly relevant here: “There are two basic narrative forms into which war narratives divide: call them the Autobiographical and the Historical, or the Personal and the General, or the Small Picture and the Large” (p. 425). The “Historical” and “Large” form Hynes refers to concerns the larger context of the war and not simply the private experiences of a soldier covering war action mainly and written in the form of a memoir. In this larger approach, what is before the war or after it is as important as what is during it. This approach makes war the agent of social and historical transformations.
While Hynes covers mainly the British literary scene, William Matsen (1993) notes a similar shift in the treatment of the Great War in American fiction in the (late) 1920s and (early) 1930s and a shift in literary realism from the early novels of “witness and testimony” (p. 10) based on events witnessed and war actualities to more creative and fictional novels still revolving around the war, a shift seen by the author as an important development in American literature of the war: “Thus," writes Matsen, "there is a development within the sub-genre of the war novel form narratives that are strongly mimetic and near journalistic to more finely crafted works of fiction” (pp. 10-11). This means that writers would give more attention to plot, character development, structure, theme, imagination …etc. Indirectly, more emphasis on the creative, imaginative representation of war places it within a broader social context. Matsen implies that documentary reporting in memoirs and autobiographies about the war was diminished in the sake of craft and human relations in a more fictionalized form. Verisimilitude gave way to more focus on the impact of war on individuals, on war as part of the human experience and not as the sole one, which is what I highlight by looking at the social context of the war in some Anglo-American novels published during the early twentieth century.