The City in Modernism
Ever ride a bus in New York City full of the cacophony of people speaking in half a dozen languages? Or drive the streets of metropolitan Southern California, where the street signs morph every few miles from Spanish to Vietnamese to Chinese to Thai to Korean to Hindi? Modern cities are melting pots of various cultures and languages, full of fermenting ideas as a fusion restaurant or ethnic market.
Modernist writers and artists not only congregated in major cities like Paris, London, St. Petersburg, Chicago, and New York, but also frequently focused their work on these places. Think about Joyce's Ulysses, which juxtaposes figures and fables of classical mythology to the mundane world of Dublin and the people who inhabited it.
Or about William Carlos William's Modernist epic, Paterson, which is an amalgamation of bits and pieces set in unlikely place—a highly industrialized and not at all glamorous town in New Jersey. And that was way before Bruce Springsteen was putting his poetic spin on Joisey.
Modernism blew raspberries at the idea that everyday places, people, and language were unfit for art. These artists insisted that any subject, location, or language could be turned to an artistic purpose.
The city formed the central focus of these writers' world. Whether they celebrated or complained about the city, it was generally a major feature of their work.
Chew On This
Have a look at the famous opening poem to The Bridge, "To Brooklyn Bridge." What is Crane's overall attitude toward the bridge in this poem? What relationship to the human beings around it does the bridge seem to have?
In his dystopian novel We, Russian novelist Evgeny Zamyatin creates the image of a nightmare city where a totalitarian government controls every aspect of residents' lives. Blegh. Can you think of any other writers of the period with a more positive (or at least neutral) view of cities?