Archive for the ‘modernism’ tag
From Glory to Gangrene: A Shift in Rhetoric in the Great War
Glory
A generation of poets greeted the outbreak of the Great War with many fine words, most of them capitalized: Honor, Glory, and England! This capitalization, and all it implied, would not survive the trenches.
Modern progress had been disorienting up to that point, with its rapid industrialization, changes in science, shifts in philosophy and nearly incomprehensible art, but there was still the feeling, before the war, that civilization was marching onward and upward toward something complete, something grand, something ideal. The word “progress” itself implies such an upward movement, and few, if any, questioned progress. That all died in the fox holes.
Experiencing “The Waste Land”: A Five-Day Unit for Teachers
A five day course, 90 minutes, for high school and undergraduates, based on a theoretical framework laid out in “What The Waste Land Expresses: An Experiential Approach to T. S. Eliot’s Poem.”
Objectives: To make “The Waste Land” more accessible to first time readers, by preparing students with three traditional sources and three modernist poems, along with discussion of tradition and modernism, in order to give readers a sense of familiarity with key passages in the poem and prepare them for the use of allusion and fragmentation of form. To direct students away from the question, “What does it mean?” towards “What does it express?” thereby focusing on the musicality and expression of emotion. To look for meanings, during the interpretive stage, rather than a singular, unifying meaning.
Meta-Introduction to Donald Barthelme and “The School”
Before I begin — I haven’t begun yet — I would like to assert that the introduction I am going to give to Donald Barthelme’s short story “The School” is non-fiction. Non-fiction means “not fiction.” Fiction, as you have learned, is a story that is “not true.” In other words non-fiction, on a linguistic level, is “not not-true.” This means, logically, when you cancel out the negatives, that the non-fictional information I am about to give you, is — I am very pleased to say — true.
