*this class will look (1) at Bourne as illustrating alternately characterized as "The Innocent rebellion," "lyrical Left" and proponents of a "beloved community"; and (2) the role of Bourne and others in redefining the literary canon, comparable to what going in past two decades; and (3) footnote on D.W. Griffiths and Modernism

 I. Up from Pragmatism: Randolph Bourne. (1886-1918)
 
*also not a settled "modernist." In fact, most controversy after his early death concerned whether he would have joined the expatriate literati, or would have become a Marxist in the 1930s. Although his writing provide evidence for both views, aim here is to show his contributions as cultural critic and as critic of pragmatism.
 
**career
 
1886 born Bloomfield, NJ, of old family who traced ancestor to Tarrytown in 17th century, setting of Irving's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow."
 
1903-09. worked in all sorts of odd jobs after collapse of his dream to attend Princeton with death of his father and decline in family fortune.
 
1909-13 undergraduate and M.A. at Columbia
 
1913-13-wanderjahr in Europe.
 
1914-18. One of "Young Intellectuals" based in New York who move beyond progressivism. Others include the New Republic group (Croly, Lippmann, Weyl), and van Wyck Brooks, the literary critic whose America's Coming of Age (1915) helped redefine the American literary canon. Group splits in 1915-16 over W.W.I. Bourne joins new magazine The Seven Arts.
 
1918. Dies in influenza epidemic, after being hounded by authorities for antiwar views.
 A. Bourne initially a disciple of John Dewey, but breaks with Dewey over war, which he believes exposed the "might makes right" side of pragmatism.
 
 *Discussion of Bourne, "Twilight of Idols," H&C, selection . Why did he break with Dewey? Reason William James cited?
 
 B. Bourne as Cultural Critic, and his attempt to define a "cultural nationalism." "Transnational America". Although superficially similar to contemporary (1980s) multiculturalism , finally called for a new common standard in "cosmopolitanism."
 
*Discussion of Bourne, "Transnational America," H&C. How different./similar to multiculturalism of the 1980s-90s? relation ot Genteel Tradition?
 
* as a "cultural transmitter," Bourne helped familiarize American intellectuals and the educated public with the ideas of Nietzsche< Freud et al. Also was influential in reorienting the American literary canon from its Victorian past.

Handout: Liberal Intelligentsia 

As the Young Intellectuals' "search for a useable past" gave way to the New Critic's formalism, the result was a major overhaul of the American literary canon. By the time the United States postal service memorialized the nation's authors and poets in stamp series of 1940 the roster of greats was already changing. Out were Longfellow, Whittier, James Russell Lowell and James Whitcomb Riley (the one, two, three, and ten cent stamps of the poets issue); also Washington Irving and Louisa May Alcott (one and five cent among the authors), as well as countless minor figures that had once filled the anthologies. In their places were Melville, Hawthorne, Henry James, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and a host of more recent writers. Emerson and Whitman (the three- and five-cent of the authors and poets, respectively) survived the cut, although now transformed as chief theorist and finest flower of the "American Renaissance." James Fenimore Cooper and Mark Twain (two- and ten-cent) also survived, but again as reinterpreted by leading New Critics.
Another result was the elimination of women writers from literary anthologies. [from Paul Lauter, "Race and Gender in the Shaping of the American Literary Canon," Feminist Studies 9 (Fall 1983), 435-63]. Whereas Fred Lewis Pattee's Century Readings (1919), a pioneering anthology of American literature, included work of almost a dozen women, Howard Mumford Jones and Ernest E. Leisy's Major American Writers (1935) contained not a single one (only a decade later did they admit Dickinson and Glascow to their collection of luminaries). Other evidence was an increase in overt attacks on what one male writer called "The Feminine Nuisance in American Literature. "Women have set the standard, determined the tone, of the characteristic American novel" wrote the popular writer Joseph Hergesheimer; "and by that irreducible and inescapable fact, both the novels and the women must be measured." For his part, Hergesheimer had no doubts: "literature in the United States is being strangled by a petticoat." [Joseph Hergesheimer, "The Feminine Nuisance in Literature," Yale Review n.s. 10 (1921), 716, 718, quoted in Lauter]

But the consequences for criticism went even deeper. Just as scientism fostered a cult of expertise in the social sciences, so the formalist emphasis on literature apart from the social life that produced it gave the critic new authority--as interpreter of texts, and finally as guardian of the language. In stressing "masterpieces" rather than "tendencies ," the New Critics also narrowed the number of acceptable writers to relatively few "major" figures.

Male critics also taught a generation to see the literary past in terms of sharply defined periods--"Puritanism," "Romanticism," "Realism," divisions which structured the past largely as it had been experienced by men rather than women. The category "Puritanism," for example, not only exaggerated the role of male, clerical New England , but by the 1920s came to stand for a legacy of social suppression of which feminine propriety was a major component. Reaction against it, fueled in part by Freudianism, often stressed the more puerile dimensions of sexuality ("Does she or doesn't she," as one commentator puts it) [Lauter, p. 454], and thus the importance of Henry Miller or even the adolescent part of Hemingway over Kate Chopin or other female writers who were concerned with the consequences of sexuality for women.
A final result was a new standard that equated literary greatness with what the critic Nina Baym has called "melodramas of beset manhood." [Nina L Baym, "Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Wo,men Authors," American Quarterly 33 (1981), 123-39] For the major critics of the forties and fifties, the key test of great literature was its "Americanness," a term they defined in rather special ways. Insisting that the story must deal with what is unique in American experience, this standard ruled out treatment of universals (family and love, for example, or betrayal and love), as well as accounts of specific segments of national life ( the province of local colorists and most realists). More importantly, the essence of "Americanness, in the phrase of the critic Lionel Trilling, was "consensus criticism of the consensus:" criticism from within the dominant group by members slightly alienated from it. Since these critics further assumed that the matter of American experience is inherently male, it followed that women, almost by definition, can not write "great" American literature.

In the new canon, , a common pattern is the confrontation of the pure American self with the promise of America, a new land free of history and social entanglements. Whether the character is Thoreau at Walden, Huck Finn on the Mississippi or Leatherstocking, the story is much the same. Although the protagonist is most likely to be male, the problem is not the gender of the hero, but two other elements in the story: "the entramelling society and the promising landscape." Both are feminine: the first as entrapper and temptress; the second as sweetheart and nurturer--for men, the perennial two faces of Eve. Although the response of women writers to this plot has been a complicated one, suffice it to say that they have been less likely to picture themselves in these terms, or, by the standard of "beset manhood," to have written literature worthy of serious attention.

Underlying these changes were developments within the humanities similar to those that fostered scientism within the social sciences, however different the end product. A basic one was professionalization, as the dissemination and teaching of literature passed from families, literary clubs, and journals of opinion to the classroom. Since women played a prominent role in the first three, but not in the last, influence over reading tastes shifted from women to academics, the majority of whom were males. Since these professors also now trained the future generation of doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, their judgment not only defined "good" literature, but the "literate" reader. Meanwhile, the Modern Language Association, significantly reorganized after the war, institutionalized the new assumptions [Lauter, "Race and Gender," p. 441-43]. Yet for literary critics, no less than for social scientists, personal factors also played a part, most obviously for the Young Intellectuals who were transitional figures in the process of professionalization.
 
 
V.W. BROOKS
 
The career of the critic Van Wyck Brooks (1886-1963) reveals a pattern remarkably similar to that in the cases of Ogburn and Watson [see class #13). . Born to upper-middle class parents whose American ancestors went back many generations, Brooks graduated from Harvard in 1907, possibly the most exciting time in the university's history. The following year he published the Wine of the Puritans, a biting attack on the thinness of American culture. With America's Coming of Age (1915) and The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1925) he established himself as one of America's leading critics, a reputation only slightly dimmed by his immensely popular, but less innovative studies of New England literary life.[based on James Hoopes, Van Wyck Brooks: In Search of American Culture (Amherst, 1977)]. Brooks's parents were picture-book Victorians with just enough flaws to make things interesting. Raised to a career in business, his father Charles was an amiable failure--cheerful, witty, good at tennis, a polished dancer, but a disaster in his own economic ventures, and thus a failure in the eyes of his wife and children. During most of Van Wyck's youth his father was perennially absent, tied to his desk in New York while the family summered in New England, excluded from a year long Grand Tour of Europe his wife and children made in 1898-99. Fortunately for body if not for soul, Van Wyck's mother Sallie (Ames) made up the difference from her own family wealth, providing trips to Europe and enough status within their community of Plainfield, New Jersey to satisfy her social pretensions. Convinced of her eternal rightness, she got her way in domestic matters as in most things. Both her sons bore her family names: Charles Ames, known throughout life as "Ames, " and Van Wyck, from the surname of her first colonial ancestor.

At birth and throughout life, however, this second son unfortunately compounded Sallie Brooks's disappointments with her husband's lack of success. Although she had hoped for a daughter, as she noted at the time of Van Wycks' birth, he "compensated" by being a "very sweet, lovely boy." And so, apparently, he remained, at least until age ten. In a picture taken that year in a Mardi Gras costume, he looked the perfect mother's boy, from a close resemblance in eyes and facial features to the costume itself---leotards, a white satin outfit with puffy sleeves, and ballet slippers. A self-appointed arbiter of American taste and culture, Sallie also taught her sons to sing, dance, and play the piano.This cultural regimen backfired, however, when Van Wyck finally refused to pursue a career in a business world that he believed had destroyed his father, then married a woman his mother didn't particularly like. "Perhaps the two greatest frustrations of Sallie Brooks's] life," writes Brook's' biographer, " was that one of her husbands failed to make money, and one of her sons refused even to try." [Hoopes, Brooks, p. 4]

Brooks's rebellion eventually took more intellectual form. When in 1908, he signed the contract to publish Wine of The Puritans, his overriding concern was less the message itself than "the possibility of hurting mama." And hurt it might, had she read her son's first book with the care of a modern reader. Brooks cast the work as a dialog between two young Americans in Italy, one of whom he had described in an essay "Charles Graeling" a year earlier. A thinly-veiled portrait of Brooks himself, Graeling was born in 1886, had just enough Gaelic blood to take the chill from a Calvinist heritage, and was small and shy but "perfectly proportioned" with a "pure and fresh" complexion. Yet one difference was crucial. Having the good fortune to be an orphan, Graeling felt "satisfaction that his father and mother had died too soon to bring to bear the force of close personal influence upon the development of his own personality."
And so it continued. In a final passage of the more optimistic America's Coming of Age, mounting yet another oblique attack on his mother, he wrote: "When the women of America have gathered together all the culture in the world there is--who knows?--perhaps the dry old Yankee stalk will send forth shoots and burst into a storm of blossoms." [Claire Sprague, ed. Van Wyck Brooks: The Early Years (New York, 1968), p. 158]. In The Ordeal of Mark Twain, the villains of the piece were again women, specifically Twain's mother and wife. Frustrated in his own ambitions to be a writer, that is, Brooks blamed his failure, not only on his country, but on his Mom. [Hoopes, p. 2].

Brooks's literary criticism, in fact, was in large measure an extension of his attempts during his college years to establish his manhood on his own terms. Emersonian self-reliance, in the absence of real emotion and a zest for experience, was no answer since it finally sanctioned the success cult that had destroyed the senior Brooks. A sometime esthete among Harvard esthetes, Van Wyck also had little time for new rituals of masculinity. "If not a diversion of the lower animals", he commented of football, it was "at least a little disturbing to the sensibilities of a gentleman." He urged readers of the Harvard Advocate not to shun artistic beauty in pursuit of false ideals of masculinity. "The truth is, " he wrote, " that we deliberately acquire our ungraceful ways in an effort to be manly." In courting his future wife, he hid his depressions and anxieties, confiding to his dairy that he could not "always be manly." ^[Hoopes pp. 101, 39, 76, 105-06, 138].

Meanwhile, Brooks's attitude toward the women was straightforwardly conservative, expressing none of the ambivalence of an Ogburn or a Watson. "Truly dear," he counseled his fiance, a recent Wellesley graduate with feminist leanings, " a contentious woman is like a Scythian chariot, covered with knives: you are mangled if you come within a yard of her"-- imagery that left little to the imagination. Participation in suffragist meetings, he lectured on another occasion, made a girl "common." ^[ Hoopes, p. 84].

Brooks abhorred the new permissiveness in American life, a permissiveness he increasingly identified with the West (California in particular) and the avant-garde sensibility. In 1911 he told his new wife a tale he had heard of a California couple--a professor and a "doctor women"--who though amicably divorced and remarried, reunite when wife number two returns to nurse wife number one back to health. To Brooks, the story was presented as evidence of "what strides we have made," but was received quite differently. "I at once got furiously angry--and I said it would revolt any decent woman's instincts as much as mine," he continued this prissy account. Since others present "pooh-poohed" him, he now appealed to his own spouse. "Is that hateful or is it not? Do tell me dearest!" [Van Wyck Brooks to Eleanor Brooks, January 3, 1911, quoted in Hoopes, p. 82]. Faced with salvos like this, Eleanor Brooks quietly abandoned both her feminism and her hopes for a career, devoting the rest of her life to the care of her husband and children.

Brooks also loathed and feared homosexuality, perhaps because his brother Ames would disappear on long trips that apparently involved homosexual affairs, perhaps because like many heterosexuals he sensed the promptings in himself, perhaps even because a tiny part of himself wanted to be the girl his mother had wanted. For whatever reason, he was curiously reticent concerning the homosexuality of authors he otherwise liked, Arthur Symonds, for example, and especially Walt Whitman. In his personal dealings, personal affection often overrode this homophobia, as attested by his close friendship with Newton Arvin , a Smith college professor, a homosexual, and one of the finest academic critics of his generation. But, when in his study Whitman (1938) , Arvin faced the poet's sexuality with a directness of which Brooks was incapable, the latter attempted to "idealize" it beyond the physical level. "I must say," Brooks confessed in their subsequent exchange, "that Whitman has never been personally lovable to me." [Hoopes pp. 22, 303-04]

Although Brook's attack on the the genteel tradition was potentially disparaging of women, his biographer argues that his basic objection was more than a protest against the previous "feminization" of culture. Rather, he objected to its consequent divorce from the business and economic processes that most needed its leaven.The sexual division of labor hurt men with cultural interests as much as women with practical interests. His cultural radicalism was thus for all humanity, men and women alike [Hoopes, p. xiii].

Yet on balance this may be a distinction without a difference. "Feminine" was, after all, rather consistently a pejorative in Brook's writing. Max Eastman's judgement of literature, for example was impotent because "unrealistic, feminine, and. . .all too American." [Brooks writing in the Freeman in 1921, quoted in Hoopes, p. 155]. More importantly, the culture Brooks envisaged, and the critics who would help give it birth, were "manly" in ways that the previous generation of literati were not. For one thing, they no longer feared science. Although no friend of scientism, Brooks joined other Young Intellectuals in praising the critic's role in making science "vital" by fusing it with the life of the spirit. In the case of H.G. Wells, the subject of another of Brooks's earlier studies, the vehicle for this fusion was socialism, which Brooks also adopted after a fashion, while talking of social reform as itself an art [Hoopes, pp. 90-92].

In celebrating both social reality and "America," Brooks also inadvertently made culture an instrument, not only of social change, but of American nationalism as the nation gained new power on the world stage. A fatal flaw in the eyes of some at the time and later, this aspect of his program proposed to bring "culture" from the private (feminine) sphere into the public (masculine) one, an arena it had not occupied since the Revolution. As Hoopes himself states the matter: "His strenuous, lifelong insistence that literature had practical consequences was in some part a defense of his masculinity." [Hoopes, p. 303]

Finally, Brooks began the revaluation of the American literary tradition that finally resulted in quite a new canon of "classics." Like other Young Intellectuals, his contribution was primarily in clearing away the past. In America's Coming of Age , he presented a series of brilliant characterizations of writers about to be consigned to the trash heap: Washington Irving ("no one was ever more satisfied with things as they are"); Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ("to poetry what the barrel-organ is to music"); Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ("a sort of expurgated German student"). [Sprague, ed. Brooks, pp. 101-03]. But his positive contributions were less. Although he celebrated Whitman, he held a low opinion of Hawthorne, and never really appreciated Melville. Although he saw promise in the criticism of Ezra Pound, he wondered how finally he could be kept from becoming a bore. [Sprague, pp. 229-32]. In The Opinions of Oliver Allston (1941), as the historian Jackson Lears notes, he attacked the "infantilism" and "death drive" of the avant-garde. His "Makers and Finders" series (1936-52) was essentially a celebration of the 19th century creed of activism and progress, an attempt to salvage his own mental stability rather than a manifesto for modern writers [Lears, No Place of Grace, pp. 256-57].
If the attempt to establish his masculine independence was not the only factor shaping Brooks's criticism, it was a significant one. America's "coming of age" was also his own. His criticism would free young men of his generation of what he once termed the "superannuated boyishness of the Emersonian tradition," a tradition of social criticism which--in the unfortunate case of George W. Curtis--manifested itself in an "energetic though perfectly well-mannered invective against smoking cigarettes in the presence of ladies." [Sprague, Brooks, pp. 118-19]. Brooks would smoke, and in so doing, be no longer a boy!
 
Malcolm Cowley
 
A. Cowley's Exile's Return both a "leisurely, untheoretical sociology of one group of American modernists" (Tallack p. 166), and a critical review of them from the perspective of the 1930s (cf. Lincoln Steffens, Autobiography 1931) [all page numbers to Viking Press edition 1951, which probably different from Penguin).
 
B. Major themes: deracination of his generation, as they became "homeless citizens of the world."
 
1. began in high school, where ongoing debates seemed old hat:
a. religious discussions converted them all to "indifferentism." (p. 18)
 
b. literature the same (p 20. See how he made may through Hardy, Mencken, Nathan).
 
c. even modernist emphasis on "paradox" now trivialized in boyish, oneupsmanship of the "convolutions." (p. 23)
 
*as with Education of Henry Adams, his generation as yet unaware of the changes transforming their world.
 
2. cosmopolitanism of the Genteel Tradition as embodied in the school curriculum continued the process of uprooting.
 
* key in retrospect is changing sense of what "culture" is (see M. Mead).
 
3. service in WWI as ambulance corps drivers put them further "above the battle" as outsiders in someone else's war.
 
4. Returned to post-war Greenwich village where Bohemianism had become "artiness" and reduced to a litany. Cowley especially perceptive in noting the fit between this "self-expression" culture and the new consumerism, a theme developed at length by a later generation of scholars, e.g. R. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace.
 
5. Escape to Europe provides no solution since Weimar inflation is symbol of way in which "values" now "valuta," and meaningless.
 
6. Rest of book describes the European sources of what he describes as "religion of art" and the final collapse of this meretricious world as symbolized by the suicide death of Harry Crosby--a playboy Henry Adams who finally finds his "absolute" in death.
 
*in conclusion, shows how the "religion of art" was a mistaken response to deeper social/economic forces that now (1930s) demanded radical (= Marxist) analysis.
 
III. D.W. Griffiths
 
*. Realism and and modernism in American film tradition, predated Griffiths,e.g Porter, Great Train Robbery 1903 which (a) used multiple frames, cross cutting, editing etc to highlight discontinuities in experience and to point to "a different concept of cinematic language." (Tallack, p. 39); and (b) at the same time employs narrative to tie scenes together and thus preserve "realism."
 
**. Birth of a Nation also combines both-- but despite "artistic experiments" (fades outs etc), the focus is still realistic, e.g in long shot (same scene) of confederate soldiers down the main street or minor characters doing background action that presumable continues off screen. In fact, critics complained of the "Art"
 
*** insofar as the realism also had a social/ideological component--one a later generation sees as blatantly "racist", subsequent arguments about Griffiths have reflected this duality in his films--i.e was he an incipient "modernist" or a "racist." [note: has broader implications when one thinks of the social attitudes of other "modernists" such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot]
 

Thesis: although Griffiths had no intention of being a modernist, or to introduce the latest "European" ideas into the United States, his decision to make uplifting movies led him into to artistic experiments which raised the film above simple narrative, that is, led him to explore some of the new ways of seeing tat film allowed. Following derived loosely from Lary May, Screening Out the Past.

 
A. Motion pictures initially heralded as "scientific," and like some literary realism, tied to 19th century "morality" by virtue of its ability to tell the "truth." Edison embodied this in his philosophy and his person.
 
B. Various forces dashed dream of "scientific" enlightenment: immigrant culture, political machines which protected their preferred forms of popular culture, and desire of workers (with disposable income for first time) to escape mechanical work.
 
C. Movies proliferate in "nickelodeons," and prompt widespread outcry by older middle classes. Culminates in drive to censor (NYC 1908), and move within industry to make "uplifting" films as direct censorship fails.
 
D. This is time Griffiths entered. Also his southern background made him ideal vehicle for new "uplift" since he combined admiration for his Confederate father (and anti-Yankee, anti-commercial bias) with adoration of pure women as the embodiment of all that was best in "civilization," and which commercialism threatened.
 
1. at conscious level DWG certainly repudiated "modernistic" approaches, that is, he wished to work in the grand European tradition of high culture realism.
 
2. yet his desire to imbue movies with "spiritual" quality seems to have been a reason he experimented with various camera techniques. Thus, says May, he infused "new dynamism" into his movies (p. 71). "...it was Griffith's immersion in the practical, empirical side of life that led to his break with formal ways of viewing the world." Thus he transcended realism.