Download or read book Modernism in The Day of the Locust 1939 by Nathanael West written by Linda Schug and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2009 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Frankfurt (Main), course: Decadence and Moderism in the Late 20th Century American Cinema, language: English, abstract: Jonathan Veitch asserts in the preface of his book American Superrealism that critics have had problems in placing Nathanael West within the literature of the 1930s and American literature in general. They understood him for example as "a poet of darkness", as "an apocalyptic writer", as "a homegrown surrealist", as "a writer of the left", as a "universal satirist", in a way as "the prototype of the contemporary Jewish-American novelist" (Wisker 1-2) or as a realistic writer (Martin, see Roberts). Although some of these characterizations are contradictory, they all fit because they reflect different facets of the author, or rather his work. West combined all these elements and probably even several others in his writings. His "style was never constant. At times his pictorial technique closely resembles collage [but also] cartoon strips, movies, and several different schools of painting, as well as such non-graphic visual arts as the tableau and the dance." (Reid 9) Taking the (though not planned) final result of his development as a writer, his last book The Day of the Locust (1939) as an example, I want to show in my essay that at least one of West's books does not "fall between the different schools of writing" (Wisker 2), as he once noted. He is certainly a representative of modernism, the "literary movement" and "point of view" of his time (see O'Conner) not only because a "struggle for definition is part of what those years are about" (Wisker 121). Nathanael West was influenced by the same historical events and used many of the strategies other contemporary writers employed to express his way of seeing the world. I will point out the features of modernism in the novel because, as Randall Reid states, "[i]n a century which has made expe
Download or read book Nathanael West and John Schlesinger The Day of the Locust A Survey of the Translation from Novel to Film written by Julia Deitermann and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2006-09-18 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2001 in the subject American Studies - Comparative Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Augsburg (Lehrstuhl für Amerikanistik), course: Proseminar: Novels of the American Modernism, language: English, abstract: Although Nathanael West’s novel The Day of the Locust did not receive much attention when published in 1939, it is today considered one of the best and most revealing novels about Hollywood. Its reviews are outstanding and it has therefore become one of the landmarks in American writing. The Day of the Locust demonstrates the fragility of the American Dream and presents it from various perspectives. It points out the cruel world of film industry using devices of irony and satire. Therefore it resembles a “nightmare vision of humanity destroyed by its obsession with film”. West took the title of the novel from the Bible. In Revelation, people turn into locusts in order to follow their aim of destroying the whole world. They do not kill immediately, though, but only sting and hurt in order to let their victims die slowly. These locusts can be compared to the film industry in Hollywood which also exploits and slowly kills its people. Besides, in the Bible Jeremiah prophesies a necessary ending of the world which ought to lead mankind to a new life and a rebirth. In the novel, this image is taken up again. This aspect will be thoroughly discussed later, though. The concept of apocalypse can be found throughout the novel and beside violence and decadence, the devaluation of love is a prominent theme, too. West illustrates the moral decay of characters on the fringe of the entertainment industry, that are Homer Simpson, Faye Greener and Tod Hackett. Each character has come to California seeking fame or health in the shining city Los Angeles, and each suffers from his or her own history of desperation and shattered dreams. Producers had already thought about turning West’s novel into a film in the early 1950’s. As they feared that most of the satirical view would get lost, however, the film was not shot until 1974, when the famous director John Schlesinger committed himself to the adaptation. [...] This survey focuses on the translation from novel to film, compares and contrasts differences, and reveals the different perspectives of the characters. Furthermore, it will both examine the use of film techniques in Schlesinger’s adaptation and the meaning of symbolism in the film. Last but not least, a few commonly invoked critical viewpoints of the film will be discussed.
Download or read book Miss Lonelyhearts written by Nathanael West and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1969 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two classic short stories, one about a male reporter who writes an advice column, and the other, about people who have migrated to California in expectation of health and ease.
Download or read book Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture written by Nancy Bombaci and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2006 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture explores the emergence of what Nancy Bombaci terms «late modernist freakish aesthetics» - a creative fusion of «high» and «low» themes and forms in relation to distorted bodies. Literary and cinematic texts about «freaks» by Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers subvert and reinvent modern progress narratives in order to challenge high modernist literary and social ideologies. These works are marked by an acceptance of the disteleology, anarchy, and degeneration that racist discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries associated with racial and ethnic outsiders, particularly Jews. In a period of American culture beset with increasing pressures for social and political conformity and with the threat of fascism from Europe, these late modernist narratives about «freaks» defy oppressive norms and values as they search for an anarchic and transformational creativity.
Download or read book Modernism and Subjectivity written by Adam Meehan and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2020-06-03 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Modernism and Subjectivity: How Modernist Fiction Invented the Postmodern Subject, Adam Meehan argues that theories of subjectivity coming out of psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and adjacent late-twentieth-century intellectual traditions had already been articulated in modernist fiction before 1945. Offering a bold new genealogy for literary modernism, Meehan finds versions of a postmodern subject embodied in works by authors who intently undermine attempts to stabilize conceptions of identity and who draw attention to the role of language in shaping conceptions of the self. Focusing on the philosophical registers of literary texts, Meehan traces the development of modernist attitudes toward subjectivity, particularly in relation to issues of ideology, spatiality, and violence. His analysis explores a selection of works published between 1904 and 1941, beginning with Joseph Conrad’s prescient portrait of the subject interpolated by ideology and culminating with Samuel Beckett’s categorical disavowal of the subjective “I.” Additional close readings of novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Nathanael West, and Virginia Woolf establish that modernist texts conceptualize subjectivity as an ideological and linguistic construction that reverberates across understandings of consciousness, race, place, and identity. By reconsidering the movement’s function and scope, Modernism and Subjectivity charts how profoundly modernist literature shaped the intellectual climate of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Modernism Satire and the Novel written by Jonathan Greenberg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-15 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking study, Jonathan Greenberg locates a satiric sensibility at the heart of the modern. By promoting an antisentimental education, modernism denied the authority of emotion to guarantee moral and literary value. Instead, it fostered sophisticated, detached and apparently cruel attitudes toward pain and suffering. This sensibility challenged the novel's humanistic tradition, set ethics and aesthetics into conflict and fundamentally altered the ways that we know and feel. Through lively and original readings of works by Evelyn Waugh, Stella Gibbons, Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett and others, this book analyzes a body of literature - late modernist satire - that can appear by turns aloof, sadistic, hilarious, ironic and poignant, but which continually questions inherited modes of feeling. By recognizing the centrality of satire to modernist aesthetics, Greenberg offers not only a new chapter in the history of satire but a persuasive new idea of what made modernism modern.
Download or read book Gale Researcher Guide for Late Modernism and the Fiction of Freaksterism Nathanael West written by Sonnet Retman and published by Gale, Cengage Learning . This book was released on with total page 17 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gale Researcher Guide for: Late Modernism and the Fiction of Freaksterism: Nathanael West is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.
Download or read book Lonelyhearts written by Marion Meade and published by Mariner Books. This book was released on 2011-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " ... A dazzling joint biography of Nathanael West and his wife, set against the world of New York writers and Hollywood screenwriters in the 1930s."--Inside jacket.
Download or read book Modernism 1910 1945 written by Jane Goldman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-04-29 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essential guide explores and celebrates the rise and development of modernist and avant-garde literatures and theories in the period 1910-1945, from Imagism to the Apocalypse movement. Jane Goldman charts transitions in writing, reading, performing and publishing practices, and in international groupings and regroupings of writers and artists, and interrogates the term 'Modernism' which labels the era. Goldman introduces students to the work of many canonical high modernist writers, such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and samples the work of other important modernist figures, including Nathanael West, John Rodker, Aldous Huxley and the Harlem Renaissance poets.
Download or read book Modernism written by Melba Cuddy-Keane and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-02-05 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Guided by the historical semantics developed in Raymond Williams' pioneering study of cultural vocabulary, Modernism: Keywords presents a series of short entries on words used with frequency and urgency in “written modernism,” tracking cultural and literary debates and transformative moments of change. Short-listed for The Modernist Studies Association 2015 Book Prize for an Edition, Anthology, or Essay Collection Highlights and exposes the salient controversies and changing cultural thought at the heart of modernism Goes beyond constructions of “plural modernisms” to reveal all modernist writing as overlapping and interactive in a simultaneous and interlocking mix Draws from a vast compilation of more than a thousand sources, ranging from vernacular prose to experimental literary forms Spans the “long” modernist period, from its incipient beginnings c.1880 to its post-WWII aftermath Approaches English written modernism in its own terms, tempering explanations of modernism often derived from European poets and painters Models research techniques based on digital databases and collaborative work in the humanities
Download or read book The Day of the Locust written by Nathanael West and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-08-16 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Day of the Locust" by Nathanael West. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
Download or read book Modernism written by Tim Armstrong and published by Polity. This book was released on 2005-06-17 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume combines a clear overview for those with no prior knowledge or experience of modernism with a subtle argument that will appeal to higher level undergraduates and scholars.
Download or read book Miss Lonelyhearts The Day of the Locust New Edition written by Nathanael West and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2009-06-23 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A primer for Big Bad City disillusionment, unsparing in its portrayal of New York's debilitating entropy."—The Village Voice. With a new introduction by Jonathan Lethem. First published in 1933, Miss Lonelyhearts remains one of the most shocking works of 20th century American literature, as unnerving as a glob of black bile vomited up at a church social: empty, blasphemous, and horrific. Set in New York during the Depression and probably West's most powerful work, Miss Lonelyhearts concerns a nameless man assigned to produce a newspaper advice column — but as time passes he begins to break under the endless misery of those who write in, begging him for advice. Unable to find answers, and with his shaky Christianity ridiculed to razor-edged shards by his poisonous editor, he tumbles into alcoholism and a madness fueled by his own spiritual emptiness. During his years in Hollywood West wrote The Day of the Locust, a study of the fragility of illusion. Many critics consider it with F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished masterpiece The Last Tycoon (1941) among the best novels written about Hollywood. Set in Hollywood during the Depression, the narrator, Tod Hackett, comes to California in the hope of a career as a painter for movie backdrops but soon joins the disenchanted second-rate actors, technicians, laborers and other characters living on the fringes of the movie industry. Tod tries to seduce Faye Greener; she is seventeen. Her protector is an old man named Homer Simpson. Tod finds work on a film called prophetically “The Burning of Los Angeles,” and the dark comic tale ends in an apocalyptic mob riot outside a Hollywood premiere, as the system runs out of control.
Download or read book The Writing of Nathanael West written by Alistair Wisker and published by Springer. This book was released on 1990-07-13 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Classical Hollywood American Modernism written by Jordan Brower and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-18 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book charts the Hollywood studio system's genesis, international dominance, and self-understood demise by way of its influences on modernist literature in the United States. It shows how the American film industry's business practices and social conditions inflected the form of some of the greatest works of prose fiction and non-fiction.
Download or read book The Englishman s Boy written by Guy Vanderhaeghe and published by Emblem Editions. This book was released on 2010-12-17 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Englishman’s Boy brilliantly links together Hollywood in the 1920s with one of the bloodiest, most brutal events of the nineteenth-century Canadian West – the Cypress Hills Massacre. Vanderhaeghe’s rendering of the stark, dramatic beauty of the western landscape and of Hollywood in its most extravagant era – with its visionaries, celebrities, and dreamers – provides vivid background for scenes of action, adventure, and intrigue. Richly textured, evocative of time and place, this is an unforgettable novel about power, greed, and the pull of dreams that has at its centre the haunting story of a young drifter – “the Englishman’s boy” – whose fate, ultimately, is a tragic one.
Download or read book Modernism Mass Culture and Professionalism written by Thomas F. Strychacz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993-07-30 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of four modernist writers and their relationship to their critics and era.
