The humanistic tradition 7th edition citation

6 Book SEVENTH EDITION

The Humanistic Tradition Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Global Perspective

LK056_P0001EDBook6_i-xii_AG.indd i 02/12/2014 16:39

LK056_P0001EDBook6_i-xii_AG.indd ii 02/12/2014 16:39

Gloria K. Fiero

6 Book SEVENTH EDITION

The Humanistic Tradition Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Global Perspective

Boston Burr Ridge, IL Dubuque, IA New York San Francisco St. Louis Bangkok Bogotá Caracas Kuala Lumpur Lisbon London Madrid Mexico City

Milan Montreal New Delhi Santiago Seoul Singapore Sydney Taipei Toronto

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Front cover Isamu Noguchi, Cube, 1968. Steel subframe with aluminum panels, height 28 ft.

Frontispiece and page x Pablo Picasso, Seated Woman (detail), Paris, 1927. Oil on wood, 4 ft. 31∕8 in. × 3 ft. 21∕4 in.

THE HUMANISTIC TRADITION, BOOK 6 MODERNISM, POSTMODERNISM, AND THE GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE SEVENTH EDITION

Published by McGraw-Hill Education, 2 Penn Plaza, New York, NY 10121. Copyright 2015 by McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Previous edition © 2011, 2006, 2002, 1998, 1995, 1992. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior consent of McGraw-Hill Education, including, but not limited to, in any network or other electronic storage or transmission, or broadcast for distance learning.

Some ancillaries, including electronic and print components, may not be available to customers outside the United States.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

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ISBN 978-1-259-35211-9 MHID 1-259-35211-0

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Permissions Acknowledgments appear on page 526, and on this page by reference.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fiero, Gloria K. The humanistic tradition / Gloria K. Fiero. -- Seventh edition. volumes cm Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents: BOOK 1. The First Civilizations and the Classical Legacy -- BOOK 2. Medieval Europe and the World Beyond -- BOOK 3. The European Renaissance, the Reformation, and Global Encounter -- BOOK 4. Faith, Reason, and Power in the Early Modern World -- BOOK 5. Romanticism, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century World -- BOOK 6. Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Global Perspective -- VOLUME I. Prehistory to the Early Modern World -- VOLUME II. The Early Modern World to the Present.

ISBN 978-1-259-36066-4 (volume 1 : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 1-259-36066-0 (volume 1 : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-259-35168-6 (volume 2 : acid-free paper)) -- ISBN 1-259-35168-8 (volume 2 : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-0-07-337666-0 (looseleaf : book 1 : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 0-07-337666-3 (looseleaf : book 1 : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-259-35209-6 (looseleaf : book 2 : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 1-259-35209-9 (looseleaf : book 2 : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-259-35210-2 (looseleaf : book 3 : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 1-259-35210-2 (looseleaf : book 3 : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-259-35539-4 (looseleaf : book 4 : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 1-259-35539-X (looseleaf : book 4 : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-259-35540-0 (looseleaf : book 5 : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 1-259-35540-3 (looseleaf : book 5 : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-259-35211-9 (looseleaf : book 6 : acid-free paper)

1. Civilization, Western--History--Textbooks. 2. Humanism--History--Textbooks. I. Title. CB245.F47 2015 909’.09821--dc23

2014037553

The Internet addresses listed in the text were accurate at the time of publication. The inclusion of a website does not indicate an endorsement by the author or McGraw-Hill Education, and McGraw-Hill Education does not guarantee the accuracy of the information presented at these sites

www.mhhe.com

This book was designed and produced by Laurence King Publishing Ltd., London www.laurenceking.com

Commissioning Editor: Kara Hattersley-Smith Production: Simon Walsh Designer: Ian Hunt Picture Researcher: Louise Thomas Text Permissions: Rachel Thorne Copy-editor: Rosanna Lewis

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vSERIES CONTENTS

BOOK 1

The First Civilizations and the Classical Legacy Introduction: Prehistory and the Birth of Civilization 1 Mesopotamia: Gods, Rulers, and the Social Order 2 Africa: Gods, Rulers, and the Social Order 3 India, China, and the Americas 4 Greece: Humanism and the Speculative Leap 5 The Classical Style 6 Rome: The Rise to Empire 7 China: The Rise to Empire

BOOK 2

Medieval Europe and the World Beyond 8 A Flowering of Faith: Christianity and Buddhism 9 The Language of Faith: Symbolism and the Arts 10 The Islamic World: Religion and Culture 11 Patterns of Medieval Life 12 Christianity and the Medieval Mind 13 The Medieval Synthesis in the Arts 14 The World Beyond the West: India, China,

and Japan

BOOK 3

The European Renaissance, the Reformation, and Global Encounter 15 Adversity and Challenge:

The Fourteenth-Century Transition 16 Classical Humanism in the Age of the Renaissance 17 Renaissance Artists: Disciples of Nature,

Masters of Invention 18 Cross-Cultural Encounters: Asia, Africa,

and the Americas 19 Protest and Reform: The Waning of the Old Order

Series Contents

BOOK 4

Faith, Reason, and Power in the Early Modern World 20 The Catholic Reformation and the Baroque Style 21 Absolute Power and the Aristocratic Style 22 The Baroque in the Protestant North 23 The Scientific Revolution and the New Learning 24 The Enlightenment: The Promise of Reason 25 The Limits of Reason 26 Eighteenth-Century Art, Music, and Society

BOOK 5

Romanticism, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century World 27 The Romantic View of Nature 28 The Romantic Hero 29 The Romantic Style in Art and Music 30 Industry, Empire, and the Realist Style 31 The Move Toward Modernism

BOOK 6

Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Global Perspective 32 The Modernist Assault 33 The Freudian Revolution 34 Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Arts 35 The Quest for Meaning 36 Liberation and Equality 37 The Information Age 38 Globalism: The Contemporary World

VOLUME I

Prehistory to the Early Modern World Chapters 1–19

VOLUME II

The Early Modern World to the Present Chapters 19–38

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vi CONTENTS

Book 6 Contents

Letter from the Author ix Preface x

32 The Modernist Assault (ca. 1900–1950) 353 LOOKING AHEAD 354 The New Physics 354 Early Twentieth-Century Poetry 355 The Imagists 355 READING 32.1 From Pound’s Personae 355 T. S. Eliot 356 READING 32.2 Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 356 Frost and Lyric Poetry 358 READING 32.3 Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” 358 Early Twentieth-Century Art 358 Picasso 358 MAKING CONNECTIONS 359 The Birth of Cubism 360 Assemblage 361 Futurism 362 The Birth of Motion Pictures 363 Matisse and Fauvism 364 Brancusi and Abstraction 365 Abstraction and Photography 366 Nonobjective Art 366 Kandinsky 367 Malevich 368 Mondrian 368 Russian Constructivism 369 Abstraction and Film 370 Early Twentieth-Century Architecture 370 The Architecture of Wright 370 The Bauhaus and the International Style 372 Le Corbusier 372 Early Twentieth-Century Music 373 Schoenberg 374 Stravinsky 374 The Beginnings of Modern Dance 375 Nijinsky 375 Graham 375 Balanchine 376 Dunham 376 LOOKING BACK 376 Glossary 377

33 The Freudian Revolution (ca. 1900–1950) 378 LOOKING AHEAD 379 Freud 379 The Tripartite Psyche 379 Civilization and Its Discontents 380 READING 33.1 From Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents 380 Freud’s Followers 382 EXPLORING ISSUES Freud versus the Critics 382

The New Psychology and Literature 383 Proust’s Quest for Lost Time 383 READING 33.2 From Proust’s Swann’s Way 383 The Nightmare Reality of Kafka 384 READING 33.3 From Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” 385 Joyce and Stream-of-Consciousness Prose 386 The New Freedom in Poetry 387 READING 33.4 Cummings’ [she being Brand] 387 The New Psychology and the Visual Arts 387 Expressionism 388 Metaphysical Art and Fantasy 389 The Dada Movement 390 Surrealism and Abstract Surrealists: Picasso, Miró, and Klee 391 Visionary Surrealists: Magritte and Dalí 393 Dada and Surrealist Film 394 The Women of Surrealism 395 Dada and Surrealist Photography 396 The New Psychology and Music 396 Strauss and Bartók 396 Schoenberg 397 Berg 397 LOOKING BACK 398 Glossary 398

34 Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Arts (ca. 1900–1950) 399

LOOKING AHEAD 400 Total Wars 400 World War I 400 World War I Literature 401 World War I Poetry 401 READING 34.1 Owen’s “Dulce Et Decorum Est” 402 READING 34.2 From Eliot’s The Waste Land 402 READING 34.3 Yeats’ “The Second Coming” 403 World War I Fiction 403 READING 34.4 From Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front 403 World War I Art 405 Ernst 405 Grosz 405 Léger 406 Experimental Film 406 The Russian Revolution 406 The Great Depression and the American Scene 409 Literature 409 The Visual Arts 409 Mexico’s Mural Renaissance 409 LOOKING INTO Thomas Hart Benton’s City Activities 410 Photography 411 Totalitarianism and World War II 412 The Rise of Hitler 412 The Holocaust 412 World War II 412 The New Journalism 413

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CONTENTS vii

World War II Poetry 413 READING 34.5 Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” 414 READING 34.6 Shuson’s haikus 414 World War II Fiction 414 Responses to Totalitarianism 414 READING 34.7 From Wiesel’s Night 415 The Visual Arts in the War Era 415 Photojournalism 415 Picasso’s Guernica 416 MAKING CONNECTIONS 416 Music in the War Era 417 Shostakovich 417 Prokofiev 417 Britten 417 Film in the War Era 418 Eisenstein 418 Riefenstahl 419 Film in America 419 Penderecki 420 Copland and the American Sound 420 The Communist Revolution in China 420 LOOKING BACK 421 Glossary 422

35 The Quest for Meaning (ca. 1940–1960) 423 LOOKING AHEAD 424 The Cold War 424 Existentialism 424 The Philosophy of Sartre 424 READING 35.1 From Sartre’s “Existentialism” 425 EXPLORING ISSUES Communism versus Capitalism 426 Christian Existentialism 427 Literature at Mid-Century 427 Utopias and Dystopias 427 The Literary Antihero 428 Theater of the Absurd 428 READING 35.2 From Beckett’s Waiting for Godot 429 Poetry at Mid-Century: Dylan Thomas 430 READING 35.3 Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night 430 Rabindranath Tagore 430 READING 35.4 Tagore’s “The Man Had No Useful Work” 430 The Visual Arts at Mid-Century 431 Abstract Expressionism 431 MAKING CONNECTIONS 433 Pollock 433 Color-Field Painting 434 Hopper’s America 435 Sculpture at Mid-Century 436 Giacometti 436 Segal 436 Smith 436 Calder 437 Film at Mid-Century 438 Bergman 438 Architecture at Mid-Century 438 Mies van der Rohe 438 Wright at Mid-Century 439 Fuller 441

Music and Dance at Mid-Century 441 Cage 441 Cunningham 442 LOOKING BACK 443 Glossary 443

36 Liberation and Equality (ca. 1930–present) 444 LOOKING AHEAD 445 Anticolonialism and Liberation 445 Liberation and Literature in the Islamic World 445 READING 36.1 Islamic Poems 446 Liberation and Literature in Latin America 446 READING 36.2 Neruda’s “United Fruit Co.” 446 The Quest for Racial Equality 447 The Harlem Renaissance 447 READING 36.3 The Poems of Hughes 448 READING 36.4 The Poems of Brooks 448 Richard Wright and the Realities of Racism 449 READING 36.5 From Wright’s The Ethics of Living Jim Crow 449 The Civil Rights Movement 451 READING 36.6 From King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail 451 READING 36.7 From Malcolm X’s “Message to the Grass Roots” 453 The Literature of the Black Revolution 454 Baldwin and Ellison 454 READING 36.8 From Ellison’s Invisible Man 455 Morrison and Walker 456 READING 36.9 Walker’s “Elethia” 456 African-Americans and the Visual Arts 457 Lawrence and Bearden 457 Saar and Colescott 457 Walker and Wiley 458 African-Americans and Film 458 African-Americans and Jazz 460 Armstrong 461 The Jazz Age 461 Postwar Jazz 462 Hip-Hop 462 African-Americans and Dance 463 The Quest for Gender Equality 463 The Literature of Feminism: Woolf 464 READING 36.10 From Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” 464 Postwar Feminism: de Beauvoir 465 READING 36.11 From de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex 465 America’s Feminist Writers 466 Plath and Sexton 466 Sanchez, Rich, and Dove 467 READING 36.12 Feminist Poems 467 Feminist Art 468 Saint Phalle 468 Mendieta 468 Chicago 468 MAKING CONNECTIONS 469 Sherman and Kruger 469 LOOKING INTO Chicago’s Dinner Party 470 Gender Identity 471 Gender Identity and the Arts 472 EXPLORING ISSUES Issue-Driven Art 473 LOOKING BACK 474 Glossary 474

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viii CONTENTS

37 The Information Age (ca. 1960–present) 475 LOOKING AHEAD 476 The Information Explosion 476 Big Data 477 From Book to Screen 477 EXPLORING ISSUES The Perils of the Information Age 477 New Directions in Science and Philosophy 478 String Theory 478 Chaos Theory 478 The Human Genome 478 Language Theory 479 Literature in the Information Age 479 Postmodernism 479 Postmodern Fiction 480 READING 37.1 Oates’ “Ace” 480 Postmodern Poetry 482 READING 37.2 Paz’s “To Talk” 482 READING 37.3 Ashbery’s “Paradoxes and Oxymorons” 482 Magic Realism 483 READING 37.4 Borges’ “Borges and I” 483 Science Fiction 483 The Visual Arts in the Information Age 484 Science-Fiction Film 484 Pop Art 485 Assemblage 486 Art Film 487 Geometric Abstraction 488 Op Art 489 Minimalism 489 New Realism 490 Total Art 492 Video Art 493 Architecture in the Information Age 495 Music in the Information Age 496 MAKING CONNECTIONS 497 Electronic Music 498 Microtonality and Minimal Music 498 Postmodern Opera 499 Rock Music 499 Dance in the Information Age 500 LOOKING BACK 500 Glossary 501

38 Globalism: The Contemporary World (ca. 1970–present) 502

LOOKING AHEAD 503 The Global Paradigm 503 Globalism and Tradition 503 READING 38.1 Achebe’s “Dead Men’s Path” 504 The Challenge of Globalism 505 Terrorism 505 The Arts and Terrorism 505 MAKING CONNECTIONS 506 READING 38.2 Szymborska’s “The Terrorist, He Watches” 507 READING 38.3 Heaney’s “Anything Can Happen” 508 China: Global Ascendance 508 The Global Ecosystem 510

READING 38.4 From Wilson’s The Diversity of Life 510 Environmental Art 511 Green Architecture 511 Globalism and Ethnic Identity 512 Latino Culture 513 READING 38.5 Cisneros’ “No Speak English” from The House on Mango Street 513 Ethnic Conflict 514 READING 38.6 The Poems of Darwish and Amichai 515 The Visual Arts in the Global Village 515 Art and Activism 515 Film and Activism 516 Immersive Environments 517 The Digital Arts 518 Digital Photography 519 Digital Projects 519 MAKING CONNECTIONS 520 Digital Film 521 Architecture in the Global Village 522 Music in the Global Village 522 The Intercultural Tapestry 522 Cybersounds 523 Dance in the Global Village 524 LOOKING BACK 524 Glossary 525

Picture Credits 526 Literary Credits 527 Index 528

MAPS 34.1 World War I, 1914–1918 401 34.2 World War II: The Defeat of the Axis, 1942–1945 413

MUSIC LISTENING SELECTIONS Schoenberg, Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21, Part 3, No. 15, “Heimweh,” 1912 374, 397 Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, “Sacrificial Dance,” 1913, excerpt 375 Copland, Appalachian Spring, 1944, excerpt 420 Cage, Sonata V, 1948, excerpt 441 Handy, “St. Louis Blues,” 1914 460 Hardin/Armstrong, “Hotter Than That,” 1927 461 Parker/Gillespie, “Koko,” 1945 462 Babbitt, Ensembles for Synthesizer, 1951, excerpt 498 Glass, Einstein on the Beach, “Knee Play 1,” 1976 499 Kalhor, Gallop of a Thousand Horses, The Silk Road Project, 2005 522

ANCILLARY READING SELECTIONS From Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams 379 Lenin on a Revolutionary Elite and Electrification 406 From Hersey’s Hiroshima 413 From Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus 428 On African Unity from Kwame Nkrumah’s I Speak of Freedom 503 From Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior 512

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ixLETTER FROM THE AUTHOR

The Humanistic Tradition originated more than two decades ago. As a long-time humanities instructor, I recognized that the Western-only perspective was no longer adequate to understanding the cultural foundations of our global world. However, none of the existing humanities textbooks served my needs. The challenge was daunting—covering the history of Western literature, philosophy, art, music, and dance was already an ambitious undertaking for a humanities survey; how could I broaden the scope to include Asia, Africa, and the Americas without over-loading the course?

I found the solution in my classroom: Instead of assuming a strictly historical approach to the past, (as I did in my history classes), I would organize my humanities lectures topically, focusing on universal themes, major styles, and significant movements---gods and rulers, classicism, imperialism, the Romantic hero, racial and sexual equality, globalism---as they reflected or shaped the culture of a given time or place. What evolved was The Humanistic Tradition, a thematic, yet global and chronological approach to humanities, one that provokes thought and discussion without burying students under mountains of encyclopedic information.

Now in its seventh edition, The Humanistic Tradition continues to celebrate the creative mind by focusing on how the arts and ideas relate to each other, what they tell us about our own human nature and that of others on our planet. Its mission remains relevant to the present, and essential (I would hope) to enriching the future of each student who reads its pages.

The Seventh Edition of The Humanistic Tradition To the seventh edition of The Humanistic Tradition I have added a new feature: Looking Into is a diagram- matic analysis of key works, such as Neolithic stone circles (including the latest archeological discoveries in Southeast Turkey), the Parthenon, the sonnets of Petrarch and Donne, Shiva: Lord of the Dance, Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Double Portrait, and Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party.

The new edition expands two popular features that promote critical thinking: Exploring Issues,

which focuses on controversial ideas and current debates (such as the battle over the ownership of antiquities, and creationism versus evolution); and Making Connections, which brings attention to con- trasts and continuities between past and present. To Exploring Issues, I have added the debate over the origins of India’s Vedic culture (chapter 3). To Making Connections I offer a novel illustration of the con- temporary affection for Chinese landscape painting (chapter 14).

The chapter-by-chapter integration of literary, visual, and aural primary sources remains a hallmark of The Humanistic Tradition. In an effort to provide the most engaging and accessible literary works, some selected readings in this edition appear in alternate translations. Marginal logos have been added to direct students to additional literary resources that are dis- cussed but not included in the text itself.

Additions to the art program include the Nebra Sky Disk, Hellenistic mosaics, Delacroix’s Women of Algiers, Oceania’s art of tattoo, Japan’s Amida Buddha, Charles Willson Peale’s Portrait of Yarrow Mamout (the earliest known portrait of a Muslim in America), Ai Wei Wei’s Forever Bicycle, Ernesto Neto’s Anthropodino, and Zaha Hadid’s Heydar Aliyev Center. Chapters 37 and 38, which treat the Information Age and Globalism, have been updated to present a cogent overview of contemporary issues, including terrorism, ecological concerns, ethnic conflict, and the digital arts.

The Humanistic Tradition pioneered a flexible six-book format in recognition of the varying chronological range of humanities courses. Each slim volume was also convenient for students to bring to classes, the library, and other study areas. The seventh edition con- tinues to be available in this six-book format, as well as in a two-volume set for the most common two-term course configuration.

In preparing the seventh edition, I have depended on the excellent editorial and production team led by Donald Dinwiddie at Laurence King Publishing. Special thanks also go to Kara Hattersley-Smith at LKP and Sarah Remington at McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

Letter from the Author

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x PREFACE

Each generation leaves a creative legacy, the sum of its ideas and achieve- ments. This legacy represents the response to our effort to ensure our individual and collective survival, our need to establish ways of living in harmony with others, and our desire to understand our place in the universe. Meeting the challenges of survival, communality, and self-knowledge, we have created and transmitted the tools of science and technology, social and political institutions, religious and philosophic systems, and various forms of personal expression—the totality of which we call culture. Handed down from generation to generation, this legacy constitutes the humanistic tradition, the study of which is called humanities.

Understanding that a global humanities course is taught in varying ways, Gloria Fiero redefines the discipline for greater flexibility via a variety of innovative digital tools. Enhanced by McGraw-Hill Education’s LearnSmart and SmartBook, Fiero delivers a learning experience tailored to the needs of each institution, instructor, and student. With the ability to incorporate new extended readings, streaming music, and artwork, The Humanistic Tradition renews the understanding of the relationship between world cultures and humankind’s creative legacy.

Personalized Learning Experience

In Connect Humanities, you can access all of the art and music from The Humanistic Tradition on your computer or mobile device. Music logos (right) that appear in the margins of the text refer to listening selections available for streaming.

As part of McGraw-Hill Education’s Connect Humanities, LearnSmart is an adaptive learning program designed to personalize the learning experience. LearnSmart helps students learn faster, study smarter, and retain more knowledge for greater success. Distinguishing what students know from what they don’t, and touching on concepts they are most likely to forget, LearnSmart continuously adapts to each students’ needs by building a personalized learning path. LearnSmart is proven to strength- en memory recall, keep students in class, and boost grades. By helping students master core concepts ahead of time, LearnSmart enables instruc- tors to spend more meaningful time in the classroom.

Enhanced by LearnSmart, SmartBook is the first and only adaptive reading experience currently available.

• Making It Effective SmartBook creates a personalized reading expe- rience by highlighting the most impactful concepts a student needs to learn at that moment in time. This ensures that every minute spent with SmartBook is returned to the student as the most valuable minute possible.

• Make It Informed Real-time reports quickly identify the concepts that require more attention from individual students—or the entire class.

The Humanistic Tradition—a personalized learning

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xiPREFACE

Personalized Teaching Experience Personalize and tailor your teaching experience to the needs of your humanities course with Create, Insight, and instructor resources.

Create What You’ve Only Imagined No two humanities courses are the same. That is why Gloria Fiero has personally hand-picked additional readings that can be added easily to a customized edition of The Humanistic Tradition. Marginal icons (right) that appear throughout this new edition indicate additional readings, a list of which is found at the end of the Table of Contents.

To customize your book using McGraw-Hill Create™, follow these steps: 1. Go to http://create.mheducation.com and sign in or register for an

instructor account. 2. Click Collections (top, right) and select the “Traditions: Humanities

Readings Through the Ages” Collection to preview and select readings. You can also make use of McGraw-Hill’s comprehensive, cross-disciplinary content as well as other third-party resources.

3. Choose the readings that are most relevant to your students, your curriculum, and your own areas of interest.

4. Arrange the content in a way that makes the most sense for your course. 5. Personalize your book with your course information and choose the

best format for your students—color, black-and-white, or ebook. When you are done, you will receive a free PDF review copy in just minutes.

Or contact your McGraw-Hill Education representative, who can help you build your unique version of The Humanisitic Tradition.

Powerful Reporting on the Go The first and only analytics tool of its kind, Connect Insight is a series of visual data displays—each framed by an intuitive question—that provide at-a-glance information regarding how your class is doing. • Intuitive You receive an instant, at-a-glance view of student performance

matched with student activity. • Dynamic Connect Insight puts real-time analytics in your hands so you

can take action early and keep struggling students from falling behind. • Mobile Connect Insight travels from office to classroom, available on

demand wherever and whenever it’s needed.

Instructor Resources Connect Image Bank is an instructor database of images from select McGraw-Hill Education art and humanities titles, including The Humanistic Tradition. It includes all images for which McGraw-Hill has secured electronic permissions. With Connect Image Bank, instructors can access a text’s images by browsing its chapters, style/period, medium, and culture, or by searching with key terms. Images can be easily downloaded for use in presentations and in PowerPoints. The download includes a text file with image captions and information. You can access Connect Image Bank on the library tab in Connect Humanities (http://connect.mheducation.com).

Various instructor resources are available for The Humanistic Tradition. These include an instructor’s manual with discussion suggestions and study questions, music listening guides, lecture PowerPoints, and a test bank. Contact your McGraw-Hill sales representative for access to these materials.

and teaching experience in global humanities

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Text The text of a primary source refers to its medium (that is, what it is made of), its form (its outward shape), and its content (the subject it describes).

Literature: Literary form varies according to the manner in which words are arranged. So, poetry, which shares rhythmic organization with music and dance, is distinguished from prose, which normally lacks regular rhythmic patterns. Poetry, by its freedom from conven- tional grammar, provides unique opportunities for the expression of intense emotions. Prose usually functions to convey information, to narrate, and to describe.

Philosophy (the search for truth through reasoned analy- sis) and history (the record of the past) make use of prose to analyze and communicate ideas and information.

In literature, as in most forms of expression, content and form are usually interrelated. The subject matter or form of a literary work determines its genre. For instance, a long narrative poem recounting the adventures of a hero constitutes an epic, while a formal, dignified speech in praise of a person or thing constitutes a eulogy.

The Visual Arts: The visual arts employ a wide variety of media, ranging from the traditional colored pigments used in painting, to wood, clay, marble, and (more recently) plastic and neon used in sculpture, to a wide variety of digital media, including photography and film. The form or outward shape of a work of art depends on the manner in which the artist manipulates the elements of color, line, texture, and space. Unlike words, these formal elements lack denotative meaning.

The visual arts are dominantly spatial, that is, they operate and are apprehended in space. Artists manipu- late form to describe or interpret the visible world (as in the genres of portraiture and landscape), or to create worlds of fantasy and imagination. They may also fabri- cate texts that are nonrepresentational, that is, without identifiable subject matter.

Music and Dance: The medium of music is sound. Like literature, music is durational: it unfolds over the period of time in which it occurs. The major elements of music are melody, rhythm, harmony, and tone color—formal elements that also characterize the oral life of litera- ture. However, while literary and visual texts are usually descriptive, music is almost always nonrepresentational: it rarely has meaning beyond sound itself. For that reason, music is the most difficult of the arts to describe in words.

Dance, the artform that makes the human body itself the medium of expression, resembles music in that it is temporal and performance-oriented. Like music, dance

exploits rhythm as a formal tool, and like painting and sculpture, it unfolds in space as well as in time.

Studying the text, we discover the ways in which the artist manipulates medium and form to achieve a charac- teristic manner of execution or expression that we call style. Comparing the styles of various texts from a single era, we discover that they usually share certain defining features and characteristics. Similarities between, for instance, ancient Greek temples and Greek tragedies, or between Chinese lyric poems and landscape paintings, reveal the unifying moral and aesthetic values of their respective cultures.

Context The context describes the historical and cultural environ- ment of a text. Understanding the relationship between text and context is one of the principal concerns of any inquiry into the humanistic tradition. To determine the context, we ask: In what time and place did our primary source originate? How did it function within the society in which it was created? Was it primarily decorative, didactic, magical, or propagandistic? Did it serve the religious or political needs of the community? Sometimes our answers to these questions are mere guesses. For instance, the paintings on the walls of Paleolithic caves were probably not “artworks” in the modern sense of the term, but, rather, magical signs associated with religious rituals per- formed in the interest of communal survival.

Determining the function of the text often serves to clarify the nature of its form, and vice-versa. For instance, in that the Hebrew Bible, the Song of Roland, and many other early literary works were spoken or sung, rather than read, such literature tends to feature repetition and rhyme, devices that facilitate memorization and oral delivery.

Subtext The subtext of a primary source refers to its secondary or implied meanings. The subtext discloses conceptual messages embedded in or implied by the text. The epic poems of the ancient Greeks, for instance, which glorify prowess and physical courage, suggest an exclusively male perception of virtue. The state portraits of the seventeenth-century French king Louis XIV bear the subtext of unassailable and absolute power. In our own time, Andy Warhol’s serial adaptations of Coca-Cola bottles offer wry commentary on the commercial mental- ity of American society. Examining the implicit message of the text helps us determine the values of the age in which it was produced, and offers insights into our own.

BEFORE WE BEGIN

Studying humanities engages us in a dialogue with primary sources: works original to the age in which they were produced. Whether literary, visual, or aural, a primary source is a text; the time, place, and circumstances in which it was created constitute

the context; and its various underlying meanings provide the subtext. Studying humanities from the perspective of text, context, and subtext helps us understand our cultural legacy and our place in the larger world.

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The Modernist Assault ca. 1900–1950

“What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things.” Constantin Brancusi

32 Chapter

Figure 32.1 PABLO PICASSO, Man with a Violin, 1911. Oil on canvas, 3 ft. 31∕2 in. × 2 ft. 57∕8 in. Knit by a lively arrangement of flat shaded planes, monochromatic in color, figure and ground are almost indistinguishable in this Cubist canvas. Representational elements—the man and the violin—are evident in only bits and pieces abstracted from the whole.

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354 CHAPTER 32 The Modernist Assault

The New Physics At the turn of the twentieth century, atomic physicists advanced a model of the universe that challenged the one Isaac Newton had provided two centuries earli- er. Newton’s universe operated according to smoothly functioning laws that generally corresponded with the world of sense perception. Modern physicists found, however, that at the physical extremes of nature—the microcosmic (the very small or very fast) realm of atomic particles and the macrocosmic world of heavy astronomi- cal bodies—the laws of Newton’s Principia did not apply. A more comprehensive model of the universe began to emerge after 1880 when two American physicists, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, determined that the speed of light is a universal constant. In 1897, the English physicist Joseph J. Thompson (1846–1940) identified the electron, the elementary subatomic particle whose interaction between atoms is the main cause of chemical bonding. Three years later, the German physicist Max Planck (1858–1947) suggested that light waves sometimes behaved as quanta, that is, as separate and discontinuous bundles of energy.

Alongside this and other groundbreaking work in quan- tum physics (as the field came to be called), yet another German physicist, Albert Einstein (1879–1955), made public his special theory of relativity (1905), a radically new approach to the new concepts of time, space, motion, and light. While Newton had held that objects preserved properties such as mass and length whether at rest or in motion, Einstein theorized that as an object’s speed approached the speed of light, its mass increased and its length contracted; no object could move faster than

light, and light did not require any medium to carry it. In essence, Einstein’s theory held that all measurable motion is relative to some other object, and that no universal coor- dinates, and no hypothetical ether, exist.

Building on Einstein’s theories, Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) theorized that since the very act of measur- ing subatomic phenomena altered them, the position and the velocity of a subatomic particle could not be measured simultaneously with absolute accuracy. Heisenberg’s prin- ciple of uncertainty (1927)—the more precisely the position of a particle is determined, the less precisely its momen- tum can be known—replaced the absolute and rationalist model of the universe with one whose exact mechanisms at the subatomic level are indeterminate.

LOOKING AHEAD

Since the birth of civilization, no age has broken with tradition more radically or more self-consciously than the twentieth century. In its first decades, the spirit and the style of this new direction came to be called “Modernism.” Modernism rejected former cultural values and conventions in favor of innovation, experimentation, and (at its most extreme) anarchy, the absolute dissolution of established norms.

The Modernist revolution in the creative arts responded to equally revolutionary changes in science and technology. The transformation in technology began at the end of the nineteenth century with the invention of the telephone (1876), wireless telegraphy (1891), and the internal combustion engine (1892), which made possible the first gasoline-powered automobiles. In France and the United States, the mass production of automobiles was underway by 1900. Among the swelling populations of modern cities, the pace of living became faster than ever before. By 1903, the airplane joined the string of enterprises that ushered in an era

of rapid travel and communication—a “shrinking” of the planet that would produce the “global village” of the late twentieth century. Advances in scientific theory proved equally significant: atomic physics, which provided a new understanding of the physical universe, was as momentous for the twentieth century as metallurgy was for the fourth millennium B.C.E. But while the latter contributed to the birth of civilization, the former, which ushered in the nuclear age, threatened its survival.

The modern era—roughly the first half of the twentieth century—is considered thematically in the next three chapters. The first, chapter 32, deals with the Modernist assault on tradition in the arts. Chapter 33 examines the shaping influence of the great Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, whose writings had a shattering effect on every form of cultural expression. Chapter 34 considers the brutal impact of totalitarianism and the two world wars that put the potentially liberating tools of the new science and technology to horrifically destructive ends.

Science and Technology

1900 Max Planck (German) announces his quantum theory

1903 Henry Ford (American) introduces the Model A automobile

1905 Albert Einstein (German) announces his special theory of relativity

1910 Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead (British) publish their Principia Mathematica, a systematic effort to base mathematics in logic

1913 Niels Bohr (Danish) applies quantum theory to atomic structure

1916 Einstein announces his general theory of relativity

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Quantum physics gave humankind greater insight into the workings of the universe, but it also made the operation of that universe more remote from the aver- age person’s understanding. The basic components of nature—subatomic particles—were inaccessible to both the human eye and the camera, hence beyond the realm of the senses. Nevertheless, the practical implications of the new physics were immense: radar technology, computers, and consumer electronics were only three of its numerous long-range consequences. Atomic fission, the splitting of atomic particles (begun only after 1920), and the atomic bomb itself (first tested in 1945) confirmed the validity of Einstein’s famous formula, E=mc2, which shows that mass and energy are different manifestations of the same thing; and therefore (in his words), “a very small amount of mass [matter] can be converted into a very large amount of energy.” The new physics paved the way for the atomic age. It also radically altered the way in which human beings understood the physical world.

Early Twentieth-Century Poetry Modern poets had little use for the self-indulgent sen- timents of the nineteenth-century Romantics and the idealism of the Symbolists. They found in nature neither ecstasy nor redemption. If nature was indeed both random and relative, the job of these poets might be to find a new language for conveying its unique character, one that captured the disjunctive eccentricities of an indifferent cosmos. At the least, they would produce a style that was as conceptual and abstract as modern physics.

The Imagists The leaders in the search for a more concentrated style of expression were a group of poets who called themselves Imagists. For the Imagist, the writer was like a sculptor, whose technique required that he carve away all extrane- ous matter in a process of abstraction that aimed to arrive at an intrinsic or essential form. Verbal compression, formal precision, and economy of expression were the goals of the Imagists. Renouncing traditional verse forms, fixed meter, and rhythm, their style of free verse became notorious for its abrupt and discontinuous juxtaposition of images. Essentially an English-language literary movement, Imagism attracted a number of talented American women, including Amy Lowell (1874–1925) and Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961), who signed her poems simply “H.D.”

Imagism’s most influential poet was the American expa- triate Ezra Pound (1885–1972). By the age of twenty-three, Pound had abandoned his study of language and literature at American universities for a writing career that led him to Europe, where he wandered from England to France and Italy. A poet, critic, and translator, Pound was thor- oughly familiar with the literature of his contemporaries, but he cast his net wide: he studied the prose and poetry of ancient Greece and Rome, China and Japan, medieval France and Renaissance Italy—often reading such works in their original language. As a student of East Asian calligra- phy, he drew inspiration from the sparseness and subtlety

of Chinese characters. He was particularly fascinated by the fact that the Chinese poetic line, which presented images without grammar or syntax, operated in the same intuitive manner that nature worked upon the human mind. It was this vitality that Pound wished to bring to poetry.

In Chinese and Japanese verse—especially in the Japanese poetic genre known as haiku (see chapter 21)— Pound found the key to his search for concentrated expression. Two of his most famous haiku-like poems are found in the collection called Personae. He claimed that it took him a year and a half to write the first of these poems, cutting down the verse from thirty lines to two.

READING 32.1 From Pound’s Personae (1926)

“In a Station of the Metro” The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.

“The Bath Tub” As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, When the hot water gives out or goes tepid, So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.

Q In what ways are these poems abstract?

Q What effects are created by the juxtaposition of the key images?

Pound imitated the haiku-style succession of images to evoke subtle, metaphoric relationships between things. He conceived what he called the “rhythmical arrangement of words” to produce an emotional “shape.”

In the Imagist Manifesto (1913) and in various interviews, Pound outlined the cardinal points of the Imagist doc- trine: poets should use “absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation”; and they should employ free verse rhythms “in sequence of the musical phrase.” Ultimately, Pound summoned his contemporaries to cast aside traditional modes of Western verse-making and “make it new”—a dictum allegedly scrawled on the bathtub of an ancient Chinese emperor. “Day by day,” wrote Pound, “make it new/cut underbrush/pile the logs/keep it grow- ing.” The injunction to “make it new” became the rallying cry of Modernism.

The Imagist search for an abstract language of expres- sion stood at the beginning of the Modernist revolution in poetry. It also opened the door to a more concealed and elusive style of poetry, one that drew freely on the cornuco- pia of world literature and history. The poems that Pound wrote after 1920, particularly the Cantos (the unfinished opus on which Pound labored for fifty-five years), are filled with foreign language phrases, obscene jokes, and arcane literary and historical allusions juxtaposed without connec- tive tissue. These poems contrast sharply with the terse pre- cision and eloquent purity of Pound’s early Imagist efforts.

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T. S. Eliot No English-speaking poet advanced the Modernist agenda more powerfully than the American-born writer T. S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot (1888–1965). Meeting Pound in 1914, Eliot joined him in the effort to rid modern poetry of romantic sentiment. He held that poetry must seek the ver- bal formula or “objective correlative” (as he called it) that gives precise shape to feeling. Eliot’s style soon became notable for its inventive rhythms, irregular cadences, and startling images, many of which draw on personal reminis- cences and obscure literary resources.

Educated at Harvard University in philosophy and the classics, Eliot was studying at Oxford when World War I broke out. He remained in England after the war, becom- ing a British citizen in 1927 and converting to the Anglican faith in the same year. His intellectual grasp of modern philosophy, world religions, anthropology, and the classical literature of Asia and the West made him the most erudite literary figure of his time.

Begun in 1910, Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (reproduced here in full) captures the wan- ing idealism that pervaded the years leading up to World War I. The “love song” is actually the dramatic monologue of a timid, middle-aged man who has little faith in himself or his capacity for effective action. Prufrock’s cynicism anticipated the disillusion and the sense of impotence that marked the postwar generation (discussed in greater detail in chapter 34).

READING 32.2 Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915)

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse A persona che mai tornasse al mondo, Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo Non torno vivo alcun s’i’odo il vero, Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.1

Let us go then, you and I, 1 When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats 5 Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question . . . 10 Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, 15 The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, 20 And seeing that it was a soft October night, Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time For the yellow smoke that slides along the street, Rubbing its back upon the window-panes; 25 There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands2

That lift and drop a question on your plate; 30 Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go 35 Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?” Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my hair— 40 (They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”) My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin— (They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”) Do I dare 45 Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all— Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, 50 I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room. So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all— 55 The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, Then how should I begin To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? 60 And how should I presume?

1 Lines from Dante’s “Inferno,” Canto 27, 61–66, spoken by Guido da Montefeltro, who was condemned to Hell for the sin of false counseling. In explaining his punishment to Dante, Guido is still apprehensive of the judgment of society.

2 An ironic allusion to the poem “Works and Days” by the eighth- century B.C.E. poet Hesiod, which celebrates the virtues of hard labor on the land.

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And I have known the arms already, known them all— Arms that are braceleted and white and bare (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!) Is it perfume from a dress 65 That makes me so digress? Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl. And should I then presume? And how should I begin?

. . . . . . . . . .

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets 70 And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .

I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

. . . . . . . . . .

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully! 75 Smoothed by long fingers, Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers, Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me. Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? 80 But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter, I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;3

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, 85 And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all, After the cups, the marmalade, the tea, Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me, Would it have been worth while, 90 To have bitten off the matter with a smile, To have squeezed the universe into a ball4

To roll it toward some overwhelming question, To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,5

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”— 95 If one, settling a pillow by her head, Should say: “That is not what I meant at all, That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all, Would it have been worth while, 100 After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—

And this, and so much more?— It is impossible to say just what I mean! But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: 105 Would it have been worth while If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, And turning towards the window, should say: “That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all.” 110

. . . . . . . . . .

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,6

Deferential, glad to be of use, 115 Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old . . . I grow old . . . 120 I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.7

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. 125 I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown 130 Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Q How would you describe the personality of Eliot’s Prufrock?

Q What do each of the literary allusions add to our understanding of the poem?

The tone of Eliot’s poem is established by way of power- fully compressed (and gloomy) images: “one-night cheap hotels,” “sawdust restaurants,” “soot that falls from chim- neys,” “narrow streets,” and “lonely men in shirt-sleeves.” Eliot’s literary vignettes, and allusions to biblical proph- ets and to the heroes of history and art (Hamlet and Michelangelo), work as foils to Prufrock’s bankrupt ideal- ism, underlining his self-conscious retreat from action, and his loss of faith in the conventional sources of wisdom. The voices of inspiration, concludes Prufrock, are submerged by all-too-human voices, including his own. Prufrock’s moral inertia made him an archetype of the condition of spiritual loss associated with Modernism.

6 A reference to Polonius, the king’s advisor in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as well as to Guido da Montefeltro—both of them false counselors.

7 In Eliot’s time, rolled or cuffed trousers were considered fashionable.

3 A reference to John the Baptist, who was beheaded by Herod (Matthew 14: 3–11). Prufrock perceives himself as victim but as neither saint nor martyr.

4 A reference to the line “Let us roll all our strength and all our sweetness up into one ball,” from the poem “To his Coy Mistress” by the seventeenth-century English poet Andrew Marvell, in which Marvell presses his lover to “seize the day.”

5 According to the Gospel of John (11: 1–44), Jesus raised Lazarus from the grave.

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Frost and Lyric Poetry Robert Frost (1874–1963), the best known and one of the most popular of American poets, offered an alternative to the abstract style of the Modernists. While Frost rejected the romantic sentimentality of much nineteenth-century verse, he embraced the older tradition of Western lyric poetry. He wrote in metered verse and jokingly compared the Modernist use of free verse to playing tennis without a net. Frost avoided dense allusions and learned references. In plain speech he expressed deep affection for the natu- ral landscape and an abiding sympathy with the frailties of the human condition. He described American rural life as uncertain and enigmatic—at times, notably dark. “My poems,” explained Frost, “are all set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless.” Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is written in the rugged and direct language that became the hallmark of his mature style. The poem exalts a profound individualism as well as a sparseness of expres- sion in line with the Modernist injunction to “make it new.”

READING 32.3 Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” (1916)

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, 1 And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; 5

Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear, Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, 10

And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. 15

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. 20

Q Why might Frost’s choice of roads have made “all the difference”?

Q How does the poem illustrate Frost’s fondness for direct language?

Early Twentieth-Century Art As with Modernist poetry, the art of the early twentieth century came to challenge all that pre- ceded it. Liberated by the camera from the necessity of imitating

nature, avant-garde artists questioned the value of art as

a faithful recreation of the visible world. They pioneered an authentic, “stripped down” style that, much like Imagist poetry, evoked rather than described experience. They pur- sued the intrinsic qualities and essential meanings of their subject matter to arrive at a concentrated emotional expe- rience. The language of pure form did not, however, rob modern art of its humanistic dimension; rather, it provided artists with a means by which to move beyond traditional ways of representing the visual world. Abstraction—one of the central tenets of Modernism—promised to purify nature so as to come closer to its true reality.

Early Modern artists probed the tools and techniques of formal expression more fully than any artists since the Renaissance. Deliberately blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture, they attached three-dimensional objects to two-dimensional surfaces, thereby violating tra- ditional categories of style and format. Like the Imagists, they found inspiration in non-Western cultures in which art shared the power of ritual. Innovation, abstraction, and experimentation became the hallmarks of the Modernist revolt against convention and tradition.

Picasso The giant of twentieth-century art was the Spanish-born Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). During his ninety-two-year life, Picasso worked in almost every major art style of the century, some of which he himself inaugurated. He pro- duced thousands of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints—a body of work that in its size, inventiveness, and influence is nothing short of phenomenal. As a child, he showed an extraordinary gift for drawing, and by the time he was twenty his precise and lyrical line style rivaled that of Raphael and Ingres. In 1903, the young painter left his native Spain to settle in Paris. There, in the bustling capital of the Western art world, he came under the influence of Impressionist and Postimpressionist painting, taking as his subjects café life, beggars, prostitutes, and circus folk. Much like the Imagists, Picasso worked to refine form and color in the direction of concentrated expression, reduc- ing the colors of his palette first to various shades of blue and then, after 1904, to tones of rose.

By 1906, Picasso began to abandon traditional Western modes of pictorial representation. In that year he started a large painting that would become his foremost assault on tradition: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (see Figure 32.2). Les Demoiselles depicts five nude women—the prostitutes of a Barcelona bordello in the Carrer d’Avino (Avignon Street). The subject matter of the work looked back to the long, respectable Western tradition of representing the female nude or group of nudes in a landscape setting (see Figure 32.3). However, Les Demoiselles violated every shred of tradition.

The manner in which Picasso “made new” a traditional subject in Western art is worth examining: in the early sketches for the painting, originally called The Philosophical Brothel, Picasso included two male figures, one of whom resembled the artist himself. However, in 1906, Picasso came under the influence of a number of important exhi- bitions: a show of archaic Iberian sculptures at the Louvre,

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MAKING CONNECTIONS

Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Figure 32.2) reflects the artist’s keen attention to the art of his time, publically displayed in the salons and museums of Paris. In Cézanne’s canvases, with their flattened planes and arbitrary colors (Figure 32.3), Picasso recognized a rigorous new language of form that seemed to define nature’s underlying structure. And in African and Oceanic sculpture he discovered the power of art as the palpable embodiment of potent supernatural forces. Of the tribal masks and sculptures (Figure 32.4), Picasso later explained: “For me, [they] were not just sculptures; they were magical objects . . . intercessors against unknown, threatening spirits.” The union of expressive abstraction and dynamic distortion clearly characterizes both the Etoumbi image and the treatment of the two figures on the right in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Figure 32.3 PAUL CÉZANNE, The Large Bathers, 1906. Oil on canvas, 6 ft. 107∕8 in. × 8 ft. 23∕4 in. Picasso came to call this artist “the father of us all.”

Figure 32.2 PABLO PICASSO, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907. Oil on canvas, 8 ft. × 7 ft. 8 in.

Figure 32.4 Mask from Etoumbi region, Democratic Republic of Congo. Wood, height 14 in. Scholars continue to debate exactly which works of tribal art Picasso viewed on his visits to the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris and which he encountered as African imports sold by Paris art dealers. The latter were purchased by artists (including Picasso himself) and collectors, such as Picasso’s expatriate American friends Gertrude Stein and her brother, who resided in Paris.

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Figure 32.5 GEORGES BRAQUE, Still Life on a Table, ca. 1914. Collage on paper, 187∕8 × 243∕8 in. Trained as a decorator, Braque introduced stenciled letters, sand, and sawdust into his artworks. His use of newspaper clippings, wallpaper, wine- bottle labels, and wrappers gave his works greater density and challenged viewers to view everyday objects from different perspectives—conceptual and perceptual.

an exhibition of Gauguin’s Polynesian paintings and sculp- tures at the Salon d’Automne, and, the following year, a huge retrospective of Cézanne’s major works. Finally, in the summer of 1907, Picasso fell deeply under the spell of African and Oceanic art on display both in local galleries and at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris.

Reworking The Philosophical Brothel, Picasso eliminated the male figures and transformed the five prostitutes into a group of fierce iconic females, forbidding rather than seductive. For what he would later call his “first exorcism picture,” he painted out the faces of the figures, giving the two on the right the features of African masks. He seems to have taken apart and reassembled the figures as if to test the physics of disjunction and discontinuity. At least three of the nudes are rendered not from a single vantage point but from multiple viewpoints, as if one’s eye could travel freely in time and space. The body of the crouching female on the far right is seen from the back, while her face, savagely striated like the scarified surfaces of African and Polynesian sculptures (see Figures 18.10, 31.27, and 32.4), is seen from the front. The noses of the two central females appear in profile, while their eyes are frontal—a convention Picasso may have borrowed from ancient Egyptian frescoes (see Figure 2.17). The relation- ship between the figures and the shallow area they occupy is equally disjunctive: background becomes indistinguish- able from foreground, and pictorial space is shattered by brutally fractured planes—brick reds and vivid blues—that resemble shards of glass. Stripping his “demoiselles” of all sensuous appeal, Picasso banished the alluring female nude from the domain of Western art.

The Birth of Cubism Les Demoiselles was the precursor of an audacious new style known as Cubism, a bold and distinctive formal language that came to challenge the princi- ples of Renaissance painting as dramatically as Einstein’s theo- ry of relativity had challenged Newtonian physics. In the Cubist canvas, the recognizable world of the senses disappears beneath a scaffold of semitrans- parent planes and short, angu- lar lines; ordinary objects are made to look as if they have exploded and been reassem- bled somewhat arbitrarily in

geometric bits and pieces that rest on the surface of the picture plane (see Figure 32.1). A comparison of this early Cubist painting with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (see Figure 32.2) shows how far toward abstraction Picasso had moved in less than four years.

With Analytic Cubism, as the style came to be called, a multiplicity of viewpoints replaced one-point perspec- tive. The Cubist image, conceived as if one were moving around, above, and below the subject and even perceiving it from within, appropriates the fourth dimension—time itself. Abrupt shifts in direction and an ambiguous spatial field call up the uncertainties of the new physics. As Picasso and his French colleague Georges Braque (1882–1963) collaborated in a search for an ever more pared-down language of form, their compositions became increas- ingly abstract and colors became cool and controlled: Cubism came to offer a new formal language, one wholly unconcerned with narrative content. Years later, Picasso defended the viability of this new language: “The fact that for a long time Cubism has not been understood . . . means nothing. I do not read English, an English book is a blank book to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist.”

Around 1912, a second phase of Cubism, namely Synthetic Cubism, emerged, when Braque first included three pieces of wallpaper in a still-life composition. Picasso and Braque, who thought of themselves as space pioneers (much like the Wright brothers), pasted mundane objects such as wine-bottle labels, playing cards, and scraps of newspaper onto the surface of the canvas—a technique known as collage (from the French coller, “to paste”). The result was a kind of art that was neither a painting nor a sculpture, but both at the same time. The two artists filled their canvases with puns, hidden messages, and subtle

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Figure 32.7 ALEXANDER ARCHIPENKO, Woman Combing Her Hair, 1915. Bronze, 133∕4 × 31∕4 × 31∕8 in. (including base).

references to contemporary events; but the prevailing strategy in all these artworks was to test the notion of art as illusion.

In Braque’s Still Life on a Table (Figure 32.5), strips of imitation wood graining, a razor-blade wrapper, and news- paper clippings serve the double function of “presenting” and “representing.” Words and images wrenched out of context here play off one another like some cryptographic billboard. Prophetic of twentieth-century art in general, Braque would proclaim: “The subject is not the object of the painting, but a new unity, the lyricism that results from method.”

Assemblage In these years, Picasso also created the first assemblages— artworks that were built up, or pieced together, from mis- cellaneous or commonplace materials. Like the collage, the three-dimensional assemblage depended on the inven- tive combination of found objects and materials. As such, it constituted a radical alternative to traditional techniques of carving in stone, metal casting, and modeling in clay or plaster. The art of assemblage clearly drew inspiration from African and Oceanic traditions of combining natural materials (such as cowrie shells, beads, and raffia) for masks and costumes; it also took heed of the expressive simpli- fications that typify power objects, reliquaries, and other tribal artforms. Picasso’s Guitar of 1912–1913 achieves its powerful effect by means of fragment- ed planes, deliberate spatial inversions (note the projecting soundhole), and the wedding of sheet metal and wire (Figure 32.6).

Within a decade, Western sculptors were employing the strategies of Synthetic Cubism in ways that reflected abstract models of time and space. The Russian-born cubist Alexander Archipenko (1887–1964), for instance, fashioned the female form so that an area of negative space actually constitutes the head (Figure 32.7).