–What elements of Modernism do you find in Anderson’s stories? (Consider Raymond Williams and Peter Singal--from the lecture notes posted to Blackboard under "Course Documents.")
–What is one of the main conflicts portrayed in these stories? With what conflict or conflicts do the characters struggle?
–What do these stories tell readers about small town America?
–Who is the most interesting or sympathetic character and why?
More specific questions:
More specific questions:
•“Hands” : Of what is Wing Biddlebaum guilty?
•“Godliness, Part Three”: Is Louise Hardy a moral character?
•“The Strength of God”: What does the title of this story mean?
I'd like to comment on the question about Godliness Part 3 which asks if Louise Hardy is a moral character. I don't know that I really have an opinion one way or the other on her morality, but I do find it interesting to read that chapter from a feminist perspective. Louise is a daughter born to a man who begged God for a son to help him fulfill what he saw as his Biblical purpose. From the very beginning she is a disappointment to her father, "wanting love more than anything else in the world and not getting it" (44). Then when she arrives at the Hardys', the only person who even halfway respects her is John. It's no surprise, then, that she latches onto him to fill her desperate need for love. He takes this attachment to mean she is romantically interested, when what she really wants is care and connection with another human. Of course she would then resent her own child, David--not because he is innately bad, but because she rebels against the sexual act that created him. She points out that if he had been a girl, she would have done everything for the child. Louise now associates her pain and isolation with the male gender. Moral? Probably not, but understandable, considering the life she's had to live. (Sorry if I got carried away. Now that I wrote all that, it seems I maybe should have saved something for the response paper.)
ReplyDeleteAvant -garde
ReplyDeleteSince last evening, I have been thinking about the question as to whether the avant-garde was a synonym for modernism , a subset, or an alternative. I viscerally wanted to respond, "none of the above" and after further consideration--I'll stick with that response. I feel an 'avant-garde' artist of any genre would wriggle out of categorization upon contact! Categorization implies an adherence to some sort of definitive qualities, some sort of parameters--even if those defining attributes are unorthodox and experimental. Once categorized, would not the true avant-garde artist, by definition, need to sunder those boundaries yet again? create something new yet again? True, early avant-garde activity coincided with what we label "modernism" with all its attendant breaks from the past and, as such, that early expression was more radically "new" than anything we would label "avant-garde" now, but that which is truly avant-garde is not static--it is always in a state of redefinition. I think of early transgressions (and to the uninitiated, they truly must have seemed like transgressions!) of artists like Matisse and Picasso, of writers like Gertrude Stein or Cocteau, or of musicians like Schoenberg --they did not stop there and settle into their avant-garde, modernist niche. Instead they eradicated the new they had just created and erased any potential definition before it could confine them. I remember studying the art of the first Armory show when I was an art student in the sixties; I remember the first time I heard an atonal composition of Schoenberg. But right now (well beyond the decade demarcations of "Modernism" ) I watch a video of the most recent Armory show in NY that an artist friend filmed for me, or I listen to John Cage's "Indeterminancy" as I wash dishes, and what I would label the "avant-garde" is alive and well outside any deliberate movement or artificial parameters someone might want to impose! (Sorry--I got carried away! I have never escaped the vortex created by my first exposure to what is labeled as the "avant-garde" and probably never will ;-)
-Ruth
I find the women in Andersons vignettes to be a particularly sad lot, but often (and I may well incite disagreement here!) they seem to be victims of their own lack of pluck. They are variously resigned, dispassionate, "unperturbed", bitter, myopically depressed, sharp, morose--all-in-all a rather "colorless, soft-voiced" lot. True--men and circumstances work against them, but neither of those elements are formidable enough in most of these cases to call forth much empathy from me. Is it because the males themselves suffer from so much ambivalence and angst? Or is Anderson himself a bit confused by women?
ReplyDeleteI wrote this weeks response paper on "A Man of Ideas." While those comments focused on the mood of its "thinking" character, Joe Welling, I am also very much interested in what his ideas were ABOUT. In so many of these stories, the natural world figures strongly in the imagery. While some of the language merely tends toward a pantheistic sort of appreciation, the presence of the imagery within other story lines seems to run contrary to modernist thinking in that the natural world exists as a place of escape--for regression into simpler, purer, more uncluttered times. Nature is the antidote to the full-frontal assault of the 'new.' So is the beauty and peace of nature escapism--or, as in "A Man of Ideas", strangely prescient? As I read Joe Welling's breathless discussion of what we would describe as the 'water table' I felt as if I could be reading the transcription of a present-day symposium on declining aquafer levels, on the fact that actions upstream have definite reactions downstream. I would like to read how modernism related (if at all) to environmental issues. Does anyone know?
ReplyDelete