U.S. Culture
Ellison. African American writers since then have contended with the same
challenge of giving voice to their experiences as a marginalized and often
despised part of America.
Several African American novelists in recent decades have struggled to
represent the wounded manner in which African Americans have participated
in American life. In the 1950s and 1960s, James Baldwin discovered how
much he was part of the United States after a period of self-imposed exile
in Paris, and he wrote about his dark and hurt world in vigorous and
accusatory prose. The subject has also been at the heart of an
extraordinary rediscovery of the African American past in the plays of
Lorraine Hansberry and the fiction of Alice Walker, Charles Johnson, and
Toni Morrison. Probably more than any American writer before her, Morrison
has grappled with the legacy that slavery inflicted upon African Americans
and with what it means to live with a separate consciousness within
American culture. In 1993 Morrison became the first African American
writer to be awarded a Nobel Prize in literature.
Writers from other groups, including Mexican Americans, Native Americans,
Chinese Americans, Korean Americans, and Filipino Americans, also grappled
with their separate experiences within American culture. Among them, N.
Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich have dealt with
issues of poverty, life on reservations, and mixed ancestry among Native
Americans. Rudolfo Anaya and Sandra Cisneros have dealt with the
experiences of Mexican Americans, and Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston
have explored Chinese American family life.
Even before World War II, writers from the American South reflected on
what it meant to have a separate identity within American culture. The
legacy of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction left the South with a
sense of a lost civilization, embodied in popular literature such as Gone
With the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell, and with questions about how a
Southern experience could frame a literary legacy. Southern literature in
the 20th century draws deeply on distinct speech rhythms, undercurrents of
sin, and painful reflections on evil as part of a distinctly Southern
tradition. William Faulkner most fully expressed these issues in a series
of brilliant and difficult novels set in a fictional Mississippi county.
These novels, most of them published in the 1930s, include The Sound and
the Fury (1929), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom (1936). For
his contribution, Faulkner received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1949.
More recent Southern writers, such as Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor,
Walker Percy, James Dickey, and playwright Tennessee Williams, have
continued this tradition of Southern literature.
In addition to expressing the minority consciousness of Southern
regionalism, Faulkner's novels also reflected the artistic modernism of
20th-century literature, in which reality gave way to frequent
interruptions of fantasy and the writing is characterized by streams of
consciousness rather than by precise sequences in time. Other American
writers, such as Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and E. L. Doctorow
also experimented with different novel forms and tried to make their
writing styles reflect the peculiarities of consciousness in the chaos of
the modern world. Doctorow, for example, in his novel Ragtime juxtaposed
real historical events and people with those he made up. Pynchon
questioned the very existence of reality in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973).
Aside from Faulkner, perhaps the greatest modernist novelist writing in
the United States was йmigrй Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov first wrote in his
native Russian, and then in French, before settling in the United States
and writing in English. Nabokov saw no limits to the possibilities of
artistic imagination, and he believed the artist's ability to manipulate
language could be expressed through any subject. In a series of novels
written in the United States, Nabokov demonstrated that he could develop
any situation, even the most alien and forbidden, to that end. This was
demonstrated in Lolita (1955), a novel about sexual obsession that caused
a sensation and was first banned as obscene.
Despite its obvious achievements, modernism in the United States had its
most profound effect on other forms of literature, especially in poetry
and in a new kind of personal journalism that gradually erased the sharp
distinctions between news reporting, personal reminiscence, and fiction
writing.
20th-Century Poetry
Modern themes and styles of poetry have been part of the American
repertoire since the early part of the 20th century, especially in the
work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Their works were difficult,
emotionally restrained, full of non-American allusions, and often
inaccessible. After World War II, new poetic voices developed that were
more exuberant and much more American in inspiration and language. The
poets who wrote after the war often drew upon the work of William Carlos
Williams and returned to the legacy of Walt Whitman, which was democratic
in identification and free-form in style. These poets provided postwar
poetry with a uniquely American voice.
The Beatnik, or Beat, poets of the 1950s notoriously followed in Whitman’s
tradition. They adopted a radical ethic that included drugs, sex, art, and
the freedom of the road. Jack Kerouac captured this vision in On the Road
(1957), a quintessential book about Kerouac’s adventures wandering across
the United States. The most significant poet in the group was Allen
Ginsberg, whose sexually explicit poem Howl (1956) became the subject of a
court battle after it was initially banned as obscene. The Beat poets
spanned the country, but adopted San Francisco as their special outpost.
The city continued to serve as an important arena for poetry and
unconventional ideas, especially at the City Lights Bookstore co-owned by
writer and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Other modernist poets included
Gwendolyn Brooks, who retreated from the conventional forms of her early
poetry to write about anger and protest among African Americans, and
Adrienne Rich, who wrote poetry focused on women's rights, needs, and
desires.
Because it is open to expressive forms and innovative speech, modern
poetry is able to convey the deep personal anguish experienced by several
of the most prominent poets of the postwar period, among them Robert
Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman.
Sometimes called confessional poets, they used poetry to express
nightmarish images of self-destruction. As in painting, removing limits
and conventions on form permitted an almost infinite capacity for
conveying mood, feeling, pain, and inspiration. This personal poetry also
brought American poetry closer to the European modernist tradition of
emotional anguish and madness. Robert Frost, probably the most famous and
beloved of modern American poets, wrote evocative and deeply felt poetry
that conveyed some of these same qualities within a conventional pattern
of meter and rhyme.
Another tradition of modern poetry moved toward playful engagement with
language and the creative process. This tradition was most completely
embodied in the brilliant poetry of Wallace Stevens, whose work dealt with
the role of creative imagination. This tradition was later developed in
the seemingly simple and prosaic poetry of John Ashbery, who created
unconventional works that were sometimes records of their own creation.
Thus, poetry after World War II, like the visual arts, expanded the
possibilities of emotional expression and reflected an emphasis on the
creative process. The idea of exploration and pleasure through unexpected
associations and new ways of viewing reality connected poetry to the
modernism of the visual arts.
Journalism
Modernist sensibilities were also evident in the emergence of a new form
of journalism. Journalism traditionally tried to be factual and objective
in presentation. By the mid-1970s, however, some of America's most
creative writers were using contemporary events to create a new form of
personal reporting. This new approach stretched the boundaries of
journalism and brought it closer to fiction because the writers were
deeply engaged and sometimes personally involved in events. Writers such
as Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and Joan Didion created a literary
journalism that infused real events with their own passion. In Armies of
the Night (1968), the record of his involvement in the peace movement,
Mailer helped to define this new kind of writing. Capote's In Cold Blood
(1966), the retelling of the senseless killing of a Kansas family, and
Mailer’s story of a murderer's fate in The Executioner's Song (1979)
brought this hyperrealism to chilling consummation. No less vivid were
Didion's series of essays on California culture in the late 1960s and her
reporting of the sensational trial of football star O. J. Simpson in 1995.
Performing Arts
As in other cultural spheres, the performing arts in the United States in
the 20th century increasingly blended traditional and popular art forms.
The classical performing arts—music, opera, dance, and theater—were not a
widespread feature of American culture in the first half of the 20th
century. These arts were generally imported from or strongly influenced by
Europe and were mainly appreciated by the wealthy and well educated.
Traditional art usually referred to classical forms in ballet and opera,
orchestral or chamber music, and serious drama. The distinctions between
traditional music and popular music were firmly drawn in most areas.
During the 20th century, the American performing arts began to incorporate
wider groups of people. The African American community produced great
musicians who became widely known around the country. Jazz and blues
singers such as Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Billie
Holiday spread their sounds to black and white audiences. In the 1930s and
1940s, the swing music of Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller
adapted jazz to make a unique American music that was popular around the
country. The American performing arts also blended Latin American
influences beginning in the 20th century. Between 1900 and 1940, Latin
American dances, such as the tango from Argentina and the rumba from Cuba,
were introduced into the United States. In the 1940s a fusion of Latin and
jazz elements was stimulated first by the Afro-Cuban mambo and later on by
the Brazilian bossa nova.
Throughout the 20th century, dynamic classical institutions in the United
States attracted international talent. Noted Russian-born choreographer
George Balanchine established the short-lived American Ballet Company in
the 1930s; later he founded the company that in the 1940s would become the
New York City Ballet. The American Ballet Theatre, also established during
the 1940s, brought in non-American dancers as well. By the 1970s this
company had attracted Soviet defector Mikhail Baryshnikov, an
internationally acclaimed dancer who served as the company’s artistic
director during the 1980s.
In classical music, influential Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, who
composed symphonies using innovative musical styles, moved to the United
States in 1939. German-born pianist, composer, and conductor Andrй Previn,
who started out as a jazz pianist in the 1940s, went on to conduct a
number of distinguished American symphony orchestras. Another Soviet,
cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, became conductor of the National Symphony
Orchestra in Washington, D.C., in 1977.
Some of the most innovative artists in the first half of the 20th century
successfully incorporated new forms into classical traditions. Composers
George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, and dancer Isadora Duncan were notable
examples. Gershwin combined jazz and spiritual music with classical in
popular works such as Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and the opera Porgy and Bess
(1935). Copland developed a unique style that was influenced by jazz and
American folk music. Early in the century, Duncan redefined dance along
more expressive and free-form lines.
Some artists in music and dance, such as composer John Cage and dancer and
choreographer Merce Cunningham, were even more experimental. During the
1930s Cage worked with electronically produced sounds and sounds made with
everyday objects such as pots and pans. He even invented a new kind of
piano. During the late 1930s, avant-garde choreographer Cunningham began
to collaborate with Cage on a number of projects.
Perhaps the greatest, and certainly the most popular, American innovation
was the Broadway musical, which also became a movie staple. Beginning in
the 1920s, the Broadway musical combined music, dance, and dramatic
performance in ways that surpassed the older vaudeville shows and musical
revues but without being as complex as European grand opera. By the 1960s,
this American musical tradition was well established and had produced
extraordinary works by important musicians and lyricists such as George
and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz
Hart, Jerome Kern, and Oscar Hammerstein II. These productions required an
immense effort to coordinate music, drama, and dance. Because of this, the
musical became the incubator of an American modern dance tradition that
produced some of America's greatest choreographers, among them Jerome
Robbins, Gene Kelly, and Bob Fosse.
In the 1940s and 1950s the American musical tradition was so dynamic that
it attracted outstanding classically trained musicians such as Leonard
Bernstein. Bernstein composed the music for West Side Story, an updated
version of Romeo and Juliet set in New York that became an instant classic
in 1957. The following year, Bernstein became the first American-born
conductor to lead a major American orchestra, the New York Philharmonic.
He was an international sensation who traveled the world as an ambassador
of the American style of conducting. He brought the art of classical music
to the public, especially through his "Young People's Concerts,"
television shows that were seen around the world. Bernstein used the many
facets of the musical tradition as a force for change in the music world
and as a way of bringing attention to American innovation.
In many ways, Bernstein embodied a transformation of American music that
began in the 1960s. The changes that took place during the 1960s and 1970s
resulted from a significant increase in funding for the arts and their
increased availability to larger audiences. New York City, the American
center for art performances, experienced an artistic explosion in the
1960s and 1970s. Experimental off-Broadway theaters opened, new ballet
companies were established that often emphasized modern forms or blended
modern with classical (Martha Graham was an especially important
influence), and an experimental music scene developed that included
composers such as Philip Glass and performance groups such as the Guarneri
String Quartet. Dramatic innovation also continued to expand with the
works of playwrights such as Edward Albee, Tony Kushner, and David Mamet.
As the variety of performances expanded, so did the serious crossover
between traditional and popular music forms. Throughout the 1960s and
1970s, an expanded repertoire of traditional arts was being conveyed to
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