Contemporary and Modern

MODULE
Writers

Objectives:
At the end of the Module, students should be able to:
1. Recognize the different writers in the contemporary and modern era of
Anglo-Saxon literatures.
2. Identify the various literary works made by the modern writers.
3. Relate the literary piece to the student’s life, experience and society
which they belong.

PRETEST

1. A movement in the arts is defined first and foremost as a radical break from the
past.
A. Impressionism
B. Expressionism
C. Modernism
D. Futurism

2. It is the era that emerged from World War II.

A. Modernist period
B. Contemporary period
C. Romantic period
D. Neoclassical period

3. What play came to prominence for the first time in the United States in the early
20th century?
A. Drama
B. Roleplay
C. Opera
D. Ballet

4. It took on a dizzying number of forms after World War II.

A. English novel
B. French novel
C. Philippine novel
D. American novel
 5. What period proved to be one of the richest and most productive in American
literature?
A. Modernist period
B. Contemporary period
C. Romantic period
D. Neoclassical period

The Modernist Period (1910 to 1945)

Advances in science and technology in Western countries rapidly intensified at the start
of the 20th century and brought about a sense of unprecedented progress. The
devastation of World War I and the Great Depression also caused widespread suffering
in Europe and the United States. These contradictory impulses can be found swirling
within modernism, a movement in the arts defined first and foremost as a radical break
from the past. But this break was often an act of destruction, and it caused a loss of
faith in traditional structures and beliefs. Despite, or perhaps because of, these
contradictory impulses, the modernist period proved to be one of the richest and most
productive in American literature.
A sense of disillusionment and loss pervades much American modernist fiction. That
sense may be centered on specific individuals, or it may be directed toward American
society or toward civilization generally. It may generate a nihilistic, destructive impulse,
or it may express a hope at the prospect of change.
Drama came to prominence for the first time in the United States in the early 20 th
century. Playwrights drew inspiration from European theater but created plays that were
uniquely and enduringly American.
Eugene O’Neill was the foremost American playwright of the period. His Long Day’s
Journey into Night (written 1939–41, performed 1956) was the high point of more than
20 years of creativity that began in 1920 with Beyond the Horizon and concluded with
The Iceman Cometh (written 1939, performed 1946).
During the 1930s Lillian Hellman, Clifford Odets, and Langston Hughes wrote plays
that exposed injustice in America
 F.Scott William Faulkner
Fitzgerald used stream-of-
skewered the consciousness
American Dream monologues and
in The Great other formal
Gatsby (1925). techniques to break
from past literary
practice in The
Sound and the Fury
(1929).

Richard Wright John Steinbeck

exposed and depicted the difficult
attacked lives of migrant
American racism workers in Of Mice
in Native Son and Men (1937) and
(1940). The Grapes of Wrath
(1939).

Zora Neale Eugene O’Neill was

Hurston told the the foremost
story of a black American playwright
woman’s three of the period.
marriages in
Their Eyes Were
Watching God
(1937).
 Ernest Robert Frost and
Hemingway’s Carl Sandburg
early novels The evocatively described
Sun Also Rises the regions—New
(1926) and A England and the
Farewell to Arms Midwest, respectively
(1929) articulated —in which they lived.
the
disillusionment of
the Lost
Generation.

Willa Cather told Thornton Wilder

hopeful stories of presented a realistic
the American (and enormously
frontier, set influential) vision of
mostly on the small-town America
Great Plains, in O in Our Town, first
Pioneers! (1913) produced in 1938.
and My Ántonia
(1918).

For more information about the Modernist period:

https://study.com/academy/lesson/modernism-in-american-literature.html
The Contemporary Period (1945 to present)
The United States, which emerged from World War II confident and economically
strong, entered the Cold War in the late 1940s. This conflict with the Soviet Union
shaped global politics for more than four decades, and the proxy wars and threat of
nuclear annihilation that came to define it were just some of the influences shaping
American literature during the second half of the 20 th century. The 1950s and ’60s
brought significant cultural shifts within the United States driven by the civil rights
movement and the women’s movement. Before the last decades of the 20 th century,
American literature was largely the story of dead white men who had created Art and of
living white men doing the same. By the turn of the 21 st century, American literature had
become a much more complex and inclusive story grounded on a wide-ranging body of
past writings produced in the United States by people of different backgrounds and
open to more Americans in the present day.
Literature written by African Americans during the contemporary period was shaped in
many ways by Richard Wright, whose autobiography Black Boy was published in 1945.
He left the United States for France after World War II, repulsed by the injustice and
discrimination he faced as a black man in America; other black writers working from the
1950s through the 1970s also wrestled with the desire to escape an unjust society and
to change it.
The Black Arts movement was grounded in the tenets of black nationalism and sought
to generate a uniquely black consciousness. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965),
by Malcolm X and Alex Haley, is among its most-lasting literary expressions.
Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), launched a writing career that would
put the lives of black women at its center. She received a Nobel Prize in 1993.
In the 1960s Alice Walker began writing novels, poetry, and short stories that reflected
her involvement in the civil rights movement.
The American novel took on a dizzying number of forms after World War II. Realist,
metafictional, postmodern, absurdist, autobiographical, short, long, fragmentary,
feminist, the stream of consciousness—these and dozens of more labels can be applied
to the vast output of American novelists. Little holds them together beyond their
chronological proximity and engagement with contemporary American society.
In the early decades of the contemporary period, American drama was dominated by
three men: Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee. Miller’s Death of a
Salesman (1949) questioned the American Dream through the destruction of its main
character, while Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(1955) excavated his characters’ dreams and frustrations. Albee’s Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? (1962) rendered what might have been a benign domestic situation into
something vicious and cruel. By the 1970s the face of American drama had begun to
change, and it continued to diversify into the 21 st century.
 Ralph Ellison’s Lorraine
novel Invisible Man Hansberry’s A
(1952) tells the Raisin in the Sun, a
story of an play about the
unnamed black effects of racism in
man adrift in and Chicago, was first
ignored by, performed in 1959.
America.

James Baldwin Gwendolyn

wrote essays, Brooks became, in
novels, and plays 1950, the first
on race and African American
sexuality poet to win a
throughout his life, Pulitzer Prize.
but his first novel,
Go Tell It on the
Mountain (1953),
was his most
accomplished and
influential.

For more information about the Contemporary period:

https://study.com/academy/lesson/contemporary-american-literature-authors-and-major-
works.html
Modern and Contemporary Literature introduction
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HoeTW9HbDg
 A Girl
By Ezra Pound

The tree has entered my hands,

The sap has ascended my arms,
The tree has grown in my breast-
Downward,
The branches grow out of me, like arms.

Tree you are,

Moss you are,
You are violets with wind above them.
A child – so high – you are,
And all this is folly to the world.

Summary:
Ezra Pound likely based this poem on the myth of Apollo, the Sun God, and Daphne, a
nymph. The traditional myth is that Apollo insulted Eros (or Cupid, his Roman name),
saying he was not worthy of his warlike bow and arrow. In response, Eros angrily shot
Apollo with an arrow to induce his love and then shot the nymph Daphne with an arrow
to make her feel hatred. Apollo fell head over heels for Daphne and continuously
followed her, while she loathed him (and all men), desperate to shake his pursuit.
Finally, Eros intervened to help Apollo catch Daphne, but she begged her father, Zeus,
to change her form. He agreed, and thus Daphne transformed into a tree. “A Girl”
details her transformation. In the poem, Apollo accepts Daphne as she is, but laments
her foolish choice to transform into a tree in the last two lines: “A child—so high—you
are/and this is folly to the world.”

Theme:
The classical allusion is another theme of the poem “A Girl” by Ezra Pound. This short
poem could easily refer to the ancient Greek myth of Daphne. As recorded by Ovid in
Metamorphosis and Hesiod in Theogony, the nymph Daphne is the daughter of a river
goddess and Zeus. When the god Apollo becomes enamored with her, Daphne refuses
his advances but to no avail. To escape Apollo, Daphne pleads with her father, Zeus, to
transform her into something that Apollo cannot recognize. Zeus consequently turns
Daphne into a bay tree.
Ezra Pound’s poem borrows heavily from this myth and shows the pivotal moment from
the girl’s point of view. At first glance, this poem can be interpreted as being about a girl
coming into maturity. When considered in the light of the myth, we can see that the first
stanza is written from Daphne’s point of view as she transforms into her new existence.
The second and final stanza is from Apollo’s point of view as he beholds the new form
that the woman of his affection.
About the Author

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (October 30, 1885 – November 1, 1972)

He was an American expatriate poet,

critic, and intellectual who was a major
figure of the Modernist movement in the
first half of the 20th century. He is
generally considered the poet most
responsible for defining and promoting a
modernist aesthetic in poetry. In the early
teens of the twentieth century, he
opened a seminal exchange of work and
ideas between British and American
writers and was famous for the
generosity with which he advanced the
work of such major contemporaries as
Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams,
Marianne Moore, H. D., Ernest
Hemingway, and especially T. S. Eliot.
Pound also had a profound influence on
Irish writers W. B. Yeats and James
Joyce.
His significant contributions to poetry
begin with his promotion of Imagism, a
movement in poetry which derived its
technique from classical Chinese and
Japanese poetry—stressing clarity,
precision, and economy of language, and forgoing traditional rhyme and meter to, in
Pound’s words, “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence
of the metronome.” His later work, for nearly fifty years, focused on the encyclopedic
epic poem he entitled The Cantos.
Ezra Pound became a published poet at the age of eleven when his first poem, The
Limerick got published in a local newspaper in 1896.

For more information about the author: https://www.google.com/url?

sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv
%3DoYQ7dWVI_I8&ved=2ahUKEwiAyLq3q5_tAhXFw4sBHSBJCCIQo7QBMAF6BAgD
EAE&usg=AOvVaw0sY4EvWSmxU8VDyX1k3Ymk
 Expect Nothing
by Alice Walker
Expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
Become a stranger
To need of pity
Or, if compassion be freely
Given out
Take only enough
Stop short of urge to plead
Then purge away the need.

Wish for nothing larger

Than your own small heart
Or greater than a star;
Tame wild disappointment
With caress unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka
For your soul.

Discover the reason why

So tiny human midget
Exists at all
So scared unwise
But expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.

Summary
Expect Nothing’ by Alice Walker teaches how to stay happy without expecting anything
from life. The expectation is the key to all suffering. It keeps human beings in a chain of
lifelong enslavement. The soul becomes weaker day by day and one day it ceases to
exist. That’s why Alice Walker says, “Wish for nothing larger/ Than your own small
heart”. She tries to save readers from the trap. Discovering the reason why human
beings live their lives in utter fear of losing something, will help us to “Live frugally/ on
surprise.” On this note, the poet ends the poem.
Theme
‘Expect Nothing’ by Alice Walker talks about the theme of expectation and self-
consciousness. The theme of expectation is the one major in the poem. The poet
presents an insightful view of expectations. As the title says, the poet is of the view of
expecting nothing from life. It welcomes suffering in life. Whatsoever, human beings
suffer from expecting something bigger than they deserve. Their heart is selfish and
they expect something which doesn’t profit humanity as a poem.
Another theme used in the poem is self-consciousness. A person has to be aware of the
desires appearing in the soul. He/she has to analyze each of them to control the mind.
Otherwise, it will run into the wrong alleys which will bring lifelong suffering in life. For
this reason, Alice Walker talks about the theme of self-consciousness while sharing her
thoughts about expectations.
About the Author
Alice Walker (February 9, 1944 – Present)
Alice Malsenior Walker is her full name.
She was born in Eatonton, Georgia. She
was the youngest of eight children born
to Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant Walker, a
maid, and Willie Lee Walker, a
sharecropper. In 1952, when she was
eight years old, one of her older
brothers accidentally shot her in her
right eye with a BB gun. The family
didn’t have a car and were unable to get
to a doctor for a week after the incident,
leaving her partially blind. Because he
didn’t get her immediate care, Walker
became resentful of her father, leading
to an estrangement that would last the
rest of his life. Before the accident,
Walker had been confident and
outgoing. When scar tissue developed
over her eye, however, she was teased
and taunted by other children. This
made her self-conscious and withdrawn,
and often suicidal. She then began
writing poetry and stories, finding comfort and solace in the solitude it afforded her.
Alice Walker is an African American writer best known for her fiction and essays that
deal with themes of race and gender. Her novel The Color Purple (1982) won the
National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The novel tells the story of a
young black woman in America, through a series of entries that span through 20 years
of her life. Dealing with abuse, rape, racism, sisterhood, feminism, and hatred, The
Color Purple embodies journey violence, beauty, and self-acceptance. She has also
published volumes of poetry, criticism, and nonfiction and is considered largely
responsible for the resurrection of the work of author Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes
Were Watching God). Walker was the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer
Prize for Fiction and was inducted into the California Hall of Fame in the California
Museum for History, Women, and the Arts in 2007. Her books have been translated into
more than two dozen languages.

For more information about the author: https://www.c-span.org/video/?203000-1/depth-

alice-walker

ACTIVITY 1 “FOCUS ON ME”

Each student will find a partner. The teacher will distribute a copy of the poem “Advice
to a son” by Ernest Hemingway. It has some missing words and phrases that the
students need to fill in when they have heard it During the oral reading. The group that
has the highest number of correct words and spelling wins.

Note: The words written in bold below are the 15 missing words i.e. 10 words and 5
phrases

Advice to a Son
By Ernest Hemingway

Never trust a white man,

Never kill a Jew,
Never sign a contract,
Never rent a pew.
Don’t enlist in armies;
Nor marry many wives;
Never write for magazines;
Never scratch your hives.
Always put paper on the seat,
Don’t believe in wars,
Keep yourself both clean and neat,
Never marry whores.
Never pay a blackmailer,
Never go to law,
Never trust a publisher,
Or you’ll sleep on straw.
All your friends will leave you
All your friends will die
So lead a clean and wholesome life
And join them in the sky
 ACTIVITY 2 “CALL ME BY YOUR MEANING”
Directions: Find the meaning of the underlined words and use them in a sentence.
Write it on one whole sheet of paper.

THE LEASH
By Ada Limon

After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear,

the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what's
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can
you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek
bottom dry to suck the deadly water up into
your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to
say, don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish
comes back belly up, and the country plummets
into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn't there still
something singing? The truth is: I don't know.
But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing
like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move
my living limbs into the world without too much
pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight
toward the pickup trucks break-necking down
the road, because she thinks she loves them,
because she's sure, without a doubt, that the loud
roaring things will love her back, her soft small self
alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm,
until I yank the leash back to save her because
I want her to survive forever. Don't die, I say,
and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings
high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay
her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth.
Perhaps, we are always hurtling our body towards
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe
like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together
peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.
 POST TEST

1. When did the Modernist period begin and end?

A. 1910 to 1945
B. 1920 to 1945
C. 1909 to 1944
D. 1911 to 1946

2. When did the Contemporary period begin?

A. 1942
B. 1943
C. 1944
D. 1945

3. Who was the foremost American playwright of the period?

A. O. Henry
B. Eugene O'Neill
C. William Faulkner
D. Robert Frost

4. Who skewered the American Dream in The Great Gatsby?

A. Scott Fitzgerald
B. Richard Wright
C. John Steinbeck
D. William Faulkner

5. His work depicted the difficult lives of migrant workers in Of Mice and Men,1937?
A. Scott Fitzgerald
B. Richard Wright
C. John Steinbeck
D. William Faulkner

6. He exposed and attacked American racism in Native Son 1940?

A. Scott Fitzgerald
B. Richard Wright
C. John Steinbeck
D. William Faulkner

7. He wrote essays, novels, and plays on race and sexuality throughout his life.
A. Ralph Ellison
B. James Baldwin
C. Geoffrey Chaucer
D. Robert Frost
8. Who writes the novel “Invisible Man” (1952) that tells the story of an unnamed black
man adrift in, and ignored by, America?
A. Ralph Ellison
B. James Baldwin
C. Geoffrey Chaucer
D. Robert Frost

9. She began writing novels, poetry, and short stories that reflected her involvement in
the civil rights movement.
A. Alice Walker
B. Gwendolyn Brooks
C. Virginia Woolf
D. Gertrude Stein

10. Who is the first African American poet to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1950?
A. Alice Walker
B. Gwendolyn Brooks
C. Virginia Woolf
D. Gertrude Stein

11. What was the form of Ezra Pound’s first published poem?
A. Free Verse
B. Sonnet
C. Limerick
D. Haiku

12. Who presented a realistic (and enormously influential) vision of small-town America
in Our Town, first produced in 1938?
A. Virginia Woolf
B. Thornton Wilder
C. Ralph Ellison
D. Alice Walker

13. Was an American by birth and, as of 1927, a British subject by choice.

A. John Steinbeck
B. William Faulkner
C. Wille Cather
D. T. S. Eliot
14. He was an American expatriate poet, critic, and intellectual who was a major figure
of the Modernist movement in the first half of the 20 th century.
A. Ezra Pound
B. Toni Morrison
C. James Baldwin
D. Ralph Ellison

15. He used stream-of-consciousness monologues and other formal techniques to

break from past literary practice in The Sound and the Fury (1929).
A. Richard Wright
B. William Faulkner
C. Thornton Wilder
D. James Baldwin

16. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), launched a writing career that would put the
lives of black women at its center.
A. Alice walker
B. Willa Cather
C. Zora Neale Hurston
D. Toni Morrison

17. She was an American writer who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life
on the Great Plains, in O Pioneers! (1913) and My Antonia (1918).
A. Zora Neale Hurston
B. Willa Cather
C. Toni Morrison
D. Alice walker

18. Her best-known work, the play “A Raisin in the Sun” a play about the effects of
racism in Chicago, was first performed in 1959.
A. Toni Morrison
B. Willa Cather
C. Zora Neale Hurston
D. Lorraine Hansberry

19. His debut novel The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926.
A. James Baldwin
B. Richard Wright
C. Ernest Hemingway
D. William Faulkner
20. Who wrote the poem ‘A girl’ where he used the mythical characters of Apollo and
Daphne.
A. Ezra Pound
B. Richard Wright
C. T. Eliot
D. Ernest Hemingway

ANSWER KEY

No. PRETEST POST TEST

1. C A
2. B D
3. A B
4. D A
5. A C
6. B
7. B
8. A
9. A
10. B
11. C
12. B
13. D
14. A
15. B
16. D
17. B
18. D
19. C
20. A
REFERECENCE:

Luebering, J.E. (2004) Periods of American Literature. Britannica.

https://www.britannica.com/list/periods-of-american-literature

Alice Walker's poem Expect Nothing (1944).

https://www.blueridgejournal.com/poems/aw-expect.htm

Walker, A. (2015, November) Expect Nothing by Alice Walker.

https://poemanalysis.com/alice-walker/expect-nothing/#Summary_of_Expect_Nothing

Alice Walker Topic Overview.

https://www.gale.com/intl/databases-explored/literature/alice-walker

A Girl by Ezra Pound

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/ezra_pound/poems/18774

Ezra Pound: Poems Summary and Analysis of “A Girl”

https://www.gradesaver.com/ezra-pound-poems/study-guide/summary-a-girl

Masterpieces of World Literature

http://www.all-art.org/world_literature/pound1.htm

Ezra Pound
https://literarydevices.net/ezra-pound/
VIDEO LINKS

Modern and Contemporary Literature Introduction

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HoeTW9HbDg

Modernism in American Literature

https://study.com/academy/lesson/modernism-in-american-literature.html

Contemporary American Literature: Authors and Major Works

https://study.com/academy/lesson/contemporary-american-literature-authors-and-major-
works.html

Ezra Pound
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://m.youtube.com/watch
%3Fv
%3DoYQ7dWVI_I8&ved=2ahUKEwiAyLq3q5_tAhXFw4sBHSBJCCIQo7QBMAF6BAgD
EAE&usg=AOvVaw0sY4EvWSmxU8VDyX1k3Ymk

In-depth about Alice Walker

https://www.c-span.org/video/?203000-1/depth-alice-walker