Lecture 14: Modernism from the Margins Continued
Edna St. Vincent Millay
• uses Petrarchan sonnet
◦ 14 lines
◦ group of 8 lines, then groups of six lines
◦ ABBA ABBA
◦ objectification of women as untouchable objects of desire
◦ has a volta, or shift, in it
• became image/icon of the New Woman in the 20s
The Harlem Renaissance
• spokesman of racial injustice
• democracy/America is an idealized future
◦ something to come
◦ renders it impossible to realize
• Questions related to modernism
◦ what is "new"?
◦ what is the value of the new?
◦ who is the audience?
◦ should literature reinforce bourgeois values and language? Or should
literature shatter those values?
◦ what is the form of the work?
• Questions related to Du Bois and Johnson
◦ how should African Americans be represented in art?
◦ what characteristics should an African American cultural leader have?
◦ who is the audience of the work?
• "the period when the negro was in vogue" (Langston Hughes)
◦ like a fad, temporary
◦ what happens to the Negro identity when that fad fades?
◦ "vogue" describes relation to white audiences
▪ something outside of you has to make you "in vogue"
• The Harlem Renaissance
◦ no one cohesive idea of it
◦ defined by the internal and external conflicts that surround it
◦ by no means limited to Harlem
▪ but the writers spent periods of their lives in Harlem
◦ still difficult to publish full volumes, so using newspapers and magazines
• The New Negro Movement
• Question: What is implied in each of these names?
• The New Negro (1925), Alan Locke
◦ "The New Negro" (1919), A. Phillip Randolph
▪ describes a new generation of African Americans post-WWI who
weren't afraid of militant and radical action
◦ critiques the "old negro for: ▪ political conservatism
▪ accomodationist politics
▪ opposition to organized labour
▪ dependence on white benefactors who disdain the working class
◦ need something old for something new
• appeals to European culture by using the word "Renaissance"
◦ Negro identity is not something new, but something that is
• jobs opened for African Americans in the North when white men left for WWI
• "We are bound by all sorts of customs that can come down as second-hand
soul clothes of white patrons. We are ashamed of sex and we lower our
eyes when people talk of it. Our religion holds us in superstitio