Modernism In The Day Of The Locust 1939 By Nathanael West

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Frankfurt (Main), course: Decadence and Moderism in the Late 20th Century American Cinema, language: English, abstract: Jonathan Veitch asserts in the preface of his book American Superrealism that critics have had problems in placing Nathanael West within the literature of the 1930s and American literature in general. They understood him for example as "a poet of darkness", as "an apocalyptic writer", as "a homegrown surrealist", as "a writer of the left", as a "universal satirist", in a way as "the prototype of the contemporary Jewish-American novelist" (Wisker 1-2) or as a realistic writer (Martin, see Roberts). Although some of these characterizations are contradictory, they all fit because they reflect different facets of the author, or rather his work. West combined all these elements and probably even several others in his writings. His "style was never constant. At times his pictorial technique closely resembles collage [but also] cartoon strips, movies, and several different schools of painting, as well as such non-graphic visual arts as the tableau and the dance." (Reid 9) Taking the (though not planned) final result of his development as a writer, his last book The Day of the Locust (1939) as an example, I want to show in my essay that at least one of West's books does not "fall between the different schools of writing" (Wisker 2), as he once noted. He is certainly a representative of modernism, the "literary movement" and "point of view" of his time (see O'Conner) not only because a "struggle for definition is part of what those years are about" (Wisker 121). Nathanael West was influenced by the same historical events and used many of the strategies other contemporary writers employed to express his way of seeing the world. I will point out the features of modernism in the novel because, as Randall Reid states, "[i]n a century which has made expe

Seminar paper from the year 2001 in the subject American Studies - Comparative Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Augsburg (Lehrstuhl für Amerikanistik), course: Proseminar: Novels of the American Modernism, language: English, abstract: Although Nathanael West’s novel The Day of the Locust did not receive much attention when published in 1939, it is today considered one of the best and most revealing novels about Hollywood. Its reviews are outstanding and it has therefore become one of the landmarks in American writing. The Day of the Locust demonstrates the fragility of the American Dream and presents it from various perspectives. It points out the cruel world of film industry using devices of irony and satire. Therefore it resembles a “nightmare vision of humanity destroyed by its obsession with film”. West took the title of the novel from the Bible. In Revelation, people turn into locusts in order to follow their aim of destroying the whole world. They do not kill immediately, though, but only sting and hurt in order to let their victims die slowly. These locusts can be compared to the film industry in Hollywood which also exploits and slowly kills its people. Besides, in the Bible Jeremiah prophesies a necessary ending of the world which ought to lead mankind to a new life and a rebirth. In the novel, this image is taken up again. This aspect will be thoroughly discussed later, though. The concept of apocalypse can be found throughout the novel and beside violence and decadence, the devaluation of love is a prominent theme, too. West illustrates the moral decay of characters on the fringe of the entertainment industry, that are Homer Simpson, Faye Greener and Tod Hackett. Each character has come to California seeking fame or health in the shining city Los Angeles, and each suffers from his or her own history of desperation and shattered dreams. Producers had already thought about turning West’s novel into a film in the early 1950’s. As they feared that most of the satirical view would get lost, however, the film was not shot until 1974, when the famous director John Schlesinger committed himself to the adaptation. [...] This survey focuses on the translation from novel to film, compares and contrasts differences, and reveals the different perspectives of the characters. Furthermore, it will both examine the use of film techniques in Schlesinger’s adaptation and the meaning of symbolism in the film. Last but not least, a few commonly invoked critical viewpoints of the film will be discussed.

Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture explores the emergence of what Nancy Bombaci terms «late modernist freakish aesthetics» - a creative fusion of «high» and «low» themes and forms in relation to distorted bodies. Literary and cinematic texts about «freaks» by Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers subvert and reinvent modern progress narratives in order to challenge high modernist literary and social ideologies. These works are marked by an acceptance of the disteleology, anarchy, and degeneration that racist discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries associated with racial and ethnic outsiders, particularly Jews. In a period of American culture beset with increasing pressures for social and political conformity and with the threat of fascism from Europe, these late modernist narratives about «freaks» defy oppressive norms and values as they search for an anarchic and transformational creativity.

Gale Researcher Guide for: Late Modernism and the Fiction of Freaksterism: Nathanael West is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.

The Eye's Mind significantly alters our understanding of modernist literature by showing how changing visual discourses, techniques, and technologies affected the novels of that period. In readings that bring philosophies of vision into dialogue with photography and film as well as the methods of observation used by the social sciences, Karen Jacobs identifies distinctly modernist kinds of observers and visual relationships. This important reconception of modernism draws upon American, British, and French literary and extra-literary materials from the period 1900-1955. These texts share a sense of crisis about vision's capacity for violence and its inability to deliver reliable knowledge. Jacobs looks closely at the ways in which historical understandings of race and gender inflected visual relations in the modernist novel. She shows how modernist writers, increasingly aware of the body behind the neutral lens of the observer, used diverse strategies to displace embodiment onto those "others" historically perceived as cultural bodies in order to reimagine for themselves or their characters a "purified" gaze. The Eye's Mind addresses works by such high modernists as Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, and (more distantly) Ralph Ellison and Maurice Blanchot, as well as those by Henry James, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nathanael West which have been tentatively placed in the modernist canon although they forgo the full-blown experimental techniques often seen as synonymous with literary modernism. Jacobs reframes fundamental debates about modernist aesthetic practices by demonstrating how much those practices are indebted to the changing visual cultures of the twentieth century.

Two classic short stories, one about a male reporter who writes an advice column, and the other, about people who have migrated to California in expectation of health and ease.

This book charts the Hollywood studio system's genesis, international dominance, and self-understood demise by way of its influences on modernist literature in the United States. It shows how the American film industry's business practices and social conditions inflected the form of some of the greatest works of prose fiction and non-fiction.

A “breezily entertaining” look at the comic couple who hobnobbed with Dorothy Parker, S. J. Perelman, Bennett Cerf, and other luminaries of their day (The New York Times Book Review). Nathanael West—author, screenwriter, playwright—was famous for two masterpieces: Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, which remains one the most penetrating novels ever written about Hollywood. He was also one of the most gifted and original writers of his generation, a scathing satirist whose insight into the brutalities of modern life proved prophetic. Eileen McKenney—accidental muse, literary heroine—grew up corn-fed in the Midwest and moved to Manhattan’s Greenwich Village when she was twenty-one. The inspiration for her sister Ruth’s stories in the New Yorker under the banner of “My Sister Eileen,” she became an overnight celebrity, and her star eventually crossed with that of the man she would impulsively marry. Together, Nathanael and Eileen had entrée into a social circle that included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dashiell Hammett, Katharine White, and many of the literary, theatrical, and film luminaries of the era. But their carefree, offbeat Broadway-to-Hollywood love story would flame out almost as soon as it began. Now, with “a great marriage of scholarship and gossip” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune), this biography restores West and McKenney to their rightful place in the popular imagination, offering “a shrewd portrait of two people who in their different ways were noteworthy participants in American culture during one of its liveliest periods” (Los Angeles Times). “Opens a window onto the lives of writers in 1930s America as they struggled with anxieties, pretensions, temptations and myths that confound our culture to this day.” —Salon.com “The first to fully chronicle and entwine these careening lives, Meade forges an engrossing, madcap, and tragic American story of ambition, reinvention, and risk.” —Booklist, starred review