4Chirchik State Pedagogical University Current Issues of Modern Philology and Linguodidactics
Staatliche Pädagogische Universität Chirchik Aktuelle Fragen der modernen Philologie und Linguodidaktik
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THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN AMERICAN LITERATURE.
Khusnora Abduvohid qizi Ergashova
Student of CSPU The English language theory and practice Department [email protected]
Scientific advisor : Muxlisa Baxodirovna Kenjayeva e-mail: [email protected]
ABSTRACT
The article deals about American writers and their works , writing how novels and poets and how themes. The 1920s and 1930s saw a new maturity and rich diversity in American literature. But their works were released after 1945. We introduce Frost, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore , E.E.Cummings , William Carlos Williams, Gwendolyn Brooks and another writers. Following the war, notable new playwrights, poets, and novelists came to prominence. We may see information about war, military mindset, military rule, the bombing of Hiroshima and etc in American writers' works
Keywords: The second world war, American literature, writers, novels, poets
INTRODUCTION
The interwar period was referred to as the "second flowering" of American writing by literary historian Malcolm Cowley. The 1920s and 1930s saw a new maturity and rich diversity in American literature, and important works by a number of influential authors from those years were released after 1945. Not quite at their prewar level, but nonetheless notable fiction was produced by Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Katherine Anne Porter; significant poetry was published by Frost, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, E.E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Long Day's Journey into Night, Eugene O'Neill's most renowned drama, was released posthumously in 1956. Robert Penn Warren was a prominent writer of poetry, criticism, and fiction both before and after World War II. His 1947 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the King's Men is regarded as one of the best American political novels. Mary McCarthy rose to prominence as an author and social satirist. Henry Miller's work was important
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when it first came out in the United States in the 1960s, mostly due to its honest examination of sexuality. However, its casual, picaresque, almost autobiographical style also worked well with literature written after the 1960s. Following the war, notable new playwrights, poets, and novelists came to prominence. In truth, there was a slow changing of the guard.
Not only had a new generation emerged from the conflict, but it also had a very distinct ethnic, geographical, and social makeup from the one that had come before it. Younger writers included African Americans, who had just come out of slavery, children of immigrants, many of whom were Jews, and finally women, who would speak with a new voice with the emergence of feminism. Some of the most talked-about writers of the postwar era were gay or bisexual, despite the conservative and even conformist social climate. These writers included Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Paul Bowles, Gore Vidal, and James Baldwin; their dark themes and avant-garde writing techniques paved the way for Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac.
In response to the cultural fallout from World War II—particularly the horrors of technology—two separate groups of novelists emerged. The Young Lions (1948) by Irwin Shaw and The Naked and the Dead (1948) by Norman Mailer were both realistic combat stories, but Mailer's work also explored fascist thought and a power preoccupation as aspects of the military mindset. James Jones, who gathered an incredible amount of meticulously collected information, chronicled the human cost of the war in an ambitious trilogy (From Here to Eternity [1951], The Thin Red Line [1962], and Whistle [1978]) that focused on outcasts who refused to submit to military rule. The bombing of Hiroshima and the actual possibility of human extinction deeply unsettled younger novelists, who felt that the rules of realism were insufficient to convey the horrific consequences of the war. Joseph Heller combined a feeling of Kafkaesque dread with surreal dark comedy to mock the military mindset in Catch-22 (1961). The 1994 follow-up Closing Time was a memorial service for the World War II generation. In Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. combined grim fantasy with numb, loopy humor to chronicle the Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany. Later, Tim O'Brien used this technique masterfully to depict the Vietnam War, which seemed to be a surreal conflict in and of itself, in Going After Cacciato (1978) and the collection of short stories The Things They Carried (1990).The cultural effects of World War II, particularly the horrors of technology, prompted two different groups of novelists to respond.
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In addition to being realistic combat books, Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948) and Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions (1948) both explored fascist thought and a power fixation as aspects of the military mindset. With an ambitious trilogy (From Here to Eternity [1951], The Thin Red Line [1962], and Whistle [1978]) that focused on loners who refused to submit to military discipline, James Jones, gathering an astounding amount of meticulously observed detail, recorded the war's human cost. The bombing of Hiroshima and the actual possibility of human extinction deeply unsettled younger novelists, who felt that the rules of realism were insufficient to convey the horrific consequences of the war. Joseph Heller combined a feeling of Kafkaesque dread with surreal dark comedy to mock the military mindset in Catch-22 (1961). The 1994 follow-up Closing Time was a memorial service for the World War II generation. In Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. combined grim fantasy with numb, loopy humor to chronicle the Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany. Later, Tim O'Brien used this technique masterfully to depict the Vietnam War, which looked to be a surreal struggle in and of itself, in Going After Cacciato (1978) and the collection of short stories The Things They Carried (1990).
The atomic bomb contributed to the rise in black humor and absurdist imagination among American writers. Many believed that the naturalistic method was unable to convey the fast-paced and utterly unbelievable nature of modern life. A very self-aware fiction began to emerge, one that exposed its own literary devices, questioned the nature of representation, and frequently mocked or imitated previous works of fiction rather than actual social events. This new "meta fiction" was greatly influenced by the works of Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges and Russian author Vladimir Nabokov. After obtaining U.S. citizenship in 1945, Nabokov wrote a body of masterfully composed fiction that stood out for its inventive language and formal style. His best English-language books, Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962), are very intimate and emotionally charged despite their artificiality. His most successful English-language novels, such as Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962), are intensely personal works with a powerful emotional undercurrent, despite their artificiality.
In a significant 1967 article titled "The Literature of Exhaustion," John Barth identified himself an American student of Nabokov and Borges. Barth defined his own writing as "novels which imitate the form of the novel, by an author who imitates the role of Author" after rejecting realism as a "used up" tradition. In actuali-
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ty, Barth's first two novels, The Floating Opera (1956) and The End of the Road (1958), were partially realistic in nature. However, in his more ambitious later works, such as The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), Greek and Christian myths in Giles Goat-Boy (1966), and the epistolary novel in LETTERS (1979), he simultaneously parodied and imitated conventional forms. In a similar vein, Donald Barthelme parodied Freudian fiction in The Dead Father (1975) and fairy tales in Snow White (1967). The most popular works of Barthelme were his parodies and short stories that somberly mocked modern fashions; these were most effective when included in Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), City Life (1970), and Guilty Pleasures (1974).
The most prominent American practitioner of the absurdist story came to be Thomas Pynchon. His books and stories were intricately written blends of imagination from comic books, historical details, and mistrust of the counterculture. Pynchon developed intricate "conspiracies" in V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity's Rainbow (1973) by using paranoia as a structuring device and a mental tool. Pynchon's fiction was predicated on the idea that entropy—the breakdown of moral and physical energy—was inevitable. Paul Auster and Don De Lillo, among other writers, were influenced by Pynchon's style in the future. William S. Burroughs, forgoing storyline and cohesive characterization in The Naked Lunch (1959) and subsequent books, employed the consciousness of a heroin addict to paint a horrifying picture of the contemporary world. Black humor and the absurdist fable were also widely used by Vonnegut, Terry Southern, and John Hawkes.
The Beat characters in Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), The Dharma Bums (1958), Desolation Angels (1965), and Visions of Cody (1972); the young Rabbit Angstrom in John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960) and Rabbit Redux (1971); Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951); and the unsettling madman in Richard Yates's potent novel of suburban life, Revolutionary Road (1961), were among the other significant portraits of outsider figures.
Even if authors like Barth, Barthelme, and Pynchon disapproved of the novel's conventional role as a social mirror, many modern novelists were hesitant to give up Social Realism, which they explored in far more intimate ways. Saul Bellow drew into the buoyant, manic energy and picaresque structure of dark humor in books like The Victim (1947), The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), and Humboldt's Gift (1975), all the while
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declaring the necessity of "being human." Although Bellow was one of the few modern writers who truly capture the squalor of urban life, his main characters disapproved of the "Wasteland outlook" he identified with modernism. Modes:
A spiritual vision, derived from sources as diverse as Judaism, Transcendentalism, and Rudolph Steiner's cultish theosophy, found its way into Bellow's later novels, but he also wrote darker fictions such as the novella Seize the Day (1956), a study in failure and blocked emotion that was perhaps his best work. With the publication of Ravelstein (2000), his fictional portrait of the scholar-writer Allan Bloom, and of Collected Stories (2001), Bellow was acclaimed as a portraitist and a poet of memory. Though writers such as Barth, Barthelme, and Pynchon rejected the novel's traditional function as a mirror reflecting society, a significant number of contemporary novelists were reluctant to abandon Social Realism, which they pursued in much more personal terms. In novels such as The Victim (1947), The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), and Humboldt's Gift (1975), Saul Bellow tapped into the buoyant, manic energy and picaresque structure of black humor while proclaiming the necessity of "being human." Though few contemporary writers saw the ugliness of urban life more clearly than Bellow, his central characters rejected the "Wasteland outlook" that he associated with Modernism. A spiritual vision, derived from sources as diverse as Judaism, Transcendentalism, and Rudolph Steiner's cultish theosophy, found its way into Bellow's later novels, but he also wrote darker fictions such as the novella Seize the Day (1956), a study in failure and blocked emotion that was perhaps his best work. With the publication of Ravelstein (2000), his fictional portrait of the scholar-writer Allan Bloom, and of Collected Stories (2001), Bellow was acclaimed as a portraitist and a poet of memory. Later novels by Bellow included a spiritual vision that he drew from sources as diverse as Transcendentalism, Judaism, and Rudolph Steiner's cultish theosophy. However, Bellow also wrote darker fiction, such as the 1956 novella Seize the Day, which is arguably his best work and is a study in failure and blocked emotion. Bellow gained recognition as a portraitist and memory poet following the publication of Collected Stories (2001) and Ravelstein (2000), his fictional portrayal of the scholar-writer Allan Bloom.
Four other notable Jewish authors, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, Bernard Ma-lamud, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, also approached the human situation with forgiveness and humor. Malamud's volumes of short stories, The Magic Barrel
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(1958) and Idiots First (1963), showcased his exceptional talent for dark humor and Hawthornean fable. Impressive works of fiction, his first three novels were The Natural (1952), The Assistant (1957), and A New Life (1961); The Assistant possessed the dark moral depth of his best pieces. Paley's stories merged a cynical knowledge of the ironies of progressive politics and family life with an unconventional, whimsically poetic style. The comic stand-up routine Portnoy's Complaint (1969), which featured savage satire and sexual high jinks about ethnic stereotypes, is perhaps Roth's most well-known work. Although Roth's most famous works are the outrageous satire and sexual high jinks of Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a hilarious stand-up routine about ethnic stereotypes, his later novels, particularly The Ghost Writer (1979), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), and, most importantly, The Counterlife (1987), may be his most enduring contributions. Like several of his later works, such as Operation Shylock (1993) and My Life as a Man (1974), The Counterlife cleverly explores the boundary between fiction and autobiography. His harsh, purposefully provocative 1995 novel Sabbath's Theater, which tells the tale of a self-destructive artist, is his best work from later on. With his trilogy on American history from the 20th century—American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000)—and his counter-historical novel The Plot Against America (2004), which tells the story of the rise of fascism in the US during World War II, Roth gained new readers by returning to realism without sacrificing his previous self-absorption. The Yiddish-language stories authored by the Polish-born Singer earned him the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature. (See also the literature in Yiddish.) From fantastical stories about angels and demons, they developed into realistic fictions set in the Upper West Side of New York City, frequently focusing on the haunting lives of Holocaust survivors. These pieces demonstrated his status as one of the greatest storytellers of the contemporary era.
Another master writer, John Cheever, was longtime editor of The New Yorker magazine and wrote novels and short tales that included a cast of unforgettable eccentrics. In the calm years following World War II, he captured the fears of suburbanites and upper-class New Yorkers. The focus of the works of J.D. Salinger, Richard Yates, and John Updike was the sexual and moral confusion of the American middle class. Updike also explored this theme in his Rabbit series, which consists of four novels: Rabbit, Run (1960) to Rabbit at Rest (1990), Couples (1968), and Too Far to Go (1979). These stories tell of the quiet breakdown of a
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civilized marriage, a theme he returned to in his retrospective Villages (2004).Hubert Selby, Jr. (Last Exit to Brooklyn, 1964) and Nelson Algren (The Man with the Golden Arm, 1949) on the other hand, brutally and candidly captured urban life of the lower class. In a similar vein, City of Night (1963) starred John Rechy as the metropolitan homosexual subculture in America. Cheever himself addressed homosexuality in his jail novel Falconer (1977) and much more openly in his personal journals, which were released posthumously in 1991, as literary and societal mores were liberalized.
https://www.britannica.com/art/American-literature/After-World-War-II
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292012841_The_Second_World_War_A
merican_writing
https: //digitalcommons.library. umaine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi? article=4414&cont ext=etd
https: //www. academia.edu/6604414/The_Second_World_War_American_writing https: // www.jstor. org/stable/2712739
https://www.encyclopedia.com/defense/energy-government-and-defense-magazines/literature-world-war-ii
REFERENCES
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