American Lit Definition of Modernism and Three Examples Indeed, creating a true and solid definition of modernism is exceptionally difficult, and even most of the more scholarly critical accounts of the so-called modernist movement tend to divide the category into more or less two different movements, being what is known as "high modernism," which reflected the erudition and scholarly experimentalism of Eliot, Joyce, and Pound, and the so-called "low modernism" of later

Old Western Frontier -- the Pervasiveness of the Western Frontier Hero in the American Imagination The heroic American national character and the search for an ungoverned American frontier are fused in the America national imagination. America envisions itself as a wide-open place, rather than a contained place of tradition like Europe. America is seen in the natural cultural mythos as an area of limitless expansion. Thus, there are little consequences

" By commerce, one should read the relationship between master and slave in general. Here, Jefferson speaks as a true man of the Enlightenment who cannot accept the degrading submission of a human being. On the other hand, some of his arguments against slavery are related to manners. Manners should probably be here less regarded as the social conventions of the time, but rather as some sort of collective conscience that

Waves of immigrants -- the Irish fleeing famine, the Italians, the Germans, the Scandinavians, the Chinese -- came to America, in the hopes of beginning their own businesses, starting their own farms and making life better for their children. America seemed like a place where the past did not define one's status in the present: yet even though many of these ethnic groups made inroads into America's social fabric and

Hero One of the most pervasive archetypes in literature is the hero. The Greeks presented a complex and very human type of hero, often referred to as the tragic hero. Readers can relate especially to tragic heroes because tragic heroes have flaws. Their flaws make tragic heroes more human, and are effective protagonists even when their plans fail. The hero who is semi-divine or divine is a less compelling story, given

American Psycho In his seminal work American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis uses the character of the yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman in order to criticize American consumer culture while simultaneously challenging the reader to confront his or her own responses to that culture, responses that Ellis seems to suggest are only removed from the sociopathic actions of Bateman in a manner of degree, rather than kind. To see how Ellis uses