Jonathan Collins

The poem chosen for this assignment is the ‘Ozymandias’ by romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. In the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFla8cWOC88) actor Brian Cranston reads the poem. It was recorded as a trailer for one of the last episodes of the television series, Breaking Bad. The series, like the poem is concerned with hubris and downfall.

Ozymandias was chosen to explicate the arrogance and demise of teacher-come-drug baron Walter White. The persona adopted by Cranston in the video is akin to Ozymandias himself and offers a clue to the outcome of the series, which is ultimately the fall of an empire.

Shelley wrote this sonnet in friendly competition with poet Horace Smith, who wrote a similar poem with an identical theme. Smith’s poem was entitled ‘On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below’. Both poems are based on the writings of the historian Diodorus Siculus.

If one of the principal characteristics of modernist painting is the moving away from conventional artistic techniques then Joan Miró must be considered a forerunner in the 20th century canon of modernist artists. The chosen artefact is a bit unusual in that it is uncharacteristically sinister for a Miró painting. In fact, many of his works from this period have darker undertones. His usual bright flamboyant colours are replaced by harsher, darker tones. It is however characteristically modernist. It is a highly abstract work and goes against the previously held belief that art must depict the real world. It is not art for art’s sake, but an expression of personal and national anguish felt by the majority of Spaniards during the civil war.

In this essay I am going to examine in what way gender was a concern for a selection of modernist writers and that while in many ways modernism was alive with misogynistic and male-centric literature, there were a few who went against the grain and empowered women. Firstly, I will examine Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen’s role as a ‘proto-modernist’ and early feminist after which I will assess Virginia Woolf’s contribution to twentieth century modernist literature as one of the first modern feminist writers and critics. Finally, I will explore American author John Steinbeck’s depiction of women in Depression era America as portrayed in his documentary novel ‘The Grapes of Wrath’.