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more technological, and more mechanized.Modernism embraced these changes.In literature, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) developedan analogue to modern art. A resident ofParis and an art collector (she and her brotherLeo purchased works of the artists Paul Cézanne,Paul Gauguin, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Pablo Picasso,and many others), Stein once explainedthat she and Picasso were doing the same thing,he in art and she in writing. Using simple, concretewords as counters, she developed anabstract, experimental prose poetry. The childlikequality of Stein’s simple vocabulary recallsthe bright, primary colors of modern art, whileher repetitions echo the repeated shapes ofabstract visual compositions. By dislocatinggrammar and punctuation, she achieved new“abstract” meanings as in her influential collectionTender Buttons (1914), which views objectsfrom different angles, as in a cubist painting:A Table A Table means does it not mydear it means a whole steadiness.Is it likely that a change. A tablemeans more than a glasseven a looking glass is tall.Meaning, in Stein’s work, was often subordinatedto technique, just as subject was lessimportant than shape in abstract visual art.Subject and technique became inseparable inboth the visual and literary art of the period. Theidea of form as the equivalent of content, a cornerstoneof post-World War II art and literature,crystallized in this period.Technological innovation in the world of factoriesand machines inspired new attentiveness totechnique in the arts. To take one example: Light,particularly electrical light, fascinated modernartists and writers. Posters and advertisementsof the period are full of images of floodlitskyscrapers and light rays shooting out fromautomobile headlights, moviehouses, and watchtowersto illumine a forbidding outer darknesssuggesting ignorance and old-fashioned tradition.Photography began to assume the status of afine art allied with the latest scientific developments.The photographer Alfred Stieglitz openeda salon in New York City, and by 1908 he wasshowing the latest European works, includingpieces by Picasso and other European friends ofGertrude Stein. Stieglitz’s salon influenced numerouswriters and artists, including WilliamCarlos Williams, who was one of the most influentialAmerican poets of the 20th century.Williams cultivated a photographic clarity ofimage; his aesthetic dictum was “no ideas but inthings.”Vision and viewpoint became an essentialaspect of the modernist novel as well. Nolonger was it sufficient to write a straightforwardthird-person narrative or (worse yet)use a pointlessly intrusive narrator. The way thestory was told became as important as the storyitself.Henry James, William Faulkner, and manyother American writers experimented with fictionalpoints of view (some are still doing so).James often restricted the information in thenovel to what a single character would haveknown. Faulkner’s novel The Sound and The Fury(1929) breaks up the narrative into four sections,each giving the viewpoint of a different character(including a mentally retarded boy).To analyze such modernist novels and poetry, aschool of “New Criticism” arose in the UnitedStates, with a new critical vocabulary. New Criticshunted the “epiphany” (moment in which a charactersuddenly sees the transcendent truth of asituation, a term derived from a holy saint’sappearance to mortals); they “examined” and“clarified” a work, hoping to “shed light” upon itthrough their “insights.”62