ModernismModernism

MAJOR WRITERS OF THE MODERN PERIOD (1900-1945) -THE WORLD WARS

Loss of the American DreamLoss of the American Dream

Prior to Modernism, Americans all believed in the “American Dream.”

Three central themes to the American Dream:

1. America is a new Eden – a beautiful. bountiful, and rewarding land.

2. Optimism in the Future – future holds abundance and opportunity

3. Importance of Individual – every person has is important, and should be independent and self-reliant

Loss of the American DreamLoss of the American Dream

During the Modern era, the American Dream seemed lost. Events occurred that made the Dream seem unreachable. People became disillusioned in “happily ever after.”

Historical BackgroundHistorical Background Modern period took place

during and after WWI, 1929 market crash, the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression

  WWI – 1914-1918 – First

time Americans face a bloodbath war. Beginning of the end of innocence for Americans.

Prohibition – 1919 amendment prohibited manufacture/sale of alcohol.

Alcohol was thought to be central social evil.

Background cont.Background cont. 1929 Stock Market Crash –

Economic destruction that spread to a global level.

Plunged the US and the rest of the world into the Great Depression. Many businesses went bankrupt and suicide was at an all time high

 Great Depression – Millions of Americans suffered loss of jobs, poverty similar to third world poverty, starvation, and loss of material items

 

Background Cont.Background Cont.  The Dust Bowl of the 1930s

lasted for eight years dust blew on the southern plains. It came in a yellowish-brown haze from the South and in rolling walls of black from the North.

The simplest acts of life — breathing, eating a meal, taking a walk — were no longer simple. Children wore dust masks to and from school, women hung wet sheets over windows in a futile attempt to stop the dirt, farmers watched helplessly as their crops blew away.

Breakdown of Beliefs And TraditionsBreakdown of Beliefs And TraditionsPost-War writers became skeptical of New

England Puritan tradition and ideas/philosophies.

 Previously, writers were from the North.

During this era, most were from the South, Midwest, or West.

With the breakdown of traditional beliefs and traditions, two movements came about:

Marxism and Psychoanalysis

TrendsTrendsMarxism – beginning of Socialism

and Communism

Psychoanalysis – new field of psychology that was pioneered by Sigmund Freud. The workings of the unconscious mind, human sexuality, and anxiety about how much freedom a person really has.

Psychoanalysis led to Stream of Consciousness – writing style that imitates moment-by-moment flow of a character’s perceptions and memories

ThemesThemes

Disillusionment is a major theme in writings of this time period.

Self –examination and dissatisfaction with self

Paralysis Loss of faith in government/authority

Self-Reliance is a continuing theme – self reliance in the face of disillusionment of government/ authority

Hemingway Hero and CodeHemingway Hero and Code

The principal ideals are honor, courage, and endurance in a life of stress, misfortune, and pain. Often in Hemingway's stories, the hero's world is violent and disorderly; moreover, the violence and disorder seem to win.

The Hemingway Hero act honorably in the midst of what will be a losing battle. In doing so he finds fulfillment: he becomes a man or proves his manhood and his worth.

Hemingway Hero and CodeHemingway Hero and Code

• Belief in the self and such qualities of decency, bravery, competence, and skill as one can summon.

• Important to recognize and snatch up the rare, good, rich moments that life offers, before those moments elude us.

Harlem RenaissanceHarlem Renaissance1. Harlem Renaissance is the name

given to the period from the end of World War I and through the middle of the 1930s Depression, during which a group of talented African-American writers produced a sizable body of literature in the four prominent genres of poetry, fiction, drama, and essay.

 2. The notion of "twoness" , a divided awareness of one's identity, was introduced by W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Harlem Renaissance

Johnson, William. Street Life.

3. Common themes: alienation, marginality, the use of folk material, the use of the blues tradition, the problems of writing for an elite audience.

4. HR was more than just a literary movement: it included racial consciousness, "the back to Africa" movement led by Marcus Garvey, racial integration, the explosion of music particularly jazz, spirituals and blues, painting, dramatic revues, and others.

John Dos Passos (fiction; importance of perspective); • F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; • William Faulkner (Southern fiction); • Ernest Hemingway (international fiction); • Langston Hughes (poet of the Harlem Renaissance); • Zora Neale Hurston (Harlem Renaissance fiction); • Eugene O'Neill (psychological drama); • Modernist poetry: T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings

Modernist writersJohn Dos Passos expressed America's

postwar disillusionment in the novel Three Soldiers (1921), when he noted that civilization was a "vast edifice of sham, and the war, instead of its crumbling, was its fullest and most ultimate expression."

Shocked and permanently changed, Americans returned to their homeland but could never regain their innocence.

Nor could soldiers from rural America easily return to their roots. After experiencing the world, many now yearned for a modern, urban life.

New farm machines such as planters, harvesters, and binders had drastically reduced the demand for farm jobs; yet despite their increased productivity, farmers were poor.

Crop prices, like urban workers' wages, depended on unrestrained market forces heavily influenced by business interests: Government subsidies for farmers and effective workers' unions had not yet become established. "The chief business of the American people is business," President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed in 1925, and most agreed.

In the postwar "Big Boom," business flourished, and the successful prospered beyond their wildest dreams.

For the first time, many Americans enrolled in higher education – in the 1920s college enrollment doubled. The middle-class prospered; Americans began to enjoy the world's highest national average income in this era, and many people purchased the ultimate status symbol – an automobile.

The typical urban American home glowed with electric lights and boasted a radio that connected the house with the outside world, and perhaps a telephone, a camera, a typewriter, or a sewing machine.

Like the businessman protagonist of Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbitt (1922), the average American approved of these machines because they were modern and because most were American inventions and American-made.

Americans of the “Roaring Twenties” fell in love with other modern entertainments. Most people went to the movies once a week.

Although Prohibition – a nationwide ban on the production, transport, and sale of alcohol instituted through the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution – began in 1919, underground “speakeasies” and nightclubs proliferated, featuring jazz music, cocktails, and daring modes of dress and dance.

Dancing, moviegoing, automobile touring, and radio were national crazes. American women, in particular, felt liberated.

Many had left farms and villages for homefront duty in American cities during World War I, and had become resolutely modern.

They cut their hair short (“bobbed”), wore short “flapper” dresses, and gloried in the right to vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1920. They boldly spoke their mind and took public roles in society.

Western youths were rebelling, angry and disillusioned with the savage war, the older generation they held responsible, and difficult postwar economic conditions that, ironically, allowed Americans with dollars – like writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound – to live abroad handsomely on very little money.

Intellectual currents, particularly Freudian psychology and to a lesser extent Marxism (like the earlier Darwinian theory of evolution), implied a "godless" world view and contributed to the breakdown of traditional values. Americans abroad absorbed these views and brought them back to the United States where they took root, firing the imagination of young writers and artists.

William Faulkner, for example, a 20th-century American novelist, employed Freudian elements in all his works, as did virtually all serious American fiction writers after World War I.

Despite outward gaiety, modernity, and unparalleled material prosperity, young Americans of the 1920s were “the lost generation” – so named by literary portraitist Gertrude Stein.

Without a stable, traditional structure of values, the individual lost a sense of identity. The secure, supportive family life; the familiar, settled community; the natural and eternal rhythms of nature that guide the planting and harvesting on a farm; the sustaining sense of patriotism; moral values inculcated by religious beliefs and observations – all seemed undermined by World War I and its aftermath.

Numerous novels, notably Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) and Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise (1920), evoke the extravagance and disillusionment of the lost generation. In T.S. Eliot's influential long poem The Waste Land (1922), Western civilization is symbolized by a bleak desert in desperate need of rain (spiritual renewal).

The world depression of the 1930s affected most of the population of the United States.

Workers lost their jobs, and factories shut down; businesses and banks failed; farmers, unable to harvest, transport, or sell their crops, could not pay their debts and lost their farms. Midwestern droughts turned the "breadbasket" of America into a dust bowl.

Many farmers left the Midwest for California in search of jobs, as vividly described in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens, shanty towns, and armies of hobos – unemployed men illegally riding freight trains – became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for sins of excessive materialism and loose living.

The dust storms that blackened the midwestern sky, they believed, constituted an Old Testament judgment: the "whirlwind by day and the darkness at noon."

The Depression turned the world upside down. The United States had preached a gospel of business in the 1920s; now, many Americans supported a more active role for government in the New Deal programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Federal money created jobs in public works, conservation, and rural electrification. Artists and intellectuals were paid to create murals and state handbooks. These remedies helped, but only the industrial build-up of World War II renewed prosperity.

After Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, disused shipyards and factories came to bustling life mass-producing ships, airplanes, jeeps, and supplies.

War production and experimentation led to new technologies, including the nuclear bomb. Witnessing the first experimental nuclear blast, Robert Oppenheimer, leader of an international team of nuclear scientists, prophetically quoted a Hindu poem: "I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds."