The Moderns:
1914-1939
“Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.”
-Willa Cather

 Life during the early part of the 20 th
Century was marked by tremendous change.
 Political
 Social
 Psychological
 Spiritual
Each decade brought the new upheaval, and each upheaval required a new adjustment in attitude.

During this period of time, look for answers to these questions :
 What is the American Dream?
 What happened to the American
Dream in the early twentieth century?
 In what ways did modernism challenge tradition-especially in what people valued in art and literature?

 World War I (the Great War) was one of the events that changed the
American voice in fiction.
 The country lost its innocence
 Many Americans began to question authority
(Modernist Movement)
- Disillusionment with traditions that seemed to have become spiritually empty.

 American as a new Eden
 A belief in progress
 Triumph of the individual

 America is a promised land of beauty, unlimited resources, and endless opportunities.
The Great Gatsby
-
-
(F. Scott Fitzgerald) 1925
- Great wealth and pursuit of pleasure had become ends in themselves for many people.
Gatsby was a self-made man whose wealth has mysterious & illegal origins.
His extravagant gestures are in pursuit of a dream .

 The American birthright in one of ever-expanding opportunity.
 Progress is a good thing.
 We can optimistically expect life to keep getting better & better.

 The independent, self-reliant individual will triumph.
 Everything is possible for the person who places trust in his or her own powers and potential.
 Idea was championed by Ralph Waldo
Emerson who said, “Trust the universe and trust yourself.”

A Crack in the World:
Breakdown of Beliefs and Traditions
 The devastation of WWI & the economic crash a decade later severely damaged the three tenets of the American Dream.
 Writers became skeptical of the New England Puritan tradition & the gentility that had been central to the literary ideal.
 Most writers came from New England, where American started but modernist writers came from the South, the Midwest, and the West.

 Marxism
 Psychoanalysis



Russia during WWI – Marxist revolution toppled & murdered the anointed ruler, the czar.
Karl Marx’s socialistic beliefs powered the revolution in 1917.

 The capitalist system could not be fixed and had to be destroyed to make way for a classless society.
 All property would be owned by everyone as a community and people would receive equal benefits and rewards.
 Sounds great, right? However, they followed the mantra:
“All men are equal, but some men are MORE equal than others.”
 Hence, Animal Farm

 Some Americans believed that certain elements of Marxism would provide much-needed rights to workers.

 Vienna, Austria (1856-1939)
 Sigmund Freud, the found of psychoanalysis
 He said our actions were influenced by the subconscious
 New understanding of human sexuality and the role it plays in our unconscious thoughts.
 His beliefs left little room for humans to have free will.

 A literary result of this study of psychoanalysis was a narrative technique called stream of consciousness.

Stories weren’t told chronologically
 Attempted to imitate the moment-by-moment flow of a character’s perception & memories
 James Joyce in Ulysses
 Katherine Anne Porter
 William Faulkner

 Prohibition - In 1919, the Constitution was amended to prohibit the manufacture and sale of alcohol.

Prohibition Added the Following
Words to Our Vocabulary…
 Bootlegger
 Speak-easy
 Cocktail
 Flapper
 Gangster
 Jazz
 F. Scott Fitzgerald gave the time period a new name:
The Jazz Age

 1920- Women got the right to vote
 Gave women an opportunity to move into artistic, intellectual, and social circles.

 Many American writers & artists left
America to enjoy life to the fullest in Europe.
 Living was cheap in Paris, the French Riviera, and Italy
 Life was more exotic there
 They could drink alcohol freely
 American Expatriates were a hint that something had gone wrong with the American Dream

 F. Scott Fitzgerald
(& wife Zelda)
 Ernest Hemingway
 Ezra Pound
 Gertrude Stein

 Ernest Hemingway was the most influential of the post-WWI writers.
 He strove for plain style; reduced literary style to the bare bones-reflects his past as a news reporter for the
Kansas City Star
 Introduced a new kind of hero-
The Hemingway Hero

 Man of action (warrior, tough competitor)


Has a code of honor, courage, & endurance
He shows “grace under pressure”
 He has thorough disillusionment-at the mysterious center of the universe lay nothing at all-this is Hemingway’s own philosophy.
 Belief in self: decency, bravery, competence, and skillfulness.

Modern Voices in Poetry:
A Dazzling Period of Experimentation
 The last traces of British influence were washed away and the
American writers began a period of experimentation.
 Many writers went to Europe to soak up artistic influences there.
 Influenced by modernist artists like Matisse & Picasso

 Poets created works that invited new ways of seeing and thinking (Ezra Pound,
T.S. Eliot, & E.E. Cummings)
- Symbolism
- Imagism

 Many American poets rejected the revolution of modernism and stayed home in America.
 Their individual accents revealed the regional diversity and character of American life.

Example: Robert Frost’s poems embodied “New England speech” and subjects.

 In the 1920s, a group of black poets focused on the unique contributions of African-American culture to
America.
 Poetry based its rhythms on spirituals and jazz and blues based its diction on the street talk of the ghettos.

Why is it called the Harlem
Renaissance?
 Geographical center of the movement was in Harlem, a
New York City neighborhood.
 People here were too long ignored, patronized, or otherwise shuffled to the margins of American art.
 When this poetry joined with music echoing from New
Orleans, Memphis, & Chicago, it became part of the Jazz Age.

 Writers of this era experimented boldly with forms and subject matter.
 Also tried to find answers to the following questions:



Who are we?
Where are we going?
What values should guide us on the search for our human identity?
 This echoes the philosophy of humanism in the European
Renaissance.