Ch. 21: Between the World Wars
Featured Works
T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”
Pablo Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles de Avignon
and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler
Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory
Overview of jazz, blues, and rock and roll
Other Important Works
W.B. Yeats’s “Second Coming”
Franz Kafka’s“Metamorphosis”
Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own
Dada Manifesto
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
Terms
• Modernism (in
literature)
• Kafkaesque
• Cubism
• Surrealism
• Harlem
Renaissance
• Dada
Background
• In what ways did World War I contribute to
the unsettling of traditional values?
• W.B. Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming”
exemplifies the mood of the time for many.
Read the poem (next slide) carefully.
– Falcon/falconer: symbols of high culture and strength
– Spiritus Mundi: “spirit of the world”; Yeats believed in something
like a collective consciousness of images that creative minds
draw upon
– Yeats believed that history is cyclical, with good and bad periods,
in 2000-year cycles
The Second Coming
1920
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Literary Modernism
• What is the modernist temper in literature?
• For our purposes, remember the following
names and titles:
– T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”
– Franz Kafka, “Metamorphosis”
– Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own
Read the excerpts from “The Wasteland“
on the next few slide.
Excerpts from The Wasteland,” by T.S. Eliot
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
...
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying "Stetson!
"You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
"Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
"Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
"Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
"Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
"You! hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frere!"
...
When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself,
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,
He said, I swear, I can't bear to look at you.
And no more can't I, I said, and think of poor Albert,
He's been in the army four years, he wants a good time,
And if you don't give it him, there's others will, I said.
Oh is there, she said. Something o' that, I said.
Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
[continued on next slide—no break]
If you don't like it you can get on with it, I said.
Others can pick and choose if you can't.
But if Albert makes off, it won't be for lack of telling.
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
(And her only thirty-one.)
I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face,
It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
(She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.)
The chemist said it would be alright, but I've never been the same.
You are a proper fool, I said.
Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, I said,
What you get married for if you don't want children?
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.
...
Art
Cubism
– What are the characteristics of this artistic
movement?
– How would you use Picasso’s paintings to
demonstrate the characteristics of
Cubism?
Art, continued
Surrealism
– What is the basic argument of Sigmund
Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams?
– How did Andre Breton define
“Surrealism”?
– How is Salvador Dali’s painting The
Persistence of Memory “surrealist”?
Later literary developments
Irreverence towards structure in any form: What was Dada a reaction to,
and how was it defined in the Dada manifesto of 1918?
Excerpts from the Dada manifesto, this slide and next:
•
. . . I'm writing this manifesto to show that you can perform contrary
actions at the same time, in one single, fresh breath; I am against
action; as for continual contradiction, and affirmation too, I am
neither for nor against them, and I won't explain myself because I
hate common sense. . . .
If I shout:
Ideal, Ideal, Ideal
Knowledge, Knowledge, Knowledge
Boomboom, Boomboom, Boomboom
I have recorded fairly accurately Progress, Law, Morals, and all the other
magnificent qualities that various very intelligent people have
discussed in so many books in order, finally, to say that even so
everyone has danced according to his own personal boomboom,
and that he's right about his boomboom: the satisfaction of
unhealthy curiosity; private bell-ringing for inexplicable needs; bath;
pecuniary difficulties; a stomach with repercussions on to life; the
authority of the mystical baton formulated as the grand finale of a
phantom orchestra with mute bows, lubricated by philtres with a
basis of animal ammonia. . . . There is no ultimate Truth.
Futuristic literature: Because of the anxiety about our values
and where our culture was headed, some important novels
were written that imagined what the future would be like.
One of the best of these novels is Brave New World, by Aldous
Huxley. In addition to the paragraphs in the book, go to the
following link to read the one-paragraph description of the
book and plot summary. Then click on the “Chapter 1” link
and read the first six paragraphs to get a bit of a feel for the
novel.
http://www.bibliomania.com/0/0/100/1956/frameset.html
Blues and Jazz Music
Before we discuss jazz music, please go to the following link and
read a brief introduction to the story of blues music:
http://afroamhistory.about.com/od/bluesmusic/a/bluesmusic.ht
m
We will listen to some blues in class.
Now, from your textbook: What were the origins of jazz, and how
influential has this form of music been? Who was Duke Ellington,
and how did he help integrate jazz with the general culture?
How is rock music related to these earlier forms of music?
Finally, what was the “Harlem Renaissance”?