1918-1945

 Open your textbooks to 1007 and take out your notebooks and a pencil. Read the quote on page 1007 from Doris
Lessing and respond to the following in your notebook:
 Explain the quote in your own words.
What do the quote and the title of this unit suggest about attitudes during this time period?

 Read the “Historical Background” on pages 1012 and 1013.
 You must have at least 8 bullet points of important information in your notebooks
(15 minutes).

Pre-Modernist World
Ordered: Faith in Leaders
Modern World (Early 20 th
Century)
Chaotic
Meaningful: God
Optimistic: Technology
Stable: Gradual Change
Faith: God cares
Morality/Values
Clear Sense of Identity
Futile
Pessimistic
Fluctuating: Sudden Change
Loss of faith: God?
Collapse of Morality/Values
Who am I? What is my place in the world?

 Major World Events
 World War I (1914-1918)
 The Great Depression (1930-1941)

 World War II (1939-1945)
Around the world, people saw…
 big corporations and mass production
 Widening divide between people and the govt.
 Rise in Revolutionary Ideologies: Communism,
Fascism, and Anarchy
 Powerful and deadly weapons
 International tensions and domestic unrest

 Fractured
 The very structure of society is different. We must think “globally.”
 Isolated and alone
 Nothing is the same after the war .
 Swallowed up and a loss of control


The war and other international forces are beyond any one person’s control .
 Lost in the new global society
They felt as if they were wandering in a void.

 Disillusionment: to free from “illusion,” a loss of naïve faith or trust
 There was an overriding sense of doom
 The world was seen as a violent , vulgar , and spiritually empty place.

 Content
 Class, race, gender, political and economic issues
 Appearances are not always realities
 Perspective
 Cannot rely on the world for stability
 So we must rely on our individual perceptions of the world.
 Form
 Experiments with no capital letters or punctuation, really long sentences, or obscure phrasings (mostly in poetry)

 Watershed date in
American art
 Introduced astonished New
Yorkers, accustomed to realistic art, to modern art;
 Teddy Roosevelt said, “That’s not art!”

Matisse

 Cubism —1909-1911
 Art in which multiple views are presented simultaneously in flattened, geometric way.

 Dadaism –deliberately irrational

 a protest against the barbarism of the War and oppressive intellectual rigidity;
Anti-art
 Strives to have no meaning
 Interpretation dependent entirely on the viewer;
 Intentionally offends.

Duchamp

 Surrealism
 Grew out of Dada and automatism.
 Reveals the unconscious mind in dream images, the irrational, and the fantastic,
 Impossible combinations of objects depicted in realistic detail.

Dali
Magritte

Jackson Pollock

 Futurism — grew out of Cubism.
 Added implied motion to the shifting planes and multiple observation points of the
Cubists;
 Celebrated natural as well as mechanical motion and speed.
 Glorified danger, war, and the machine

Kandinsky
Giacomo Balla

 Randomized http://www.youtub
e.com/watch?v=c
G1SZroFfFY&feat ure=related
 Non-melodic http://www.youtub
e.com/watch?v=Y
NPADyKJQ0&feature=r elated

 Le Sacre Du Printemps by Pina
Bausch Wuppertal Dance Theater

“The Rite of Spring” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXVuVQu
MvgA

Compare to “Swan Lake”
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_5WCZ-XvG4
 The Rite of Spring Riot
 http://classicalmusic.about.com/od/20thce nturymusic/qt/rite-of-spring.htm

 You have15 minutes to discuss the painting as a group and be prepared to answer the following questions in front of the class:
 What story is the painting telling?
 How do the composition, line quality, and color contribute to the painting’s meaning?
 What does the title of the painting contribute to its meaning?
 How does this painting reflect
Modernism?




Read: Introduction to W.B. Yeats (p. 1022)
Listen and Discuss: “The Lake Isle of
Innisfree ” by W.B. Yeats
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UL8vEW-
JTZE&feature=related
Closing Type II Quick Write: Yeats writes this poem about escaping from civilization and living a Thoreau-like lifestyle at Lake Innisfree.
Based on what you have learned about the modern period, why do you think he is expressing these sentiments in this poem?
What is he responding to in his society?

 “It is better, in a paradoxical way to do evil, than to do nothing: at least we exist
…. The worst that can be said of most of our malefactors [wrongdoers], from statesmen to thieves, is that they are not man enough to be damned” – T.S. Eliot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
NOUtZOqgSG8