The Modern Age
(1915-1946)
Historical Background
• US rose to become a world power
politically and economically
• However, Roaring Twenties, the Great
Depression, WWI and WWII significantly
affected the mood of the American people
• Created fragmentation in society, sense of
isolation of individuals, and sense of
disenchantment with government
– People no longer trusted their government
• Devastation from wars, depression,
economy replaced America’s characteristic
optimism with disillusionment
• Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
John Dos Passos lost their sense of
idealism
– Replaced with overriding feeling of doom and
a view of the world as vulgar, violent, and
spiritually empty.
Expatriates
• Because many people were disillusioned
with life after W W I and II, many American
writers became expatriates
• Left US to live elsewhere (Paris)
• Gertrude Stein called them the “lost
generation”
– Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound, Eliot
– Searching for a new source of hope
Birth of Modernism
• After W W I, most people lost sense of
optimism; felt uncertain about future and
disillusioned
• Modernism---the international movement
that developed in the postwar period
where authors felt the need to break with
the past and “make it new”
New ways of seeing demand new
ways of saying
• Unconventional literary techniques such
as no punctuation, no capital letters,
endless sentences, and obscure phrasing
made works difficult to understand
Case in point…
• Gertrude Stein once called the comma
“servile” and refused to have anything to
do with it.
• Thurber often fought with his editor Harold
Ross about commas.
– Thurber saw commas as so many upturned
office chairs unhelpfully hurled down the wideopen corridor of readability.
(Truss 68 ,80)
• Stein again…the question
mark was “the most
completely uninteresting”
of all marks of
punctuation:
– It is evident that if you ask
a question you ask a
question but anybody who
can read at all knows when
a question is a question
[…] I never could bring
myself to use a question
mark, I always found it
positively revolting, and no
very few do use it. (1935)
Characteristics of Modernism
• Capture modern life (fragmented)
• Attempt to find common ground in a world no
longer unified in belief
• Emphasize individual perception and
experiences as an attempt to find shared
meaning of humanity
• Omitted traditional forms of stories (exposition,
resolutions, etc..)
• Themes were implied, not stated (forced readers
to draw their own conclusions)
Authors and their messages
• Wharton and Fitzgerald show the values and
appearances of the privileged are false and
destructive
• Sinclair Lewis criticized hypocrisy in lives and
values of middle class
• Dreiser showed precarious lives of working class
• Steinbeck glorified lives and values of oppressed
outcasts living in poverty
• Hemingway and John Dos Passos cast doubt on
martial glory and patriotism
• Henry James emphasized sensibility and human
consciousness
Literary Traditionalism
• Despite new ideas and new techniques,
many writers continued American tradition
• Continued to use characteristic American
themes combined with modernist
techniques
• Regionalism and realism still dominate
traditional writing
Pluralism in literature
• Pluralism---existence of more than one
group, culture, religion, sex, etc. in
American literature
• Predominantly male view point gave way
to ethic minorities, women, and religious
groups
Harlem Renaissance
• 1921---rise of African
American writers
• Harlem, New York
Consciousness of Experience
• Despite fragmentation and sense of isolation,
modern writers were attempting to find common
ground in which we all recognize a shared
humanity
• Society is after all made up of its people and
each person has a story to tell
• Experiences are exact details of what makes us
human
If one becomes conscious of human
consciousness, one begins to put the world back
together into meaning we can share
New Approaches
• Stream of Consciousness Technique
– Re-creating the natural thought flow of a
character (not necessarily linear)
– Ideas presented are done in a way that is
natural for the character (natural associations)
• Incongruity
– Joining of opposites to create a situation that
is totally unexpected
Incongruity
• the juxtaposition of the "expected" with the
"unexpected." For example, the one-liner
is based on this structure: "Never raise
your hand to your children; it leaves your
midsection unprotected."
• serious sentence meets unexpected
ending. The shock is our recognition of
this incongruity. There is virtually no
opportunity to warn the reader.
Modern Poetry
• Experimental in form
– Beginnings in Whitman’s new world view
• Owes a debt to symbolist movement
(French late 19th cent.)
• Some reworking of traditional forms
• Pervasive themes---”the age of anxiety” &
disillusionment
– Nature and possibilities of human relationships
and the complex emotional and psychological
elements that bear on them
Symbolist Movement
• All external objects are symbols of deeper, truer
reality
• Unrelated things are connected by surprising,
secret links
• Poet avoids directly stating meaning instead
relying on the mood created by highly
suggestive symbols
• Variety of styles
• Relies more on free association than on logical
sequence
Poets and their work
• Imagists: Ezra Pound, William Carlos
Williams, E. E. Cummings (typographical
appearance of poetry on page is as
important as poems sound and meaning of
its words)
• T. S. Eliot---man who cannot love and
spiritually barren world that only God can
infuse with meaning
• Pound---pervasive greed corrupts the
possibility of fruitful human relationships