American Modernism (1910 – 1945) “Make It New” -Ezra Pound Modernist Poet.

American Modernism(1910 – 1945)

“Make It New”-Ezra Pound

Modernist Poet

BeginningsThe 1893 World’s Fair in

Chicago was organized to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World.

Ironically, this monumental tribute to the past would herald the beginning of another entirely New World, one marked by profoundly different values, goals, and, indeed, core beliefs.

The Harbingers of Change Monuments to the Modern Period Two structures summarized the

direction the country would take:

The Ferris Wheel

The Eiffel Tower

Essentially, these two marvels of beams and rivets – materials of the Industrial Age - gathered all the era’s technical knowledge and industrial know how and for the first time aimed them to the sky.

Indeed, the Ferris wheel, with its circular shape, its endless spinning, its tireless revolving, would for many come to epitomize the Modern age.

In Previous Times . . .

In earlier phases, capitalist economic development acquired a kind of “heroic” dimension: – the self-made person became the cornerstone of

American business mythology. (An outgrowth of Franklin’s 13 Virtues)

– the American Dream was inevitably linked to middle-class ideals of thrift, the Protestant work ethic and self-reliant perseverance.

However, after the Civil War, the rise of large-scale organizations made the individual’s role much more ambiguous.

And in the Modern Era . . .

• What was built in Chicago was a monument not only to Columbus but to a society that would become increasingly dominated by the power of corporations and other large-scale organizations that were …

• overtaking traditional confidence in the individual’s ability to shape their own destinies.

. . . And Here’s the Rub

• It remains a central paradox of modern history that while the United States has always been suspicious of concentrated power –

a fear that lies behind the American Revolution itself and founding documents such as the federal Constitution

• it has also given birth to the modern business mega corporation, beginning with the railroads.

Andrew Carnegie, founder of U.S. Steel, the nation’s first billion dollar corporation.

The Robber Barons of the 19th Century

Jay CookFinancier

Leland StanfordRailroad

Henry Morris FlaglerOil

Frank W. WoolworthMerchandising

J.P. MorganBanking

Jay GouldRailroads

John. D. RockefellerStandard Oil

James Duke BuchananTobacco

Charles SchwabSteel

Frederick WeyerhaeuserTimber

Other Factors that added to the Modernist Period

As the century opened and at about the same time large-scale corporations began to etch away at the idea of self-determination, intellectual currants had been working to undermine long-held beliefs.

In England, Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859. This work displaced traditional ideas of God as the creator of the universe, suggesting that man arose not from a divine plan but by a process of continuous change from a lower to a higher, often better, state. This was the theory of evolution. Charles Darwin – Monkey Man

And still add to the mix . . .In Vienna, Austria – Sigmund Freud

rocked the world with his ideas about sexuality and his theories of personality, ideas that came to be referred to as Freudian. In The Interpretation of Dreams and other studies on the workings of the mind, Freud suggested that men and women were ruled by dark forces of which they were unaware, particularly, the drive toward sex and death (eros and thanatos).

At first Freud’s ideas were ridiculed but acceptance of them grew until they became widespread in the culture. Freud’s ideas had – and continue to have - a profound influence on many artists, writers and thinkers.

He opened a window on the unconscious — where, he said, lust, rage and repression battle for supremacy — and changed the way we view ourselves- TIME Magazine

And still add to the mix . . .

Like Freud’s studies, Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity – also in circulation at the time – opened a new window on the human mind.

Both Freud and Einstein seemed to confirm that people were not in control of their lives. … the genius among geniuses who

discovered, merely by thinking about it, that the universe was not as it seemed. –TIME Magazine

Other Forces that Contributed to the Modernist Temper

• Urbanization• Industrialization• Immigration• Technological

Evolution

1928 - The Birth of Sliced Bread

World War I – The Age of Uncertainty

But more than any factor or combination of factors, the Modern period came to be defined by a single, shattering experience: World War I.

For many who experienced it, nothing could have been less genuine than America’s involvement. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson was elected to a second term largely on the strength of a campaign slogan: “He kept us out of the war.” By 1917, Wilson got America into a war that would usher in the Modern era with a vengeance.

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson – “He almost kept us out of the war.”

Mechanized SavageryUnlike previous armed conflicts,

where soldiers squared off on the battlefield and obeyed time-honored rules of engagement, World War I demonstrated the horrific potential of new technologies of destruction.

Poison gas, submarines, armored tanks, airplanes and machine guns now did the work of killing. Mechanization also made death far more accurate and far less personal.

Devastation, Uncertainty . . . By the time the war ended in 1917:

– Nearly 10 million soldiers and almost as many civilians had been killed.

– Europe laid in ruins, its national boundaries redrawn.

But the devastation was more than physical. WWI was a brutal assault on the orderly civilization of the nineteenth century. The world was left a collective sense of despair and a widespread feeling of uncertainty. All that people had known as fair, moral and correct had been challenged and shattered. The world had become fragmented.

“How could all this death and destruction have been allowed to happen?”

It appeared that Good had lost the battle against Evil.

“You are all a Lost Generation.”The American writer Gertrude

Stein used these words to describe the intellectuals, poets, artists, and novelists who rejected the values of post World War I America and relocated to Paris to live a bohemian lifestyle.

The description, however, could easily describe an entire group of men and women who experienced the horrors of World War I and came out of it shaken – having lost their faith in government, God, and most of their peers and elders. The Lost Generation thought

Western Civilization was coming to an end.

1918

. . . New Money and New Ways to Spend It

The end of the war signaled an end of idealism and ushered in an era marked by – economic growth– technological advancement – new ways to have fun.

During the Roaring Twenties, people had more money and more things to buy. Radios carried the new sound of jazz into American homes. Cars gave people mobility and freedom. Movies abounded. People visited nightclubs and speakeasies where illegal alcohol was plentiful.

The Paradox of the Time

It was an age of great disillusionment – people found the American Dream not only unavailable but shallow, empty, vulgar and unfulfilling.

America had no idols. The idols of American life:– small town goodness– the decency of the common man – faith in business – devotion to religion

were broken and gone. . .

So . . .

Let’s Party If World War I deprived humanity of its faith and made daily living meaningless, then style – the way in which one lived – becomes all important.

People in the 1920s could not redeem the conditions of existence, but they could take advantage of the ride. This ride was often littered with wild escapades and wild drinking and partying. To a shattered individual, what one did mattered less than how one did it.

“How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm, now that they’ve seen Paree”

-Popular 1920’s song

“The Jazz Age” was a term coined by Fitzgerald in the short story “May Day.” It was coined less for the music popular in that period than for the random and improvisational way people led their lives.

It began in May of 1918 and ended with the stock market crash of 1929. The Jazz Age brought about one of the most rapid and pervasive changes in manners and morals the world has ever seen, changes that we are still wrestling with today.

It was a period when the younger generation – both men and women –rebelled against the values and customs of their parents and grandparents.

After all, the older generation had led thousands of young men into the most brutal and senseless war in human history. People had seen death, so when they came back, they were determined to have a good time.

Out with the Old

• The saxophone replaces the violin

• Skirt hemlines went up• Corsets came off• Women started smoking• Prohibition, which was

supposed to end drinking, only reshaped it into a secret – and therefore more desirous way to have fun.

• Public saloons, now illegal, were replaced with the private cocktail party

• Men and women began drinking together.

• Enormous parties began to thrive

• Hoodlums became millionaires in a few months by controlling the bootleg liquor business.

The Face of the Modernist Era• Rejection of Romanticism and the

advent of moral uncertainty– the catastrophe of World War I– (the wasteland and valley of

ashes)

• Embracing the new i.e. mechanization and industrialisation

– Gatsby’s car– The phone– new (replaceable) fashions– mass entertainment

• Using new means of Representation

– the development of cinema – the mass media and advertising

(T.J. Eckleburg)

Modernist Art“Keep it New”

-Ezra Pound

Modernist Poet

Art of this period was a direct response to these social and cultural changes.

Disillusioned by the war and appalled by the materialism of the day, artists in all categories rejected the past as barren and useless. They sought instead a completely original form.

Artists tried to capture new perceptions of reality.

Modernist Art

In its disregard and disdain of the past, modernist art is highly experimental, highly expressionistic. Indeed, often it appears purposely chaotic, fragmented and disjointed.

Modernist LiteratureThe modernists period

extends over 35 years and encompasses a variety of artists and movements, including the vibrant Harlem Renaissance. Still it shares several common characteristics across time and practitioners.

Characteristics of Modernist Literature• Artists threatened by a massive

uncaring society• Alienated, isolated characters

– Withdrawn, puzzled or worried– Unresponsive– Hurt by unnamed forces

• Experimental styles of expression and form

• Often pessimistic commentaries on the American experience

• Dark summations on man’s nature• A sense of futility, world weariness and

disillusionment.• No narrative voice with explanations or

details – the reader is left alone to navigate the moral landscape.

• Duality or double nature of situations• Conflict between the old and the new

TECHNIQUES IN MODERNIST WORKS

The modernists were highly conscious that they were being modern—that they were “making it new”—and this consciousness is clear in the Modernists’ radical use of a kind of formlessness:– Collapsed plots– Fragmentary techniques– Shifts in perspective, voice, and tone– Stream-of-consciousness point of view– Associative techniques

Literary Forces of the Modernist Period

Scott Fitzgerald e. e. cummings John Dos Passos Langston Hughes T. S. Eliot Gertrude Stein

William Faulkner Ernest Hemingway Robert Frost Zora Neale Hurston Eugene O’Neil Dorothy Parker

F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby

• F. Scott Fitzgerald, (1896-1940), was the leading writer of America's Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, and one of its glittering heroes.

• The chief quality of Fitzgerald's talent was his ability to be both a leading participant in the high life he described, and a detached observer of it.

• Few readers saw the serious side of Fitzgerald, and he was not generally recognized as a gifted writer during his lifetime. While he lived, most readers considered his stories a chronicle and even a celebration of moral decline. But later, readers realized that Fitzgerald's works have a deeper moral theme.

Fitzgerald BiographyFrancis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St.

Paul, Minnesota, on Sept. 24, 1896. He attended Princeton University, where he wrote amateur musical comedies. He left Princeton in 1917 without a degree. Years later, Fitzgerald remarked that perhaps he should have continued writing musicals, but he said,

"I am too much a moralist at heart, and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form, rather than entertain them.“

Fitzgerald won fame and fortune for his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920). It is an immature work but was the first novel to anticipate the pleasure-seeking generation of the Roaring Twenties. A similar novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1921), and two collections of short stories, Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), increased his popularity.

Critics generally agree that Fitzgerald's early success damaged his personal life and marred his literary production. This success led to extravagant living and a need for a large income. It probably contributed to Fitzgerald's alcoholism and the mental breakdown of his wife, Zelda.

The success also probably led to his physical and spiritual collapse, which he described frankly in the long essay "The Crack-Up" (1936). Fitzgerald spent his last years as a scriptwriter in Hollywood and died there on Dec. 21, 1940. A few years after his death, his books won him the recognition he had desired while alive.

Highlights of Fitzgerald’s Life• Descendent from “prominent”

American stock • Missed WWI (just) • Met Zelda but couldn’t afford to

marry her • Published This Side of Paradise in

1920 at the age of 24: instant stardom

• Married Zelda, his “golden girl”• Wrote “money-making” popular

fiction for most of his life, mainly for the New York Post: $4000 a story (which equates to about $50,000 today)

• He and Zelda were associated with high living of the Jazz Age

• Had a daughter, Scotty

• Wrote what is considered his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, in Europe in 1924-25

• Gatsby contains a great deal of autobiographical material and references to the 1920’s.

• Zelda has an affair and Gatsby poorly received

• The Great Gatsby went out of print in 1939.

• Attempts to earn a clean literary reputation were disrupted by his reputation as a drunk

• Zelda becomes mentally unstable• Moved to Hollywood as a screen writer• Dies almost forgotten aged 45• Zelda perished in a mental hospital fire

in 1948• Only became a “literary great” in the

1960’s

… As You Read, Keep In Mind• The idea of the American

Dream• Foils

– People– Places – Ideas

• Character Development• Symbols• Setting• Weather• Colors• References to the past• Nick as a narrator• Gatsby as a metaphor