Modernism (1901-1950)

1. A Collective Powerpoint Modernism (1901-1950)

2. Guiding Historical Forces • Education Act of 1870 -- Brought scads of literate people into the marketplace. • World War I (1914-1918) • Industrialization/Urbanization • Rejection of Victorian appearances • Scientific Discovery • World War II (1940’s)

3. “In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.” - Ernest Hemingway “You are all a lost generation” - Gertrude Stein

5. Artists deeply disturbed by WW I and wrote about the absurdity of war, specifically, and generally about the increasingly chaotic and and absurd nature of modern life Expressed that alienation through radically different experimental literary forms or highly unusual subject matter vs. traditional styles. Guiding Historical Forces

6. Reaction to a century of relative conviction and optimism (Victorianism) • Skeptical irresolution; the rejection of accepted truths • Bleakness of tone • Stoicism • good lies not in external objects, but in the state of the soul itself, in the wisdom and restraint by which a person is delivered from the problems of everyday life. Qualities of Modernism

7. Traditional stabilities of society, religion and culture weakened • Challenged traditional ways of structuring and making sense of human experience. • Rapid pace of social and technological change; • Mass dislocation of populations by war, empire and economic migration • Mixing in close quarters of cultures and classes in expanding cities Modernism Cont’d

8. Disrupted the old order, Upended ethical and social codes Cast into doubt previously stable assumptions about self, community, the world and the divine (see also GOD, the Almighty, a higher power or Michael Jordan). Modernism Cont’d

9. Modernist Features • Ambiguity • Multiple Truths • Fragmented Narration • Stream-of-Conscious Writing • Multiple Point of Views • Feeling that life is meaningless

10. The Expatriates In the 1920s black American writers, artists, and musicians arrived in Paris and popularized jazz in Parisian nightclubs. They include Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes After World War II - jazz musicians Charlie Parker and Dexter Gordon; and writers Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Chester Himes.

11. The Expatriates • American literary notables who lived in Paris in the 1920s (the so-called Lost Generation), including Gertrude Stein, Robert McAlmon, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Anais Nin and Henry Miller.

12. T.S. Eliot • Born 1888 • “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock” 1917 • “The Waste Land” 1922 • Four Quartets 1943 • Died 1965

13. “Humankind Cannot Stand Very Much Reality” T.S. Eliot

14. Ezra Pound • Born 1885 • “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” 1923 • Friend to T.S. Eliot

15. James Joyce • Born 1882 • Published Dubliners 1913 • Published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 1915 • Published Ulysses 1922 • Published Finnegan’s Wake • Died 1941

16. “One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.” James Joyce

17. Virginia Woolf • Born1882 • Mrs. Dalloway 1925 • To the Lighthouse 1927 • A Room of One’s Own 1929 • The Waves 1931 • Died1941

18. If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you can’t tell it about other people. Virginia Woolf

19. Pablo Picasso • Born 1881 • Befriended by the patron/writer Gertrude Stein while staying in Paris • His artistic style is known as Cubism