Literature Section IV: Shorter Selections (ACADEC '25-'26)

Why have the shorter works of literature been collected?

To provide some sense of the wide variety of literary and aesthetic movements that developed during the 1920s

What informed artistic production across all disciplines and genres?

Modernist revolutions

What did artists need new methods to represent?

The radical changes inaugurated by WWI, globalization, and technological innovation

Who wrote “Rope”?

Writer Katherine Anne Porter

Who experimented with new forms of narrative perspective, rejecting classical forms and methods?

Writer Katherine Anne Porter

How did some writers seek to expand the literary imagination?

By dispensing with the artificial distinction between “high-brow” and “low-brow” forms of art and by incorporating other forms of media into their work, such as photography and film

What was often employed to expand the literary imagination?

Focusing on themes and characters that were typically left out of high literary culture

Whose work often involved focusing on themes and characters that were typically left out of high literary culture?

Hart Crane does in the poem “Chaplinesque”

Who wrote the poem “Chaplinesque”?

Hart Crane

Who pushed aggressively against the traditional values of the previous generations, challenging long-held beliefs about what counted as “obscene” and ruthlessly satirizing what they perceived to be the hollow moral codes of the bourgeois middle class?

Journalist H.L. Mencken

What did journalist H.L. Mencken push aggressively against?

The traditional values of the previous generations, challenging long-held beliefs about what counted as “obscene” and ruthlessly satirizing what they perceived to be the hollow moral codes of the bourgeois middle class

Who said that the modernists were not the only ones attempting to “make it new”?

Ezra Pound

What were Black writers also seeking?

Newness: new avenues for publication, new pathways to respect and artistic success, and new appreciation for traditional Black folk cultures that had been either erased or ignored by the white mainstream

What did authors from the Harlem Renaissance and New Negro Movement share a commitment to?

Using art and writing to explore the social and political realities of Black Americans

How did Black writers differ in their approach to explore the social and political realities of Black Americans?

Langston Hughes sought to bring the structures of folks styles like blues and new styles like jazz to mainstream Americans, while Sterling Brown and Zora Neale Hurston set off away from the metropolitan centers to record and honor those cultures as they appeared in their own communities

What did Langston Hughes seek to bring?

Structures of folks styles like blues and new styles like jazz to mainstream Americans

What did Sterling Brown and Zora Neale Hurston do to explore the social and political realities of Black Americans?

They set off away from the metropolitan centers to record and honor those cultures as they appeared in their own communities

What did the 1920s see a rise in?

Explicitly feminist writers

What were explicitly feminist writers in the 1920s?

Hurston, Georgia Douglas, Johnson, and Edna St. Vincent Millay

What did Black writers and feminist writers have in common?

They used their art to demand recognition

Who used literature to question patriarchal norms?

Edna St. Vincent Millay

What did Fitzgerald never stop thinking about?

The Jazz Age, even as it came to a screeching halt in response to the beginning of the GD in 1929

When did the Jazz Age end?

The beginning of the GD in 1929

Who wrote “Echoes of the Jazz Age”?

Fitzgerald

What does the essay “Echoes of the Jazz Age” see Fitzgerald doing?

Looking back on the Jazz Age

What does Fitzgerald admit about his writings on the Jazz Age?

He was sometimes excessive and crass, but there was also something truly revolutionary in the air

The 1920s were a period of tremendous ?

Upheaval

What was the new world defined by in the 1920s?

New rules and new sensibilities

What can help us appreciate how truly radical the 1920s really were?

Reading the work of authors from the period and studying how their work rethought, resisted, and rejected artistic and social conventions

Where did Fitzgerald often publish his essays, like his short stories?

The Saturday Evening Post and in widely read magazines like Esquire

When did Carl Van Vechten create a portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald?

June 4, 1937

What is an example of Fitzgerald’s essay on writing?

“One Hundred False Starts”

When was “One Hundred False Starts” published?

1933

What does “One Hundred False Starts” offer?

A sardonic glimpse into the anxieties and frustrations that can consume a writer, as well as the degree to which singular, transformative events can come to be repeated over and over in an author’s work

What essay is similarly spiced with Fitzgerald’s sly sense of humor and insightful perspective?

“How to Live on $36,000 a Year”

When was “How to Live On $36,000 a Year” published?

1924

What is particularly compelling in Fitzgerald’s “How to Live on $36,000 a Year”?

His descriptions of excessive spending and poor financial decisions, given his reputation for extravagant living

What essay recounts the Fitzgeralds’ well-documented spending spree?

“How to Live on $36,000 a Year”

What is “How to Live on $36,000 a Year” not so much as it is a clever, iconic self-reflection?

It is not so much a plea for pity

Where did the Fitzgeralds’ first go broke?

Broke and facing a mountain of debt from the Plaza hotel

What strategy did the Fitzgeralds’ adopt when they went broke?

Denial: “I wasn’t poor—they couldn’t fool me. Poverty meant being depressed and living in a small remote room and eating a rotisserie on the corner, while I—why, it was impossible that I should be poor! I was living in the best hotel in NY!”

Where does Fitzgerald’s deliberate irony derive from?

How he focalized the narration through his past self, meaning that he is presenting his thoughts at the time of the events depicted

What suggests that Fitzgerald recognizes his naivete of his past self?

His authorial choices in the presentation of that perspective, especially his inclusion of his past self’s exaggerated disbelief

Without explicitly saying so, how is Fitzgerald presenting him?

The butt of his own joke, a joke that also includes a sharp criticism of the freewheeling financial excesses encouraged during the 1920s

What did Fitzgerald say the only lesson he learned from being broke was?

“My money usually turns up somewhere in time of need, and that at the worst you can always borrow—a lesson that would make Benjamin Franklin turn over in his grave”

When did Fitzgerald have a negative impression of him made?

1936

What publication did Michael Mok work with?

New York Post

What was Fitzgerald well aware, and even occasionally critical of?

Both his reputation and his flaws

How is Fitzgerald’s nonfiction writing, and many of his letters, often described?

Thoughtful, self-deprecating, and hesitant—a far cry from the arrogant egotist he was painted out to be in later years

What is F. Scott Fitzgerald most famous for?

HIs novels

What was Fitzgerald most prolific as?

A short story writer

What does Fitzgerald’s nonfiction offer a glimpse into?

The personality of one of the period’s most significant writers, as well as the attitudes and idiosyncrasies of the period that made him famous

Who created “Echoes of the Jazz Age”?

F. Scott Fitzgerald

When was “Echoes of the Jazz Age” created?

1931

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” what happened too soon to write about?

The Jazz Age with perspective

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” what would writers be suspected of for writing about the Jazz Age with perspective?

Premature arteriosclerosis

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” what do many people succumb to when they happen upon any of the Jazz Age’s characteristic words?

Violent retching

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” what describes the characteristic words of the Jazz Age?

Words which have since yielded in vividness to the coinages of the underworld

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” what does Fitzgerald compare the death of the Jazz Age to?

The Yellow Nineties in 1902

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” when were the Yellow Nineties dead?

1902

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” how did present writers look back at the Jazz Age?

With Nostalgia

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” why did writers look back at the Jazz Age with nostalgia?

It bore him up, flattered him and gave him more money than he dreamed of, simply for telling people that he felt as they did, that something had to be done with all the nervous energy stored up and unexpended in the War

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” how long was the Jazz Age?

10 years

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” when did the Jazz Age leap to its spectacular death?

October 1929

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” what happened around the same time as the Jazz Age dying?

The May Day riots in 1919

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” when were the May Day riots?

1919

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” during the May Day 1919 riots, what did the police do?

Ride down the demobilized country boys gaping at the orators in Madison Square

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” what did the police riding down the demobilized country boys gaping at the orators in Madison Square do?

Alienate the more intelligent young men from the prevailing order

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” when does Fitzgerald say that America remembered the Bill of Rights?

When Mencken began plugging it

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where did we know tyranny belonged?

The jittery little countries of South Europe

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” if goose-livered business men had a damaging effect on the government, why had America gone to war?

For J.P. Morgan’s loan

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” what happened because we were tired of Great Causes?

There was no more than a short outbreak of moral indignation

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” what typified the short outbreak of indignation?

Dos Passos’ Three Sodiers [sic]

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” what did Americans begin to have when the newspapers made melodrama out of such stories as Harding and the Ohio Gang or Sacco and Vanzetti?

Slices of the national cake and our idealism

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” what did the newpspaers make melodrama out of?

Stories such as Harding and the Ohio Gang or Sacco Vanzetti

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” what did the events of 1919 leave Americans?

Cynical rather than revolutionary, in spite of the fact that now we are all rummaging around in our trunks wondering where in hell we left the liberty cap—”I know I had it”— and the moujik blouse

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” what were people rummaging in their trunks for?

The liberty cap—”I know I had it”— and the moujik blouse

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” what was especially characteristic of the Jazz Age?

That it had no interest in politics at all

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” what did Fitzgerald say it was an age of?

Miracles, art, excess, and satire

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” what sat upon the throne of the U.S.?

A Stuffed Shirt, squirming to blackmail in a lifelike way

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” who hurried over to represent to us the throne of England?

A stylish young man

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” what did a world of girls yearn for?

The young Englishmen

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” what did the old American do upon the advice of the female Rasputin?

He groaned in his sleep as he waited to be poisoned by his wife

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” who made the ultimate decision in our national affairs?

The female Rasputin

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” what caused the style of man to pass to America?

Americans ordering suits by the gross in London, the Bond Street tailors perforce agreed to moderate their cut to the American long-waisted figure and loose-fitting taste

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” when did Francis the First look to Florence to trim his leg?

The Renaissance

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” who looked to Florence to trim his leg?

Francis the First

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” who did Francis the First look to to trim his leg?

Florence

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” what did 17th century England do?

Aped the court of France

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” what happened 50 years ago?

The German Guards officer bought his civilian clothes in London

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” what was the symbol of “the power that a man must hold and that passes from race to race”?

Gentlemen’s clothes

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” what nation did Fitzgerald say was the most powerful?

The U.S.

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” what did the U.S. do because they were isolated during the European War?

Combing the unknown South and West for folkways and pastimes, and there were more ready to hand

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” what did the first social revelation create?

A sensation out of all proportion to its novelty

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” as far back as what year were the unchaperoned young people of the smaller cities discovering the mobile privacy of the automobile given to young Bill at 16 to make him “self-reliant”?

1915

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” when had young Bill gotten an automobile?

When he was 16

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” why had young Bill gotten an automobile?

To make him “self-reliant”

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” what was at first a desperate adventure even under such favorable conditions?

Petting

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” as early as what year were there references to such sweet and casual dalliance in any number of the Yale Record or the Princeton Tiger?

1917