Literature Section II (ACADEC '25-'26)

What Black artists made shorter works about the legacies of slavery, racism, and exclusion in the U.S.?

Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Sterling A. Brown

What word surprisingly only appear a few times in The Great Gatsby?

Jazz

Who wrote that “the Renaissance was an effort to secure economic, social, and cultural equality with white citizens, and the arts were to be used as a means of achieving that goal”?

Samuel A. Floyd

What activists and educators worked hard in the decades before the Great Migration?

W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Countee Cullen

What widely read magazines could African-American poets get published in?

“The Crisis” and “Opportunity”

Where could musicians experiment and perform in Harlem?

The Cotton Club

Who describes the earliest versions of jazz as a mixture of genres?

Michael Broyles

What did Michael Broyles say jazz was a mixture of?

Blues, ragtime, brass bands and their marches, gospel, and a little Tin Pan Alley

What year did jazz start sweeping the country?

1917

Why did jazz start sweeping the country in 1917?

After early recordings by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band became hits

What was Jazz originally spelled like in Original Dixieland Jazz Band?

Jass

What did conservative music fans think about jazz?

It was too loose and irregularly rhythmed

Who helped popularize jazz through their recordings and live performances?

Joe “King” Oliver, Fletcher Henderson, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington

Who was inspired by Jazz’s continued success into the 1920s?

Langston Hughes and Sterling A. Brown

Who sang in expressive, nontraditional ways about the difficulties of growing up impoverished and marginalized?

Blues musicians Mamie Smith and “Mississippi” John Hurt

Who said that the blues were a “musical ethos”?

Richard A. Long

What is modernism?

Transformations in dance, visual arts, literature, photography, and cinema

Whose psychoanalytic theories proactively challenged long-held beliefs about human development and desire?

Sigmund Freud

What were Ezra Pound’s professions?

Modernist poet and critic

Who said that artists felt a pressure to “make it new”?

Ezra Pound

What did American modernist poets eschew in favor of original, non-rhyming forms and musical or conversational style?

Traditional forms, rhyme schemes, and meter

Who implemented nonlinear, cinematic, and journalistic storytelling techniques?

John Dos Passos

Who focused on “pure” language, dispensing of traditional narrative and nonrepresentational strategies?

Gertrude Stein

Who rejected the overly descriptive language of Victorian and naturalist writers?

Ernest Hemingway

What’s the most influential piece of modernist writing?

T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”

Who wrote “The Waste Land”?

T.S. Eliot

What did The Waste Land use to upend long-held beliefs about the purpose and nature of poetry?

Use of collage and disjunction, free verse, an unsentimental impersonality, and references to high and low culture

Who was F. Scott Fitzgerald not as experimental as?

Dos Passos, Stein, Eliot, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, or James Joyce

Who described Fitzgerald writing as a “skeptical depiction of American progress”?

James H. Meredith

Who contributed immensely to the cultural developments of the 1920s?

Black Americans

Despite significant barriers, Black American artists made influential and prolific contributions to?

Music, literature, the visual arts, theater, cultural criticism

What did the influential and prolific contributions of Black American artists help shape?

American culture while paving the way for future Black writers and thinkers

What will we pay particular attention to in terms of Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Sterling A. Brown?

Their use of innovative aesthetic forms

Whose image is often understated in popular images of the Roaring Twenties?

Black American artists

Whose contributions are underrepresented relative to their white counterparts?

Black American artists

What is considered to be the definitive Jazz Age novel but features no significant Black characters and no meaningful engagement with jazz itself, either as a musical form or as a cultural phenomenon?

The Great Gatsby

What is The Great Gatsby considered to be?

The definitive Jazz Age novel but features no significant Black characters and no meaningful engagement with jazz itself, either as a musical form or as a cultural phenomenon

How many women were photographed in Harlem in 1925?

3

When were three women photographed in Harlem?

1925

Where were 3 women photographed in 1925?

Harlem

What relationship is The Great Gatsby’s not especially strong to?

TGG and Fitzgerald’s relationship to the music and Black aesthetic tradition that gives the period its name

What is the most famous and well-studied Black artistic movement in American History?

The Harlem Renaissance

Is there some scholarly disagreement about when to date the “official” beginning of the Harlem Renaissance?

Yes

Is there any debate that the Harlem Renaissance reflects a historically precedented rise in the publication, promotion, and acceptance of Black literature, music, and aesthetic criticism?

No

What does the Harlem Renaissance irrefutably reflect a historically unprecedented rise in?

The publication, promotion, and acceptance of Black literature, music, and aesthetic criticism

What did the hard work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Countee Cullen lead to?

The New York borough of Harlem becoming an epicenter for a vibrant artistic community in the early 1920s

What did critics and scholars work together to theorize about in the 1920s?

The nature and purpose of Black artistic expression

Is Harlem Renaissance able to be covered in depth in the resource?

No, it’s far too vast and complex of a cultural phenomenon

Can the Harlem Renaissance be reduced to a singular set of aesthetic principles?

No, it features far too many different artists and ideas

What is essential to emphasize about the Harlem Renaissance?

The contributions to the culture of the period

In what period were Black writers, for the first time in American history, achieving something close to the fame and recognition of their white coutnerparts?

The Harlem Renaissance

What unique cultural contributions especially helped shape the experiments and interests of artists across the country?

Their use of folk traditions and their literary use of musical developments like jazz and the blues

What stands out as a defining development of the 1920s?

Jazz

Though the origins are murky, where did jazz likely develop?

In part out of musical experiments performed in New Orleans

Who likely developed jazz in New Orleans?

Musicians who had grown up listening to a variety of forms of music from a variety of cultures

Was everyone a fan of jazz?

No

What did Langston Hughes and Sterling A. Brown experiment with?

New poetic forms in an effort to replicate how jazz musicians used repetition, improvisations, and unique rhythms in their music

What did jazz musicians use in their music?

Repetition, improvisations, and unique rhythms in their music

When was a photograph of Ezra Pound taken?

1920

Who took a photograph of Ezra Pound in 1920?

E.O. Hoppe

Where was the picture of Ezra Pound in 1920 taken?

London, United Kingdom

What Blues musicians paved the way for writers to try out new ways to express themselves?

Mamie Smith and “Mississippi” John Hurt

What is John Hurt’s nickname?

Mississippi

What is Richard A. Long’s profession?

Music historian

What do Blues musicians who paved the way for writers to express themselves explain for Richard A. Long?

For Black artists of the time, the blues were not just a musical form with a recognizable shape and sound but also a “musical ethos”

What is a “musical ethos”?

A way of thinking about the purpose of art

What signaled a new era in the popularity and importance of Black artists in the U.S.?

The emergence of jazz, the blues, and the Harlem Renaissance writers

Why was the emergence of jazz, the blues, and the Harlem Renaissance writers significant?

It helped carve out a space for a uniquely African-American aesthetic

What did Black artists formalize, rather than simply creating something aesthetically pleasing?

New ways to express the collective sorrows and traumas—but also the joys and triumphs—of their community

Without the contributions of what would the 1920s not have roared to the same extent, and there would certainly not have been a “Jazz Age” at all?

The emergence of jazz, the blues, and the Harlem Renaissance writers

What practices did the 1920s also feature significant changes in, along with major revolutions in music and social behavior?

Literary and artistic practices

What was the most significant literary revolution in the 1920s?

Modernism

What does modernism in general refer to?

The efforts of artists to come to terms with the radical changes occurring across the world

What radical changes were occurring across the world in the 1920s?

• Rapid technological innovations

• Developments in psychology and social sciences

• Increased levels of urbanization and the subsequent sensations of alienation and isolation

• The destruction of traditional ideas of home, country, and region

• The unprecedented violence and destruction of WWI

In wake of all the radical changes happening in the 1920s, artists felt a pressure to do what?

Break from old traditions and “make it new”

What did artists experiment with to “make it new”?

Techniques, forms, and subject matters

What literary strategies does literary modernism generally include as direct presentation of?

Experience, economical use of language, symbolism, and an informal, colloquial style

What kind of writer was Ernest Hemingway?

An experimental writer

Was Fitzgerald’s writing overly experimental?

No

Was Fitzgerald influenced by trends in experimentation in the 1920s?

Yes, even though he wasn’t overly experimental

What was Fitzgerald especially influenced by in experimental writ

Many of the philosophical concerns of the modernist period are reflected in what writer’s works?

Fitzgerald

What philosophical concern of the modernist period is particularly reflected in Fitzgerald’s writings?

A “skeptical depiction of American progress”

Who illustrated the cover of The Great Gatsby?

Francis Cugat

What describes the cover made by Francis Cugat?

A blue-black sky punctuated by neon lights and dominated by the floating lips and eyes of a mysterious woman

When did the movie version of The Great Gatsby release?

2013

Who directed the movie version of The Great Gatsby?

Baz Luhrmann

Who starred in The Great Gatsby movie?

Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan

Who said that The Great Gatsby has become part of America’s “Iconographic lingua franca”?

Cultural critic Greil Marcus

Who coined “The Jazz Age”?

Fitzgerald

What were well-dressed men and women called in the 1920s?

“Sheiks” and “flappers”

What instruments did bands play in jazz clubs?

Pianos, trumpets, and upright basses

What are examples of dapper gangsters?

Al Capone and John Dillinger

What did Al Capone and John Dillinger wield?

Tommy Guns

What is the most visually recognizable period in American history, besides the 1920?

The 1960s

What were the memorable pictures of counter-culture in the 1960s?

“Flower children” and “hippies”

Who created “Where there’s smoke there’s fire”?

Russell Patterson

What does “Where there’s smoke there’s fire” depict?

A fashionably dressed flapper

When did America enter WWI?

April 6, 1917

What period is notable for experiencing the highest rates of inflation ever seen in U.S. history?

1916-1920