Unit 3: Modernism

20th Century

1. Popular facts
   • Women- voting rights, break taboos
   • Stock market
   • Roaring 20s
   • Jazz- New Orleans
   • “Sin” Industry- alcohol, gambling
   • Class Gap
2. World War I
   • Ended in 1918
   • Disillusioned because of the war, the generation that fought and survived has come to be called “the lost generation”
3. The roaring 20s
   • Depression and disillusionment took a less obvious form coming out of WWI
4. The Jazz Age
   • Music promoted by such recent inventions as the phonograph and the radio swept from New Orleans to capture the national imagination
   • Improvised and wild, broke the rules of music
   • “It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.” -Fitzgerald
   • The New Woman
     • Demanded the right to vote and to work outside the home
     • Symbolically cut her hair into a boyish bob and bared her calves in short skirts- became known as flappers
     • drunk alcohol, smoked, went dancing as unmarried women, “scandalous” activities

Modernism- psychological realism

1. “Make it new” -Ezra Pound
   • Abstract expressionism
2. Historical Context 1915-46
   • Reaction to overwhelming optimism preceding WWI and sense of promise introduced by technological advances
     • Tragic devastation proceeding WWI
3. Value differences in the Modern World
   • Themes of Alienation and Existentialism
     • Confused sense of identity and place in the world, the collapse of morality and values, loss of faith, fluctuating, pessimistic, futile, chaotic
4. Characteristics
   • “dis” Themes: disjointedness, disillusionment, disenchantment, disappointment, dissatisfaction
   • Collapse of the American dream: It’s impossible for the individual to triumph and America is no longer a “new Eden,” a land of opportunity
   • Collaboration with the reader: implied themes and piecemeal prose forces readers to draw their own conclusions
     • Reader has to piece together chronology and true image of titular character
   • Fragmentation- texts are fragmented to reflect fragmentation of the modern world (expositions, transitions, resolutions, and explanations are omitted)
   • Cynical Tone
5. Characteristics of Modernism literature
   • Emphasis on bold experimentation in style and form
   • Rejection of traditional themes and subjects. Loss of faith in religion and society.
   • Sense of disillusionment and loss of faith in the American dream
     • Gatsby eg: Nick
6. TS Elliot “Wasteland”

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