20th Century American Literature: Modernism and the Lost Generation Notes

20th Century American Literature: Modernism in Fiction - The Lost Generation

Modernist Trends

  • Symbolism: Use of symbols to represent ideas or qualities.

  • Impressionism: Capturing sensory impressions and fleeting moments.

  • Art Nouveau: Decorative style characterized by organic motifs and flowing lines.

  • Post-Impressionism: Subjective interpretation of reality, moving beyond impressionism.

  • Expressionism: Expressing subjective emotions and experiences.

  • Cubism: Fragmenting objects and depicting them from multiple viewpoints.

  • Futurism: Emphasizing speed, technology, and the dynamism of modern life.

  • Imagism: Focusing on precise and clear imagery.

  • Vorticism: Abstract art movement related to cubism and futurism.

  • Dadaism: Anti-art movement rejecting logic and reason.

  • Surrealism: Exploring the realm of dreams and the subconscious.

The Ambivalence of Modernism

  • Celebration of progress: Modernism embraced technological advancements and societal change.

  • Nostalgia for past values: Modernism also expressed a longing for traditional values and a sense of loss.

Modernist States of Mind

  • Alienation and Identity Crisis:

    • Middle of the crowd.

    • Represented by Edvard Munch's The Scream (1895).

  • Fragmentariness of Perception:

    • Illustrated by Cubism, which breaks down objects into fragmented forms.

  • Existence of Alternative Realities: Explored by Surrealism, which delves into dreams and the subconscious.

Impressionism

  • Painting impressions through the work of Claude Monet's Water Lily Ponds.

  • Monet's Water Lilies: Examples cited from Musée d'Orsay, Paris (1899) and Boston Museum of Fine Arts (1900).

  • Monet's house at Giverny: Located 80 km away from Paris, where Monet lived from 1883-1926.

  • Water lily ponds at Giverny: Subject of many of Monet's paintings.

The Colony of American Artists at Giverny (1887-1914)

  • American expatriates in France: American artists sought international recognition and were drawn to the artistic environment of Paris.

  • Colony Founders: Willard Metcalf, Louis Ritter, Theodore Wendel, and John Leslie Breck.

  • Robert Vonnoh: Poppies in France, 1888, Musée d'Art Américain Giverny.

  • Richard Emil Miller: The Pool.

The Modernist Portrait

  • Pierre-Auguste Renoir: The Two Sisters (1881), Chicago Art Institute.

  • Renoir: La première sortie (1876), National Gallery London.

  • Mary Cassatt (1844-1926):

    • Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge, 1879, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

    • The Child's Bath, 1893, Chicago Art Institute.

    • Lydia Leaning on Her Arms, Seated in Loge (1879).

Cubism

  • Definition: An early 20th-century school of painting and sculpture that portrays subject matter through geometric forms without realistic detail.

  • Emphasis: Abstract form at the expense of other pictorial elements, often using intersecting cubes and cones.

  • Key Figures: Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who developed Cubism in Paris between 1907 and 1914.

  • Characteristics: Rejection of traditional perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and chiaroscuro; emphasis on the flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane; depiction of radically fragmented objects from multiple viewpoints simultaneously.

  • Pablo Picasso: Les demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907.

  • Georges Braque: Violin and Candlestick, 1910, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

  • Gertrude Stein (1874–1946):

    • Tender Buttons (1914) - prose poems (Objects, Food, Rooms).

    • ‘a translation of the art of the cubists into prose poems’

Surrealism

  • Originated in the late 1910s and early '20s as a literary movement experimenting with automatic writing (automatism).

  • Sought to release the unbridled imagination of the subconscious.

  • Officially consecrated in Paris in 1924 with André Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism.

  • Became an international intellectual and political movement.

  • Influences: psychological theories and dream studies of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and the political ideas of Karl Marx (1818–1883).

  • Key Figures: André Breton (1896–1966), Louis Aragon (1897–1982), Paul Éluard (1895–1952), and Philippe Soupault (1897–1990).

  • Using Freudian methods of free association to draw upon the private world of the mind, traditionally restricted by reason and societal limitations, to produce surprising, unexpected imagery.

  • The cerebral and irrational tenets of Surrealism find their ancestry in Dadaism.

Surrealism in Painting

  • Key Artists:

    • Max Ernst (1891–1976).

    • André Masson (1896–1987).

    • Salvador Dalí (1904-1989).

    • Joan Miró (1893-1983).

    • Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978).

    • Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968).

    • Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky, 1890–1976).

    • Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964).

  • Salvador Dalí: The Persistence of Memory, 1931, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

  • Max Ernst: L'Ange du Foyer (1937).

  • Salvador Dalí and Man Ray in Paris, 1934, photograph by Carl Van Vechten.

  • Man Ray: The Misunderstood (1938), collection of the Man Ray Estate.

The Stream of Consciousness Technique

  • Definition: A literary technique that records the multifarious thoughts and feelings of a character without regard to logical argument or narrative sequence.

  • The writer attempts to reflect all the forces, external and internal, influencing the psychology of a character at a single moment.

  • Origin: First employed by Édouard Dujardin (1861–1949) in his novel Les lauriers sont coupés (1888).

  • Notable Writers: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner.

  • Term Origin: The phrase “stream of consciousness” to indicate the flow of inner experience was first used by William James in Principles of Psychology (1890).

  • William James: “The Stream of Consciousness”, Psychology, Ch. XI, Cleveland & New York: World, 1892

  • Virginia Woolf: “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” (Modern Fiction, in V. Woolf, The Common Reader, 1925)

Modernism’s Second Generation: The Jazz Age

  • American expatriates in Europe.

  • The “Roaring” Twenties: prosperity, frivolity, optimism and loosening morals (Tindall).

  • Disillusionment and shock.

  • Challenge to the old values of progress, faith, reason and optimism.

The Lost Generation

  • F. Scott Fitzgerald (1920): “here was a new generation, … grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken”.

  • Gertrude Stein: “You are all a lost generation”.

  • 1931: Fitzgerald called the past decade of economic boom and high personality “The Jazz Age” (an age of bootlegging, flappers and bohemians): a new lifestyle + a new life philosophy.

Defining the Twenties: F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age”

  • “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.”

  • “A whole age was going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure. The precocious intimacies of the younger generation would have come about with or without prohibition – they were implicit in the attempt to adapt English customs to American conditions.”

Jazz

  • “The word jazz in its progress toward respectability has meant first sex, then dancing, then music. It is associated with a state of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of big cities behind the lines of a war. To many English the War still goes on because all the forces that menace them are still active – Wherefore eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. But different causes had now brought about a corresponding state in America – though there were entire classes (people over fifty, for example) who spent a whole decade denying its existence even when its puckish face peered into the family circle. (…) The honest citizens of every class, who believe in a strict public morality and were powerful enough to enforce the necessary legislation, did not know that they would necessarily be served by criminals and quacks, and do not really believe it to-day.” (Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age”).

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

  • This Side of Paradise (1920)

  • The Beautiful and the Damned (1922)

  • Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

  • The Vegetable (play, 1923)

  • The Great Gatsby (1925)

  • Tender Is the Night (1934)

  • The Last Tycoon (1941)

The Great Gatsby: The Valley of Ashes

  • Description: A desolate area between West Egg and New York, characterized by ashes growing like wheat into ridges, hills, and grotesque gardens; ash-grey men move dimly through the powdery air.

The Great Gatsby: T. J. Eckleburg

  • Description: Gigantic blue eyes behind enormous yellow spectacles, overlooking the valley of ashes; a faded advertisement of an oculist.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

  • 1925 - In Our Time (stories)

  • 1926 - The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta)

  • 1929 - A Farewell to Arms

  • 1932 - Death in the Afternoon

  • 1933 - Winner Takes Nothing (stories)

  • 1935 - Green Hills of Africa

  • 1937 - To Have and Have Not

  • 1940 - For Whom the Bell Tolls

  • 1952 - The Old Man and the Sea

  • 1964 - A Moveable Feast – (posthumous)

The Hemingway Hero

  • Religion replaced by his own code of human conduct: a mixture of hedonism and sentimental humanism.

  • Carpe diem

  • Nada

  • Expressing himself in few words, often charged with meaning (the core of Hemingway’s minimalist fiction- writing style).

“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1938)

  • Kilimanjaro: A snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, the highest mountain in Africa; its western summit is called the Masai "Ngaje Ngai," the House of God.

  • A dried and frozen carcass of a leopard near the western summit; the leopard's purpose at that altitude is unknown.

  • Quotes: "THE MARVELLOUS THING IS THAT IT’S painless," he said. "That's how you know when it starts." "Is it really?" "Absolutely. I'm awfully sorry about the odor though. That must bother you." "Don't! Please don't." "Look at them," he said. "Now is it sight or is it scent that brings them like that?"

  • Snow: Flashback to a Christmas week in the Gauertal, where they lived in a woodcutter's house with a big square porcelain stove; a deserter came with bloody feet in the snow, and they helped him escape the police.

  • War: Remembering Barker bombing an Austrian officers' leave train and machine-gunning them as they scattered; the reaction of others calling him a "bloody murderous bastard."

  • Talent: Reflecting on his destroyed talent, blaming himself for betrayals, drinking, laziness, sloth, snobbery, pride, and prejudice.

  • Trading talent for security and comfort with a rich woman; acknowledging she was a "damned nice woman" but knowing he would never write about her or others like her.

  • Death: Her cries of "Molo!" and "Harry!" as he dies, and the sound of the hyena outside the tent.