5.4. Modernist fiction

→ The lost generation (experience of feeling lost, posst-war disillusiusm, fragmentation) e.g. Gertrude Stein or

Ernest Hemingway 1899-1961

  • personal experiences of WW I (part of lost generation)

  • e.g. “A farewell to Arms” 1929, “In our time” 1925

  • WWI “wound”

  • Hemingway code hero

  • hard-boiled style (cold-hearted)

  • focus on precision

  • iceberg theory (seven eights of story not written down, reader has to fill in blanks, texts only simple on surface)

  • settings contribute to simplicits

  • decontextualization (often don't know where exactly)

  • not only novels, also short stories

    • e.g. “A clean, Well-Lighted Place” 1926/33

    • Deaf man: disconnection form word

    • direct, simple dialogue, different perspectives

    • upside-downs, contradictions, disillusion

F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896-1940

→ e.g. The Great Gatsby 1925

  • lost generation, epatriates → to Paris

  • Jazz Age/roaring Twenties → to America/New York

  • ideological criticism (of American Dream)

John Dos Passos 1896-1970

  • stands for experiment, fusion of fiction and journalism

  • e.g. U.S.A.

    • “The 42nd Parallel” 1930

    • 1919 (1932)

    • “The Big Money” 1936

  • simultaneous chronicle:

    • authenticity, progress of events

    • explores American perspective/society

  • Intermediality: fusion of cinematic techniques and modernist fiction

    → Anything but “golden” twenties

William Faulkner 1897-1962

  • e.g. “The Sound and the fury” 1929

    • portrayal of historical legacy of South

  • focus on multiperspectivism, subjectivity and stream of consciousness