Modernism 1910 1930

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Modernism 1910 - 1930
Urged on by Ezra Pounds exhortation to Make it
new!, poets and writers of this period made
every effort to break with the past and establish
new forms of literature.
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Ideas Shaping the Twentieth Century
Einstein
Marx
Freud
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Karl Marx

• The Communist Manifesto, 1847
• Theory that economic systems determine social
  structure and even thought
• Belief that the upper-class exploits the
  lower-class

4
Sigmund Freud

• Proposed the existence of a subconscious mind
• Belief that childhood conflicts and trauma
  determine adult personality
• Belief that sexuality motivates most of human
  behavior

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Albert Einstein

• Theory of Relativity
• Mutability of matter
• Variability of time
• These and other ideas ended the Newtonian universe

6
Political and Social Upheaval

• World War I demonstrated the new realities of the
  twentieth century
• Divided reaction sexual revolution vs.
  prohibition, Jazz Age vs.Monkey Trial, Civil
  Rights vs. Sacco and Vanzetti

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Literary Movements of Modernism

• Expatriates
• Lost Generation

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Literary Movements of Modernism

• American scene
• Harlem Renaissance
• Social criticism
• Greenwich Village bohemians

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Literary Movements of Modernism

• American scene (continued)
• Midwest
• Sexual Revolution (The Jazz Age)

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Expatriates and Imagism

• Ezra Pound, Poetry A Magazine of Verse
• T. S. Eliot The Wasteland, 1922
• New forms of poetry
• James Joyce, Pablo Picasso

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The Lost Generation

• Paris in the 1920s
• Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, born with
  the twentieth century, disillusioned by WW I
• Defiant of American conservatism

12
The Harlem Renaissance

• African-Americans in New York City writing about
  the unique experience of their community
• Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer,
  Zora Neale Hurston

13
Social Criticism

• Sinclair Lewis Babbitt, Elmer Gantry
• Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table
• H.L. Mencken

14
Greenwich Village

• The bohemian movement in America (uninhibited
  unconventional lifestyle)
• Edna St. Vincent Millay, e.e. cummings
• Connection with Paris expatriates

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The Emergence of the Midwest

• Harriet Monroes Poetry established in Chicago
• Carl Sandburg
• Edgar Lee Masters
• Hemingway born in Oak Park, Fitzgerald in St. Paul

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The Jazz Age

• The sexual revolution flappers, jazz, Freud, the
  rumble seat, Margaret Sanger
• Writers and poets challenged the restrictions
  against dealing with sexuality in literature

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The Jazz Age (continued)

• Publication of Joyces Ulysses and Lawrences
  works
• Fitzgeralds forward females in The Great Gatsby
  and short stories, psychoses in Tender is the
  Night

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The Jazz Age (continued)

• Faulkners The Sound and the Fury (psychological
  naturalism)
• Hemingways The Sun Also Rises

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The 1920s, what a decade!
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Check out the website www.sns.com/rbotti/1920.ht
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