MODERNISM (1901-1950)A Collective Powerpoint

GUIDING HISTORICAL FORCES Education Act of 1870 -- Brought scads

of literate people into the marketplace. World War I (1914-1918) Industrialization/Urbanization Rejection of Victorian appearances Scientific Discovery World War II (1940’s)

“In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.”

- Ernest Hemingway

“You are all a lost generation”

- Gertrude Stein

GUIDING HISTORICAL FORCES Artists deeply disturbed by WW I and

wrote about the absurdity of war, specifically, and generally about the increasingly chaotic and and absurd nature of modern life

Expressed that alienation through radically different experimental literary forms or highly unusual subject matter vs. traditional styles.

QUALITIES OF MODERNISM Reaction to a century of relative conviction

and optimism (Victorianism) Skeptical irresolution; the rejection of

accepted truths Bleakness of tone Stoicism

good lies not in external objects, but in the state of the soul itself, in the wisdom and restraint by which a person is delivered from the problems of everyday life.

MODERNISM CONT’D Traditional stabilities of society, religion and

culture weakened Challenged traditional ways of structuring and

making sense of human experience. Rapid pace of social and technological change; Mass dislocation of populations by war, empire

and economic migration Mixing in close quarters of cultures and

classes in expanding cities

MODERNISM CONT’D Disrupted the old order, Upended ethical and social codes Cast into doubt previously stable

assumptions about self, community, the world and the divine (see also GOD, the Almighty, a higher power or Michael Jordan).

MODERNIST FEATURES Ambiguity Multiple Truths Fragmented Narration Stream-of-Conscious Writing Multiple Point of Views Feeling that life is meaningless

The Expatriates In the 1920s black American writers,

artists, and musicians arrived in Paris and popularized jazz in Parisian nightclubs. They include Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes

After World War II - jazz musicians Charlie Parker and Dexter Gordon; and writers Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Chester Himes.

The Expatriates

American literary notables who lived in Paris in the 1920s (the so-called Lost Generation), including Gertrude Stein, Robert McAlmon, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Anais Nin and Henry Miller.

T.S. ELIOT Born 1888 “The Love Song of

J.Alfred Prufrock” 1917

“The Waste Land” 1922

Four Quartets 1943

Died 1965

“Humankind Cannot Stand Very Much Reality” T.S. Eliot

EZRA POUND Born 1885 “Hugh Selwyn

Mauberley” 1923 Friend to T.S. Eliot

JAMES JOYCE Born 1882 Published Dubliners

1913 Published A Portrait

of the Artist as a Young Man 1915

Published Ulysses 1922

Published Finnegan’s Wake

Died 1941

“One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.” James Joyce

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Born1882 Mrs. Dalloway

1925 To the Lighthouse

1927 A Room of One’s

Own 1929 The Waves 1931 Died1941

If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you can’t tell it about other people. Virginia Woolf

PABLO PICASSO Born 1881 Befriended by the

patron/writer Gertrude Stein while staying in Paris

His artistic style is known as Cubism

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