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This presentation is a work in progress. I began it to share with a 12th grade British Lit class. It was used with the Anglo-Saxon period and Beowulf.
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The The ModernsModerns
1 9 0 0 - 1 9 5 01 9 0 0 - 1 9 5 0
Important Happenings• 1905- Einstein
formulates theory of relativity
• 1906-Great earthquake and fire ravages San Francisco
• 1912- Titanic sinks
• 1914- Panama Canal opens
• 1914- WWI begins in Europe
• 1917- US enters WWI
• 1919- Baseball scandal Chicago White Sox paid to throw World Series game with Cincinnati Reds
• 1920- 19th Amendment passed Women given right to vote
• 1927- Charles Lindberg completes first transatlantic solo flight
• 1927- The Jazz Singer opens one of 1st sound pics w/dialogue
• 1929- US stock market crashes leads to GREAT DEPRESSION
• 1933- Adolph Hitler comes to power in Germany
• 1939- WWII begins Germany invades Poland
• 1945- US enters WWII after Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
• 1945- Germany surrenders
• 1945- US drops atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan; Japan surrenders
• 1945- United Nations formed
• 1948- State of Israel established
• 1950- Korean War begins
• 1950- US population about 151 million
Sherwood Anderson, in a letter to his
son, November 1929
• “I had a world, and it slipped away from me. The War (WWI) blew up more than the bodies of men…It blew ideas away—”
• GREAT WAR aka WWI (1914-1918) one of the events that changed the voice of American fiction.
• Fictious voice “brash..not original and uncertain as an adolscence’s”
• In 1917 US entered WWI a conflict fought under “bright banners of humanity and democratic righteousness” that became a “bloodbath.”
• In 1916 over half-million soldiers were killed in a ten-month-long struggle in Verdun, France.
Paradise lost….
• America victorious in WWI yet SOMETHING had changed--- loss of innocence
• “Idealism was turning into cynicism.”
• Writers began to question “authority and tradition”
•NEW MORAL CODES
•Short skirts•Bobbed hair•Slang
expressions
• “Americans’ sense of a CONNECTION to their past seemed to be deter-iorating”
OTHER FACTORS
• “ This movement in literature, painting, music and other arts– swept along by disillusionment with traditions that had seemed to have become spiritually empty—called for bold experimentation and a wholesale rejection of traditional themes and styles” (Leggett & Brinnin, pg. 525, 2000).
“The American Dream”
•PURSUIT OF
•PROMISE
• Three central ideas– “admiration for America as a new Eden, a
land of beauty, bounty, and unlimited promise.”
– “optimism” a belief in “progress…life keeps getting better and …moving toward an era of prosperity, justice, and joy that always SEEMS just around the corner.”
– “the importance and ultimate triumph of the individual—the independent, self-reliant person.”
• “The era of the 1930s in the United States was marked by triumph and tragedy, growth and hardship” (Leggitt
& Brinnin, 2000, p. 528)
The Best of Times, The Worst of Times
POPULATION
• Between 1890 and 1940, the population MORE THAN DOUBLED• From 63 million to 132 million
• Presently as of last census (2000)• ALABAMA: 4,486,508
• UNITED STATES: 288,368.698
POPULATION BREAKDOWN
• Caucasian: 90.5%
• African Americans: 10%
•Other ethnic groups: .5%
The BAD
• The Great Depression
• By 1933 between 25% to 33% of population UNEMPLOYED
• Bread lines, ate out of garbage cans, slept in sewer pipes, tents, and shacks
The GOOD
• Technological advances– Amelia Earhart becomes first woman to fly solo
across Atlantic– THREE FAMOUS STRUCTURES ARE
BUILT• The Empire State Building (NYC, 1931)
• Boulder (now Hoover) Dam (AZ/NV border, 1936)
• Golden Gate Bridge (San Francisco, 1937)
The Empire State Building
• 1931 in New York City
Hoover Dam
• 1936 Arizona/Nevada Border
Golden Gate Bridge
• 1937 San Francisco, California
Golden Age of MOVIES
• Laurel and Hardy
• Marx Brothers
• GONE WITH THE WIND ( 1939 )
RADIO
• Most common form of entertainment
• 2/3 of all American households owned at least one radio
• Halloween broadcast 1938 SIX MILLION listeners tuned to Orson Welles’s “Invasion from Mars” broadcast. 100s flock and clog eastern highways in a panic.
Breakdown of Beliefs and Traditions
• WWI combined with stock market crash SEVERLY DAMAGED ideas of America as an EDEN.
• LITERARY focus shifts AWAY from NEW ENGLAND
• Most MODERNISTS were from: the SOUTH, MIDWEST, and the WEST
New Intellectual Trends
• MARXISM: Karl Marx: Socialism (govt controls all aspects of society: EQUALITY
• PSYCHOANALYSIS: Sigmond Freud: Unconscious mind and sexuality
– Continued to pressure traditional beliefs and values
The JAZZ AGE
• PROHIBITION: 1919 Constitution amended to PROHIBIT the manufacture and sale of ALCOHOL, which was singled out as a CENTRAL SOCIAL EVIL
• Had opposite effect … became an age of…
• Bootleggers
• Cocktails
• Short-skirts
• Jazz
• Gangsters
• The “Roaring 20s” Fitzgerald’s novels
• American writers expatriate to Europe
New American Hero
• DISILLUSIONMENT major theme in the fiction of the time
• Most influential: Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway’s Hero
• Many embraced as a protagonist and role model• Man of action• A warrior• A tough competitor• Has a code of honor• Courage• Endurance• “grace under pressure”
Most Important Trait
• THROUGHLY DISILLUSIONED– Held true to Hemingway’s own outlook
• Feared at the center of it all lay nothing
Poetry
• During this time poetry took a break– Ezra Pound– T. S. Eliot
– SYMBOLISM
– IMAGISM
– Some poets still retained traditional verses
Harlem Renaissance
• African American culture found expression in poetry in two different ways:– Conventional forms: more readily adopted by
white audiences– Unique contributions used diction and street
talk
The American Dream REVISED
• How do you define the American dream now?
• How has it changed?• How has it remained the same?• What forces might shape it in the future?
• Construct a 100 word essay that answers these questions. Turn in tomorrow!