What is Modernism?
-Here is the introductory video.
-This one is on the second half of the literary period.
-Here are the unit notes for your binder:
The horrors of World War I (1914-19) and its accompanying atrocities and senselessness became the catalyst for the Modernist movement in literature and art. Modernist authors felt betrayed by the war, believing the religious and political institutions in which they were taught to believe had led the civilized world into a bloody conflict. They no longer considered these institutions as reliable means to access the meaning of life, and therefore turned within themselves to discover the answers. Although American prose between the two world wars experimented with viewpoint and form, Americans wrote more realistically, on the whole, than did Europeans. The importance of facing reality became a dominant theme in the 1920s and 1930s: Writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and the playwright Eugene O'Neill repeatedly portrayed the tragedy awaiting those who live in flimsy dreams.
The early 20th century saw many American writers rebelling against long held social norms to an unheard of degree, abandoning many of the value systems and tightly held worldviews that had influenced American society and art since the birth of the nation. Change was the norm of the time as new advances in technology, radical new social theories, and two brutal world wars changed the face of the world forever. The violence of both World War I and World War II was unprecedented and terrible, and these two conflicts help to shatter all illusions of the romanticism of war. Industrialization and urbanization became even larger factors in American society as the nation moved further from its agricultural roots into a new existence as a large factory nation that lived by the products it produced rather than the food it grew. Social theorists, seeking to understand this new, urban world, began to apply Darwin’s theories of natural selection to social systems. Science developed at an exponential rate, teaching humanity more about themselves and the world around them. Such swift, unbounded changes disoriented Americans, sowing a deep distrust in the old institutions that had guided American life for so long. Many of America’s artists began to question what they could trust in this new world. The church, the family, the government, nothing seemed to give sufficient answers to the horrible questions that been raised by the changes of this time. It was this new uncertainty, this complete ambiguity that became the true style of this time.
Prose underwent a revitalization during this time, as novelists and short story writers felt the same need to create new modes of communication that had pushed poets to such artistic heights. The anti-heroic war tales of Ernest Hemingway were both controversial yet wildly acclaimed by the reading public. One of the most famous prose writers of the period, Hemingway had served as an ambulance driver during World War I before he began his literary writing career. Through novels such as A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway brought the many bloody battlefields that he had seen firsthand to American readers. His novels and short stories often dealt frankly with the gross realities of war, while he subtly manipulated his simple, journalistic prose style to express his own bleak view of the world around him, a world outside of simple cause and effect relationships, lacking both logic and philosophy. Similarly, the novels and prose works of William Faulkner reflected the Modernist movement, showcasing disjointed images, multiple points of view, complex sentences, and stream-of-consciousness narration as newly accepted literary tools to describe the world. His most famous novel, the complex The Sound and the Fury, featured as one of its narrators a mentally handicapped man-child, Benji. The work of these writers and their contemporaries expressed a new view of the post-war world, a world capable of both amazing technology and incomprehensible cruelty. It was a world of newfound ambiguities, a world with no clear center and no clear distinction between good and evil, black or white.
However, the rebellion of the period was not limited simply to the realms of philosophy or art. Social change was also a very powerful force during this time, as minorities who had previously stood silent seized this rebellious time as an opportunity to speak up and be heard. This new social consciousness worked its way quickly into literature. The so-called “Harlem Renaissance” of the 1920’s was a powerful movement of New York-based African-American writers who attempted to create for their race, so recently enslaved, a powerful literary tradition in this new America. Led by two very different young men--Countee Cullen, the classically trained and British influenced “proper” poet, and Langston Hughes, raised on jazz music and black spirituals--the Harlem Renaissance sought to give African-Americans a strong, clear voice with which they could express themselves. Its effects can still be felt in all urban poetry to this day. Others challenged gender biases, as female writers such as Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Willa Cather shattered stereotypes of women as second-class citizens, either directly through their work or indirectly by their sheer presence on the literary scene. Still other writers saw class issues as paramount and wrote about the complications of America’s new financial landscape, both for the new elite and the newly poor. John Steinbeck’s novels, such as Cannery Row and Of Mice and Men, were stern examinations of the hardships of tenant farmers in California, while F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic American novel The Great Gatsby laid bare the wide gap between society’s wealthy elite and everyone else.
Americans literature’s discontentment with all of the old facets of life was rapid in growing and comprehensive in scope. Out of this distrust of society’s institutions, a new focus on the individual was born. Indeed, it now seemed as if one’s own reason, untouched by society’s influence, was the only reliable authority on any question of importance, a theme that can be seen over and over again in the literature of the time. Writers now looked inside themselves to answer their own question about religion, sexual mores and any other issue. In a period in danger of dissolving itself into generality, with its vast blending of literary styles and dealings with a variety of topics, this introspection is the true hallmark of the modern period. By attempting to rethink their relationship to society and social institutions, the artists shifted the focus of the art from merely recording the world in which they lived to saying something about that world, as well.
What are the Major Tenets of the Modern Period?
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald's life resembles a fairy tale. During World War I, Fitzgerald enlisted in the U.S. Army and fell in love with a rich and beautiful girl, Zelda Sayre, who lived near Montgomery, Alabama, where he was stationed. Zelda broke off their engagement because he was relatively poor. After he was discharged at war's end, he went to seek his literary fortune in New York City in order to marry her.
His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), became a best- seller, and at twenty-four they married. Neither of them was able to withstand the stresses of success and fame, and they squandered their money. They moved to France to economize in 1924 and returned seven years later. Zelda became mentally unstable and had to be institutionalized; Fitzgerald himself became an alcoholic and died young as a movie screenwriter.
Fitzgerald's secure place in American literature rests primarily on his novel The Great Gatsby (1925), a brilliantly written, economically structured story about the American dream of the self-made man. The protagonist, the mysterious Jay Gatsby, discovers the devastating cost of success in terms of personal fulfillment and love. Other fine works include Tender Is the Night (1934), about a young psychiatrist whose life is doomed by his marriage to an unstable woman, and some stories in the collections Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), and All the Sad Young Men (1926). More than any other writer, Fitzgerald captured the glittering, desperate life of the 1920s; This Side of Paradise was heralded as the voice of modern American youth. His second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), continued his exploration of the self-destructive extravagance of his times.
-Unit Materials
"Richard Cory" Assignment
"The Long Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" Assignment
-Here is the introductory video.
-This one is on the second half of the literary period.
-Here are the unit notes for your binder:
The horrors of World War I (1914-19) and its accompanying atrocities and senselessness became the catalyst for the Modernist movement in literature and art. Modernist authors felt betrayed by the war, believing the religious and political institutions in which they were taught to believe had led the civilized world into a bloody conflict. They no longer considered these institutions as reliable means to access the meaning of life, and therefore turned within themselves to discover the answers. Although American prose between the two world wars experimented with viewpoint and form, Americans wrote more realistically, on the whole, than did Europeans. The importance of facing reality became a dominant theme in the 1920s and 1930s: Writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and the playwright Eugene O'Neill repeatedly portrayed the tragedy awaiting those who live in flimsy dreams.
The early 20th century saw many American writers rebelling against long held social norms to an unheard of degree, abandoning many of the value systems and tightly held worldviews that had influenced American society and art since the birth of the nation. Change was the norm of the time as new advances in technology, radical new social theories, and two brutal world wars changed the face of the world forever. The violence of both World War I and World War II was unprecedented and terrible, and these two conflicts help to shatter all illusions of the romanticism of war. Industrialization and urbanization became even larger factors in American society as the nation moved further from its agricultural roots into a new existence as a large factory nation that lived by the products it produced rather than the food it grew. Social theorists, seeking to understand this new, urban world, began to apply Darwin’s theories of natural selection to social systems. Science developed at an exponential rate, teaching humanity more about themselves and the world around them. Such swift, unbounded changes disoriented Americans, sowing a deep distrust in the old institutions that had guided American life for so long. Many of America’s artists began to question what they could trust in this new world. The church, the family, the government, nothing seemed to give sufficient answers to the horrible questions that been raised by the changes of this time. It was this new uncertainty, this complete ambiguity that became the true style of this time.
Prose underwent a revitalization during this time, as novelists and short story writers felt the same need to create new modes of communication that had pushed poets to such artistic heights. The anti-heroic war tales of Ernest Hemingway were both controversial yet wildly acclaimed by the reading public. One of the most famous prose writers of the period, Hemingway had served as an ambulance driver during World War I before he began his literary writing career. Through novels such as A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway brought the many bloody battlefields that he had seen firsthand to American readers. His novels and short stories often dealt frankly with the gross realities of war, while he subtly manipulated his simple, journalistic prose style to express his own bleak view of the world around him, a world outside of simple cause and effect relationships, lacking both logic and philosophy. Similarly, the novels and prose works of William Faulkner reflected the Modernist movement, showcasing disjointed images, multiple points of view, complex sentences, and stream-of-consciousness narration as newly accepted literary tools to describe the world. His most famous novel, the complex The Sound and the Fury, featured as one of its narrators a mentally handicapped man-child, Benji. The work of these writers and their contemporaries expressed a new view of the post-war world, a world capable of both amazing technology and incomprehensible cruelty. It was a world of newfound ambiguities, a world with no clear center and no clear distinction between good and evil, black or white.
However, the rebellion of the period was not limited simply to the realms of philosophy or art. Social change was also a very powerful force during this time, as minorities who had previously stood silent seized this rebellious time as an opportunity to speak up and be heard. This new social consciousness worked its way quickly into literature. The so-called “Harlem Renaissance” of the 1920’s was a powerful movement of New York-based African-American writers who attempted to create for their race, so recently enslaved, a powerful literary tradition in this new America. Led by two very different young men--Countee Cullen, the classically trained and British influenced “proper” poet, and Langston Hughes, raised on jazz music and black spirituals--the Harlem Renaissance sought to give African-Americans a strong, clear voice with which they could express themselves. Its effects can still be felt in all urban poetry to this day. Others challenged gender biases, as female writers such as Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Willa Cather shattered stereotypes of women as second-class citizens, either directly through their work or indirectly by their sheer presence on the literary scene. Still other writers saw class issues as paramount and wrote about the complications of America’s new financial landscape, both for the new elite and the newly poor. John Steinbeck’s novels, such as Cannery Row and Of Mice and Men, were stern examinations of the hardships of tenant farmers in California, while F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic American novel The Great Gatsby laid bare the wide gap between society’s wealthy elite and everyone else.
Americans literature’s discontentment with all of the old facets of life was rapid in growing and comprehensive in scope. Out of this distrust of society’s institutions, a new focus on the individual was born. Indeed, it now seemed as if one’s own reason, untouched by society’s influence, was the only reliable authority on any question of importance, a theme that can be seen over and over again in the literature of the time. Writers now looked inside themselves to answer their own question about religion, sexual mores and any other issue. In a period in danger of dissolving itself into generality, with its vast blending of literary styles and dealings with a variety of topics, this introspection is the true hallmark of the modern period. By attempting to rethink their relationship to society and social institutions, the artists shifted the focus of the art from merely recording the world in which they lived to saying something about that world, as well.
What are the Major Tenets of the Modern Period?
- Modernism is marked by a strong and intentional break with tradition. This break includes a strong reaction against established religious, political, and social views.
- Modernists believe the world is created in the act of perceiving it; that is, the world is what we say it is.
- Modernists do not subscribe to absolute truth. All things are relative.
- Modernists feel no connection with history or institutions. Their experience is that of alienation, loss, and despair.
- Modernists champion the individual and celebrate inner strength.
- Modernists believe life is unordered.
- Modernists concern themselves with the sub-conscious.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald's life resembles a fairy tale. During World War I, Fitzgerald enlisted in the U.S. Army and fell in love with a rich and beautiful girl, Zelda Sayre, who lived near Montgomery, Alabama, where he was stationed. Zelda broke off their engagement because he was relatively poor. After he was discharged at war's end, he went to seek his literary fortune in New York City in order to marry her.
His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), became a best- seller, and at twenty-four they married. Neither of them was able to withstand the stresses of success and fame, and they squandered their money. They moved to France to economize in 1924 and returned seven years later. Zelda became mentally unstable and had to be institutionalized; Fitzgerald himself became an alcoholic and died young as a movie screenwriter.
Fitzgerald's secure place in American literature rests primarily on his novel The Great Gatsby (1925), a brilliantly written, economically structured story about the American dream of the self-made man. The protagonist, the mysterious Jay Gatsby, discovers the devastating cost of success in terms of personal fulfillment and love. Other fine works include Tender Is the Night (1934), about a young psychiatrist whose life is doomed by his marriage to an unstable woman, and some stories in the collections Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), and All the Sad Young Men (1926). More than any other writer, Fitzgerald captured the glittering, desperate life of the 1920s; This Side of Paradise was heralded as the voice of modern American youth. His second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), continued his exploration of the self-destructive extravagance of his times.
-Unit Materials
"Richard Cory" Assignment
"The Long Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" Assignment