Modernism 1910 - 1930

Urged on by Ezra Pound’s 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.

Ideas Shaping the Twentieth Century

Freud

Einstein

Marx

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

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

Albert Einstein

•Theory of Relativity

•Mutability of matter

•Variability of time

•These and other ideas ended the Newtonian universe

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

Literary Movements of Modernism

•Expatriates

•Lost Generation

Literary Movements of Modernism

•American scene

•Harlem Renaissance

•Social criticism

•Greenwich Village bohemians

Literary Movements of Modernism

•American scene (continued)

•Midwest

•Sexual Revolution (The Jazz Age)

Expatriates and Imagism

•Ezra Pound, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse

•T. S. Eliot The Wasteland, 1922

•New forms of poetry

•James Joyce, Pablo Picasso

The Lost Generation

•Paris in the 1920’s

•Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, born with the twentieth century, disillusioned by WW I

•Defiant of American conservatism

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

Social Criticism

•Sinclair Lewis Babbitt, Elmer Gantry

•Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table

•H.L. Mencken

Greenwich Village

•The bohemian movement in America (uninhibited unconventional lifestyle)

•Edna St. Vincent Millay, e.e. cummings

•Connection with Paris expatriates

The Emergence of the Midwest

•Harriet Monroe’s Poetry established in Chicago

•Carl Sandburg

•Edgar Lee Masters

•Hemingway born in Oak Park, Fitzgerald in St. Paul

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

The Jazz Age (continued)

•Publication of Joyce’s Ulysses and Lawrence’s works

•Fitzgerald’s forward females in The Great Gatsby and short stories, psychoses in Tender is the Night

The Jazz Age (continued)

•Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (psychological naturalism)

•Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises

The 1920’s, what a decade!

Check out the website: www.sns.com/~rbotti/1920.htm