CHARACTERISTICS

WRITERS

HISTORICAL EVENTS

 v      Construction out of fragments, collage technique, montage of images (cinema)

v    The ideal of art is to regain the whole (like in The Waste Land)

v      Work structured as a quest for the very coherence it seems to lack at the surface; order found in art (Porter), religion (Eliot)

v     Sense of discontinuity, harmony destroyed in WWI

v      Omission: of explanations, interpretations, connections, summaries, continuity

v      Arbitrary beginning, advancement without explanation, end without resolution

v      Shifts in perspective, voice and tone

v      Experimentation with time: flashback, leaps to the future

v      Rhetoric understated, ironic

v      Symbols and images instead statements

v      Use of myth –escape from dramatic present, Christianity also a myth (Faulkner)

v      World of random possibilities

v      Search for truth

v      Subject often the literary work itself (the only meaningful activity is the search for meaning carried out in art)

v      Opposition to mass culture, belief that art is for the elites

v      References to literary, historical, philosophical, religious past to remind the reader of old, lost coherence

v      Secularization of religion, erosion of religious belief, lose of mystery

Nitze declared God was dead and man was on his own

v      Undermining of the belief in history as a linear concept (Darwin)

v      Distrust of family bonds, family no longer the safe haven (Freud)

v      Anti-female tendency, “new woman”, a flapper – a carrier of chaos;

Widespread male anxiety about a female “takeover” – some writers (Lawrence, Hemingway, Fitzgerald) believe that women conspired with the new technology to render their male contemporaries socially and even sexually impotent

v      Fragments of popular culture, dream imagery

v      Parodies

v      Use of language previously considered improper: colloquial, slang, uneducated

v      Directness, compression, vividness ~> significance of short story

v      First person narration, one character’s point of view (truth does not exist objectively)

 A naïve or marginal person as narrator (a child, an outsider) to convey the reality of confusion

v      Alienation of the individual

v      Experimental, self conscious manipulation of form

v      Stream of consciousness, interior monologue

v      Psychological influences: Freud, Young

v      Fascination with machines

v      Vision of social breakdown, society in decay

v      Faith in art

Prose

Gertrude  Stein (1874 – 1946)

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)

John Dos Passos (1896 – 1970)

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 – 1940)

William Faulkner (1897 – 1962)

Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941)

Katherine Anne Porter (1890 – 1980)

Zora Neale Hurston (1901?–1960)

Thomas Wolfe  (1900 – 1938)

Nathaniel West  (1903 – 1940)

Willa Cather   (1873 – 1947)

Henry Miller  (1891 – 1980)

Anais Nin  (1903 – 1977)

Poetry:

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965)

William Carlos William (1883 – 1963)

Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955)

“Imagists:”

Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972)

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886 – 1961)

Amy Lowell  (1874 - 1925)

Marianne Moore (1887 – 1972)

e.e. cummings (1894 – 1962)

Archibald MacLeish (1892 – 1982)

Hart Crane (1899 – 1932)

“Fugitives:”

John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974) 

Allen Tate   (1899 – 1979)

Drama:

Eugene O’Neill   (1888 – 1953)

Thorton Wilder   (1897 – 1975)

Ernest Hemingway   (1899 – 1961)

1914-18  –    World War I

1917 – US enters the War, Russian Revolution

1918 –  worldwide flu epidemic

Jan 1919 –   Prohibition (18^th Amendment)

1920 –   women given the vote (19^th Am.)

1920s –  Henry Ford’s assembly-line, cars become  affordable

1921 –  Sacco-Vanzetti case

1924 –  Immigration Act, quota systems: 1921, 1924.

1927 –  first non stop solo flight across Atlantic

1928 – Mussolini’s comes to power in Italy

1929 –  first motion picture with sound

               stock market crash, Depression begins

1932 –  F. Delano Roosevelt becomes President

1933 –  18^th Amendment repealed

1933 –  Hitler’s dictatorship in Germany

1936-39 –  Spanish Civil War

1941, 7 Dec –   Pearl Harbor

1945, 6 Aug – Hiroshima atomic bomb

Influential thinkers:

Sigmunt Freud   (1856 – 1939)

Carl Jung   (1875 – 1961)

Anderson,  Winesburg, Ohio  (1919)

Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent  (1920)

Eliot,    The Waste Land (1922)

Stevens,  Anecdote of the Jar   (1923)

Fitzgerald,   The Great Gatsby (1925)

Dos Passos,   Manhattan Transfer   (1925)

Hemingway,  The Sun Also Rises (1926)

Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)

Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)

Dos Passos,   The 42^nd Parallel  (1930)

Faulkner,  Light in August   (1932)

Faulkner,   Absalom, Absalom!  (1936)

Steinbeck,  Of Mice and Men   (1937)

Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

West,   The Day of the Locust (1939)

Hemingway,   For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

Hemingway,  The Old Man and the Sea    (1952)

Steinbeck,  East of Eden  (1952 )