20th Century

1. Popular facts

   • Women- voting rights, break taboos

   • Stock market

   • Roaring 20s

   • Jazz- New Orleans

   • “Sin” Industry- alcohol, gambling

   • Class Gap

2. World War I

   • Ended in 1918

   • Disillusioned because of the war, the generation that fought and survived has come to be called “the lost generation”

3. The roaring 20s

   • Depression and disillusionment took a less obvious form coming out of WWI

4. The Jazz Age

   • Music promoted by such recent inventions as the phonograph and the radio swept from New Orleans to capture the national imagination

   • Improvised and wild, broke the rules of music

   • “It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.” -Fitzgerald

   • The New Woman

     • Demanded the right to vote and to work outside the home

     • Symbolically cut her hair into a boyish bob and bared her calves in short skirts- became known as flappers

     • drunk alcohol, smoked, went dancing as unmarried women, “scandalous” activities

Modernism- psychological realism

1. “Make it new” -Ezra Pound

   • Abstract expressionism

2. Historical Context 1915-46

   • Reaction to overwhelming optimism preceding WWI and sense of promise introduced by technological advances

     • Tragic devastation proceeding WWI

3. Value differences in the Modern World

   • Themes of Alienation and Existentialism

     • Confused sense of identity and place in the world, the collapse of morality and values, loss of faith, fluctuating, pessimistic, futile, chaotic

4. Characteristics

   • “dis” Themes: disjointedness, disillusionment, disenchantment, disappointment, dissatisfaction

   • Collapse of the American dream: It’s impossible for the individual to triumph and America is no longer a “new Eden,” a land of opportunity

   • Collaboration with the reader: implied themes and piecemeal prose forces readers to draw their own conclusions

     • Reader has to piece together chronology and true image of titular character

   • Fragmentation- texts are fragmented to reflect fragmentation of the modern world (expositions, transitions, resolutions, and explanations are omitted)

   • Cynical Tone

5. Characteristics of Modernism literature

   • Emphasis on bold experimentation in style and form

   • Rejection of traditional themes and subjects. Loss of faith in religion and society.

   • Sense of disillusionment and loss of faith in the American dream

     • Gatsby eg: Nick

6. TS Elliot “Wasteland”