Literary Modernism (1900-ish to 1950)

1. What Characterizes Modern and Post-Modern Texts? Literary Modernism (1900-ish to 1950)

2. 1912 Things were going well – The Victorian era monitored moral conduct, the Civil War was now just a memory for most and the world was relatively at peace. That all sank, though… HUBRIS was the word that described Titanic – and Victorian thought. 1513 lives lost due to hubris shakes America’s sense of invincibility. Over the next decade, American will is pounded and shaken by historical events….

3. 1912 The sports world was rocked by controversy: Jim Thorpe (grandson of Chief Blackhawk) won both the decathalon and pentathalon at the Olympics in Stockholm…only to have to return his medals after it was discovered he had played semi-pro baseball.

4. 1913 The game of football would be forever changed when Knute Rockne introduced the “forward pass” during a game.

5. 1914 Controversy took center stage when Margaret Sanger was arrested for mailing leaflets detailing birth control and feminine hygiene products. She also opened a clinic that distributed “products.”

6. 1914 Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and his wife are assassinated, setting off a chain reaction throughout Europe that sparked the beginning of World War I: The War to End All Wars

7. 1914 The Christmas Truce Approaching the first Christmas season of WWI, impromptu “truces” sprouted up all along the Western Front, as soldiers on both sides put down their weapons and joined together in “No Man’s Land” between the trenches to celebrate Christmas. There would be no more truces for the next four years of fighting.

8. 1915 Filmmaker D. W. Griffiths debuts his epic film Birth of a Nation which sympathetically explains the rise and need of the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK, which had been silent for decades, experienced a terrible resurgence as a result. Lynchings became part of American culture once more.

9. 1915 Accusing them of aiding Russia during WWI, Turkey expels 1.75 million ethnic Armenians. Over 600,000 die of starvation in their forced migration, thus marking this century’s first official genocide. The term “Ethnic Cleansing” was first used. Turkey still denies to this day….

10. 1915 German u-boats sink the S.S. Lucitania, killing 1,198 passengers. Controversy erupts world-wide, as the passenger ship was also carrying 173 tons of military supplies for Britain. President Woodrow Wilson, who was narrowly re-elected on the promise “He kept us out of the war,” is now forced closer to official Declaration.

11. 1917 American soldiers are introduced to the horrors of “trench warfare.” Conditions were so bad on both sides that an unspoken code of conduct “Live and Let Live” was enacted: this allowed soldiers on both sides to take breaks from the trenches.

12. 1918 Lenin leads Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Tsar Nicholas, his entire family and servants are arrested and later secretly murdered. Lenin announces that only Nicholas was executed and the family was safely evacuated to peaceful exile. The remains of the family are discovered buried in a Siberian forest in 1991, identified through DNA testing and finally laid to rest in 1998. The bodies of the two youngest, Anastasia and Alexai, are never recovered, continuing the romantic rumor that they somehow escaped.

13. 1918 Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany abdicates, thus ending WWI… But not until after SIX million lives are lost, and over TWENTY million are wounded.

14. 1918…adding insult to injury… Returning soldiers bring home one deadly memento of the Great War….Influenza. By the time the epidemic wanes, nearly 20 million die worldwide, and over 500,000 in the U.S.

15. 1919 Several nations affected by the war sign the Treaty of Versailles… Except the U.S…..The U.S. Senate refuses to ratify – opposing the League of Nations

16. 1919 – preamble to the next war Germany is given little option but to agree to the terms of the Treaty, giving up territories to Poland, France and other surrounding countries affected by the war. As part of the reparations, Germany is also forced to pay massive sums of money to neighboring countries for their heavy losses during battle.

17. 1919 • Germany spirals into economic disaster after trying to pay hefty reparations from WWI • Nations eventually attempt to allay Germany’s economic crisis by issuing loans to the beleaguered country. The loans, Germany later claims, are controlled and manipulated by, they claim, Jews…thus sparking once-quiet rumblings of anti-semitism. • Only four years later, young Adolf Hitler and his budding Nazi party seize Munich’s city government in a coup…he’s arrested and sentenced five years in prison, where he writes and publishes the first part of Mein Kampf as dictated to his assistant Rudolf Hess. • His “platform” promises to restore Germany to its pre-WWI glory.

18. 1920….time to party… NOT QUITE….returning soldiers, suffering from shell-shock, crippling disfigurement and ravaged from influenza turn to the one thing that left them heaving in a toilet…alcohol. Wives were not pleased.

19. 1920 Shortly before women win the right to vote (19th Amendment) they squeak in another…the 18th Amendment: Prohibition. Doesn’t stop alcohol abuse, just forces it underground.

20. So begins the Roaring Twenties… • Women feel empowered…having won the right to vote. As a formal act of shedding their mothers’ antiquated values, women everywhere bob their Victorian hair, destroy their restrictive corsets and show some skin. • In 1904, women were arrested for smoking in public – now, they flaunt their liberated sexuality, drink heavily and stay out all night…. • Young men everywhere say, “Me likey…”

21. In 1910 there were 500,000 cars in America. By 1920, there were more than 8 million. Modern roads began snaking across America Electricity spread into more and more homes Skyscrapers were built Industry expanded at an enormous rate The speed and flurry of modern life Beginnings of the Modern Age

22. “There is one basic fact which underlies all the questions that are discussed on political platforms at the present moment,”declared Woodrow Wilson in 1913. “That singular fact is that nothing is done in this country as it was done twenty years ago.” 1920 Fashion 1900 Fashion History of the Time

23. New Freedom More Americans left rural areas for cities. By 1920, for the first time in the nations history, city inhabitants outnumbered rural dwellers. Many African Americans left the rural South with hopes of greater freedom in northern cities.

24. “World War I . . . Destroyed faith in progress, but it did more than that – it made clear to perceptive thinkers . . . That violence prowled underneath man’s apparent harmony and rationality.” With their belief in human reason shaken by war, artists strive for new ways to portray the world. Painter, Pablo Picasso, instead of reproducing what one sees from a single perspective, shows multiple perspectives in one painting. Writers also abandon conventions. Many create characters who, like real people, think in a continuous flow of ideas that seem to go in several directions at once. These authors include T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and James Joyce.

25. The Harlem Renaissance The Harlem Renaissance was a culmination of forces that began after the Civil War. Ironically, reconstruction created even more segregation in the South, especially after the Supreme Court ruling in 1896 in Plessey v. Ferguson. This ruling created the concept of “separate but equal.” This, as well as the creation of more jobs because of WWI production, helped usher a migration of African Americans North.

26. Modernism grew out of the disillusionment that many writers, artists, and thinkers felt after World War I. What Caused Another Shift in Literature?

27. Imagism Disillusionment Expatriate Harlem Renaissance Unreliable narrator Stream of consciousness Terms to know (we will define them as we go)

28. “disappointment caused by a frustrated ideal or belief” In other words, writers lost the trust they previously had in mankind and his social and political systems if those systems could lead to such a horrific war. Disillusionment: (n)

29. The image is the Essence; raw material of poetry Images in poetry should instantly convey to the reader the poems meaning and emotion Language of poetic images should be the way people speak, not made up of predictable rhythms and rhymes. No topic is unsuitable. Does not have to be high minded or poetic. Imagism

30. One who lives outside their native country. American literary notables who lived in Paris from the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression included Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein. Expatriate

31. Centered in Harlem in the 1920s-1930s, the Harlem Renaissance was a period in which African Americans created great literature and art. They wrote poetry, prose, plays, and novels. The literature ranged in subject, but race and racial identity was a common theme. Harlem Renaissance

32. In literature, an unreliable narrator is a first-person narrator, the credibility of whose point-of-view is seriously compromised, possibly by psychological instability or powerful bias. Stories told by narrators who come to appear unreliable raise unsettling questions about the limitations of human knowledge. Unreliable narrator

33. A literary technique that presents the thoughts and feelings of a character as they occur. Representing the mind at work. Stream of consciousness

34. Writers challenged traditional forms of writing. They explored modern themes that applied to the world that they saw (which according to them had not worked out so well due to war.) They often looked at life as “fragmented,” meaning that life does not always “fit together.” This idea of fragmentation often leads to the idea that life is meaningless. Writers grapple with this issue. So How Did They Write “Modern” Texts?

35. F. Scott Fitzgerald T.S. Eliot Langston Hughes Gertrude Stein Ezra Pound Ernest Hemingway Claude McKay Who are these writers?