The Jazz Age or The Roaring Twenties
“The Lost Generation”
"you are all a lost generation"
Gertrude Stein to Ernest Hemingway
epigragh to The Sun Also Rises
Gertrude Stein coined the phrase “lost generation” to describe the intellectuals, poets, artists, and novelists that rejected the values of post World War I America and relocated to Paris to live a bohemian lifestyle. The Lost Generation was said to be disillusioned by the senseless slaughter of the First World War (1914-17), cynical and disdainful of the Victorian notions of morality and propriety of their elders. Writers and artists expatriated for many reasons, but while there they commonly searched for meaning, drank excessively, had love affairs, and created some of the finest American literature to date.
Lost generation writers
(1920-30s) have gained prominent places in the landscape of 20th century
American civilization for three main reasons. First, they led the way in
expression of the themes of spiritual alienation, self-exile, and cultural criticism.
Thus, their mark on intellectual history is distinct. Secondly, these writers
attempted to express their critical response in new ways. Their literary
innovations challenged traditional assumptions about writing and expression,
and thereby paved the way for subsequent generations of avant garde writers.
And lastly, myth surrounds the lost generation and perpetuates its popularity
as a countercultural entity. Every later generation—from the Beats to the Xers—aspire
in some way to the reputation for hedonism and headiness of the lost generation
of the 1920s.
The Formation of Modern American
Mass Culture
Many of the defining features
of modern American culture emerged during the 1920s. This time period saw many
social and environmental changes: the rise of cities, changes in class
structure, advancing technology, etc. The record chart, the book club, the
radio, the talking picture, and spectator sports—all became popular forms of
mass entertainment. But the primary reason the 1920s stand out as one of the
most important periods in American cultural history is because the decade
produced a generation of artists, musicians, writers who were among the most
innovative and creative in the country’s history.
Modernism and the Modern Novel
The
term modernism refers to the radical shift in aesthetic and cultural
sensibilities evident in the art and literature of the post-World War One
period. The ordered, stable and inherently meaningful world view of the 19th
century could not, wrote T.S. Eliot, accord with “the immense panorama of
futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” Modernism thus marks a
distinctive break with 18th and 19th-century optimism
wherein artists presented a profoundly pessimistic picture of a culture in
disarray (German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed the “Death of God”)
and sought ways to locate and restore meaning and significance through art.
Literary Modernism, 1915-1945
Impetus: Can be seen as a response to an
increasing sense of social and moral breakdown after WWI: a breakdown of the Age
of Enlightenment values that saw science, reason and logic as means of progress
to a state of freedom, happiness, and moral progress
Historic Causes: WWI, the Depression, American /
People were left with a sense that the world is
increasingly fragmented, a “wasteland” to refer to T.S. Eliot’s poem (many
modernist works show a radical disruption of linear flow of narrative—a more
fragmented style reflects the world they saw and lived in)
Philosophical Influences: a new view of human
beings emerged in the thinking of four major thinkers: Karl Marx (economic
determinism, human behavior controlled by forces OUTSIDE self, class struggle,
workers unite for utopian change); Darwin; Sigmund Freud (psychoanalysis, psychological
determinism, man behavior from forces INSIDE the self, interior forces, man's
taboos and rules govern self and world, self-analysis); and C. F. Nietzsche (God
is Dead, economic and psychological determinism, no divine patterns, search for
meaning, spiritual ruins after the war, what is the meaning of life???)
Some
characteristics found in Modernistic works:
1. Alienation from Society and Loneliness
2. Procrastination/An inability to act
3. Agonized recollection of the Past and a Desire to return to a State of
4. Fear of Death and the Appearance of Death
5. Inability to feel or express Love (the subject is detached; ironic but not
unfeeling)
6. World as a Wasteland: poor Environmental portrayal
7. Sees Man creating his own Myths within his mind to fall back upon, to
“shore” the fragments of his life together
Major
themes emerging in Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and others of period:
1. violence and alienation
2. historical discontinuity
3. decadence and decay
4. loss and despair
5. rejection of history
6. race relations
7. unavoidable change and a longing for a return to innocence
8. sense of place, local color