New Directions 1910-1930
The Lost generation
Modernist Achivement
Search for New Art
Creating new styles
The use of the past to create a relationship with the new world.
The authors writting comes to terms with the changes of time.
The "Supreme Fiction" a way of living in the new world.
Modernism
Early 20 Century
New inventions such as airplanes, radios and telephones.
Increase availability of books and newspaper.
More people were informed and learned about the variety of life.
Artists had the desire of capturing the complexity of modern lifestyle.
It was a New Era with lots of changes.
It explore all the possibilities in poetry, fiction, drama, music and painting.
Timeline
1912- Atlantic Ocean: Titanic sinks
1914- World War 1 begins
1920- Women gain right to vote
1917- U.S declares war on Germany
1922- Egypt: Tutankhamen discovered
1924- Congress makes all native-born American Indians citizens
1927- Charles Lindbergh makes first solo nonstop transatlantic flight.
1911- Pulitzer Prizes established
1929-Stock Market crashes: Beggining of the Great Depression.
1932- Germany. Nazi party wins plurality in national election
World War I was a key events due to experiences which had a profound effect on the optimism.
Gertrude Stein once told Hemingway "You are all a lost generation" that term has been used again and again to describe the people of postwar years.
European and American artistic communities drew closer together.
Jazz times. Musicians moved to Chicago. Music became a symbol of the times.
Many writers lived most of their lives in Europe.
Scott Fitzgerald portrays the jazz age as a generation of "the beatiful and damned"
The task of the modernist writters was not only to express the waste and futility, but to took up the burden of attempting to make some sense of what they experienced
Modernist Literature
Is often experimental in form and in content
Free verse was the most used tool. It contains rhymes but they were rarely put in the usual places
Is often fragmentary. Reflects "stream of consciousness" and the modernist perception of the 20 century conflicting ideas.
Abstract ideas and emotions were often avoided
Reader participate and draw their own ideas
Imagist poetry: Modernists shows rather than tells
Modernist writers were interested in the workings of the human mind
Is sometimes intentionally puzzling
Authors
Scott Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway
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Carl Sandburg
Langston Hughes
Eugene O'Neill
T.S. Eliot
E. E. Cummings