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55. THE LOST GENERATION, THEMES in Lit, STYLE, OVERLAPS, TGG, STYLE &…

- - - - Associated with late realism & modernism.
- - - - Characterised by
        
        Inventions! Vacuum cleaner, freezer, TV!
        
        ↑ consumer demand & significant changes in lifestyle - eg cars!
        
        Unprecedented industrial growth
        
        Feeling of discontinuity associated with modernity, a break with traditions.
        
        BUT Great Depression 1929 ends the party
        
        Unemployment high, even with New Deal. Remained so until WW2. America entered 1941 after PH. War ended 1945 with Truman dropping bomb. War greatly influenced Civil Rights movt
  - - - Features:
        
        Disillusioned by horrors of war they rejected traditions of older gen. eg proper behaviour, morality & gender roles.
        
        Decadence, distorted visions of “American Dream”, & gender confusion = common traits
        
        “Lost” due to tendency to act aimlessly, even recklessly, often focusing on the hedonistic accumulation of personal wealth.
        
        Internal struggles of individual in face of chaos & alienating effects of modernity.
      - Term from verbal exchange witnessed by G Stein - Fr garage owner told young employee, “You are all a lost generation.” Stein repeated it to colleague & pupil Hemingway, who popularised it as used it as an epigraph to classic 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises.
  - - - Realism
        
        Originated mid-19thC & seeks to depict world & people as they really are. Eg: George Eliot, Henry James, Mark Twain
        
        Writers employ specific details & psychologically complex, believable characters
        
        Reaction vs romanticism (idealised world characterised by intense emotion)
      - Modernism
        
        Beg 19C - new technology, ↑ industrialization & globalisation + horrifying events of World Wars (esp WW1) made ppl Q future of humanity - what is the world coming to?
        
        Saw ↓ of civilisation & cold machinery instead of progress. Thought capitalism led to ↑ alienation
        
        Irony, satire, & comparisons to point out society's ills
        
        To achieve these emotions most Modernist fiction written in 1st person. Instead of clear beg/mid/end it was often more SofC
        
        Pound: make it new - slogan - he called for need to reshape both form & lang of literature
        
        1 change was grammatical sentence - it may break down into fragments or hyperextend
        
        Another is shift from the world per-se to the world perceived.
      - Naturalism
        
        Result of D's Theory of Evolution. From 1900 - 1914. Man's actions = consequence of his struggle to survive in a given environment.
        
        Man is not completely free - behaviour is determined by the environment (circumstances etc)
- - - - Family - insecure middle class BUT he went to private schools, went to college but left without degree & joined army - officer during WWI (in US)
        
        Met Zelda Sayre 1918 - arguably America’s 1st celebrity pairing - a golden couple - lots of parties, drinking & excess in the 20s (he dubbed her ‘1st flapper’)
        He lived & coined the term "the jazz age"
        
        1st novel The Side of Paradise published 1920 - immediately popular. $$ - married Zelda weeks later. Largely autobiographical, showcased youth of Jazz Age. Set in an America about to go into prohibition, it blasts a hole through 19th-century morality
        
        2 volumes of short stories, Flappers and Philosopher (1920) & Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
        
        2nd novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922)
        
        Masterpiece TGG (1925) - Jay Gatsby's pursuit of an elusive dream destroyed by casual cruelty of fabulous wealth.
        
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- - - - LIFE & WORKS
        
        Born Salinas, California. Only son (3 sisters) family weren’t wealthy but not poor.
        
        Growing up he formed a deep appreciation of his environment. Decided aged 14 to be a writer.
        
        Stanford Uni (only enrolled to please parents) but dropped in & out, often to work with migrants on California ranches. Deepened his empathy for the workers, disenfranchised & lonely - characteristic in his work
        
        After uni, briefly tried construction work & journalism in NYC before → California
        
        Early novels, Cup of Gold, The Pastures of Heaven & To a God Unknown - poorly received. In 30s, poor, dependent on wife’s paychecks & living father’s house
        
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- - - - Local public schools - then junior reporter instead of college.
        
        Fought WW1 - wounded Italy 1918. Then journalist in Europe (Fr, Italy, Spain...)
        
        Published Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923) and In Our Time (1924)
        
        Success came 1926 -The Sun also Rises fictional reminiscence of 'Lost Generation' expatriates - set in Pamplona, Spain. Bull-fighting big theme (H super fan)
        
        A Farewell to Arms (1929) - sense of war’s immorality through tragic story of American officer & British nurse in wartime Italy
        
        Journalist in Sp CW - material for For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) - greatest novel. American volunteer joins a guerrilla band in Guadarrama mountains. Portrays tragic betrayal of Spp ppl by foreign Fascist & Communist forces + by reactionary elements within Spain
        
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  - - - Style = understated & anti-rhetoric. Partly response to overly florid public rhetoric of war yrs, but also related to modernist experimentation esp mentors Ezra Pound & Gertude Stein.
        
        Juxtaposes a predominance of action words when describing characters with overall sense that they're passive - action happens to them, they lack agency. Typical of modernist - c's react to events & circumstances they have no control over.
        
        Frequent repetition of words & phrases, short sentences or long sentences consisting of short phrases/clauses connected by conjunctions. Novels ∴ easy to read BUT have deeper meanings - reader needs to work (like eg VW!) Iceberg theory.
        
        Main themes = reflection of his own life:
        
        The Sun also Rises (1926) - frustrated love - backdrop of Paris & Spain 1920s
        
        Men Without Women (1927) - boxing, bullfighting & love
        
        Farewell to Arms (1929) - love, betrayal & reconciliation - backdrop - violence of WWI.
        
        The Garden of Eden (1986 posthumously)- glamorous life of young Am writer on the Cote dÁzur in 1920s.
        
        The Old Man and the Sea, heroism, stoicism & ceremony.
- - - - 1919 - began writing poems. Enrolled local uni but soon quit & → NY for a yr - before → home again.
        
        Self-educated - wide-reading - wrote short stories, sketches & reviews.
        1st publication - poems The Marble Faun 1924. 1st novel Soldier´s Pay - 1926 - a wounded soldier returns home to “wasteland” of post-war society =MODERNIST THEMES
        
        1929 - Sartoris - 1st in Yoknapatawpha series - a fictional archetypal addition to Mississippi & setting of all bar 5 of novels (mostly between C/W-WW1). Yoknapatawpha county is realistic - fits seamlessly into real world around it - c's often go to real places eg Memphis/Harvard. Shows dev of area over 200 years & how landscape ↑ industrialised - represents whole confederate south
        
        Experimental novel The Sound and the Fury 1929 & As I Lay Dying 1930 - both v influenced by JJ´s SofC. Eg in AILD death of a southern matriarch, Addie Bundren, told from 15 viewpoints
        
        More in Y.. saga: Absalom Absalom! (1936), The Unvanquished (1938), Go Down Mose (1942) & Intruder in the Dust (1948).
        
        Last novel The Reivers, published just before death in Oxford Mississippi 1962.
  - - - Closely associated with his experiences of growing up in South - evils in modern society - legacy of C/W, persistence of structural racism, & deep concern about decay of 'old South'. Often tragic. Invented extraordinary cast of (often weird) southerners typical of Y.. County - eg descendants of slaves, poor whites, agrarians, w/c & aristocracy from trad. families.
        
        Eg - racial prejudice in Absalom,Absalom (1936) - young man rejected by father & brother due to his mixed blood.
    - - Distortion of time through SofC, eg The Sound and the Fury (1929) - downfall of Compson family seen through minds of several Cs who give fragmentary & impressionistic responses to events
        
        Also uses “the continuous present” style where present, past & future events are mixed - so everything seems to happen at the same time
        
        Uses hyperextended grammar & omits/uses unexpected punctuation - attempts to show his world at being paralysed by its past
        Also - lonnnggg descriptions of Cs & scenes
        
        Uses vernacular language & culture to immerse reader in a society that was deeply foreign to mainstream American experience. Eg in As I Lay Dying 1930 - (considered 1 of best novels)
        
        Experimented switching different perspectives & voices, inc. those of children, outcasts, insane & illiterate
        
        SO narrative = complex & varied & V MODERNIST
- - - - Eg Daisy: “I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
- - - - Green light = metaphor for perfect futures we continue to believe in even while watching it get farther away. SO despite evidence Lost Gen cont. to believe that “one fine day” dreams will come true.
- - - - BUT The Sun also Rises (1926)has elements of dramatic realism & naturalism - eg: (inspired by Mark Twain) c's often speak in distinctively American English - colloquial & vernacular, with American idioms - how ppl actually speak
- - - - Satiric portrayal of many characters critiques American concepts of social mobility