Redefining the American Dream The Moderns: 1914-1939 Redefining the American Dream

The Moderns: 1914-1939 The Great War – 1914 Women’s Suffrage – 1920 The Decade that Roared – 1920s The Great Depression - 1929

The Moderns: 1914-1939

The Moderns: 1914-1939 Prior to the twentieth century, people believed in the United States as a new Eden with limitless resources. They trusted in the ultimate triumph of any self-reliant individual. Basically, they had faith in the country’s progress toward prosperity.

The Moderns: 1914-1939 During and after World War I, though, people became hesitant to believe in the American dream and became cynical about traditional authority and values.

The Moderns: 1914-1939 To satisfy this new reader, American writers had to find new themes, styles, and subjects. They needed to reflect a variety of American voices. They were interested in psychoanalysis and wanted to capture characters’ thought processes.

The Moderns: 1914-1939 Two major authors of this time period, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, faced these challenges quite differently. While Fitzgerald’s heroes were often Byronic in nature, Hemingway’s often behaved honorably in a world without purpose.

The Moderns: 1914-1939 European painters were using imagery and symbolism very creatively. American poets were inspired by this creativity and began toying with rhythms and vocabulary

A new poetry – Symbolism, Imagism, and Beyond! American poets were inspired by the French symbolist poets. Americans were able to produce a new type of poetry through which the true American genius could speak.

Symbolism: The Search for a New Reality Symbolists wanted to get rid of traditional symbols (religious, national, or psychological symbols). They believed these symbols were dull and meaningless through overuse. They wanted the reader, instead, to use his or her imagination, which they believed was more reliable than reason. They saw this new technological world as corrupt and detested mass culture.

Imagism: “The EXACT Word” Imagists believed that poetry can be made purer by concentration on the precise, clear, unqualified image. The treasured the raw power of the image to communicate feeling and thought.

A New Poetic Order Free verse – Poetry without regular rhyming and metrical patterns. How is this different from blank verse?

Harlem Renaissance We will do an entire lesson over the Harlem Renaissance, but, for now, remember this: The writers of this era responded to the oppression and feelings of powerlessness that pervaded the lives of Harlem neighbors. The poets liked the rhythms (the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of prose or poetry) and jazz sounds of the African American dialect and mimicked them in their poetry.