1. Modernism

2. The American dream America is seen as a “promise land” or “New Eden”
Beautiful, bountiful, land of limitless possibilities
Optimistic views on progress prevail
Life is continually improving; opportunities are continually advancing
Faith in the individual
Anyone can triumph and succeed in this land with a bit of effort, perseverance, and common sense.

3. Death of the American dream
Industrialism & Technology
Rapid transformation of everyday life in early 1900s
Spread of electricity, proliferation of cinema and radio, expansion of cities
Airplanes, wireless communication, mass-produced automobiles

4. Death of the American dream
World War I
Unprecedented destruction
7 million civilians die (massacres & military battles; starvation & exposure; influenza)
11 million soldiers lose their life
Dominance of Science
Planck’s quantum theory & Einstein’s theory of relativity
“empirical explanations can be found for everything”
This notion weakens the influence of organized religion

5. The results
All elements of modernity combine to undermine traditional values and ideas.
Skepticism, cynicism, and pessimism about life and nature prevail.
Disillusionment with morals, religion, country, progress, technology, etc.
Fragmentation: coherent worldviews blown apart.

6. The results
Spiritual Bankruptcy: atheism and loss of faith in any traditional moral order
Alienation: a feeling of the loss of all things that give life meaning and order
Modernity represents relentless change, loss, and destabilization.

7. The results
“Because of the rapid pace of social and technological change, because of the mass dislocation of populations by war, empire, and economic migration, because of the urban juxtaposition of vast cultural differences, modernity disrupts the old order, up-ends ethical and social codes, casts into doubt previously stable assumptions about self, community, the world, and the divine”

8. The bright side Because all bets are off and nothing traditional
holds water anymore, the following potentially
positive things results:
Freedom from old forms: morally, artistically, and socially
Experimentation becomes a hallmark of Modern
art and literature: you can do WHATEVER YOU
WANT!
Fewer restriction on human thought and behavior

9. The bright side
Wider acceptance of the non-traditional, such as the role of women and minorities
Artists are truly free: Stream of consciousness, stories with no plot, free verse poetry
Freedom like this can be either terrifying or incredibly liberating and inspiring

10. Response: The roaring 20s
Drink to oblivion to distract yourself from the pain of existence.
Hedonistic behaviors prevail in a effort to enjoy the good in life and ignore the bad.
Try to fill spiritual void with economic success, social status, etc. Whoever dies with the most toys wins.
This is clearly not an option after the Depression!

11. Response: the lost generation
Generally speaking, the Lost Generation refers to those who became reckless and meandering after experiencing the war, either first or second hand.
They were disillusioned and lost faith in traditional values like courage, patriotism, and masculinity.
Writer Gertrude Stein coined the phrase and Ernest Hemingway used it famously as an epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises.

12. Response: The Lost generation
In literature, the Lost Generation refers to a group of writers and artists who left the United States after the war and emigrated to Europe, where they experimented with new styles of writing that would more accurately reflect the modern world.
Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald are among the most famous members of the Lost Generation.

13. Elements of modern literature
Value placed on experimentation and individualism
Attempt to find meaning in the wake of chaos
Look inward and attempt to record consciousness
Belief that nothing is knowable; truth is relative and constantly in flux
Modern world is viewed as impersonal, alienating, and antagonistic

14. Modern poetry
Just like the writers of the Lost Generation, poets took this opportunity to experiment with form and create poetry that fit with modernity.
Most modern poets wrote with two guiding principles in mind:
Make it new
Life is different; poetry must reflect that change
Make it difficult
Simple poetry evades modernity
New questions about the reality of the objective world leads to more imaginative poetry

15. Modern poetry
The following literary terms are useful when attempting to interpret and analyze modern poetry:
Imagery: A concrete representation of a sense impression, a feeling, or an idea. Imagery refers to the pattern of related details in a work. In some works one image predominates either by recurring throughout the work or by appearing at a critical point in the plot. Often writers use multiple images throughout a work to suggest states of feeling and to convey implications of thought and action. Some modern poets, such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, write poems that lack discursive explanation entirely and include only images.

16. Modern poetry
Free Verse: Poetry without a regular pattern of meter or rhyme. The verse is "free" in not being bound by earlier poetic conventions requiring poems to adhere to an explicit and identifiable meter and rhyme scheme in a form such as the sonnet or ballad. Modern and contemporary poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries often employ free verse.
Open Form: A type of structure or form in poetry characterized by freedom from regularity and consistency in such elements as rhyme, line length, metrical pattern, and overall poetic structure.

17. Modern poetry
Syntax: The grammatical order of words in a sentence or line of verse or dialogue. The organization of words and phrases and clauses in sentences of prose, verse, and dialogue. In the following example, normal syntax (subject, verb, object order) is inverted: "Whose woods these are I think I know.”
Enjambment: A run-on line of poetry in which logical and grammatical sense carries over from one line into the next. An enjambed line differs from an end-stopped line in which the grammatical and logical sense is completed within the line.

18. William carlos williams
The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
This is Just to Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

19. e.e. cummings pity this busy monster, manukind
not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)
plays with the bigness of his littleness
-electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born-pity poor flesh
and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this fine specimen of hypermagical
ultraomnipotence. We doctors know
A hopeless case if—listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go