1. MODERNISM

2. HISTORICAL CONTEXT WWI Roaring Twenties The Great Depression WWII
modern weapons = loss of humane values & optimism
Roaring Twenties
economic boom & new technology and products
Prohibition & rise of organized crime
Gave way to self-indulgence
The Great Depression
economic recession
WWII
Ushered in the atomic age

3. LITERARY THEMES
Modernism spawned from the feeling of uncertainty and disillusionment with old ideas & ideals that followed WWI
Disillusionment is the condition of being disenchanted; disappointed.
A wider cultural awareness
Democracy increasing for women, African Americans, and Immigrants
Experiences became more fragmented due to the war, stresses, and speed of change

4. LITERARY THEMES Out with the old and in with the new!
Writers shared one common purpose: they sought to capture the essence of modern life in both the form & content of their work

5. LITERARY STYLES
Experimented with new approaches & techniques - this produced a more diverse body of literature
Form became fragmented
Formal boundaries broken
Themes became implied rather than directly stated
Tone became more ironic
Imagery more symbolic

6. WHO WERE THE MODERNISTS?
T.S. Eliot
Ernest Hemingway
F. Scott Fitzgerald
E.E. Cummings
Expatriates: writers who settled in Europe (mainly Paris) because of post-war disenchantment/ disillusionment – “The Lost Generation”

7. WHO WERE THE MODERNISTS?
William Faulkner
John Steinbeck
Robert Frost
Sinclair Lewis
Eudora Welty
Writers who described the more rural life

8. Cultural Context of The Great Gatsby

9. World War I Pre WWI Propaganda – everywhere, ingrained
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World War I
Pre WWI Propaganda – everywhere, ingrained
America went into the war convinced that we would “make the world safe for democracy”
America believed it was “the war to end all wars” because that’s what Woodrow Wilson said

10. World War I Soldiers get “over there” and it is “hell”
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World War I
Soldiers get “over there” and it is “hell”
Trench warfare – miles & miles of deep trenches, frequently in water because of rain, soldiers develop “trenchfoot,”,rats in trenches ate corpses and sleeping men, surrounded by human & animal waste
Going “over the top” – out of trench into “no man’s land” where they are met with machine gun fire, barbwire, bombs, and mustard gas (1st time used in history) – TS Eliot “The Wasteland”
Soldier and civilian deaths total over 41 million
The war was NOT what we expected or what we were told it would be

11. End of World War I After soldiers get home they:
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End of World War I
After soldiers get home they:
Want to forget the horror
They don’t want to sacrifice themselves for any cause
People become very self-centered. They go into WWI idealistic but come back so disillusioned to the capabilities of humanity and war.
The world no longer makes sense to people, they don’t trust science, government, humanity, people begin to question God
People think, “well we’re going to die anyways, we may as well have a good time.”
Fitzgerald called the 1920s “the most expensive party in history.”
It makes sense why so many people turned to alcohol, parties, and excess; they wanted to drown themselves.

12. The Roaring Twenties
While the sense of loss was readily apparent among expatriate American artists who remained in Europe after the war, back home the disillusionment took a less obvious form.
America seemed to throw itself headlong into a decade of madcap behavior and materialism, a decade that has come to be called the Roaring Twenties.

13. Culture of the Roaring Twenties
The Jazz Age
The era is also known as the Jazz Age, when the music called jazz, promoted by such recent inventions as the phonograph and the radio, swept up from New Orleans to capture the national imagination.
Improvised and wild, jazz broke the rules of music, just as the Jazz Age thumbed its nose at the rules of the past.

14. Culture of the Roaring Twenties
The New Woman
Among the rules broken were the age-old conventions guiding the behavior of women. The new woman demanded the right to vote and to work outside the home.
Symbolically, she cut her hair into a boyish “bob” and bared her calves in the short skirts of the fashionable twenties “flapper.”

15. Culture of the Roaring Twenties
Prohibition
Another rule often broken was the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, or Prohibition, which banned the public sale of alcoholic beverages from 1919 until its appeal in 1933.
Speak-easies, nightclubs, and taverns that sold liquor were often raided, and gangsters made illegal fortunes as bootleggers, smuggling alcohol into America from abroad.

16. Culture of the Roaring Twenties
Gambling
Another gangland activity was illegal gambling.
Perhaps the worst scandal involving gambling was the so-called Black Sox Scandal of 1919, in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox were indicted for accepting bribes to throw baseball’s World Series.

17. Culture of the Roaring Twenties
The Automobile & Materialism
The Jazz Age was also an era of reckless spending and consumption, and the most conspicuous status symbol of the time was a flashy new automobile.
Advertising was becoming the major industry that it is today, and soon advertisers took advantage of new roadways by setting up huge billboards at their sides.
Both the automobile and a bizarre billboard play important roles in The Great Gatsby.

18. THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE
A time of artistic/ musical/ literary creativity for African Americans, centered in the Harlem district of NYC
Produced great works of literature, the new musical forms of jazz and the blues, and opened the door for later African American Writers

19. Hemingway
Wrote about people trying to maintain dignity in a hostile world
Could not fight in the war (WW1) due to an eye defect, so he joined the Red Cross Ambulance corps & was sent to the Italian front
Severely wounded in Italy
Struggled to readjust to life in the U.S. after war
Writing style was concise & concrete