The coming of the twentieth century spurred an unprecedented metamorphosis that redefined society to many of those who inhabited it. Facets of the transformation included technological and scientific advancements that began to undermine the foundation of which many laid their belief structures upon, utterly annihilating the traditional perspective towards life. Scientists such as Darwin, who attenuated once concrete interpretations of the Bible with his evolutionary theories, or Freud, who depicted human individuality as being driven by primitive, sexual desires, illustrated that the world was not as it seemed. Accompanied by the painful shattering of many paradigms, the tragedy of the world’s first total war, the Great War, which was characterized by millions of bloody casualties and nightmarish battlefield conditions, traumatized the early twentieth century. Those tormented by these changes turned their backs to romantic tradition and heritage to embrace innovational styles that diverged from norms laid down by the Victorian era as a coping mechanism. Thus, modernism was born.
Modernist titans like T.S. Eliot depicted an infertile, dilapidated society in The Waste Land; John Dos Passos illustrated the hopeless battle between individual and the overwhelmingly powerful machine in Three Soldiers; Ernest Hemingway exemplified the degradation of morals and how alcoholism was used as a crutch in a hobbled limp in search of greater meaning in The Sun Also Rises. These individuals, in renouncement of their past cultural heritage, created a momentous movement that has left a tremendous impact still seen today.
At the forefront of this movement, Eliot, widely considered the greatest poet of the twentieth century, constructed The Waste ...
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...nged and everything was in place, but put the watch to the ear, and one heard nothing” (Hart xi).
Works Cited
Passos, John Dos. Three Soldiers. New York: George H. Doran Company, 1921. Print.
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. The Waste Land: Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Michael North. New York: Norton & Company, 2001. 3-20. Print.
Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot’s Early Years. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Print.
Hart, Jeffrey. The Living Moment: Modernism in a Broken World. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2012. Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, 1926. Print.
Howard, Michael. The First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print.
Reef, Catherine. Ernest Hemingway: A Writer’s Life. New York: Clarion Books, 2009. Print.
Strachan, Hew. The Outbreak of the First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Print.
In the years after the Great War, America rose to become a global power, symbolic of wealth and everything that came with it. Frivolous spending was a common thing to expect in the years between World War 1 and the Great Depression. Luxury was no longer a commodity solely for the upper-class during the roaring 1920's. All throughout, the United States was booming. The return of the veterans from Europe was of course celebrated by all, but there was a certain coterie that were troubled in discovering tranquility in a country that was still commemorating it's upset over the Central Powers. The very men that had fought for their country to propel it to a state of economic prowess were slowly becoming alienated by the society of post war America. A term coined by Gertrude Stein, friend and mentor of Ernest Hemingway, the “Lost Generation” found that their lives in the states would be altered perilously by Allied victory in Europe. The epoch of this conglomerate of young men was brought to life through the style of its writers. The Lost Generation is an allocation of young men, generally American writers, who built themselves during the 1920's based on a sense of aimlessness and loss of moral compass, showed how their learned values no longer applied in post war society through their written works and was made commonplace in the vocabulary of today through the writing of Ernest Hemingway.
...to subjects relevant to today, such as religion.Eliot argues that without religion we are all lack direction and more importantly we lack substance in our lives. Without religion, we are superficial and it is due to this that we turn to pop culture. Pop culture is a filler for that which is intellectually rewarding. Eliot recognized this and for this reason he wrote “The Wasteland”. Eliot’s poem made bold statements about what was really happening in the modern world. Whether one argue with Eliot’s positions or not, his work joins the canon of the classic and ironically provides an opportunity for readers to plug into something greater.
American Literature from its very beginning has been centered around a theme of innocence. The Puritans wrote about abandoning the corruption of Europe to find innocence in a new world. The Romantics saw innocence and power in nature and often wrote of escaping from civilization to return to nature. After the Civil War, however, the innocence of the nation is challenged. The Realists focused on the loss of innocence and in Naturalist works innocence is mostly gone. During these periods of American Literature it seems almost as if a hole was being dug, a sort of emptying of innocence, and after World War I the Modernists called this hole the wasteland Many Modernist works focus on society lost in the wasteland, but they hint at a way out. The path out of the wasteland is through a return to innocence. This is evident in the Modernist works of The wasteland by T. S. Eliot, "Directive" by Robert Frost, "Babylon Revisited" by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and "Hills Like White Elephants" by Earnest Hemingway as will be shown in an analysis of the inhabitants of the wasteland and their search for innocence, the role of children and pregnancy in the wasteland, and the symbolism of water and rebirth.
The Modernist era of poetry, like all reactionary movements, was directed, influenced, and determined by the events preceding it. The gradual shift away from the romanticized writing of the Victorian Era served as a litmus test for the values, and the shape of poetry to come. Adopting this same idea, William Carlos Williams concentrated his poetry in redirecting the course of Modernist writing, continuing a break from the past in more ways than he saw being done, particularly by T.S. Eliot, an American born poet living abroad. Eliot’s monumental poem, The Waste Land, was a historically rooted, worldly conscious work that was brought on by the effects of World War One. The implementation of literary allusions versus imagination was one point that Williams attacked Eliot over, but was Williams completely in stride with his own guidelines? Looking closely at Williams’s reactionary poem to The Waste Land, Spring and All, we can question whether or not he followed the expectations he anticipated of Modernist work; the attempts to construct new art in the midst of a world undergoing sweeping changes.
The modernist period was a time of change. After World War II many people found themselves unhappy, lonely, and depressed. With the groundbreaking influences of Karl Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, many people began to question their own reality. What did it mean to exist? What was life, and what was death? The modernist author reflected this change, and confronted these questions with enthusiasm. Together modernist artists became the representative voice of the people. This voice transcended all forms of art, but was most successful in the written word. Through the experimentation of language and form, the modernist author managed to convey the meaninglessness felt by many, and created a light in the darkness of an uncertain world. Ernest Hemingway's short stories titled "A clean well-lighted Place", and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited" are two notable examples of literary art during the modernist period.
Eliot, T. S., and Michael North. The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Print.
In the beginning of the twentieth century, literature changed and focused on breaking away from the typical and predicate patterns of normal literature. Poets at this time took full advantage and stretched the idea of the mind’s conscience on how the world, mind, and language interact and contradict. Many authors, such as Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and Twain, used the pain and anguish in first hand experiences to create and depict a new type of literature, modernism. In this time era, literature and art became a larger part of society and impacted more American lives than ever before. During the American modernism period of literature, authors, artists, and poets strived to create pieces of literature and art that challenged American traditions and tried to reinvent it, used new ways of communication, such as the telephone and cinema, to demonstrate the new modern social norms, and express the pain and suffering of the First World War.
With the end of the first World War in the year 1918, many soldiers, young and old, came home to their families dark and cynical. Many famous authors of this time, like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, wrote short stories not of their times at war, but of how material the world truly is. These were considered the “Lost Generation,” due to their lack of belief in humans in general and their dreary outlook of life in general. F. Scott Fitzgerald is famous for his book, The Great Gatsby which showed how he as an author viewed the Roaring Twenties, as one of the main themes is the idea that the American Dream is dead and humans are fickle and obsessed with material things, like money. On the opposite end of the spectrum, though, was the bright young generation, which “came into power” shortly after the Lost Generation. These young people were full of bright ideas and with the American Economy is a good place, everyone seemed to be happy. Art and fashion changed drastically, w...
In the 1950s, authors tended to follow common themes, these themes were summed up in an art called postmodernism. Postmodernism took place after the Cold War, themes changed drastically, and boundaries were broken down. Postmodern authors defined themselves by “avoiding traditional closure of themes or situations” (Postmodernism). Postmodernism tends to play with the mind, and give a new meaning to things, “Postmodern art often makes it a point of demonstrating in an obvious way the instability of meaning (Clayton)”. What makes postmodernism most unique is its unpredictable nature and “think o...
The art, literature, and poetry of the early 20th century called for a disruption of social values. Modernism became the vague term to describe the shift. The characteristics of the term Modernism, all seek to free the restricted human spirit. It had no trust in the moral conventions and codes of the past. One of the examples of modernism, that breaks the conventions and traditions of literature prior to Modernism, is Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants”. The short story uses plot, symbolism, setting, dialogue, and a new style of writing to allow human spirit to experiment with meaning and interpretation.
In the early portion of the 1920’s, Gertrude Stein told Ernest Hemingway, “All of you young people who served in the War, you are the lost generation.” (Shi 987) After World War I, those who served returned to a world that had lost morals, ways of life and a traditional status quo. Consequently, young soldiers were forced to reconcile with a world that seemingly lacked meaning. To compensate, the generation turned to alcohol, sex and tainted love affairs. (Shi 988) From 1920-1926, a series of novels, including Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises formed a modern form of literature (Reynolds 6); furthermore, these novels were based on the “Lost Generation,” and the issues that perpetually following the Great War. Ernest Hemingway himself was a member of this generation, an...
...ke Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who cast off the beliefs of post World War I America. Many of these thinkers moved to Paris and try to make find meaning in their meaningless lives. They would throw wild parties, "drink excessively, and have scandalous love affairs (Kaiser)." They gained prominent places in the twentieth century because of their spiritual alienation. Loss of faith may cause fame and fortune, as it did for the lost generation, but with this loss came inescapable emptiness.
T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land" is considered by many to be the most influential work in modern literature. First published in 1922, it captures the feelings and sentiments of modern culture after World War I. Line thirty of "The Waste Land," "I will show you fear in a handful of dust," is often viewed as a symbol of mankind’s fear of death and resulting love of life. Eliot’s masterpiece—with its revolutionary ideas—inspired writers of his era, and it continues to affect writers even today.
The post World War II period had an enormous impact on American society and literature. Many important events occurred and affected directly to the movement of American literature. During this period, American Literature reflected the movement of disillusionment, and portrayed the lost generation. Many WWII writers adapted new approaches and philosophies in writing their novels. They portrayed the lost generation, anti-war perspective and explored the true meaning of “war hero”. Among them, the pioneers are Bernard Malamud, Ken Kesey and Joseph Heller, who wrote the Natural, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Catch-22.
Modernism has been defined as a rejection of traditional 19th-century norms, whereby artists, architects, poets and thinkers either altered or abandoned earlier conventions in an attempt to re-envision a society in flux. In literature this included a progression from objectivist optimism to cynical relativism expressed through fragmented free verse containing complex, and often contradictory, allusions, multiple points of view and other poetic devices that broke from the forms in Victorian and Romantic writing, as can be seen in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" (Levanson).