BABYLON REVISITED

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BABYLON REVISITED

• Jorge Silla
• Juan Vicente
• 3º Filología Inglesa B- English III

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THE ROARING 20s

• After World War I and Spanish Flu
• Defeated countries in World War I had economic
  problems, as well as others in Europe
• Rise of radical movements Communism vs Fascism
• 1st time in US having more urban population than
  rural

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THE ROARING 20s

• Technology TV (Baird, 1925)
• Warner Brothers produces the first movie with a
  soundtrack Don Juan in 1926, followed by the
  first Part-Talkie The Jazz Singer in 1927, the
  first All-Talking movie Lights of New York in
  1928 and the first All-Color All-Talking movie On
  with the Show 1929.
• Charles Lindbergh becomes the first person to fly
  solo across the Atlantic Ocean (20 May-21 May
  1927)
• Karl Ferdinand Braun invented the modern
  electronic cathode ray tube in 1897. The CRT
  became a commercial product in 1922.
• Record companies (such as Victor, Brunswick and
  Columbia) introduce an process on their
  phonograph records in 1925 (that had been
  developed by Western Electric), resulting in a
  more life-like sound.

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SPANISH FLU

• The 1918 flu pandemic spread to every part in the
  world
• It hit dramatically in the US
• Young adults were the most likely to suffer of it
• Neglected by the high decease rate produced by
  War World I
• Theories argue that it sprang from birds to humans

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POLITICS IN THE 20s

• Communism
• Facism and Nazism
• Rise of radical groups Ku Kux Klan
• Turkish War of Independence
• IRISH CIVIL WAR AND INDEPENDENCE (1921-23)
• Women in the US received the right to vote after
  the 19th ammendment

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LITERATURE IN THE 20s

• Virginia Woolf publishes Mrs. Dalloway, To the
  Lighthouse, and A Room of One's Own
• George Gershwin writes Rhapsody in Blue
• T. S. Eliot publishes The Waste Land
• James Joyce publishes Ulysses
• Franz Kafka publishes The Trial
• Erich Maria Remarque publishes All Quiet on the
  Western Front
• Rene Magritte paints The Treachery of Images
• Hugh MacDiarmid publishes A Drunk Man Looks at
  the Thistle
• Walter Gropius builds the Bauhaus in Dessau
• F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes This Side of
  Paradise and The Great Gatsby
• Hermann Hesse publishes Siddhartha
• Ernest Hemingway publishes The Sun Also Rises and
  A Farewell to Arms
• Thornton Wilder publishes The Bridge of San Luis
  Rey
• Alexey Tolstoy publishes Aelita
• George Bernard Shaw publishes Back to Methuselah
• Eugene O'Neill awarded Pulitzer Prizes for Beyond
  the Horizon in 1920, Anna Christie in 1922, and
  Strange Interlude in 1928.
• Sinclair Lewis publishes Babbitt, Dodsworth,
  Arrowsmith, and Elmer Gantry
• Wallace Stevens publishes his first book of
  poetry, Harmonium

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CULTURE AND RELIGION in the 20s

• Prohibition legal attempt to end consumption of
  alcohol in Canada, the USA, Norway and Finland.
  Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and
  Public Morals defends alcohol prohibition in U.S
  crime would profit of the bootleg production.
• Youth culture of The Lost Generation flappers,
  the Charleston, and bobbed hair
• "The Jazz Age" jazz and jazz-influenced dance
  music widely popular
• F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes some of the most
  enduring novels characterizing the Jazz Age. This
  Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, and
  The Great Gatsby, as well as three short story
  collections, were all published in these years.
• Women's suffrage movement continues to make gains
  as women obtain full voting rights in Denmark in
  1915, in the USA in 1920, and in the UK in 1918
  (women over 30) and in 1928 (full
  enfranchisement) and women begin to enter the
  workplace in larger numbers
• First commercial radio station in the U.S. goes
  on air in Pittsburgh, in 1920, and radio quickly
  becomes a popular entertainment medium

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CULTURE AND RELIGION in the 20s (2)

• Beginning of surrealist movement
• Beginning of the Art Deco movement
• Fads such as marathon dancing, mah-jongg,
  crossword puzzles and pole-sitting are popular
• The Harlem Renaissance
• The Scopes Monkey Trial (1925) which declared
  that John T. Scopes had violated the law by
  teaching evolution in schools, creating tension
  between the competing theories of creationism and
  evolution. .
• The Group of Seven (artists)
• Minister Daisey Douglas Barr heads Women's Ku
  Klux Klan (WKKK).
• The tomb of Tutankhamun is discovered intact by
  Howard Carter (1922). This begins a second
  revival of Egyptomania.
• Edward Higgins becomes the third General (
  international leader) of The Salvation Army . His
  term is from 1929-1934.

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CULTURE AND RELIGION IMAGES
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THE GREAT DEPRESSION
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THE GREAT DEPRESSION
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THE GREAT DEPRESSION

• The largest economic depression in modern history
• International trade, as well as personal incomes,
  tax revenues, profits and prices affected.
• Cities, farming and heavy industry seriously
  affected.
• Countries setting up relief programmes
• Political turbulence and rise of radical parties
• The snowball effect
• Causes
• Consequences Incomes and prices falling 20-50,
  9000 banks failed, rates of 25 of unemployment
  in 1933, Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (influencing
  exports)

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• Inequality of wealth and income
• Marriner S. Eccles, who served as Franklin D.
  Roosevelt's Chairman of the Federal Reserve from
  November 1934 to February 1948, detailed what he
  believed caused the Depression in his memoirs,
  Beckoning Frontiers (New York, Alfred A. Knopf,
  1951)21
• As mass production has to be accompanied by mass
  consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a
  distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth,
  but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to
  provide men with buying power equal to the amount
  of goods and services offered by the nation's
  economic machinery. Emphasis in original.
• Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a
  giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a
  few hands an increasing portion of currently
  produced wealth. This served them as capital
  accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out
  of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied
  to themselves the kind of effective demand for
  their products that would justify a reinvestment
  of their capital accumulations in new plants. In
  consequence, as in a poker game where the chips
  were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the
  other fellows could stay in the game only by
  borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game
  stopped.
• That is what happened to us in the twenties. We
  sustained high levels of employment in that
  period with the aid of an exceptional expansion
  of debt outside of the banking system. This debt
  was provided by the large growth of business
  savings as well as savings by individuals,
  particularly in the upper-income groups where
  taxes were relatively low. Private debt outside
  of the banking system increased about fifty per
  cent. This debt, which was at high interest
  rates, largely took the form of mortgage debt on
  housing, office, and hotel structures, consumer
  installment debt, brokers' loans, and foreign
  debt. The stimulation to spending by
  debt-creation of this sort was short-lived and
  could not be counted on to sustain high levels of
  employment for long periods of time. Had there
  been a better distribution of the current income
  from the national product -- in other words, had
  there been less savings by business and the
  higher-income groups and more income in the lower
  groups -- we should have had far greater
  stability in our economy. Had the six billion
  dollars, for instance, that were loaned by
  corporations and wealthy individuals for
  stock-market speculation been distributed to the
  public as lower prices or higher wages and with
  less profits to the corporations and the
  well-to-do, it would have prevented or greatly
  moderated the economic collapse that began at the
  end of 1929.
• The time came when there were no more poker chips
  to be loaned on credit. Debtors thereupon were
  forced to curtail their consumption in an effort
  to create a margin that could be applied to the
  reduction of outstanding debts. This naturally
  reduced the demand for goods of all kinds and
  brought on what seemed to be overproduction, but
  was in reality underconsumption when judged in
  terms of the real world instead of the money
  world. This, in turn, brought about a fall in
  prices and employment.
• Unemployment further decreased the consumption of
  goods, which further increased unemployment, thus
  closing the circle in a continuing decline of
  prices. Earnings began to disappear, requiring
  economies of all kinds in the wages, salaries,
  and time of those employed. And thus again the
  vicious circle of deflation was closed until one
  third of the entire working population was
  unemployed, with our national income reduced by
  fifty per cent, and with the aggregate debt
  burden greater than ever before, not in dollars,
  but measured by current values and income that
  represented the ability to pay. Fixed charges,
  such as taxes, railroad and other utility rates,
  insurance and interest charges, clung close to
  the 1929 level and required such a portion of the
  national income to meet them that the amount left
  for consumption of goods was not sufficient to
  support the population.
• This then, was my reading of what brought on the
  depression.

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F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
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F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

• Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896
  December 21, 1940) was an American writer of
  novels and short stories, whose works are
  evocative of the Jazz Age, a term he coined
  himself. He is widely regarded as one of the
  twentieth century's great writers. Fitzgerald is
  considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of
  the twenties along with contemporaries like
  Ernest Hemingway and Nathaniel West. He finished
  four novels, including The Great Gatsby, with
  another published posthumously, and wrote dozens
  of short stories that treat themes of youth and
  promise along with despair and age. Fitzgerald is
  also famous for the phrase, "There are no second
  acts in American lives," which resonates with his
  own death in middle age.

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F. SCOTT FITZGERALDLIFE

• Problems at Princeton
• Problems with his wife
• Problems publishing
• Problems with alcohol
• Problems at his death

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THE GREAT GATSBY

• Five characters Nick, Tom, Daisy, George, Jordan
• Gastby as a destabilizing factor
• Plot

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PRAGUE VS PARIS
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PARIS VS PRAGUE

• Prague World War I ended with the defeat of the
  Austrian Empire and the creation of
  Czechoslovakia. Prague was chosen as its capital
  and Prague Castle as the seat of president (Tomá
  Masaryk). At this time Prague was a true European
  capital with a very developed industry. In 1930
  the population had risen to a startling 850,000.
• Paris During World War I, Paris was at the
  forefront of the war effort, having been spared a
  German invasion by the French and British victory
  at the First Battle of the Marne in 1914. In
  1918-1919, it was the scene of Allied victory
  parades and peace negotiations. In the inter-war
  period Paris was famed for its cultural and
  artistic communities and its nightlife. The city
  became a gathering place of artists from around
  the world, from exiled Russian composer
  Stravinsky and Spanish painters Picasso and Dalí
  to American writer Hemingway.22

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ALCOHOLISM

• Excessive consumption of alcohol
• The quantity that determines alcoholism differs
  from person to person
• It can be influenced by social milieu
• Effects physical, mental and social
• Reflected in literature and cinema

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CONNECTIONS WITH THE PRESENT

• Crack of (20)09?- Similar causes and
  foreshadowing of effects --bank bubble,
  mortgages, salaries, money given to worldwide
  banks (Sub-prime mortgage crisis and in the
  Intervention of the State vs. Free
  capitalism)
• The problem of custody ownership (domestic
  violence, fathers discrimination)
• Alcoholism
• Fitzgeralds reputation

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BABYLON REVISITED

• Characters evolution
• Alcoholism and Depression reflected
• The question of honor
• Symbolism
• Modernism as a technique Problems with Charlies
  narration