Modernism

1
Modernism

• Background, Concerns, and Authors

2
Background

• Some critics argue that Modernism began around
  1890
• For our purposes, we will assume it took true
  form in American Lit. at around 1910
• Social Movement, not just literary

3

• Born out of
• Imagism
• The apparition of these faces in the crowd
• Petals on a wet, black bough.
• Ezra Pound, In A Station of the Metro
• Realism
• There was this bookwhat was it? Something about
  Huckleberry whatever
• Realism is nothing more and nothing less than
  the truthful treatment of material.
• William Dean Howells, Editors Study, Harper's
  New Monthly Magazine (November 1889), p. 966.

4

• Other Influences/Results
• WWI
• Kind of a big deal
• Dada
• Chaos and originality
• Rejection of tradition
• Anti-War

5
Cut with the Kitchen Knife Through the First
Epoch of the Weimar Beer-Belly Culture Hannah
Hoch, 1919
6
Dada Movement Francis Picabia, 1919
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Concerns

• War (WWI)
• Causes
• Resultant societal impact
• Personal aftermath
• Authority
• Realism
• Love/Romanticism
• Aimlessness/Discontent
• Female Independence
• Masculinity
• Institutions/Conventions/Traditions
• Materialism
• Brevity of language

8
The Lost Generation

• Group of American Expatriates living in Paris in
  early 1900s
• Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra
  Pound, T.S. Eliot (disciple of Pound)
• Name coined by Gertrude Stein
• You are all a lost generation.

9
Hemingway

• Born 1899 in suburb of Chicago
• Wide lawns and narrow minds
• Fun Fact His mother dressed him in
• girls clothes when he was a baby
• Hobbies fishing, hunting, camping
• Sports Boxing, football
• Kansas City Star (18 years old)

10

• Left Star for US Army to fight in
• WWI (1918)
• Rumored that poor vision led to Ambulance Corps
  in Milan
• Injured in July 1918
• Mortar fragments in leg/machine gun fire
• 227 scars
• Awarded Silver Medal of Military Valor
• Despite wounds, saved another soldier
• Met and fell in love with a nurse from D.C., who
  left him before returning to America with him as
  planned (Agnes Von Kurowsky)
• Jaundice prevented return to Corps

11

• Oak Park to Toronto to Chicago (married Hadley
  Richardson) to Paris
• Greco-Turkish War
• 1927 Divorce and Remarriage (Pauline Pfieffer)
• Return to Key West in 1928
• Continued to write as a journalist, novelist, and
  short story author

12

• 1940 Divorce and Remarriage (Martha Gellhorn)
• Covered WWII as journalist
• 1944 Divorce and Remarriage (Mary Welsh)
• Brushfires and two plane crashes in Africa
• Depression and Paranoia
• Committed suicide on
• July 2, 1961

13
Some Works

• 1923 Three Stories and Ten Poems (Short Stories)
• 1925 In Our Time (Short Stories)
• 1926 The Torrents of Spring (Novel)
• 1926 The Sun Also Rises (Novel)
• 1927 Men Without Women (Short Stories)
• 1929 A Farewell to Arms (Novel)
• 1930 The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine
  Stories (Short Stories)
• 1932 Death in the Afternoon (Novel)
• 1933 Winner take Nothing (Short Stories)
• 1935 Green Hills of Africa (Novel)
• 1937 To Have and Have Not (Novel)
• 1940 For Whom the Bell Tolls (Novel)
• 1942 Men at War (Edited Anthology)
• 1950 Across the River and into the Trees (Novel)
• 1952 The Old Man and the Sea (Novel)

14
Posthumously Published

• 1962 The Wild Years (Compilation)
• 1964 A Moveable Feast (Novel)
• 1967 By-Lines (Journalism for the Toronto Star)
• 1970 Islands in the Stream (Novel)
• 1972 The Nick Adams Stories
• 1979 88 Poems
• 1981 Selected Letters

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1926
1930
16
1930