The Moderns 1900 1950 Event Timeline 1905 Einstein

The Moderns 1900 -1950

Event Timeline • 1905: Einstein formulates his theory of relativity • 1914: The Panama Canal Opens • 1917: America enters WWI • 1920: The Harlem Renaissance begins • 1920: 19 th Amendment grants women the right to vote • 1927: The Jazz Singer, one of the first sound films, opens

Events Timeline • 1929: U. S. Stock Market crashes leading to the Great Depression • 1934 -1937: The Dust Bowl – recurrent dust storms wreak havoc on the Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas • 1939: WWII begins in Europe • 1941: US enters WWII • 1945: United Nations established • 1950: US populations reaches 1 million

Tenets of The American Dream Three Central Ideas behind The American Dream: ► America as the new “Eden”; a land of beauty, bounty and unlimited promise. ► Optimism justified by the ever-expanding opportunity and abundance that many people have come to expect. ►The importance and the triumph of the Individual

Traditional Beliefs are Questioned • Americans had a growing interest in phycology • Americans began to question just how much freedom we really had • Marxism: The Socialist beliefs of Karl Marx help fuel the Russian Revolution

The Jazz Age • Prohibition prohibited the manufacturing and sale of alcohol • Prohibition ushered in the era of the bootlegger • Speakeasies, Jazz clubs • The short-skirted flapper (Oh, my!) • The Gangster • An era defined as “racy” and unconventional • Fitzgerald publishes his book The Great Gatsby

The New American Hero • Disillusionment becomes a major theme in the fiction of the time • Sinclair Lewis publishes Main Street, a novel about the small-mindedness of small town life. • Writer Ernest Hemingway introduces a new kind of hero: has a code of honor, is courageous, and totally disillusioned.

The Elements of Modernism in American Literature • Emphasis on bold experimentation in style and form, reflecting the fragmentation of society. • Rejection of traditional themes and subjects • Sense of disillusionment and loss of faith in the American dream • Rejection of the ideal of a hero as infallible in favor of a hero who is flawed and disillusioned but shows “grace under pressure. ” • Interest in the inner workings of the human mind, sometimes expressed through new narrative techniques such as stream of consciousness.

Poetry in New England the Midwest • Rejected the Modernist trends such as free verse and stream of consciousness • Held on to traditional verse forms of poetry • New England Poets: Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost • Midwestern Poet: Edgar Lee Masters

The Harlem Renaissance • Two different types of African American poetry during the Harlem Renaissance: • Conventional poetry – metrically regular and rhymed verse (Paul Laurence Dunbar) • Lyrical Poetry – based on spirituals and jazz (James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Claude Mc. Kay, and Countee Cullen) • Introduced the language of the inner city into literature, gave voice to a group, African Americans, who had been ignored, marginalized

Against the Grain • Robert Jeffers – Carved out an isolated and hermitlike existence in California • Sometimes wrote in meter and rhyme, but more often wrote in long lines of free verse • Unorthodox views on progress, religion, and the nature of humanity • Became an inspiration to the “Beat Generation” of the 1950’s • John Crowe Ransom – Southern poet, stood for wit, gentility, subtle intellect, and the manners of an earlier century

The American Dream Revised • American Modernists both echoed and challenged the American dream • Modernists constituted a broader, more resonant voice than ever before • Some of America’s best writers came out of this period • Created a second American Renaissance