American Modernism

Question 1

Modernism and The Lost Generation

Answer 1

• overlapping topics (all Lost Generation writers were Modernist)

Question 2

Modernity =

Answer 2

(= Late Modern Era – 1900 - )
- typically stands for technological progress (20s and 30s of 20th century)

• telephone - people are instantly approachable, speed of information
• affordable cars – mass production

Question 3

Background

Answer 3

• democratic trend
• suffragist movement (women have the right to vote)
• the USA is the cradle of Democracy – THE buzzword
• massive migration and immigration
• the South still mainly agrarian place

Question 4

What did Landed gentry turn into?

Answer 4

Sharecropper = a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land

Landed gentry = a British social class, those who owned land, didn’t have to work

Question 5

Harlem Renaissance

Answer 5

(1920s – 1930s)
– contributed to the Jazz Age, brass instruments
– Flappers = young women known for their energetic freedom

Question 6

John Steinbeck

Answer 6

• combines realism and modernism (hard to categorize) – modernist because of WHAT he writes about, not because of HOW
• a harsh critique of capitalism

book - In Dubious Battle – a farmworkers’ strike
Of Mice and Men - The Great Depression

Question 7

Lost Generation

Answer 7

• 1900 and the early teens were very optimistic → optimism ended with WWI

= young people coming of age in the US during and shortly after the WWI
- disillusioned/disappointed
- DOESN’T mean shell-shocked (ptsd, war veteran)

Question 8

What does WASP mean?

Answer 8

= White Anglo-Saxon Protestant

Question 9

Who was the chronicler of the Jazz Age?

Answer 9

(bc of that considered to be a Modernist – he doesn’t use many modernist elements)
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Question 10

The Sound and The Fury

Answer 10

William Faulkner
- (narrated by 5 people, one of them is a village idiot) – you find a narrator you find the most trustworthy

Question 11

Hills Like White Elephants

Answer 11

Ernest Hemingway

Question 12

A Rose for Emily

Answer 12

William Faulkner

Question 13

What is The Iceberg Technique and who used it?

Answer 13

Ernest Hemingway
– he provides very cryptic (not clear enough, deliberately ambiguous) text, the visible (the said things) is just a small part in comparison with the invisible (inferred by the reader)
 what we get: action, physical description
 what we don’t get: thoughts, motivation, psychology, background (no adv. or adj.)

Question 14

Innovative literary techniques of Modernism?

Answer 14

1) stream of consciousness
- inner monologue, chain of associations, ambiguity

2) flashbacks

3) stylistic innovations – disruption of traditional syntax and form

4) multiple/polyphonic narration (several people tell you parts of story or the same event)
- advantage: you get a better picture of what is actually going on (very realistic, more life-like than realism)

5) literary minimalist – saying as much as you can with as few words as you can

Question 15

A Telephone Call

Answer 15

Dorothy Parker