Modernist fiction

Question 1

Modernist fiction: The Great War (Ernest Hemingway)

Answer 1

• War as a literary theme, writers felt the need to write about being in war
• “A Plunge of Civilization” (war taken to a metaphorical level)

Question 2

Modernist fiction
Ernest Hemingway

Answer 2

• Individualists characters, rejects society, moves away to risking activities to avoid war.
• Tries to face death to give meaning to life
• Fiction is extremely massive
• Plot: boy meeting a girl but their relationship will never work because they do not communicate well.
• 3 phases:
  1. Early work (mid 1920s) - individualism, short stories. “The Sun Also Rises”, “A Farewell to Arm”
  2. 1930s - more social. “To Have and To Have Not”, “For Whom The Bells Tolls”
  3. 1950s - back to individualism. “The Old Man and the Sea”

Question 3

Modernist fiction
The 1920s aesthetics

Answer 3

• Great time of fun, glamour and emergence of jazz
• US profits economically
• Time of liberation
  -Conservative VS non-conservative
• Social and political repression
• Directed towards modernism consciousness.
• New perceptions led to the emergence of New Literature.
• Made fiction shorter

GEROG LUKACS
WALTER BENJAMIN
BEGGINING OF MODERN FICTION

Question 4

Modernist fiction
Francis Scott Fitzgerald

Answer 4

• Upper class, technology, jazz age, rise of new fortunes.
• Wrote mainly for entertainment and dealt deeply with important issues of modernity.
• Autobiographies.
• Alcoholism, drugs, etc.
• Style: sophisticated, elegant, close to Stein.
  - Cruel issues in an elegant way, using full sentences with peculiar flow and rhythm.

“Flappers”
“Taps of Reveille”
“Tender is the Night”