Namangan davlat universiteti ingliz filologiyasi fakulteti amaliy ingliz tili kafedrasi

LESSON 12 
American literature at the beginning of 20th century 
Plan 
1.
 
The 20th Century has been called ‘the American Century’
 
2.
 
Numerous novels, notably Hemingway's 
The Sun Also Rises
(1926) and Fitzgerald's 
This Side of 
Paradise
(1920), evoke the extravagance and disillusionment of the lost generation.
 
The 20th Century has been called ‘the American Century’ and the faculty in the field 
variously address the rhetoric and substance of this claim. We have particular interests in modern 
and contemporary literature within an international and global frame; in peacetime and at war; in 
the emergence of forms of experimental writing that even as they cross boundaries possess special 
affinities with evolving characterizations of ‘Americanness.’ Nor are we content to let phrasing 
such as ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ pass unchallenged. The complex interactions of modernism 
and modernity stand at the core of the field. When does modernism start? When does it stop? Is it 
one thing or many? (Among the varieties of modernism we study: American modernists abroad in 
London and Paris, cinematic modernism, theatrical modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, Afro-
Modernism, queer modernism, Jamesian modernism.) Ethnicity, gender, sexuality, race don’t just 
enter into the picture—they define and redefine it. How adequate is the language of postmodernism 
to characterize the fiction, poetry and nonfiction prose of the past thirty, forty, fifty years? Politics, 
science, society, our relations to the natural world and to built environments, to our selves, our 
bodies, those of others—these all enter into the department’s vigorous investigation of the past 
century and of the present.
Americans of the "Roaring Twenties" fell in love with other modern entertainments. Most 
people went to the movies once a week. Although Prohibition -- a nationwide ban on the 
production, transport, and sale of alcohol instituted through the 18th Amendment to the U.S. 
Constitution -- began in 1919, underground "speakeasies" and nightclubs proliferated, featuring 
jazz music, cocktails, and daring modes of dress and dance. Dancing, moviegoing, automobile 
touring, and radio were national crazes. American women, in particular, felt liberated. Many had 
left farms and villages for homefront duty in American cities during World War I, and had become 
resolutely modern. They cut their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short "flapper" dresses, and gloried in 
the right to vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1920. They boldly 
spoke their mind and took public roles in society.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and disillusioned with the savage war, the older 
generation they held responsible, and difficult postwar economic conditions that, ironically, 
allowed Americans with dollars -- like writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude 
Stein, and Ezra Pound -- to live abroad handsomely on very little money. Intellectual currents, 
particularly Freudian psychology and to a lesser extent Marxism (like the earlier Darwinian theory 
of evolution), implied a "godless" world view and contributed to the breakdown of traditional 
values. Americans abroad absorbed these views and brought them back to the United States where 
they took root, firing the imagination of young writers and artists. William Faulkner, for example, a 
20th-century American novelist, employed Freudian elements in all his works, as did virtually all 
serious American fiction writers after World War I.
Despite outward gaiety, modernity, and unparalleled material prosperity, young Americans 
of the 1920s were "the lost generation" -- so named by literary portraitist Gertrude Stein. Without a 
stable, traditional structure of values, the individual lost a sense of identity. The secure, supportive 
family life; the familiar, settled community; the natural and eternal rhythms of nature that guide the 
planting and harvesting on a farm; the sustaining sense of patriotism; moral values inculcated by 
religious beliefs and observations -- all seemed undermined by World War I and its aftermath.
Numerous novels, notably Hemingway's 
The Sun Also Rises
(1926) and Fitzgerald's 
This 
Side of Paradise
(1920), evoke the extravagance and disillusionment of the lost generation. In T.S. 

---

Eliot's influential long poem 
The Waste Land
(1922), Western civilization is symbolized by a bleak 
desert in desperate need of rain (spiritual renewal).
The world depression of the 1930s affected most of the population of the United States. 
Workers lost their jobs, and factories shut down; businesses and banks failed; farmers, unable to 
harvest, transport, or sell their crops, could not pay their debts and lost their farms. Midwestern 
droughts turned the "breadbasket" of America into a dust bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for 
California in search of jobs, as vividly described in John Steinbeck's 
The Grapes of Wrath
(1939). 
At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens, shanty 
towns, and armies of hobos -- unemployed men illegally riding freight trains -- became part of 
national life. Many saw the Depression as a punishment for sins of excessive materialism and loose 
living. The dust storms that blackened the midwestern sky, they believed, constituted an Old 
Testament judgment: the "whirlwind by day and the darkness at noon."
In 1860, most Americans lived on farms or in small villages, but by 1919 half of the 
population was concentrated in about 12 cities. Problems of urbanization and industrialization 
appeared: poor and overcrowded housing, unsanitary conditions, low pay (called "wage slavery"), 
difficult working conditions, and inadequate restraints on business. Labor unions grew, and strikes 
brought the plight of working people to national awareness. Farmers, too, saw themselves 
struggling against the "money interests" of the East, the so-called robber barons like J.P. Morgan 
and John D. Rockefeller. Their eastern banks tightly controlled mortgages and credit so vital to 
western development and agriculture, while railroad companies charged high prices to transport 
farm products to the cities. The farmer gradually became an object of ridicule, lampooned as an 
unsophisticated "hick" or "rube." The ideal American of the post-Civil War period became the 
millionaire. In 1860, there were fewer than 100 millionaires; by 1875, there were more than 1,000.
From 1860 to 1914, the United States was transformed from a small, young, agricultural ex-
colony to a huge, modern, industrial nation. A debtor nation in 1860, by 1914 it had become the 
world's wealthiest state, with a population that had more than doubled, rising from 31 million in 
1860 to 76 million in 1900. By World War I, the United States had become a major world power.
As industrialization grew, so did alienation. Characteristic American novels of the period 
Stephen Crane's 
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
, Jack London's 
Martin Eden
, and later Theodore 
Dreiser's 
An American Tragedy
depict the damage of economic forces and alienation on the weak or 
vulnerable individual. Survivors, like Twain's Huck Finn, Humphrey Vanderveyden in London's 
The Sea-Wolf
, and Dreiser's opportunistic Sister Carrie, endure through inner strength involving 
kindness, flexibility, and, above all, individuality.