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American drama of the XX century. Detective genre, fiction. American female writers
.
Plan
1.Modernism and Experimentation: 1914-1945
2.The concept of Modernism
3. Poetry 1914-1945:Experiments in form
4. Prose writing: 1914-1945
5. American Prose Since 1945: Realism and Experimentation
Key words: modernism, experimentation, poetry, epiphany, new criticism
1.MODERNISM AND EXPERIMENTATION: 1914-1945
M
any historians have characterized the period between the two world wars as the United
States' traumatic "coming of age," despite the fact that U.S. direct involvement was relatively
brief (1917-1918) and its casualties many fewer than those of its European allies and foes. John
Dos Passos expressed America's postwar disillusionment in the novel
Three Soldiers
(1921),
when he noted that civilization was a "vast edifice of sham,
and the war, instead of its crumbling,
was its fullest and most ultimate expression." Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never regain their innocence.
Nor could soldiers from rural America easily return to their roots. After experiencing the world,
many now yearned for a modern, urban life. New farm machines such as planters, harvesters,
and binders had drastically reduced
the demand for farm jobs; yet despite their increased
productivity, farmers were poor. Crop prices, like urban workers' wages, depended on
unrestrained market forces heavily influenced by business interests: Government subsidies for
farmers and effective workers' unions had not yet become established. "The chief business of the
American people is business," President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed in 1925, and most agreed.
In the postwar "Big Boom," business flourished, and the successful prospered beyond their
wildest dreams. For the first time, many Americans enrolled in higher education -- in the 1920s
college enrollment doubled. The middle-class prospered; Americans began to enjoy the world s
highest national average income in this era, and many people purchased
the ultimate status
symbol -- an automobile. The typical urban American home glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the house with the outside world, and perhaps a telephone, a
camera, a typewriter, or a sewing machine. Like the businessman protagonist of Sinclair Lewis's
novel
Babbitt
(1922), the average American approved of these machines because they were
modern and because most were American inventions and American-made.
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
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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
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). "
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