American modernism

Continuity and change (indebtedness and break

free from tradition )(

(when you see tradition or continuity always

remember ts eliot’s essay tradition and the indv
talent)
Exemplary question: Continuity and change in am lit of the twenties. Discuss in relationship to the themes

and forms of two works.

The 20’s can certainly point to a decisive divide marking ends and beginnings,

The 20’s seem to highlight a historical watershed where traditional binary oppositions of high and low, old

and new, order and chaos appear to be disrupted by the formation of more complex hierarchies.

This economic engine swept many Americans into an affluent “consumer culture” in which people

nationwide saw the same advertisements, bought the same goods, listened to the same music and did the

same dances.

But for some, the Jazz Age of the 1920s roared loud and long, until the excesses of the Roaring Twenties

came crashing down as the economy tanked at the decade’s end.

Continuity and change in character description

Continuity and change in narration ( non linearity, temporal distortion, fragmentation, multiciplicity of

narrators/unreliable narrators, stream of consciousness)

Continuity and change ( indv freedom and the American dream) What lies behind

the country’s relentless demand for lonesome achievement and personal responsibility is a collective fantasy

that Americans must be entirely self sufficient to succeed, and that, if managed well, riches await. Some of

America’s most popular authors helped construct that narrative notion. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry

David Thoreau stressed the more elegant and literary element of that process, which is self reliance. Horatio
Alger’s fixation on the “rags-to-riches” plot line gave rise to the idiom “the Horatio Alger story.” These

penniless trapped stock boys, shop girls, and factory workers who make it up the ladder

of American commerce, do so through pluck and hard work. If we abstract it further, a Horatio Alger story is

an idea of American life that starts with indigence and ends in affluence.

The American literature of the twenties pokes holes in these myths. While triumphant aloneness has been

enshrined as the quintessentially rugged American biography, in the real world, such self-sufficiency

contributes to the rise of alienation, estrangement, and ostracism.

To chasten our expectations towards an ever diminishing spiral/

Individual vs society
Human beings have always tried to come together in groups, not only to live in a way that ensures an escape

from pangs of solitude but also to attain a collective strength against a common enemy, be it animals, other

humans, or the wrath of nature. Even so, the relationship between the individual and society has always been

simultaneously rewarding and conflicting. An endless debate exists over whether an individual—the basic

unit of the society—should be able to claim greater attention to his personal rights and privileges, or the

society—the alliance of individuals strengthened by their mutual consent— should be empowered to

overlook one for many. The tension inherent in such a puzzling relationship becomes apparent from the

subtle contradiction in defining each The brightest minds have long endeavored to solve this conundrum.

with the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declaring the death of God, all binding factors that had

kept social obligations alive so far seemed to crumble, and individuals were suddenly left with a dangerous

kind of freedom encumbered with a responsibility for every decision taken. With the two devastating world

wars of the 20th century, no wonder older traditions lost their worth for the trauma-ridden individual. Such

despair of “isolation amid crowds” understandably gave rise to Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism and Albert

Camus’s sense of the absurd.

Alienation

Prior to the First World War, the human race had always had the habit of clustering in

groups in times of need. Some groups would fight others as was the case of colonizers
and colonized, but the members of the same group had seldom shown signs of

detachment or hostility towards one another. During and after the War, however, this

state had begun to change into one of alienation; a sort of estrangement that divided

members of the same social unit, community, and even family. In this manner,

alienation and estrangement defamiliarized even the haven of safety which humanity

had formerly called unity. The authors of the day were very sensitive and extremely

responsive to this phenomenon. Thus, they spared no efforts to illustrate and

emphasize it in a desperate attempt, no doubt, to remedy its evils on the

psychological, existential, and social spheres. Different authors dealt with this subject

matter in different ways. A systematic study of the most significant works

undoubtedly begins at the initial level of what had ignited and brought about such a

state of affairs. In his 1905 novel The Czar's Spy, William Le Queux suggests that the

upheaval began with the decaying moral compass of the world, and its center which

could no longer hold people together in a

community that scarified love and honor for money. The book's main female

character, by means of illustration, had been subjected to atrocious kinds of torture,

both physical and psychological, in a last and final blow aimed at the archaic regime

of chivalry. Thus, in a world where people could no longer trust their own family

members, rely on science, or find solace in the sanity of their own minds, alienation

was the unavoidable end result which enveloped in its mist the already agonizing

carcass of humanity.

The American Dream (already made but needs

more ( 1 disillusionment, 2 reassessment, 3 moral
decline)
F. Scott Fitzgerald's recreations of the Jazz Age are convincing not only because they draw upon his
experiences as a charter member of the Lost Generation but also because they convey so pervasively a sense
of the fundamental paradox which gave the Age its poignancy. In a Fitzgerald novel one is drawn almost
simultaneously in two directions: toward the naive hope that the best of life is yet to come, and toward the
realization that such circumstances as give life meaning lie buried in an irrecoverable past. Characters in his
best work are nowhere more representative of the Jazz Age than when they find themselves curiously
suspended in time.

The conventional wisdom of the nineteenth century, threadbare even before the Great War, was simply and
undeniably inadequate to deal with the world which the War had left in its wake. To a person standing at the
threshold of the 1920s the pre-war world and its traditions appeared not simply remote, but as relics of an
outmoded and archaic past, the repository of an innocence long since dead. Possessed of what seemed an
obsolete past, Americans faced an inaccessible future; for a moment in history, there was only the present.

The roar of the twenties was both a birth-cry and a death-rattle, for if it announced the arrival of the first
generation of modern Americans it also declared an end to the Jeffersonian dream of simple agrarian virtue
as the standard of national conduct and the epitome of national aspiration. The new generation forfeited its
claim to the melioristic certainties of an earlier time as the price of its full participation in the twentieth
century, and declared itself lost not in spite of its history, but because of it

escapism
The presence of escape, or flight, in the modern American novel has long reflected a dominant mood in

American life. wherever it appears in American literature—and it does so with astonishing frequency—it

appears as a kind of obsessive accompaniment, a counterpoint to, or even a part of, the main structure of the

story.

Though escape generally implies a flight from one reality to another, escapism has a wider cluster of

associations For escapism implies a flight from daily reality, far less forgivable than literally running away

from a society or situation.

Although the theme of flight may be seen in other literatures, it is only in American literature, particularly in

the American novel, that the preoccupation with flight begins to loom large, begins to represent what is

most characteristically American—the urge to be forever wandering forward into new territories, to take

to the Open Road This American preoccupation—the desertion of the old for the hope of the new—has been

a deep and powerful force in Amer ican life since the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, in their own

escape from social and religious persecution