TRUTH DOES NOT EXIST

Truth is highly subjective, how an author writes a story can alter our perception of the truth. The truth can be
manipulated by those in power and the media, Hollywood, politicians, business leaders. Anything can be
valid if it is justified and academically supported.

INTRODUCTION TO THE PERIOD (1920-1926)

- The II World War as historical marker.
- USA as the major global power as a result of the war. USA citizens tend to forget about the history of
other countries.
- Stock Market 1929. It crashed. It can be reflected in many works, such as Of Mice and Men
- American literary Modernism. Popular culture (music, comics, folklore, Elvis Presley) appears in serious
literature
- Influence of popular culture in serious literature.
- Tradition versus authenticity.

CHANGING TIMES
- Alternatives to capitalism.
- 1919 founding of the American Communist Party. Very few people joined.
- 1924 Immigration act: control of ethnic makeup of the American population.

SELF- EXPRESSION AND PSYCHOLOGY.

-“Whoever would be a man, must be a non-conformist” (Emerson)
- 18th amendment to the US constitution: prohibition of alcohol-phenomenon of “gangsters”
- 1920s: significant changes in sexual ideas
• Sigmund Freud: repression and the unconscious.
- 19th Ammendment: Women’s liberation movement
• Education, professional work.
• New style of dressing
• Sexual freedom

Dichotomy in the figure of women: some are now modern, some are more traditional.

Jazz Age

THE FLAPPERS
- Flappers smoked in public, drank alcohol, danced at jazz clubs and practised a shocking sexual freedom.
- Designers like Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Jean Paton ruled flapper fashion.
- Straight and slim, high heels rouge, and the bob hairstyle.

The tattoed Venus: Betty Broadbent

 The Roaring Twenties

- Inflation rates rocketed (money)

- Consumer culture
- Technological innovations like the telephone and radio.
- Supremacy of jazz (Harlem Cotton Club)

THE 1930s
- Consequence of the Great Depression
• Suicides of millionaire bankers
- Increase in Communist Party membership-STALIN.

AMERICAN MODERNISM
- The breakdown of traditional society under the pressures of modernity. The US was still behind Europe in
terms of modernity.
- The Waste Land: exponent of the world in ruin.
- It involved other forms of art (sculpture, painting, dance…) - Pablo Picasso, Dadaism, etc.
- Key characteristics:
• A construction out of fragments: works constructed out of fragments
• Shifts in perspective, voice and tone: the truth is determined by the different point of views and
perspectives.
• Ironic rhetoric.
• Suggestion of symbols and images instead of statements.

- The search for meaning

• Literature is important in society
- Varied content based on the experience/interest of the writer.
- Concrete sensory image.
- Allusions to literary, historical, philosophical or religious details of the past.
- Vignettes of contemporary life, elements of popular culture
- Use of slang, colloquial and uneducated language.
- First person narrator or one character’s point of view.
- “Truth does not exist”; it is the product of a personal interaction with reality.
- Pure/high Modernism (Stein, Pound, Elliot) —> THE LOST GENERATION (expatriates)
- More traditional writers.

- They left USA:

• Lack of tradition of high culture
• Indifferent or even hostile to artistic achievements.
• Localised and narrow-minded interpretation of national culture.
- London and Paris 1920s:

 • Vibrant community of artists

• Personal freedom
• Bringing the USA into the larger context of European culture
- Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, Katherine Anne
Porter, Dorothy Parker, Eugene O’Neill, Djuna Barnes…
- The origin of the term: Gertrude Stein is credited for the term Lost Generation, though it was famously
coined by Hemingway.
- “You are all a lost generation”, as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (1926), a novel that captures the
attitudes of a hard-drinking, fast-living set of disillusioned young expatriates in postwar Paris.
- LINK

POETRY
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
- Born in California but identified with New England.
- Life between farms and poems, teaching at various colleges.
- Personal tragedies: a son committed suicide and a daughter suffered a complete mental collapse.

Frost’s style
- Clarity of diction
- Colloquial rhythms (found in The Mending Wall)
- Simplicity of images (anybody can understand his poems)
- Natural speech (ruralism)
- He rejected Modernist internationalism and revitalised New England regionalism
- New England as the heart of America
- “Poetry was a momentary stay against confusion”.
- Humorous like in “Fire and Ice”.
- Comparisons between outer scene and psyche.
- Ideological descendant of 19th century American Transcendentalists.
- Old-fashioned values?

— Glocalization: combination of globalisation with respect for local culture.

WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

- Portrayal of race, sexual abuse, and violence.
- Autobiographical: raped by her mother’s boyfriend when she was seven years old, then she turned mute
for five years.
- Relationship with Mrs. Flowers: an educated Afroamerican woman.
- Fiction-writing techniques: dialogues, plot, memory, truth.
- Traces of African-American oral traditions like slave and work songs.
- Individual responses to hardship, oppression and loss.

 JOHN DOS PASSOS

- Expatriate (Lost Generation): ambulance driver IWW
- Politically active (20s and 30s): trips to the Soviet Union
- Executive board of a Communist journal but he never joined the party.
- From social radicalism to social conservatism (leaving communist ideas behind)
- Manhattan Transfer (1925): fragmented short stories about the roaring twenties.
- USA, trilogy: 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), The Big Money (1936)
- Topics:
• 20th century American portrayal of society
• Protest literature
• Corruption of individuals
• Capitalism was a division between rich and poor — social change
Form
- Experimental typography and layout
- Blending fiction/non-fiction
- Blending words ‘workingclass’
- Cinema strategies
- Newspaper extracts
- Quotations from public speeches, songs: POPULAR CULTURE ELEMENTS
- Collages, fragments
- Stream of consciousness

‘People don’t have lives, they just have destinies’.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
- Expatriate (Lost Generation)
- Turbulent life (economic problems, parties, alcohol)
- The couple, ‘celebrities’: symbol of excesses
- Jazz Age (20s and 30s)
- Writer of short stories
- The Great Gatsby (1925): his main success

Gatsby’s topics
- Autobiographical traces
- The corruption of the American dream
- The figure of the narrator
- Portrayal of the roaring twenties and consumer society: automobiles, parties, luxury.
- Love and success
- New rich vs Old rich
- Hollowness of the Upper class

 BIG MONEY
- Fake democracy
- The failure of the American dream
- The image of USA as ‘two nations’

THE GREAT GATSBY

Dreams and reality in Gatsby

- Dreams
• Party
• Green light
• New Rich/West Egg
• Gatsby
• East Egg
- Reality
• Funeral
• Billboard
• East Egg
• Tom
• Valley of ashes
Nick is both

Plot structure
- Past
• Romantic and pure love
- Present
• The chance of the dream (chapter 5)
• Symbols to anticipate the end
• CLIMAX: Myrtle’s death (dinner scene: destruction of the dream)
- Future
• No future (corruption of the dream): Gatsby dies alone
• Nick as an evolving character

WILLIAM FAULKNER
- High Modernist (Joyce’s Ulysses, Proust’s In the Search of Time)
- Native Mississippi (native South, dialects, slang)
- Invented voices for characters.
- Experimental form
• Unique narrative voice (the reader is able to distinguish who is narrating just by the narrative voice)
• Experiments with chronology
• Techniques representing memory and mind

 • Interesting theories to apply: Freud (psychoanalysis) and Bakhtin (sociolect, ‘words are just words’)
- Topics: time, past, families, childhood, race, social class, religion, sin…

As I Lay Dying
1) Experience and Identity
2) Death
3) Mind versus words
- Interior monologues
- Comic, tragic, grotesque, absurd

Addie
- Female complexity
- Only one section but protagonist of the story
- Male-dominated world (patriarchy)
- Unnatural motherhood (Dewey Dell vs Cora)
- Non-religious (sinner) and non-traditional (revolutionary role of woman, spiritual crisis)
- ‘Words are just words’
- Symbol: coffin

Darl
- Main narrator
- Clairvoyant features
- Rational character and elaborated language
- Reasoning (layers of subconscious-italics)
- Setting FIRE (Inferno): to finish the trip, to regenerate as a person/family, to restore sanity and logic
- Insanity: an attempt to rationalise death
- The only evolving character (the one out of the family nucleus)
- Symbol: fire

HEMINGWAY
Selfish, obsessed with writing the summit. Hemingway didn’t want to be a normal author, he wanted to be
the best, to be immortal through his works.

PRESENTATION: THE AUTHOR AND HIS WORK

Historical context I
World War l.
• Between World War 1-Il. World War l: traumatic experience. Mass killing. New war technology.
• Hemingway saw action in the war and was wounded. Harry carries painful memories of the war.

The Lost Generation.

 • WWI scarred a generation. Death toll: 8 million soldiers and 13 million civilians. 1918 influenza outbreak
was the deadliest in history, Many people felt disillusioned.
• Hemingway was part of a group of writers. They lost faith in traditional values after the WW1.
• In the story, Harry references this disillusionment. He focuses on writing so he "[does] not go to pieces...
the way most of them had." (7) referring to soldiers and members of his generation.
• Others: Harry recalls his fellow writer Julian as admiring the rich: "poor Julian and his romantic
awe of [the rich]." (18) Based on Fitzgerald, who wrote about upper classes in The Great Gatsby.
• "The very rich are different from you and me" (18) is adapted from Fitzgerald's "The Rich Boy." Fitzgerald
was named the "poor" writer by Hemingway, but he asked to remove his name.

Paris in the 1920s

• Member of a group of artistic-minded young Americans who, after World War I, moved to Paris. Gertrude
Stein, another American writer, dubbed these Americans the Lost Generation because of the aimlessness,
dissatisfaction with USA, and refusal to assimilate into the culture of France.

Africa in the 1930s.

• First half of the 20th century. Africa consisted almost exclusively of colonies of European nations
European powers divided up between themselves control over the African continent for economic reasons:
natural (and human) resources of Africa to enrich themselves.
• Mount Kilimanjaro is located in Tanzania, near the border of Kenya, and il was a popular destination for
European and American adventure tourists such as the protagonist of the story, Harry, who wished to hunt
exotic game animals on safaris.

The work
- Main character, Harry, a dissipated writer.
- With him, Helen, his wife. They are waiting for the arrival of a plane to take them to civilisation.
- Harry is dying and he recalls his experiences, at the same time he regrets what he will not be able to
capture and write down.

The work: general aspects

• The story follows a linear, chronological, plot structure. There are several flashbacks (appearing in italic),
as the main character looks back on his life.
• The main character in the story is Harry, a writer. He regrets not being able to write about the things he
witnessed and which he finds important. The physical setting is Kilimanjaro, Africa. The story takes place
during a single day.
• The story is told by a third-person narrator who has access to Harry's thoughts and feelings.
• The language is formal. The style of language reflects Harry's worldview

The whole story is about Hemingway’s obsession with being an immortal writer: his frustrations, how he
loses his skill tor write. For all this, he blames Helen: Hemingway was a misogynist. He wanted to
obsessively control her. Harry is going to die from gangrene: he is rotten inside, deterioration of the soul.

 Harry is the alter ego of Hemingway. The reader is supposed to hate Harry; Hemingway is trying to show the
reader that he is like Harry.

SECOND PRESENTATION: DEATH IN THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO

Harry is a parasite of Helen. The author laments that he could have wrote more about war. Hemingway died
believing he was not a good writer.

Treatment of death
- Circular structure
- Immediate death from the beginning of the story (in medias res)
- Death of a body — PHYSICAL
Of a soul — EXISTENTIAL
Of a writer — PROFESSIONAL
Of love — EMOTIONAL
- SYMBOLS: leopard, hyena, vultures
- Understanding of death in different cultures (African vs American traditional).
- Helen admires Harry, and for this it is difficult for her to break the bond with him, even though he treats
her badly.

Images of war and violence

Flashbacks: di erent war settings (I World War) Alter ego of Hemingway

Williamson ashback (5): the only sign of Harry’s Metaphor of the mountain: plains and summit
humanity (immortal writers)

Violence in streets, police, prostitutes… Laziness and security vs creative impulse

Italics to highlight the subconscious part of the Lament of wasting his good stories
story: his real self, tears and desires.

Violence to Helen (psychological, emotional Flashbacks

violence): dialogues (VERBAL violence as
examples, Helen as guilty of his lack of talent, the
impossibility of becoming immortal

Violence towards women in general: objects to be Destruction of talent (ambivalence of blame)

used for sex and money (“love is a dunghill”)

fl
ff