Transcript The Lost Generation

The Lost
Generation
What is the Lost Generation?
• Seeking the bohemian lifestyle and rejecting the
values of American materialism,
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a number of intellectuals, poets,
artists
and writers
fled to France in the post World War I years.
• Paris was the center of it all.
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Hemingway Classics include
The Lost Generation writers
• The Lost Generation writers all gained
prominence in 20th century literature.
• Their innovations challenged assumptions
about writing and expression,
• and paved the way for subsequent
generations of writers.
Gertrude Stein
&
Ernest Hemingway
• American poet Gertrude Stein actually
coined the expression "lost generation."
Speaking to Ernest Hemingway, she said,
"you are all a lost generation."
• The term stuck and the mystique
surrounding these individuals continues to
fascinate us.
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Artists in Paris, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound
The three best known
• There were many literary artists involved in the
groups known as the Lost Generation.
• The three best known are F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos.
• Others usually included among the list are:
Sherwood Anderson, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane,
Ford Maddox Ford and Zelda Fitzgerald.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Hemingway
John Dos Passos
John Dos Passos
• Dos Passos left university to join the
• Allied war effort in Europe.
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He served as an ambulance driver
in France and Italy during the First World War
and afterwards drew upon these experiences
in his novels,
One Man's Initiation (1920)
and
Three Soldiers (1921).
Politics
• Dos Passos was active in the campaign against
the growth of fascism in Europe. He joined other
literary figures such as Dashiell Hammett,
Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman and Ernest
Hemingway in supporting the Republicans
during the Spanish Civil War. However Dos
Passos gradually became disillusioned with leftwing politics and this is reflected in his novels,
The Adventures of a Young Man (1939) and
Number One (1943).
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Ernest Hemingway's
Six Toed Cats
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Today, approximately 60 cats, half of them polydactyl, make their home in the Ernest
Hemingway Museum and Home, in Key West, protected and taken care of by the terms of his
will.
Ernest Hemingway was a cat-lover. He admired their spirit and
independence, and often
wrote about them.
Hemingway was given a special six toed cat from a ship's captain,
and from that cat the legends of Hemingway's cats have grown.
This cat, which may have been a Maine Coon, had extra toes (technically
known as polydactyl,
latin for "many digits").
Ernest Hemingway
The Lost Generation's leader in the adaptation of the naturalistic technique in
the novel
• Ernest Hemingway was the Lost Generation's leader in
the adaptation of the naturalistic technique in the novel.
• Hemingway volunteered to fight with the Italians in World
War I and his Midwestern American ignorance was
shattered during the resounding defeat of the Italians by
the Central Powers at Caporetto.
War time experiences
• Newspapers of the time reported Hemingway,
with dozens of pieces of shrapnel in his legs,
had heroically carried another man out.
• That episode even made the newsreels in
America.
• These war time experiences laid the
groundwork of his novel, A Farewell to Arms
(1929). Another of his books, The Sun Also
Rises (1926) was a naturalistic and shocking
expression of post-war disillusionment.
Hemingway
F. Scott Fitzgerald
• F. Scott Fitzgerald is remembered as the
portrayer of the spirit of the Jazz age.
• Though not strictly speaking an expatriate,
he roamed Europe and visited North
Africa, but returned to the US occasionally.
• Fitzgerald had at least two addresses in
Paris between 1928 and 1930. He fulfilled
the role of chronicler of the prohibition era.
Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald
The free spirited Fitzgerald
• His first novel, This Side of Paradise became a best-seller. But when
first published,
• The Great Gatsby on the other hand, sold only 25,000 copies.
• The free spirited Fitzgerald, certain it would be a big hit, blew the
publisher's advance money leasing a villa in Cannes.
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In the end, he owed his publishers, Scribners, money. Fitzgerald's
Gatsby is the story of a somewhat refined and wealthy bootlegger
whose morality is contrasted with the hypocritical attitude of most of
his acquaintances. Many literary critics consider Gatsby his best
work.
The impact of the war on the group of writers in the Lost Generation is aptly
demonstrated by a passage from Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night (1933):
• "This land here cost twenty lives a foot that
summer...See that little stream--we could walk to it in two
minutes. It took the British a month to walk it--a whole
empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing
forward behind.
• And another empire walked very slowly backward a few
inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs.
No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation."
Virginia Wolfe
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
• Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is now generally
recognized as the author of two of the twentieth
century’s greatest literary works,
• To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway, both of
which employ a style of narration that has come
to be known as "stream of consciousness,"
which focuses on the interior—and not always
logical—movement of thoughts that make up the
better part of most people’s psyches.
Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Wolfe
http://www.flp.com/films/mrs_dalloway/
Mrs Dalloway is the story of one day in the life of the heroine
in which the impingement of past on present consciousness enables
her to tell the whole of Mrs Dalloway's past by naturally
developing flashbacks within consciousness.
Vanessa Redgrave starring in the movie, Mrs. Dalloway-
The text
http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/vi
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• Mrs. Dalloway
• by
• Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway
• Woolf’s 1925 novel, Mrs. Dalloway, is about the casualties of early
twentieth-century life, and she explores the gendered forms of
mental illness, and the social repercussions of feminism,
homosexuality and colonialism.
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The central consciousness is that of the title character, Clarissa
Dalloway, on the day of a dinner party that she is giving. Moving
through the relatively uneventful preparations, the arrival of the
guests, and the rituals of hosting a party,
Clarissa
• Clarissa’s thoughts wander across past, present
and future. Throughout the relatively mundane
actions through which the book follows her, she
is slowly revealed by means of her interior
monologues of memory and reflection to be a
most interesting person who has been squeezed
by society into a rather ordinary role.
Septimus
• The narrative broadens to include others
in her life, most notably Septimus Warren
Smith, a shell-shock victim whose life has
had no direct connection to Clarissa’s, but
who in many ways can be read as a male
parallel.
FROM
Mrs. Dalloway
By Virginia Woolf
• "Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking
towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must
inevitably cease completely? All this must go on
without her; did she resent it; or did it not
somehow become consoling to believe that
death ended absolutely? but that somehow in
the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of
things, here, there, she survived...."
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/themes/englishlit/virginiawoolf.html
• At the link above: This working draft for one of Virginia Woolf’s most
admired novels dates from 1924. Originally called ‘The Hours’, it
was published the following year as Mrs Dalloway. Woolf is
acclaimed as an innovator of the English language.
• Here, in her own handwriting, we see her explore a new style of
writing called ‘stream of consciousness’, in which the imprint of
experience and emotion on the inner lives of characters is as
important as the stories they act out.
The Hours
(movie)
The Hours
Stream of Consciousness
• From all sides they come, an incessant
shower of innumerable atoms;
• and as they fall, as they shape themselves
into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the
accent falls differently
• from of old.Virginia Woolf, in an essay on
'Modern Fiction'
• .
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The Lost Generation
The End