1. Watch a video-- Lost Generation by Jonathan Reed and discuss some questions.
2. Get to know some background information—the author (Rod W. Horton); F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Sad Young Men; Prohibition; Puritanism and Puritans ; Greenwich Village ; Jazz Age or Roaring Twenties; Victorian Age (Victorian Gentility)
1. Do you know the following terms: the Sad Young Men and the Lost Generation?
2. Can you name some American literary celebrities? Make a list of them and discuss their masterpieces.
Key:
1. The Sad Young Men and the Lost Generation refer to the same group of people. The former was created by F. Scott Fitzgerald; the latter, by Gertrude Stein. They were applied to the disillusioned intellectuals and aesthetes of the years following the First World War, who rebelled against former ideals and values, but could replace them only by despair or cynical hedonism.
2. John Dos Passos (1896-1970) American novelist. He utilized his wartime experience as an ambulance driver in France as background for his first novel One Man's Initiation: 1917 (1920). Both critical and popular recognition came to Dos Passos with his next bitter antiwar novel, Three Soldiers (1921). Manhattan Transfer (1925), a panoramic view of life in New York City between 1890 and 1925, became immensely successful.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) World-famous American novelist and short story writer. His novels include The Sun Also Rises (1927), A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (1951). In 1954 he was awarded the highest prize a writer can receive, the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) Urban planner, historian, sociologist, local advocate, and architectural critic Lewis Mumford is recognized as one of the greatest urbanists of the 20th Century. His works include The City in History, which received the National Book Award in 1961, Technics and Civilization, and The Condition of Man.
Summarize the writing styles of the some famous writers involved in The Lost Generation.
Key:
Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway hated the abstract, especially abstract words such as honor, glory, and courage. He held strong to old beliefs, and symbolism, as he used symbolism to depict the Protestant religion he could not accept. He used observation and description in his works, rather than rhetoric views. The concept of war fascinated Hemingway, as well as the experiences one could endure in a lifetime. Hemingway’s works were raw, and dilled with the notion that one could be inside the characters mind, the concrete, and not around in the abstract view of his works.
T. S. Eliot
Eliot’s poetry has no fixed verse, form, or regular pattern, with an occasional rhyme scheme. His most celebrated work “The Wasteland” is a long poem, which construes his views of the modern society, in comparison of the past. In “The Wasteland” Eliot incorporates many footnotes. Some critics claimed it was Eliot’s egocentrism that allowed him to do this while others said he was crazy. Eliot was an essential figure in the modernistic times, and his methods of literary analysis influenced literary criticism for future writers.
Ezra Pound
Pound was an instructor in Romance Languages at Wabash College. Pound’s friendship with various authors and poets helped establish the birth of modernism with regards to French, English, and American literature. In addition to the Romance Languages, Pound studied Chinese. Pound felt a greater admiration to French and Chinese past histories than he did for American and British. Ezra Pound had a penetrating impact on literature. Not only did he write his own highly acclaimed works; he helped others to achieve the same recognition.
Gertrude Stein
Stein used her knowledge of medicine and philosophy (particularly what she learned from James about stream of consciousness) and incorporated them into her writings. With influences such as Picasso, Stein explored Cubism, with concentration on illumination of the present moment. Stein’s first and most celebrated work was “Three Lives” where she tried to establish new verb forms, and a way to enable the reader’s consciousness to be able to study the workings of another mind. Dialogue was a main focus, because dialogue allowed the reader to understand the perceptions of the characters, while allowing the reader to understand the perceptions of the self. Freud was also an influence, as seen in Stein’s attempt to get into ones conscious and unconscious mind while merging the two together.
