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The Influence of WWI: (1914-1918)
The heavy loss of lives (1,400,000 killed in France,
including 300,000 in the first five months) led to people
refusing to subscribe to the notion of ‘la gloire’ (glory).
The total deaths of all nations who fought in the war is
thought to have been 8.5 million with 21 million being
wounded.
During the war, the death toll was so high that many
found themselves inflicted with an “eat-drink-and-be-
merry-for-tomorrow-we-die spirit.”
Hotel de Ville Arras, France soon after WWI, circa March 1919.
The Influence of WWI: (1914-1918)
While men were fighting in the war, women took on more
responsibilities (jobs, etc). Women did not want to return to traditional
gender norms after the war.
The Suffrage Movement (particularly in Britain and The United States)
The emergence of the flapper
Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald
A flapper is a woman
who thought “it was
fun to flirt, …bobbed
her hair, …put on her
choicest pair of
earrings, and a great
deal of audacity and
rouge and went into
battle” (Zelda
Fitzgerald)
Fashion – The Garconne
“By mid decade, in fashion terms the ideal new woman was a tomboy, a garconne, young,
slim, athletic, short-haired and short-skirted, almost androgynous in appearance; a friend and
an equal rather than a passive dependent” (Madeleine Ginsburg, Paris Fashions: The Art Deco
Style of the 1920s 12)
“The shape of the lady who wore the fashion was…considered an enchanting, bosomless, hipless, thighlesscreature…and fairly tall but seemed taller than she was by reason of her remarkable slenderness” (Madeleine Ginsburg, Paris Fashions: The Art Deco Style of the
1920s 50).
Post-War Disillusionment
American soldiers came back to a divided
America: Ku Klux Klan became bigger, there were
anti-labour movements, the beginning of
prohibition (1920-1933).
There was a national effort to return to traditional
gender norms.
Paris offered a more Bohemian lifestyle.
The dollar was very strong. People could live off
very little money for a long time. They could easily
live off $100/month in Paris.
Post-War Disillusionment
“Paris was full of the young from Africa, from Eastern Europe, from Asia, the
Swedes, the Norwegians, the Finns, the Latinos, every kind of Latino. They
poured into Paris after the war. I think it is possible to say (it may not be
possible to prove) that they felt a kind of vacuum. The youth of Europe had
been slaughtered. The thing I used to notice in Paris was the total absence of
the young, even young women, because young women didn’t look young.
They looked old. They were dressed in black and their faces were unsmiling.”
Archibald MacLeish: Reflections, 1986
Foreigners in
Paris:
Of the 2,906,472 people residing in Paris in
1921, according to the census of the year,
no fewer than 400,000 were foreigners.
(Today: population in Paris is 2,234,105)
The Lost Generation
This term refers to a group of (mostly American and British) writers, who lived primarily in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s and who has lived through and sometimes witnessed firsthand the devastations of World War I.
Included writes such as Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett, Kay Boyle, John Dos Passos, Lawrence Durrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein.
Disillusionment after WWI
The Waste Land (1922)
BY T. S. ELIOT
FOR EZRA POUND
IL MIGLIOR FABBRO
I. The Burial of the Dead
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
The poem asks how can we rebuild a civilization after the devastation of
the Great War?
Ezra Pound: “Make it new”
Gertrude Stein tried to find new forms and wrote still-lifes and portraits.
Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse experimented with different forms (see Matisse, Blue Nude(Souvenir de Biskra) 1907 – pre-war)
Ernest Hemingway attempted to write the “one true sentence.”
Igor Stravinsky re-imagined music and experimented with tonality, metre, rhythm, stress and dissonance.
Dadaism flourished in Paris in the 1920s and questioned aesthetics (see Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917)
In A Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Ezra Pound (1913)
Modernist Movement
Interest in subjective
experience, interiority
Experimentation in form
Questioning of aesthetics
Interest in non-European
art forms (Japanese haiku,
African masks)
Influences besides the
Great War: emergence of
psychoanalysis,
modernization,
industrialization, and more.
The Persistence of Memory, oil on canvas, by Salvador Dalí, 1931
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas – 27 rue du Fleurus
“America is my
country, Paris is my
hometown.”
Picasso’s Portrait of Stein
(1906)
“[Picasso’s] reduction of the figure to simple
masses and the face to a mask with heavy lidded
eyes reflects his recent encounter with African,
Roman, and Iberian sculpture and foreshadows
his adoption of Cubism. He painted the head,
which differs in style from the body and hands,
without the sitter, testimony to the fact that it was
his personal vision, rather than empirical reality,
that guided his work. When someone
commented that Stein did not look like her
portrait, Picasso replied, ‘She will.’” (The
Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Picasso’s Portrait of Stein (1906)
"I was and still am
satisfied with my
portrait, for me it is I,
and it is the only
reproduction of me
which is always I, for
me.” Gertrude Stein
Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald
Watching her face you could see her mind leave the table and go to the night's party and return with her eyes blank as a cat's and then pleased, and the pleasure would show along the thin line of her lips and then be gone. Scott was being the good cheerful host and Zelda looked at him and she smiled happily with her eyes and her mouth too as he drank the wine. I learned to know that smile very well. It meant she knew Scott would not be able to write.
Scott in a 1930 letter to Zelda
Stock Market Crash 1929
Hemingway and his
new wife Pauline, the
Fitzgeralds went back
to America.
The Murphys went to
Switzerland. Villa
America was shut
down.
Crowd gathering on Wall Street after the 1929 crash
Next Week: A Moveable Feast
The 1964 Edition vs. The 2009 Restored Edition
Mary re-arranged the chapters in chronological order.
As seen on the right, Hemingway also revised his epigraph to the Fitzgerald chapter.
Mary eliminated passages that show that Hemingway felt remorse about his conduct to Hadley. Mary Hemingway deletes the section in which Hemingway apologized to Hadley.
Next Week: A Moveable Feast
The 1964 Edition vs. The 2009 Restored Edition
Mary re-arranged the chapters in chronological order.
As seen on the right, Hemingway also revised his epigraph to the Fitzgerald chapter.
Mary eliminated passages that show that Hemingway felt remorse about his conduct to Hadley. Mary Hemingway deletes the section in which Hemingway apologized to Hadley.
Can one re-establish the author’s intent? According to Irene Gammel, "Ethically and
pragmatically, restoring an author's original intent is a slippery slope when the published text has stood
the test of time and when edits have been approved by authors or their legal representatives."
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