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Art, Literature, and Women in the Age of Anxiety By Mohamad Dalloul Mathew Badger Bea Dimaunahan AP European History Period 4 April 25, 2011
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ART In the age of Anxiety
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The Art Although created BEFORE the interwar years (age of anxiety) the art portrayed, was used throughout the interwar years since it accurately displayed much of the emotions artists had felt thru ought depression and hard times.
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Impressionism Instead of portraying religious, mythological, and historical themes, painters began to depict modern life itself. Painters focused on the social life and leisured activities of the urban and lower middle classes. The artists were fascinated with light, color, and the representation largely unfocused social life or landscape experiences.
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Postimpressionism Created by younger artists who drew upon impressionist techniques but also attempted to relate the achievement of impressionism to earlier artistic traditions. The chief figures associated with Postimpressionism are Georges Seurat, Paul Cezanne, Vincent Van Gogh, and Paul Geuguin.
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Cubism Beginning in 1907, Picasso and Braque rejected trying to reproduce the appearance of reality. Braque once stated, “ The painter thinks in forms and colors. The aim is not to reconstitute an anecdotal fact but to constitute a pictorial fact… One does not imitate the appearance; the appearance is the result”.
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Jazz Jazz was created at the beginning of the 20 th century by African Americans in the Southern United States. It is a musical tradition and a style of music that is infamous for its use of blue notes, improvisation, polyrythems, syncopation, and the swung note. Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, and Artie Shaw are to name a few famous Jazz musicians.
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Women in the Age of Anxiety
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Women in Germany With the uprise in dictators, such as Hitler, women were given the obligation in giving birth to “pure” German children. Women were then subjected to the responsibility of raising and breeding adequate children for the German nation.
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Motherhood Women were not allowed to have children with Jews, Slavs, and Gypsies They were also categorized to “healthy”, “unhealthy”, “desirables” and “undesirables”. The “undesirables” were prevented from having children. Nazis even provided loans for women they believed should have children
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Work Obligations At the time of the Great Depression, women needed to work. - And the Nazi protected their jobs. As a role of the consumer, women had to buy and support only German shops. Mothers also had to teach their children to love Germany and develop a nationalistic sense of pride.
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Literature in the Age of Anxiety
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Disillusionment and Modernism Many American writers such as T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway left America for Europe where they could express their revulsion with the war in their work. The Lost Generation, is the phrase often used to describe the writers of this era. The population of Europe, following WWI, was left with a feeling of disillusionment and despair. These would be central topics of writers. Modernism was critical of middle-class society and morality, but was not concerned with social issues. Modernism as a culture was nourished by the turmoil and social dislocation created by WWI. After the violence readers found themselves less shocked by up-heavels in literary forms and the moral content of novels and poetry. T.S. Eliot
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Virginia Woolf Woolf developed the writing style of stream-of-consciousness which entails the author writing in the equivalent of a character’s thought process. The style of stream-of- consciousness was used within her works Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves. Mrs Dalloway, which is one of Woolf’s best known novels, portrays a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in post-World War I England. Woolf, in her novel To the Lighthouse, portrayed individuals trying to make their way in the world with most of the 19 th century social and moral certainties removed.
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Erich Maria Remarque Remarque is famous for his first published novel All Quiet on the Western Front. All Quiet on the Western Front depicts the extreme physical and mental stress placed upon German soldiers during World War I and their detachment when returning home. Although All Quiet received international success and Remarque was from Germany, it was ordered to be banned and destroyed by Hitler who was aggravated due to the anti- fascist perspective of the novel. The casual amorality of the novel was in sharp contrast to the common patriotic rhetoric found after WWI.
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Oswald Spengler and T.S. Eliot Spengler is best known for his novel The Decline of the West, in which he formulates the theory that every culture experiences a cycle of growth and consequential decline. This theory of historical and nearly inevitable rise and decline, comforted people attempting to rationalize their postwar despair, as well as the German people who felt the national humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles and following economic depression. T.S. Eliot in the poem, The Wasteland, depicts the disillusionment of the post-war generation. In his poem The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot recognizes post- war Europe following the Treaty of Versailles with the disillusionment of hope and religious conversion. This idea of losing faith and the struggle while regaining it and religious conversion also appears in T.S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday, which was the turning point in his writing from being allusive and obscure, to more casual and melodic.
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T.S. EliotOswald Spengler
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Franz Kafka Franz Kafka, a German language novelist, had a peculiar style of writing in The Metamorphosis which consisted of writing long sentences which could span up to a page with a brief directive summary towards the end. This provided trouble for translators due to verb placement in German. Another style of his writing, involved the use of world which contained multiple meanings or connotations. For example, Ungeziefer(used in The Metamorphosis) which can mean bug; insect; or unclean animal not suitable for sacrifice. In The Trial, Kafka tells the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor the reader. Within The Trial, Kafka creates a parable in which he advocates that there are assigned unique roles in life, and individuals must search deep within the apparent absurdity of existence to achieve a somewhat objective self-awareness. In The Castle, a protagonist, known only as K., struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities of a castle who govern the village for unknown reasons. Franz Kafka portrays helpless individuals crushed by inexplicably hostile forces
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George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four is a novel written in 1949 about a society formed around collectivism and oligarchy. It is considered as a classical novel within the subgenre of social science fiction. Since it’s publication in 1949, many of the terms referenced within 1984 have become common terms such as “Big Brother”, and “thoughtcrime”. Thoughtcrime is the term that a thought can be deemed illegal, since within 1984 the government not only tries to control the speech and actions of their subjects, but also their thoughts. In 1984, Big Brother is dictator of the totalitarian socialist state of Oceania. Since the publication, the term “Big Brother” has come to symbolize the abuse of government power, with a connotation of intruding civil liberties. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Big Brother and his totalitarian state use a new kind of language, sophisticated technology, and psychological terror to strip a weak individual of his last shred of human dignity.
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Sigmund Freud Freud’s earliest medical interests had been psychic disorders, to which he sought to apply the critical method of science. He formulated a theory of infantile sexuality, in which sexual drives and energy already exist in infants and don’t simply emerge during puberty. With this theory, he questioned the concept of childhood innocence. Freud believed that the seemingly irrational content of dreams must have a reasonable, scientific explanation. He concluded that dreams allow unconscious wishes, desires, and drives that have been excluded from everyday conscious life. He then organized the mind within three entities: the id, the superego, and the ego. The id consists of amoral, irrational, driving instincts for sexual gratification, and general physical/sensual pleasure. The superego consists of morals and expectations created by society and culture. The ego is the mediator between the impulses of the id and the superego, creating a stable personality.
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Friedrich Nietzsche Friedrich portrayed Christianity as a religion that glorified weakness rather than the strength life required. He believed that Christianity demanded a useless and debilitating sacrifice of the flesh and spirit, rather than heroic living and daring. In his book, The Birth of Tragedy, he urged that non- rational aspects of human nature are as important and noble as the rational characteristics. He insisted on the positive function of instinct and ecstasy in human life. Two of his most insightful works were Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and The Genealogy of Morals (1887), he sought to discover not what is good and what is evil, but the social and psychological sources of the judgment of good and evil. In Nietzsche’s view, morality was a human convention that had no independent existence. This discovery liberated humans beings to create life-affirming values instead. In his appeal to feelings and emotions and in his questioning of the adequacy of rationalism, Nietzsche drew on Romantic tradition.
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