ENG 2212 Exam #3

How did economic and technological changes of the early 20th century transform daily life? How did such changes challenge small-town values such as the work ethic, social conformity, duty, and respectability versus internationally minded progressives who argued for more diverse, permissive, and tolerant styles of life?

Access to electricity, and to modern appliances designed to make communication and domestic work more efficient, expanded dramatically in American homes during the interwar years. It created a split in America between those who wanted to preserve the small town method of thinking versus the international thinkers.

How do each of the main male characters -- Bell, Moss, and Chigurh -- struggle toward a definition and framework of morality and ethics. What is the moral center, or reference point, by which they measure their decisions, actions, and beliefs?

Bell: religion; Moss: freedom; Chigurh: chance/fate

A Distant Episode

Bowles

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Eliot

A Rose for Emily

Faulkner

Babylon Revisited

Fitzgerald

What does Fitzgerald's portrayal of the American dream suggest about its viability in the modern world?

Fitzgerald portrays the American Dream as becoming rich and moving abroad to party endlessly. But, as proven in the story, it does not survive in the modernist world because of the stock market crash and depression.

The Paperhanger

Gay

How might gender, ethnicity, or class have influenced the modern writers we've read? How did an international influence affect modernist writers and emerge as a determining factor of much modern literature?

Gender, ethnicity, and class all would affect the authors because of all of the issues relating the first world war

Hills Like White Elephants

Hemingway

The Sun Also Rises

Hemingway

No Country for Old Men

McCarthy

Good Country People

O'Connor

A Perfect Day for Bananafish

Salinger

True West

Shepard

Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited" looks back with longing or regret to a time past. Why do you think many modernist texts dwell on this sense of loss and remorse? Are there historical events or cultural developments that help to explain this shared preoccupation?

They feel a sense of loss when it comes to the simple way of life pre-war. Blissful ignorance.

Modernism

a catchall for any kind of literary production in the interwar period that dealt with the modern world

Modernity

a feeling that life is not the same as it was

What impact did World War I have on the thinking and writing of these authors?

divided the nation into people who wanted to conserve ways of life before the war and people who wanted to be more progressive and live life with new freedoms and ideals

World War I

divided the nation into people who wanted to conserve ways of life before the war and people who wanted to be more progressive and live life with new freedoms and ideals

How and why did modernist writers see the world differently from writers in earlier periods and centuries?

industrialization was mobilized and there was a lot of civil unrest in regards to foreign affairs. There was also a lot more political progressiveness (women/minorities in the work force). Also, Great Depression

Allusion

modernist artists would allude to pre-war works with a sense of irony or fractioning it to create something new that has a modernist feel

Fragmentation

order, sequence, and unity did not fit the post-war way of life, so artists would write literature in fragments, leaving the reader to fill in a lot of blanks and participate in the creative writing of the story

Expatriate

people who would leave America. They didn't think of it as abandoning their country; instead, they saw it as bring America to the rest of the world

Compare the modern "subject" and the use of the modernist technique of fragmentation in the works of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Shepard. Why did modernist writers choose to represent characters using experimental fragmentation rather than with a coherent or stable "wholeness"?

the traditional way of writing did not reflect the modern life.

How and why did modernist writers choose experimental rather than traditional poetic forms?

they saw anything traditional as old-fashioned and despised it. Some did use traditional methods though as a form of rebellion