The Lost Generation—Making
Outsiders
WWI and the Death of the Age of
Faith, Pride, Innocence, and the
American Dream.
Victoria Tuttle, Spring 2014
The Great Gatsby
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
Published 1925
Takes place in 1922:
After “The War to End All Wars”
The “Roaring 20s”
The Jazz Era
18th Amendment—Prohibition
19th Amendment—Suffrage for
Women
Stock Market Boom
Jim Crow Era
Concerned with “the American
Dream”…
What is the American Dream?
*Equality (kind of)
*Liberty
*Pursuit of Happiness (cough,
cough… ahem… property…)
*Individualism
*Discovery
European and American Society
before the War:
The Enlightenment:
Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776, John
Trumbull, 1819.
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, JeanJaques-Francios Le Barbier, 1789.
Industrial Revolution:
Textile development. The Spinning-Mule.
Steam power. Savery Engine.
Progression of the Industrial
Revolution:
Imperial Reach:
Political Cartoon of the “mad dash”
for Africa (by Europe).
Excerpt from Samuel George
Morton’s Crania Americana, 183949.
“Pinnacle of Civilization”:
Edouard Manet, Bal du Moulin de la Galette, 1876.
Tightly Wound and Ready to Snap:
Political Cartoon, pre WWI; WWI Propaganda Poster.
Destruction of the War:
Perrone during the Battle of the
Somme.
British Soldiers knee deep in mud in trenches.
Destruction of the War:
Duckboards through Chateau Wood.
Artillery pocked banks of the river Yser.
Art/Literature Does Not Occur in a
Vacuum:
Dada in Zurich:
The magic of a word—Dada—which has brought journalists
to the gates of a world unforeseen,
is of no importance to us.
To put out a manifesto you must want: ABC
to fulminate against 1, 2, 3
to fly into a rage and sharpen your wings to conquer and
disseminate little abcs and big abcs, to
sign, shout, swear, to organize prose into a form of absolute
and irrefutable evidence, to prove your non plus ultra and
maintain that novelty resembles life just as the latestappearance of some whore proves the essence of God. His
existence was previously proved by the
accordion, the landscape, the wheedling word. To impose
your ABC is a natural thing—hence deplorable. Everybody
does it in the form of crystalbluffmadonna, monetary
system, pharmaceutical product, or a bare leg advertising
the ardent sterile spring. The love of
novelty is the cross of sympathy, demonstrates a naive je
m'enfoutisme, it is a transitory, positive sign without a
cause…
Dada Means Nothing.
--Tristan Tzara
Outside the relocated Cabaret Voltaire, a Dada
cabaret and exhibition site.
Dada Collage/Photomontage:
Untitled (Duo-Collage), Hans Arp and Sophie
Taeuber, 1918.
Der Kunstreporter (The Art Critic), Raoul
Hausmann, 1920.
Dada Assemblage:
Mechanischer Kopf (Der Geist unserer Zeit),
Mechanical Head (The Spirit of our Age), Raoul
Hausmann, 1920.
Preussischer Erzengel (Prussian Archangel),
reconstruction, John Heartfield, 1920.
“Readymades”:
Cadeau (Gift), Man Ray, 1921.
L. H. O. O. Q., Marcel Duchamp, 1919.
Fitzgerald Himself
*1896-1940
*Born in St. Paul, Minnesota (West)
*Raised in Buffalo, NY
*Upper-middle class, but nouveau riche
*Father lost job in 1908
*Attended Princeton University, but never
graduated
*Became a second lieutenant in the
infantry, just before the war ended—
NEVER SERVED.
The Story of Fitz and Zelda
*Fitzgerald meets Zelda in 1918 (she is 18)
*Zelda is from Montgomery, AL
*Zelda is the daughter of an Alabama
Supreme Court Justice (old money)
*Zelda accepts proposal, but family does not
approve
*Gets to marry Zelda after This Side of
Paradise is published (1920)—instant success
*Mirrors Gatsby—Fitzgerald writes his life
End of an Era:
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except
the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose
higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the
old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the
new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had
once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory
enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent,
compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to
face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for
wonder.
And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder
when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long
way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail
to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that
vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the
night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before
us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our
arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.