Social Values and the Lost Generation

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Social Values and the Lost Generation

• Art Literature of the Inter-War Period

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Paul Valery

• The storm has died away, and still we are
  restless, uneasy, as if the storm were about to
  break.

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Logical Empiricism

• Rejected traditional philosophy
• God and the idea of happiness was a façade

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Existentialism

• Searched for moral values in a world filled with
  uncertainty
• Atheistic
• God does not create humans, humans are born and
  they create themselves
• God is not there to help us
• Humans must act because they are human not
  because God expects them too

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The Great Existentialists

• Jean-Paul Sartre
• Albert Camus
• Simone DeBeauvoir
• I do not believe in God his existence has been
  disproved by Science. But in the concentration
  camp, I learned to believe in men. Sartre

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Christianity

• Soren Kierkegaard (mid 1800s) believes he was
  imperfect so to find happiness made a religious
  commitment to God

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Catholic Revival

• Graham Greene (English novelist)
• One began to believe in heaven because one
  believed in hell.

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Bohemian Culture
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Characteristics of a Bohemian..

• An artisan
• usually gifted in literature or the creative arts
• one who defies social conventions
• a gypsy

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World of Bloomsbury

• Socially entwined, the Bloomsbury Group produced
  books, criticism and art they shared
  conversation, wine and lovers. (from a travel
  guide)
• Virginia Woolf wrote "We take chairs and sit on
  our balcony after dinner.... Really Gordon Square
  with the lamps lit and the light on the green is
  a romantic place."

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If you go visit Bloomsbury

• Literary residences
• Gertrude Stein lived at Number 20 Bloomsbury
  Square.
• Members of the Bloomsbury Group lived at Nos. 51,
  50 and 46 Gordon Square. There are blue plaques
  marking the houses.
• Charles Dickens lived at Tavistock Square, but
  his house has been demolished.
• Virginia and Leonard Woolf had their Hogarth
  Press at No. 42 Tavistock Square, but that, too,
  is now gone.
• George Bernard Shaw lived at 29 Fitzroy Square,
  at the edge of Bloomsbury.
• John Maynard Keynes lived for thirty years in
  Gordon Square.

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A Lost Generation
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Key figures of this group

• Gertrude Stein
• Pablo Picasso
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Ernest Hemingway

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Moulin Rouge
Cabaret
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Characteristics?
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What is the appeal of Cabaret??
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African American Musicians..

• Josephine Baker
• Duke EllingtonWhat is their appeal?

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Why would they live in Europe?
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Stream of consciousness
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Virginia Woolf

• Mrs. Dalloway
• A Room of Ones Own

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James Joyces Ulysses

• Ordinary man living daily life in Dublin
• Intertwined the story with the life of Ulysses
  (from Homer)
• No grammar structure, English and foreign words
  mixed together, chaotic
• Mirrored modern day life in the 1920s ? life was
  a riddle and could not be solved

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Anti-utopian literature

• George Orwells 1984
• Big Brother
• Dictatorial state with advanced technology, no
  human dignity
• The Thought Police!
• If you want a picture of the future, imagine a
  boot stamping on a human faceforever.

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Dada
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What is Dada?

• deliberate irrationality, anarchy, and cynicism
  and the rejection of laws of beauty and social
  organization

George Grosz, Germany, a Winters Tale city of
Berlin is a kaleidoscope, the good citizen is at
his table and the evil forces that molded him
surrounded him clergy, General, schoolmaster
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Surrealism
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Surrealism

• An art form that expresses the process of
  thought free from reason or aesthetic or moral
  purpose

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Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, a
dream where time and space have been distorted