35
modern women of post-war society who also act ascharity girls during the war
years, but their image was softened by a romantic connection to the protagonist.
Most female characters in modern poems and novels are sexually disorganized
and try to escape the patriarchy and get control over men through the act of
involving several men with carnal affections.
16
As modernist writers found it necessary to write about new subject
matters for making a new literature, it was clear that their new way of seeing
life required a new form, a different way of writing.
So many experimental and
individual
forms of writings were practiced by the writers of the Lost Generation.
But some elements were obvious in the works of all these writers:Modernist
works of these writers were mostly affected by theemergence of psychology
and Freud’s theories about the humanpsyche. In modernist literary works,
especially works written by the lost generation of writers, consciousness and
evaluation of the interior world of characters were some of the key elements of
their new form of writing. In this manner, the reader would be more entangled
with inner world of the characters. Since
dreams and thoughts are
indiscriminate and chronologically disorganized in their fictions, time loses its
sense of being linear and to be perceived as moment time. New theories of
quantum physics and relativity --Einstein's first book on relativity 1905-- were
attractive for writers like Hemingway (1964) or Stein to highlight the
impossibility of being a single way for the salvation of humankind or solving a
problem.
17
The substitution of the belief in absolute, comprehensible truth with a
sort
of relative, conditional truths gradually found its way into a modernist novel
and poetry of the writers of this movement. Cities and their changing roles in the
constitution of new societies became more prominent in the constitution of
their works. Cities were now centers of this radical change, as movie theaters,
skyscrapers, electric lights, telephones, automobiles and advertisements were
16
Scott, John (2005).
Industrialism: A Dictionary of Sociology
. Oxford University Press
17
Theado, Matt. "
Beat Generation: Literary Criticism."
The University of Wisconsin Pree 45.4 (2004): 747-61. The
University of Wisconsin Press. Web. 6 Mar. 2012
36
spreading more and more during this era. Even
new technologies had some
effects on the physical procedure of writing in that era.
With the widespread use of the typewriter, even the mechanical act
of writing changed. As media theorist Marshall McLuhan would later
explain, the legibility of typewriting and its visual similarity to published
literature gave writers the feeling of being able to simultaneously compose
and publish their work: Seated at the typewriter, the poet, much in the manner
of
the jazz musician, has the experience of performance as composition (Seed,
2010: 14).Characters in modernist works like The Great Gatsby were more
ambiguous, contradictory and strange in comparison with discrete well-
demarcated characters in works of Victorian writers like Dickens.
The characters became more complicated and simple adjectives were not
sufficient for their portrayal. So common features of this group of writers
are linked with the shared experience of them of a changing world and post-
war years which brought about the emergence of modernism in literature.
Being affected by looseness and disillusionment of post-war years Lost
Generation members were trying to console themselves with searching for
new values and distractions like gaining more power in
the new system of social
class, excessive drinking, enjoying the technology and the flicker of the modern
bright cities, but on the other hand, they were lost in the abundance of theories
in the new century, skyscrapers and vastness of megacities and lost themselves in
order to find new identities.
Dostları ilə paylaş: