Themes and Ideas:
- Modernity and modernism
- Efficiency, speed, technology, standardization, urbanization, with subsequent loss of meaning and authentic connection with land and the past
- Fragmentation and loss of/rejection of an earlier America of (stodgy) values
- Emphasis on “personality” rather than “character,” popularity rather than accomplishment
- Changing roles for women: the flapper, etc. as jobs opened up; also, increasing sexual freedom for men and women
- Hutchinson : “For the whites, art was the means to change society before they would accept it.”
- Interest in the East (“Orientalism”), King Tut, the sheik
- Interest in (but fear of) immigrants as representing a more authentic culture yet one more threatening (anarchists, Communists) to the American way of life
- Prohibition and questioning of laws
- Expatriate life in Europe as a means of escaping American social repression
- Influence of Freud and psychoanalysis in examining states of consciousness
- Interest in African American culture, especially music and painting, and heavy borrowings from that culture by white artists (Eugene O'Neill, George Gershwin)
- Mass culture, including music, movies, and radio
- College life
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Themes and Ideas:
- Great Black Migration of African Americans to northern cities after WWI, especially Harlem in New York, with loss of connections with the land
- Demands for social change and an end to legal, institutional, and social racism
- Modernity and modernism
- Reconnecting with African past and history
- Interest in the “primitive” in arts and music: drums, sculpture, emphasis on the body and its knowledge of a lost past, depictions of Africa as a space of lush natural beauty and danger
- Changing roles for African Americans, with “racial uplift” and Du Bois’s idea of the “talented tenth” being important in the first wave
- Hutchinson : “For the blacks, art was the means to change society in order to be accepted into it.”
- Interest in African American art as more authentic, exciting, and vibrant than standardized mass culture produced by whites
- Modernist painters and artists (Picasso) and their use of African themes in art; work by African American artists like Aaron Douglas and others used these sources with more claims to "authenticity"
- Expatriate life in Europe, especially Paris, as a means of escaping U. S. racism
- Influence of Freudian ideas of psychoanalysis and Jungian ideas of racial memory
- Interest in representing African American culture, though a battle erupted over whether to represent its "best" citizens (the Talented Tenth) or all of its citizens, even those who lived in ways unacceptable to Du Bois (McKay's Home to Harlem)
- "Scientific" and anthropological/ sociological approaches to African American life
- Attempts to place jazz, blues, and ragtime as original American art forms
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Texts
- Stories by Dorothy Parker and others in The Smart Set, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, etc.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, stories and novels
- Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, other stories and novels
- Eugene O'Neill, The Emperor Jones
- William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
- T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
- Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberly
- Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons, Three Lives, and later Four Saints in Three Acts (written for an African American cast)
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Texts
- Jean Toomer, Cane (1923)
- Countee Cullen, Color (1924)
- Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues (1926)
- Alain Locke, ed. The New Negro (1926), expanded version of a special issue of Survey Graphic
- Claude McKay, Home to Harlem(1928)
- Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928)
- W. E. B. Du Bois, The Dark Princess (1928)
- Jessie Fauset, Plum Bun (1929)
- Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry(1929)
- Nella Larsen, Passing (1929)
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