THE LOST GENERATION/ THE JAZZ AGE.

The 1920s were a period of intense American literary activity. They were also the years for the coming of age of what Gertrude Stein, addressing Ernest Hemingway, had labeled ‘The Lost Generation’ («All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation. You have no respect for anything, you drink yourselves to death»). Indeed, the American writers born at the turn of the century (Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Dos Passos, Cummings, Crane…) do, in many respects, constitute a distinct generation from the elder modernists, a generation which, in the words of Fitzgerald, had «grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken», a generation characterized by the loss of bearings, by a distinctly un-sentimental approach («Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene», Hemingway) following a war which had put a radical end to the 19th century Romanticism or ideal of Progress. Although these writers would stay closely linked to their modernist elders, they tended nevertheless to reject older guides of conduct in order to create new values, new standards of conduct, for instance the «grace under pressure» of Hemingway’s heroes whose courage and nobility come from responding to things and experiences in themselves, not ideas about them; thus creating a new ethic, and a new literary style as well.

This generation came of age and started writing in the 1920s, the paradoxical «Jazz Age» which in America was characterized by a tension between, on the one hand, aspiration to novelty, experimentation, bohemia, and on the other an underlying nostalgia, puritanism, and conservatism (Prohibition, censorship, repression of radicalism). Fitzgerald, often viewed as the chronicler of this Jazz Age, would be the very shrewd recorder of these tensions, of the American Dream in all its ambivalence.

Fiction: Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson

Poetry: Hart Crane, e. e. cummings

30.Творчество Г.Миллера.

Henry Miller (1891-1980)

American writer whose autobiographical novels had a liberating influence on mid-20th century literature. Because of the frank portrayals of sexuality, Miller's major novels have been banned in several countries. In the 1960s Miller became one of the most widely read US authors. In his autobiographical works Miller created a myth out of his own life, about a free-spirited, penniless American writer who has a number of affairs and spends his time between New York and Paris.

Black Spring (1936) based on his childhood's experiences in Brooklyn

The Colossus of Maroussi (1941) inspired by his visit to Greece

Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (1957)

Tropic of Cancer (1961)

31.Творчество В.В.Набокова.

Vladimir Nabokov as a Bridge between Modernism and Postmodernism

The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain characteristics of post- World War II literature (relying heavily, for example, on fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators, irony, absurdity, playfulness, pastiche, quotations, references, allusions, etc.)

Vladimir Nabokov (1889-1977)

Like many other writers who had an influence on the American prose of the 60s, Nabokov represents the main link between the earliest periods of the modernist movement and the development of that way of writing that is called “postmodernist” in the USA (Daiu, 2000). Traits of both currents can be found in his literary works: his masterpiece “Lolita” is known for its rich style, power of language, alienation, games and doubles. “The Gift” is widely known for its richness of detail, and “Pale Fire” for its metafiction, pastiche, technical ingenuity. “Lolita” might be read as a modernist or postmodernist novel while his later works “Pale Fire” and “Ada or Ardor” are more likely to be postmodern.

Influenced by such authors as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. We can findexperimentation,anti-realism,individualismandintellectualisminNabokov’s works. One feature above all is striking in Modernism: experimentation, change for the sake of change, a need to be constantly at the cutting edge in technique and thought and as Pound said: Make it new.

32.Особенности литературы США второй половины XX века.

In an American century marked by two world wars, the Depression, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, every crisis heralds a new cultural challenge and brings along new redefinitions of literature, new literary voices, different considerations on the writer’s place in American society.

The 1920s and 1930s were also the epoch of the «Harlem Renaissance», also called the «New Negro» movement, marks the emergence of an African American literature. This name describes the literary work of Afro- American novelists, whose creative center was Harlem, N. Y.. These people wanted to evoke a new kind of cultural selfconfidence in their black brothers and sisters spread all over the country and to support the idea of the „New Negro“. Emerging with the development of an African American cultural elite in the Harlem of the 1920s, it would find distinct voices through writers such as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Arna Bontemps and Richard Wright in later years.

The 1950s and 1960s saw a new revival of African American literature through the Black Arts Movement, which worked for the promotion of a Black pride and Black aesthetic amidst a militant context. Among more activist instances of this movement, Ellison’s novel Invisible Man explores the question of black identity, and of identity in general, through a unique style which mixes realism, surrealism, the picaresque, folklore, symbolism and myth, and unfolds a nightmarish naturalism.

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