The early 1900’s brought on a time of fierce emotion ringing out in the battle cry of World Wars. Millions of young men went into the wars willing and eager to fight, with few of them returning home. Those who were able to return came back distant and bitter about what they had seen and felt.
All of this emotion was reflected in the culture, literature, and artwork of the time, escaping from traditionally aesthetic ideas to a period of indifference, known in art as the Dada Movement and the Modern Movement of American Literature in writing.
These movements abandoned the traditions of American society and broke barriers with art and writing that had never been experienced before. Dada, which was known as the Anti-War Movement, was initiated by the artist Hans Arp, the filmmaker Hans Richter, and the poet Tristan Tzara. It was “an artistic revolt and protest against traditional beliefs of a pro-war society, and also fought against sexism/racism to a lesser degree.” (The Art History Archive) Marcel Duchamp is a well-known Dada artist, who famously chose a handful of everyday objects called “Ready Mades”, signed his name to them and gave them titles that had no connection to their actual function. (The Art History Archive) These artists, along with modern American writers focused on the deep, foreboding, and impossible questions about life and the unknown. This was a period of ever changing circumstances; technology, fashion, and politics aided the Industrial era in becoming a booming empire full of brilliant minds challenging the purpose of humanity.
Surrealism, which was created in between World War I and II (Deese), became a period of “positive expression” that “represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the “rationalism” that had guided European culture and politics in the past and had culminated in the horrors of World War I.” (Deese) This period combined reality with a dream world, sort of a rational idea combined with something surreal, hence, surrealism. Duchamp was also a part of the surrealist movement, even editing for a surrealist periodical called “VVV” (The Art History Archive), avoiding talk of war issues and focusing on seemingly indiscriminate yet deep and meaningful ideas.
Ernest Hemingway wrote one of the most modern novels of that time called The Sun Also Rises. This book embodies the period of indifference through diction, thought, and action. Like all artists of the early 1900s, Hemingway disagreed with war and rejected all ideas of hostility and replaced it with sarcasm, focusing on the cause and effect of relationships and the fast-paced, frivolous society that America had evolved into. All of the characters of the novel eagerly throw away money and spend the majority of their time drinking and feeling like they had no purpose in the world. Hemingway writes like a journalist, using a simplistic prose that evokes a static tone to describe “a world with no clear center and no clear distinction between good and evil, black or white”. (Byrd) Other writers such as e.e. cummings wrote poems that created a whole new aspect of rhyme and meaning, evading rational concepts and ideas and developing unrealistic and dreamlike ideas similar to the Surrealist movement.
The movements previously described generate an empire built on the idea that a person’s individual beliefs overrule society as a whole and are the main beneficiaries of defining the meaning of life. Most of the Dada artists, Modern American writers, and Surrealists adapted their own view in trying to answer impossible questions such as death and religion and used their abilities to not only document the world at large but show different aspects of it as well.
Work Cited
Deese, Patrick. The Surrealist Movement. The Biography Project. Web.
http://www.popsubculture.com/pop/bio_project/surrealism.html
Dada- The Anti-War Movement. The Art History Archive. July 2000. Web. 25 September 2009.
http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/dada/arthistory_dada.html
Byrd, Steven. Literature. Modern America, 1914-present. Web.
http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/allam/1914-/lit/index.htm
American Literature Since 1875 
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