Outline Ch.6 Hoffman's "The Twenties"

I. The Problem
a. "The ‘dilemna of modern youth,' said Krutch, as he surveyed the postwar decade, was a consequence of our no longer being able to sustain either an unreasonable faith or a rational doubt. For the most part, science has been responsible for this sharp division between feeling and thought " (Hoff 275) Unlike the past where man turned to myth and religion for meaning, man was now putting their trust in science instead. "We have discovered that faith does not come from knowledge, that knowledge is more likely to destroy faith or to make its exercise all but impossible." (Hoff 276)
b. "As for literature, Krutch maintained that is was no longer possible to write genuine tragedy. Great tragedy requires a certain naïve faith in the nobility of man and in the genuineness of his suffering, a willingness to suspend current fashions in disbelief and to entertain the illusion that man can act heroically." (Hoff 276). "Aesthetic principles cannot give society the stability it needs ‘because, though the human mind may be made to work in accordance with them, external nature will not, and the ultimate dilemma may be stated thus: the proposition that life is a science is intellectually indefensible; the proposition that life is an art is pragmatically impossible." (Hoff 277)
c. People were left in a cloud of disillusionment when they realized that the world is meaningless and there is no scientific basis in religion. "Science has given us a description of a meaningless world, Russel said, a world in which belief is not possible. Man must recognize that he is of no importance in such a world; unless he realizes his insignificance, he will not adjust himself intelligently to the world." (Hoff 278)
d. "Religion has erred by inspiring fear in men, fear of death especially, though all fear is bad and works great harm when it is used as a religious sanction for human acts." (Hoff 280)

II. The Technological Fallacy
a. "The great problem of the mechanical age, of which the 1920s were an important expression, had to do with assimilation of the machine. Writers of the 1920s, whenever they took account of the machine, saw it either as the perfect concrete demonstration of man's ingenious mind or as the perfect desperate symbol of the evil science has wrought upon his vain efforts to achieve a rational life.
b. "The movement called futurism had an important influence upon literature and the arts. It was begun in 1909 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who maintained that the new age of movement and the machine had wrought a comparable change in our attitudes towards the arts." (Hoff 288) "Marinetti listed some fifteen ways in which our sensibilities have been affected by scientific discoveries. They have led to an acceleration of life and have made us despise the old and welcome the new and the unforeseen. We now scorn the prospect of a quiet life we are attracted toward danger. We are much more interested in ourselves. Romantic love has disappeared." (Hoff 289)
c. "The industrial efficiency of America, Sandburg tells us, is purchased at the cost of human blood; he means actual blood spilled in accidents, and most of all the emotional effects of working conditions upon the men responsible for the finished bar of steel." (Hoff 295)

III. Pre-Industrial Illusion
a. "Opposition to the machine took many forms in the 1920s. As the product of modern industry, it was held responsible for almost all of the evils of the modern city-for the ugliness, the congestion, the ludicrous restriction of man's physical activities, and, above all, his spiritual frustration Lawrence described the effect of an industrial passion for profit upon the human personality, its disastrous murder of the will." (Hoff 299) Famous writers like D.H. Lawrence could clearly see the evils that industrialism would bring upon society. "Several writers predicted that man would finally be destroyed by the monster he had created." (Hoff 301). "For Anderson, modern industrial life seemed degrading, humiliating, and dispiriting." (Hoff 302). "Anderson did not deny the industrial age, but he regretted its influence in destroying the "poetry and vague thought" available to pre-industrial sensibility." (Hoff 306)
b. "The primitivism of the 1920s was in many respects a reaction against the standardization caused by modern science in all its social applications." (Hoff 306). "Many artists expressed their primitivism by taking up American jazz." (Hoff 307)

IV. The Affairs of Dayton, Tennessee
a. "One of the tasks assumed by scientist was that of reeducating the public concerning the background of its beliefs. In a world of uncertainties and half-certainties the awesome discipline, the monastic regimen, of the scientist gave the public a feeling of confidence almost like that inspired by the priest in the earlier time." (Hoff 309) Science became the new religion of the 1920s. Evolution became a popular yet controversial belief. The Scopes trial took place in 1925. "It was the result of a bill passed by Tennessee legislature, forbidding the teaching of any theory that denied ‘ the story of the Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible." (Hoff 313) This fundamentalist Christian belief displayed a blind faith in the Bible and showed no tolerance for Darwin's theory of evolution which proved to have a factual basis, unlike religion.

V. Science, Poetry, and Belief
a. "Literature, then, as a thing distinct from science, may be a pure communication of experience; it may interpret experience in spheres as yet untouched by science; it may offer interpretations as intellectual things to be enjoyed without a tense regard to their validity." (Hoff 315) "This is the crisis : man can no longer believe, but he desperately needs more than the gifts science offers him; he is not merely a physical being, and no amount of mechanical improvement in the externals of his life will compensate for his loss in belief." (Hoff 318)

VI. The Text: T.S Eliot's The Waste Land
a. "Dramatically The Waste Land identifies its general circumstance in terms of a failure of great love, of sexual communion and spiritual communication" (Hoff 332) "The Waste Land is not a poem for any one given time; it not merely describes a local circumstance but reveals a universal dilemma. The essential emotions of the poem are the terror and agony that accompany a loss of belief, of the capacity to believe, to enter absolutely into a communication with the spiritual and the moral life. Its value to the 1920s was that it pointed up the problem of belief, as it was debated in the 1920s, as it was associated with the influence of science on the mood of religious acceptance and on the formations of "industrial waste land" observed and commented by scores of writers." (Hoff 34