Cultural+and+Intellectual+Trends+in+Interwar+Years

-Sara Yogi
 * Explain the cultural and intellectual trends in the 1920s and 1930s*

20/30s Thinking: -optimistic liberal-rationalist feelings GONE after four years of devastating war -WWI confirm unorthodox prewar notion that humans violent/irrational animals who cannot create sane/rational world -Great Depression, fascism, lowered individual rights add to uncertainties generated by WWI -break down traditional middle-class attitude (especially sexuality) -cosmetics, sun tanning, short skirts/hair...EXPOSE and BEAUTIFY female body -Theodore van de Velde's IDEAL MARRIAGE: ITS PHYSIOLOGY AND TECHNIQUE = birth control techniques, glorify sex, male/female anatomy

Art and Music: -prewar fascination with absurd/unconscious leads to DADAISM and SURREALISM =-Dadaism= purposelessness of life + Hannah Hoch: DADA DANCE...criticize modern women; other works creates positive image of new women =-Surrealism= reality beyond material, sensible world; logic to portray illogical + Dali = PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY...disturbing world, irrational tangible =-Functionalism= fulfilling purpose of constructed piece (architecture) + Sullivan's "The Chicago School" + Frank Lloyd Wright = innovative design for domestic houses...pioneered modern American house + Gropious' Bauhaus school of art, architecture, and design...blend fine art with applied art; create buildings and objects of future

New Audiences: -artist/muscians involve themselves -theatre used by postwar artists to make impact on popular audiences -totalitarian states DENOUNCE decadence in arts + Hitler says modern art is "degenerate" or "Jewish (really now? XP) + Soviets = realistic portrayal, "nineteenth-century old-fashioned" -Music: + Igor Stravinsky "revolutionize" music; still wrote in definitive key + Viennese composer Arnold Schonberg express RADICAL new stylle (atonal music, created twelve-tone composition)

Search for Unconsciousness: -writers express innermost thoughts of characters; "stream of consciousness" + James Joyce's ULYSSES (ramblings of ordinary people) + Virgina Woolf's MRS. DALLOWAY and JACOB'S ROOM (for women to be writer, need income to free stereotype of mother/housewife) + Herman Hesse (Carl Jung's psychological theories/Eastern religions...spiritual loneliness in urban world); DEMIAN (incest) and STEPPENWOLF (psychological confusion of modern existance) -Sigmund Freud taken seriously; unconscious, repression, id, ego, Oedipus complex enter vocabulary; uninhibited sex life is good ;) -opposition from Freud = his OWN pupil O: + Carl Jung believe Frued's theories too narrow/based on personal life + unconscious opening to deep spiritual needs/ever-greater vistas for humans + unconscious = PERSONAL UNCONSCIOUS and COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS (all memories humans share, consist of archetypes (mental forms or images in dreams))

Heroic Age of Physics: -Ernest Rutherford shows atom can be split into subatomic particles (seven discovered by 1940s) -Werner Heisenberg states "uncertainty principle"...no one can determine part of electron because observing electron with light affects electron's location - Heisenberg SHATTERS confidence in classical physics' predictability...now, uncertainty at root of physical laws :D