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Literary Topics Videos 221 videos
Dr. Seuss was a failure to start, but he soon learned to follow his heart. He wrote books about things that he knew, and soon enough, his book sale...
Sure, Edgar Allan Poe was dark and moody and filled with teenage angst, but what else does he have in common with the Twilight series?
Emily Dickinson was a New England poet/hermit with a fascination with death and immortality. She wrote over 1000 poems in her lifetime, most of the...
Life Sucks and Then You Die 266 Views
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Description:
Cute fuzzy puppies. Giggling babies. A huge sundae topped with fudge and whipped cream and... yeah. We just wanted to put a smile on your face, because the topic of this video sure won't do the trick.
Transcript
- 00:07
Life Sucks, and Then You Die… or, How Modernists Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the World…
- 00:12
a la Shmoop The 1920s wasn’t one big flashy DiCaprio-does-Gatsby
- 00:18
party. If all the flappers and jazz is too much for you, the modernists are there to
- 00:22
harsh your buzz.
- 00:23
The modernist era was all about crises…
Full Transcript
- 00:25
Crises of faith…
- 00:26
Crises of knowledge…
- 00:28
Crises of humanity…
- 00:30
These guys and gals thought the world was spinning out of control, and they saw humanity
- 00:33
at its most brutal. Care for a few examples?
- 00:36
ONE: Thomas Hardy thought the world was just a place of total empty randomness… a war
- 00:42
will do that to you, we guess.
- 00:43
TWO: George Santayana wasn't high on the world, either, but he insisted that poetry could
- 00:49
replace religion and make the world beautiful again.
- 00:52
Even the worst poetry would be a step up from trench warfare and mustard gas.
- 00:58
THREE: T.S. Eliot took another route: he thought that we should draw on the classic art of
- 01:06
our past to make sense of our present-day world.
- 01:09
Today, this would be like invoking the Smurfs and Transformers to make sense of our world.
- 01:14
Hooray for Hollywood. Three guys, three different opinions. It might
- 01:18
all sound like the modernists were just coming up with creative ways to dodge reality…
- 01:27
But a poet like Wallace Stevens tried to show us that pretty much all of our experience
- 01:31
is made up by our imaginations anyway. The question is, what do we do with our imaginations?
- 01:39
Do we use them to make bombs, or to write stories and poems that’ll make our daily
- 01:44
lives feel more beautiful? With all these different opinions floating
- 01:47
around, you'd think there wasn't just one right answer. And guess what? That's what
- 01:51
yet another Modernist thought.
- 01:53
William Faulkner argued that you couldn’t really believe in one true perspective.
- 01:57
Instead, the modern world was all about the fragmentation of human bonds.
- 02:05
In other words, without a common religion to follow, everyone was just left to their
- 02:08
own perspective, turning the world into one big Choose Your Own Adventure book.
- 02:13
So not only was the world fragmented, but people’s perspectives were fragmented too.
- 02:18
How did these guys run a society when everyone had their own take on what’s right and wrong?
- 02:24
Shmoop amongst yourselves.
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