Introducing 

Prezi AI.

Your new presentation assistant.

Refine, enhance, and tailor your content, source relevant images, and edit visuals quicker than ever before.

Loading…
Transcript

The Lost Generation

  • Gertrude Stein used the phrase in conversation with Ernest Hemingway, supposedly quoting a garage mechanic saying to her, "You are all a lost generation."
  • This phrase signifies the disillusioned postwar generation characterized by lost values, lost belief in the idea of human progress, and a mood of despair
  • The term gained importance with The Sun Also Rises . The phrase, and Hemingway’s book, depicted this generation as characterised by doomed youth, hedonism, uncompromising creativity, and wounded by the experience of war.
  • This mood and belief was characterizes and described by writers such as Fitzgerald and Hemingway in their view of war, followed by materialist and mass consuming society
  • Paris in the 1920s often described as one of the most exciting and sophisticated city in the world was home to many writers and artists, all belonging to this term and idea, all lost and in disbelief of this time period

Her position today

  • Critics today agree that her influence, her work and her experimental writing is largely neglected
  • Although her importance as a literary figure may not be claim to fame, her influence as a person definetely is
  • She was an imposing and demanding figure, compassionate and caring yet possessed by a commanding manner and a great sense of self-confidence
  • While hosting weekly meetings in her salon, she would entertain the men, writers and artists from all over, sending the wives to Toklas
  • Away from the American lifestyle making her feel like an outcast, Stein was able to invent her persona in Paris in a community filled with young artists trying to make a name for themselves
  • Away from censure and somewhat oppression, she was able to develop herself

" l'Amerique est mon pays mais Paris est mon chez-moi"

  • February 3rd, 1874- July 27, 1946
  • She was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania
  • Stein studied psychology under William James before attending John Hopkins Medical school before "quitting" to become a writer
  • She spent the earlier portion of her live in Europe and in 1903 settled in Paris
  • She quickly started collecting art, as well as writers such as T.S Elliot, James Joyce, F.Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway
  • During WWI, Toklas and Stein set out to become ambulance drivers for the French
  • During and after the war, in the 1920s, she became an inspiration to American expatriates such as T.S Elliot, James Joyce, F.Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway who regularly attended her salon
  • In 1933 she published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas which she published from her point of view
  • In 1934, she made a return to America where she made a successful lecture tour before returning to France before the war
  • After the liberation of Paris, she was frequently visited by many acclaimed artists and writers whom she had helped suceed or inspired
  • Overal she wrote many novels and memoirs, accompanied by librettos for two operas
  • On July 27, 1946 she died in Neuilly-sur-Seine of stomach cancer

Contributions

"If you can do it then why do it"

  • Stein and her brother Leo started collecting Post-Impressionist paintings thereby helping struggling artists such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse
  • At 27 Rue de Fleurus, Leo and Stein established a literary and artisitic salo where they exposed some of the collected works
  • While her brother moved to Florence, taking many paintings, she stayed and met the love of her life and life long companion Alice B. Toklas
  • In the early 20s she started to have her work published: Three Lives (1909), Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms (1914) and The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress (1925) all of which were intended to capture the techniques of abstraction and cubism

  • Gertrude Stein was a central figure in the Parisian art world.
  • Being an advocate of "avant garde" she helped create and shape a movement "that demanded a novel form of expression and a conscious break with the past"
  • Her salon became a gathering for new moderns and their friends, all of whom dedicate the being of their careers to her
  • What artists contributed and sent forth in art, she did in writing
  • She rejected the linear, and typical characteristics and in exchange reached for a spacial and space oriented form of literature
  • This resulted in not commercially successful books but dense poems and yielded memorable phrases: "Rose is a rose is a rose" ; "To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write"

Gertrude Stein and the Lost Generation

Learn more about creating dynamic, engaging presentations with Prezi