A Modernist Examination of the Good Anna and the Great Gatsby

A Modernist Examination of The Good Anna and The Great Gatsby Modernism is a movement characterized by the re-examination of literary styles, structures, content, and even human existence thought to be standard prior to 1900. The movement was all about looking at things in a new light, and trying to break the mold so long held by society as the norm. This movement took place in art, music, architecture, and as I will further discuss in this paper, literature. In this paper, I will discuss the modernist movement, specifically in relation to The Good Anna by Gertrude Stein, and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Though modernism affected all different areas, they share the same common theme, which is, ironically, almost no theme. The modernists aspired to make things new by examining them from new points of view, making them fresh and exciting. In art, this movement was exemplified by creating a whole new kind of art people had never seen before. Specifically, there were three groups of artists in the modernist movement. There were the Fauvists, whom used color in a non-representational and unrealistic way, creating vivid, bold, and fantastical paintings. Similarly, the impressionists used lots of color in their paintings, though they were more realistic with their portrayal in color. Impressionists also were characterized by small, almost invisible brush strokes, and works that were not very detailed. Lastly, there were the cubists. Cubists created abstract works from reality; they would take an object or scene and separate them into cubes, then rearrange the cubes until the artwork became an abstract representation of the original object. Similarly, in modernist literature, the writing became less constructed and linear, and became more abstract and open to interpretation. As you will see in The Good Anna and The Great Gatsby, the modernist writers were all about gaining a full picture only through glimpses and different perspectives. Much like a

Cited: Stein, Gertrude. Three Lives. New York: Viking Penguin, 1990. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.