AGE OF ANXIETY

ETYMOLOGY AND BACKGROUND

• From W.H. Auden's book length poem, "Age of Anxiety"
• Characterized by continual crisis
• Pessimistic, hopeless, dystopian, impersonal, unexplainable

SCIENCE

POETRY

LITERATURE

THE LOST GENERATION

• Coined by Gertrude Stein
• Group of authors including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Erich Remarque
• Generation that came of age during WWI
• Disoriented, wandering, directionless

Franz Kafka

Kafkaesque

• Involve victims of impersonal, inexplicable, hostile forces
• Reflected growing anxiety of the power of the state bureaucracy and of science

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

NON-REPRESENTATIONAL ART

FUTURISM AND VORTICISM

MODERNISM

• Embodied in Ezra Pound's slogan "Make it New"
• Rejection of classical and Enlightenment tradition and structure
• Fear of technological changes