Abstract:
The present dissertation attempts to provide a reflection on modernity, disenchantment and nostalgia in archetypal works in American modernism that rendered the crisis of the modern age. The primary sources of this research consist in The Waste Land (1922) and The Hollow Men (1925), written by the modernist poet Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888 - 1965), and The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934), belonging to the American novelist Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940).
My aim is to demonstrate, through Walter Benjamin's analysis of Baroque aesthetics in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), through his reading of Charles Baudelaire and Marcel Proust in "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" (1939), as well as through his concept of the 'aura' he developed in The Storyteller (1936), how modern men's cult of decadent beauties led to their estrangement from a unified universe of tradition and harmony. At the same time, it is their contact with archaic beauties that helps them restore the link with a distant realm of harmony identified with purity, virginity and childhood innocence, that is to say, only with the past.
The research tries thus to demonstrate how the wastelands of Eliot and Fitzgerald, sterile worlds reduced to a state of ruin and fragmentation, are not devoid of harmony since it is precisely the contact with the ruin that brings the protagonists back to ancient times of timeless beauties. In what follows, we will see how the crumbled universes of Eliot and Fitzgerald parable a state of melancholy and disenchantment at the same time as they reflect in the ruins and rubbles, the timeless beauties of the past. We will see precisely how, in the works of both American artists, the ruin becomes a complex image that conveys both the horror and the glory of human existence.
