Historia de la Educación (Jul 2019)

Francis Scott Fitzgerald, between pedagogical puritanism and postmodern morality

  • Raquel CERCÓS I RAICHS,
  • Conrad VILANOU TORRANO

DOI
https://doi.org/10.14201/hedu201837341363
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 37, no. 0
pp. 341 – 363

Abstract

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This article reviews what the experience of the First World War (1914-1918) meant for the American generation that promoted what Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) called «Jazz Age», period corresponding to the decade of the twenties until the crack of 1929. It attends the novels of this American writer to trace the emergence of a new moral that eroded the pedagogical puritanism of the time of the pioneers. This change brought a new educational horizon away from the ideal of the Christian student that had represented university institutions such as Princeton, whose classrooms passed our protagonist before joining the army. It is a pedagogical chronicle of a literary generation that, after visiting Europe in the 1920s, broke with the tradition of the biblical story, with which it anticipated postmodern morality.

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