Trivia Question
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Answer
The little black dress.
Vocabulary Term
MLA formatting
A paragraph style where the first line sits at the left margin and every line after it indents 0.5 inches — required for every entry on an MLA Works Cited page.
Modern Work
Igor Stravinsky, 1913 · Ballet score
Its harsh dissonance and irregular rhythms reportedly caused the audience to riot at its Paris premiere — now considered one of the most influential works of 20th-century music.
Trivia Question
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Answer
The Bauhaus.
Modern Work
Joseph Conrad, 1899 · Novella
A journey up an unnamed river into the Congo Free State, narrated in a fractured, layered style that anticipates many Modernist techniques.
Trivia Question
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Answer
A container.
Trivia Question
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Answer
Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf.
Citation Example
Formatting · Works Cited
Author. Title of source. Title of container, Other contributors, Version, Number, Publisher, Publication date, Location.
Skip any element that doesn't apply to your particular source, but keep the remaining order and punctuation the same.
Modern Figure
1899–1961 · American novelist
Developed a spare, understated prose style — sometimes called the "iceberg theory," where most of the meaning stays beneath the surface — in novels like The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms.
Modern Work
Pablo Picasso, 1907 · Painting
Its five fractured, angular nude figures are often cited as the painting that launched Cubism.
Modern Work
Le Corbusier, 1931 · Architecture
Raised on thin supporting columns ("pilotis") with ribbon windows and a rooftop garden, it embodies Le Corbusier's "Five Points of a New Architecture."
Modern Figure
1883–1969 · German architect
Founded the Bauhaus school in 1919, uniting fine art, craft, and industrial design under one roof — one of the most influential art schools of the 20th century and a driving force behind modernist architecture.
Vocabulary Term
MLA formatting
The nine standard pieces of information — author, title, container, and so on — that MLA arranges in the same order and punctuation to build a citation for almost any kind of source.
Citation Example
In-Text · Web source
The Tate defines Modernism as a break from "history and tradition" ("Modernism").
Most web pages have no page numbers, so cite the (shortened) title instead — in quotation marks, since it's an untitled-author web page.
Citation Example
Formatting · Quoting
The critic wrote that Woolf's technique "changed [the novel] permanently."
Square brackets show a word was added or changed to keep the quotation grammatical inside your own sentence.
Modern Figure
1898–1937 · American composer
Fused jazz idioms with classical concert forms in works like Rhapsody in Blue (1924), helping define the sound of the Jazz Age.
Modern Figure
1882–1941 · English novelist & essayist
A founding figure of literary Modernism and of the Bloomsbury Group, Woolf pioneered stream-of-consciousness narration in novels like Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and argued for women's intellectual independence in the essay A Room of One's Own.
Trivia Question
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Answer
More than four lines. (For verse, the threshold is more than three lines.)
Modern Work
Henri Matisse, 1910 · Painting
Five figures circle hand in hand across a flat field of saturated blue, green, and red — color and rhythm standing in for realistic detail.
Modern Work
Franz Kafka, 1915 · Novella
Opens with traveling salesman Gregor Samsa waking to find himself transformed into a giant insect — a stark, unsettling image of alienation often read as a bridge into Modernist fiction.
Modern Work
David Smith, 1964 · Sculpture
Welded, geometric stainless-steel forms balanced in a stack that looks precarious but is carefully engineered to stand.
Trivia Question
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Answer
Pablo Picasso's — the painting itself is titled Guernica.
Vocabulary Term
MLA formatting
A quotation of more than four lines of prose (or three lines of verse), set off from the paragraph with its own 0.5-inch indent and no quotation marks.
Modern Work
Constantin Brâncuși, 1923 · Sculpture
A tall, polished bronze form reduced almost to pure aerodynamic line — U.S. customs once classified it as "raw metal" rather than art and taxed it accordingly, prompting a landmark 1928 court case.
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A shortened version of the source's title, in quotation marks if it's an article or webpage.
Vocabulary Term
architecture movement
A mid-20th-century architectural style stripped of ornament in favor of glass, steel, and open, flowing volumes.
Vocabulary Term
historical period
F. Scott Fitzgerald's own term for the 1920s in America — an era defined by jazz music, Prohibition, and rapidly changing social codes.
Modern Work
George Gershwin, 1924 · Orchestral jazz
Opens with a now-famous solo clarinet glissando before fusing jazz rhythms with the structure of a classical concert piece.
Citation Example
In-Text · Prose
Modernist writers "made the world strange again" through fragmented form (Bradbury 12).
Author's last name and page number, no comma between them, placed before the sentence's closing punctuation.
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0.5 inches — this "hanging indent" is required on every entry.
Citation Example
Works Cited · Book
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. Harcourt, 1925.
Author, then the title (italicized), then publisher, then year — a comma after each element, a period at the very end.
Vocabulary Term
art & design school
An influential German school (1919–1933) that united fine art with craft and industrial design under one roof, shaping design education worldwide long after it closed.
Modern Work
Louis Armstrong, 1928 · Jazz recording
Its unaccompanied opening trumpet cadenza is one of the most celebrated passages in early jazz recording.
Modern Figure
1867–1959 · American architect
Championed an "organic architecture" that grew from its site — most famously Fallingwater (1935), a house cantilevered directly over a waterfall in rural Pennsylvania.
Trivia Question
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Answer
Nine — author, title of source, title of container, and so on, in a fixed order.
Vocabulary Term
MLA formatting
A brief note — usually just an author's last name and a page number in parentheses — placed right where you use a source, pointing the reader to its full entry on the Works Cited page.
Modern Work
Marcel Duchamp, 1913 · Sculpture (readymade)
A bicycle wheel mounted upside-down on a wooden stool — widely considered the first "readymade," an ordinary object turned into art simply by the artist's choice.
Citation Example
In-Text · Corporate author
Cubism "shattered the Renaissance illusion" of one fixed viewpoint, according to the museum (Museum of Modern Art 4).
A group or organization stands in for an individual's name when no individual author is credited.
Vocabulary Term
MLA formatting
Restating someone else's idea in your own words and sentence structure — it still came from somewhere else, so it still needs a citation.
Trivia Question
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Frank Lloyd Wright.
Trivia Question
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Answer
The Jazz Age.
Vocabulary Term
art movement
An early-20th-century painting movement, led by Picasso and Georges Braque, that broke subjects into geometric planes shown from multiple angles at once.
Trivia Question
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1 inch on the top, bottom, left, and right.
Modern Figure
1888–1965 · American-British poet & critic
His fragmented, allusion-dense poem The Waste Land (1922) became one of the defining texts of literary Modernism; he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.
Modern Work
Elsa Schiaparelli, 1937 · Fashion (Surrealist)
Designed in collaboration with Salvador Dalí: a woman's shoe, worn as a hat — Surrealism's playful, dreamlike logic applied directly to fashion.
Vocabulary Term
art movement
The historical condition of being "modern": the rapid industrialization, urbanization, and technological change from the late 19th century onward that Modernist art was responding to.
Modern Work
Ernest Hemingway, 1926 · Novel
Follows a group of disillusioned American and British expatriates — the "Lost Generation" — drifting through postwar Europe.
Vocabulary Term
art movement
An ordinary, manufactured object that becomes an artwork simply through the artist's choice to designate it as one — a concept pioneered by Marcel Duchamp.
Modern Work
Virginia Woolf, 1925 · Novel
Follows a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway as she prepares for a party in London, narrated through shifting streams of consciousness — one of the defining novels of literary Modernism.
Trivia Question
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A DOI, when the source has one — it stays valid even if the source's web address changes.
Citation Example
Works Cited · Artwork
Picasso, Pablo. Guernica. 1937, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid.
Artist, title, year, then the institution and city that holds it — current MLA style drops the old "Print." or "Oil on canvas." labels.
Vocabulary Term
MLA formatting
A Works Cited list in which every entry is followed by a short paragraph summarizing and evaluating that source.
Vocabulary Term
MLA formatting
Latin for "thus": bracketed as [sic] right after a copied error inside a quotation, to show the mistake was already there in the original source.
Modern Work
William Van Alen, 1930 · Architecture
An Art Deco skyscraper crowned with a stainless-steel spire, briefly the tallest building in the world before the Empire State Building surpassed it months later.
Vocabulary Term
MLA formatting
Three spaced periods ( . . . ) inserted into a quotation to show that words from the original have been left out.
Modern Work
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925 · Novel
Set amid Jazz Age excess on Long Island, it follows the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby's pursuit of a lost love — now widely read as a critique of the American Dream.
Modern Work
Salvador Dalí, 1931 · Painting (Surrealist)
Melting pocket watches drape across a dreamlike, barren landscape — one of the most recognizable Surrealist paintings ever made.
Modern Figure
1866–1944 · Russian painter
Widely credited as a pioneer of pure abstraction in painting — art built from color, shape, and line alone, without a recognizable subject.
Trivia Question
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The Rite of Spring.
Citation Example
In-Text · Poetry
Eliot opens with a jarring reversal of expectation: "April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land" (lines 1-2).
A slash with a space on each side marks a line break in poetry quoted inline; cite line numbers, not page numbers.
Modern Figure
1881–1973 · Spanish painter & sculptor
Co-founder, with Georges Braque, of Cubism — breaking subjects into geometric planes seen from multiple angles at once — and later painter of Guernica (1937), one of the century's most famous anti-war artworks.
Modern Work
James Joyce, 1922 · Novel
Maps Homer's Odyssey onto one ordinary day in Dublin, June 16, 1904 — now celebrated worldwide every year as "Bloomsday."
Modern Figure
1887–1965 · Swiss-French architect
A pioneer of modernist architecture who argued a house should be "a machine for living in"; his Villa Savoye and "Five Points of Architecture" reshaped how the century built.
Vocabulary Term
art movement
Art that departs from recognizable representation of the physical world, emphasizing shape, color, and form for their own sake instead.
Citation Example
Works Cited · Web page
"Modernism." Tate, www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/m/modernism. Accessed 3 Sept. 2026.
No listed author, so the page's title moves to the front in quotation marks; an access date is added because the page itself has no fixed publication date.
Citation Example
Formatting · Works Cited page
Every Works Cited entry's second and later lines indent an extra 0.5 inches, so a reader's eye can scan straight down the first line of every entry — usually an author's last name — at the left margin.
Vocabulary Term
MLA formatting
The larger whole that holds a source: the journal that holds an article, the website that holds a webpage, the anthology that holds a short story.
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12-point, in an easily readable font such as Times New Roman.
Modern Figure
1883–1971 · French fashion designer
Freed women's fashion from the corseted silhouette of the 19th century; her simple 1926 "little black dress" became one of the most enduring garments in modern fashion.
Vocabulary Term
art movement
French for "advance guard": artists and movements that deliberately push past current convention, often shocking audiences before the wider culture catches up.
Vocabulary Term
MLA formatting
The alphabetized list of every source cited in the paper, on its own page at the very end, with a hanging indent on every entry.
Modern Figure
1907–1954 · Mexican painter
Painted unflinching, often surrealist-inflected self-portraits exploring identity, pain, and her own mixed heritage — including The Two Fridas (1939).
Trivia Question
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Double-spaced — including the Works Cited page, with no extra space added between paragraphs.
Vocabulary Term
MLA formatting
Used inside a quotation to mark a word you've added, changed, or capitalized differently so the quotation reads grammatically inside your own sentence.
Vocabulary Term
MLA formatting
Ordinary written or spoken language, without the regular line-by-line rhythm of verse — MLA treats a quotation of more than four lines of prose as a block quotation.
Vocabulary Term
design movement
A glamorous, geometric decorative style of the 1920s and '30s, seen in buildings like the Chrysler Building and in fashion and design of the same era.
Vocabulary Term
MLA formatting
Words that introduce a quotation or paraphrase and name where it came from, such as "According to Woolf..." — it lets a citation feel like part of a sentence instead of a bolted-on afterthought.
Trivia Question
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Stream of consciousness.
Modern Work
Henry Moore, 1929 · Sculpture
An abstracted, hollowed-out human form that draws on non-Western sculptural traditions Moore studied closely, rather than classical European ones.
Modern Work
Virginia Woolf, 1929 · Extended essay
Argues that a woman needs money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction — a foundational text of feminist literary criticism.
Citation Example
Formatting · Block quote
A prose quotation of more than four lines is set off from the paragraph, indented 0.5 inches, with no quotation marks — the parenthetical citation comes after the final punctuation, not before it.
Vocabulary Term
art movement
A movement exploring dreams and the unconscious mind through startling, irrational imagery — Dalí and Schiaparelli both drew on it.
Vocabulary Term
MLA formatting
Short for Digital Object Identifier: a permanent code assigned to an online scholarly source, preferred over a URL in a Works Cited entry because it never changes even if the source moves.
Vocabulary Term
art movement
A broad, international movement across literature, art, architecture, and music, roughly 1890–1945, that deliberately broke with 19th-century tradition and realism in favor of new forms and techniques.
Citation Example
In-Text · Unknown author
One gallery guide calls it "the most powerful anti-war statement in modern art" ("Picasso's Guernica" 2).
With no named author, use a shortened version of the title in quotation marks instead of a last name.
Modern Figure
1876–1957 · Romanian sculptor
Reduced the human and animal form to pure, polished abstraction; U.S. customs officials once taxed his sculpture Bird in Space as raw metal rather than art, prompting a landmark court case.
Modern Work
1920s · Fashion
Dropped waist, shorter hemline, and fringe or beading defined the look of the "New Woman" of the Jazz Age, built for the era's new social freedoms and dances.
Citation Example
Works Cited · Digital image
Kahlo, Frida. The Two Fridas. 1939, Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City. MoMA, www.moma.org/....
Same core elements as artwork seen in person, plus one more container: the website where you actually viewed the image.
Modern Work
Wassily Kandinsky, 1923 · Painting
Built entirely from geometric shapes, lines, and color — no recognizable subject at all, a pure exercise in abstraction.
Trivia Question
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The author's last name and the page number, with no comma between them — e.g. (Woolf 24).
Modern Work
Pablo Picasso, 1937 · Painting
A monumental, black-and-white protest against the German and Italian bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.
Modern Work
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 1929 · Architecture
Built for a world's fair and demolished soon after (then rebuilt decades later), its open plan and glass, steel, and polished stone embody Mies's dictum "less is more."
Modern Work
Walter Gropius, 1926 · Architecture
The glass-curtain-walled headquarters Gropius designed for his own Bauhaus school — a manifesto in steel and glass for functional, ornament-free design.
Modern Work
Frank Lloyd Wright, 1935 · Architecture
A private house cantilevered directly over a waterfall in rural Pennsylvania, fusing the building with its site rather than simply overlooking it.
Vocabulary Term
literary technique
A narrative technique that renders a character's thoughts as an unfiltered, flowing sequence, often with little conventional punctuation or structure — used by Woolf and Joyce alike.
Trivia Question
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Answer
Marcel Duchamp.
Citation Example
Works Cited · Journal via database
Bradbury, Malcolm. "The Denuded Place." Modernism/modernity, vol. 3, no. 2, 1996, pp. 1-18. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/....
Two containers, back to back: the journal that holds the article, then the database that holds the journal.
Vocabulary Term
MLA formatting
Poetry set in deliberate lines, quoted with a slash ( / ) to show a line break when quoted inline, or set off as a block quotation (preserving the original lineation) once it runs to four lines or more.
Vocabulary Term
MLA formatting
The author-and-page-number reference in parentheses — e.g. (Woolf 24) — placed after the borrowed material and before the closing punctuation.
Modern Figure
1882–1971 · Russian composer
His ballet score The Rite of Spring (1913), with its jarring rhythms and dissonance, reportedly provoked a riot at its Paris premiere — now considered a landmark of musical Modernism.
Modern Figure
1882–1941 · Irish novelist
Best known for Ulysses (1922), which reimagines Homer's Odyssey across a single day in Dublin using radically inventive narrative styles — a landmark of Modernist fiction still argued over by scholars today.
Modern Work
T. S. Eliot, 1922 · Poem
A fragmented, allusion-packed meditation on a civilization left broken after the First World War — its opening line, "April is the cruellest month," is one of the most quoted in modern poetry.
Citation Example
In-Text · Quoting a quotation
Stravinsky said the riot left him "convinced . . . it was written that way" (qtd. in Smith 45).
"Qtd. in" signals you're quoting someone as reported by another author, not from that person's original text directly.
Modern Work
Coco Chanel, 1926 · Fashion design
A deliberately simple, versatile dress that Vogue likened to a "uniform for all women of taste" — it helped move women's fashion away from elaborate Victorian and Edwardian dress.
Modern Work
Frida Kahlo, 1939 · Painting
Two seated self-portraits sit side by side, their exposed hearts joined by a single vein — painted the year of Kahlo's divorce from Diego Rivera.
Citation Example
Formatting · Quoting
"Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself . . . what a lark!"
Three spaced periods show that words from the middle of the original sentence were cut out.
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Bird in Space (1923).
MLA formatting & citation rules follow Excelsior University's Online Writing Lab (OWL): MLA Style.
Artwork/image citation format cross-checked against Mississippi State University Libraries' MLA image & artwork citation guide.