Survey of American Literature Part 1 PDF

**Survey of American Literature Part 1 -- Summary** 1. Overview of Literary Periods - Periods of American Literature - Variable divisions: time periods, prominent literary form, political era, wars - Colonial period (1607 -- 1775) - Theology, conduct books, diaries, nar...

**Survey of American Literature Part 1 -- Summary** 1. Overview of Literary Periods - Periods of American Literature - Variable divisions: time periods, prominent literary form, political era, wars - Colonial period (1607 -- 1775) - Theology, conduct books, diaries, narratives of encounter and captivity - North America was a colony of various European countries - 1755 beginning of revolutionary war - Writings of this period were dominated by theological topics, books that set out rules of society and social living together, unexpected and unplanned encounters which were often warlike dominated by misunderstandings (people were killed, got bugs that they were never made immune to, illness spread, violent encounter) - Revolutionary Age (1765 -- 1790) - Political tracts, poems (didn't require a lot of paper, mostly about political topics), early novels - Age of reason, thinking for themselves, thinking that colonies should become independent - First election of American president - New and different people came to the stage, and everything changed - Early National Period (1775 -- 1865) - After 1828: Romanticism - American Renaissance: Emmerson, Thoreau, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman - Age of Transcendentalism - Didn't come to America as fast as in England (c.a. 40 years later) - Women and people of color didn't have a voice, it was all white men (Emmerson, Poe, Melville) - Also called American Renaissance - 4 years of civil war (first 3.5 years it looked like America was a failed project and the country would be divided into two countries) - Very brutal, number of losses of American lives from civil war exceeds the number of deaths from any other American war combined - A time in which the U.S. wanted to find out who they were as a nation - Trying out various forms of presidents - Different parties which changed their names - Period of shifting - Realism (1865 -- 1914) - Novels, humor, newspapers, short stories, psychological novels - *Regionalism* and *Local Color* 1870 -- 1895 - Naturalism 1895 - 1910 - Modernism (1914 -- 1939/1945) - Poetry, novels, drama - Lost generation - Things were a lot quicker - Modernism is basically the same in every society / country - So intensely filled with literary forms that it was divided into different parts - Division of the world in two blocks: - 1917 1^st^ world war in Europe, America and Soviet Union didn't make part of it until then - Rest of 20^th^ century America and Soviet Union as the biggest rivals - Post-War period (1945 -- mid-1960s) - *New Criticism* dominates academic teaching of English - Poetry: Confessional, Black Mountain, New York... other "schools" of poetry - Postmodernism (Mid-sixties to eighties) - Black Arts movement - Metafiction - Additional voices gain full entry to expanded canon: - African American - Asian American - Native American - Chicano/a - LGBTQ+ - Several movements in poetry: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, conceptual poetry, poetry of engagement, neoformalist poetry, etc. - Opened the list of what people were reading before it was only white male authors like Poe - Contemporary - Expansion of life writing and memoirs, nature writing and ecological awareness, identity-based writing (before: after book was published the message was for everyone, now it can only be for author or small groups of people), political and social advocacy,... 2. Columbus and other "Discoverers" - Nothing about his discovery makes any sense, India and America, East and West - Invented new pattern of understanding: saw things, named them - Columbus writing to his European audience - His thoughts: we're the gods they are the ones that work for us original thought of colonialism (the way he looked at the world determined how Europeans looked at the world) - *Letter of Discovery*: key motifs - Providential protection: God saved Columbus because it took 33 days (Jesus lived 33 years) - Claim of land for Spain - Naming islands: Columbus as Adam naming sth = dominating sth - The garden-like beauty and permanence of the vegetation - People who wear no clothes and are timid - No monsters!! - Spaniards: God or new inhabitants of Paradise? - Mixture of Old and New Testament tropes interpreted in favor of the discoverers - As long as you've decided that you're in charge, you are logic of Columbus and all other colonialists - Rhetorical Strategy - Travelers since Marco Polo have employed the term of "the marvelous" - No name exists as yet; the sight inspires wonder and admiration; the experience supersedes the factual description - Expectation of marvel determines interpretation: Columbus sees what he expects and literally cannot see what does not fit into his horizon of expectation - He "maps" his experience onto a pre-determined Christian / biblical pattern of narrative - Privileging the eyewitness: "You can't believe it unless you have seen it with your own eyes." - Doesn't see the indigenous people as real people but as things out of an exhibition - 1503 letter pleading for redress from the "Reyes" - Ten years later: greed and disappointment - Political factions among Europeans - No more Paradise: "encompassed about by a million savages, full of cruelty and our foes." - Change in interpretive pattern: but Columbus apparently fails to see his own involvement in the turn in his fortunes - Literary relevance and recurring echoes - Land apparently providentially given to Europeans (the "virgin wilderness") - They assume that native Americans either willing to serve or easy to subjugate - A "new world" upon which to exercise ones' imagination as well as impulses North America was seen as a gift to Europeans - An opportunity to be a "new Adam" - The height of initial euphoria matched by the depth of sudden disappointment - Became a disaster because a lot of Europeans went there and claimed different lands huge fights because the land didn't have one "owner" - Bartolomé de las Casas - Explorer, then priest, later bishop of Chiapas, Mexico - He was the only one who saw the whole America Discovery with clear eyes - *Very Brief Relation* published 1552 - Willful devastation of native culture - Total disregard for human life - Traces of importation of Africans - The hypocrisy of the "Christians" - Terminology and Key Ideas - Discovery = conquest didn't leave the beautiful land alone, they wanted it - Commerce / exchange = colonialization / possession - Writing can shape reality: Columbus shaped the mind of everyone who read his texts everyone believed that he did everything right and that there's nothing wrong about colonialization 3. Colonial and pre-Revolutionary America - Chronology - 1492 Columbus - 1552 Bartolomé de las Casas - 1620 **Pilgrims** arrive at Plymouth Rock (*The Mayflower*) - 1630 **Puritans** arrive with John Winthrop - 1675 / 1682 Captivity of Mary Rowlandson - 1680s Edward Taylor's poetry - Reading life through religion - Modelled on English / European traditions... but "purified" - On the Continent, the 17^th^ century was dominated by the Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648: religion and politics - Literature was **transplanted** - The "soil" changed, the topics did not (yet) - The texts are part of "American" literature by virtue of their location, not necessarily by virtue of distinction from British models - Reading "the book of the Bible" and "the book of the world" resulted in: - Typological interpretation (a certain "plot" unfolds) - Providential interpretation (the guiding hand of God) - New England Puritan communities were intensely aware of their mission and of the fact that they were "living history" - John Winthrop *A Model of Christian Charity* (1630) - Begins as tract on the **justification of economic difference** - Economic difference gives occasion for God to manifest himself -... and for humans to be neighborly -... and for justice and mercy to be balanced - How to measure and assign charity? - In ordinary times, give out of your abundance - In extraordinary times, give beyond your means - Mercy is exercised in giving, lending, and forgiving - Mercy must arise from true affection - **Typology**: neighborly love and support are a mirror image of God's love for His creatures - **Providence**: the situation in New England allows for fresh start and for "getting it right" - **Consequence**: the ubiquity of charity, volunteerism, church and private social support groups in the U.S. - Winthrop's key passage (section II) - We are fellow members of Christ - Our work is to establish a government both civil and clerical: "the public must oversway all private respects" - The end is to do more service to the Lord - We must love better and more purely than anyone else - **We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.** - Mary Rowlandson: *A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson* - Commonly known as: A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson - "narrative" not identical to "story"; suggests personal authenticity; this genre is permitted to Puritans - "captivity and restoration"; suggests satisfactory completion - "Mrs. Mary Rowlandson" obviously a respectable English lady, with a good Christian name suggesting selfishness, motherhood, suffering - Structure & Design - 21 sections (introduction + 20 "removes") - Actually not a genuine "captivity", but a progressive removal - Subdivided by changes in place: the opposite of a "settled" existence - All captivity narratives are necessarily structured as **journeys** - Extreme pain depression textual / spiritual comfort - "Captivity" is relatively short: 11 weeks - Narrative is personal and religious - Political only to a small extent - Opening chapter and last remove are longer than other passages: opportunity for didactic interpolations - Painful experiences - Assaulted in fortified house - Wounded by bullet that eventually killed her child - Extreme hunger and exhaustion - Seeing 13 killed or maimed, while 24 are abducted - Etc. - What we learn about sin - Intimate details of Mary's consciousness of sin - Used to like tobacco - Misspent the Sabbath - Etc. - Yet: "none of them offered me the least abuse of unchastity (not pure)" - What is in the "subtext"? - Scripture references cluster - Psalms, Job, Pentateuch, OT prophets and histories, few NT references - English settlers interpret their lives under the type of the people of Israel - OT gives you an image of the right God, NT gives you the image of a loving God - Mary's "final reckoning" - "Remarkable passages of Providence" - God seemed to leave his people to themselves... - The Indians derided the slowness and dullness of the English army (Mary saw military through the bushes, but they couldn't cross the river, so they were worthless) - Edward Taylor - *Huswivery* - A metaphysical conceit - An allegorical reading: every part of the image matches a piece of reality - Grounded in daily reality - *Upon Wedlock, and the Death of Children* - The "and" in the title - Wedding is prefigured in Eden - Childbirth is figured as botanical image (stock, flower, root) - Stanza 5: Paradox / Turn: thank God for bereavement (grieve) - Comfort: "I piecemeal pass to Glory" - Baroque exuberance of poetry! -- belies the traditional -- and clearly insufficient -- image of ascetic, other-worldly Puritanism - Intermediate summary - Religion pervade New England communities in the following manner: - The church has answers to all questions - Public behavior can be index of private orthodoxy - "Visible saints" must model good behavior: charity, mercy, etc. - Supervision -- and suspicion -- are constant - Daily life and worship of the mind is allowed only when applied to scriptural topics and religious duties - Fear of sexual sins overshadows almost all other possible transgressions (Hawthorne's 1850 *Scarlet Letter*) - Emory Elliott *The Dream of a Christian Utopia* - The Puritan legacy is ambiguous and paradoxical - Grace cannot be earned, but one can "prepare" for grace and expect conversion - Nature: object for scientific study AND a "book in which to read Providence" (such as falling sparrows) - "Literature" must be justified as utilitarian (e.g. Milton's *Paradise Lost*) - Conversion / Proselytizing: the Massachusetts "praying Indians" - Frequent ministerial disputes about correct interpretation, made more difficult by individual congregational control 4. The Republic is Founded: America's Revolution - The philosophical background - 1989: John Locke, *Two Treatises of Government* - The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone: and reason, which is the law teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions - Requires "consent of the governed" - 1762: Jean-Jacques Rousseau: *The Social Contract* - Which power is legitimate? How can the state of nature rule our society? The sovereign must be the whole population (including women); the government must be derived from it - *Scottish Enlightenment* - David Hume (empiricism, free will) - Adam Smith (political economist, publishes *The Wealth of Nations* in 1776) - The universe is knowable -- humans possess mastery over nature; thus, the Enlightenment valorizes the rational aspects of the mind of humans over their mystical or spiritual side - The physical, social, and political aspects of the universe are testable and theoretically perfectible (thus rejection of Calvinist notions of inherent depravity and the subjugation of the human to the will of God) - The universe is perfect and orderly -- the master trope for the Enlightenment conception of the universe is a watch (a metaphor used by Josh Priestley, the scientist who is often credited with discovering oxygen in 1744) - Thomas Paine - Aspects and arguments - Paine was raised in a religious household but rejected organized religion - "My own mind is my own church" - Only Americans know what is good for Americans - Logic, not (bad) habit should influence decision-making - What did the revolutionaries ("Founding Fathers") have in common? - Deism - Respect to God because He created us, but not more - Jefferson made his own bible, left out the resurrection because the afterlife isn't common sense - Enlightenment (= the state of having knowledge or understanding) reason - Common sense - The American revolution and the establishment of the political order occurred in a fairly narrow window of the rule of reason between two periods of "romantic" enthusiasm - Thomas Jefferson - Architect, visionary, statesman, slaveholder - Third president of the US: two terms (1801-1809) - "Here we are not afraid to follow truth whenever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it." *Letter to William Roscoe 1820* - "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." *Letter to William Stephens Smith 1787* - "Of all the views of this law, none is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people the safe, as they are ultimate, guardians of their own liberty." *Notes on Virginia* - "All my wishes end, where I hope my days will end, at Monticello." - Had a list and explanation of how his tombstone should look like - Wanted to take slavery out of the constitution, but the people from the south (who had most power) didn't allow him to do it but he was probably just as happy about that decision - Had 4 children with one of his slaves, was a widow - Wanted everyone to be educated, so he founded a public university - Thomas Jefferson's Rhetoric in the *Declaration* - Attempt to persuade a rational audience: casual analysis - A decent respect to opinions of mankind requires that they should declare that causes which impel them to the separation - Parallel sentences / periodic sentences - We hold these truths to be self-evident - That all men are created equal - That they are endowed by their creator - List of facts and Grievances / enumeration - He was refused / forbidden / dissolved / endeavored / obstructed / erected / affected / abdicated / constrained / plundered / burnt / destroyed - *Federalist No.10* by Publius (James Madison) - A lot of essays that weren't signed, only with Publius - The duty of the government: control and break factions - Factors that contribute to different factions - Two different approaches of treating factions - The argued root of the problem: distribution of property (the rich want to keep what they have and don't want to share) - Majority are poor people, so when Madison and Jefferson talk about minorities and protection of them, they mean themselves because they're rich, if poor people have power the rich lose their privileges - The destructive power of an unprivileged, angry majority - Why a Republic is the only solution - Factions - "a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, advised to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community" - a group within a larger group, especially one with slightly different ideas from the main group - Driven by self-interest that is unprofitable to greater good of the State(s) - Major cause for factions: "various and unequal distribution of property" - Methods of "cure": *remove the causes* (unwise because it removes liberty), or *control the effects* (impracticable) - The advantages of a "republic" as opposed to a "pure democracy" - Republic works with representation - Small number of citizens voted as representatives - "true interest of the country", "patriotism", "love of justice" ensured - Large and diverse Republic preferred better representation, less intrigue, avoidance of a dissatisfied majority, wider distribution of interests - Factions will be reduced to being "a malady \[...\] more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State." - So, what about American "literature"? - Puritans: religiously motivated poetry - At the time of the revolution: statements of reason, precision, and elegance - In early republican times: practical advice - And: searching the self, now loosened from religious introspection: the autobiography - Novels, drama, further poetry: led a more marginal existence until the turn to the 19^th^ century - American literature at that time were political texts, poems about knitting and spinning, stories about captivities, etc. - America was founded by literature 5. Major Voices and Looming Conflicts of the 19^th^ Century - Abraham Lincoln - Big topic of 19^th^ century was race - Felt responsible for keeping the U.S. in shape (the ones in charge slowly started to die) - "no foreign soldier shall enter this country and claim land" - Saw U.S. already in 1830s as a world power - Summary: social / historical events - Westward expansion / territorial definition - Conflict / integration / deferral of - Native Americans - Black Americans / the status of slavery - Women - Results: Wars - 1846/48 (Mexico) - 1861/65 (Civil) - Indian Wars: 1876 Little Bighorn (Custer) - Dark Romanticism: Nathaniel Hawthorne *Young Goodman Brown* Puritan Faith and Initiation into Ambiguity - Set in Puritan history: the past and its characters are "alive" -- church and state appear inseparable - Personalized in marriage plot, but set in society - Village vs forest: domesticity vs wilderness ("errand") - Symbolic spaces: thresholds, forest paths, church-like spaces in the forest - "Young Goodman" and "Faith" -- the pink ribbons - Psychological trauma: YGB returns from forest a changed man, though he failed to join the "cult" - His "recognition" of fellow townspeople: (1) in the forest (2) upon his return to town - Initiation story: initiand, mentor, mystery...failed transformation? - History and nightmare may be inseparable -- for all Americans? - Exclusive separation of good and evil may be impossible, tragedy results - Frederick Douglass: a freed slave in the North - 1817-1895: Born in Maryland - 1838 escaped to North - 1847 purchased his freedom with help of English friends - *Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself* (1845) - *My Bandage and My Freedom* (1855) - *"What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?"* (1852) - had to give speech for 4^th^ of July irony: was still a slave then, America is not the land for black people - Rhetoric in the service of confrontation: F.D. is neither sentimental nor conciliatory! - Highlights the absurdity of his role as speaker: - What is there to prove? Manhood? Liberty? Slavery not divinely instituted? - "... for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival" (1239) - With Douglass, a long line of black orators takes center stage - Walt Whitman: Significant biographical data - Born 31 May 1819 Long Island - Worked as housebuilder and carpenter, printer's apprentice and schoolteacher, journalist, wrote short fiction indebted to Poe and Hawthorne - Lived in New Orleans for some months (witnessed slavery) - Worked for Federal Government in Washington during Civil War until he was dismissed - Adored Opera, Shakespeare, Bible, Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson - Died in 1892 - Whitman's Themes - Transcendent power of love, brotherhood, and comradeship - Imaginative projection into other's lives - Optimistic faith in democracy and equality as political promises - Belief in regenerative and illustrative powers of nature and its value as a teacher - Belief in personal potential of democracy, the "common man", and the future of American cities - Equivalence of body and soul, of women and men, and the unabashed exaltation of the body and sexuality - Whitman's Poetic Techniques - Free verse: lack of metrical regularity and conventional rhyme. **Instead**: prophetic utterance on long breaths one line in one breath - Rhythm achieved in natural speech - Repeated images, symbols, phrases, and grammatical units - Enumerations and catalogs: illustrating the diversity and simultaneity of American life - Anaphora (initial repetition) and Epiphora (repetition of final words) - Contrast and parallelism in paired lines: Psalm-like prosody - Whitman's Use of Language - Idiosyncratic spelling and punctuation - Words used for their sounds as much as their sense; foreign languages - Use of language from several disciplines - The sciences: anatomy, astronomy, botany (especially the flora and fauna of America) - Business and professions, such as carpentry - Military and war terms; nautical terms - *Leaves of Grass* 1855 - Twelve poems, including - *Song of Myself* - *I Sing the Body Electric* - *The Sleepers* - Only 795 copies printed - Family tradition says that Whitman set some of the type for this edition - *Leaves of Grass* 1856 - Whitman has Emerson's praise printed on the spine in gold letters: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career" - "I do not believe that all the sermons, so-called, that have been preached in this land put together are equal to it for preaching." Henry David Thoreau - Civil War - After his brother was wounded at Fredericksburg (1862), Whitman went to Washington to care for him and stayed for nearly 3 years, visiting the wounded, writing letters, and keeping up their spirits. - Abraham Lincoln - Whitman saw Lincoln often, but the two never met face to face - Walt Whitman, Civil Servant - 1862, Clerk at the Paymaster's Office - 1865\. 1 January, became a clerk at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a post he enjoyed. - Fired in May because Secretary of the Interior James Harlan saw Leaves of Grass in Whitman's desk drawer and denounced it as immoral. - A look at some passages in *Song of Myself* - 1: "assume", "loaf", "grass" - 2&3: nakedness, sex, the book of nature, anaphora and epiphora - 4: the "I" and the "Me" are intellectually separated - 5: the soul and cosmic love - 6: the grass - 7: life and death: "undrape" -... - Whitman's Relevance - Poetic relevance: a new kind of poetic speech - Identitarian / sexual relevance: changing discourses - Religious / spiritual relevance - Patriotic relevance - Emily Dickinson: Biographical Information - 1830-1886 - Amherst, Massachusetts - "reclusive eccentric" - Published ten poems in er lifetime; gave others as gifts to friends - First book publication: 1890 / 1892 / 1896, *Poems by Emily Dickinson* Edited by two of her Friends: Mabel Loomis Todd and T.W. Higginson (very bad changes) - Fresh edition: 1955-1961, by Thomas H. Johnson - *The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson* published by R.W. Franklin, beginning 1981 - Franklin's *Variorum Edition*, 1998 - Emily Dickinson's themes - The life of the imagination ("The brain is wider than the sky...") - Spirituality and interiority - (a question one would not as about Whitman!) - But prompted by ED, because of - The church hymn stanza - The lexicon and topoi - Assumptions about women's inward lives in 19^th^ century New England - How is spirituality manifested? - Is it conventional religious adherence? - Is it self-investigation of her own spirit? Spiritedness? Inspiration? - Is it a psychological profile? - Formal and thematic aspects of poems - Rhetorical situations - Definition -- like a dictionary, with illustrative example -- Webster's? ("Faith" is a fine invention, "Hope" is the thing with feathers) - Sensory experience (feel taste, hearing,...) -- intense preoccupation with self - Domestic setting of illness and common death experience - Precarious life: infections, infant mortality, death in childbirth, accidents, war - Social practices of viewing the dead, burial practices - Questions conventional narratives of ostensibly meaningful sacrifice (Patriotism? Beauty? Truth? Idealism?) - A psychic catastrophe... and its consequences - *I felt a funeral* (Johnson 280, Franklin 340) - Treading -- treading, beating -- beating, down, and down - Incremental loss of control and increase of torture - "being" reduced to an "ear" - The "plank" in reason breaks - Oddly unemotional, as if experience were dissociated from recollection - Sequential accounts / phases of illness - Analyze steps in experience; watch for shifting metaphors - But: - Poetic energy instead of muteness - Craft instead of gibberish - Metaphorical funerals and resurrections - Depression and Mania? Bipolar extremes of emotion? - "The Soul has Bandaged Moments" - "After Great Pain, a formal feeling comes" - "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" (the same brain that is "wider than the sky"!) - Letters to Higginson - "... if my Verse is alive?" - "while my thought is undressed -- I can make the distinction" - "I had a terror -- since September" - "for several years, my Lexicon -- was my only companion" - "They are religious -- except me" - "You speak of Mr. Whitman -- I never read his Book -- but was told that he was disgraceful" - The looming crisis of the 19^th^ century - Secession: war between north and south between two brothers, until they've killed so many people that they had to stop - They officially fought over state rights (federal government can't tell us what to do ideology of South) - But what they really fought over were slaves - Gettysburg was one of the bloodiest battles, went on for 3 or 4 days 6. Realism & Naturalism - What is realism? What is naturalism? - Realism: 1860s -- 1890s - Naturalism (a subcategory): 1890s -- 1910s - Why at this time? - Post-war experience - Industrialization: machine age / railroad - Scientific developments popularized - Magazine publication (people didn't have time to read big books, so they read quickly)/ women's writing - Urbanization (1888-population pivot): cities took over, 95% of people lived in countryside everyone lived alone with their families, then they moved to the cities - 1890 census: closing of the frontier - What had come before? - Idealism (how it should be) - Romanticism (what we wish for) - Belief in "manifest Destiny" - "American Renaissance" -- male authors with large visions - Realism - A literary period - W.D. Howells - Mark Twain - Henry James - Opposite: romance -- the world as it *might* or *should* be - A mode of representing human life and experience in literature: how it *is* - Writing to give the effect of representing the world in the way the reader might in fact see it - Shouldn't be something new, something that the reader could've never thought of - Naturalism - Realistic, detail-oriented writing supported by a philosophical conviction: pessimistic determinism - Man is higher-order animal, science tells us so - There is no spiritual salvation - Human beings are driven by instinct and heredity, especially in moments of crisis - Life ends in a miserable death, heroism is impossible - William Dean Howells, *Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading* - Truth and falsehood - "It is only the false in art which is ugly, and its only the false which is immoral" - "The truth may be indecent but it cannot be vicious" - As long as you write realistically and truthfully you can't write immorally - If truth is ugly, then write about how ugly it is - Imagination - "The imagination can only work with the stuff of experience. It can absolutely create nothing: it can only compose." - "The novel I take to be the sincere and conscientious endeavor to picture life just as it is" - (Things that are not novels) - Romance novels aren't about real things and they are thus false in nature - Readership - Novel readers are women, because they have more time to read them - The role of the novelist - "It is his function to help you be kinder to your fellows, juster to yourself, truer to all." - "Naturalism" in American literature - Naturalism and Nature - The 18^th^ century: Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Nature as positive model: the "noble savage" - The 19^th^ century: Charles Darwin - Nature as observed fact: natural selection, nature "red in tooth and claw" (Tennyson) - Literary Naturalism - Describes a type of literature that attempts to apply scientific principles of objectivity and detachment to its study of human beings - Unlike realism, which focuses on literary technique, naturalism implies a philosophical position: for naturalistic writes, since human beings are, in Emil Zola's phrase, "human beasts", characters can be studied through their relationships to their surroundings. - See definition of Donald Pizer - Jack London: *The Law of Life* (1901) - Wilderness setting (urban setting would be different!) - Extreme temperatures, pressures on human decisions - Indifferent nature - Humans and animals alike are challenged - Very harsh community: we love you as long as you contribute to our society and if you're no longer able to contribute we'll still love you, but we'll leave you - Unsparing look at the passing of generations: description designed to shock the conventional expectations of his readers - The "Social Contract" reinterpreted for extreme climate conditions - Physical strength and ability to procreate are determining features of judging the value of a human life - Hunting the moose: prefigures the death of Koskoosh - Fire as a momentary stay against (literal and metaphorical) darkness - Nature is not interested in the individual - Kate Chopin (1850-1904): *Désirée's Baby* - The art and artistry of this short story: surprises and narrative ambiguities, romantic beginnings - Stone pillar, founding, "this is not the baby", "Désirée", "L'Abri" - Realism: the color line in Luisiana's upper-class society before the Civil War - Whites / blacks /quadroons... very racist terms, they describe how much black blood runs in your veins - The Paris connection... (from Louis XIVth through the 1960s) - Naturalism: social roles by race -- house slaves ("yellow") and field slaves, institutionalized racism as derived from presumed "natural" order - The short story - Designed to focus on one theme (just one plot) - Starts often near the climax of an event (baby's already born) - May reverse a situation in the last sentence - Generally, does not resolve, but instead reveals (we don't know what Armand's going to do) doesn't tell us how the story goes on 7. Across the Century's Divide into Modernism - The "shocks" of the Modern Era and possible responses - In literature: realism and naturalism have changed perspectives - Philosophical underpinnings of pessimistic determinism: - Marx: history is really economics (hard to come to term with his ideas) responses from literature to these pessimistic thoughts - Darwin: human beings descend from primates - Freud: the ego is much weaker than we think; the id and the super-ego much stronger - Nietzsche: God is dead - Literary responses: local attention to truth - Edgar Lee Masters: *Spoon River Anthology*: Homage to local dead and their "buried life". - Robert Frost: "what to make of a diminished thing" - (And soon but not yet: Ezra Pound: "Make it New!" - Look at science to explain relationships started believing in science in beginning of 20^th^ century - Edgar Lee Master - **Spoon River Anthology, 1915**: poems / epitaphs of "the buried life" - What can a gravestone say that a living human being could not say? - Why is small-town society so hypocritical in censuring life publicly while failing to admit real motivation? - Modern anonymity, despair, conformity revealed as stifling - "Trainor the druggist": scientific / mechanical conception of life; work as "fulfillment" fails - Controlling metaphors: science / chemistry, agricultural business: neither one is adequate to express a fulfilled humanity - "Margaret Fuller Slack" - Wanted to be great writer like George Elliot - Doesn't have time to do so because she has to work - Then gets married to have more time to write, but then has to have children doesn't have time to write either - Died of lock jaw while washing the babies napkins because she had a wound on her finger from sewing the napkin on baby - "Nellie Clark": victim of childhood sexual abuse, then re-victimized in adulthood by small-town talk - SA by a 15-year-old farm boy - After 2 years of marriage, she told her husband, and he deserted her - She died of small-town-talk - Master's thematic and poetic method - Direct, unabashed treatment of the subject matter - Often: accusatory tone of poem, as if making legal argument - Absence of regular rhythm and rhyme; instead: **a story (a life) told** - Privileging the "I"-perspective; poetry as form of **public address**: what is on a gravestone can be read by everyone! I tell you what happened to me and what I did - **breaking convention, speaking truth** - Early modern because he doesn't rhyme - Principles - Turn-of-the-century writers: - **Regional** attention, lives of ordinary Americans - **Questioning** the large promises made to Americans: are they realistic? - **Revealing** the realities of **small-town-life**, whether in Illinois farm country, in Maine fishing villages, in the New Hampshire woods, or on the Kansas prairie - Artistic impulse: **tell the truth!** - By contrast: **Modernism**, just across the horizon, will be a **big-city artistic movement**, focused on artworks, with an international perspective, with innovative and revolutionary technique - Robert Frost: Context - Dates 1874-1936 - Transitional figure between realism and modernism - Regional poet (born in San Francisco, moved to London, associated with New England) - Ezra Pound wrote the first American review of Frost's verse and wrote about Frost: "a man who has modernized himself!" - Public image: a mild, grandfatherly man - Personal life: tortured by depression and suicides within family - Will not give a definite statement because he's a modernist, doesn't say something you can walk away with - Early publications: *A Boy's Will* (1913), *North of Boston* (1914) - Views about poetry from: *The Figure a Poem Makes* - A poem "begins in delight and ends in wisdom" - A poem is "a momentary stay against confusion" - "Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down." - Poetic technique and subject matter - Employs traditional poetic forms (sonnets, quatrains, iambic pentameter lines, etc.) to express skeptical, speculative ideas - Offers large assertions playfully -- only to question them or take them back at the end - Uses analogies from nature to explore states of psychological uncertainty - Presents wistful assessments of romantic / spiritually meaningful / rural past, as opposed to mostly pessimistic outlook on future - Frost: textual examples - *Mending Wall* - Dispute and agreement between neighbors -- tradition vs innovation -- the two duplicated lines -- borders as psychological concept - *Home Burial* - The dual meaning of the title -- The power of a conversational / narrative poem -- Two ways to mourn: marriage crisis - Child died, mother cries a lot, father doesn't want to talk about it - Iambic pentameter (5 beats) - *Fire and Ice* - Apocalyptic poem in understated language - Conclusion: world might end like that or like that - *Nothing Gold Can Stay* - Mournful recognition of pessimistic determinism - Modernism in one picture - "Nude descending a staircase" by Marcel Duchamp - Fragments put together into a collage, snatches from here and there put together - Modernism is fragmentary, not necessarily original - Ezra Pound (1885 -- 1972) - "Make it New!" as long as it's new, it might be interesting - Imagism: exploit one "hard, clear, and concentrated" image in a poem - Pound "discovered" and promoted many major modernist figures in poetry and art - Economics and Poetry "usury": the poet can "hoard" or "squander" the wealth of his insight and can "circulate" his ideas, much like money circulates ("A Pact") - Anti-Semitism: became fawned of Mussolini when studying abroad in Italy, Prisoner of War in U.S. camp in Pisa, Italy - "Bollingen" prize controversy 1949: would he be released from psychiatric ward? - Judgements - A gifted intellectual who made American literature part of comparative world literature - A person unable to concentrate in a sustained fashion, worked in fragments - *The Cantos*: an intellectual journal of (largely) unconnected episodes - *In a Station of the Metro* - Metrically free verse, but extremely well structured - Rhythm of poem is similar to train sounds - A poem with a single image - Title gives us the place, fist line what we see ("apparition") and second line is the metaphor (image) - Equivalencies: title-poem / line 1 -- line 2 - Content: city experience / unexpected beauty - Anonymity-revealed into engagement and specificity: "these" (!) faces - Machine vs human - "apparition" -- not "appearance"! - "Petals" and "wet" -- suggests Japanese garden - Form suggests haiku (Japanese poem) - Speed turned into quiet - Sound supports sense: onomatopoeia of arriving train - T.S. Elliot (1888-1965) - A quiet revolutionary in poetry - A lasting influence - A poet committed to the formal and intellectual heritage of Europe... while changing it radically - A poet who investigates the general condition of humankind while (ironically) writing about himself - Denys that he writes about himself because he thinks that poetry shouldn't be personal - *The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock* - Literary setting in *Dante's Commedia* - Pre-World War 1 isolation of self - A "love song" without results - Hesitation and inaction: the "overwhelming question" - A life of frustration, not of fulfillment: "coffee spoons" / tedium - Painful self-consciousness: "to prepare a face to meet the faces that we meet" - Aquatic / submarine imagery - "drowning" in modern mass society - Ernest Hemingway, *Hills Like White Elephants* - Plot and subtext: easy to discern, interest of the story lies elsewhere - 1927: expatriate alienation: Americans in a foreign country (language) - Sense of purpose / purposelessness of travel and drink - Testing and challenging conventional gender roles: who decides the next step? - Compare with Frost's *Home Burial*: how do "the man" and "the girl" deal with the crisis in their relationship? - What are their patterns of communication? - Conclusion: what is revealed and not resolved? - *Hills Like White Elephants* approaches - Stasis & Dialogue - "white elephants" -- unwanted, precious gift - Hills: metaphor & metonymy - The girl's point of view - The extraordinary line: "please, please..." (Raymond Carver meets Ernest Hemingway...) - Now one of the most-reprinted stories - Hemingway's transcontinental characters: are these the citizens of "modernism"? - At the end of *Hills like White Elephants* we have: - Americans - Who only partially understand their context - At a juncture - About to embark on a journey - With an uncertain destination - Equipped with heavy baggage - At a crisis point in their relationship - And considerable (unrealized) potential in the making 8. Nella Larsen, *Passing* within the Harlem Renaissance - Why study this text? - It is a novel: it exhibits the constitutive features of the genre in a small space - It is relevant: the construction of identity -- and the societal power associated with it -- are central to contemporary American life - It is a modernist text - Questions categories - Examines psychological motivations - Writes sociological history - Militates against "naturalist" determinism (successfully or not?) - Employs realism but strongly suggests unreliability - Nella Larsen, 1891 -- 1964 - Caribbean father, Danish mother - Uncertainty about her mother's (re-?) marriage to Peter Larsen - Had younger (half-?) siter - Was the only visibly Black member of her family - Youth in Chicago, Education in Nashville and Copenhagen - 1919 marriage to Elmer Imes, prominent Black physicist and member of Harlem intellectual elite - 1928 *Quicksand* - 1929 *Passing* - 1930s plagiarism accusations, divorce, poverty, nursing career - 1964 death in obscurity - The cast of characters - Several characters with complex psychological profiles: - **Irene Redfield**: comfortable in her Black identity, conservative in outlook, active in social "uplift", careful behavior, over-protective of her children, **confronted with social danger, wavering husband, disturbing love-hate attraction to Clare, REPRESSIVE** - **Clare Kendry:** has passed and married white, wants to "return" to Blackness, is "dangerously" attractive, reckless, uses her friends and relies on their racial solidarity, **acts as chaos agent by disturbing social equilibrium, EXHIBITIONIST** - **Jack Bellew:** a classic racist, believes that he acts on his "principles": "that's where I draw the line", has made his money in South America, married Clare for her looks and social capital, precipitates final crisis of the novel - **Biran Redfield:** an accomplished doctor who chafes under the societal restrictions against Blackness, restless and wishes to emigrate to Brazil, has acceded to his wife's desire for "stability", may be attracted to Clare - Narrative technique and social construction - Manipulation of time and textuality - "encounter" starts with flashback: two years earlier in Chicago - "re-encounter" starts with the same scene: Irene holding a letter - "finale": suggests resolution in addition to revelation - The "construction" of race - Are personal identity and race constituted by biology or environment? - What are the novel's political and moral appeals to the reader? - The ending: suicide, accident, homicide? - Point of view and racial performance - Point of view: - The point of view is resolutely focused on Irene! - Irene is the "focalizer" of this novel (even when the narrator speaks) - Hence she is unreliable, shares only what she chooses - "mise-en-abîme": the novel shows what it argues - The notion of "passing" is essentially a performance - Characters are shown as "performing" roles, performing race, performing sexual identity (scene in encounter three) - Foreshadowing of final scene in the "broken teacup" scene: "dark stains / white fragments / you didn't push me / I had an inspiration / rid of it forever" - The conclusion performs a dramatic playlet at the Freelands' apartment: all characters are assembled; the whites and Blacks survive the mixed race character is "ejected" from society and winds up dead - in the end, has Irene "passed" (in the reader's view) from human being to monster by enforcing conventional separation of races and conventional sexuality? - Race and Modernism - Larsen addresses race as a modernist - Not through Southern stereotypes - Not through vernacular speech - But through societal ostracism and separation - "encounter" three: fear of dark babies (compare "Desirée's Baby") - Is "passing" in the novel just a cover for Irene's same-sex desire? - Whose story is this? Clare's or really Irene's? - Witness Irene's strange reversals, her conventionality, her need to "kill" what disturbs her? - "Clare" (clara) means "light", of course... but "Irene" means "peace" -- how will she get her peace back? - Race in *Passing* - For Jack Bellew, race is not a question of color, but of essence... and so it seems for the other characters as well - Whiteness is above all a material condition (wealth) for both Jack and Clare - All characters seem to worry about what is "essential" to racial identity; hence, all are (falsely) caught in an essentialist discourse - The novel demonstrates, however, that race is constructed and can be performed, the author refutes her characters' beliefs 9. Midcentury Masculinity: Wright, Faulkner, Cheever - Black masculinity - Historic fear of black male sexuality (19^th^ century, slavery, etc.) - Resulted in (psychological) emasculation of black men (Uncle Tom) - Black men were perceived as physically and sexually threatening to whites (women) - R. Wright's *Native Son* (1940): Bigger Thomas, the rapist and murderer, whose sexual manifestation demands punishment - Another man who was almost a man - *The Man who was almost a Man* - What is the narrator's view of this protagonist? - Pity? Contempt? Excuse? An object of scientific study? - Richard Wright - 1908 (Mississippi) - 1960 (Paris) - 1927: escape to Chicago - 1932: joined Communist Party - 1937: *Uncle Tom's Children* (wrote it to show how much *Uncle Tom's Cabin* still affected black people in 1930s) - 1940: *Native Son* - 1945: *Black Boy* (largely autobiographical) - From 1947 on, lived in Paris - Always conscious of class issues in his writing (Native Son, Black Boy) - Dave: caught in poverty, illiteracy, dependency: - His mother controls his income - Farmer Hawkins (white) controls his work - Storekeeper Joe (white) controls his material desires - Assumes that gun ownership will make him a man - Accidentally kills the mule - Becomes the object of ridicule - What does this text say about manhood? - Manhood means the ability to exercise violence - Manhood means controlling one's material wealth - Does black society willingly perpetuate the social structure of disenfranchisement? - Dave's parents exercise draconian control, corporal punishment - Dave kills a mule (symbol of a contented worker) who is a female - Dave can only go to school in the winter - Wrights attitude to his subject - Uses conventionalized / stereotypical "black" language to represent Dave and his family, uses n-word freely - Stresses Dave's foolishness by giving us access to his mind in free indirect discours - Narrates the conclusion so as to convey the likely futility of Dave's flight - Revelation, not resolution Dave just ends up in another crisis, reader doesn't know if he'll get out of it - Wiliam Faulkner (1897 -- 1962) - A story of white share-croppers and of "the old fierce pull of blood" - Poverty is equally distributed in the south (white people only have privilege of class) - Illiteracy, impossibility of getting ahead, clock stands still - The circuit judge and his hearings (two court scenes) - Unforgettable character descriptions - Father: a "private" in the Civil War, 30 years later still bearing grudges - The "bovine" sisters and helpless mother - Sarty: narrative rendering of his adolescent thoughts (in italics) - Decisions / actions change from unthinking loyalty to betrayal of his father - Becomes a free "man" by warning Major de Spain but now has to face the world alone - The "feudal" South - The indelible heritage of the Civil War - The violence associated with growing up - The "law of the father"... and the necessary rebellion - Compare Jacques Lacan: "le nom-du-père / le Non du père " law of the father, he says what goes and what not - The importance of the justice system - The separation that follow upon the realization of an ethical act - Revelation, not resolution - John Cheever, *The Swimmer* (1964) - Formal division: - First part: his swim success - Second part: encounters (with reader and neighbors) disappointment - §1: setting the scene - §2,3: reality changing to myth (close read) - Key metaphors: liquidity, heroism, pilgrimage, charting a course - Second part: Judgments / conversations - Addressing the reader: "had you gone..." - Passing drivers - The public pool - The Hallorans (doubt creeps in) - The Biswangers (gate crasher) - Shirley Adams - Exhaustion and recognition - A few literary observations - Modernist writing: short stories suggest more than they make explicit - Require deliberate and slow reading - Skillful handling of point of view, thereby leading the reader - Require awareness of narratology in order to appreciate - Realistic telling, but enhanced by symbolic order - Require wide reading and solid knowledge of literary history: modernist writes consciously take part in a tradition - Heritage of the South - Probing psychological portraits - Formal mastery of the short story, especially in the 1930s and 1940s - Real and imaginary challenges to "manhood": poverty, race, suburban meaninglessness 10. The Sixties: A Decade with a Lasting Legacy - Political upheaval in post-WW II years: Aspects of Race - 1929: Martin Luther King born - 1943: lunch counter sit-ins in Chicago - 1946/47: first federal efforts to desegregate (interstate bus travel, Armed Forces, etc.) - 1950: Gwendolyn Brooks receives Pulitzer Prize for Poetry - 1955: Rosa Parks begins the Montgomery bus boycott - 1957: Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) is founded - Allen Ginsberg (1926 -- 1997) - *Howl*: 13 October 1955, Six Gallery, San Francisco - Read like Whitmans poems: one line in one breath - *A Supermarket in California* (1955, Berkeley) - Direct address across time and space - "shopping for images": "your enumerations" - Moon vs neon light - Where to find inspiration? In the domesticated world of mid-20^th^ century with its wholesome nuclear families ("Aisles")? - Encounter with Whitman: poet looking for sexual conquest (meat, boys, bananas)? - Whitman lives / lived outside the commercial paradigm that governs modern life - Lost America: has modern California turned into Hades? What can the "courage-teacher" still teach Ginsberg? - Gwendolyn Brooks (1917 -- 2000) - Black Arts Movement - Poverty - City life - Unsparing in social detail -- "social realism" - Designed to move listeners to act - Brooks: rare poetic gift, acknowledged early - *my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell* - "No man can give me any word but Wait" - People who acknowledged black people and knew that the way they were treated was bad but said just wait we can't deal with this right now, there are more important things right now - Martin Luther King was bothered by these kind of people more than from blank racists - Joan Didion (1934 -- 2021) - Born in Sacramento, California, and spent much of her childhood moving around the country - Descended from Gold Rush pioneers who travelled across America by wagon in the 19^th^ century - One of the "New Journalists" of the 1960s applying the techniques of fiction to hard-news reportage - Themes and motifs of place, space, mobility, disorder recur throughout her work - Author of various essays and essay collections, novels, memoirs, a play, and screenplays - *Slouching* - The spontaneous and erratic nature of the youth protest movement: - Why do blackface actors provoke a "Negro"? - How confused can the young people be?? (The protest has nothing whatsoever to do with the John Birch Society, an anti-communism, ultra-racist pre-MAGA organization) - The pathos of 5-year-old Susan who is in "High Kindergarten" but has otherwise regular childhood desires - The 3-year-old chewing an electrical cord while the adults chase their lost drugs - Didion's method: observe pitilessly, and allow characters to indict themselves (no judgement is necessary)