Slavery
How can Phillis Wheatley's poems be read in two competing ways?
Bought by wealthy Boston merchant, John Wheatley
Wheatley recognized her talents and she was tutored, received ‘classical education’
educated
by the age of 12 she already read Greek and Latin classics and difficult passages from the bible
later: strongly influenced by the works of Milton, Pope, Gray
After Wheatleys death, rapid decline of life, death in poverty
Frontispiece of her “Poems on Various Subjects”
Two competing readings of her work:
favorable: W. as inspiration for later generations, model of emancipation
unfavorable: W. as accomplice of white elite, accused of assimilation
Why can we call Stowe's novel 'sentimental'?
diverging plots: sale of Uncle Tom’s from Shelby’s Kentucky plantation generates two plots proceeding in opposite geographical (south/north) directions
surviving characters safely rejoining in Canada (not US!)
extreme sentimentality: deaths of little Eva and Uncle Tom
melodrama: Eliza’s escape across ice of Ohio River
moral lesson: direct address to reader
What are the main similarities and differences between Frederick Douglass' and Harriet Jacobs' slave narratives?
Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)
Slave narrative published at age of only 27
Tells story of childhood until his escape to freedom at the age 20
To avoid being retaken, he changed his name form Bailey to Douglass (name after character of one of Walter Scott’s novels)
Born into slavery: white father (master), black mother (slave)
Education as way to freedom
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, 1845
Slave narratives staple of abolitionist propaganda in 1840s
Addressed mostly to white audience
Authenticated by white abolitionist (preface)
Naturally divided into story of “before and after” slavery
Representative autobiography (author, narrator, protagonist): extraordinary and typical
American tale of self-made man
Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897)
Linda Brent (pseud.): Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861)
Emphasis on family, women, female experience
Techniques of sentimental novel (seduction) and theme of slave narrative (escape)
Addressed to white women in North to help black female slaves
Female autobiography: not heroic and solitary, focused on family, and yet extraordinary and typical
Mother died, when she was six
Sexual harassment by master
She became lover of another white man, had two children from him
Escapes, but not to North à stays in grandmother’s attic for 7 years, watching her children grow up
Finally escape to North and reuniting with children there
Regionalism/Realism/Naturalism
What are the characteristics of regionalism? Give two differing examples and describe them.
post-Civil War:
intensified awareness of regional differences (e.g. Reconstruction in South until 1877: federal troops implemented abolishment of slavery)
reflected by regional writers and local colorists
regionalism and local color instances of literary realism
set in contemporary time
speech (often dialect) of common people
action plausibly motivated
What is a tall tale? Give an example.
oral (folk) tradition of frontier (Old West)
narrative of exaggerated and impossible feats
with unbelievable elements, related as if it were true and factual
exaggeration primary for comic purposes
origins in the bragging contests of frontier
“The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865)
story of stranger
California mining camp
story (boring) within story (funny)
story about seemingly innocent stranger who cheats a famous frog racer and beats him
Western humor: hoax (ordinary or weak people trick experts or strong)
tenderfoot/greenhorn (inexperienced foreigner being butt of joke)
Describe the mythic qualities of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
sequel of Tom Sawyer (1876): from pastoral to satire
classic of regionalism
Huck (escaping abusive father) and Jim (escaping slavery) on Mississippi southwards
picaresque pair (quest, moral development) (Picareque novel = Schelmenroman)
attachment between boy and slave overcomes Southern mentality
‘mythic’ Huck: embodiment of American hero (innocent, ingenious, individuality, desire for freedom, moral integrity)
‘mythic’ river: the American river, South, quest for freedom/morality
vernacular for serious (not comic) purposes (vernacular = Mundart, Dialekt)
critical readings:
unsuitable for children (language, violence, immorality)
perpetuation of racial stereotypes and racist language
misogyny (narrow representation of women as domesticating and oppressive)
What are the differences between realism and naturalism? Choose one text each to explain.
Realism
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Major authors
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dominated American prose fiction from 1865 to 1920
indebted to Balzac and Flaubert (France), and George Eliot (England)
departs from sentimentality and idealization of life (Romantic novel)
desire to represent life in fiction with sincerity and honesty
surface appearance presented in unembellished way
story set in here-and-now
characters of average social position
speech and manners accurately reproduced
rather optimistic outlook on ethical problems
pragmatic solutions to problems without improbable interventions
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William Dean Howells (first theorist)
Henry James (“father of psychological novel”)
Edith Wharton (novel of manners)
[Mark Twain]
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Naturalism
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Major authors
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developed from / intensified realism:
narratives of the present time, representations of surface reality
aims at accurate reproduction of speech, manners, landscapes
psychologically valid motivations
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1890s-1920s
Stephen Crane
Frank Norris
Theodore Dreiser
Jack London
[Kate Chopin]
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Differences: Naturalism compared to Realism
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departing from realism:
drawing upon science, esp. Darwin (Marx)
drawing on French novels of Emile Zola
writer diagnoses societal ills: human person regarded as highly developed animal
responsive to forces of environment (animal hungers), aims above all at survival: survival of the fittest ideology
human existence is deterministic
limited by genetic heritage (biology), place of society born into (sociology), economic forces (economy)
no freedom of will anymore, disappearance of ethics (illusion of ethical choice)
à ethical problem at the heart of realist novel eliminated in favor of determined behavior beyond good/evil judgments
characters from underclasses of cities, rural poor, raw nature, primitive and aboriginal
violence replaces decorum
sex emerges, pessimism predominates
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Example (Realism)
William Dean Howells (1837-1920) - A Modern Instance (1882):
shocked public
divorce subject not talked and written about
complex, but unromantic characters
society takes blame for characters’ troubles
Howell’s realism expressed through:
writing about essential goodness of provincial or urban America
novels’ concern with “the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American”
consequences of innocence unknowingly violating social taboos
commercial integrity in conflict with fraud and greed
decay of morals in modern life
struggle between classes
need for a democratically mandates social revolution
his novels built as succession of dramatic episodes
characters shaped by what they say and do rather than by revelation of their consciousness
well-shaped novels avoid lurid and violent
actions well motivated and reactions to ethical problem
speech and manner reflect middle class life
fiction should find material in the commonplace, average, everyday events of American middle-class life
characters should act psychologically motivated
plot without accidents or coincidences
avoidance of societal extremes and indecencies
Other examples by Howell
The Rise of Silas Lapham (ordinary, uneducated man becomes rich in paint business, over-commitment and competition tempt him to take on unethical business practices, but he refuses to cheat people his business is ruined, but with fall of fortunes comes a rise of morality in the end he manages to retire through honest transactions and lives in modest comfort on his farm)
exemplifies Howells’s theory:
Romantic novels “make one forget life and all its cares and duties.”
Novels “should make you think … and shame you into wishing to be a more helpful creature than you are.”
The good realist should be interested in “the common feelings of commonplace people.”
Realism: “the truthful treatment of materials […] true to the motive, the impulses, the principles that shape the lives of actual men and women.”
Explain key features of Henry James' realism.
About the author
lived from 1843-1916
novel reaches new level of maturity and refinement
native New Yorker, wealthy family
father and brother William philosophers, sister Alice diarist
interest/influence French realist fiction
acquainted with Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, Conrad, Crane, Wells, Wharton
from 1876-1916 in England, became British subject in 1915
majority of novels set in Europe
strong influence on Joseph Conrad, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner
Henry James’ Realism
few characters in domestic context
comedy of manners in early novels, but tragic intensity in some (fractured, frustrated lives)
narratives packed with information, distinctions, shades of meaning
labyrinthine sentences and paragraphs, long blocks of narration
strongly architectured narratives (proportions, balance)
especially characters of last novels don’t act: they watch life, things happen to them (story of how their mind works)
“stream-of-consciousness” literature (term coined by William James)
realist narration: telling through the consciousness of single character, not entering the story directly
In what ways is Jack London's Sea Wolf a naturalist novel?
Jack London (1876-1916)
naturalism based on theories of Darwin, Haeckel, Marx, Spencer, Nietzsche
men and women seen as animals (Darwinism), animalistic survival instinct in extreme circumstances
woman can become equal despite given genteel standards
simple, chronological writing style
common speech
fiction mostly based on personal experience
The Sea Wolf (1904)
Captain Wolf Larson as proto-superman (Nietzsche), but killed in end
effete Humphrey Van Weyden undergoes vitalizing education (masculinization), kills Larson (effete = erschöpft, entkräftet, verweichlicht)
Modernism
Why did so many American writers leave for Europe?
Post-WW I: military, politics, economy: reactionary climate
Hostility to new social and artistic ideas
Many writers left for Europe: freedom to discover new standards and techniques of art
Technical refinement of Europe mixed with subject matter of America à shocking the genteel classes
What sources did the American writers draw upon?
Freud (psychoanalysis)
Einstein (relativity)
French symbolism (Baudelaire (“modernité” as art that uses material and experience of modern life, heroism of the present), Mallarmé, Verlaine)
Yeats, Proust, Joyce
Avant-Garde (military term, radical, violent, revolutionary): -isms such as Dadaism, Futurism, Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism
What was the Armory Show? In what way was it significant for the development of Modernism?
Arrival of modernist art as shock for America
Shock as threat or liberation
1913 – Armory Show: Avant-Garde art exhibition in an old munitions storage arms and aesthetics!
Choice of exhibition hall: radically anti-bourgeois
New forms of perceiving art within traditionally sanctioned spaces
First time in US works of French Impressionists and modernists – Cezanne, Matisse
American modernist poet William Carlos Williams describes his encounter especially with one painting: Marcel Duchamp‘s „Nu descendant un escalier no. 2“ (Nude descending a staircase) he laughed
Laughter not of misunderstanding or absurdity, but of liberation: the realization of the radical gap between title and representation
Endless repetition of the same theme: the female nude à here creating own laws of representation, breaking with convention
Move from the represented object (nude women) to art itself, art as object à ways of producing art, act of making art
Here: movement of a body in space. Not body as a whole, but cutting up into parts and movements à stressing the singular moment as well as its abstraction (not eternal beauty of woman, but abstract idea of woman caught in artistic representation)
Other critics disagreed: called the painting an „explosion in a brick factory“ or even worse representing European anarchism and thus a threat for American culture
Armony show: opening eyes for other forms of representation
taken from http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MUSEUM/Armory/galleryI/tour.i.html
"Chamber of Horrors," Gallery I, in the far lefthand side of the Armory
Innocently titled French Paintings and Sculpture in the catalog, Gallery I quickly became known as The Cubist Room
the works shown there solidified the movement in the minds of Americans for many years
Explain Pound's idea of imagism.
Pound on Modernism
Paradox of Modernism:
The „new“ as radical revitalization of the old
History and tradition not in terms of national or geographical charactistics, but universal basis for art for all cultures
Including Asian art, japanese/chinese
Exploring the cultures of the world from its beginning
Retrieving the best that had been done
Displaying the best in a way to “make it new”
Imagism
New poetry: objective, adjective-free, lean, hard
The “image” is to present “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”
à immediate, intensified perception of a felt impression finds its equivalent in an intensified, reductive verbal image.
Articulation of formal strategies for poetry
Including visual techniques
Language not as means of mediation , but a concrete material to be used
Why is Eliot's Waste Land a landmark text of modernism?
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
The Waste Land (1922) together with James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) central texts of modernism
Original text “tamed” by Pound (comments, annotations, abbreviations)
Pound: “the justification of the ‘movement’ of our modern experiment since 1900”
Richness of interpretations
e.g. allusions to Grail Legend of Fisher King (Christ) who reigns over infertile land
spiritual infertility as analogue to sexual debility
today we live in an apocalyptic nightmare “falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal”
ancient blind prophet Tiresias (incorporating both genders) merges with Fisher King to shore up “these fragments” of our culture against chaos)
Multiple sources, styles, voices, forms
The poem itself as “waste land”: landscape of forgotten things, objects, situations, events
Tradition and reality as “waste land” (garbage dump) to choose from
Oscillation between degeneration and regeneration, decreation and recreation
Why is the Lost Generation called that way?
Gertrude Stein coined the term “lost generation”: disillusionment of American literary expatriates, esp. after First World War
Explain Hemingway's "Iceberg Theory".
Hemingway’s style
Narrative method: simplicity of diction and sentence structure, showing characters’ feelings as “sequence of fact and motion that made the emotion” not by mere assertion, irony not symbolism
Themes: love and loss, passion and sex, war and crime; search for happiness, fulfillment, gratification; cult of masculinity, violence of blood sports (social rituals: hunting, bull fight, drinking) (but like himself womanizers who are often tragic, depressive, death-ridden, prone to suicide (1961))
Iceberg-Theory
“The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water”.
“I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eights of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show.”
à the most important things lie beneath the surface of the page (gaps, omissions, etc.)
à fatal consequence for surface interpretation
In what way does Hemingway's protagonist Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises personify the "Lost Generation"?
Mottos:
“You are all a lost generation”
– Gertrude Stein in conversation
“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever … The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose …”
– Ecclesiastes
Ex-soldier Jake Barnes in Europe amongst group of expatriates (all wounded either physically or psychologically), represents the rupture of his generation through his body: injury to genitals and impotence through war à reassertion through male rituals = healing rituals; experience as substitute for lost masculinity/destroyed body
How does Jay Gatsby represent the paradoxes of the Roaring Twenties?
Written by Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
The Great Gatsby (1925)
Jay Gatsby as representative of nouveau riches
Roaring 1920s: after shock of WWI, now booming economy, but also Prohibition and organized crime
Fatal believe in piling up wealth and material symbols (incl. beautiful woman = Daisy) as means of redeeming past
Collapse of Great American Dream (murdered), empty, tragic heart of the self-made man
Story narrated by Nick Carraway, who is like Gatsby a war veteran from Midwest where he returns to in the end
Symoblism: Valley of ashes - The downfall of the American dream
Harlem Renaissance & After
Questions not answered/not found in presentations:
Give a brief overview of the Harlem Renaissance.
What can you say about Langston Hughes's writing technique? Think especially of "The Weary Blues".
Explain Claude McKay's aesthetic approach to poetry.
Describe your impression of the attraction of the "Cotton Club".
What are the differences between Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison?
Ralph Ellison
born in Oklahoma, father merchant, named him after Emerson à hope his son would become a poet of individualism
see Ellison’s claim that he feels more connected to modernism of Hemingway or Eliot than to “protest literature” of Wright
still: Ellison in Harlem was helped by Wright to get into the “Federal Writers Project” (à Roosevelt’s New Deal)
resistance to be categorized as black writer
universalist claim
debate betw. Wright and Ellison valid for cont. identity politics
although writing about black-white relationships, critical and satirical treatment of black social, ethnic, regional, moral traditions
realism (incl. symbolism, expressionism, surrealism)
mixture of black cultural tradition and white modernism
Richard Wright
first African-American writer to win broad response from reading public
born in South, experience of oppression à turn to Communism until 1944
Native Son (1940): made him a leading American novelist
Essay: Blueprint for Negro Writing (1937)
the “negro writer” should not prostitute himself nor do propaganda: à reliance on own consciousness and perspective (intellectual endeavor to read hard facts of reality)
call for politically engaged and radically social realism (↔ aesthetics and optimism of Harlem Renaissance)
declaration of cultural independence for black writers
What is so radical about Richard Wright's novel Native Son?
Novel: The Native Son (1940)
Bigger Thomas: from Chicago slums to electric chair (false claim: murder and rape of white girl)
black rage
radical politics
determinism in underclass black life
white hypocrisy
critical, political realism/naturalism
What is so shocking about Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man?
The Invisible Man (1952)
complex reflection on individual, collective, and artistic identity
unnamed first-person narrator born in deep South and adopts compliant behavior of “good Negro”
his individualism as “invisible”
educated in black college, sent north to powerful whites who want to place him in high-sounding, but empty positions à keeping him “invisible”
discovery of imposture à pitches into chaos of New York City
bewildering succession of adventures
falls into a coal cellar à disillusioned by world’s absurdity, determines to remain underground and to write down his experiences (= novel)
paradox of negativity: seeing oneself ONLY through eyes of others, and they see NOTHING
powerful passage: activation from Emerson’s “transparent eyeball” to DuBois’ “looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” à negative application
also Poe and popular images (Hollywood) of invisible ghost à forms of the uncanny and evil
Choose one literary example of a post-Harlem African American writer and elaborate on his/her text.
Alice Walker (born 1944)
black (female) experience of South
impressionist, symbolist realism
wisdom of black matriarch, brutality of low-class black male; white oppression, exploitation; folk heritage, feminism (sexism, rape, abortion, economic injustice)
The Color Purple (1982): American Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, epistolary novel (see tradition of English sentimental novel). Story of Celie who suffers poverty, racism, sexual abuse, but through strength of character rises to accommodation to her life and restoration to her loved
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