Colonial Era



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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:

  1. favorable: W. as inspiration for later generations, model of emancipation

  2. 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

Major authors

  • 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

    • William Dean Howells (first theorist)

    • Henry James (“father of psychological novel”)

    • Edith Wharton (novel of manners)

    • [Mark Twain]







Naturalism

Major authors

developed from / intensified realism:

  • narratives of the present time, representations of surface reality

  • aims at accurate reproduction of speech, manners, landscapes

  • psychologically valid motivations




1890s-1920s

    • Stephen Crane

    • Frank Norris

    • Theodore Dreiser

    • Jack London

    • [Kate Chopin]




Differences: Naturalism compared to Realism

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

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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