PRE-SETTLEMENT PERIOD (< 1620s)
CHARACTERISTICS * Oral literature relaying on performance * Most texts collected and written down in the end of 19th and beginning of 20th century * Distinguishable Distinguishable by form, content, and style - thus correspond to the most fundamental features of literature * Types of oral narratives: ¨ Origin and Emergence Stories, ¨ Historical Narratives, ¨ Culture Hero Stories, ¨ Trickster Tales
WRITERS HISTORICAL EVENTS anonym anonymous ous 1452 1452 - Gutenbe Gutenberg rg invent inventss a printin printing g press press 1492, 12 Oct. - Columbus discovers America, landing on an island in the Bahamas 1507 - Martin Waldseemuller, geographer, names the new land "America" for Vespucci 1603 - Elizabeth I dies; James I becomes king of England 1607 - Capt. John Smith founds founds Jamestown in Virginia 1584 - Walter Raleigh lands on "island" of Roanoke; names it "Virginia" for Queen Elizabeth
PURITANISM (1620s – 1783)
CHARACTERISTICS v Forms of writing: - histories - diaries - chronicles - poetry - sermons: 1. explanation of biblical quotation 2. interpretation 3. application to the life of the colony v Role of sermons: > new argument in the ongoing theological debates > a part of the political process (“Election Day’s.”) > scaring the congregation back into religious life (“jeremiads”) v Chronicles - describe the earthly in terms of the eternal v Literal truth substituted with potential symbolic lesson v No novels – they divert people’s attention from work v Writing should have a practical purpose v Belief in America being the “promised land” and Americans being the “chosen people” v Frequent religious references
WRITERS Poetry: Anne Bradstreet (1612 – 1672) Michael Wigglesworth (1631 – 1705) Edward Taylor (1645 – 1729) Diaries/Chronicles/Histories: William Bradford (1590 – 1657) John Winthrop (1588 – 1649) Cotton Mather (1663 – 1728) Edward Johnson (1598 – 1672) Mary Rowlandson (c.1636 – c.1678) Sermons: Jonathan Edwards (1703 – 1758)
HISTORICAL EVENTS 1620 - Mayflower, Puritans found Plymouth Plantation 1630 - arrival of Arbella Arbella Massachusetts Bay Colony founded 1636 - Harvard University University founded near Boston 1650 - Bradstreet, Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up In America 1662 - Wigglesworth, The Day of Doom 1704 - first newspaper ~> in Boston 1741 - Johnson, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” 1741-61 – The Great Awakening Puritan influence on American Values: · Urge to succeed and exceed · Belief that hard work necessary for happiness · Cult of money -> money indicator · Conviction that Americans are the chosen people
v Often plain style so that common people can understand ENLIGHTENMENT (2nd half 18th century) The Age of Reason CHARACTERISTICS WRITERS HISTORICAL EVENTS v Rational approach to the Political Pamphlets 1773 - Boston Tea Party world, belief in progress Philosophical / Religious 1775-83 – American Revolution v Pragmatism – truth measured Tracts: 1776, 4 July – Declaration of by practical experience, law of Benjamin Franklin (1706 – Independence nature 1790) 1783 - Treaty of Paris v Deism – God created the Thomas Paine (1737 – 1787-88 - Federalist Papers: Alex. world but has no influence on 1809) Hamilton, John Jay, and James human lives Thomas Jefferson (1743 – Madison v Idealism – conviction of the 1826) 1789 - American Constitution universal sense of right and Alexander Hamilton (1757 1789-1799 - French Revolution wrong; belief in essential – 1804) goodness of man v Interest in human nature ROMANTICISM (1820s – 1861) The American Renaissance
CHARACTERISTICS v Explored what it meant to be an American, an American artist v Looked at American government and political problems v The problems of war and Black slavery v Emerging materialism and conformity v Influence of immigration, new customs and traditions v Sexuality; relationships between men and women v The power of nature v Individualism , emphasis on destructive effect of society on individual v Idealism v Spontaneity in thought and action v Not an optimistic vision of America; pictures of human frailty, weakness, limitation v Writers spoke not directly but obliquely, ambiguously v Christianity a valuable source of symbols v Stories built around dreams v Stories of emblematic pilgrimages or journeys
WRITERS Prose: Washington Irving (1783 – 1859) James Fennimore Cooper (1789 – 1851) William Cullen Bryant (1794 – 1878) Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849) Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882) Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 – 1864) Margaret Fuller (1810 – 1850) Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862) Herman Melville (1819 –
HISTORICAL EVENTS 1812 – War with England 1815-50 – Westward Expansion 1846-48 – Mexican War 1849 – California gold rush 1861-1865 – Civil War 1863 - Gettysburg Address
Emerson, Nature (1836) Poe, The Raven (1845) Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850) Melville, Moby Dick (1851) Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) Thoreau Walden (1854) Whitman, Leaves of Grass(1855)
v Hero seems to represent a general type of person v Belief that evil is merely the absence of good v Through the symbolism of writing, portrayal of the reality beyond what’s visible, thus putting into practice the central notion of Transcendental thought. v Critique of formalized church, faith must come from within TRANSCENDENTALISM (1835 – 1860) A New England movement rooted in Romanticism and post-Kantian idealism. Basically religious, emphasized role and importance of individual conscience and value of intuition in matters of moral guidance and inspiration. Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Fuller. Critical of formalized religion. All constructive practical activity, great literature viewed as an expression of the divine spirit. An ambition to achieve vivid perception of the divine as it operates in common life which would lead to personal cultivation. Insistence on authority of individual conscience A trust in the individual, democracy, possibility of continued change for the better A need to see beyond what is before our eyes, to see a deeper significance, a transcendent reality Intellectual eclecticism; a vague conception of the God-like nature of human spirit Nature conceived of not as a machine but as an organism, symbol and analogue of the mind Spontaneous activity of the creative artist seen as the highest achievement GOTHIC ROMANCE: · More interest in action than in the development of character · Action often fantastic, allegorical, interest in the supernatural, terror, madness · Characters have mysterious origins; tend to be ideal, exaggerated,
1891) Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811- 1896) Louisa May Alcott (1832 – 1888)
Poetry: “The Boston Brahmins” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809 – 1894) James Russell Lowell (1819 – 1891) Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892) Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886)
more types · Suspense and mystery involving fantastic and supernatural, interest in light and shade · Interest in evil, its origins · Descriptions of various mental states often verging on the abnormal
CHARACTERISTICS
REALISM (1860s – 1890s) WRITERS HISTORICAL EVENTS Prose: Mark Twain (1835–1910) Henry James (1843 – 1916) William Dean Howells (1837 – 1920)
life presented with fidelity fidelity in presenting the inner workings of the mind v the analysis of thought and feeling v function of environment in shaping the character v set in present or recent past v colloquial speech v commonplace characters “Local Color” v exposed political corruption, Sarah Orne economic inequity, business Jewett (1849 – deception, the exploitation of labor, 1909) women rights problems, racial Kate inequity Chopin (1851 – * described the relationship 1904) between the economic transformation Bret of America and its moral condition Harte (1836 – v v introduction of a new kind of 1902) characters: · industrial workers and rural Charlotte poor Perkins Gilman · ambitious businessman and (1860 – 1935) vagrants · prostitutes Poetry: · unheroic soldiers v rise of what critic Warner Edward Berthoff calls “the literature of Arlington argument” – works in sociology, Robinson (1869 philosophy, psychology. – 1935) Robert REGIONAL WRITING (“local Frost (1874 – color”) 1963) § desire to preserve distinctive Carl ways of life before industrialization Sandburg (187 dispersed or homogenized them 8 – 1967) § coming to terms with the harsh realities of the “new times” § rapid growth of magazines creating a new, largely female audience for short fiction
1860 – Abraham Lincoln elected President 1861-65 – Civil War 1863, 1 Jan – Emancipation Proclamation: slavery abolished th 1865 – 13 Amendment (abolition of slavery) 1869 – first transcontinental railroad 1870s – few individuals take control of big industries: stea oil, meat-packing 1859 – Darwin’s The Origin of Species 1870 – Darwin's Descent of Man
James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881) Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(1884) Frost The Road Not Taken (1916)
§ immortalizing linguistic features § many colorists women describing a patriarchal society from female perspective
NATURALISM (1890s ~> 1950s)
CHARACTERISTICS v Trend rather than a movement; never formalized nor dominated by the influence of a single writer v A more extreme, intensified version of realism v Shows more unpleasant, ugly, shocking aspects of life v Objective picture of reality viewed with scientific detachment v Determinism – man’s life is dominated by the forces he cannot control: biological instincts, social environment v No free will, no place for moral judgment v Pessimism v Disillusionment with the dream of success; collapse of the predominantly agrarian myth v Struggle of an individual to adopt to the environment v Society as something stable, its predictability unabled one to present a universal human situation through accurate representation of particulars v Faith in society and art
WRITERS Prose: Henry Adams (1838 – 1918) Hamlin Garland (1860 – 1940) Frank Norris (1870 – 1902) Stephen Crane (1871 – 1900) Theodore Dreiser (1871 – 1945) Edith Wharton (1862 – 1937) Jack London (1879 – 1916) Sinclair Lewis (1885 – 1951) Upton Sinclair (1878 – 1968) John Steinbeck (1902 – 1968) Poetry: Edgar Lee Masters (1869 – 1950)
HISTORICAL EVENTS 1898 – Spanish-American War 1901 - Theodore Roosevelt elected President 1903 - first powered airplane flight
Crane, The Red Badge of Courage(1895) Babbitt (1922) Lewis, Dreiser An American Tragedy(1925)
MODERNISM (1914-1945)
CHARACTERISTICS WRITERS v Construction out of fragments, collage technique, montage of images (cinema) Prose v The ideal of art is to regain the whole Gertrude Stein (1874 (like in The Waste Land ) – 1946) v Work structured as a quest for the very Ernest coherence it seems to lack at the surface; Hemingway (1899– order found in art (Porter), religion (Eliot) 1961)
HISTORICAL EVENTS 1914-18 – World War I 1917 – US enters the War, Russian Revolution 1918 – worldwide flu epidemic Jan 1919 – Prohibition (18 th Amendment) 1920 – Women given the vote (19 th Am.) 1920s – Henry Ford’s assembly-line, cars beco 1921 – Sacco-Vanzetti case
v Sense of discontinuity, harmony destroyed in WWI v Omission: of explanations, interpretations, connections, summaries, continuity v Arbitrary beginning, advancement without explanation, end without resolution v Shifts in perspective, voice and tone v Experimentation with time: flashback, leaps to the future v Rhetoric understated, ironic v Symbols and images instead statements v Use of myth –escape from dramatic present, Christianity also a myth (Faulkner) v World of random possibilities v Search for truth v Subject often the literary work itself (the only meaningful activity is the search for meaning carried out in art) v Opposition to mass culture, belief that art is for the elites v References to literary, historical, philosophical, religious past to remind the reader of old, lost coherence v Secularization of religion, erosion of religious belief, lose of mystery Nitze declared God was dead and man was on his own v Undermining of the belief in history as a linear concept (Darwin) v Distrust of family bonds, family no longer the safe haven (Freud) v Anti-female tendency, “new woman”, a flapper – a carrier of chaos; Widespread male anxiety about a female “takeover” – some writers (Lawrence, Hemingway, Fitzgerald) believe that women conspired with the new technology to render their male contemporaries socially and even sexually impotent v Fragments of popular culture, dream imagery v Parodies v Use of language previously considered improper: colloquial, slang, uneducated v Directness, compression, vividness ~> significance of short story v First person narration, one character’s point of view (truth does not exist objectively) A naïve or marginal person as narrator (a
John Dos Passos (1896 – 1970) F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 – 1940) William Faulkner (1897 – 1962) Sherwood Anderson (1876– 1941) Katherine Anne Porter (1890 – 1980) Zora Neale Hurston (1901?–1960) Thomas Wolfe (1900 – 1938) Nathaniel West (1903 – 1940) Willa Cather (1873 – 1947) Henry Miller (1891 – 1980) Anais Nin (1903 – 1977) Poetry: Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) William Carlos William (1883 – 1963) Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955) “Imagists:” Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972) H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886 – 1961) Amy Lowell (1874 1925) Marianne Moore (1887 – 1972) e.e. cummings (1894 – 1962) Archibald MacLeish (1892 – 1982) Hart Crane (1899 – 1932)
1924 – Immigration Act, quota systems: 1921, 1927 – first non stop solo flight across Atlantic 1928 – Mussolini’s comes to power in Italy 1929 – first motion picture with sound stock market crash, Depression begins 1932 – F. Delano Roosevelt becomes President 1933 – 18th Amendment repealed 1933 – Hitler’s dictatorship in Germany 1936-39 – Spanish Civil War 1941, 7 Dec – Pearl Harbor 1945, 6 Aug – Hiroshima atomic bomb Influential thinkers: Sigmunt Freud (1856 – 1939) Carl Jung (1875 – 1961) Karl Marx (1818 – 1883) 1848 – Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto
Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919) Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent (1920 Eliot, The Waste Land (1922) Stevens, Anecdote of the Jar (1923) Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925) Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (1925) Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926) Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929) Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929) Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel (1930) Faulkner, Light in August (1932) Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936) Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (1937) Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939) West, The Day of the Locust (1939) Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952 Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952 )
child, an outsider) to convey the reality of confusion v Alienation of the individual v Experimental, self conscious manipulation of form v Stream of consciousness, interior monologue v Psychological influences: Freud, Young v Fascination with machines v Vision of social breakdown, society in decay v Faith in art
“Fugitives:” John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974) Allen Tate (1899 – 1979) Drama: Eugene O’Neill (1888 – 1953) Thorton Wilder (1897 – 1975) Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1961)
POST-WWII (1945 - )
CHARACTERISTICS Southern writers: - grotesque
- fascination with extreme and perverse incongruities of character and scene - cultivation of verbal effect - problem of the situation of the Blacks in the South - sense of history - no engagement with the public and social happenings The Beat Generation: - inspiration from Whitman, Buddha, eastern religion, drugs - spontaneity, opposition to constricting forms – poetic or political - rhetorical shock - language of drug subculture, Black music, jazz milieu - references to mythical religion - comic touches
POST-MODERNISM exploration of fantasies and extremities of experience use of myth, fantasy, fairy tale
self-conscious style
WRITERS
PROSE Southern writers: Eudora Welty (1909 2001) Flannery O’Connor (1925– 1964) Carson McCullers (1917 – 1967) Truman Capote (1924 – 1984) Walker Percy (1916 1990) William Styron (b. 1925)
New York writers: Saul Bellow (1915 2005) Philip Roth (b. 1933) Bernard Malamud (1914 -
POETRY The Beat Generation: Allen Ginsberg (1926 – 1997) Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919) Confessional Poets: Robert Lowell (1917 – 1977) Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963) John Berryman (1914 – 1972) Theodore Roethke (1908 – 1963) Anne
HISTORICAL EVENTS 1945, 6 Aug – Hiroshima bomb 1950-53 – Korean War 1950-54 – McCarthy’s era 1954 – end of school segregatio 1960s – Civil Rights movement 1960 – J. F. Kennedy President 1962 – Cuban missile crisis 1963, Nov 22 – JFK assassination 1964-75 – Vietnam War 1965 – Malcolm X assassination 1968 – Robert Kennedy, Martin L Jr. assassinated 1969 – first man on the Moon 1972-74 – Watergate Scandal 1974 – Richard Nixon’s resignatio 1981 – Ronald Reagan President Wright, Native Son (1940) Williams, A Streetcar Named Desi Mailer, The Naked and the Dead ( Miller, Death of a Salesman (194 Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Ellison, Invisible Man (1952) Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Ginsberg, Howl (1956) O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey Into Kerouac, On the Road (1957) Updike, Rabbit, Run (1960)
the mirror effect – story within the
story
parodies of other literary styles, formal and linguistic experimentation irony, grotesque “black humor” – employing elements of cruelty and shock to make readers see the ugly, the awful in a new way novel an independent art form creating its own universe, its own rules stresses artificiality of its worlds literature a game between an author and a reader participation exaggeration, repetition, unexpected view point, dislocation disruption of cause-and-effect narration, structure episodic (feeling of artificiality) characters two-dimensional, flat, grotesque, alien use of popular culture first person narration – can be an animal celebration of chaos, acceptance of entropy (world moving towards inert uniformity and disintegration, a measure of the lack of order in a system, that includes the idea that the lack of order increases over a period in time) doubt if literature can reflect any reality, even disintegrating one less confidence in art and hence the artist “naïve” childlike narration myth, religion, history presented as arbitrary constructs of the human mind moral relativity interest in the problems of literary creation
1986) J.D. Salinger (b. 1919)
Middle America writers: John Updike (b. 1932) Norman Mailer (b. 1923) Joseph Heller (b. 1923)
The Beat Generation:
Sexton (1928 – 1974) Black Mountain Poets: Charles Olson (1910 – 1970) Robert Creeley (b. 1926) Robert Duncan (1919 - 1988) Denise Levertov (1923 - 1997)
Jack Kerouac (1922 – New York 1969) Poets: Afro-American Frank O’Hara Writers: (1926 – Richard 1966) Wright (1908 – John 1960) Ashbery (b. Ralph 1927) Ellison (1914 Kenneth 1994) Koch (b. James 1925) Baldwin (1924 James 1987) Schuyler Alice Walker (b. (1923 - 1991) 1944) AfroPost-Modernism: American Vladimir Nabokov (1899– Poets: Langston 1977) Hughes(1902 Thomas –1967) Pynchon (b. Countee 1937) Cullen (1903 John Barth (b. – 1946) 1930) LeRoy Jones Donald Barthelme (1931 - [Amiri Baraka] (b. 1989) 1934) William Burroughs (1914 Gwendolyn Brooks (1917 - 97) - 2000) William
Heller, Catch-22 (1961) Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962) Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Bellow, Herzog (1964) Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 ( Barthelme, Snow White (1967) Barth, Lost in the Funhouse (19 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5
Gaddis (1922 1998) Robert Coover (b. 1932) Joseph Heller (b. 1923) Kurt Vonnegut (19222007) Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938) Asian American Writers Maxine H. Kingston (b. 1940) Amy Tan (b. 1952) Jade Snow Wong (b. 1922) Frank Chin (b. 1940) John Okada ( 1923 - 1971)
DRAMA Arthur Miller (1915-2005) Tennessee Williams (1911-83) Edward Albee (b. 1928) Sam Shepard (b. 1943) David Mamet (b. 1947) August Wilson (b. 1945) David Hwang (b. 1957)
