Матеріали з Американської Літератури - натуралізм, модернізм, поезія та проза

Naturalism – definition and defining problems

 

-          an international movement in literature, an aesthetic and philosophical ideology, based on the findings and ideas of social Darwinists, esp. Edmund Spencer

-          international representatives: Emil Zola

-          comparison with Realism: no psychological depth, no free will or choice; strong limitation of dilemmas in characters

-          two meanings of naturalism: ideology coming out of social Darwinism and an evolution or version of Realism

-          one of the biggest questions of the naturalist movement: what is determinism, how does it work, does determinism necessarily produce pessimistic outcomes, the role of accident in human life

 

Stephen Crane

Overall, "The Open Boat" presents a naturalistic view of the world, depicting nature as a powerful and indifferent force that shapes the lives of individuals. The story explores the human struggle for meaning and significance in the face of an often hostile and unpredictable environment.

 

In summary, "The Red Badge of Courage" is significant as a war novel due to its psychological realism, anti-romantic portrayal of war, symbolic use of the red badge, incorporation of naturalistic elements, and its influence on subsequent works in the genre. The novel provides a nuanced exploration of the internal struggles faced by soldiers, contributing to the evolution of war literature.

The term "red badge" refers to a wound received in battle. Initially, Henry desires a physical injury as a badge of courage, something tangible to prove his bravery. However, as the story progresses, the red badge takes on a symbolic meaning, representing the internal growth and transformation of the protagonist. The novel explores the idea that true courage is found within, regardless of external symbols.

 

Jack London

- rich biography: oyster pirate in San Francisco Bay; sailor/seaman, cross-country hobo; later takes part in the Alaska gold rush; wrote a thousand words a day for 17 years;

- mixed social message:

o attracted to Nietzsche’s theory of “will to power” AND to the idea of the social revolution

- his best novels: The Call of the Wild (1903); White Fang (1906):

o tales of animals – animals as characters eliminate the element of human agency; or they diminish or question human agency

o animals as organisms which coordinate inner energy with external circumstance

- “To Build a Fire” (1908) – his best story

o The very character of this prose favors pessimistic determinism

- Martin Eden (1908): most biographical novel: from rough life in San Francisco Bay to fame as best-selling author

“To Build a Fire”

-A man traveling in Yukon and Alaska, there was a better trapper that advised him not to do it, story is an analysis of series of misfortunate events. He’s very calm when his legs get wet. He makes a fire under the tree with snow on it, and the snow cap falls onto the fire extinguishing it. There’s also a dog whom is wiser than the owner. It understands that they shouldn’t be there. When the man realizes that he can’t make a fire. He wants to kill the dog to warm himself, but dog senses it and won’t come near. Best story of the author probably. He’s almost mechanical in his descriptions.

Frank Norris

· early works: McTeague (1899); Moran of the Lady Letty (1898);

· the intended (unfinished) “wheat” trilogy: The Octopus (1901); The Pit (1903)

background and crucial ideas:

· family moves from Chicago to San Francisco

· Norris studied painting in Paris and becomes familiar with Emil Zola’s novels

· Studied as the University of California: Darwin and Spencer

· Worked as journalist and reporter for the press

· the predominance of animal instinct in human behavior

· overturning and rejecting the standard liberal bourgeois realism which sustained the idea of individual responsibility; attacking the story of the success of the American individualism as myth

· greed, lust, rage, envy – are seen from biological/evolutionary perspective, not from the perspective of morality

· man is governed by his impulses and innate instincts (the main character of his novel McTeague is unable to curb his animal brutality – kills his wife)

· conventions were just a surface covering deeper inner instincts, animal nature – culture is less important than the instinctual layer

The “wheat trilogy”:

· ambitious literary design to trace large scale processes, far exceeding the control not only of individuals but also of separate institutions

· in The Octopus – the conflict is between ranchers and the Southern Pacific Railroad Company – but neither side is shown to have moral superiority (even though the novel is narrated from the ranchers’ perspective)

· individuals and their progress and development are shown in subplots

· the inner development of the individuals is sacrificed to larger social and economic processes

· the predominant perspective is deterministic

· collective development is more important than any individual life

· the individual is sacrificed for the sake of the progress of the race: “the individual suffers, but the race goes on”

· ultimately, the message is of the progress of humanity as a whole

 

Theodore Dreiser

background, themes and ideas:

· son of a German immigrant, born in Indiana, mother came from Ohio; multiple children family; family suffers impoverishment

· raised as a Catholic, later became an atheist

· beginnings of professional career as a journalist in Midwest

· irrelevance of middle-class standards

· personal experience of poverty, humiliation, lack of stability in life

· deep personal understanding of the desire for advancement, wealth, power in life especially in those who begin at the lowest sections of the social ladder

· dominance of chance and accident in human affairs and in human happiness

· mixture of the realist and naturalist approaches; contemporary of modernist prose writers, like Fitzgerald (sometimes compared with them)

· the characters success or failure does not depend on their inner qualities – it is a result of mere chance and accident

· characters are at the right/wrong time in the right/wrong place – and this accidentality is the entire determining factor of their failure or success

· this approach sometimes means that mediocrity succeeds over merit

· dominance of instinctual action and human desires which come into chance alignments with the environment

· influence of the early training as journalist and reporter on his writings

major works:

· Sister Carrie (1900): story of the success of a mediocre actress; the failure of success of the characters rest on one and the same principle: accident

o mixture of realist portrayal of society and naturalist analysis of the human condition

o some traces of H. James’s realist portrayal of women’s position in society

o Carrie succeeds despite, or because, her mediocrity: she merely acts out commonly shared desires and expectations

o Carrie says something when onstage, and the line fits the general expectation, which leads to her stardom – an accident determines the situation of the character

o Hurstwood – the male protagonist and Carrie’s partner – is a combination of desires, foolishness and indecision which leads to his gradual social degradation; he is a good example of a naturalist principle in building a character – as the story unfolds, less and less depends on him, his situation is governed by accident

· An American Tragedy (1925): the main factors governing the fate of the characters: accident and inability to curb one’s instincts

o a culture in which success is imagined in sexual terms

o the main protagonist – Clyde Griffiths – follows a path of irresponsible, purely instinctual acts

o the central “tragedy” of the novel is a combination of his uncontrolled instincts (frustration, anger) and accident – Clyde wants to kill his partner, and yet there is more accident than intent behind the killing – he hits her, when they are both on a boat, by accident, but this leads to her drowning anyway

· “Trilogy of Desire”: The Financier (1912); The Titan (1914); The Stoic (1947):

o evolutionary analogies applied to large scale financial and social processes; urban themes, development of the modern city

o the “lobster vs. the squid” fragment: irrelevance of anything but strength in the organization of society

o Dreiser dazzled by such people as JP Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller – he saw them as artists

Dreiser’s legacy:

His techniques and general perceptions were important for later American writers: Richard Wright, John Dos Passos, Norman Mailer, even Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner

 

 

Pre-Modernist Tensons in American Poetry

• Gap between tradition (traditional themes and techniques of poetry) and the sense of the new
• Impinging pressure toward new forms, topics, and voices in poetry, in reaction to:

1. the exhausted romantic tradition
2. vast social, political, demographic changes
3. Aesthetic tastes of the genteel tradition

• A group of poets who are bridging this gap

1. tension between traditional verse form and new topics
2. tension between disciplined form and tendencies toward fragmentation
3. moral and metaphysical dilemmas: how to maintain faith in large, unified, holistic world-views of Romanticism or religion

 

 

Edwin Arlington Robinson

- born in a small sea-side town in Maine

- family of modest material means combined with respect for learning, education,

- suffered poverty in adult life

first volume brought out in 1896 (The Torrent and the Night Before) – one review read: “[this vers has] true fire… but the world is not beautiful to him, but a prison house”.

- Children of the Night (1897)

- The Town Down the River (1910)

- the two above volumes: influence of realistic prose

- president Theodore Roosevelt praises Children of the Night (in 1905; there is correspondence between the poet and the president; president’s patronage helps the poet financially)

- quote from the poet: “the world is not a ‘prison house’ but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell ‘God’ with wrong blocks”. (this in response to a review which said that “the world is not beautiful to him but a prison house”.

Themes in his poetry:

- bridge between the transcendental and naturalist vision

- crisis of faith in transcendental structures founding order

- bridge between Romanticism and modernity

- individual, single characters and their internal crisis

- small town characters (Tilbury Town, fictive place based on his childhood town of Gardiner, Maine)

- bleak vision of alienation, solitude, ”quiet desperation”

- contrast between external appearance of success and internal sense of failure (poem „Richard Cory”):

 

 

Edgar Lee Masters

•          representative of Chicago Renaissance

•          themes of working class or small-town life

•          most important work: Spoon River Anthology (1915)

Spoon River Anthology:

•          free verse poems

•          self-epitaphs

•          approachable, natural, plain diction

•          miniature tales of speakers’ lives

•          elegiac tone

•          various life situations and stories

•          coming to terms with their faults, failures, but also affirming values of honesty, fortitude,

•          facing the necessities of life with austere morality and stoicism

•           

Robinson Jeffers

•          - poet of the return to the pre-human or non-human

•          - praises wild shores of California

•          - seeks the landscapes untainted by civilization

•          - creates visions of mythical, or mystic union between the human and divinity or the non-human

•          - ”Roan Stallion” (1925) – long narrative poem with elements of mystic vision; an attempt to bring together the human, the non-human, the divine

•          - repudiation of the pieties of humanism for the sake of „Inhumanism” – the (proto)-ecological and philosophical idea which decenters the human from its usual place of dominance over the natural element (an anticipation of what today is called post-humanist studies).

•          - his goal: ”to uncentre the human mind from itself” (the post-humanist perspective)

•          - meditation on the limits of civilization, or the end of civilization

Robinson Jeffers' concept of "inhumanism" is a philosophical stance urging a shift away from human-centric views. Inhumanism advocates for recognizing the intrinsic value of nature and emphasizes a humble acknowledgment of humanity's place within the vastness of the universe. Jeffers challenges human exceptionalism, encouraging individuals to embrace the cosmic realities and find meaning in the interconnectedness of all existence. Inhumanism does not deny the harsh realities of life but promotes a broader, nature-centered perspective.

 

 

 

 

Robert Frost

- born in S. Francisco but lived in New England

- travelled to England where he gained critical recognition

- his first book, Boy’s Will (1912) brought out in England

- remotely identified with the English „Georgian” poets

- returns to the US in 1915 and buys a farm again in New Hamsphire

- became one of the most successful and popular American poets of the 20th century

- was selected to be president’s J. F. Kennedy’s ”poet laureate” and read at Kennedy’s inauguration

- traditional form in tension with romantic vision

- plain speech imitating the language of small town or village New Englanders

Forms and themes

- ability to mold this simple language into traditional poetic patterns

- the voice of a shrewd, ironic village sage who speaks in riddles

- philosophy of a poem in his essays “The Figure a Poem Makes”: it is a following of a first impression found in nature and arriving at a transitory resolution, a „momentary stay against confusion”

- critique of the Emersonian tradition of trust on transcendental orders

- critique of the Transcendentalist sense of unity with orders of the Spirit represented in nature

- but also follows the Emersonian – first impulse comes from nature and guides the lyrical subject in his quests

- the general Romantic impulse – as in Wordsworth – the first impulse toward reflection comes from close contact with nature; unlike in Wordsworth – in Frost there is no difference between the idea of work with nature and the idea of the poetic

- pragmatist aesthetics – working with the material presence of the world – beginning to replace standard Romantic beliefs (nature is a material presence with which we interact, not a channel to a non-material spirit)

- Darwinian perception of nature (nature chaos and accident with the moral element absent from it)

- qt from Trilling on Frost: he was the great poet of contemporary tragic vision, evoking a "terrifying

universe" of exposure and emptiness, the romantic vacancies of modern secular life.

Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson share commonalities in their use of realism, narrative styles, and exploration of dark themes in their poetry. Both poets depict everyday life and ordinary people in their work. However, Frost's outlook tends to be more optimistic and pragmatic, aligning him with modernism, while Robinson is often associated with late Romanticism or a transition toward modernism. Despite their differences, both poets contribute uniquely to American poetry, each with distinct voices and perspectives.

 

 

Design 

-          The scene is of utter cruelty but every creature is wild the spider, flower and the butterfly

-          Spider hides in the flower hunting and butterfly flies and wants to land at it

-          There is no design at all? Or there might be a design

-          The chaos controls the nature

Desert Places

-          The speaker is attracted to the bland raw landscape

-          Things will become even blanker, the speaker says that the empty spaces cannot scare him 

-          The darkness of the space terrifies me, it is scary to be a human on this earth

-           Pascal mathematician

Mowing 

-          Sound of the poem is connected with doing specific work outside

-          “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows” pentameter

-          It isn’t much but it honest work Frost farmer

Birches

-          There is a boy who bends birches and swings on ‘em, it’s a metaphor to swinging up from the earth, but later coming back. He’s reading it little to fast based on Professor Bartczak’s opinion. 

-          Male competition between father and son Freudian idea

Mending Wall

-          “Good fences make good neighbors”

-          The other person in the poem keeps repeating the same sentence, the sentence he learned from his father

 

The rhythm in Frost’s poem is iambic which is natural for the speaker, it is associated with simple poets from the countryside

“It begins in delight and ends in wisdom” that’s the rule he uses in his poems.

Poem is something to come closer to the initial feeling of delight, but its purpose is to end in clarification.

 

Modernism in poetry

1. General problems with the meaning of the term modernism

Modernism has been used to connote a vast group of phenomena in culture, aesthetics, arts, and politics. Here is a selective list of the phenomena that have been at times included or described as modernist:

-          aesthetic experiment, innovation in form, formal self-consciousness

-          the outbursts of “isms”: cubism, Dadaism, surrealism,

-          aesthetics of fragment, collage, and montage

-          the crisis of unifying structures, such as the mythological structures; breaking with traditions

-          the attempt to regain or re-think various “ideas of order”, that is various deep structures supposed to underlie the organization of everyday life: mythologies, religions, traditions

-          the idea of the linear technological progress of societies and a crisis of this idea

-          mass state planning, management of the masses, architecture in the service of society

 

 

•          Ezra Pound and ”imagism”

•          to objectify experience by using economical language

•          to objectify emotion

•          to bring thought and feeling back together in poetry

•          focus on craft and the knowledge of traditions

•          T. S. Eliot and biographical experience in poetry

•          the poet is a medium that transforms individual experience into a work of art

•          individual emotionality is filtered through form

•          poetry goes back to ancient patterns of experience

•          Pound and Eliot’s combined influence (poetry and prose):

•          craftsmanship 

•          precision, objectivity

•          knowledge of traditions

T.S. Eliot

Dissociation of sensibility

Suffering poet - romanticism 

Elliot “tradition and the individual talent”

Tradition - order that doesn’t belong to any author

Poet’s mind is a catalyst of the reaction (writing)

 

 

 

 

 

перерыв на чудо рисунок

T.S. Eliot's idea of impersonality in poetry, as outlined in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," emphasizes the importance of detaching the poet's personal emotions and experiences from the work. Instead, the poet becomes a conduit for universal truths, using objective correlatives and drawing on literary tradition to achieve a more enduring and timeless quality in their art. Impersonality, in Eliot's view, is not a denial of the poet's self but a means of achieving a higher level of artistic integrity and contributing to the ongoing evolution of literature.

 

William Carlos Williams

•          a family doctor

•          after meeting Pound revolutionizes his verse alongside the general „Imagist” tradition in the years 1913-1917

•          1917 – Al Que Quiere!

•          Spring and All (1923) – combination of prose and free verse

•          main theme: imagination as confrontation with mundane reality

•          Paterson: a long book poem in five volumes, tribute to life, culture and localities of Paterson, New Jersey (1946-1958)

•          general themes and features:

•          imagist free verse,

•          locality, the local culture and genuine local languages

•          love, imagination, power of creativity

The Red Wheelbarrow 

•         Presence of language as a material creating poetry

•         Words being presented upon a page

•         Very simple object

 

- “This is just to say”

"Paterson" is a long poem by William Carlos Williams, published in five books between 1946 and 1958. It explores the city of Paterson, New Jersey, and its inhabitants, addressing themes such as art, love, and politics. The poem is known for its innovative structure, incorporating prose, verse, and various forms to capture the multifaceted nature of the city and broader human experiences.

 

Wallace Stevens

- born in Pennsylvania, studied at Harvard, lived in NYC

- became a lawyer, moved to Hartford, Ct., worked in an insurance company

- associated with NY artistic milieu,

- didn't publish much, started writing in his student years at Harvard (around 1916), very late debut

- Harmonium (1923) his first collection

Main themes and forms:

- influence of Keats and Whitman,

- life of imagination in highly crafted language

- American locality in more abstract terms than in Williams

- the role of aesthetic structures in participating in cognitive (mental) operations of knowing reality; the role of aesthetics in formulating and maintaining beliefs

Example from Stevens: “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, “Anecdote of the Jar”, “The Snow Man”

Wallace Stevens employed a diverse range of vivid and often abstract imagery in his poetry. His approach included both concrete, tangible images and more abstract, symbolic elements, creating a nuanced exploration of sensory and intellectual experiences.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gertrude Stein

•          organized an open house/salon for the support of arts in Paris

•          supported the work of painters

•          supported and promoted  of writers (Pound, Hemingway)

•          literary equivalent of the cubism

formal ideas:

•          her poetry exposes the material medium of literature

•          underlining the peripheral parts of speech

•          experiment in syntax and semantics

•          anticipates late 20th c. poetry of linguistic experiment

•          ”If I Told Him” – a literary portrait of Pablo Picasso

 

 

Tender Buttons

 

 

Harlem Renaissance

I. Social and political background

the failure of Reconstruction in the South after the Civil War:

a. 14th and 15th Amendments (political reintegration of Blacks into the American society – access to the democratic process)

b. growing opposition to racial integration in the South

c. the Compromise of 1876: the act which effectively signals the withdrawal of the federal government from the process of racial reintegration in the South; the political/historical consequences: growing division and enmity between the racially different populations in the South

d. Plessy v. Fergusson Supreme Court Decision (1896): the American Supreme Court decrees the legality of the segregation of schools under the maxim of “separate but equal”; the decision reinforces the existing racial division of American society in the South

e. results: increased migration North of the black populations from the South to the cities in the North: Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City; Harlem (originally white middle-class area) becomes a center for black writers and musicians

 

major ideas of Black American cultural identity:

 

 

1. Booker T. Washington:

”adjustment and submission” (this phrase from Du Bois)

· proposes didactic/positivist program of self—education and progress

· utilitarian, vocational education

· mutual trust and aid between white and black population

· problem from later perspective: it advocates the model in which this trust is to be mutual but the white and black population remain separate

· emulation of Benjamin Franklin pattern of self-progress (so it emulates white patterns)

 

2. W.E.B. Du Bois

· one of the founders of NAACP (1909)

· editor of Crisis, the NAACP periodical (1910-1934)

· The Souls of Black Folk (1903) – his most important book publication

· critique of B.T. Washington model – it accepts the Negro’s inferiority and shifts the racial problem ”to the Negro’s shoulders”

· describes the awkward and social positioning of the black mind in American society with the phrase: ”double consciousness of the Negro”

· the Afro-American personality is blocked from true self-consciousness

· Blacks see themselves through the perceptions of others

· ”It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others”

· special insight and special knowledge; but also a blocking of one’s own development through self-assertion

 

3. Alain Locke

- a series of speeches “Race Contacts and Interracial Relations”:

o The idea of racial pride and identity independent from white culture

o no such thing as racial inferiority: racial inferiority is a social construct created in order to dominate

o talk of “race” is really talk of a history of dominance (not of anthropological difference)

- The New Negro (1925) – a collection of essays on black, Afro-American culture and art

- The idea of racial/ethnic self-affirmation

- Racial/ethnic division is to be overcome not through elimination of the thinking about race but through open cultivation of Afro-American identity

 

Countee Cullen

•          ”to be a poet, not a Negro poet”

•          Color (1925) – his most important collection

•          formal poetry based on Romantic models

•          the influence of Keats

•          follows the poetic convention

•          respect for white poets of traditional meter

•          much in the center of the black cultural mainstream

•          praised by white academic critics

•          problem: is the African-American poet limited to the themes of race

•          tension in Cullen’s poetry: ”My color shrouds me” [Q]

•          Robert Hayden’s defense of Cullen: why should a black poet be evaluated on grounds that are different from those applied to white poets

•          1930 – marriage to Nina Yolande du Bois

 

 

Cluade McKay

•          born in Jamaica in 1889

•          studies poetry early on, mostly the British patterns

•          arrives in the U.S. in 1912

•          contests the models for black identity – even those coming from Du Bois and Locke [Q]

•          1922 - his most important volume of poetry, Harlem Shadows

•          critical opinion: the volume announces the Harlem Renaissance

•          central poem ”If We Must Die” – written in response to racial riots in American cities in 1919

•          the poem establishes him as a poet of the militant stance toward the racial problem

•          in his other poems he celebrates the vibrant, sensual life of Harlem

McKay wrote “To the White Fiends” as a challenge to white oppressors and bigots. It was the 1917 version of “you got me all the way fucked up”, playing into the stereotypical fears perpetuated by white supremacy that Black people are savages.

 

 

 

Langston Hughes

-          born in Missouri

-          spends his younger years in Midwest

-          arrives in New York City in 1921 to study at Columbia

-          ”The Negro Speaks of Rivers” published in 1920

-          his poetry takes from the influence of the black music traditions: jazz and blues

-          influence of Claude McKay, Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman

-          doesn’t finish education at Columbia

-          later in life turns to prose and theater

ideas:

-          commitment to the idea of separate and independent black identity

-          advocate of racially independent culture

-          ”Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro – and beautiful” (in ”The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) [Q]

 

 

Differences in the concepts of how to write the poetry of Black cultural identity:

Countee Cullen:

Style and Form: Cullen often employed traditional poetic forms and structures. His poetry was characterized by meticulous craftsmanship, formal elegance, and a sophisticated use of language.

Cultural Dualism: Cullen's work sometimes explored the tension between his African American heritage and the influence of European literary traditions. He grappled with themes of racial identity and cultural dualism.

Claude McKay:

Versatility and Themes: McKay was known for his versatility, writing both traditional and modernist poetry. His works ranged from sonnets to more politically charged and socially conscious pieces.

Social and Political Commentary: McKay's poetry often delved into issues of racial and social injustice. His work, such as the famous poem "If We Must Die," reflects a more overt engagement with political and social concerns.

Langston Hughes:

Innovative Language and Style: Hughes is often celebrated for his innovative use of language, incorporating the rhythms and idioms of African American culture into his poetry. He embraced a more colloquial and accessible style.

Celebration of Black Culture: Hughes celebrated the beauty and resilience of Black culture. His poetry frequently featured the everyday lives of Black people, their struggles, joys, and cultural expressions. He played a crucial role in portraying the diverse experiences of Black Americans.

 

Ernest Hemingway

"The Sun Also Rises" (1926):

Lost Generation: Hemingway, like the characters in this novel, was a part of the Lost Generation—those who came of age during World War I and were disillusioned by the impact of the war. The characters grapple with a sense of aimlessness and the search for meaning in a post-war world.

"A Farewell to Arms" (1929):

World War I Service: Hemingway served as an ambulance driver during World War I, and his experiences influenced the depiction of war in this novel. The protagonist's wartime experiences reflect Hemingway's own, and the novel explores the impact of war on individuals and relationships.

"For Whom the Bell Tolls" (1940):

Spanish Civil War: Hemingway reported on the Spanish Civil War as a journalist, and these experiences informed the setting and themes of the novel. The story follows an American dynamiter fighting for the Republicans, reflecting the complexities of war and the struggles for justice.

Overall Motifs:

Minimalist Prose Style: Hemingway's life in journalism and his desire for precision and simplicity in writing are evident in his prose style. He favored short sentences and sparse descriptions, often leaving much unsaid, allowing readers to infer emotions and meanings.

Themes of Love and Loss: Hemingway's relationships, particularly his four marriages, influenced the themes of love and loss in his works. The tragic aspects of love and the impact of personal relationships on individuals are recurring motifs.

Adventurous Lifestyle: Hemingway's adventurous life, including experiences in bullfighting, big-game hunting, and deep-sea fishing, is mirrored in his characters' pursuits of adventure and challenges. His love for outdoor activities and the thrill of danger often feature prominently in his works.

 

 

Main themes and ideas:

•          stylistic clarity, discipline, (stylistic influences: journalism, imagism)

•          modernity/imagism – through stylistic discipline to self-discipline in confronting life’s emptiness

•          stance of dignity, courage, self-honesty in the face of life’s brutality

•          existential stance of confronting nothingness in post-religious world

•          writing as an exercise in self-discipline

•          to get to the ”truth” of the emotional and physical experience

•          affirmation of the immediate physical experience

•          battling a sense of loss and danger

•          masculinity: its portrayal and crisis

 

”There was no grass beside the road. Looking back we could see the country spread out below. Far back the fields were squares of green and brown on the hillsides. Making the horizon were the brown mountains. They were strangely shaped. As we climbed higher the horizon kept changing. As the bus ground slowly up the road we could see other mountains coming up in the south. Then the road came over the crest, flattened out, and went into a forest.” (from The Sun Also Rises)

 

”Big Two-Hearted River”

 

Ernest Hemingway's journalistic experience, including his collaboration with Esquire magazine, significantly shaped his writing style. His journalism background emphasized clarity, simplicity, and attention to detail, influencing his novels and short stories. The focus on authentic dialogue and realism in his literary works can be traced back to his experience as a journalist.

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald's major novels embody a symmetrical shift between the 1920s and the 1930s. "The Great Gatsby" reflects the excesses of the Jazz Age, while "Tender Is the Night" and "The Last Tycoon" depict the cultural and personal crises of the Great Depression era. This symmetry mirrors Fitzgerald's own life, transitioning from a period of conspicuous consumption to one marked by challenges and disillusionment.

Main themes:

•          the doubleness within the American dream

•          the mixture of idealism and materiality

•          infatuation with the gaudiness of the age of luxury

•          ”historian of the jazz age”

•          capturing the moment of the growing wealth of American society

•          recording the excess of that age, conspicuous consumption and crisis

•          the same pattern reflected in Fitzgerald’s biography: the crisis of the 30’s as a price for overcostly living in the 20’s

•          auto-biographical themes: reconning with one’s own infatuations with wealth and luxury

The Great Gatsby: main themes and ideas:

•          main plot and story: life of a simple American who pursues the path of self-making and is destroyed by the discrepancy between his idealism and by the rigidity of class divisions within American society

•          compared to Theodor Dreiser’s Sister Carrie – the question of the relations to the naturalistic pattern (how far is the main hero self-defined and how much is he overdetermined)

•          GG – not a naturalistic social novel

•          life on the edge (jazz age), forgetting the war, living with a ”presentiment of disaster”

•          the comparison between various characters, representing various social classes and life choices

Gatsby as a character

•          from James Gatz to Jay Gatsby

•          born to a poor family, adventurous career of self making, morally careless acquisition of money in a society that worships money

•          modelled on traditional patterns of American liberal individualism (Benjamin Franklin)

•          mixture of brutishness, idealism, ”appalling sentimentality” imaginative excess, ”capacity for wonder”, ”some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life”

•          what is the American dream: the question of American vitality/vitalism (Gatsby as a character who wants to be bigger than the defining material circumstances)

•          the connection between the narrator (Nick Carraway), the protagonist (Gatsby), and the author: moral imagination within a society of rigid social structure; the theme of resistance to this rigidity

the Buchanans

•          the moneyed class (inherited wealth and social privilege)

•          moral complacency and irresponsibility

•          Tom Buchanan: a mixture of obtuseness and skillful manipulation of others

•          opposition to Gatsby: Tom represents the brutish materiality ingrained in American history

•          Tom always gets what he wants because of his position in the social lader

•          capacity to survive

•          Tom and Daisy avoid the responsibility for causing the car accident, use Gatsby as scapegoat, and move on with their life

Nick Carraway

•          Fitzgerald’s alter ego (but so is Gatsby)

•          the significance  of his name (”get carried away”)

•          a way of distancing himself from his own experience

•          a way of finding an objectifying lens on the story with which Fitzgerald himself is emotionally involved

•          his relation to Gatsby: mixture of awe, attraction, respect, but also revulsion

•          Nick Carraway is considered an unreliable narrator in "The Great Gatsby" due to his personal involvement in the story, biases, moral judgments, selective memory, idealization of certain characters, social class influences, and the presence of ambiguity and irony in his narrative. These factors contribute to a subjective portrayal of events and characters, raising questions about the accuracy and completeness of his storytelling.

the Wilsons

•          Myrtle and George Wilson

•          the working class

•          alienated from the American dream

•          George is spiritually broken

•          Myrtle (Tom’s lover) and her dream of social advancement

style and narrative structure

•          language: rich, elegant, crafted

•          style corresponds to the cultural risk of the rich America: the problem of style over substance

•          modernist craft and psychological insight from Henry James

•          fragmented way of telling the protagonist’s main story

•          many different characters provide the reader with info on Gatsby

cultural significance

•          early reception not favorable: H. L. Mencken: ”[GG] no more than a glorified anecdote”

•          Lionel Trilling (1950’s): Gatsby will lose his magnetism

•          numerous film adaptations

•          recurring story of the cycle of exuberant, reckless growth and crisis

•          in this, the critique of the American capitalism

•          the most recent adaptation (2013): emphasizes the gaudy, glossy, grotesque side of the America from before the 2008 financial crash

•          Baz Luhrmann’s „The Great Gatsby” is lurid, glamorous, trashy, tasteless, seductive, sentimental, aloof and artificial. It’s an excellent adaptation, in other words of Fitzgerald’s… American classic” (from a review)

•          the novel as interpreted by the most recent adaptation – about infatuation with dreaming itself; America as a state of always insatiable mind

It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.

…five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York—every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves.

…face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

^Цитаты из гэтсби понимайте как хотите

 

William Faulkner

Main themes:

•          place, locality, closed universe of a small community (Yoknapatawpha county, modelled on Faulkner’s Lafayette county)

•          the local/particular vs. the universal/mythological

•          the individual determined by history, psychology (instincts), culture/tradition

•          Confrontation with history: of one’s own family and communal

•          History as entrapment and the act of telling the story as an attempt to be liberated from it

•          Recreation of experience, reconnection to experience

•          world explanation through story-telling, effort to find words to tell the story

•          repetition, revision, reliving of the events: multiple narrators telling the story of one person or one event

•          recuperating the dignity and humanity of the old South

•          the South: tradition, history, psychology

•          Civil War and its memory: the need to recreate the region, to go through change

•          changing economic realities

•          cultural identity of the South

•          the device of ”incessant talking” as insight into problems of the South:

•          racial problems of the past (slavery) and present (racial prejudice)

•          class problems – poverty

•          social caste problems (the rooted ”aristocracy” of the place and the shiftless newcomers)

•          ”moral function of the novel” in ”moral seriousness of the form” (Ralph Ellison)

The Sound and the Fury (1929)

•          Four narrators telling the story that revolves around a girl, Caddie, who is a central, yet absent character

•          Benjy – mentally handicapped, his need for shelter and home;

•          fragmentation signifying loss

•          primal proximity of the world, primal openness to the world

•          most objective and direct images of the sister

•          Quentin – closed in his own obsessions and desires, desperate search for order:

•          fear of time – both past and future

•          the South and its imprisonment in time (the present as repetition of the past)

•          Jason – limited through his materialism, need to blame others

•          4^th narrator: traditional omniscient narration

•          the point of this composition: trying to reach to the sister (Caddie – ”the absent presence”)

As I Lay Dying (1930)

•          the story of the death of Addie Bundren told by fifteen narrators, both her own family and other people

•          the central event is Addie’s death and the attempts of her family to transport the coffin to the forty-mile distant Jefferson

•          linearity of the main story contrasts with the much less coherent internal lives of the narrators

•          the mythical quality of the effort by the family to transport the coffin despite the elements

Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

•          story of Thomas Sutpen, born in West Virginia, who moves to the South, intent on founding his own plantation empire

•          several narrators: Quentin Compson, Quentin’s father, Rosa Coldfield

•          non-chronological narration uncovers complex family past racial prejudice of the protagonist

•          The subsequent tellings reveal more about the biases of the narrators than about the main plot

•          narratives are strategies of evasion and self-justification: the narrators interpret events in ways that are convenient to their world-views

 

 

Examples of stylistic/narratorial technique:

- from As I Lay Dying – the way a child character’s consciousness deals with the dramatic experience of death and conceptualizes death through some primal symbolic mechanism (“my mother is a fish”); how is the individual connected with the more general/cultural in

the portrayal of this character (how does the boy’s psychology deal with the traumatic event of his mother’s death)

- from Absalom, Absalom! – the double movement of Faulkner’s long sentence – a push forward in preparation to hear the story (in one of the characters, Quentin Compson, who will also later be a commentator of the main story-line) counteracted with a strong pull backward in time connected with another character’s imprisonment in time, history, and memory

- from “The Bear” – on the way in which the character “knows” his region: this knowledge is pre-conscious, running it the deep psychological space of the unconscious

 

 

 

Women writers in the early 20th c.

Background:

•         1820 – 1930 – 42 million immigrants in the US

•         economic, social, demographic expansion West

•         growth of wealth in big cities of the West

•         changing role of women, radicalism of ”the new woman”

•         ”On the New Woman” (1898), a satirical sketch that illustrates the social change

•         the development of this phenomenon: from 1880’s to the 1920’s (Jazz Age)

•         demystification of the ”fair sex”

•         conscious, rational choice of self-development beyond convention (individualism)

•         choice for making one’s own living outside family or marriage (away from the domestic literature)

•         the woman’s modernity: individuality and creativity accessible to women

•         beyond the duality model of the ”outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions” (Kate Chopin)

Kate Chopin

 The Awakening (1899)

•         the main character, Edna Pontellier, discovers her inner passions and needs, and, unable to realize them within the confines of her social milieu, commits suicide by drowning

•         refuses to tolerate the duality of the inner need and social convention

•         realist observation in the service of embodied, sensual consciousness

•         the novel refuses to judge the heroine for taking control of her life

•         [a tendency in naturalist fiction: the main character commits suicide:

•         The Awakening

•         Martin Eden (by Jack London)

•         House of Mirth (by Edith Wharton)]

 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

”The Yellow Wallpaper”

•         woman’s creativity

•         psychological condition of the creative married woman

•         health, body, diet, gender problem: how to treat women’s intellectual activity

•         and intellectual life – its accessibility for women

•         writing and feminist awareness

•         the story was first rejected by Atlantic Monthly

•         published in New England Magazine (1892)

•         Gilman became better known in her lifetime for her work in sociology (Women in Economics, 1898)

Edith Wharton

-          born 1862, New York, wealthy family, placed in the social hierarchy of the New Your city leisured class

-          1860’s/70’s – the family travels in Europe; receives education from hired tutors; fluent in French, Italian, German

-          1885 marries a man 13 years old her senior (divorces him in 1913)

-          late 1890’s – decides to devote herself to writing; lives in Paris after her divorce

-          themes: social convention and the woman’s capacity for self-realization in the conservative higher social class; possibilities of rebellion, inner conservatism

-          The Writing of Fiction (1925) – her artistic, aesthetic debt to H. James

-          The House of Mirth (1905) –

-          popular success

-          the limitations of a woman in upper class – between imaginative and social needs (complexity of the character: following a societal instruction vs. a wish to rebel)

-          similarities to Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (both women compromise their morality to break beyond their class limitations)

-          the heroine (Lily Bart) dies from overdose of a sedative (a shocking ending to readers of the day)

-          Ethan Frome (1911) --

-          a naturalist broken family story set in New England

-          sacrifice and hardship stronger than unrealized dreams

-          The Age of Innocence (1920) --

-          love story between a man (Newland Archer) and a woman (countess Ellen Olenska) divided by social convention

-          they are able to recognize their limitations and appreciate and respect their mutual choices

-          they realize they can only love each other if they give up on the relationship

Willa Cather

-          born in Virginia, moves with her family to Nebraska in 1883

-          lives on a frontier farm in Nebraska

-          family moves to a small Nebraska town

-          Lincoln, Nebraska (U of N)

-          moves to the East, writes stories for a Journal, works as a journalist (McClure’s Magazine)

-          her best novels are results of trips from New York to the South and the Midwest (regions on the frontier not so long ago)

-          she finds her material in the early life experience

-          themes: women in frontier regions

-          the relations to the land and its energies

-          the female character as embodiment of the land, its energies, cycles and moods

-          My Ántonia (1915) – after a trip back to Nebraska

-          the story of a woman, Antonia Shimerda (Czech descent), told by a male narrator (Jim Burden)

-          an American pastoral contrast between the male narrator’s mythologizing of the heroine and the mundane side of her life

-          the woman stands for strength against the weaknesses of the male narrator (his praise for her is a form of confession)

-          her life is one of dignity and fortitude within hardship

-          part of a larger social unit

-          natural rhythms – the narrator is already alienated from them

-          the role of women in the making of the West

-          romance, nostalgia, myth – vs. the realism of life in the rural West

 

Ellen Glasgow

•         born in Richmond Virginia

•         mother’s affection vs. father’s cold, Calvinist personality (”rock-ribbed with Calvinism”)

•         ”Everything in me, mental and physical, I owe to my mother”

•         her debt to her father: determination to succeed

•         the sentimental traditions of the antebellum South

•         participates in the women’s suffrage movement of the early 1900’s

•         considered one of the founders of realism in the literature of the South

•         considered a link between the Reconstruction and the Southern Renaissance

•         first novel, The Descendant (1897) published anonymously, shocking to the public for the use of ”vulgar” language

“Barren Ground”

•         published 1920

•         heroine, Dorinda Oakley, is betrayed and forsaken by a man she loves

•         suffers poverty

•         decides to fight back to have her own life path restores a declining family farm

•         the question of the land’s fertility: Dorinda restores it

•         male-female relations: she is ”finished with all that”

•         the life choice of hard work and fortitude: she gets close to the ”spirit of the land” for the price of individual emotional life

 

Realism in the American novel after WWII

Social backgrounds and challenges:

•         The growing American affluence

•         the US as the creditor of Europe

•         the growth of American suburbia

•         The ”present absence” of WWII memories

•         the A bomb and the death camps as distant (?) realities

•         Social homogeneity of the 50’s and its pressures

•         emphasis on traditional gender roles

•         repressed racial problem

•         The beginnings of Cold War (later the threat of nuclear destruction)

•         Decreasing transparency of American politics both domestic and foreign

Norman Mailer: introductory ideas

•         undermining the stable, rational,  social and racial sense of class

•         exposing the conflicts:

•         racial: ”The White Negro”

•         class: critique of the sterility of middle class

•         gender: hidden misogyny, male/female as opposed elements/forces

•         exposing the underlying fascist or totalitarian tendencies in American life

•         flirt with violence – violence as a way of examining the pieties of social appeasement

•         turning to his own self and his own crisis for material

•         Expanding the formal scope of the novel: essay, journalism, autobiography

Mailer: selected titles

•         The Naked and the Dead

•         war as inhuman machine

•         "The White Negro”

•         personal problems (with drugs) and the homogenizing pressures of the social life

•         flirt with violence, critique of Eisenhower era liberalism

•         testing and provoking the racial difference

•         the ”hipster” is a self-maker against convention, an existential rebel out against the homogenizing pressures of society

•         ”The Man Who Studies Yoga”

•         criticism of middle-class sterilizing effect on the writer

•         Advertisements for Myself

•         how to turn personal and creative crisis into a theme for a literary work (celebrity culture)

•         similar gestures by other writers of the Times: R. Lowell and J. Baldwin

•         searching for the idea of the ”hero” (Hemingway influence)

•         form: novel, autobiography, essay, fact/fiction

•         daring, risky experiments with gender roles – sex and violence

 

 

Saul Bellow

•         confronting the growing chaos in American culture

•         the individual crisis vs. the public culture

•         Intellectual, cultural, philosophical heritage in confrontation with a disintegrating reality

•         Novels of ideas (Dangling Man) – ideas as a bulwark against existential angst

•         Intellectual comedy: intellectual characters in confrontation with highly non-intellectual, violent, incoherent reality

•         male/female relations

•         National Book Award (1953, 1970)

•         Pulitzer Prize (1976)

•         1976 – Nobel Prize

“Herzog” –

•         study of a personal crisis of the protagonist (an aging intellectual)

•         effort to maintain one’s intellectual and psychological integrity amidst personal/public pressures and crises

•         novel of a state of mind (not of action)

•         Bellow works with some of his biographical themes: confronting oneself, one’s identity, the writer’s problematic attitude toward women, his growing conservatism

•         Hatred, being hurt, as forms of Energy [Q 252]

•         The influence of Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Montaigne

•         the protagonist’s ”letters” to the world: a method of portraying eroding sanity but also of introducing ideas

•         The theme of not surrendering one’s sense of integrity, of one’s past, personality, character

“Humboldt’s Gift”:

-          problem of the artistic debt to others [Q 261]

-          biographical element – relations to the poet Delmore Schwartz

-          artistic and intellectual personality coping with pressures of dynamic, incoherent, post-war reality

-          changing material realities of producing art in the US

-          intellectual comedy

-          tension between ideas and mundane, down to earth life

-          vitalist return to everydayness

 

J. D. Salinger

•         Catcher in the Rye (1951)

•         Holden Caulfield – a modern day Huck Finn. While Holden Caulfield and Huck Finn share some common characteristics as young protagonists navigating the challenges of adolescence, there are key differences in their socioeconomic backgrounds, educational experiences, and family dynamics. Holden is a middle-class student troubled by alienation, while Huck, an orphan with a lower socioeconomic status, faces a different set of challenges, including a lack of formal education. These distinctions shape their individual journeys and the lenses through which they view the world.

•         Premonition of the dissatisfaction with the limitations and hypocrisies of the American ”affluent society” of the 1950’s

•         Nine Stories (1953)

•         Franny and Zooey (1961)

•         Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963)

•         Franny, Zooey, Seymour – eccentric individualists of the Glass family

•         The writers withdraws from society in 1960’s

 

 

Poetry in mid-20th c.

Background situation of poetry after WWII:

•         realist poetry of the war: Randall Jarell

•         use of dream, archetype, mythology: W. H. Auden, R. Jarell, W. S. Merwin

•         dominance of T. S. Eliot’s ideas about poetry

•         New Criticism – academic formula of poetry that dominates in the 40’s and 50’s

•         Reactions against academic establishment poetry in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s:

•         Beat poets (50’s, 60’s): Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti

•         Black Mountain poets (50’s): Charles Olson, Robert Creeley

•         San Francisco Renaissance (40’s, 50’s): Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser

•         New York (1st generation, 50’s, 60’s): John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler

•         Confessional poetry – a style that evolves away from Eliot’s ideas, but remains partly ”academic”

•         Confessional poetry is a poetic style that emerged in the mid-20th century, characterized by the intimate and personal revelations of the poet. The term "confessional" suggests that the poetry often delves into the poet's own experiences, emotions, and personal struggles. This genre is known for its candid and sometimes raw exploration of the poet's inner life, including topics such as relationships, mental health, and identity.

•         New Criticism:

•         academic continuation of High Modernism

•         Academic formula evolved from the ideas of Eliot, Leavis, I. A. Richards

•         The influence of Eliot (historical erudition and form, impersonality in creation), F. R. Leavis (liberal humanism), I. A. Richards (scientific approach to language)

•         Cleanth Brooks’s ”well-wrought urn”

•         Brooks: ”the heresy of paraphrase”, the form of the poem is in its coherence

•         William Empson: form is a resolution of ambiguities

•         John C. Ransom: the poem reflects coherent hierarchies of society

•         Allen Tate: ”good poem [is] a piece of craftsmanship, intelligible or cognitive object”

•         Wimsatt and Beardsley: ”intentional fallacy” and ”affective fallacy”

•         Wimsatt/Beardsley: poem is a ”a verbal icon”

 

Robert Lowell

•          born in Boston, in a family whose traditions go back to the Puritan period

•          began as a poet under the tutelage and guidance of New Criticism authorities (Allen Tate)

•          Early poetry under the influence of Milton (complex rhetoric), but also the aesthetic ideas of Allen Tate

•          Rebels against his father and looks for sources of authority; converts to Catholicism

•          Lord Weary’s Castle (1946; Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1947):

•          serious themes in symbolic treatments

•          National history and religiousness

•          complex, rhetorical, mostly impersonal style

 

Confessional poetry

•          Rebellion against the idea of impersonality and return to the personal:

–        family (family problems, childhood, relations to parents, portraits of other relatives)

–        psychological crises and breakdowns, private and social taboos,

–        marriage problems, crises, betrayals,

–        the presence and importance of the bodily dimension

•          The aesthetic task of confessional poetry

–        distance to one’s experience found in craft

•          Representatives:

–        Robert Lowell (Life Studies 1959, Notebook 1969, The Dolphin 1973, History 1973)

–        W. D. Snodgrass (Heart’s Needle 1957)

–        John Berryman (The Dream Songs 1969, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet)

–        Elizabeth Bishop (Questions of Travel 1965, Geography III 1976, The Complete Poems 1983)

–        Sylvia Plath (Ariel 1965, 2004, The Bell Jar 1963)

–        Anne Sexton (All My Pretty Ones 1962)

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath's "Ariel" is a significant collection of poems that showcases her artistic prowess and mastery of confessional poetry. The poems delve into themes of feminism, identity, and mental health, offering a deeply personal exploration of Plath's experiences. The collection is characterized by intense imagery, vivid language, and powerful symbolism, contributing to its lasting impact on the world of poetry. "Ariel" stands as a testament to Plath's unique voice and her ability to convey complex emotions through her art.

 

 

Elizabeth Bishop

Начало формы 

 

Richard Wright

•          Native Son (1940)

•          white society’s complicity in the criminalization of the novel’s protagonist, Bigger Thomas (the protagonist kills a white woman and rapes his girlfriend)

•          his actions – fulfilling a prescribed scenario

”The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever. No matter how much qualifying the book might later need, it made impossible a repetition of the old lies. In all its crudeness, melodrama, and claustrophobia of vision, Richard Wright’s novel brought out into the open, as no one ever had before, the hatred, fear, and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our culture.” (These thoughts were echoed in Barack Obama’s speech on race.)

(Irving Howe, ”Black Boys and Native Sons”, 1963)

James Baldwin

-          novelist, essayist, playwright, script writer

-          born in Harlem, grew up there, witnessed Harlem social riots

-          harsh relationship with his step-father (a Baptist preacher)

-          stepfather: a person destroyed by his own bitterness evolved from experiencing social injustice

-          in his essays and novels often connected the personal/individual experience with its larger social significance

-          Notes of a Native Son (1955) – essays

-          diagnosed the condition of various social discriminations and exclusions in American society:

•          racial

•          sexual

-          lived in Europe, after emigrating from the U.S. in 1948 (France, Switzerland)

Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

•          autobiographical elements

•          personal experience of various exclusions and discriminations and their symbolic meanings

•          the protagonist is rejected by the stepfather (tagged as ”ugly”)

•          problems of faith, religious conversion – father’s anger mixed with preacher’s talent

•          relation between faith and the bodily experience of religion – religion is sensed, sensual

•          the definition of the racial struggle in terms of the biblical moral struggle of good vs. evil

•          style of the novel: the persisting spirit of zealous evangelism

•          anatomy of Black pain, rage, dissatisfaction with American society

•          anatomy of du Bois’s ”double consciousness”

”Everybody’s Protest Novel” (in Notes of a Native Son) –

critique of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Native Son for not paying attention to the authentic experience of being black in America

•          Uncle Tom’s Cabin – sentimental Christian piety

•          Wright’s The Native Son – simple reversal of Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s sentimentality

”Black Boy Looks at the White Boy” (a different essay published in Esquire in 1961)

•          critique against Norman Mailer’s stereotyping the black man as the model of sexual virility

•          Mailer’s writing: a fantasy of male Negro sexuality

“I think that I know something about American masculinity which most men of my generation do not know because they have not been menaced by it in the way that I have been. It is still true, alas, that to be an American Negro male is also to be a kind of walking phallic symbol: which means that one pays, in one’s own personality, for the sexual insecurity of others. The relationship, therefore, of a black boy to a white boy is a very complex thing.”

Ralph Ellison

•          born in Oklahoma, moved to Alabama

•          educated in segregated school system

•          attended black college of Tuskegee in Alabama (studied music, played the trumpet)

•          close to blues and jazz cultural developments of the 30’s

•          early experience in the South: ”the signs and symbols that marked the dividing lines of segregation”

•          meets Richard Wright in NYC in the 30’s

•          Shadow and Act (1964) (litereary essays)

•          one of the essays -- ”The World and the Jug”: ”Wright was no spiritual father of mine…”

 

Invisible Man (1952)

•          a variation on the bildungsroman model

•          picaresque, epic novel

•          story line: a young black man trying to advance in life tries various alliances with various social groups, various forms of self-identifications

•          always finds forms of abuse, discrimination, exploitation

•          encounters forms of the phoniness of adult, organized, social and political life

•          ends up in self-imposed exclusion (living in a cellar in the sewers)

•          a tale of moving away from stable identity (modification of the bildungsroman pattern): identity is an improvisation

•          problems with reception: Ellison did not want it to be read as only a novel about the black experience of exclusions and discrimination

•          Irving Howe’s criticism of both Ellison and Baldwin for not taking up the more politically oppositional stance

major themes and plot structure of Invisible Man:

•          the theme of identity creation in Invisible Man

•          identity as an improvised experiment

•          race – a fiction used and abused by social manipulators

•          identity is a cultural product – created, not determined by biological data

•          the protagonist in the novel – doesn’t have any clear identity – he is an object of others’ manipulation

•          reversed Bildungsroman: the novel about unmaking of identity or imposed identities

•          mockery of social formulas of respectability: racial, corporate, communist, middle class, working class, liberal

•          styles in the novel: wordplay, satire, ideological burlesque, realistic detail

 

Postmodern fiction (self-reflexive fiction)

Postmodernism in American prose – general social and cultural contexts:

•          sense of a break, or breach, in the coherence of American reality

•          the assassination of JFK as the end of the era of social consensus

•          beyond the realism and reality-recreation of the ”silent generation” (Mailer, Bellow, Salinger)

•          pressing need to come to terms with the realities of wars and rethink the connection between politicians and society

•          diversification of literary audiences beyond the sophistication of the High Modernism

Postmodernism in American prose – literary contexts:

•          increased awareness of the novel (and poetry too) as form

•          renewed interest in the beginnings of the novel as form (Cervantes, Sterne, Fielding, Diderot)

•          revaluation of the novel as a digressive capacious form including a multitude of voices and perspectives

•          growing interest in the research of Mikhail Bakhtin and his terms heteroglossia and dialogic form (the novel as dialogic form)

•          relation between literature and linguistic theory (Derrida, R. Barthes)

•          dominance of ”language”: he novel as ”language” (Ihab Hassan, William Gass)

•          experimental rethinking of all other elements of the novel: plot, character

•          self-reflexive fiction: the novel and its experimental extremes: death of the novel

•          the ”exhaustion” of the forms of High Modernism –

•          Donald Barthelme, ”After Joyce” (1964)

•          ”the death of the novel” thesis (a group of critics)

•          John Barth, ”The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967)

•          John Barth, ”Literature of Replenishment” (1980)

•          the significance of international late modernist writers:

•          Samuel Beckett

•          Jorge Luis Borges

•          Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov

•          Russian born, Came to the US in (1940), Taught at Cornell (1948-59)

•          Lolita (1955)

•          morally complex story in excessively rich language

•          Form: linguistic excess, artifice of the plot

•          Pale Fire (1962)

•          an introduction, a poem, a commentary to the poem

•          Three components, two voices, the question of the wholeness of this novel

"Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov is often classified as a late-modernist novel due to its complex narrative structure, linguistic experimentation, and thematic exploration. The intricate storytelling, unreliable narration, and linguistic virtuosity contribute to the novel's status as a representative work of late-modernist literature. Nabokov's exploration of subjectivity and the challenging nature of the narrative align with the characteristics of the late-modernist literary movement.

"Pale Fire" by Vladimir Nabokov features an experimental structure characterized by a unique combination of poetry and commentary. The novel unfolds through a 999-line poem written by the fictional poet John Shade, followed by an extensive and unreliable commentary from Charles Kinbote, a neighbor of Shade. This intricate narrative structure adds layers of complexity, requiring readers to navigate between the perspectives of the characters and the interplay of fiction and reality. The result is a rich and challenging work that showcases Nabokov's mastery of literary experimentation.

John Barth

•          Floating Opera (1956) – existentialist approaches

•          ”Literature of Exhaustion” (1967) – a manifesto of the form of the postmodern novel

•          ”The Literature of Replenishment” (1980)

•          Lost in the Funhouse (1968)

•          Chimera (1972) – using archetypal/mythical patterns of story-telling to ”replenish” the art of the narrative

The literature of exhaustion refers to a state in which traditional narrative forms, conventions, and storytelling techniques are perceived as worn out or depleted. Writers, according to Barth, had exhausted the possibilities of conventional storytelling, leading to a need for innovation and reevaluation of narrative approaches.

"Lost in the Funhouse" by John Barth exemplifies self-reflexive fiction or metafiction. The story is characterized by a heightened narrative awareness, featuring direct addresses to the reader and a deliberate exploration of the storytelling process. Through various narrative devices, Barth disrupts traditional literary forms, inviting readers to reflect on the artificiality of the narrative and the relationship between the author, the narrative, and the audience. Themes of identity, self-awareness, and the interplay between reality and fiction are woven into the story, making it a playful and experimental exploration of the boundaries of traditional storytelling.

”He being by vocation an author of novels and stories, it was perhaps inevitable that  that one afternoon the possibility  would occur to the writer of the these lines that his own life might be a fiction, on which he was the leading  or an accessory character”