American Literature

Course OutlineAmerican PoetryAmerican Comic BookLiterature of Colonial AmericanAmerican RomanticismAmerican RealismAmerican NaturalismImagismModern Before 1945Postwar Realism in FictionBeat GenerationSouthern LiteratureBlack LiteratureAmerican Drama

American Poetry

American PoetryThe poetry of the United States, arose first as efforts by colonists to add their voices to English poetry in the 17th century, well before the constitutional unification of the thirteen colonies (although before this unification, a strong oral tradition often likened to poetry existed among Native American societies).

Unsurprisingly, most of the early colonists' work relied on contemporary British models of poetic form, diction, and theme. However, in the 19th century, a distinctive American idiom began to emerge. By the later part of that century, when Walt Whitman was winning an enthusiastic audience abroad, poets from the United States had begun to take their place at the forefront of the English-language avant-garde.

The history of American poetry is not easy to know. Much of the American poetry published between 1910 and 1945 remains lost in the pages of small circulation political periodicals, particularly the ones on the far left, destroyed by librarians during the 1950s McCarthy era.[2] The received narrative of Modernism proposes that Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot were perhaps the most influential modernist English-language poets in the period during World War I.[3]

But this narrative leaves out African American and women poets who were published and read widely in the first half of the twentieth century. By the 1960s, the young poets of the British Poetry Revival looked to their American contemporaries and predecessors as models for the kind of poetry they wanted to write.

Toward the end of the millennium, consideration of American poetry had diversified, as scholars placed an increased emphasis on poetry by women, African Americans, Hispanics, Chicanos and other cultural groupings.

American Comic BookAn American comic book is a thin periodical containing primarily comics content.While the form originated in 1933, American comic books first gained popularity after the 1938 publication of Action Comics, which included the debut of the superhero Superman. This was followed by a superhero boom that lasted until the end of World War II

After the war, while superheroes were marginalized, the comic book industry rapidly expanded, and genres such as horror, crime and romance became popular. The 1950s saw a gradual decline, due especially to new censorship laws and the spread of television.

The 1960s saw a superhero revival, and superheroes continue to be the dominant character archetype into the 21st century today.Since the later 20th century, comic books have gained note as collectable items.

Comic shops cater to fans, and particularly valuable issues have fetched in excess of a million dollars. Systems of grading comic books have emerged, and plastic bags and backing boards are available to maintain the comic books' condition.

Course DescriptionThis course will survey American literature from the Colonial period to the Post-World War II period. Readings will include poems, novels, essays, autobiographies, short stories, and philosophical writings, originating in different regions and social settings across the country.

Some works are chosen from their historical importance, others for their aesthetic virtues. Taken as a whole, they form a rich collection of imaginative and critical writings.

Our goal will be to analyze these works as diverse representations of American experience, ideas, and values. As it is created, literature in its widest sense can function as moral instruction, personal expression, and casual entertainment.

Much classroom discussion will involve close textual commentary upon the assigned works.

Literature of Colonial American

The first American literature was neither American nor really literature. It was not American because it was the work mainly of immigrants from England. It was not literature as we know it---- in the form of poetry, essay, or fiction---- but rather an interesting mixture of travel accounts and religious writings

Benjamin Franklin(1706-1790)

An inventor, scientist, printer, political statesman, diplomat, exemplary self-made man,revolutionary hero, author.

---- Having faith in human accomplishment and progress

---- Believing that an individual with industry and thrift will improve himself and his community, a self-mad man and an archetypal American success story that has since become part of American popular culture

---- Almost the first example of achieving the American Dream

Philip Freneau(1752-1832)

A forerunner of American Romanticism or a transitional figure towards Romanticism.

A lyrical lament for the mutability of nature and an expression of faith in mans ability to learn universal truths from nature. An indirect eulogy of America predicting Whitman.

Wild Honeysuckle

American Romanticism (1815-1865)

Learning Points

Distinct Features

Representatives

Conclusion

Distinct FeaturesAmerican Romanticism is in a way derivative.American Romanticism is in essence the expression of a real new experience and contains an alien quality for the simple reason that the spirit of the place is radically new and alien.3. Different from their European counterparts, American Romanticism tended to moralize, to edify rather than to entertain. It presented an entirely new experience alien to European culture.

RepresentativesHenry Wadsworth LongfellowWashington IrvingRalph Waldo EmersonHenry David ThoreauNathaniel HawthorneEdgar Allan PoeHerman Melville Walt Whitman Emily Elizabeth DickinsonJames Fenimore Cooper

Conclusion

imaginationsensibility and tuition over reasonprimitivismlove of naturesympathetic interest in the pastmysticismindividualism

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow(1807-1882)

The Secret of the SeaAh! what pleasant visions haunt me As I gaze upon the sea! All the old romantic legends, All my dreams, come back to me. Sails of silk and ropes of sandal, Such as gleam in ancient lore; And the singing of the sailors, And the answer from the shore! Most of all, the Spanish ballad Haunts me oft, and tarries long, Of the noble Count Arnaldos And the sailor's mystic song. Like the long waves on a sea-beach, Where the sand as silver shines, With a soft, monotonous cadence, Flow its unrhymed lyric lines:-- Telling how the Count Arnaldos, With his hawk upon his hand, Saw a fair and stately galley, Steering onward to the land;-- How he heard the ancient helmsman Chant a song so wild and clear, That the sailing sea-bird slowly Poised upon the mast to hear,

Till his soul was full of longing, And he cried, with impulse strong,-- "Helmsman! for the love of heaven, Teach me, too, that wondrous song!" "Wouldst thou,"--so the helmsman answered, "Learn the secret of the sea? Only those who brave its dangers Comprehend its mystery!"

In each sail that skims the horizon, In each landward-blowing breeze, I behold that stately galley, Hear those mournful melodies; Till my soul is full of longing For the secret of the sea, And the heart of the great ocean Sends a thrilling pulse through me.

The Secret of the Sea

In this poem the sea symbolizes life and the moral of the poem lies in the line of Only those who brave its dangers comprehend its mystery.

William Cullen Bryant(1794-1878)

One of Americas earliest naturalist poetsThe American WordsworthTo A WaterfowlThe Poet In Self-doubt And DespairA Lonely Bird-- Flying to--Its Destination-- by PowerThe Poet-- Walking to-- Destination-- by Power too

Washington Irving(1783-1859)

Works by Washington Irving

1. Rip Van Winkle

2. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

3. The Sketch Book

Ralph Waldo Emerson(1803-1882)

Father of American literature

the dominant spirit of the age

the proponent of the American newness

Henry David Thoreau(1817-1862)

On July 4, 1845, he began living in a hut (built on Emersons land) by the Walden Pond. There he lived simply and deliberately, devoting his time to observations and reflections.Walden, or Life in the Woods

a reflection of his readings, concerns and thinking, a mixture of politics and philosophy.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

Annabel Lee

Thematically speaking, this poem not only mourns the death of a beautiful girl but also celebrates the timeless love.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

I hear America Singing

The poem presents an image of America: an image of proud and healthy individualists engaged in productive and happy labor.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (1830-1886)

There Is a Certain Slant of Light

The poem itself conveys the oppressive mood that the weather creates. With her uncommon creativity and imagination on the poet associates the winter sunlight with the image of death.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

Works by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Scarlet Letter The House of the Seven Gables3. The Blithedale Romance 4. The Marble Faun 5. Young Goodman Brown6. The Ministers Black Veil 7. The Birthmark

American Realism (1865-1910)

Learning Points

Distinct Features

Representatives

Distinct Features1.Realism is the theory of writing in which familiar aspect of contemporary life and everyday scenes are represented in a straightforward or matter-of-fact manner. 2.In realist fiction characters from all social levels are examined in depth. 3.Open ending is also a good example of the truthful treatment of material. 4.Realism focuses on commonness of the lives of the common people who are customarily ignored by the arts.

5. Realism emphasizes objectivity and offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience.6. Realism presents moral visions

Representatives

William Dean HowellsHenry JamesEdith Wharton Willa CatherO.HenryKate ChopinHarriet Beecher StoweMark Twain

Henry James (1843-1916)

Paste

This story is a subtle and profound study of human greed, hypocrisy and the betrayal of innocence. With his avoidance of the simple and direct statement, the story is full of hints, insinuations, suggestions, and implications. The Jamesian style is very well exemplified in this story.

Mark Twain(1835-1910)

The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

This story tells of a practical joke of the grimmest kind. It is successful mainly because it represents the Western humor that was extremely popular in America at that time.

American Naturalism

Learning Points

Distinct Features

Representatives

Conclusion

Distinct Features

1. Humans are controlled by laws of heredity and environment.2. The universe is cold, godless, indifferent and hostile to human desires.

Representatives

Hamlin GarlandStephen CraneFrank Norris Jack LondonTheodore DreiserSherwood AndersonSinclair Lewis Upton Sinclair

Conclusion

1.Generally speaking, American naturalists sharesimilarities in theme and technique.2. They tend to reduce to nil the human chances of winning on their own terms while realists stressfreedom of choice with large provisos concerning the power of outside forces and romantics stress the possible triumph of the human will.

Stephen Crane (1871-1900)

The Red Badge of Courage

War is seen as a force moving men ruthlessly and blindly as if they were pawns on a chessboard.

By deromanticizing war and courage, the author depicts the education of a young man in the context of struggle in alarming honesty.

Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)

Sister Carrie

On the one hand, Sister Carrie represents the image of new woman with more independence and freedom.

On the other hand, she is slave to her heredity and environment, drifting in life all the time.

Jack London (1867-1916)

The Law of Life

In the story, the old tribal leaders death is depicted both as an illustration of the natural law that all living things die and in terms of the particular psychological state of the individual facing his end.

Edwin Arlington Robinson(1869-1935)

Richard Cory

The poem tells us very directly that the heart of man is a mystery. This is his best known statement on the hollowness of conventional success.

Robert Frost(1874-1963)

The Road Not Taken

The poem itself tells us the importance of making decisions and we should be aware that decisions in life once made cannot be changed.

Imagism

Learning Points

Distinct Features

Representatives

Conclusion

What Is Imagism Movement?

Poetic movement of England and the United States, flourished from 1909-1917.

Its credo included the use of the language of common speech, precision, the creation of new rhythms, absolute freedom in choice of subject matter, the evocation of images in hard, clear poetry, and concentration.

Originated from the aesthetic philosophy of T.E. Hulme (), the movement soon attracted Ezra Pound (), who became the leader of a small group opposed to the romantic conception of poetry.

Distinct Features

1. With a spirit of revolt against conventions, Imagism was anti-romantic and anti-Victorian. 2. Imagism produced free verse without imposing a rhythmical pattern. 3. Imagism tried to record objective observations of an object or a situation without interpretation or comment by the poet.

Representatives

Ezra PoundHilda DoolittleAmy LowellWilliam Carlos Williams

Conclusion

1.The imagists poets rebelled againstconventional poetic material and forms andadvocated the direct presentation of feelings inexquisite images.2. The second lasting influence of imagism is the form of free verse.

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

In a Station of the Metro

In this brief poem, Pound uses the fewest possible words to convey an accurate image, with which he represents exactly what he observed in Paris subway. faces flowers petals

Modernism Before 1945

Learning Points

Distinct Features

Representatives

Distinct Features 1. Modernism presented discontinuity andimminent severance from the past whilemaking determined efforts to use the past, itsvalues and artistic forms by incorporating themin new literary production.2. Modernists had a sense of fragmentation insocial communities and the fragmentationwithin the individual himself. Hencefragmentation became a common theme inmodernist writing.

3. Often in presenting their theme, these writersused an anti-hero. 4. The distinctive feature of literary modernism was its strong and conscious break with traditional forms, perceptions, and techniques of expression, and its great concern with language and all aspects of its medium.

Representatives

Ernest HemingwayFrancis Scott FitzgeraldJohn Dos PassosJohn SteinbeckThomas Stearns EliotWallace Stevens

Thomas Stearns Eliot(1888-1965)

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

This poem not only presents some of Eliots central ideas but also gives startling glimpses of the unprecedented methods the poet begins to use

dramatic monologue stream-of-consciousness

Ernest Hemingway(1899-1961)

In Another Country

The story is filled with emotional overtones. Its dominant feeling is pity for misfortunes that can never be remedied.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald(1896-1940)

The Great Gatsby

The story deals symbolically with the failure of the American Dream.

Postwar Realism in Fiction

Distinct Features1. It has been a search for vision that can relate an oppressed response to society and history to an awareness of individual loneliness and moral and transcendental hunger both to differentiate and reunite the self and the society.2. Postwar realism combines the time-honored realism with the effective achievements of various literary trends, including modernism.3. Postwar realism embodies the great changes in literature along with the great changes in society. In new realistic fiction, naturalistic depiction has become very explicit and old-fashioned realism is increasingly combined with fabulism.

John Cheever(1912-1982)

The Swimmer

With a long-distance swimming as a means to link up a series of events not closely related, the author unfolds a picture of social manners and morals.

John Updike(1932-2005)

Beat Generation

Learning Points

Distinct Features

Representatives

What Is Beat Generation?

A group of American writers and artists popular in the 1950s and early 1960s, influenced by Eastern philosophy and religion and known especially for their use of nontraditional forms and their rejection of conventional social values.

Distinct Features

1. The Beats were fed up with the official explanations of why things happened .2. The Beats rejected middle class values, commercialism, and conformity.3. The Beats withdrew from politics and from the obligations of citizenship.4. The Beats rejected universities and the academic tradition.

5. The Beats evolved a free, non-materialistic religion with no formal church, but based loosely on the teaching of Buddha, comprising love, gay, and anarchy. 6. The Beats regarded modern American life as so cruel, selfish, and impersonal that writers and artists were being driven to madness.

Representatives

Allen GinsbergJack KerouacNeal CassadyGary SnyderWilliam Burroughs

Jack Kerouac(1922-1969)

On the Road

On the Road is Kerouacs representative work. The title of the novel is pun, meaning both on the road to enlightenment as the Chinese philosophy of Taoism and literally on the road as homeless, aimless wanderers.

Southern Literature

Learning Points

Distinct Features

Representatives

Distinct Features

1. A tightly knit, long established community is always powerfully presented and must be reckoned with. 2. There is the emotional, almost physical, response to the southern environment, including wind, rain, light, heat, the feel of the soil underfoot, the smell and sounds of land and river.

3. There are the accustomed patterns of speech, black and white, the intimate knowledge of characteristic body carriage and movement, the slow unemphatic drawl, the long effortless squatting silent companionship.4. There is a curious quality of leisure, often long digressions in narration such as reminiscences of earlier events slightly related to the present.

5. There is a high rhetorical quality in narration to gain oratorical effect.6. A profound consciousness of time itself is ever evident.

Representatives

Allen TateKatherine Anne PorterEudora WeltyFlannery OConnorWilliam Faulkner

Katherine Anne Porter(1890-1980)

Katherine Anne Porter is good at short stories in which describes human beings empty spiritual World and their loneliness.

Works by K. A. Porter

The Leaning TowerShip of Fools

Theft

This is Porters remarkably appealing short story. The stolen purse symbolizes all property. The theft represents the conflicts between the haves and have-nots, between men and women, between two women, between generations, and between ideals and reality.

William Faulkner(1897-1962)

A Rose for Emily

One of the themes of this story is the relation of the individual and his actions to the past, present and future.

Black Literature

Background

Black literature was once a neglected area of American literary scholarship. The rising interest in the work of Americans of African ancestry has come about mainly for two reasons:

1. Blacks have made significant contributions to all aspects of American life, esp. during and after World War II.

2. Black writers have produced literature of impressive scope and quality.

Representatives

Langston HughesAlice WalkerRichard WrightJames BaldwinRalph EllisonToni Morrison

Alice Walker(1944- )

Langston Hughes(1902-1967)

The Negro Speaks of River

In this poem, the poet uses the rivers to symbolize the soul of the Black people who create human civilization.

The strong rhythm and the use of repetition heighten the effectiveness of the verse.

Toni Morrison(1931- )

Works by Toni Morrison

The Bluest EyeSulaSong of SolomonTar BoyBeloved

American Drama

Eugene Gladstone ONeill(1888-1953)

Works by ONeill

Long Days Journey into NightThe Iceman Cometh Beyond the Horizon Emperor JonesThe Hairy Ape