US FICTION NOTES 2019-20

FROM NATIVE AMERICANS TO ANGLO PURITANS TO AMERICAN CITIZENS

1492: Discovery of the American continent (mistaken for “India”); 5 million Natives in 2.000
tribes; Inca and Aztec empires in South America
1620: First Puritans (Anglo-Dutch Protestant separatists) arrive at Plymouth Rock,
Massachusetts
1730-50s: “The Great Awakening,” Puritan revival (failed)
1830-39: Manifest Destiny, systematic persecution of the Native Americans
1890: Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee—end of NA culture in the US

18th-19th century U.S. literature traits:

a. still Europe-oriented (ReasonRomanticism)
b. rising national consciousness—local talent small, but dynamic, optimistic
c. 1861-65, Civil War
d. conformity, materialism

MOURNING DOVE
19th century Okanogan Native with white schooling; Native fiction (Cogewea novel,
Okanogan Sweat House tales) a novelty

“Owlwoman and Coyote”

NA traits:
 Love of nature, circle of life (resurrection of chipmunk, Owlwoman’s eyes)
 Identification of human-animal, anthropomorphism/zoomorphism
 Coyote as the Trickster
 Sense of good and evil; evil as self-destructive
 Didactic/entertaining/aetiological myth value
 Orature format of fable/myth: ritual repetition (“Your…wants you,” hiding spots)
 archetypal characters (Owlwoman as Terrible Mother)

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
 American Founding Father/icon, self-made success, polymath, genius publisher,
journalist, inventor, politician, abolitionist, co-author of the Declaration of Independence,
1st Postmaster General, 1st US Ambassador to France, President of Pennsylvania
 Poor Richard’s Almanack (1732-58), The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1771-
90?), essays
 The Franklinean Work Ethic

“The Way to Wealth”

 Form: Use of persona of Richard Saunders
Use of persona of “Father Abraham”
Direct “reporting” of an incident
Quotes
The ending (humor, irony)—why so?
 Civic problem (British taxes) a moral problem:
1. sloth (not overseeing/doing one’s own business)
 2. vanity, greed (spending too much to show off)
3. pride (no thankfulness or asking Heaven’s blessing)

WASHINGTON IRVING (late 18th-early 19th c.)

 US most-loved author for 50 years, essayist, historian, biographer, US delegate
in London, US Ambassador to Spain, international success
 Romantic influence, American materials (folklore, local color, regionalism,
history, “Diedrich Knickerbocker”)
 Literature as “curing the world with gentle alternatives, not by violent doses”
(preface to Tales of a Traveller, 1824):
I have often hid my moral from sight, and disguised it as much as possible by sweets
and spices, so that while the simple reader is listening with open mouth to a ghost or a
love story, he may have a bolus of sound morality popped down his throat, and be never
the wiser for the fraud…

“Rip Van Winkle”

 why embedded/framed tale?
 archetypal setting and characters:
o German folkloreU.S. tall tale, regionalism
o rural utopia in relation/contrast to Nature
o past mixed with present (tempus fugit; political changes still the same underneath;
Rip as his daughter’s “child”)
o Dame Van Winkle as Xanthippe, wife of Socrates
o Rip as anti-Franklinean, anti-hero, artist/storyteller
 Rip as reborn by Mother Nature (setting symbolism)
 TRANSCENDENTALISM

 An “Americanization” of European Romanticism

 The American bias VS the arts and the new American Scholar
 Reaction to Protestant work ethic, degrading urban modernization
 Revival of pioneer spirit (frugality, self-reliance, individual ethos over State obedience)
 1830s-40s: Transcendentalism as U.S. Romanticism
 “defiant pantheism” (Thoreau)
 Influence of Native American nature worship and Indian (Hindu) spirituality: Nature as
both physical and Over-Soul
 The Poet as philosopher/prophet/leader: “imitation is suicide”

RALPH WALDO EMERSON ((1803-82)

 Orator, essayist, “the Concord Sage”

 Founder of the Transcendental Group of Connecticut The Dial journal (1840-44,
Margaret Fuller ed.)
 Tremendous influence on Whitman, Dickinson, Fuller, Melville, Thoreau, Hawthorne,
Nietzsche, et al.
 VS Protestant dogma, but ideologically influenced (dogmatic tone, typology, VS corrupt
society)
 Great influence of Europe and the Vedas (science, philosophy)

“Thoreau” (1862)
 Eulogy for best disciple
 Attitude towards:
a. other nations/ states outside Concord, Massachusetts
b. women
c. formal education
d. the Puritan work ethic (Thoreau example)
e. the State (library example)
f. Nature: self-acquired talent as “land surveyor” better than regular society job,
education
the “naysayer” as role model
 Thoreau’s virtues: freedom from community, frugality, simplicity, independence, physical
and mental fitness (?)

What did Thoreau ultimately achieve? (final paragraph)

What is the tone of the essay?

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

 Anarchist, essayist, orator, land surveyor, abolitionist, U.S. Scholar icon
 Influence on movements of “passive resistance” Tolstoy, Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr.
 Early death of tuberculosis
 Walden, Or, Life in the Woods (1854)
 “Resistance to Civil Government/On Civil Disobedience” (1849)
VS 1845-48 Mexican-American War
Anarchy best, State/army only upon expedience
View of U.S. Government:
a. less important than single man’s will
b. imposes taxes/labor for its own advantage
c. impedes enterprise of men
d. majority ≠ justice
e. substitutes conscience
f. uses people’s bodies as tools (“serve Devil as God”)
 a slave’s government, shameful to obey it
 right and DUTY to revolution (fear, apathy, compliance make one part of the problem)
 Why is c.d. better than voting?
a. faster
b. no taxes given meanwhile (money used to corrupt)
c. more effective
d. right to vigilantism (1759)
e. freedom, obedience to a Higher Law
 Importance of setting
a. unexpected serenity
b. observation time
c. dispels fear of shame, harm
d. reveals one’s true friends
e. “Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage;
If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone that soar above
Enjoy such liberty.”
Richard Lovelace, “To Althea, from Prison”
 LATE ROMANTICISM—AMERICAN GOTHIC
(early 19th century)

 Influence of European 2nd wave Romanticism

 Critical interest in the American past—escapism

Grant Wood, “American Gothic” (1930)

NATHANIEL
HAWTHORNE
 From prominent Puritan
family of Salem,
Massachusetts,
short-story writer,
novelist, Customs
House official
 The Scarlet Letter
(1850)
 Transcendentalist influence, “Dark Romanticism”
 Much respected by fellow authors, but not too popular before SL (posthumous success)

“The Minister’s Black Veil”

 symbol of veil as mask (religious, metaphysical, psychological); gaze politics
 meaning of plot order (Mass-funeral-marriage)
 the role of Father Hooper’s “bride”
 why is Father Hooper buried with veil?
 Gender politics (effect of “feminizing” Father Hooper)

EDGAR ALLAN POE

 Family and work problems reflected in his work
 Master of the horror tale, alliterative poetry (“The Raven”, “The Bells”)
 Kantian aesthetics for poetry (beauty, not usefulness/truth)
 Theory of the short story (expanding-contracting “single sensation” in 30 minutes,
“unity of effect”)

“The Cask of Amontillado”

 psychological portrait: “punish with impunity”
negative psychology in baiting Fortunato’s descent
 symbol: Venetian carnival
Fortunato’s and Montresor’s costumes
names
family crest and credo
Amontillado
vault
` punishment
 the end: who can(not) “rest in peace”? (C/c start paragraph)
 AMERICAN HUMOR AND MINORITIES

-U.S. a multicultural (immigrant), democratic society in principle, but racism, sexism rampant
(especially in the South) in late 19th century
-Women’s suffrage (Seneca Falls Convention, July 1848 creation of N.O.W., and
abolitionism (Emancipation Proclamation 1863)
-Minority literature: different approaches, themes, ideologies, production venues

FANNY FERN (SARAH WILLIS PARTON)

-“Organic” experience of patriarchy (no money or male support as widow, 2nd bad marriage
recounted in Rose Clark, social ostracism for rebelliousness, “unwomanly” autobiography in
Ruth Hall, professional bias)
-1st woman regular columnist, highest paid, great success (Fern Leaves), suffragette (Sorosis
group), social concerns (poor, prisoners, etc.)

“A Law More Nice than Just”

-meaning of title
-hidden prohibition against homosexuals
-style reflecting alternate point of view (humor, symbolism of house vs. outside, symbolism
of “rainy day”)
-St. Paul: “men rule, so men make laws to their convenience”
-how does FF interpret exclusion of women from the public sphere?
-women enslaved in: house, clothes, manners, male gaze, male law
-what does experience of transvestitism teach?
Sexes not so different after all; Males repressed too
Comfort, freedom, health of outdoors
Performativity of gender (Judith Butler)
Androgynous gender, unisex costume works best
-relation to “Mr. Fern” (3rd husband Parton)

MARK TWAIN (SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS)

 “The Great American Novel(ist)”:
o experience before writing (orphan at 12, had to work for a living): steamboat pilot’s
apprentice (1883 Life on the Mississippi) and peripatetic journalism (1869 The
Innocents Abroad)
o Regonalism, master use of slang/colloquial/vernacular dialects
o pluck and (self-deprecating) humor
o world’s first stand-up comedian with after dinner circuit lectures, usually bawdy
o American “epic” in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)—the “American primitive”:
an absolute social and cultural outcast as the essential (transcendentalist) hero

“How to Tell a Story” (1897)

 American humor definition:
o manner of direct approach to audience
o egalitarianism (comic needs classes, witty needs ego)
o self-involvement (presentation art)
o string of incongruities and absurdities
o slurring of the point
o dropping of a studied remark (loud thought)
o pause
 Effect of black dialect in “The Golden Arm”
FROM ROMANTICISM TO REALISM

 From Victorianism to modernity:

o Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection
o Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious mind
o Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism in Das Kapital
 Socialism, communism, social Darwinism

HERMAN MELVILLE (1819-91)

 Romantic attitude VS realistic/naturalistic themes, treatment
 Aristocratic education VS orphan at 12, jobs as sailor, adventurer (1841 whaler
journey)
 Grand Shakespearian/epic style VS sailing jargon, themes
 Genius VS rebel, shunned + silenced after 1840s (“Melville Revival” in the 20th
century)
 Profound allegory, philosophy, social concern VS public outrage, horrible family man
 1st-novel prodigy VS early fall into infamy, obscurity
 friendship with Hawthorne
 Novels, novellas and short stories: Typee (1846); Moby Dick (1851); The Confidence
Man (1856); in his later years, devoted solely to poetry, with the exception of Billy
Budd, Sailor (~1891, posthumously published).

“Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853)

 Symbols: walled window
“The Tombs”
Dead Letter Office
Copying law
 “I would prefer not to”:
o Individuality
o not exactly denial, but not complicity either
o dignity (no lawbreaker)
o free will punishable/ no real “choice”
o bare (non-utilitarian) value of a human being
 Employer-employee relations:
o Other clerks
o Why does he try to help B.?
o Why guilt?
o Last words
 Critique of institutions: law, capitalism, technological progress, civilization, manliness,
religion

FREDERICK DOUGLASS (1817-95)

-escaped slave, abolitionist, activist for all human rights, author, orator, diplomat, 1st black
nominated for USA VP
-Pathfinder for Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois
-Narrative of the Life of F.D., an American Slave (1845) an instant success
“What to a slave is the 4th of July?” (1852)
-rhetorical modes:
 opening qualms about inadequacy, incompatibility (rhetorical question)
 repetitively-patterned phrase sequences, rhythm
 Biblical references (Babylon, “If I forget thee, Jerusalem”)
 gruesome images, personal testimony
 refutation (moral-humane law over logic)
 irony and rage
 contrast of parts:
 a. praise of July 4th achievement (rights to freedom, justice)
 b. unfavorable present (political hypocrisy of the “free” Christians, Fugitive Slave Act)
 LITERATURE AND THE NEW WOMAN: FROM FEMININE TO FEMALE

-The turn-of-the-century “progressive” woman:

 later or no marriage, less or no children
 more education
 new (and more) occupations
 women’s rights clubs and suffrage (Seneca Falls convention 1848)
 against “cult of True Womanhood” (domesticity, purity)
 faced opposition from traditional sexist forces of patriarchy

KATE CHOPIN (1850-1904)

-Mixed household (Acadian husband, French-Irish Catholic background)
-strong female ancestral paradigms, useful when she had to support herself and 6 children as
widow
-came to writing late as a sole source of income and therapy for harsh life (bankruptcy,
widowhood, deaths)
-Creole background as point of introduction of new female ethics, sensuality, sexuality
(scandalous)
-The Awakening (1899)—scandalous sexuality, female desire.

The Storm
 Continuation of “At the ‘Cadian Ball” (“Assuncion” reference)
 Characters and names
 Symbols:
 color white
 storm
 horse
 canned shrimp
 chinaberry yard tree
 heat and moisture
 mud
 class relations
 Plot—amoral ending? Attitude towards marriage?
 Is this an early Harlequin?

MODERNISM

• Early 20th century:

• 2 World Wars: questioning of humanitarian values (alliance with fascism—
Ezra Pound, Tomaso Marinetti)
• rise of the machine and pop culture BUT ALSO high modernism (elitist—T.S.
Eliot, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf)
• Psychoanalysis
• rejection of tradition—“Make it new” (Pound)
• experimental techniques (avant-garde VS convention) to speak the
unconscious, sense of loss/disillusionment:
• automatic writing, stream-of-consciousness (Faulkner)
 • surrealism, abstraction
• Hemingway style
• language as musical variations/mathematical formulas (Gertrude Stein)
• American expatriates in Europe, Latin America (Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest
Hemingway) VS “Home” authors (Steinbeck’s Great Depression, Faulkner’s South)
•  Turn to social issues, the voices of minorities (African-Americans, women)

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1860-1935)

Hippocrates’/Sigmund Freud’s “hysteria” and patriarchy (Silas Weir Mitchell’s “rest cure”)
Militant feminism: Women and Economics (1898), Herland (1923)

“The Yellow Wallpaper”

autobiography—why journal form?
“écriture feminine” (Hélène Cixous)
humor, parody, desire to connect to the outside→sombre, grotesque “mad,” inward language
at the end
symbols: names
husband’s job
house morphology (barred nursery attic VS flowery patio/garden)
bolted bed
journal
wallpaper pattern
the “creeping woman” (C/c Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the
Attic re: Charlotte Bronté’s Jane Eyre)
final scene: symptoms of hysteria
- meaning of open ending
 THE HARLEM AND THE SOUTHERN RENAISSANCE

RALPH ELLISON
-Tuskegee scholar (music), artist, reviewer, prose author
-Invisible Man (1952) his only major complete work
-Influenced by: Fyodor Dostoevski’s Notes from the Underground (1864)
existentialism
Richard Wright’s naturalistic Native Son (1940) and autobiographical Black Boy
(1945)
-Meaning of “invisibility”

“Battle Royal”
-meaning of Battle Royal
reversal of expectations
acts of emasculation of black manhood
seductive blonde dance
blindfolded fight
electrified rug with coins
the final speech
the boy’s act of resistance
meaning of final dream (symbols: clowns, briefcase with endless envelopes, ominous
note)

WILLIAM FAULKNER
Southern author, Nobel Prize (1949), 2 Pulitzers (1955/63)
-Oxford, Mississippi, as Yoknapatawpha county (noble Sartoris VS “white trash” Snopes)
-grand epic style, “Southern Gothic” re: the racist past and “stream-of-consciousness”
technique
-cult persona: alcoholic, womanizer, financial and postmaster disaster (like his improbable
characters)

“Barn Burning”
-opening scene: divided loyalties, powerless law
-naturalism: the Snopeses, sharecropping as “white slavery”
-symbols: Abner’s stiff leg, gray eyes, black longcoat
Major De Spain’s mansion
white carpet and stain
barn on fire
dark woods
-why does Sarty inform on his father?
-end: catharsis, or perpetuation of “Civil War hero” lie?
 20TH CENTURY MODERNISM

REALISM NATURALISM

“objective” committed, political

distanced extreme (romantic)
middle class low class
mimesis existentialism/grotesque detail
life-description doom
heteroglossia Fate
pictoriality biology
life-lesson a-moral, raw survival

JOHN STEINBECK (1st half of 20th century)

-Salinas, California origins, grandson of German immigrants (mix of cultures; migrant contact
during youth; open attitude; the importance of farmland and “Dust Bowl” literature during
Great Depression)
-Travelled wide (even USSR!) and fought in the Mediterranean during WWII
-Wrote on Natives, migrants, workers, drifters vs. U.S. materialism, capitalism, mass culture
-Of Mice and Men (1937); The Grapes of Wrath (1939, banned, but won Pulitzer Prize)
-1962 Nobel Prize

“The Leader of the People”

 Opening scene motion; the importance of the farm
 3 generations of Tiflin family men: pioneerfarmerdreamer
 Symbols of: haystack mice; “westering” with the Conestoga wagons; the ocean
 Importance of language: dialogues and descriptions vs. grandpa’s narrative
 Why does grandpa tell the story over and over again?
 Why does Jody like it?
 Why is it a story “for men”?
 Why does Jody not kill the mice, but make lemonade?
 Irony of the title

ERNEST “PAPA” HEMINGWAY

Author, journalist, Pulitzer (1953) and Nobel (1954) Prize
Part of “The Lost Generation” of American expatriates who helped create European
Modernism
-writing from life: ambulance driver in WWII (A Farewell to Arms)
: foreign correspondent in Paris (The Sun Also Rises, A Moveable Feast)
: correspondent for the Spanish Civil War (For Whom the Bell Tolls)
: life in Cuba (The Old Man and the Sea)
: plane accidents in Congo (“The Snows…”)
-the “Hemingway code (hero)” (“nada,” Nick Adams)
-the Hemingway style (terse, tense, gritty realism)
-authorial identity VS machismo (shadow-boxing, hunting, wars, suicide)
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
-why is Harry being punished?
-symbols: Harry (Henry VIII)
gangrened foot
“the Big Novel”
Africa
heat, thirst VS snowy Kilimanjaro
hyena
rescue plane ride
leopard (news story)
-oppositions: prose memories VS reality dialogue
Harry VS his wife (character, treatment)
-open ending: is Harry redeemed in the end?
a. irony: he DID write the novel
b. admission of guilt

MINORITY REPORT

ALICE WALKER
Novelist, essayist, feminist activist (womanism)
Double victimization of black women
“In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” (1974)
The Color Purple (1982)

“Everyday Use”
-Satire of “New Negro” urbanity (The Harlem Renaissance/ “The New Negro” movement of
the 1920-30s)
-everyday vs “artistic” use
-opinion on books, art, “style” vs “I know how to” and memory
-symbolism: fire, Maggie’s scars,
Dee’s dress and sunglasses
quilt and churn top and dasher
 FROM THE BEATS TO THE 21ST CENTURY

 Post-war period of “conformity and criticism”

 suburban conservative culture, communal patriotism VS “Red Scare,” Cold
War
 G.I. Bill veterans, young, hippies, pacifists, conspiracy theorists and other
minorities as questioners of the system/American Dream The Beats
(beaten/beatific/”beat” of heart, life, public)
 Native American movements
 Taboo subjects (drugs, sexuality, marginal/criminal culture), liquid/flowing identities:
 the postmodern pastiche/medley/mix
 Deconstruction, posthumanism and alternative fiction, cyberfiction, sci-fi, fantasy,
electronic fiction, faction

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS (1914-1997)

Novelist, poet of the Beat

Generation, performer (for a
living), highly cultured yet
marginal (drug addiction, queer
sexuality, criminal trouble)
Postmodernism and pop (“cut up”
technique, scandalous themes as
literary autobiography)
Naked Lunch, Queer, Junkie, Wild
Boys

“The Junky’s Christmas” (1952)

-from the story “‘The Priest,’ they
called him”
-anti-hero protagonist
-irony via juxtapositions:
Christmas vs misery,
crime, hate, hypocrisy
Innocent boy with “birth”
pangs (a Virgin Mary?) vs
religious symbols
Miracle vs “immaculate
fix”
Junkie, thief Danny as angel of mercy
-vague ending: “on the nod”=
a. Euphoria of good deed mistaken for junky bliss
b. falling asleep (death)
c. Grace (a Christmas miracle)
 LOUISE ERDRICH (1954-)

 Chippewa Native, poet and novelist,

part of the Native American
Renaissance (1970s-1980s); “dream”
marriage to Michael Dorris until
molestation accusations, divorce and
MD’s suicide
 Minority issues (reservation life and
identity), feminism
 Love Medicine (1984; multiple
narrators as tribal voice/woes)
 The Plague of Doves (2009)

“Saint Marie”

 Symbol of walleye fishing, Sister Leopolda’s hook pole “fishers of men” irony
 Irony of religion for reservation children
 Setting of Sacred Heart Convent (white; on top of high hill; “end of the world”)
 The character of SL—why does she act like that?
 Love-hate relation of Marie to SL—allegory for NAs and Christianity (“dust”)
 The oven incident: Hansel and Gretel, trickster tales
 Irony: marks of hot fork taken for stigmata
 What is it that Marie sees when she looks at the defeated SL? Why is she “caught”?

DIANE WILLIAMS (1946- )

 NY short story writer, editor of NOON, highly praised

by contemporaries for avant-garde depiction of
everyday life
 “micro” or “flash” fiction in the 21st century (c//c
social media)

“When I Was Old and Ugly”

 Irony of title
 What sort of person is the speaker?
 Symbolism:
 Animals (vs human relationships)
 Colors
 Combing hair
 Personal items
 Apartment knicknacks
 How are being “old and ugly” resignified?
 THE (GRAPHIC) NOVEL

The novel vs short fiction:

NOVEL SHORT STORY

Can span volumes Read in “half an hour”

(Poe)
A world (Mikhail A “slice of life”
Bakhtin’s heterotopia)

Different characters A single

and perspectives character’s/narrator’
(heteroglossia and s perspective/focus
polyglossia) (unified emotion)
Character development How fixed characters
react to a crisis

Loose web of symbols, Every word matters

motifs, tropes

Comics and Graphic Novels (sequential art)

• Comics as a popular influence and entertainment medium since the beginning of the
century
• From newspaper strip “funnies” (“Yellow Kid”) to adventure comics and superheroes
to the graphic novel (Will Eisner’s 1978 A Contract with God); prestige and academic
recognition since Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980-91)
• A new hybrid language (image-text-lettering and sound effects) as effective way to:
• communicate unspeakable situations/emotions
• disseminate propaganda (Alan Moore; Roland Barthes)
• teach more effectively (information retaining)
• train in multifaceted, multidirectional reading of autographic art/text
(see Scott McCloud’s 1993 Understanding Comics)

DANIEL CLOWES (1961- )

• Alternative comics author and illustrator, screenwriter, creator of Eightball series
(1989-2004)
• Pen, Eisner and Harvey award-winner
• Ronald Crumb influence (grotesque caricature, satire)
• Ghost World adapted to 2001 film (Dir. Terry Zwigoff, starring Thora Birch, Scarlett
Johansson and Steve Buschemi)

Ghost World (1997)

• Setting and time

• Opening 2-page frame, references to “GW” graffiti: why this title?
• Who is the developing character in the story? How do we know?
• Themes:
– small-town dead-end life
– Color, choice of style
– the deceptiveness of appearances, need for “fiction”
– symbols: time, t.v., the diners, Enid’s hats, hearse, “Norman” at deactivated
bus stop
– Metafictional elements
– the importance of memory
– Bob Skeetes
– the importance of love
– meaning of end sequence