Literatura Amerykańska Ustna

Wykład 1:
TRICKSTER:

• The name of a man as a crook who defies established norms and order.
• After Columbus – as a survivor and rebel.
• The Prophet – animating an inanimate world.
• A coyote, a rabbit, a spider-man, a human-in-mind of animal appearance.

Was America discovered?

• Christopher Columbus was probabl not the first explorer of America but the Vikings.
• Some say he was the first and others he wasn’t for example Leif Eriksson (Newfoundland)
“been there, done that” and Marco Polo: ,,might have been there, might have done that

Leif Eriksson – Viking, about 1000 years old and the Normans have reached the shores of America.

Marco Polo – Venetian traveler and explorer who made groundbreaking reips to Asia and China. His
travels and writings helped open the Far East to Europe and inspired Christopher Columbus and
many other explorers.

Columbus and his impact (wpływ):

• The Italian explorer

• He is credited with the discovery of America
• He made four landmark trips to America.

IMPACT:

• He returns to Spain with seven indigenous slaves

• Reorganisation i nthe Old and New Worlds.
• American nature, culture and society undergo changes.

Early “American” literature after 1492

• Letters, legal documents, testimonies;

• Coumbus’ letters and reports;
• Bartolome de Las cosas ,,The very Brief Relation of the Indies”.
• Alvar Nuńez Cabeza de Vaca ,,The relation of Alvar Nuńez Cambeza de Vala”.
• John Smith’s writings
• Christian propaganda.

First settlers’ (distorted) perception of the new world:

• Postcolonialsm (Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) and the notion of sameness.
• First settlers – European perspective treated as a universal measure.
• The Spanish were among the first Europeans to explorer the New World and the first to
settle in what is now the United States

Native American orature:

• Before Columbus: over (350) three hundred fifty language and tribes
 • Now: more than ten milions descendants, over (200) two hundred languages.
• Various customs and kinds of social organisation.

Orature: (Blend of oral + literature)

• Chants, rituals, songs, prayers, spoken narratives, myths of creation;

• Genres absent in the western tradition;
• Problem of performance, translation and preservation;

Native American orature – selected motifs

• Creation myths, stories of the emergence of the human, of the changes in the world, myths
of the end of the world, historical narratives;
• Narratives of every tasks or of life experiences;
• ,,The coming of the White Man” - Brule Sioux’ apocalyptic story of Iktomo the Spider-Man, a
trikscter and a prohpet and the coming of the White Man;
• The myth of the world moulded on the back of a turtle;

The hopi creation myth:

• Creative female principle > the Earth;

• Divine spirit > the sun;
• Womb connotations;
• Clay theme;

The Hopi maintain a complex religious and mythological tradition stretching back over centuries.

Wykład 2:
Historical background:

• Reformation in Europe;
• PErseation of Puritans during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James Stuart;
• Puritan’s escape to the Netherlands, and then, their religious and commercial voyage on the
Mayflower;
• First Puritans (called Pilgrims) establishing Playmouth Plantation;

Theological foundations:

• The dismissal of accepting any head of the Church;

• ELECTION:
• People are already saved or damned: Heaven or Hell – their action on Earth don’t affect their
fate;
• Obligation to submit and accumulate wealth;

Only two sacraments: Most important: The Lord’s Supper and baptism;

• Initially, communion regarded as a sign of election;

• The rise of the doctrinal rigour;
• Communa sense of being either special or chosen;
• Olbigation to have writing and evangelization;

First American Puritan Narratives:

 • William Bradford – governor of Plymouth colony, who helped shape and stabilize the
political instructions of the first permanent colony in New England.
• John Winthrop – governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the chief figure among the
Puritain founders of New England.

Challenges to the Puritan obligarchy:

• Thomas Morton – A British settler, mocked the strict religious principels of pilgrims and
Puritans.
• Roger Willioms – English colonist in New England, founder of the colony of Rhode Island and
pioneer of religious liberty.
• Anne Hutchinson – religious liberal who became one of the founders of Rhode Island after
her banishment from Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Puritan poetry:

• Michael Wigglesworth – clergyman, physician and author of rhymed treatises expounding

Puritan doctines
• ,,The Day of Doom” - a long poem in ballad measure using horrific imagery to describe the
Last Judgment.

• Anne Bradstreet – first poets to write English verse in the American colonies
• ,,Prologue” - focuses on what the speaker thinks it means for a woman like her to write
poems.

• Edward Trylor – one of the foremost poets in colonial British North America.
• ,,The Ebb and Flow” - in the poem the speaker is characterizing his faith in god as an ebb and
flow of intensity.

Age of reason (wiek rozumu): being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology.

• Thomas PAine
• 1728 – the death of Cotton Mather; the symbolic end of Puritain Age.

The 18th century: social, philosophical, scientific contexts:

Main figures:

Isaac Newton – was a physicist and mathematician who developed the principles of modern physics,
including the laws of motion.

John Locke – Understanding and sympathy as the foundations of rich social and spiritual lives within
a community.

Adam Smith – the focus on human sympathy and sentiment as catalysts of morality grew and
retrived the destiny into the hands of men.

• Disputes between political and religious worldviewes;

• A universe rational and kinder than in the Puritan doctrine.
• Deism – identifing the creator in the organisation and integrity of the universe and its laws.
The Renaissance of old belief: the great awakening:

• An attempt to reconcile reason with religion based on the Lockean cult of feeling;
• Sympathetic emotions – no longer the results of our imperfect condition, but rather the
promises of the future glory.
• Jonathan Edwards - ,,Sinners n the Hands of an Angry God”.

Phillis Wheatley – the first black womand poet of note in the USA.

• ,,On Being Brought from Africa to America” - contains a mild rebuke toward some white
readers.

Imperial politics:

• War for American Independence 1775-1783

• 1776 – The Declaration of Independence signed as the result of the second Cintinental
Congress.
• Colonists transformed into revolutionaries by the power of the word:

Thomas Paine – writer and political pamphleteewhose ,,Common Sense” and other writings
influenced the American Revolution.

• Common sense, The fights of man

Pailid Frenean – American poet, editor, known as the ,,poet of the American Revolution”

• On Mr. Paine’s Rights of Man – relates to the Revolutionary War

Pursuing Happiness (dążenie do szczęścia):

Benjamin Franklin – Autobiography

• Literary attention paid to: equality between people, awareness of social injustice, the
tyranny behind monarchy, learning fellowship from the noble savages;
• Rise of the American idealism;

Thomas Jefferson – arguing for the individual’s right to happiness on earth in his texts.

Wykład 3: Romanticism, transcendentalism, american renaissance

XIX century American Renaissance:

• A very powerful yet self-contradictory figure

- It is hard to speak of the Renaissance (literally, “rebirth”) when it doesn’t revive any
particular order tradition;
• It’s a white and masculine figure that undermines the achievements of Native American,
Black American and Women Writing;
• Mathiessen diagnosed the 19th century American literature of having a comparable impact
on the whole American literary tradidion to the Renaissance in England.

Cultural and historical background of Renaissance:

Main features of Romanticism:

• Thrived on the rapid industrialisation of this period;

 • The American Romantics use symbolism to hit at idea and emotions that are beyond
ordinary language or beyond the reach of everyday expression.
• Shunned the artificiality of cibilisation;
• Romantic literature is emotional imaginative and interested in beauty;

Historical and nostalgic tones

• Washinghton Irving – writer called the ,,first American man of letters”. He is best known for
the short stories ,,The Legend of Sleeoy Hollow” and ,,Rip Van Winkle”.

• ,,Rip Van Winkle” - the story Americanised with version of German folk tales. The story tells
about a colonial Dutch American villager who falls asleep in the Catskill Mountains for
twenty years.

• John Fenimore Cooper – author of the novels of frontier adventure known as

Leatherstocking Tales.
• ,,The Pioneers” - In story Cooper portrays life in new settlement on New York’s Lake Ostego.

Transcendentalists:

• The intellelectual movement inanguarated by Ralf Waldo Emerson;

• The unofficial group was often movked as ,,The Transcendentalist Club”
• Poets and essayists who publishing mostly in The Dial;

Transcendentalism – a movement that convinces us that the most important reality is what we feel
of what is intuitive, not what is considered scientific knowledge.

IDEAS:
• Everything in the world including human beings, is a reflection of the Divine Soul;
• Scepticism towards social reforms;

Persons:

• Ralf Waldo Emerson – American lecturer, poet and essayist, the leading exponent of New
England Transcendentalism
• ,,Self-reliance" - Emerson urges his readers to follow their individual will instead on
conforming to social expectations.
• ,,Nature” - expresses Emerson’s belief that each indyvidual must develop a personal
understanding of the universe.

• Henry David Thoreall – poet, essayist, practical philosopher who lived the doctrine
Transcendentalism and been a vigorous advocate of civil liberties
• ,,Walden or Life in the Woods” - It tells the story of author living in a hut and relying on
himself.

• Margatet Fuller – American critic, teacher and woman of letter about to make the taste of
life more civilized and enriching.
 • ,,Womand in the Nineteenth Century” - further advocated the reform of property laws that
were unfair to-women-a controversial and unpopular idea in many quarters.

Romantic poetry: Important persons:

• Walt Whitman – poet journalist and esaysist. A breakthrough in publishing ,,Leaves of

Grass”.
• ,,Leaves of Grass” - Whitman’s major concern was to explore, discuss and celebrate his own
self, his individuality and personality.
• ,,One’s-self I Sing (odnosi się do wiersza powyżej)” - directly adresses the successive themes
in Whitman’s poems.

• Emily Dickinson – lyric poet who lived in seclusion and commanded a singular brilliance of
style and integrity of vision.
• ,,288” - powerful poem that questions the need for attention seeking instead to highlight the
virtues of anonymity and isolation.

• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – the most popular American poet in the 19th century.
• ,,Evangeline” - It is a sentimental tale of two lovers separated when British soldiers expel the
Acadians from what is how Nova Scotia.

ROMANTIC FICTION:

• Herman Melville – novelist, short-story writer, poet, best known for his novels of the sea,
including his masterpiece ,,Moby Dick’’.
• ,,Moby Dick’’ - with a novel as richly ambiguous as Moby – Dick, we look at themes as
guides, but it is important t be flexible while we do so.
• ,,Bonito Cereno”, ,,Bartleby, the scrivener”.

• Nathaniel Hawthorne – short-story writer who was a master of the allegorical and symbolic
tale.
• ,, The Scarlett Letter” - about a puritan town and the fallout occuring from a woman’s
adulteny, has endured for many centuries.

• Harriet Beecher Stowe – the author of the novel ,,Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, which contributed so
much to popular feeling against slavery that it is cited among the causes of the American
Civil War.
• ,,Uncle Tom’s Cabin” - is an anti-slavery novel, vividly dramatizing the experience of slavery.

Imporant Persons Renaissance: Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralf Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Throean, German
Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson

Wykład 4: REALISM, NATURALISM

Part 1: Edgar Allan Poe

• Interest in relation between weirdness and beauty;

 • Fantasy and horror were dominant in his work;
• Gotic themes and elements eg. Darkness inside the troubled psyches of his protagonists,
castle, libraries etc.
• Poe as anti-Emerson: musical, metrical poetry, limited control over one’s fate;

FAMOUS WORKS: ,,The Raven”, ,,The Cask of Amontillado”, “The Tell-tale Heart”, “The Fall of the
House of Usher”.

• ,,The Raven” - It tells the story of a man who, out of longing for his beloved, goes crazy, talks
to a raven who says one word. We don’t know if the rest of it is a dream or a dream.

Part 2: REALISM, NATURALISM

Transforming the nation:

• Economical and technological revolution.

• 19th century westword expension;
• The American Civil War and its aftermath;
• The rise of capitalist barons;

Literature on the market:

• Diverse and abundant national literature;

• Literary carrer opportunities for women writers;
• New newspaper and magazines and their increasing importance;
• Focus on previously unrecognised members of the society as literary characters;

Towards realist fiction:

• Frowing interest in the key text of European realism and naturalism;

• The importance of vernacular, ordinary discourse and impressionistic subjectivity in writing;
• The rise of distinctively American protagonists;

• William Dean Howells - The founding father of realist aesthetics in America.

• ,,The Rise of Silas Lapham” - deals with the efforts of a self-styled businessman to adapt to
Boston society.

• Edith Wharton – American author best known for her stories and novels about the upper-
class society into which she was born.
• ,,The Age of Innocence” - presents a picute of upper-class New York in the 19th century.
• ,,The House of Mirth” - The story concerns the tragic fate of the beautiful and well-
connected but penniless Lily Bart, whot at age 29 lacks a husband to secure her position in
society.
• ,,The Custom of the Country” -

• Henry James – American novelist. His foundamental theme was the innocence and
exuberance of the New World in clash with the corruption and wisdom of the old.
• ,,The Golden Bowl’’ - the novel focuses deeply and almost exclusively on the consciousness
of the central characters, with sometimes obsessive detail but also powerful insight.
 • ,,The Portrait of a Lady”.

• Mark Twain – novelist who acquired international fame for his travel narratives. He write
about his life because he was sick in first ten years.
• ,,The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” - a novel that follow the development of a hero from
childhood through a dolescence and into adulthood.
• ,,Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”
• ,,The Prince and the Pouper”

IS NATURALISM REALISM 2.0?

Main features of realism:

• Presents the contemporary social reality and the life and everyday of ordinary people;
• Refers to a few historical movements;
• Ability to recognize true potential of American culture.

What is the difference between realism and naturalism?

• Naturalists believed that these froces shaped individual and their destiny. It often included
themes of survival, determinism and violence but realism was a literary movement that
focused on ordinary characters, everyday life situations, realistic stories.

American Naturalists:
• Stephen Crane – short-story writer best know for his novels ,,Maggie: A Girl of the Street”
and “The Red Sadge of Courage”.
• ,,Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” - sympathetic study of an innocent and abused slum girl’s
descent into prostitution and her eventual suicide.
• ,,The Red Badge of Courage” - novel of the American Civil War. Perspective despiction of
warfare and soldier’s psychological turmail.
• ,,The Open Boat” - It recounts the efforts of four survivors of a shipwreck. They attempt to
remain afloat in a dinghy on rough seas.

• Theodore Dreiser – novelist who was the an outstanding American practitioner of

naturalism.
• ,,Sister Carrie” - tells the story of a rudderless but pretty small-town girl who comes to the
big city filled with vague ambitions.

• Kate Chopin – American novelist and short-story writer known as an interpreter of New
Orleans Culture.
• ,,The Awakening” - realistic novel about the sexual and artistic awakening of a young wife
and mother who abancons her family and eventually commits suicide.

• Jack London – American novelist, his works depict elemental struggles for survival.
• ,,To Build a Fire” - London’s widely anthologized masterpiece illustrates in graphic terms the
futility of human efforts to conquer nature.
• ,,The Call of the Wild” - The story follows Back throughout his journey as a sled dog.
THE ROLE OF REGIONALISM:

• Revival of fascination with regionalist fiction;

• Regionalism and Native American writers;

REALISM AND NATURALISM AS THE BATTLEFIELDS OF SOCIAL REFORMS:

• Importance of women’s point of view (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Harrlet Beecher Stowe)
• Debates and clashes within the black community;

Wykład 5: MODERNIST POETRY

THE UNITED STATES OF 1914-1945: XX century.

• Changes in self-expression and identity;

• Growing importance of woman and African Americans;
• The belated entrance to the war and the impossible returns to the pre-war life;
• Technology rebolutionises everyday life;

PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE

• 20th century discoverces in physics and the paradign shift;

• Analytic philosophy;

Key people: Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud

MODERNISM:

European influences: William Butler Yeats, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Marcel Proust
(literature), Igor Stravinsky (music), Pablo Picasso (art)

• The search for meaning and language;

• Fascination with reworking mythical and religious codes;
• Poem literary work, authors themselves turn into literary subjects;
• Disillusion, resignation, lack of faith in humanity;

T.S. Eliot – a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry. Eliot exercised a strong influence on
Anglo-American culture.

Nobel works: ,,The Waste Land”, “Four Quarters”, “The Hollow Man”, “The Love Song of Alfred J.
Prufrock”.

• ,,The Waste Land” - expresses with great power the disillusionment and disgust of the period
after World War I. It portrays a sterile world of panickly fears and barren lists and of human
beings waiting for some sign or promise of redemption.

• Wallace Stevens – American poet whose work explores the interaction of reality and what
man can make of reality in his mind.
 • ,,The Emperor of the Ice-cream" - In this poem is sharp contrast between images of life and
death. First stanzas presents a scene of life and second about death.

• Ezra Pound – a supremely discerning and energetic entrepreneur of the arts who did more
than any other single figure to advance a ,,modern” movement in English and American
literature.
• ,, In a Station of a Metro” - Based on Japanese haiku, this poem reflects Pound’s interest in
other cultures. As well as his belief that purpose of art. Was to ,,make it new”.
• ,, A pact” - Pound in poem calls a ceasefire between himself and the work of Walt Whitman.

• Hilda Doolittle – byname H.D. American poet, known initially as an Imagis. She was also
translator.
• ,,Oread” - may serve to illustrate some prominent features of language through extreme
reduction.

• Amy Lowell – American critic, lecturer and leading poet of the Imagist school.
• ,,Night Clouds” - In this poem, the poet looks towards the sky at night to see clouds as
mares, than continuing to action throughout the entirety.

• William Carlos Williams – American poet who succeeded in making the ordinary appear
extraordinary through the clarity and discreteness of his imagery.
• ,, The Red Wheelbarrow” - focuses above all an counveying a precise depiction of ,,an
image”.
• ,,The young Housewife” - Williams in this poem suggests many sad things about the life of
the poem’s main object, the housewife, through subtle detail.

• Robert Frost – American poet who was much admired for his depictions of the rural life of
New England.
• ,,Nothing Gold Can Stay” - is a famous short narrative poem about nature and its
transcience.

• e.e. cummings (Edward Estlin Cummings) - American poet, and painter who first attracted
attention , in an age of literary experimentation for his unconventional punctuation and
phrasing. (He didn’t intentionally use small letters in his own names!)
• ,,spring! may" - It’s about spring.

Wykład 6: MODERNIST PROSE:

EUROPEAN AND AMERICAN MODERNIST PROSE:

• Modernists’ defamiliarisation of reality in the search for new language, form, mythology;
• Different experiences of World War I in Europe and in the USA;
• American modernism and the verges of realism
-Fascination with changing social, economid and technological reality;
Francis Scott Fitzgerald – American short-story writer. His private life with his wife, Zelda in both
American and France became almost as celebrated as his novels.

His most brilliant novel:

 • ,,The Great Gatsby” - the novel tells the tragic story of Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire
and his pursuit of Daisy Buchanan, a wealthy young woman whom he loved in hus youth.

• Ernest Hemingway – awarded the Nobel Price for Literature. He was noted both for the
intense masculinity of his writing and for his adventurous and widely publicized life.
• ,,Ice berg theory” - Hemingway’s stories presented only a small part of what was actually
happening
HIS FAMOUS WORKS:
• ,,The Sun also Rises” - the novel captures the moods, feelings and attitudes of hard-drinking,
fast-living group of disillusioned expatriates in postwar France and Spain.
• ,,The Old Man and Sea” - The story centries on an aging fisherman who engages in an epic
battle to catch a gigant marlin.
• ,,For Whom the Bell Tolls’’ - It tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer
attached a Republican guerilla unit during the Spanish Civil War.

• William Faulkner – American South, Internal monologues, Yoknapatawpha County in

Mississippi as an allegory of the South. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

NOBLE WORKS:
• ,,The Sound and the Fury” - details the destruction and downfall of the aristocratic Compson
family from four different points of view.
• ,,As I Lay Dying” - It is the story of the death of Addie Bundren and her poor, rural family’s
quest and motivations to honor her wish to be buried in her hometown of Jefferson,
Mississippi.

• John Dos Passos – one of the major noveists of the post – World War I ,,lost generation,
whose reputation as a social historican and radical critic of the quality of American life vests
primarily on his trilogy U.S.A.

U.S.A. Trilogy:
• ,,The 42nd Parallel’’ - It is the storu of the USA from about the early days of the 20th century
until about late 1918, centerin toward the end of the war in Europe.
• ,,1919” - dealing with the war and the critical years of the Treaty of versailles.
• ,,The Big Money” - It moves from the boom of the 1920s to the bust of the 1930s.

• John Steinbeck – American novelist which summed up the bitterness of the Great
Depression decade and aroused widespread sympathy for the plight of migratory
farmworkers.
• ,,The Grapes of Wrath” - It evokes the harshness of the Great Depression and arouses
sympathy for the struggles of migrant farmworkers.

• 2: Harlem Renaissance.
HARLEM RENAISSANCE CONTEXT:
• The Great Depression of the ‘20s;
• Rich culture of the black community uptown in Harlem (NY city)
• Jazz culture
• The New Negro Movement
Harlem Renaissance poetics:
• Jazz
• Blues
• Spirituals
• Street and ghetto talk;

Harlem Renaissance representatives:

• Langston hughes;
• Claude Mckay;
• Zora Neale Hurson;
• Nella Larsen;
• Countee Cullen;

• Langston Hughes – American writer, important figure in the Harlem Renaissance he made
the African American experience the subject of his writings, which ranged rom poetry and
plays to novels and newspaper columns.
• ,,I, too” - Hughes wrote ,,I, too” from the perspective of an African American man – either a
slave or even a domestic servant.
• ,,Negro Speaks of the Rivers” - is a peneguril to people of black African origin throughout
history.

• Claude Mckay – Jamaican – born poet and novelist whose ,,Home to Harlem’’ was the most
popular novel written by an American black to that time.
• ,,If we must die” - McKay wrote the poem as a response to mob attacks by white Americans
upon African-American communities during Red Summer.

• Zora Neale Hurston – American folklorist and writer associated Harlem Renaissance who
celebrated the African American culture of the rural South.
• ,,Tell My Horse” - a blend of travel writing and anthropology based on her investigations of
voodoo Haiti.
• ,,Their Eyes were Watching God’’ - Janie Crawford tells of her three marriages, her growing
self-reliance and her identity as a black woman.

Wykład 7: CONTEMPORARY

THE WORLD AND AMERICA AFTER 1945:

• The Cold War;

• Overseas military conflicts (Korean War, Vietnam War, Cuban Missile Crisis, Gulf Wars);
• Political unrest and assassination;
• Watergate Scandals and growing importance of the press;
• Ronald REagan’s presidency and the booming captialism;

THE CHALLENGES OF THE 20th CENTURY:

 • Information society, mass media, new media;
• Globalisation, new communication and transport networks, capitalist booms;
• Sexual rebolution, women’s rights, sexual and gender minorities;
• Scientific and technological progress stimulated by the military industry during the Cold War;
CULTURAL CONSEQUENCES:

• Media, popular and everyday language and its influence on literary expression
• The crisis of a unique sense;
• Redefinition of locality and globality;
• Expreimentation;

DRAMA:

• Eugene O’neill;
• Arthur Miller;
• Tennessee Williams;
• Amiri Baraka;
• Tony Kushener;

• Tennessee Williams – American dramatist whose plays reveal a world of human frustration
in which sex and violence underlie an atmosphere of romantic gentility.
• ,,Streetcar Named Desire” - it concerns the mental and moral disinregnation and ultimate
ruin of Blanche DuBois, a farmer Souther belle. Her neurotic, genteel pretensions are no
match for the harsh realities symbolized by her brush brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski
• ,,Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” - The play exposes the emotional lies governing relationship in the
family of a wealthy Southern planes of humble origins.
PROSE:
POSTMODERNISM:
• Philip Roth;
• Thomas Pynchon;
• Don Delillo;
• Cormac McCarthy;
• Toni Morrison;
• Paul Auster;
• Kurt Vonnegut;

• Kurt Vonnegut – American writer noted for his wryly satirical novels who frequently used
postmodern techniques as well as elements of fantasy and science fiction to highlight the
horrors and ironies of 20th-century civilization.
• ,,Cat’s Cradle’’ - Author describes the atomic bomb drop on Hiroshima.
• ,,Breakfast of Champions”
• ,,Slaughterhouse no. 5”

• Cormac McCarthy – American writer in the Southern gotic tradition.

• ,,Blood Meridian” - The majority of the story follows a teenager refferred to only as ,,the
kid’’, with the bulk of the text devoted to his experiences with the Glanton gang.
• ,,No Country for Old Man” - a bloody modern western that opens with a drug deal gone bad.
 • ,,The Road’’ - a father and son struggle to survive after a disaster that has all but destroyed
the United States.

• Toni Morrison – American writer noted for her examination of black eperience within the
black community.
• ,,Song of Solomon’’ - explores the quest for cultural identity. Based on the African-American
folktale about enslaved Africans who escape slavery by fying back to Africa.
• ,,Jazz” - The novel deliberately mirrors the music of its title, with vanous characters
,,improvising” solo compositions that fit together to create a whole work.
• ,,Be loved” - The work examines the descruchive legacy of slavery as it chronicles the life of a
black woman named Sethe;

POETRY (A VERY SUBJECTIVE SELECTION):

• Allen Ginsberg – American poet whose epic poem ,,Howl” is considered to be one of the
most significant products of the Beat movement.

BEST GENERATION: Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac.

• ,,Howl’’ - is a combination lamentation, jeremiad, vision. The poem opens with a description
of the despair and frustration of American youths.

• Anne Sexton – American poet whose work is noted for its confessional intensity.
• ,,Starry Night’’ - identifies with another tortured and suicidal artist and makes comparisons
between her own life and the masterpiece she is talking about.

• John Ashberry – American poet noted for the elegance, originality and obscurity of his
poetry.
• Paradoxes and Oxymorons” - is a poem about language. Poem directs readers’ attention to
the words themselves.

• Yusef Komunyakaa – poet and professor known for his autobiography poems about race, the
Vietnam War, Jazz and blues
• ,,Facing It’’ - It is a reflection on Komunyakaa’s first visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

• Rae Armantrout – American poet, identified with the group of poetry L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
• ,,Dark Matter’’ - Emerge from Armantroout’s battle with adrenal – cortical cancer.

• Tracy K. Smith – American poet and author whose writing often confronts formidable
themes of loss and grief, nascent adulthood and the roles of race, family identity through
references to pop culture and precise descriptions of intimate moments.
• ,,Universe Original Motion Soundtrack’’ - creates expectations of hearing in a musical form
the sounds and feelings that accompany the entirety of what is known to exist by humans:
the universe.
Przykładowe pytania:

Wymyślić autorów np. Romantyzmu i opisać wybranego.

Trixter – co to? Coś o tym opowiedzieć.
Jaka jest różnica pomiędzy naturalizmem a realizmem?
Wymień główne cechy realizmu.
4 pytanie – autor – odpowiadasz jaki okres i jakie są jego dzieła lub dostaniesz dzieło a Ty mówisz
okres i autora. Jeśli spyta np. o Modernizm to możesz powiedzieć jacy byli autorzy