Professional Documents
Culture Documents
American Literature
American Literature
Introduction
Course Description
This 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.
Course Outline
1.Literature of Colonial American 2.Early Romantics 3.Transcendentalism 4.High Romantics 5.Realism 6.Local Color Fiction 7.Naturalism 8.Modern Poetry 9.Modern Fiction Before 1945
10.Postwar Realism in Fiction 11.Beat Generation 12.Women Writers in America 13.Black Literature 14.Southern Literature 15.Modern Drama
Course Requirements
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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
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
Philip Freneau(1752-1832)
Wild Honeysuckle 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
Learning Points
Distinct Features
2. 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.
Representatives
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Washington Irving Ralph Waldo Emerson Henry David Thoreau Nathaniel Hawthorne Edgar Allan Poe Herman Melville Walt Whitman Emily Elizabeth Dickinson James Fenimore Cooper
Conclusion
imagination sensibility and tuition over reason primitivism love of nature sympathetic interest in the past mysticism individualism
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.
To a Waterfowl the poet in self-doubt and despair a lonely bird-- flying to--its destination-- by Power the poet-- walking to-- destination-- by Power too
Washington Irving
Washington Irving(1783-1859)
Works by Washington Irving 1. Rip Van Winkle 2. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow 3. The Sketch Book
Father of American literature the dominant spirit of the age the proponent of the American newness
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.
Annabel Lee Thematically speaking, this poem not only mourns the death of a beautiful girl but also celebrates the timeless love.
Walt Whitman
I hear America Singing The poem presents an image of America: an image of proud and healthy individualists engaged in productive and happy labor.
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
Works by Nathaniel Hawthorne 1. The Scarlet Letter 2. The House of the Seven Gables 3. The Blithedale Romance 4. The Marble Faun 5. Young Goodman Brown 6. The Ministers Black Veil 7. The Birthmark
Dr. Heidegger
Colonel Killigrew
Water of Youth
Mr. Medbourne
Widow Wycherly
Learning Points
Distinct Features
1.Realism is the theory of writing in which familiar aspect of contemporary life and everyday scenes are represented in a straightforward or matter-offact manner.
2.In realist fiction characters from all social levels are examined in depth.
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.
Representatives
William Dean Howells Henry James Edith Wharton Willa Cather O.Henry Kate Chopin Harriet Beecher Stowe Mark Twain
Henry James
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
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
1. Humans are controlled by laws of heredity and environment.
Representatives
Hamlin Garland Stephen Crane Frank Norris Jack London Theodore Dreiser Sherwood Anderson Sinclair Lewis Upton Sinclair
Conclusion
1.Generally speaking, American naturalists share similarities in theme and technique.
2. They tend to reduce to nil the human chances of winning on their own terms while realists stress freedom of choice with large provisos concerning the power of outside forces and romantics stress the possible triumph of the human will.
Stephen Crane
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
3. Imagism tried to record objective observations of an object or a situation without interpretation or comment by the poet.
Representatives
Conclusion
1.The imagists poets rebelled against conventional poetic material and forms and advocated the direct presentation of feelings in exquisite images.
Ezra Pound
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
Learning Points
Distinct Features
1. Modernism presented discontinuity and imminent severance from the past while making determined efforts to use the past, its values and artistic forms by incorporating them in new literary production.
2. Modernists had a sense of fragmentation in social communities and the fragmentation within the individual himself. Hence fragmentation became a common theme in modernist writing.
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 Hemingway Francis Scott Fitzgerald John Dos Passos John Steinbeck Thomas Stearns Eliot Wallace Stevens
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
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.
The Great Gatsby The story deals symbolically with the failure of the American Dream.
Distinct Features
1. 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
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
John Updike(1932-2005)
Beat Generation
Learning Points
Distinct Features
1. The Beats were fed up with the official explanations of why things happened .
3. The Beats withdrew from politics and from the obligations of citizenship.
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 Ginsberg Jack Kerouac Neal Cassady Gary Snyder William Burroughs
Jack Kerouac
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
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.
Representatives
Allen Tate Katherine Anne Porter Eudora Welty Flannery OConnor William Faulkner
Katherine Anne Porter is good at short stories in which describes human beings empty spiritual World and their loneliness.
Works by K. A. Porter
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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
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.
Representatives
Langston Hughes Alice Walker Richard Wright James Baldwin Ralph Ellison Toni Morrison
Alice Walker
Alice Walker(1944- )
Everyday Use
Maggie
Dee
Langston Hughes
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
Toni Morrison(1931- )
American Drama
Works by ONeill
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Long Days Journey into Night The Iceman Cometh Beyond the Horizon Emperor Jones The Hairy Ape