Transcript American Literature in 60 Minutes

American Literature in 60
Minutes
“In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American
play?” – Sidney Smith, 1820
“Some thinkers may object to this essay, that we are about to write of that which has, as yet,
no existence.” –Margaret Fuller, in her 1846 essay “American Literature”
“Ah, yes, American Literature. I must take an afternoon and read it some time.”—Allan
Carroll, former University of Tennessee English Dept. Chair and terminal Brithead
Tale of Two Smithies
John Smith’s 1608 “A
True Relation”
Promotional Literature
Smith as 1st-person
master negotiator
Indians: Savage but
can be worked with
No Pocahontas
Rescue story!
John Smith’s 1624
“Generall Historie”
Captivity Narrative
Smith as
swashbuckling, 3rdperson hero
Indians: Savage but
subduable
Pocahontas: Forest
Fever
Other Promotional Lit
Drayton’s “Ode”: “To get the pearl and gold/And
ours to hold/Virginia,/Earth’s only Paradise.”
Point: to get settlers over to work the land and
make it profitable for joint-stock companies
Promotional Literature begins long tradition of
projecting on the idea of “America” whatever
dreams/aspirations/desires an immigrant can
imagine.
Other Captivity Narratives
Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration…
(1682) – basis, with Smith, of nearly all Indian captivity narratives to
follow
Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative (1789)
Susanna Rowson’s Slaves in Algiers (1794)
Herman Melville’s Typee (1842)
Frederick Douglass’ Narrative (1845…)
Mocked in Huckleberry Finn (1880)
Captivity narratives
– Gave an illicit peek at the “other” without fear of contamination
– Helped establish racial categories and, later, attitudes toward slavery
– The most popular type of adventure fiction in U.S. popular culture
Puritans
Ed Ward, on Boston, from A Trip to New England, 1699:
“The buildings, like their Women, being Neat and
Handsome. And their Streets, like the Hearts of the Male
Inhabitants, are Paved with Pebble.”
“A Captain of a Ship who had been on a long Voyage,
happen’d to meet his Wife, and Kist her in the Street, for
which he was Fin’d Ten Shillings, and was forc’d to pay
the Money. What a Happiness, thought I, do we enjoy in
Old-England, that cannot only Kiss our own wives, but
other Men’s too without the danger of such a Penalty.”
So Why Care About Them?
Spiritual Autobiography
Jeremiad – 3-part sermon form that
foreshadowed nearly all American political
speeches – 1) listing of community sins; 2)
threat of utter doom; 3) call to repentance
and promise of future [return to] glory
Bradford, Taylor, and Mather (for the test)
Women Writers: Bradstreet and
Rowlandson
William Bradford
William Bradford – Of Plymouth Plantation (1647) – “The History of
How Far We Have Fallen”; using Exodus as his style book,
memorializes the first settlers:
“Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before in
their preparation (as may be remembered by that which went
before), they had now no friends to welcome them nor inns to
entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies; no houses or much
less town to repair to, to seek for succour…. And for the season it
was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know
them to be sharp and violent, and subject-to cruel and fierce storms,
dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an
unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and
desolate wilderness, fall of wild beasts and wild men—and what
multitudes there might be of them they knew not.”
Edward Taylor
New England’s “metaphysical poet” – poems as meditations on
Calvinist theology
“Huswifery” - Make me, O Lord, thy Spinning Wheele compleat;
Thy Holy Worde my Distaff make for mee.
Make mine Affections thy Swift Flyers neate,
And make my Soule thy holy Spoole to bee.
My Conversation make to be thy Reele,
And reele the yarn thereon spun of thy Wheele.
“I Am the Living Bread” - In this sad state, Gods Tender Bowells run
Out streams of Grace: And he to end all strife
The Purest Wheate in Heaven, his deare-dear Son
Grinds, and kneads up into this Bread of Life.
Which Bread of Life from Heaven down came and stands
Disht on thy Table up by Angells Hands.
Cotton Mather
Wonders of the Invisible World (1693) and Magnalia
Christi Americana (1702) and about 450 other printed
works.
From Wonders: “Samuel Preston testify'd, that about two
years ago, having some Difference with Martha Carrier,
he lost a Cow in a strange Preternatural unusual
manner; and about a month after this, the said Carrier,
having again some Difference with him, she told him, He
had lately lost a Cow, and it should not be long before he
Lost another! which accordingly came to Pass; for he
had a Thriving and well-kept Cow, which without any
known cause quickly fell down and Dy'd.”
Anne Bradstreet
The Tenth Muse (1678)
“Prologue”: “I am obnoxious to each carping tongue/Who says my hand
a needle better fits.”
“The Author to Her Book”: I washed thy face, but more defects I
saw,/And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw./I stretcht thy joints to
make thee even feet,Yet still thou run'st more hobbling than is meet.”
“Verses Upon the Burning of Our House”: “Farewell, my pelf; farewell,
my store./The world no longer let me love;/My hope and Treasure
lies above.”
“In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess, Queen Elizabeth”: “She
hath wip'd off th' aspersion of her Sex,/
That women wisdom lack to play the Rex….Let such as say our sex
is void of reason/ Know 'tis a slander now, but once was treason.”
Mary Rowlandson
Narrative (1682): “I can remember the time when I used to sleep
quietly without workings in my thoughts, whole nights together, but
now it is other ways with me…. Before I knew what affliction meant, I
was ready sometimes to wish for it. When I lived in prosperity,
having the comforts of the world about me, my relations by me, my
heart cheerful, and taking little care for anything, and yet seeing
many, whom I preferred before myself, under many trials and
afflictions, in sickness, weakness, poverty, losses, crosses, and
cares of the world, I should be sometimes jealous least I should
have my portion in this life, and that Scripture would come to my
mind, "For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth
every Son whom he receiveth" (Hebrews 12.6). “
Compared often to the narratives (written by others, esp. Mather) of
Hannah Dustan, who killed and scalped her captors.
Eighteenth Century
Enlightenment
Revolution
Post-Colonial Inferiority Complex
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (1771-90): rags to
riches, program of moral perfection (actually a bagatelle)
Royall Tyler, The Contrast (1789)
Important Poets: Phyllis Wheatley, Philip Freneau (preRomantic)
Novelists you should know: Susanna Rowson (Charlotte
Temple 1794), Charles Brockden Brown (Wieland 1798),
Hannah Webster Foster (The Coquette 1797)
Nineteenth Century Literary
Movements as Bumper Stickers
Romanticism: Life is what you make of it!
Realism: Life is what it is.
Naturalism: Life sucks and then you die.
Early Romantics – Mutability
(hence lots of Death), Pantheism
Philip Freneau, poet, “The Wild Honeysuckle” (1785) : “If
nothing once, you nothing lose,/ For when you die you
are the same;/ The space between is but an hour,/The
frail duration of flower.”
William Cullen Bryant, poet, “Thanatopsis” (1817): “The
hills Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; the vales/
Stretching in pensive quietness between; /The venerable
woods—rivers that move/In majesty, and the
complaining brooks /That make the meadows green;
and, poured round all,/Old Ocean's gray and melancholy
waste,— /Are but the solemn decorations all Of the great
tomb of man!” NOTE: BRYANT INTRODUCES BLANK
VERSE INTO AMERICAN LIT IN THIS POEM.
Early Romantics in Prose – Nature,
Sensibility, Noble Savage, Gothic,
Fashion Sense
William Fenimore Cooper – The Leatherstocking Tales are a series
of novels written between 1826 and 1841describing the adventures
of Natty Bumppo, set in frontier communities west of the Allegheny
Mountains: The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The
Deerslayer, The Pathfinder,The Prairie. Natty Bumppo is celebrated
for his closeness to nature, and is the mouthpiece Cooper uses to
decry “the wasty ways of man” and “the twisty ways of the law.”
Washington Irving – His The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon (1819)
contains his two most famous stories, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” In his dozens of other sketches, he
celebrates the sentimental over the commercial and entertainment
over didacticism. Invents the old English Christmas in his 5
“Christmas Sketches” and in “Philip of Pokanoket,” rewrites Mary
Rowlandson’s captivity narrative from the Wampanoag point of view,
calling them “a native band of untaught heroes.”
American Renaissance
Term coined by F. O. Matthiessen in his
book of the same name in 1940.
Established the following as canonical
American writers: Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville,
Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman—Margaret
Fuller has since been added to this list as
major American writers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Famous for his essays: Nature (1836) was used
as a launching pad for the Transcendentalist
movement. Most famous for this image:
“Standing on the bare ground, -- my head
bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite
space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become
a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all;
the currents of the Universal Being circulate
through me; I am part or particle of God.”
Henry David Thoreau
Seen sometimes as the “legs” of the
Transcendentalist movement—was more
political than RWE. Most famous works are
“Resistance to Civil Government” (1849) and
Walden (1854): “ I went to the woods because
I wished to live deliberately, to front only the
essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn
what it had to teach, and not, when I came to
die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to
live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did
I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite
necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all
the marrow of life…”
Margaret Fuller
Feminist journalist, essayist, travel writer, and
transcendentalist thinker. Most famous work
Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845): “We
would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down.
We would have every path laid open to Woman
as freely as to Man. Were this done, and a slight
temporary fermentation allowed to subside, we
should see crystallizations more pure and of
more various beauty. We believe the divine
energy would pervade nature to a degree
unknown in the history of former ages, and that
no discordant collision, but a ravishing harmony
of the spheres, would ensue.”
Edgar Allan Poe – Romantic Quadruple
Threat (but NOT a Transcendentalist)
Poet: “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,”
Horror Fiction writer: “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The
Masque of the Red Death”—great with
unreliable narrators
Detective Fiction “inventor” (Auguste Dupin):
“Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Purloined
Letter”
Critic: “The Philosophy of Composition,” “The
Poetic Principle”—in his newspaper reviews of
lit, earns nickname “The Hatchet Man”
Nathaniel Hawthorne – THE typical
Romantic novelist
Novels: The Scarlet Letter, The House of
the Seven Gables
Short Stories: “Young Goodman Brown,”
“The Minister’s Black Veil” – like Poe,
master of unreliable narration
Herman Melville – Yarns on the
High Seas
Moby-Dick, of course, is his most famous novel, but his more
popular novels were south-sea Island captivity/adventure tales
Typee and Omoo.
Critic who, in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” in 1850, sets the adoring
critical tone others will follow: “What a mild moonlight of
contemplative humor bathes that Old Manse!--the rich and rare
distilment of a spicy and slowly-oozing heart. No rollicking rudeness,
no gross fun fed on fat dinners, and bred in the lees of wine,--but a
humor so spiritually gentle, so high, so deep, and yet so richly
relishable, that it were hardly inappropriate in an angel. It is the very
religion of mirth; for nothing so human but it may be advanced to
that. “
Though he wrote what purports to be poetry, I’m not convinced.
Walt Whitman – a Kosmos
Leaves of Grass revised 8 times between 1855 and 1892. Major
poems: “Song of Myself,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the
Cradle, Endlessly Rocking” “O Captain, My Captain,” “When Lilacs
Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”
Democratic in subject matter, style (free verse), and theme: “I have
said that the soul is not more than the body,/ And I have said that the
body is not more than the soul,/ And nothing, not God, is greater to
one than one's self is,/ And whoever walks a furlong without
sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud…Do I
contradict myself?/ Very well then I contradict myself,/
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)…. I too am not a bit tamed, I too
am untranslatable,/ I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the
world.”
Emily Dickinson – Your Easiest ID
on the Exam
Major poet more influential on modernists than in her
own time—most of her work wasn’t published until the
1890s. Her work is very easy to spot:
Hymn meter—nearly all of her poems can be sung to the
tunes of either “Amazing Grace” or “The Yellow Rose of
Texas”
Slant Rhyme— “room” rhymed with “storm,” for ex.
Dashes—her signal punctuation: “I heard a Fly buzz –
when I died – / The Stillness in the Room /Was like the
Stillness in the Air – / Between the Heaves of Storm – ”
Death is as overriding a theme in Dickinson’s poetry as
Life is in Whitman’s
Realism
As a reaction against Romanticism, it aimed to depict life as it was, “ragged
edges” and all.
Much of Realist fiction had a muck-raking, political impetus, like Rebecca
Harding Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills (1861)
Some aimed at a realistic aesthetic in the depiction of persons, situations,
and language, as Mark Twain indicates at the beginning of Huckleberry Finn
(1880): “In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri
negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect;
the ordinary "Pike County" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last.
The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork;
but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal
familiarity with these several forms of speech. I make this explanation for
the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these
characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.”
Doesn’t “end” with subsequent literary movements (Naturalism,
Modernism), but informs them.
See this link for major concerns and texts:
http://web.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap5/5intro.html
Naturalism
Either a branch of realism or a reaction against it—some
call it realism infused with determinisms.
Economic and Social Determinism – the work of Marx
and condition of American working class informs works
such as Stephen Crane’s Maggie, a Girl of the Streets
(1893) and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900)
Psychological and Biological Determinism – the work of
Freud and Darwin—our behavior controlled by our
unconscious drives; plays on a fear of a de-evolutionary
state; see Frank Norris’ McTeague (1899), Kate Chopin’s
The Awakening (1900), and Jack London’s “To Build a
Fire” (1910)
Robert Frost
“Pre-Modern” poet
Public image vs. poetic actualities
“The Road Not Taken”
Modernism(s)
Ezra Pound’s “Make it new” is the slogan
of all modernisms.
Marked by experimentation in form and
content.
Modern Poetry
Goals of Imagism – Ezra Pound, from “A
Retrospect”: “1. Direct treatment of the 'thing'
whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not
contribute to the presentation.
3.As regarding rhythm: to compose in the
sequence of the musical phrase, not in
sequence of a metronome.”
Pound wanted to get the “Victorian slither” out of
poetry.
Imagist Examples
Pound: “In a Station of
the Metro” (1913)
The apparition of these
faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black
bough.
(this is the entire poem,
pared from a 36-line
original)
William Carlos Williams:
“The Red Wheelbarrow”
(1923)
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
Other Important Modernist Poets
T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, e.e.
cummings, Langston Hughes, Edna St.
Vincent Millay
20th Century Poetry after the
Modernists
http://www.literaryhistory.com/20thC/20CA
mericanandBritish.htm
New Negro Renaissance
Alain Locke, “The New Negro”
Schomburg Exhibition:
http://www.si.umich.edu/CHICO/Harlem/te
xt/exhibition.html
Modernist Fiction
F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby
(1925)
Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises
(1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929)
William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury
(1929), Light in August (1932)
20th Century Fiction after
Modernism
http://web.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/
chap10/10intro.html
20th Century Drama
Eugene O’Neill and the Provincetown
Players: The Hairy Ape, The Emperor
Jones, Desire Under the Elms, Mourning
Becomes Electra, A Long Days Journey
Into Night
Other dramatists: Arthur Miller, Tennessee
Williams, Edward Albee, LeRoi Jones
(Amiri Baraka), Tony Kushner, Suzan-Lori
Parks