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1. The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe

Gothic Literature-dreams. Bring to light what society hides. Elements: ghostly atmosphere,
supersensitive character, narrator is an observant of the action, only survivor, mediator between what
happens and the reader, protagonist. Claustrophobic atmosphere, oppressive nature. Genre to tackle
political issues indirectly.
The house: symbol of exterior reality, nation. Projection of its inhabitants. Attic= darkspace, domestic
cemetery, oblivion, death. Bedrooms=private life. Kitchen, living room=public life.
Cycle structure: story starts and finishes the same way. Evth. contributes to the final effect. Nothing is
written without a reason.
The tarn: is a mirror with a distorted reflection of reality.
Relation Usher-sister: communication beyond natural, returning to life after death.
The crack of the House: erosion of his soul, presented at the beginning, anticipates the destruction of the
house.
Power of blackness: dark side, nightmare, African presence as a literary tradition.
The picture: by Usher, sort of devil, psychological decay of the character.
Poem: the haunted palace.

2. The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Gothic story. A woman suffers a mental breakdown, recluded in a room.
Topic of the haunted house: projection of the protagonist’s mental disorder.
Woman: married with children, middle class protestant white heterosexual.
Marriage: is a prison, legitimation of woman in society, political institution.
Indoctrination of women: cult of true womanhood. Women are told the values of feminity (modesty,
sacrifice, become a wife and mother, educators of future citizens). Her space is limited by the house.
Control of the body (passion clothes).
Wallpaper: sign of social class, expensive. Wall=prison. Paper=for writing. It’s the only thing she can
use. Oppression from the patriarchal culture.
Feminism: from French revolution, two branches: 1)equality,2)difference (conservative)
Yellow: old, colour for the sickness, antiquity, negative, problematic connotations, no exposition to sun,
racism (Asiatic immigration).
Husband: doctor. John (common name). He and her brother (men) decide she is ill. Rest
cure=relax=passivity. Creativity and the intellectual activity must stop. She becomes voiceless, loosing
subversive potential. Protest=madness. John’s sister: happy as a housewife, she things she is not
repressed, indoctrinated in manhood.
The room=her mind.

3. Trifles – Susan Glaspell

Trifles: gilipolleces, what women’s life is about according to men. Things out of the domestic sphere are
the important. Reflects how women’s life is described in society.
SG: provincial town writers experimenting with new drama, aware of women’s movements, pressure
and political invisibility of woman.
Text is about reading, interpreting text and reality.
Kitchen: sacrosanct space, women’s queendom where she is not controlled and organizes the family
through children and husband. Symbolic space where women struggle. Mss Wright projects herself onto
the kitchen. It is a mess, like Minnie’s mind.
John Wright, husband, representation of order, law, what is right and don’t.
Minnie Wright: small, invisibility, powerlessness, lack of authority.
Topic: domestic violence. Wife fighting back, isolated physically and psychologically. Finds a way to
liberate from oppression. Woman physically and spiritually harassed that can’t protest, divorce, speak
loud.
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Clues: only the two women can read the kitchen, not for biological reasons, but because they identify
with Minnie’s problems and experiences.
Miss Hale takes the initiative. Mss Peters (sheriff’s wife=married to law=similar attitude), follows her.
Quilt & patchwork: expression of women artistic talent when forbidden to be expressed in other areas.
Well done but somehow wrong. Miss Hale reads it. Myth of Phylomel (Ulisses’s wife). Myth of Aracne
(spider takes the web out of herself=potential inside women’s body).
Bird=killed by twisting its neck by John. Parallelism with his death. Symbol=he kills her voice.
Destroys her as a human being.
Knot: way of sewing. John was killed with one. Church=marriage, knot, bonding between the couple.

4. A Rose for Emily – William Faulkner

Name symbolism: Love
Gothic story:
Emily: transform the convention, is not a passive victim. Projecs her ownself in the kitchen. Rebellion,
burden/obssession of the soul/past, feeling of defeat, famil corruption, loss of values in a material world.
She rebels not openly but through the onl way the system permits, the intimacy of her house.
Style: flashbacks, concioussness techniques, use of present, past and future tenses, description of events
through the focalisation of diff characs. Circular narrative, destruction of traditional
structure(beginning+development+end). Reader constructs his own reading, no single interpretation.
Nechrophilic relationship: she kills her lover, mummified, makes love. Fullfilment if not in life, in death.
House: place of liberation instead of repression
Invisibility of black figures: servant never says a word, when he comes home, he disappears.
Cult of true womanhood: what restricts her behaviour, desire, sexuality makes her achieve it. No direct
confrontation with society. She’s respected.
Narrator: a man (Great Gatsby: narrator smbdy in the story but not protagonist)

5. Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain

Nature+adventures: due to American writers context. Reflects the situation of the country at the time
(slavery). Written by men using a space confronting domesticity (contraposition).
Men=rite of initiation, overcome a danger. Nature=place where to achieve maturity, overcome forces of
nature to show manhood/masculinity.
Humor: Weapon to criticise with bitterness the state of things, subversive.
Genre: Road stories.
HF: small boy (12yo) low low marginal class, no mother, drunk father, ignorant about the world, wild
boy, the +ignorant=the +sexist & racist, innocence, sincerity. Trickster. Poor guy that has money. Draw
the reader’s sympathy. Cheats the black man & the society that marginalises him.
Trip up the river: pains of growing, men experiences, construction of masculinity.
MT (penname: Samuel Langhorne Clemens): Invents American tradition, vernacular language to stand
against Britain. Recreates the American talk, the idiom. Gets inspiration from Cervantes and picaresque
novel. Western humorist (a literary weapon), local colour. Lnguage represented America. Grown-up in
southern atmosphere.
Language: American vernacular. More sophisticated=more evil. Masquerade to exploit reality.
The ship becomes a micro world (Heart of Darkness). HB & Jim = Robinson Crusoe & Friday.

6. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger

HC: White male boy (WASP high class), awakening into life, pains of growing, sort of Peter Pan, fierce
real world. Structures the world in 2levels: 1adult (hypocrisy, superficiality, phoniness), 2childhood
(purity, honesty, innocence).
Language: very important. Words=identity, social sense of belonging, subversion, rebellion.
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Title: HC wants to be the guardian angel to avoid childhood’s perversion. He feels like a new Messiah
protecting innocence in children from perversion from adulthood.

7. The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrisson

Background: Civil rights movements, perspective of Pecola.
Pecola: pains of growing, ugly black young poor girl. Marginalisation, social prejudices. Self-hatred
(black, not acceptance of oneself). She’s alone, no sense of womanhood, differently from Push.
No confrontation between black and white characters. Blacks project their anger in their own people.
Title: Blue in superlative, meaning sadness. Singular “eye”, from Judeo-Christian influence=God. White
prejudices over black community she wants their eyes to become blue.
Syntax & language goes crazy like her.
4 parts= 4 seasons. Change in weather is a contrast to what happens to her.

8. Push - Sapphire
Title: 1)struggle, 2)when having a baby, 3)force s.o. to do sth, 4)keep fighting
Clarice Precious Jones
Miss Rain: mediator, counsellor, helper. Constructs a black syllabus. Like Aunt Lupe from The House on
Mango Street.
Ghetto: limits by physical/invisible boundaries. Harlem, New York. People’s life depends on where the
live. Wilderness (attack of beasts).
Recreation of the American vernacular (HF): vulgar slang, truthfully speech.
Literacy: self-respect, self-made (Benj.Frnk), journey into civilisation (Heart of Dark), freedom, makes
Clarice become a human being through education. Weapon to fight back oppression.
Neo-slave narrative: slavery in modern times fought through education.
Critic on the system, teachers and parents can open or close the world for children. Education is given
less importance in society.
Sense of womanhood, sisterhood, community, they help each other, come together at school (educational
context where they can articulate what happens to them as a cure from that pain). They can write
themselves into being so they overcome it.

9. The House on Mango Street – Sandra Cisneros

Esperanza Romero: Female version of HF: pains of growing. Quest for identity, journey to find herself.
Chicana, poor, catholic.
Aunt Lupe: counsellor, helper, mediator between her present and her future (old wise witch who helps as
in magic tales/blind people with supernatural powers).
The Waterbabies: ideological book for children, indoctrinating. Opposition white/black. White=they
swim and are clean. Black=chimneysweepers, dirty.
Mango Street: social imprisonment, leaving the barrio means success. Alienation from one’s root. Social
space (barrio) vs the house (private spc).
Language: very difficult simplicity inspirated in American authors: Hemingway.

10. Bartleby the Scrivener – Herman Melville

Radical passive resistance vs violence. Talks about politics, revolution, change the world. Natural law vs
legal law.
Scrivener, not a creative job, just copies in an office.
Wallstreet: centre of capitalism (alienation, dehumanization, man=clog in the machine to the richest get
richer). Symbol of the world. Wall=prison, confinement. American nightmare instead of American
dream.
Bartleby wants to provoke some change in the boss, but without violence. Wants to change the narrator
and the reader. If he does, he will have been successful.
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Office: bleak the present, sad.

Bartleby: sort of Christ dying on the cross.
Narrator: lawyer, the boss, tries to react from a charity/bourgeois point of view. He thinks he did evth. he
could (Poncio Pilatos).

11. The Snows of Kilimanjaro – Ernest Hemingway

Imperial travelling: EH was a tourist, sort of colonisation, stereotypical idea of the country visited,
western vision, imperial eyes.
TitleSnow: white, spirituality, innocence. Kilimanjaro=“house of God”. Journey to find salvation,
redemption, purity. Religious connotations.
Africa=primitive place, wild landscape, uncivilised.
Harry = leopard. Alienated hero, only achieves his desire/transcendental end in his imagination.
Frustrated man victim of his own desires ending up alienated, lost.
Gangrene: biblical illness, spiritual+physical disease.
Italics=flashbacks thoughts.
Style: short sentences, adjective, direct, picturing the situation and letting the reader decide. Interior
monologues and third-person narrator.
Narrator: Omniscient, controlling all the information. Reader is asked to piece together the parts of the
text.
Wife: part of the source of his misery.

12. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Context: happy 20’s. USA becomes first world power, Charleston, women’s right to vote, feminism.
Opportunities for people from the middle west.
FSF: Journalist. Worked on language, constructing the American novel. Talks about the American dream
(Benj Fr, self-made man, autobiography=reinventing oneself, change of name and identity as much as
you want, so it’s difficult to trace people past).
Nick Caraway: character participant in the events. Evth. is mediated by his vision, sometimes an
outsider and sometimes a participant.
Gatsby: great (we expect someone great in moral or money but it’s ironic because he is a common
American man). In one hand, he is extremely romantic, passionate for Daisy but also with dark side,
materialist, mafia, dark business. Similarity to Scarlet O’Hara and JFK.
Corruption of the American dream: first puritans dreamt of a New Jerusalem paradise but they slaughter
natives, slavery. No matter how corrupted the dream is, we need it. We need illusion, hope, or we have
to commit suicide. If we loose hope, we loose everything. Corruption of wealth (money corrupts, they
can kill, break anything.
Spaces: The Eggs, The Valley of Ashes, NY.
Daisy=romanticism. GG loves her and wants her back.