6.

MODERN AMERICAN DRAMA

Previous to 1916, the American experience had not found a suitable way of expression in the
dramatic form. Causes:

- The Puritan antagonism to leisure and to the misinterpretation of reality

- The prevalence of European works, British patterns dominated American theaters
- Playwrights had found in cinema and TV writing a more dependable medium economically
speaking

O’NEILL

O’neill’s play inaugurated modern American drama. During the 20’s and 30’s O’Neill and his
followers would liberated it from unwelcome European influence and from commercial impositions,
and would transform Broadway in the centre of dramatic art. The 20’s witnessed a generalized
psychological approach to the self and the World, while the 30’s and 40’s added to plays the social
and political color of the period

Modernist literature responded to the period’s concern about human consciousness and
unconsciousness. The new psychological approach to the self disclosed the hidden process of the
mind, and proposed our actions are mere surfaces. The dramatic genre is a form whose essence
consists in offering a representation of appearances. Hence, the dramatists tried to convey those
occult processes beyond usual gestures and situations on stage. O’Neill proposed the use of masks.

The American drama of the early 20th century moved away from the romantic and melodramatic
formulae. New modes of representing human experience:

- Realism, which investigated social issues, real-life conditions, ordinary people

- Symbolism, which favored suggestion over realistic detail
- Naturalism, which explored the forces that shaped and determined human behavior
- Expressionism, which sought the expression of moods and emotions by means of distortion
and exaggeration.

Post-impressionists artists like Van-Gogh inspire writers with his use of non-representational
techniques. Playwrights engineered diverse strategies to show the characters’ hidden conflicts and
inner drives. O’Neill embraced the symbolical (or evocative) as well as the naturalist (or
representational). His expressionistic plays evidence his effort to experiment with language and
structure, in order to bring to life the unseen operations of human mind. Masks, spoken thoughts,
asides or onstage choruses evidence such an interest. Characteristics:

- A dreamlike atmosphere
- An episodic plot consisting of a cinematic cutting of scenes
- Lyrical, often delirious monologues and dialogues

THE EXTRAORDINARY IN THE ORDINARY

In addition to this new attention to the human unconscious, the pioneers of American modern
drama would bring the ‘common man’ onto the stage. Drama therefore revealed the nation’s
powerful self-consciousness at the moment, in particular after the First World War and during the
Depression years. O’Neill and his contemporaries shaped their plays with the two main features: the
exploration of the unconscious and the incorporation of the common man. The self had been
previously depicted as struggling with the gods; now the struggle was perceived to be with oneself.
Playwrights conceived conflict as inherent to those who strive to belong, to be part of a social
system where they play a role. They moved away from character abstractions in search of more
human and recognizable figures.

Innovative use of localism, and features of local-color writing (speech, customs, and realistic
representations of place...) Ordinary events of everyday life in a small community… common
language and simple life.

REMEMBER: American drama was born in the Modernist era. Several artistic and economic reasons
energized the creation and flourishing of a national dramatic genre that surveyed national themes
and characters. O’Neill: expressionistic strategies and emphasis on common people and situations.

REVIEW OF DRAMATIC ELEMENTS, HOW TO READ A PLAY

Aristotle: drama is the ‘imitation of men in action’. A genre that exposes the changing nature of the
inner and outer conflicts of the human being. The story of a ply is not told but represented. Plot is
not the same as story: story is “what happens”, while the plot is the way the narrator presents the
story to the audience. The plot is formed by:

- Dramatic action requires a conflict between opposing forces. The conflict creates
complications, originates the unfolding events and the tensions in order to breed action,
until the arrival of climax.
- The exposition is the introduction of the characters and setting
- The rising action presents the central conflict, complications, suspense…
- The crisis is a minor climax at the end of an act or scene
- Climax is the point of greatest dramatic tension, and when the conflict is resolved
- Denouement is the resolution.

Acts are normally intended to indicate changes of time, setting, characters onstage or mood. In
fiction, characters are presented through the point of view of an observer, either the narrator or
some of the other characters. Dramatic characterization employs an array of visual and verbal
strategies to make the characters personalities known to the audience:

- The characters words and actions

- Other characters; comments on him or her
- Stage directions

Monologue: extended speech by one character. Soliloquy: extended speech by one character who is
alone on stage, used to express private thoughts. Aside: character’s direct address to the audience.
Dramatic irony: the audience knows more about the character about a specific situation than him or
her. Anagnorisis: central discovery made by the tragic hero, particularly the discovery of this
responsibility.

ARTHUR MILLER; DEATH OF A SALESMAN

Miller was sympathizer of the American Communist Party; The Crucible dramatizes his persecution
in a parallel historical moment. Basic preoccupation: family ties, responsibility, and the self’s
frustrations. Death of a Salesman: father-son anxieties. The story of an unsuccessful salesman who
undergoes a tragic end. It stemmed from Miller’s own experiences. Miller’s artistic outcome exhibits
a Realist and Naturalist approach to life: as a realist, he always revealed a concern to offer a densely
populated social world. His characters are manufacturers, salesmen, lawyers…

He redefined and complemented the notion of reality by exploring psychological depths and
personal drives. As a Naturalist, he explored the frustrations caused by the limitations that social
conditions cast upon the self. In this play, a series of allusions and foreshadowings that progressively
lead to the disclosure of hidden sins. This gradual revelation contributes to the rising tension of the
play until the climax certifies the horror lurking behind apparently quite domestic scenes. Memory
play = dramatization of mnemonic workings.

Features:

- Realistic and expressionistic use of the stage

- Anachronies or temporal dislocations of the plot
- The use of a common man as a tragic hero
- The retelling of the American Dream from the perspective of those who fail
- The family
- The symbolic network
- The accurate vernacular speech

The formal strategies employed by Miller aimed at the exhibition of mental processes such as
memory, conflict, and self-delusion. The temporal and spatial dislocations that nevertheless
maintained a continuous action and tension provided an agile strategy through which to reveal the
protagonist’s constant recall of the past.

Memories of actual events can coexist with dreams and with present situations onstage, giving a
kind of synchronicity. Light effects contribute to the hallucinatory atmosphere that surrounds Willy.

Another dramatic strategy: to present a common man, and Everyday man that could represent any
person, as a tragic figure. The tragedy resides in the realm of the domestic.

Whether highborn or common characters, tragic heroes are flawed and therefore make errors of
judgment. The Greek termed this hamartia: “missing the mark”. In other words, tragic figures set
out on an enterprise that they misjudge, and therefore fail. Willy Loman’s hamartia consists of his
belief in a sort of indisputable birthright to prosper, by reason of his American nationhood.

Miller stated the importance of social forces such as class, family, norms and labor on the lives of
characters.

The idea of America as a land of opportunity is deeply rooted in the national mythology of the US.
Like The Great Gatsby, Death of a Salesman inspects the nature of such dream, and provides
adequate dramatic representation of its facts and fallacies. Unlike Gatsby, Willy Loman stands for
those whose ambitions have resulted in failure, thus embodying the falseness of the idea that
success is achievable by anyone. His characterization is built upon contradictions, the first of which
emanates from the disparity between his firm belief in the American myth of success and his own
actual life.

The ‘jungle’ of modern urban life, imagized by the brick density of the Loman place, seems to have
Darwinian implications: only the fittest will survive… Willy is represented as unfit.

Willy’s hamartia or tragic flaw: distorted understanding of life divert him from the way to success, as
well as wrong decisions.

Overt criticism to the capitalist system. The play deals with the decay, perversion, or destruction of
social relationships at family level. Revelations of deficiencies of the capitalist system run parallel to
those pertaining to the personal and the familial. Willy evidences consumerist ansiety; distress at
having to pay bills or clear a mortgage.

Another myth that the play subverts: the open road. The image of the road has traditionally entailed
a promise of escape, improvement, self-finding, and return to nature. In Death of a Salesman, the
road is not an actual physical space because it is never displayed onstage. Rather, characters speak
of it.

The play lacks overt manifestations of the Loman’s Jewishness –Miller had Jewish background. Two
central issues at the heart of Jewish-American literature: the family as the fundamental structural
and ideological element, and focus on the common man.

The play makes use of the following imagery :

- The Loman’s home functions as a metaphor for Willy’s ambitions, as well as for his failures. The
modern appliances he wants for his house stand for Willy’s idea of success and happiness.

- “Loman” evokes the family’s social class.

- The stage set, suffocated tall urban constructions, suggest the strain felt by the Lomans.

- Willy’s car is an instrument of death and destruction, as well as an image of the reversal of the myth
of the open road.

- The seeds that Willy unsuccessfully plants stand for his failure in life.

- Irony. Dramatic irony = the spectators know more about the action than some of the characters

- A house free of mortgage seems to express the modern version of freedom.

REMEMBER: Miller was concerned with the moral condition of ordinary human beings. His plots
explore family relations or life in small communities. Death of a Salesman presents a Realist account
of the capitalist system and its implications.
7. POSTMODERISM. THE US AFTER WORLD WAR II.
Postmodernism began as an attempt to reestablish a homogenized American identity. The end of
Second World War marked the beginning of a time of stability and economic prosperity. Americans
felt disturbed by the use of the atomic bomb in the name of progress and democracy, history and
technology had showed their dark side. Cold War eral Communism was to be suppressed in Asia and
elsewhere. Development of transport and communications.

Eisenhower assumed the role of restorer of the backbone of American civilization, capitalism, and
individualism. After two decades in which Americans had sacrificed for the collective benefit, the cult
to the individual returned. It adopted the form of homogeneous consumerism. But economic and
social progress did not reach all races –racial ghettos proliferated in the cities.

American mainstream ideology was propagated by TV, radio, shows advertising, the film industry
and other media: the family system, consumerism, prosperity, and protection.

A GENERATION OF FURTIVES: THE BEATS

Late forties = Beat Generation.

The Beat movement rejected mainstream America, it’s a sort of furtiveness. In an effort to assert
themselves as independent in every area of life, they embraced and worshipped social outcasts:
from blacks to Mexican-americans to psychopaths, drugadicts, and criminals. Literary bohemians;
blending of fact and legend in relation to their actual motivations and activities. They lived
unorthodox lives, disregarding social and artistic establishments: they rejected white-collar work,
the family system, religion.

The Beats embraced 19th century Transcendentalism; they were inheritors of the romantic spirit of
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau. However, the Beats’ romantic flavor reached beyond their
interest in nature as a source of inspiration. Beat writers preferred literary forms scarcely
constrained by rigid structures. Subject matters / ideological features:

- Romanticism. Emerson / Thoreau. Their spontaneity and originality were put into practice
mostly in painting and jazz. Kerouac and other Beats had an idealized and patronizing view
of the black race, similar to the romantic racialism of the 19th century.
- Artistic fusion: the Beats were not only a literary movement –filmmakers, musicians, etc.
- Masculinity and youth: the beat spirit tried to recover the essence of the Frontier era:
independence, mobility, closeness to nature.
- Transcendence: the Beats sought a method to reach beyond the real world of surface. They
pursued altered states of consciousness with drugs and music.

ALLEN GINGSBER: HOWL

The poem is a beat manifesto in praise of the American outsiders. It conveys the idea of alienation,
and protested the nation’s surrender to the current conformity and contentment. Gingsber raised
scandal for his homosexuality and used of drugs.
The Beats sought spiritual liberation and their compositions echoed this quest. Beat poetry
developed out of public readings; its verse is focused on orality. Modernist poetry often resorted to
phrase and line length to replace metrical feet. Ginsberg would find in jazz a suitable rythmic
pattern, he view himself as a messiah with a message to diffuse.

- Use of free verse and long line

- Mechanism to create rhythm: anaphora and parallelism
- Concern with cultural references and allusions
- Denunciation of modern life and regret for its victims

Howl is a literary denunciation of the unbalancing effects of modern culture and the Eisenhower
period. It depicts a spiritually void America, ruined by “Moloch” –Ginsberg’s image for greed and
industrialization.

The poem is structured in three parts: the first one censures the lamentable damage done to the
poet’s contemporaries; the second one is a poetic charge on the “pure machinery” of Moloch; and
the third part extends the boundaries of Rockland –the mental asylum where Carl Solomon was
voluntarily confined- to contemporary America. Ginsberg juxtaposes the spiritual poverty of modern
life with mental breakdown, soul and reason being equally injured. Walt Whitman’s poetics: long
lines, incantory repetitions, and syncopated rhythms. It shows and ‘in crescendo’ tone.

Stylistic features:

- Breath units, a poetic and meditative system by which a line takes the linguistic space
provided by one physical breath. Breath also function as a measure of life. Each line was
independent and unrelated to the poem as a metric whole.
- Anaphora: the initial word or phrase is repeated along two or more lines. “Who” in the first
section, “Moloch” in the second, and “I’m with you in Rockland” in the third.
- Parallelism and repetition. Reiteration of ideas and words, sounds, and syntactic structures.
Alliteration: “dusks of Brooklyn ashcan rantings and kind king light”
- Juxtaposition of images: incongruous images are fused: “…the streets of Idaho seeking
visionary Indian angels”.
- Allusions: reference to people or events commonly known by the audience.
- Parataxis: sentences are placed together without connective words.
- Paranomasia, or puns. Wall Street = Wailing Wall.
- The poem ends abruptly, unpunctuated.

REMEMBER: The Beat generation had its roots in the conformist spirit of postwar America. Beat
artists subverted the homogeneous cultural panorama with works that claimed freedom of thought,
speech, and form. Denunciation of modern life.

LITERARY POSTMODERNISM

After Second World War; Postmodernism would be a late mode of Modernism. Postmodernism
however shows an interest in popular art and in marginal discourses and voices. While Modernism
questions reality and one’s perception of it, Postmodernism emphasizes identity and constructions
of the self. Differences between Modernist and Postmodernist texts:

- Modernist texts attempted the creation of a design to impose an aesthetic order, while
Postmodern texts delight in anarchy.
- During Modernism, meaning and authority were interrelated. When Postmodern thought
suspects any form of authority –political, cultural- meaning is devalued.
- While Modernist authors sought newness and uniqueness, Postmodern authors attempt
creations that rely on previously created patterns.

All Postmodern texts deny the existence of a universally valid system of belief and claim the collapse
of intellectual authority. Many postmodern works will be invested with a strong epistemological
component, as a detective quest.

Jacques Derrida states that language itself –the bridge between the self and the world- mediates this
relationship. Derrida criticizes the cult for reason or ‘logocentrism’. Language as an arbitrary and
volatile system will be present in Postmodern texts.

Frederic Jameson proposes that Postmodernism is the result of late capitalist culture, dominated by
corporations and mass media. In a cultural landscape where hyperreality and media eclipse reality,
imitation of such reality has ceased to represent a desirable objective of artistic manifestations. The
process of art is therefore more attractive than the result of art. Intellectual panorama:

- The complex nature of subjectivity and identity

- The relationship between the real and the imaginary
- Skepticism about knowledge

LITERATURE AND METANARRATIVES

Postmoderint questions narrative in its broad sense. In this light history, science, philosophy,
religion, etc are interrogated and contested for their claim to universality. If reason and the progress
of humanity were behind the atrocities of the World Wars, they could no longer be perceived as
legitimizers of other systems of thought. Postmoderism holds that there cannot exist one single
discourse to apprehend and explain the totality of the world –and only a plurality of discourses can
therefore account for a plurality of worlds.

The meaning of a text cannot be said to depend on the author.P ostmodernists question the validity
of language as sustainable system or as the instrument for the construction of metanarratives.
Language is arbitrary, where the ‘sign’ can be attributed a variety of ‘signifieds’.

A direct consequence of the growing disbelief in authority are the conspiration theories and
paranoia. Metafiction = self-reflexive fiction or fiction that mirrors the process by which it is
constructed and read.

FRAME-BREAKING

A frame is any plan, structure, or support that underlies a literary text. Frame-breaking attempts to
lay bare these conventional frames. The author emerges as another linguistic construction. Readers
find themselves active parts of the process of meaning. Intertextual connections. According to
Roland Barth, the author becomes another creative construction.

THE VOICES OF MINORITIES

Despite the political measures proclaimed in the 60s to alleviate racial inequalities and intolerance,
racism still haunt the diverse racial communities living in the US. A combination of demographic
transformations and cultural movements have brought the voices of minorities to the forefront.
Racial and ethnic questions share this space of cultural pluralism with class and gender issues.
Notions of identity will play a fundamental part in the imaginative records of dominant and minority
groups. From the 60s on, works by Native Americans, Latinos, gays and lesbians, etc and other
silences authors have claimed their version of Americanness.

THE IMPACT OF THE MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY

If Modernism was highly influenced by contemporary studies on psychology and anthropology,

Postmodernism reflects a post-Hiroshima anxiety about science and technology. Communication
(highways, TV, computers) became a primary interest. Mass production has also shaped art and our
perception of the artistic process. Andy Warhol’s creations were based on consumerism:
multiplication of images suggested that culture was becoming a mere accumulation of copies.
Intertextuality. Television was changing our modes of perception of reality.

The advances in science and technology have activated the emergence of texts which denounce the
perverse consequences of modern life. Toxic consciousness = the feeling of waste prevailing in some
works. Toxic consciousness goes beyond the attempt to describe the cecaying health of the planet, it
refers to our own awareness of environmental decadence, and to the shifting perception of the self
in relation to it –environmentalist spirit.

THOMAS PYNCHON’S “ENTROPY”

Postmodernist literature is called the literature of entropy or chaos because it has rejected the
creation of meaning as its main objective. Structurally complex, cryptic, and drawing from popular
culture, this narrative mirrors Postmodern life and sensibility in the protagonist paranoiac search for
certainty. Pynchon’s works communicate the idea that technological progress is behind modern
distress. Contemporary scientific discourse permeates his stories and projects on them the notion of
an entropic understanding of the universe. Features:

- Double setting, which entails also a double set of characters and a double perspective in the
telling.
- Scientific concept structuring and informing the plot.

The story takes place in Washington DC in 1957. It reflects the Red Scare time, the years in US
history when leftist ideas were considered threatening to the welfare of the nation. The characters
are engaged in uncertainty and the limits of knowledge. The author stretches scientific concepts in
order to apply them to a cultural condition which seems to be reaching its “heat-death” or point of
exhaustion of energy.
Broadly speaking, entropy is the random but irreversible tendency of a system to lose energy and
run down. But entropy belongs to both thermodynamics and communication theory. Entropy enters
the story in its three main definitions: as a measure of randomness in a closed system, the measure
of thermal energy not available to work, and the measure of the loss of information in the
transmission of a message.

Spatial disposition is highly relevant to the story. Pynchon chose a binary setting for the unfolding of
events. On the one hand, Meatball’s apartment is what could be defined as a highly disordered
place. In scientific terms, it is an open system that harbors diverse forms of energy. Callisto’s
apartment, on the other hand, is a closed system designed to resist the heat-death that Callisto
presumes outside. Both settings share the suggestion that the uniformity outside and its subsequent
decline require some form of opposition, although both attempts (Meatball’s uncontrolled party and
Callisto’s hothouse) prove unsuccessful.

As the narrative shifts from upstairs to downstairs space, the point of view shifts as well. Ineffectual
communication is neutralized by musical patterns in the story. Musical imagery is important in
Entropy, for music supplies organized structures of sounds that create meaning and harmony.

Characters in Entropy mirror the countercultural ambience that prevailed in the US from the late 50s
through the 60s and 70s. Several forms of counterculture or subculture contested the dominant
discourse: histories sought by minorities, as the emerging cyberpunk literature, and the
conspirational stories that offered alternatives to the established system.

Humor is ubiquitous in Pynchon’s prose. He presents absurd situations, unexpected plot turns, and
provoking names. He also plays with overloading referentiality of cultural allusions. Bizarre
characters and events. Many of the characters are Meatball’s wild party have responsibilities in
national institutions.

REMEMBER: The Postmodern period reveals an acute questioning of any kind of authority and a
deconstruction of meaning. Contestation of traditional understanding of the ‘sign’. Pynchon’s
Entropy displays a postmodern trait in its questioning of scientific metanarratives and reason, its
defiance of binary oppositions and its challenge of readers’ expectations.
8. THE 1960’S: POETRY AND PROSE OF DISSENT.
The 60s –Kennedy’s openness against the monolithic ideology of the preceding years. Tumultuous
moments with human greatness and misery coexisting on equal levels. The nation aimed at cultural
homogenization after WW II, however differences emerged everywhere: Civil Rights and Women’s
Liberation Movements, Cold War, nuclear threat, space exploration, power of the media… and the
Vietnam War added a new component of friction.

When the anti-war movement exploded in protest against the Vietnam War, so did all the other
movements against cold-war containment: the feminist movement, the anti-nuclear peace
movement, the environmental movement, the gay and lesbian rights movement, and civil rights not
only for African Americans.

In this postwar context, American women saw how the end of the conflict extinguished the
aspirations and careers that WW II had encourage, when veterans returned home they recuperated
the jobs that women had provisionally occupied.

“The Feminine Mystique” was a study of American womanhood. It reflected the frustration
experienced by women in domestic roles that undervalued their actual capacities, and questioned
the belief system that forced them to find reward and self-fulfillment only in the domestic sphere; a
role in which they had to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers. The book triggered the second wave
of feminism.

Despite the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1965, which disallowed racial discrimination in
voting practices, racism persisted. A more radical activism emerged, and activists like Malcolm X
spread the idea that the black issue should be handled by black people. Some Black Power advocates
supported violence as a racial right, and discouraged integration.

ADDRIENNE RICH: ‘SNAPSHOTS OF A DAUGHTER-IN-LAW’

She was intellectually encouraged while she was taught southern manners and female passivity. She
therefore felt a sense of contradiction and division: both Jewish and anti-Semitic, educated to
conform to stereotypes of feminine behavior and to question, critique. She acknowledged she had
been writing under the influence of male forms and themes.

Hers is a political poetry. Her early poems already hinted at women’s oppression through imagery of
opposing forces, in particular those of creativity and domesticity. The formalism she had inherited
and imitated, so praised by her male contemporary critics, constricted her awakening feminism in
her early stages.

Increasingly alert of her complex, sometimes contradictory identity as a poet and a wife, she spend 8
years between her second and third books reflecting on the roles that society had constructed for
women. Frustration and a sense of disloyalty provoked a deep feeling of guilt in Rich, who at
moments perceived herself as an anti-woman woman. Rich would insistently portray rebellious
women who resented their commitment to patriarchal values they were contributing to reproduce.

A distinc postmodern aspect in Rich’s work is her robust engagement with history and identity. She
aims at reviewing the western consciousness she has inherited, from which she declares herself
exclude as a woman and a Jewish. Her growing awareness of women’s historical oppression and
subsequent powerlessness has shaped her poetry since the late fifties. Rich has been concerned with
another distinctively Postmodern issue: that of language as a social construct, a structure that
reveals itself as male-controlled as history. The struggle to find a real female language has
condemned woman writers to either adaptation to male discourse or complete silence.

“Snapshots of a daughter-in-law” expands the idea of the ‘two minds, two messages’. Features:

- Fragmentary form
- Use of quotation and allusion
- Imagery related to violence
- Challenge to domestic issues

The author writes taking women as the center of her compositions. Its structure, language, and
theme aim at liberation from male-dominated patterns and traditions. This poem is an overt
proclamation of women’s position in society, as each ‘snapshot’ reveals a female state of mind. Rich
was taught that poetry should be universal, which to her meant ‘non female’.

The title of the poem is significant enough for its announcement of the fragmentary contrstruction
that follows, caused by an intermittent writing process. They should be viewed as a photograph, a
still moment captured from life. Another issue concerning the title is the central figure in it, named
after the social role she plays. Such label defines the woman in relation to a system based on
heterosexual love and marriage, a conventional discourse that Rich would progressively decry both
as a lesbian and as a feminist. The poem’s title suggests that only by marrying a man does the
daughter in law exist.

A highly literary poem, very academic in the tradition of TS Eliot and Ezra Pound, and imitative of
their allusive style that resorted to the poetic tradition. Indeed, the poem offers a profusion of
scholarly allusions and quotations. The poem also appropriates traditionally male elements, like the
quester and the outdoor scenario. It starts with a passive southern belle and ends with an active
challenger, advancing through traditionally female confined spaces of the domestic sphere. ‘Home’
as an ideal space for women is decried in the poem.

Home, the national myth of the 50s, is therefore attacked as the center of a masculine system to
which women are expected to keep loyalty. In fact, the Women’s Liberation Movement was
sometimes associated with Communism in the 50s because they both represented a menace to the
American way of life. The final section of the poem envisions the daughter-in-law as a saboteur, or at
least as a disloyal interrogator of the sacred institutions of family, marriage, heterosexual romance,
or the foundations of patriarchal civilization. Each of the ten ‘snapshots’ of the poem challenge and
dismiss preconceptions and stereotypes; they discard those roles and attitudes socially constructed
and conventionally attributed to women. For women authors, finding artistic independence requires
a symbolic annihilation of patriarchal conceptions of women. Despite her focus and distinctive
experiences, Rich avoided the “I” speaker in the poem. She uses a “you” that refers to the daughter-
in-law figure, central to the poem, as well as to those ‘darlings’ and ‘ladies’ to whom the speaker
addresses. The author therefore designates a collective femaleness that finds representation in a
“she” figure. The poem displays polivocality, or array of voices, by assuming the voices of other
silenced women. It is Rich belief that language is a male instrument, like history and time, which can
only shut women down.

REMEMBER: Adrienne Rich’s poetry and essays stand out as relevant contributions to the feminist
movement of 60s. She became increasingly aware of the gender issues. She uses allusions and
quotations to question stereotypes concerning womanhood and raise female consciousness.

LEROI JONES (AMIRI BARAKA’S): DUTCHMAN

Literature absorbed and mirrored the dissenting atmosphere of the American 60s. But it was prose,
narrative and drama, the mode that best reflected this context, this texture of conditions and social
circumstances from which disagreeing voices were merging. If Adrienne Rich;s work is distinguished
by its activism in gender issues, Jones typifies the racial struggle for social rights.

Under the influence of William Carlos Williams and Ezra pound, was involved in the Beat movement.
He developed an extremist ideology and changed his name. The turning point was the assassination
of Malcolm X in 1965, after which he decided to actively engage in Black Nationalism.

The Black Arts Movement became known as such in the mid 60s when activists of Black Nationalism
started to strive for the definition of a Black Asthetic. Art and politics were thus decisively linked in
this attempt to repudiate white culture and taste. Artistic expressions were conveived as political
instruments. It proposed a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology.

Black Aestheticians dismissed the work of previous African American writers because of their
unconcious ‘imitation’ of white models and values. Jones and other supporters of the Black
Asesthetic proposed black music as the sole valid model at the writers’ disposal for the expression of
black experience. “Pure” black art would not represent a mere celebration of black heritage, but a
form of dissidence and an empowering act. Black Art employed exaggeration and imagery of
violence.

“Dutchman” features:

- The myths and archetypes that inform the plot and characters
- Symbolic power
- Intertwining of gender, class, and race issues.
- Themes of racial activism
- Violence in its tone and situations

‘Dutchman’ was stage in 1964 and reflects the dissenting 60s. It revealed its author’s revolutionary
drive behind the text, and his deep concerns for racial matters. The play focused on and criticized
the black middle-class integrationists who had embraced the white ideology and its representations.
It’s been defined as a didactic fable. –the play its self is a means to a social end. Allegorical structure.
Readings:

- The setting, a subway train, is an expressive strategy; it signifies the exploration of issues
below the surface of reality.
 - Jones makes archetypical patterns, like the descent into darkness, to disclose hidden
anxieties.
- The apple is a recurring element. It reinforces the Eveness of the main femal character. Here
as in the biblical patter, the symbolic power of the fruit includes both Lula’s body and one’s
self-knowledge. Lula is a white liberal who tries to seduce Clay. She attempts to entice him
into a sexual encounter that mainly involves an apprehension of his position as a black man
in the US. Clay openly admits his approaches to whiteness, which he later rejects.
- Clay’s book is another reference to the Genesis. Clay’s knowledge comes from his readings,
and his curse originates in his ability to use such learning in the right way.
- The knife, a phallic weapon for a symbolical sexual encounter. The knife is an instrument of
execution.
- The name of the male protagonist alludes to the primary matter of which the first man was
made.
- The title refers to the legend of the Flying Dutchman, the doomed captain that perpetually
wanders in search of selfless love.
- Lula is female, white, middle-class. Clay is male, black, and ‘fake’ middle class. Jones
presented Clay as a man attempting invisibility as a black citizen, and that distinguishes
himself with the help of garments and language.

Historical and cultural allusions permeate the play. Minor characters are nameless and mostly
voiceless figures. Themes:

- Racial prejudice: racial stereotypes.

- Symbolic fall of the man: in racial as well as in mythological sense, the Dutchman is a
representation of the universal theme of loss of grace and innocence. The Genesis is
reenacted, portraying Adam and Eve.
9. NEW FICTIONS.
POSTMODERN NARRATIVES

Mainly, American new fictions have discarded the reflection, explanation or denunciation of reality
in order to reinvent their relationship with it. Both modernism and postmodernism are forms of
Realism, that is, modified understandings of reality and its expression. “New fictions” embrace the
different fictive responses to a series of literary historical circumstances. Fiction has seeked new
ways of reinventing itself –i.e. forcing the readers’ participation in the construction of the text’s
meaning. Major approaches to the relationship between reality and fiction:

THE FABULATORS

A parodical treatment of past literary conventions, making use of inexplicable occurances. “Magic
Realism” is frequently used as well to refer to narratives that further explore the conflicting spheres
of reality and fantasy by stating that these share the same space. ‘Fabulation’ describes those
narratives that depart from the faithful recreation of actuality and rather deconstruct their own
worlds, governed by their own rules, and therefore free from the restrictions imposed by tradidional
narrative frameworks.

The decades that followed the end of WW II witnessed a new interest in genres that previously were
considered frivolous. Detective fiction, science fiction, westerns, thrillers… Metafictive fictions could
enter the class of Fabulist narratives since their aim is not the accurate representation of a shared
reality; they rather point inwards. Metafiction is fiction about the writing of fiction.

NON-FICTION NOVELISTS

In the turbulent 60s, the novel form resented the complexity of current events –Kennedy’s
assassination, Vietnam War, racial tumults, space trips; the overwhelming amount of remarkable
social and political events defied the imaginative outcome of fiction writers. In addition to writers,
journalists encountered a similar obstacle in the task of translating life into text. Both fiction writers
and journalists were forced to reconsider their methods, and they arrived to a common space.
Fiction and journalisms attempt a reconciliation of categories. i.e. Truman Capote: his non-fiction
novel took the form of a novel through a scene-by-scene organization of events, characterization
techniques, careful handling of dialogue… This sort of creative journalism has been labeled “new
journalism”, or the oxymoron “non-fiction novel”.

• The Realist novelist tries to create a parallel world and says to the reader “all this did not
really happen, but it could have”.
• The Fabulator needs only to convince on the basis of the internal cohesion of his purely
imaginary worlds, and claims: “All this could never happen, so do not blame me if it does not
same real”.
• The New Journalist needs only to convince on the basis of verifiable sources: “All this
actually did happened, so do not blame me if it does not seem real”
THE NEW REALISTS

The 80s (the ‘me’ decade) had certainly witnessed the American authors’ growing preference for the
realist style, particularly in the form of short-story writing. The common events of ordinary
experience were placed at the center of writers. The New Realists conform to basic conventions of
the Realist style and reproduction of reality. Drivers:

- Market factors that exercise pressure on literary forms –fiction as a commodity

- Class issues; fiction requires an enlarging of audiences.

URSULA LE GUIN’S: “SHE UNNAMES THEM”

Author of science fiction and fantastic stories. As a feminist author, she has found in fantasy a
suitable space for the reconsideration and reimagination of woman’s position in contemporary
American society. Although the volume is a highly heterogeneous combination of fiction, essay and
poetry, it contains the repeated idea that oneness with nature has been lost, and that such
communion will remain impossible as far as the fallacy of human superiority over nonhuman life
persists. Features:

- Its retelling of the myth of Adam and Eve –with a twist

- Its contestation of authority and tradition
- The combination of fantasy and closeness

Magical realism: blends the occurrences of everyday life with surrealism, and in this story animals
are granted the capacity to speak, analyze and debate while in an utterly domestic, or normalized
scenario. (Ref: Animal Farm, George Orwell, 1945)

The author subverts accepted notions of reality and offers alternative visions of it. Her interest in
anthropology and mythical patterns is present throughout her work. The story also borrows from
the Bildungsroman form, a narrative pattern that explores the character’s process of learning or
maturity. Growing up and dismissing established values are traditional themes in American
literature. This story is a form of re-writing of one of the best-known myths in the western world: the
Genesis, and God’s granting Adam the power to name animals and woman. “She unnames them”
uses the original story as its starting point, in the awareness that readers will construct meaning
from their knowledge of the previous version. Intertextuality enters the reading of this story
because the readers instantly think of the Genesis.

A good number of palimpsests attempt to offer a traditionally silenced or ignored point of view. “She
unnames them” reveals in its very title those who have been overlooked by the myth. Indeed “She”
(woman) and “them” (animals) were, according to the Biblical telling, the ones who received names
from Adam without previous consultation. (“She” is dependent on ‘he’). Language shapes reality as
much as cultural frames do. The story’s setting remains indistinct enough to recreate the Biblical
myth of Adam and Eve. Characters are blurry and unsituated. “She unnames them” is a recreation
because

a) Its retelling of the myth

b) It endorses the creatice figure on the character that has been ignored (Eve) It tells the
woman’s part of the story
It’s mock telling deprives the story of its religious overtones. Mixture of surrealist elements with
domestic affairs. The association of women and animals – they are grouped in the same category of
creatures, with a name imposed by the male human. Western thought has traditionally coupled
women and nature, and man equals reason and civilization. Besides the spatial and temporal
indefinition, the narrator’s name is omitted too, but cultural background fills the gap, and readers
establish the link between Adam and Eve.

Le Guin’s story seems to imply the similarities between the rights of women and animals. All kinds of
oppression emanate from the same sources. Ecofeminism is the critical approach that examines the
relationship feminism and ecology.

RAYMOND CARVER: “CATHEDRAL”

His has been termed ‘dirty realism’ for its in-depth look at the most disagreeable aspects of
American life, and for its exploration of the most disturbing side of the American promise.
“Minimalist” is another frequent label employed to define Carver’s fiction. Minimalism became a
fashionable and very marketable literary option in the 80s. As a literary mode it imploed the
distinguishable but simplified imitation of reality, that is to say, the world’s representation as
reduced to a few recognizable segments. Minimalism features:

- Economy of words and detail

- Slight plot and compression of incident
- Openness of form and misleading conclusions

Minimalist is therefore a sort of general understatement of the essential components expected in

fiction. Carver preferred the term “precisionist”, an artistic movement of the 20s: coldness, precise
drawing of situation, stylistic economy.

“Cathedral” features:

- Compactness of its style, plot and characterization

- Suffocating atmosphere
- Presentation of the darker side of the capitalist system
- Importance of televisual culture.

“Cathedral” presents its readers with a first-person, homodiegetic narrator who tells the story in a
manner that powerfully resembles oral storytelling. A homodiegetic narrator describes his or her
personal and subjective experiences as a character in the story. Such a narrator cannot know
anything more about what goes on in the minds of any of the other characters than is revealed
through their actions.

He also uses reported speech, to be ironic about his wife’s relationship with the blind man.
Homodiegetic narration usually derives in the reader’s empathy towards the speaker.

Carver usually placed his characters in indoors settings in which a menacing atmosphere could be
perceived. Carver’s minimalist-precisionist style concerned the description of his characters as well
as places and situations. In “Cathedral” the narrator does not provide a description of his wife, and
the blind man is described through his size and his beard. Since the story is narrated in first person,
the scarcity of detail casts an air of inarticulateness.

Televisual culture: TV in Carver’s works stands as a sign of consumer and media culture, a culture
where sensitivity and sensibility are dissolved by audiovisual strategies. Media culture has shaped
contemporary literature as film techniques did the literature of the early decades of the 20th century.
Oversimplification of discourse.

Carver’s dirty realism is observed in the self-portrayal of the narrator. The reader progressively
places him among the American pariahs, i.e. those who have been left out of the American dream of
success and self-fulfillment. Moreover, Carver’s lack of interest in political agendas or social critique
intensifies the numbness of his characters’ lives, further deadened by such unawareness or
indifference to actual conditions around them.

REMEMBER: Carver’s fiction can be defined as belonging to the New Realist, dirty Realist, Minimalist
or Precisionist styles. His prose is sparse in detail, meager in character or plot development, and
contained in tone.
10. FROM THE ‘MELTING POT’ TO THE ‘MARTINI
COCKTAIL’: THE LITERATURES OF MULTICULTURALISM
METAPHORES FOR THE ‘E PLURIBUS UNUM’: AMERICAN CULTURAL DIVERSITY

“e pluribus unum” or “the one from the many” – the aphorism comprises the multicultural nature of
American society. The melting pot was a metaphor which entailed the assimilation to the new
territory and the eradication of anything old the newcomer may bring along. The outcome of the
melting was a ‘new man’. The violence of the sixties disagreed with the melting pot. The “New
American man” rejected any other form of Americanness than non-whites, non-males or non-Anglo
Saxons.

The liberal ideal of cultural pluralism encountered a harsh context during the Reagan and Bush
administrations, when the emphasis was put on the unity of the nation rather than on its diversity.
The “Martini Cocktail” refers to the relationship of the permanent presence of two basic ingredients,
one of which will remain as the dominant majority. The adjective or noun “American” is one of those
controversial terms –the sameness and amalgamation suggested by the term have been challenged
by hyphenated constructions such as African-American, etc.

Multicultural nature of contemporary American culture:

- Immigration has nurtured US with colonists, pioneers, exiles, and workers. Enslaved men
and women enriched the national texture as well
- Though the early years of the 20th century witnessed a Modernist project that was
fundamentally Eurocentric and male, it expressed a curiosity about other rhythms, patterns
and beliefs.
- The ongoing movements for civil rights strive for the visibility and equality of those who had
been previously and systematically silenced.

Assimilation and acculturation are relevant aspects to take into account when dealing with American
minorities. The attachment to original roots and the preservation of a non-American identity are
manifested in several ways –ghettoes, reservations, etc.. geographical evidence of the resistance to
completely lose one’s origins. “American literature” has now broadened its scope to include those
social segments that had remained “invisible” –native American, Chicano, French American, Jewish…

The trickster figure in Native American writing: a fusion of rogue, fool, and wizard, that resists
classification.

Native American writers suffered the internal colonization of those who for centuries deprived them
of their land and silenced them. American literature largely offered the unique perspective of the
colonizers and conquerors, thus overlooking the side of the disposed. American Indian literature can
be said to be based on the traditional tales of the manifold tribes that populated North America.
Their rituals and their myths, sacred narratives, creation stories and trickster tales have developed
into a modern Native American literature that combines tradition and modernity; i.e. the
recuperation of harmonious relationship with nature, and the healing power of story telling.
1858 Guadalupe-Hidalgo treaty: Arizona, New Mexico, California, Colorado.

Mestizaje: fusión of differences. Illuminates the notion of a decentered identity in which its
components (race, gender, nation) are in flux, in shifting relationship.

SCOTT MOMADAY: “THE WAY TO RAINY MOUNTAIN”

“We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in or imagination of ourselves”. Initiator of
the “Native American Renaissance”; the term implies recovery, but this particular revival also calls
for political restitution. Its beginnings are in the mid-60s, when American-Indian activism energized
the publication of Native-American poems, stories, etc.

He was raised in Indian reservations, exposed to the Pueblo, Navajo and Apache traditions, and
familiar with folk-tales of his people that had been passed down for generations. He proposed the
trope “blood memory” to define identity in imaginative terms. He employed and celebrated blood
memory as recuperator of the racial, collective memory passed down through oral tradition, ‘racial
memory’. Blood memory thus tropes the conflating of storytelling, imagination, memory and
genealogy. The contemporary Indian writer renders himself coincident with indigenous ancestors
and with indigenous history. It blends the traditional elements of oral discourse with modern tactics.
“The way to rainy mountain” was initially a collection of legends, tales, and family stories. Features:

- Orality as a fundamental component in story telling and in the formation of identity

- The connection between the one and the many
- The approach to nature

“The Way to Rainy Mountain” in Momaday’s narration of an actual pilgrimage across Kiowa’s
landscapes and its parallel mnemonic and historical-anthropological journeys. This work is then a
gathering up of all these processes with a view to reconstruct Native American identity in an
imaginative dimension. Deliberate blending of legend, personal narrative, and documentary.
Exploration of identity; “autobiographical writing”.

This work first strikes the reader for its surpriseing form. It shows a collage technique by which
disparate texts seem to have been cut and pasted toegehter. Its innovative disposition challenges
traditional conventions of storytelling and reading, since both authors and readers alike are used to
one linear, sequential narrative where events are reported. Momaday bracketed the text with an
opening and a closing poem. Myth, history, and personal account are displayed simultaneously.

What the author hisself labeled “commentaries” –the historical and personal ftragments adjacent to
the main, mythical text- “are meant to provide a context in which the elements of oral tradition
might transcend the categorical limits of prehistory, anonymity, etc. As the exercise in blood
memory it is, the text manifests that Native American identity has to be imagined. Quest is therefore
the attire that Momaday puts on this mythical journey, a pilgrimage towards the recovery and
restitution of lost harmony. The journey motif is ubiquitious in American literature. Native American
tribes used to move around North America in search of food, or as a sort of collective ritual. Travel,
as a result, was an important part of their storytelling.
Momaday’s work reveals the environmental mindedness of Native American people. Indian
ecoliterature. Free of patterns of intellectual or exploitative domination perceived in Euramerican
writing, they respect and venerate the earth and the feminine principle associated with it.

REMEMBER: Native American renaissance (1068). He uses blood memory as thematic constant in his
work. Motifs in Native American literature” the mythic power of orality, the search for roots and
identity, and the harmonious relationship with nature.

JUDITH ORTIZ COFER: “THE WITCH’S HUSBAND”

Geographic, linguistic, religious and gender crossings have had an immense influence on the production of
Latin American literature. Judith Ortiz Cofer is defined by her in-betweenness, for she does not consider
herself outside the United States nor the Puerto Rican culture but in between two traditions.

The reading of her work manifests her “transnational” approach to questions of identity, neither
assimilationist to the dominant culture of the United States, neither oppositional. As with other ethnic writers,
Judith Ortiz Cofer’s work deals with culture as handed down from woman to woman through storytelling. Her
novels and stories are woman-centered, woman-fabricated, and woman-organized. Features:

- Instances of bi-culturalism
- Emphasis on oral culture and tradition
- Representation of gender types

Ortiz Cofer’s “The Witche’s Husband” discusses a family’s private history. She evidences her biculturalism in
her choice of words. Uses English but raised in a Spanish-speaking household. She shows her interest in
‘mestizaje’, in blending assumed opposites and crossing boundaries. Her attention mainly focuses on the
shifting and overlapping components of identity.

The witch figure hints a gender-related issue. Gender and nationhood are particularly interesting in this story,
for they communicate the particular understanding of feminism that a number of Puerto Rican women writers
share. She is suggestively portrayed as a witch-healer with wonderful secret skills but, unlike the witch in the
story –and in popular imagination- she shows a thorough dedication yto her family and her community.

Attention should be paid to the remarkable physical reality that separates mainland Puerto Ricans from their
homeland. The Texas-Mexican border whose circumstances configured Anzaldua’s consciousness differs from
the Puerto Rican-mainland border, which is a liquid border, not a land formation. Therefore, those Puerto
Ricans who live in the mainland lack the peculiar sensation of physically living on a borderland.

Magic Realism = offers a new understanding of reality and the procedures to recreate it. “The Witche’s
Husband” being a borderland text, fuses the tradition of South American Magic Realism with the Gothic
tradition. She appropriates the Gothic themes and styles of such authors as Nathaniel Hawthorne or Henry
James, and transplants them into Puerto Rican folklore. The oral tradition plays in The Witch’s Husband the
same significant oart as in Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain. It is a tradition composed of myth, folklore,
and public and private stories. Memory and cultural identity are strongly connected to femininity. Solidarity
among women. Domesticity is colored with suggestive hints of witch-healing practices.