CHAPTER 10: POST-WAR TRADITIONAL FICTION

JEWS AND NOBEL LAUEREATES AND POLES

SAUL BELLOW NOBEL LAUREATE JEW

Dangling Man (1944) - Quasi-Philosophical Discourse + Joseph (protagonist) is about to be drafted + Characterization of characters through events that befall them rather from the actions that they take The VIctim (1947) - Asa Leventhal ( A boring character) is accused by Kirby Allbee of causing the letters loss of job. Conclusions from reading the novel - Everybody has a weak spot and can fall prey to ruthless bullies The Adventures of Augie March (1953) - Takes Place in Usa, Mexico and Europe + Shows the development of Augie March (protagonist) + As the protagonist develops the language of the novel follows Henderson the Rain King (1959) - Puzzling + Takes place in Africa + Eugene Henderson (protagonist) bored and rich tries to nd the sense of life. + (funny scene - Henderson Enters a lioness den, pretending to be a lion himself) Herzog - study of a man that goes through summer durning which his worst fears are conrmed. + Herzogs mind is deteriorating Mr. Sammlers Planet - The main hero escapes alone to tell a story + The man is disappointed by the new world + Its a bitter book Humboldts Gift -Charles Citrines success juxtaposed with the failure of Von Humboldt Fleisher. + Success comes with a exacting price The Deans December (1982) - Set in Bucharest Mosbys Memoirs (1968) - A collection of stories The Last Analysis (1965) - A play To Jerusalem and Back (1976) - Journalistic account of Israel

PHILIP ROTH JEW

Goodbye, Columbus (1959) - A collection of stories + deals with problems that arise when the Jews confront the American reality Portnoys Complaint (1969) - Its not about anti-semitism, but about how Jews try to dene themeslevs against older family members who strive to preserve the Jewish identity The Ghost Writer (1979) - Jewish writer who wants to write about his own experience Writing About Jews (1963) - if one wants to depict his community faithfully, it is impossible to disregard its less attractive aspects, yet presenting such elements would inevitably lead to the communitys displeasure and rejection of the writer The Breast (1972) - Franz Kafka + SEX + the protagonist turns into a breast just like Geregor Samsa in Kafkas book turns into a Vermin

The Great American Novel (1973) - A story told within the framework of baseball. + A metaphorical portrait of the USA + Tries to achive the American writers dream - To write the great American novel.

BERNARD MALMUD JEW

The Natural (1952) - The world of baseball The Assistant (1957) The Fixer (1966) - Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award The Tennants (1971) - Deals with the relationship between Jews and blacks The Magic Barrel (1958), Idiots First (1963), Rembrandts Hat (1973) - Books of stories

J.D SALINGER JEW

The Catcher in the Rye (1951) - Holden Cauleld - a rebel without cause + The embodiment of the frustration of his generation

WILLIAM WHARTON SALINGERS COPYCAT ( ? )

Birdy (1979) - An important book Dad (1981) - a less important book A Midnight Clear (1982) - a less important book

JERZY KOSINSKI POLE

Steps (1968) Being There (1971) Pinball (1982) The Painted Bird (1965)

SOUTHERN WRITERS

WILLIAM STYRON SOUTH

Lie Down in Darkness - A family entangled in destructive feelings + Peyton Loftis is not able to regain her childhood innocence and is doomed to destruction The Long March - A product of haunting past of the author + deals with senseless cruelty of the Marine corps Set this House on re (1960) - conrmed the talent of the author, but no new insights into his creative abilities The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) - A surprising novel + Nat Turner a 19th century slave plots a rebellion against the white owners + The revolt results in death of 55 whites, 24 of them children. + A highly controversial picture of Nat Turner + People accused Styron of racial prejudice and willful distortion of facts

Sophies Choice - Longest and most complex book of his + the narrator based on Styron himself meets an odd couple - Sophie ( Polish Refugee) and Nathan (Mentally disturbed jew, who has uncontrollable outbursts of rage) + We see through the novel Sophies past + In Aushwitz she is faced with the choice from the title (the blubook doesn't say what it is)

WALKER PERCY SOUTH

The Moviegoer (1961) - existential novel + main character is trying to dene his place in the world which for him is a combination of the outside reality and the reality of the movies he loves to watch. The Last Gentleman (1966), Love in the Ruins (1971) , Lancelot (1977) - The Protagonists are heirs to established Southern families who are alienated from their environment. The Second Coming (1980) - Not serious treatment of ultimate problems shows Percy as a philosopherwriter. The message in the Bottle (1975) - Essays about problems of existence, human communication, and various theories of meaning and symbol.

FLANNERY OCONNOR SOUTH CARSON MCCULLERS SOUTH

Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) - tittle borrowed from french philosopher + presents a gallery of Southern types who are in various states of mental instability

The ballad of the Sad Cafe - First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons - but the fact that it is joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. + The tension, immanent to the human relationship, is at the core of McCullerss story A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud - love for a woman is so destructive to a man that it should be substituted with other types of love.

JOHN UPDIKE SOUTH

Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971) and Rabbit is Rich (1981) - At First Rabbit almost belong s to the middle class. he tries to nd some other way. he doesnt want to be mediocre. In Rabbit redux he lives with a hippie girl and a militant black boy, In the last book Rabbit is used-cars dealer, golf player and a wifeswapper.

NORMAN MAILER SOUTH

The Naked and the Dead (1948) - Brought him instant fame + remains one of the best American war novels + the characters are characterized by their relation to power (Physical, political, intellectual) An American Dream (1965) - semi-autobiographical + Death, constant fascination with power + ways the power can be used to intimidate people or destroy them. Of a Fire on the Moon (1970) - a book about the ght of Apollo-11 The Executioners Song (1979) - a true life novel of Gary Gilmores crime and death Ancient Evenings (1983) - takes place in ancient Egypt

CHAPTER 13: AMERICAN POETRY 1900-1980

THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN AMERICAN POETRY

EDWARD ARLINGTON ROBINSON

rejected the 19th century conventions and articial forms Robinson took novelists interest in the foibles, ironies, and failures inherent in human existance in his Spoon River Anthology (1915) he tried to dene human life in terms of actualities. he felt strong afnity for Walt Whitman and his poetry internal psychological reality in external reality he wanted to explain human problems - failure to communicate, alcoholism, suicide, illusions, loss of love. he was inuenced by Emersons ideas Every individual is responsible for himself self-reliance and individualism mixed with deterministic negation of general futility that appears to be the basis of rational thought ones choices are limited and shaped by social environment Most of his characters, while nostalgic for higher values have lost touch with their own higher values. they end up defeated by greed, sex, and the struggle for social status

ROBERT FROST

The rural and the local provide his characters, event and setting. mark his titles - The Wood Pile Mending Wall Two Tramps in Mud Time An Old Mans Winter Night. he stayed with the traditional verse form - free verse is like playing tennis without a net radical, but subtle innovator he captured in formal verse the sound of colloquial, spoken American English - His idiom is educated but talked American, with a slight wash of country vocabulary and often a Yankee intonation frequent humor, dry, perhaps wry, and subtle, even sly his simplicity is deceptive his poems are allusive though the allusions are never obvious or insisted upon he was familiar with classics a modern master of the narrative poem he encouraged a simple reading

created a public persona of a rough, blunt-spoken homespun Yankee sage only American poet to enjoy a national popular following during his own lifetime sold over half a million copies of his books won four Pulitzer Prizes He had not an easy life - abused by father, dropped out of college. His early life was so grim he contemplated suicide. His sister was institutionalized for insanity, a son committed suicide, his wife died he had a psychological interest his descriptions of the natural world suggest correspondences in internal human reality he is committed to a classical ideal of restraint, control, and balance he is a modernist in his focus on craft and form, and in his pervasive irony he rejected cosmopolitanism, use of anthropology or and myth and the radically experimental

CARL SANDBURG
genuinely simple traditional sort of Whitman kind of bard, singer, and yea-sayer apposition and direct address, personication, apostrophe, and most of all cataloguing. he doesnt use poetry to analyze or question he uses poetry to afrm the value of the people his vision for America centered on Abraham Lincoln as a democratic hero (he wrote a six-volume biography of Lincoln views) he cared much less about poetic form than about his message

VACHEL LINDSAY
commited to local, and democratic colloquial speech. use of euphony, rhythm, music and musical sound to create a musical poetry The Congo - his most famous poems resembles a chant or a song

POETRY BETWEEN THE WORLD WARS: THE GREAT MODERNISTS

EZRA POUND
he shaped modern Anglo-American poetry Active and involved in promoting others helped - Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Hemingway, e.e cummings

he wanted discipline and professionalism for literature he pursued music and art, studied history and economics and politics befriended William Carlos Williams, Hilda Doolittle (H.D) objectivity and again objectivity nothing that you couldnt, some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say. he liked chinese ideograms Make it new. The Cantos - modern epic, Confucian principles, compendium of history, philosophy. Nobody knows what the structure of the poem is. Often seems like a puzzling collage, unrelated materials, scattered languges. Some complain that too much of the synthesis is left up to the reader Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: Life and Contacts (1920) - the poem anticipated The Waste Land ( Thomas S. Elliot) He liked Mussolini and Fascists He was charged with treason In detention camp he wrote The Pisan Cantos he has been pronounced insane

IMAGISM
H.D

F.S Flint and T.E Hulme

Ezra Pound coined the name John Gould Fletcher, D.H Lawrence Denition of image - that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. 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 the sequence of the metronome. Emphasis on clarity, precision, and vigor, on simplicity and directness.

THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT NOBEL LAUREATE

wanted to introduce a truly modern, urban, industrialized reality into poetry along with diction precise, clearcut and exible as prose. no room for sentimental, archaic, hazy poetry

he developed a new idea of classicism - he wanted to subordinate his creative impulses to the ide of tradition understood as the whole body of literary works he wanted to be aware of his responsibility to alter, contribute to enrich existing literary culture he chose French Symbolists for his masters in verse he enjoyed Dante and the English Metaphysical poets The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock The Waste Land - hailed a poetic manifesto + The Lost Generation The Hollow Men - This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper Ash Wednesday - use of symbolism borrowed from Dante + the main theme is the search for God and spiritual guidance Four Quartets - reuse of the use from Ash Wednesday +religious symbolism is interwoven with private symbols + symbols + religious poetry in which direct contemplation of metaphysical and spiritual, revaled through symbols, reduces physical reality to a minimum.

HILDA DOOLITTLE AKA H.D

credited with writing the most perfect Imagist poems but she didnt develop beyond the limitations of the small-scale mode The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribitue to the Angels (194S), and The Flowering of the Rod (1946) Friends with Freud fascinated with Greek art and thought Tribute to Freud Helen in Egypt Bid Me to Live - tells of London years Hermione - roman a clef

MARIANNE MOORE
Her poetry is artful but never obviously so employs syllabic meters concealed rhymes often observes animals the fact that her verse is patently verse, yet embraces many characteristics of prose, is almost revolutionary.

incorporates unlikely prose materials in poetry

WALLACE STEVENS
He earned a law degree executive of a major insurance company in Hartford inuenced by Pound and Eliot Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird - the point is how ordinary people ignore the sensory perceptions around them poetry must replace religion to invigorate life The Man with the Blue Guitar - guitar is like poetry - it perceives expresses, and shapes life through the imagination considered a sophisticated and difcult poet he is determinied to clarify the relationship between poetry and reality,

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

Inuenced by Pounds Imagism he immersed himself in American experience he saw himself in opposition to the values which he felt his culture substitutes for true moral and aesthetic values he creates an image rather than telling the reader how to feel Peterson - a long poem + tries to describe as specically as possible the geographical, social, and psychological realties of the city and the people who live there. felt that Eliot put poetry back in the classroom He believed that poetry should not become so allusive and referential

THE SOUTHERN AGRARIANS, FUGITIVES

advocates of aristocratic social values all university teachers their ideas become to be know as The New Criticism

John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Donald Davidson

THE BEAT GENERATION

Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso On the road - born disillusioned. It takes for granted the imminence of war, the barrenness of politics and the hostility of the rest society. It does not know what refuge it is seeking, but it is seeking Alllen Ginsberg - Eclactic poet, like William Blake experimented with various drugs, Howl Howl - an attack on the modern America, to large extent depends on rhetorical shock, obscenities, repetition, apostrophe, and colloquial diction. Kaddish Lawrence Ferlinghetti - A coney Island of the Mind

THE 1960S AND SINCE:THE CONFESSIONS AND OTHER SCHOOLS

Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton

THE NEW YORK POETS

Frank OHara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, John Ashbery