American Literature

Introduction

Course Description
This course will survey American literature from the Colonial period to the Post-World War II period. Readings will include poems, novels, essays, autobiographies, short stories, and philosophical writings, originating in different regions and social settings across the country. Some works are chosen from their historical importance, others for their aesthetic virtues. Taken as a whole, they form a rich collection of imaginative and critical writings.

Our goal will be to analyze these works as diverse representations of American experience, ideas, and values. As it is created, literature in its widest sense can function as moral instruction, personal expression, and casual entertainment. Much classroom discussion will involve close textual commentary upon the assigned works.

Course Outline
1.Literature of Colonial American 2.Early Romantics 3.Transcendentalism 4.High Romantics 5.Realism 6.Local Color Fiction 7.Naturalism 8.Modern Poetry 9.Modern Fiction Before 1945

10.Postwar Realism in Fiction 11.Beat Generation 12.Women Writers in America 13.Black Literature 14.Southern Literature 15.Modern Drama

Course Requirements
1.

Class attendance(10%) Assignments(10%) Classroom Discussion(10%) Final Exam(70%)

2.

3.

4.

Literature of Colonial American

The first American literature was neither American nor really literature. It was not American because it was the work mainly of immigrants from England. It was not literature as we know it---- in the form of poetry, essay, or fiction---- but rather an interesting mixture of travel accounts and religious writings

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin(1706-1790)

An inventor, scientist, printer, political statesman, diplomat, exemplary self-made man, revolutionary hero, author.

---- Having faith in human accomplishment and progress ---- Believing that an individual with industry and thrift will improve himself and his community, a self-mad man and an archetypal American success story that has since become part of American popular culture ---- Almost the first example of achieving the American Dream

Philip Freneau

Philip Freneau(1752-1832)

A forerunner of American Romanticism or a transitional figure towards Romanticism.

Wild Honeysuckle a lyrical lament for the mutability of nature and an expression of faith in mans ability to learn universal truths from nature. An indirect eulogy of America predicting Whitman

American Romanticism (18151865)

Learning Points

Distinct Features Representatives Conclusion

Distinct Features

1. American Romanticism is in a way derivative.

2. American Romanticism is in essence the expression of a real new experience and contains an alien quality for the simple reason that the spirit of the place is radically new and alien.

3. Different from their European counterparts, American Romanticism tended to moralize, to edify rather than to entertain. It presented an entirely new experience alien to European culture.

Representatives

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Washington Irving Ralph Waldo Emerson Henry David Thoreau Nathaniel Hawthorne Edgar Allan Poe Herman Melville Walt Whitman Emily Elizabeth Dickinson James Fenimore Cooper

Conclusion

imagination sensibility and tuition over reason primitivism love of nature sympathetic interest in the past mysticism individualism

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow(1807-1882)

The Secret of the Sea In this poem the sea symbolizes life and the moral of the poem lies in the line of Only those who brave its dangers comprehend its mystery.

William Cullen Bryant

William Cullen Bryant(1794-1878)

one of Americas earliest naturalist poets the American Wordsworth

To a Waterfowl the poet in self-doubt and despair a lonely bird-- flying to--its destination-- by Power the poet-- walking to-- destination-- by Power too

Washington Irving

Washington Irving(1783-1859)

Works by Washington Irving 1. Rip Van Winkle 2. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow 3. The Sketch Book

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson(1803-1882)

Father of American literature the dominant spirit of the age the proponent of the American newness

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau(1817-1862)

On July 4, 1845, he began living in a hut (built on Emersons land) by the Walden Pond. There he lived simply and deliberately, devoting his time to observations and reflections.

Walden, or Life in the Woods a reflection of his readings, concerns and thinking, a mixture of politics and philosophy.

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

Annabel Lee Thematically speaking, this poem not only mourns the death of a beautiful girl but also celebrates the timeless love.

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

I hear America Singing The poem presents an image of America: an image of proud and healthy individualists engaged in productive and happy labor.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (1830-1886)

There Is a Certain Slant of Light The poem itself conveys the oppressive mood that the weather creates. With her uncommon creativity and imagination on the poet associates the winter sunlight with the image of death.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

Works by Nathaniel Hawthorne 1. The Scarlet Letter 2. The House of the Seven Gables 3. The Blithedale Romance 4. The Marble Faun 5. Young Goodman Brown 6. The Ministers Black Veil 7. The Birthmark

Dr. Heideggers Experiment

Dr. Heidegger

Colonel Killigrew

Water of Youth

Mr. Medbourne

Widow Wycherly

American Realism (1865-1910)

Learning Points

Distinct Features Representatives

Distinct Features
1.Realism is the theory of writing in which familiar aspect of contemporary life and everyday scenes are represented in a straightforward or matter-offact manner.

2.In realist fiction characters from all social levels are examined in depth.

3.Open ending is also a good example of the truthful treatment of material.

4.Realism focuses on commonness of the lives of the common people who are customarily ignored by the arts.

5. Realism emphasizes objectivity and offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience.

6. Realism presents moral visions.

Representatives

William Dean Howells Henry James Edith Wharton Willa Cather O.Henry Kate Chopin Harriet Beecher Stowe Mark Twain

Henry James

Henry James (1843-1916)

Paste This story is a subtle and profound study of human greed, hypocrisy and the betrayal of innocence. With his avoidance of the simple and direct statement, the story is full of hints, insinuations, suggestions, and implications. The Jamesian style is very well exemplified in this story.

Mark Twain

Mark Twain (1835-1910)

The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County This story tells of a practical joke of the grimmest kind. It is successful mainly because it represents the Western humor that was extremely popular in America at that time.

American Naturalism

Learning Points

Distinct Features Representatives Conclusion

Distinct Features
1. Humans are controlled by laws of heredity and environment.

2 The universe is cold, godless, indifferent and hostile to human desires.

Representatives

Hamlin Garland Stephen Crane Frank Norris Jack London Theodore Dreiser Sherwood Anderson Sinclair Lewis Upton Sinclair

Conclusion
1.Generally speaking, American naturalists share similarities in theme and technique.

2. They tend to reduce to nil the human chances of winning on their own terms while realists stress freedom of choice with large provisos concerning the power of outside forces and romantics stress the possible triumph of the human will.

Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane (1871-1900)

The Red Badge of Courage War is seen as a force moving men ruthlessly and blindly as if they were pawns on a chessboard. By deromanticizing war and courage, the author depicts the education of a young man in the context of struggle in alarming honesty.

Theodore Dreiser

Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)

Sister Carrie On the one hand, Sister Carrie represents the image of new woman with more independence and freedom. On the other hand, she is slave to her heredity and environment, drifting in life all the time.

Jack London

Jack London (1867-1916)

The Law of Life In the story, the old tribal leaders death is depicted both as an illustration of the natural law that all living things die and in terms of the particular psychological state of the individual facing his end.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Edwin Arlington Robinson(1869-1935)

Richard Cory The poem tells us very directly that the heart of man is a mystery. This is his best known statement on the hollowness of conventional success.

Robert Frost

Robert Frost(1874-1963)

The Road Not Taken The poem itself tells us the importance of making decisions and we should be aware that decisions in life once made cannot be changed.

Imagism

Learning Points

Distinct Features Representatives Conclusion

What Is Imagism Movement?

Poetic movement of England and the United States, flourished from 1909-1917. Its credo included the use of the language of common speech, precision, the creation of new rhythms, absolute freedom in choice of subject matter, the evocation of images in hard, clear poetry, and concentration.

Originated from the aesthetic philosophy of T.E. Hulme ( ), the movement soon attracted Ezra Pound ( ), who became the leader of a small group opposed to the romantic conception of poetry.

Distinct Features
1. With a spirit of revolt against conventions, Imagism was anti-romantic and anti-Victorian.

2. Imagism produced free verse without imposing a rhythmical pattern.

3. Imagism tried to record objective observations of an object or a situation without interpretation or comment by the poet.

Representatives

Ezra Pound Hilda Doolittle Amy Lowell William Carlos Williams

Conclusion
1.The imagists poets rebelled against conventional poetic material and forms and advocated the direct presentation of feelings in exquisite images.

2. The second lasting influence of imagism is the form of free verse.

Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

In a Station of the Metro In this brief poem, Pound uses the fewest possible words to convey an accurate image, with which he represents exactly what he observed in Paris subway. faces flowers petals

Modernism Before 1945

Learning Points

Distinct Features Representatives

Distinct Features
1. Modernism presented discontinuity and imminent severance from the past while making determined efforts to use the past, its values and artistic forms by incorporating them in new literary production.

2. Modernists had a sense of fragmentation in social communities and the fragmentation within the individual himself. Hence fragmentation became a common theme in modernist writing.

3. Often in presenting their theme, these writers used an anti-hero.

4. The distinctive feature of literary modernism was its strong and conscious break with traditional forms, perceptions, and techniques of expression, and its great concern with language and all aspects of its medium.

Representatives

Ernest Hemingway Francis Scott Fitzgerald John Dos Passos John Steinbeck Thomas Stearns Eliot Wallace Stevens

Thomas Stearns Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot(1888-1965)

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock This poem not only presents some of Eliots central ideas but also gives startling glimpses of the unprecedented methods the poet begins to use dramatic monologue stream-of-consciousness

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway(1899-1961)

In Another Country The story is filled with emotional overtones. Its dominant feeling is pity for misfortunes that can never be remedied.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Fitzgerald(1896-1940)

The Great Gatsby The story deals symbolically with the failure of the American Dream.

Postwar Realism in Fiction

Distinct Features
1. It has been a search for vision that can relate an oppressed response to society and history to an awareness of individual loneliness and moral and transcendental hunger both to differentiate and reunite the self and the society.

2. Postwar realism combines the time-honored realism with the effective achievements of various literary trends, including modernism.

3. Postwar realism embodies the great changes in literature along with the great changes in society. In new realistic fiction, naturalistic depiction has become very explicit and old-fashioned realism is increasingly combined with fabulism.

John Cheever

John Cheever(1912-1982)

The Swimmer With a long-distance swimming as a means to link up a series of events not closely related, the author unfolds a picture of social manners and morals.

John Updike

John Updike(1932-2005)

Beat Generation

Learning Points

Distinct Features Representatives

What Is Beat Generation?

A group of American writers and artists popular in the 1950s and early 1960s, influenced by Eastern philosophy and religion and known especially for their use of nontraditional forms and their rejection of conventional social values.

Distinct Features
1. The Beats were fed up with the official explanations of why things happened .

2. The Beats rejected middle class values, commercialism, and conformity.

3. The Beats withdrew from politics and from the obligations of citizenship.

4. The Beats rejected universities and the academic tradition.

5. The Beats evolved a free, non-materialistic religion with no formal church, but based loosely on the teaching of Buddha, comprising love, gay, and anarchy.

6. The Beats regarded modern American life as so cruel, selfish, and impersonal that writers and artists were being driven to madness.

Representatives

Allen Ginsberg Jack Kerouac Neal Cassady Gary Snyder William Burroughs

Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac(1922-1969)

On the Road On the Road is Kerouacs representative work. The title of the novel is pun, meaning both on the road to enlightenment as the Chinese philosophy of Taoism and literally on the road as homeless, aimless wanderers.

Southern Literature

Learning Points

Distinct Features Representatives

Distinct Features
1. A tightly knit, long established community is always powerfully presented and must be reckoned with.

2. There is the emotional, almost physical, response to the southern environment, including wind, rain, light, heat, the feel of the soil underfoot, the smell and sounds of land and river.

3. There are the accustomed patterns of speech, black and white, the intimate knowledge of characteristic body carriage and movement, the slow unemphatic drawl, the long effortless squatting silent companionship.

4. There is a curious quality of leisure, often long digressions in narration such as reminiscences of earlier events slightly related to the present.

5. There is a high rhetorical quality in narration to gain oratorical effect.

6. A profound consciousness of time itself is ever evident.

Representatives

Allen Tate Katherine Anne Porter Eudora Welty Flannery OConnor William Faulkner

Katherine Anne Porter

Katherine Anne Porter(1890-1980)

Katherine Anne Porter is good at short stories in which describes human beings empty spiritual World and their loneliness.

Works by K. A. Porter
1.

The Leaning Tower Ship of Fools

2.

Theft This is Porters remarkably appealing short story. The stolen purse symbolizes all property. The theft represents the conflicts between the haves and have-nots, between men and women, between two women, between generations, and between ideals and reality.

William Faulkner

William Faulkner(1897-1962)

A Rose for Emily One of the themes of this story is the relation of the individual and his actions to the past, present and future.

Black Literature

Background
Black literature was once a neglected area of American literary scholarship. The rising interest in the work of Americans of African ancestry has come about mainly for two reasons:

1. Blacks have made significant contributions to all aspects of American life, esp. during and after World War II.

2. Black writers have produced literature of impressive scope and quality.

Representatives

Langston Hughes Alice Walker Richard Wright James Baldwin Ralph Ellison Toni Morrison

Alice Walker

Alice Walker(1944- )

Everyday Use

Maggie

Dee

Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes(1902-1967)

The Negro Speaks of River In this poem, the poet uses the rivers to symbolize the soul of the Black people who create human civilization. The strong rhythm and the use of repetition heighten the effectiveness of the verse.

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison(1931- )

Works by Toni Morrison

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

The Bluest Eye Sula Song of Solomon Tar Boy Beloved

American Drama

Eugene Gladstone ONeill

Eugene Gladstone ONeill(1888-1953)

Works by ONeill
1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

Long Days Journey into Night The Iceman Cometh Beyond the Horizon Emperor Jones The Hairy Ape