American Literature Flashcards

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Flashcards about key people and events in American Literature

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Thomas Wolfe was born and raised in __.

Asheville, North Carolina

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Thomas Wolfe attended __ and edited The Tar Heel newspaper there.

UNC Chapel Hill

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Thomas Wolfe studied __ at Harvard.

playwriting

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__ was Thomas Wolfe's editor and they had a contentious relationship.

Maxwell Perkins

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Aline Bernstein and Thomas Wolfe had a __ year affair.

five

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Wolfe immortalized Bernstien as the character of __ in his novels.

Esther Jack

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The Lost Boy was published in __.

1937

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Confessional poets wrote about dark and private subject matters such as __.

Death, trauma, depression, relationships

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The Fish was written by __.

Elizabeth Bishop

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The Fish poem is about the __.

ethics of knowing

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Sylvia Plath's father, __, passed away when she was eight, which traumatized her.

Otto

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Sylvia Plath tried to kill herself __ times.

three

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Sylvia Plath was married to __.

Ted Hughes

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Jack Kerouac is well known for producing the novel __.

On the Road

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Charles Olson is known for his work in __.

Projective verse

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__ was institutionalized and his mom was crazy and suffered through psychological delusions.

Allen Ginsberg

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Skunk Hour Poem:One dark night,

my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;

I watched for love-cars . Lights turned down,

they lay together, hull to hull,

where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .

My mind’s not right.


A car radio bleats,

“Love, O careless Love. . . .” I hear

my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,

as if my hand were at its throat. . . .

I myself am hell;

nobody’s here—


only skunks, that search

in the moonlight for a bite to eat.

They march on their soles up Main Street:

white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire

under the chalk-dry and spar spire

of the Trinitarian Church.


I stand on top

of our back steps and breathe the rich air—

a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail

She jabs her wedge-head in a cup

of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,

and will not scare.


The first four stanzas are meant to give a dawdling more or less amiable picture of a declining Maine sea town. I move from the ocean inland, Sterility howls through the scenery, but I try to give a tone of tolerance, humor, and randomness to the sad prospect. The composition drifts, its direction stinks out of sight into the casual, chancy arrangements of nature and decay. Then all comes alive in stanzas V and VI. This is the dark night…My night is not gracious, but secular, puritan, and agnostical. An Existentialist night. 


the mind is not right when there is a confusion of time

title of the poem: humans have a diversion acknowledging the human mind is going through suffering

existentialism: expassing the notion of nothing, “god is dead” absurdity. So absurd, nothing makes sense

18
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The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop


I caught a tremendous fish


and held him beside the boat


half out of water, with my hook


fast in a corner of his mouth.


He didn’t fight.


He hadn’t fought at all.


He hung a grunting weight,


battered and venerable


and homely. Here and there


his brown skin hung in strips


like ancient wallpaper,


and its pattern of darker brown


was like wallpaper:


shapes like full-blown roses


stained and lost through age.


He was speckled with barnacles,


fine rosettes of lime,


and infested


with tiny white sea-lice,


and underneath two or three


rags of green weed hung down.


While his gills were breathing in


the terrible oxygen


—the frightening gills,


fresh and crisp with blood,


that can cut so badly—


I thought of the coarse white flesh


packed in like feathers,


the big bones and the little bones,


the dramatic reds and blacks


of his shiny entrails,


and the pink swim-bladder


like a big peony.


I looked into his eyes


which were far larger than mine


but shallower, and yellowed,


the irises backed and packed


with tarnished tinfoil


seen through the lenses


of old scratched isinglass.


They shifted a little, but not


to return my stare.


—It was more like the tipping


of an object toward the light.


I admired his sullen face,


the mechanism of his jaw,


and then I saw


that from his lower lip


—if you could call it a lip—


grim, wet, and weaponlike,


hung five old pieces of fish-line,


or four and a wire leader


with the swivel still attached,


with all their five big hooks


grown firmly in his mouth.


A green line, frayed at the end


where he broke it, two heavier lines,


and a fine black thread


still crimped from the strain and snap


when it broke and he got away.


Like medals with their ribbons


frayed and wavering,


a five-haired beard of wisdom


trailing from his aching jaw.


I stared and stared


and victory filled up


the little rented boat,


from the pool of bilge


where oil had spread a rainbow


around the rusted engine


to the bailer rusted orange,


the sun-cracked thwarts,


the oarlocks on their strings,


the gunnels—until everything


was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!


And I let the fish go.


fish did not fight because he was caught and released over and over again

flat poem

repeated similes

knowledge requires a knower and a known

fish poem is about the ethics of knowing

fisherman is bothered that the fish is not fighting for its life

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