LPW 02 Lesson 6: North-American Literature

PRE- COLONIAL AMERICA

Primarily oral (mythology, legends, tales, and lyrics).

Native Americans have a kinship with animals, plants, the land, and other elements. Tribes maintained their own religions by worshipping them.

America was originally populated by Asian (Indian) since 20,000 years ago.

The first European contact with the Americans was with the Vikings in the year 1000

Christopher Columbus

He mistakenly discovered the Americas in 1492 while searching for a faster route to India.

Pilgrim Fathers

Religious refugees who left England for America at the beginning of the seventeenth century are known as the...

Puritan Age

1620-1776

Sermons, essays, speeches, prayers, poetry

United States declaration of independence from Great Britain

Calvinist Puritanism

Inherent evil of man, the salvation of the elect few, predestination, and a general distrust of sexuality, guilt and orthodox; theocracy

William Bradford

The first historian of America, described in his book History of Plymouth Plantation the travel of the pilgrims from the time they set sail for the new land to their landing on the coast of America in 1620

Anne Bradstreet

America's first notable poet, captured the colonial experience in verses in her collection of poems, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, which is reflective of her own piety.

Jonathan Edwards

Considered as the greatest of Puritan religious leaders, whose tracts and sermons reflected his conversion to Calvinism.

Edward Taylor

An American Puritan poet and minister of the Congregational church at Westfield, Massachusetts for over 50 years.

THE LITERATURE OF THE NEW REPUBLIC (1776-1836)

The American Revolution (1765-1783)

Americans (Patriots) vs. Loyalists (Tories)

Boston Tea Party (1773)

Literature is politically motivated, either in support for British rule or American patriotis

THE AGE OF REASON

Thomas Paine, the principal American exponent of Deism, called Christianity "a fable." Paine, the protégé of Benjamin Franklin, denied "that the Almighty ever did communicate anything to man, by...speech,...language, or...vision.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Dark Romanticism novel; Dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne; Explores themes of good and evil, humanity and nature, obsession and survival

Romanticism

literature that focused on emotions and feelings over reason.

Celebration of individualism

Reverence of nature

Respected imagination over reason

Fascination with death and supernatural

Focus on emotions and feelings

Transcendentalism

the belief that through individual contemplation one could transcend reason and discover a higher reality

Age of Realism

works that attempt to accurately portray life typical to middle and lower class

Critical comments on American politics, gender, race, economics, and social issues

American Dream

a resilient vision of the world where individuals enjoy full liberty and reap the just reward for their efforts

Naturalism

Fate of humans is beyond an individual's control

Authors focused on how natural environment and instinct influence behavior

EMILY DICKINSON

One of America's greatest and most original poets of all time

Experimented with expression in order to free it from conventional restraints

Experimented with poetic rhythms and rhymes and has been called the "New England Mystic"

The subjects of her poems express intimate, domestic figures of speech, including love, death, and nature

THE LITERATURE OF MODERNISM (1912-1940)

Literature should teach and entertain, yet not too much of either.

Good literature remained beyond the grasp of the general reader—complex and abstract, filled with metaphors, irony, subtlety, ambiguity.... A huge time of industrial change for this country.

Jazz Age

a time of social and moral flux that gave new life to the American Dream yet harbored a latent sense of impending disaster

The Lost Generation

artists and writers who questioned the narrow-minded pursuit of wealth and emigrated to Europe in the hope of finding a deeper set of cultural values

Ernest Hemingway

Used short sentences, avoid rhetoric, embellishment and cheap emotion

Ezra Pound

A central figure in the modern movement; founded imagism, a movement in poetry which focused on clarity, precision, and economy of language, as against traditional rhyme and meter -In a station of the Metro

Robert Frost

Master of traditional meters, and revive the use of blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter); he finds free verse artistically unsatisfying -The Road Not Taken

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Writer of the Jazz Age, known for The Great Gatsby, often called the Great American Novel

THE LITERATURE OF POST-WAR AMERICA (1940-1973)

World War I (1914-1918) The Great Depression (1930) World War II (1939-1945

Disillusionment

Become disenchanted or disappointed; to be stripped of an illusion

Writing mimics confusion of the time

Stream of Consciousness, free verse poetry

Ending left for readers to figure out based on clues in the novel or short story

Themes implied-reader feels uncertain about outcome

Reflects feelings of loss of innocence because reality of situation becomes clear

William Faulkner

Known for The Sound and the Fury, which employs stream of consciousness, unreliable narrator, and time-shift techniques, and pointedly avoids neat resolution at the end -A Rose for Emily

John Steinbeck

Known for Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath

Ray Bradbury

Best known for his highly imaginative short stories and novels that blend a poetic style, nostalgia for childhood, social criticism, and an awareness of the hazards of runaway technology.

An American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer

Born August 22, 1920

One of the most celebrated among 20th and 21st century American writers of speculative fiction

Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and for the science fiction stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951)

Post-Modernism

explores fantasies and extreme experiences. Literature is a game between writer and reader. Doubt if literature can reflect any true reality.

Beat Generation

drug subculture, spontaneous prose, vigorous antiestablishment and anti-traditional literary movement