Literatura Amerykańska Wykład

John Smith

Founder of Jamestown, first permanent English settlement (1607)

Thomas Morton

founded Merry Mount colony, celebrated Maypole, clashed with puritans, wrote New English Canaan, thought the mixing of races was ok

William Bradford

Leader of Plymouth Colony, wrote of Plymouth Plantation, arrived on a ship called Mayflower, Mayflower Compact - signed my 41 people 1620; organized first puritan settlement in New England

John Winthrop

City upon Hill, 1630 Massachusetts Bay Colony - new puritan group in New England

Two more famous puritans

Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor

Roger Williams

Founded Rhode Island for religious freedom, started as a Puritan minister

Puritans

culture of New England, branch of Calvinism

Predestination

God chose who will be going to hell and heaven

Theocracy

ideal political system is a fusion of the Government and the Church

Salem Witch Trials

1692-1693, killing of women because it was thought they were witches

Cotton Mather

Wonders of the Invisible World, recommended executions

Nataniel Hawthorn

Young Goodman Brown, 1835, criticized Puritan heritage

Artur Miller

The Crucible, 1952, criticized America after WWI

Robin Cook

Acceptable Risks, 1994

Sermon

religious texts delivered in church (Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Jonathan Edwards 1703-1758)

Explanations for salem witch trials

Religious - men and women were equal in the eyes of God but not in the eyes of Devil, women are easier to be corrupted
Economic - focus was mainly on unmarried women with no children, if you execute her you inherit what she possessed
Political - when people start to be indifferent to religion then the religious government loses power, so this governments need enemies in order to promise to destroy them

Deism

belief in the existence of God

Republicanism

forms of government and liberalism, personal freedom

Conservatism

ethical opinions, toleration, we are right and they are not

Benjamin Franklin

Autobiography self made man (hard work=success)

Thomas Paine

The Age of Reason

Thomas Jefferson (First note)

3rd president of the US, formulated Declaration of Independence

Stono rebellion

1739 South Carolina, largest uprising of slaves before the American Revolution

Enlightment

writing as the principal measures of African humanity

Phillis Wheatley

enslaved in Boston, first published African American poet, poems subtly protest racism (On Being Brought from Africa to America)

Olaudah Equiano

Autobiography exposing slavery horrors, 1770 the interesting narrative

Frederick Douglas

Autobiographical slave narrative, Advocated abolition and equality

Sojourner Truth

Famous speech “Ain’t I a Woman?”, advocated abolition and women’s rights

Harriet Jacobs

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, focus on female experience under slavery

David Hume

known for his ideas about reason and human nature, believed that black people were naturally inferior to white people

Immanuel Kant

wrote about morality, freedom and human dignity, described racial hierarchies that placed white Europeans above others

Thomas Jefferson (Second note)

criticized the poetry of Phillis Wheatly her poems were not worth serious criticizm and religion may have inspired her but it didn’t make her a real poet, in his 1787 book “Notes on the state of Virginia” he claimed that black people suffered greatly but were not able to create true poetry

The paradox of slavery and literature

enslaved people used writing to speak out against oppression and tell their own stories

Middle Passage

horrific journey enslaved Africans were forced to take across the Atlantic Ocean to Americas

Doctrine of Discovery

used by the Spanish in the late 1400s, gave Europeans idea that they could claim any land they discovered

First Native Novel

John Rollin Ridge’s Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (1854)

First Novel by Native American woman

Sophia Alice Callahan’s Wynema (1891), came just months after the Wounded Knee Massacre, where 300 Lakota were killed

American Gothic Fiction

subgenre with American themes: haunted houses, madness, mystery, supernatural, explores the uncanny: familiar yet strange, causing discomfort, sublime - referes to powerful feelings of fear or wonder

Charles Brockden Brown

Wieland or The Transformation (1798), religious fanaticism, madness, reality vs delusion

Edgar Allan Poe

The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat: psychological horror, unreliable narrators, symbolism

• the opening paragraphs create a feeling of dread and the sublime

• had strong views about literature: believed it should not be didactic instead he thought the goal of literature was to create specific emotional effect in the reader

• good writing should focus on art and emotion not moral messages

Transcendentalism → Romanticism

• 19th-century American literary and philosophical movement

• Core beliefs: intuition over logic, self-reliance, nature as spiritual path, inherent goodness of people

• Rejected materialism and organized religion

• Influences: German Idealism, Romanticism, Eastern philosophy

Ralph Waldo Emerson

• believed in the over-soul = he saw God filing up each humans

• Nature (1836) - he says not to live in the past and to values of past generations

• Self-reliance:

  • envy - when you look at somebody’s life and wish to have what they have, imitation - you just follow the ways which were developed by somebody else (spiritual suicide)

  • noncomformist - rebel

  • believe in your potential, spark and originality

Henry David Thoreau

• “Walden” - written near small pond in Massachusetts

• Civil Disobedience - 19th century

• Emersonian noncomformity

• America was strong because of the American-Mexican War (1846-1848) and The American Slavery

• “Passive resistance” - refusal to cooperate, inspired Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr

Margaret Fuller

• Woman in the 19th Century

• fascinated with Adam Mickiewicz, very close, sexual relationship probably

Herman Melville

1819-1891, Renaissance

• Novelist, poet, complex philosophical themes

• Early popular work: Typee (1846, South Pacific, cultural relativism)

• Masterpiece: Moby-Dick (1851)

  • Initially failed, rediscovered in 1920s

  • Mixes adventure, philosophy, religion and symbolism

  • Ship “Pequot” refers to Native American tribe and perhaps America (30 members = 30 states)

  • Themes: obsession, fate, madness, spirituality

  • Characters: Ishmael (narrator), Ahab (obsessed captain), diverse crew (symbolizing America)

  • “Whiteness of the Whale” symbolizes paradox of purity and terror

• Short story: Bartleby, the Scrivener (passive resistance, alienation , critique of capitalism)

• Blends symbolism, deep questions, and social criticism

Walt Whitman

1819-1892 (Romanticism)

• Poet of democracy, individuality, and the American experience

• Leaves of Grass:

  • Leaves - they can mean pages in a book

  • Grass - trivial popular literature

• Life divided into 4 periods:

  • Youth and early writing (1819-1850)

  • Rise as a poet (1851-1860)

  • Impact of the Civil War (1861-1873)

  • Later years of reflection and decline (1873-1892)

• Influenced by Emerson, American Ideas, Bible

• Joined Free Soil Party (opposed the expansion of slavery)

• Themes:

  • body (“I Sing the Body Electric”)

  • democracy (“Democratic Vistas” 1871)

  • nature (“The Compost”, “A Sun-Bath-Nakedness”)

  • sexuality, death, urban life

• Style: free verse, catalogs, inclusive language

• Key poem: “Song of Myself” (mystical union of self and cosmos)

The Cult of Success

It’s everywhere. Most writers want to be successful. The Cult of Success → The Almighty Dollar

Emily Dickinson

1830-1886

• Reclusive poet from Amherst, MA

• Wrote ~1800 poems, most unpublished in her lifetime

• Themes: success/failure, pain/truth/death, madness vs conformity, artistic integrity, identity, love

• Style: short lines, elliptical, dashes, slant rhyme, ambiguous

• Legacy: anticipated Modernism, demanded close reading

Realism

Mid 19-th Century

• Focus: accurate, truthful depictions of everyday life

• Features: ordinary people, detailed social settings, vernacular speech

• Reaction to Romanticism, influenced by industrialization

• US authors: Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells

Naturalism

Late 19th Century

• Scientific version of realism, determinism shapes humans

• Themes: survival, violence, biology, pessimism

• Focus on marginalized characters

• US authors: Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London

Modernism

Early 20th Century, 1900s-1930s

• Radical break with past, reflects alienation, uncertainty

• Techniques: fragmentation, stream-of-consciousness, symbolism

• Themes: loss, disintegration of meaning

• US authors: William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Elliot (“The Waste land” - quotes from famous people put together)

Picaresque Novel

• sub genre of novels, protagonist is sometimes clever sometimes not

• sequence of novels, each chapter has got a new adventure

• usually first person narrative

• use of dialects → “authentic” language

The South

slavery and cotton plantations

The North

more progressive, Anti-slavery, industrial

1860 Civil War

moment of collapse - the birth of resentment

William Faulkner

1930s

• Themes: decay, memory, race (spectrum), guilt, Southern Gothic grotesque

• Techniques: fragmented narratives, stream of consciousness, non-linear chronology, multiple narrators

• Setting: Yoknapatawpha County (fictional South)

• Key works:

  • The Sound and the Fury (1929) → The Great Depression (multiple narrators, decline of aristocracy - “White Aristocracy”, reference to “Macbeth”

  • As I Lay Dying (family journey, multiple perspectives)

  • Absalom, Absalom! (1936) - dark counter-narrative of South, obsession, race, criticized American Dream, reference to “The Bible”, multiple narrators

John Dos Passos

1896-1970

• War veteran and radical thinker

• Captured urban life, capitalism, trauma

• Major works:

  • Three Soldiers (1921) - anti-war

  • Manhattan Transfer (1925) - urban alienation

  • U.S.A Trilogy, Three volumes (1930-1936) - historical narrative with innovative structure, tradition of Walt Whittman

• US.A. Trilogy uses “Four-Way Conveyor Belt”:

  • newsreel (about facts)

  • biography (people who made difference in America

  • camera eye (internal monologue)

  • fiction

The Roaring Twenties

1919-1929 - huge parties, celebration and enjoying life

The Great Depression

1929

Soup Kitchen

institution where you get one free meal a day

The Dust Bowl

1930s in The South, extreme droughts

Hoovervilles

small towns created by homeless during The Great Depression

Modernist Literature Rejections

• Rejection of traditional realism:

  • Chronological plots - when you write a novel there are sequences, time developed only in one direction

  • Narratives relayed by omniscient narrators - that’s the narrator who knows everything

  • Closed endings - a distinct ending to a book, story or novel, in the 19th century people could not imagine stories that are abruptly stopped in the middle and not finished

Impressionism

moment which you want to capture

Modernism

• preference for fragmented forms

• discontinuous narrative

• collages of disparate materials

Stravinsky

• Russian composer who went from Paris to the USA, he changed music completely

• When he presented “Le sacre du plasons” the audience was furious, it was not what people expected it to be, Stravinsky was attacking melody and harmony, saying there are no obvious assumptions of it

Henry Gaudier Brzeska

“Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound” (1914) - a way of representing human body

Robert Frost

• traditional forms, modern themes (existential doubt, tension)

• poem: “Fire and Ice” (destruction metaphors for desire and hate)

E.E Cummings

• Experimental form, visual playfulness

• Themes: individualism, rebellion, love

• Poem: “in Just—” (childhood, spring, growth)

Wallace Stevens

• Philosophy + poetry

• Reality shaped by perception

• Poem: “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” (embrace impermanence and sensuality)

Ezra Pound

• fed up with poems that are too long, wanted to compress it all

• “The tradition is a beauty which we preserve and not a set of fetters (chains) to bind us”

• “In a station of the metro” - “the apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough”