Survey of American Literature

1. Survey of American Literature Junior English Mrs. Montgomery

2. Origins of the American TraditionPuritanism1620-1750

3. Native American Literature • Oral tradition • Iroquois Constitution: Dekanawida, Huron who established the Iroquois League • Message of unity: Great Law of Peace • Song • “Song of the Sky Loom”: Pueblo people of the Southwest; interdependence with nature

4. Early American Writing • Religion dominant influence/presence • Types of writing • Nonfiction • Sermons (Puritan intellectuals and ministers: Cotton Mather & Jonathan Edwards) • Impact of European Enlightenment (late 17th century) • empirical (study of the natural world) evidence + human experience = one needs to feel/experience God, not just intuit his existence from one’s belief or from the Bible; result: Great Awakening (1734) • Colonial histories: John Smith’s General history of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles • Texts: The New England Primer (first textbooks produced in American; circa 1690) – sold into the 19th century • Personal diaries • Poetry • “To My Dear and Loving Husband” (Anne Bradstreet)

5. Puritan beliefs“Puritan Ethic” • Community service • Importance of community • Goal: “city upon a hill” (Biblical reference) - a selfless, harmonious community directed by God • Strict moral propriety • Original sin: all people are born sinful and must be saved by divine grace • Hard work • Predestination (God’s elect) • Material and social successes are signs of salvation • So…fate cannot be changed by force of will & watch for proof of salvation (being among the elect)

6. What did Puritans write about? • Explores story of spiritual struggles • Events are emblems (allegories) of the progress of souls or of God’s design • Expressed both: • official Puritan views & beliefs • Jonathan Edward’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” • struggles with orthodoxy and conformity • Anne Bradstreet critical of distorted view of women

7. The Age of Reason/Enlightenment1750-1800

8. The Thinking behind the Constitution Philosophers during the Age of Reason/Enlightenment were concerned with the perfection of the human being through reason/science • Enlightenment • Isaac Newton: through reason people could discover the principles that guarantee social and political harmony • Joseph Addison– discovery of natural laws can ensure peace and tranquility • Thomas Hobbes, certain natural rights exists and cannot be turned over to a sovereign • John Locke - to preserve natural rights, people must balance the power of the sovereign against the power of Parliament, retain the right to rebel against oppression • Jean-Jacques Rousseau (French philosopher) - governments are instituted as asocial contract between the people and the government • Didn’t reject, but questioned the heavy reliance on spirituality of the Puritans • Romantic movement (18th and 19th century): championed democratic ideals & rights of the individual

9. Literature of the Revolutionary Period • Articulation of Independence and Liberty • Speeches • Patrick Henry speech in the Virginia Convention (“Give me liberty or give me death”) • Declaration • The Declaration of Independence (Thomas Jefferson) • Letters (John & Abigail Adams) • Pamphlets • Common Sense and Crisis (Thomas Paine) • Poetry • Phillis Wheatly “To S.M. a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works” • Christianity, American independence, abolition of slavery

10. The New England Renaissance1800-1865 Romantics rejected the scientific and rational emphasis of the previous time period. They were more interested in emotion, nature as a reflection of the divine, etc.

11. Cultural & Literary Movements • Romanticism (18th & 19th centuries) • Valued private, subjective experience (emotions & creativity) • Metaphysical truths: A higher form of reason different from ordinary understanding of the physical world of sense perception • Nature not just evidence of the operation and regularity and laws and life more than practical advancement of social systems of organization • Nature: repository and stimulus for intuition of higher truths in the individuals • Highest authority: individual conscience rather than authority and external control

12. Transcendentalism (a variation of European Romanticism) • Established American writers as distinct literary force

13. Practical implications • Goal of these writers: pursuit of forging new ground • Henry David Thoreau (Walden articulated American individualism) • Utopian communities • Hawthorne and Poe collectively responsible for the development of the modern short story: a brief fictional work designed to create in the reader a single dominant impression

14. A change in thinking • Material success less important (Irving) • Dismissed tradition and social convention (it may violate the individual conscience) • Celebrated the self, rather than deny it; self-awareness not selfish but a way to understand the universe • The soul of the individual was a microcosm of the larger world • Study the self to know the universe and its God • (self-realization, self-expression, self-reliance were coined) • Respect for multiple, divergent viewpoints • Optimistic • Nature/human nature is benevolent and good– Emerson & Thoreau

15. The flip side • Human nature is dark • Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter (sin) • Herman Melville (evil and obsession) • Edgar Allan Poe (psychology of madness and terror)

16. Social Purpose: Writers wanted to change society through literature • Live simple life in nature (Walden) • Better yourself by changing your thinking and lifestyle (Emerson) • Fireside poets (Schoolroom poets) wrote about slavery) • Idealized, romantic, morally uplifting views of the nation • Created a popular interest in poetry • Emily Dickinson • Focus on a vivid present/uncertain future • Poems about time, isolation and death • Some humor • Precise/ compressed

17. 19th Century Robert DiYanni, Pace University claims: These three writers—Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson—have been the primary and seminal influences on the American poets of the twentieth century: Emerson for his philosophical perspective;

18. Whitman for his public celebration of the American themes of democracy, idealism, solidarity, equality, and love of nature; Dickson for her finely discriminating probings of the soul in a spare poetic style, original in its elliptical syntax, its metaphorical daring, and its unconventional rhythm and rhyme.

19. Slavery & the Civil War • Newspapers • The Liberator (William Lloyd Garrison) • Freedom’s Journal (John Russwurm & Samuel Cornish) • The North Star (Frederick Douglass) • Speeches & Debates • Senatorial candidates Stephen Douglas & Abraham Lincoln • Slavery in Massachusetts” (Henry David Thoreau) • Novels • Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe) • Clotel(William Wells Brown, 1st African American to publish a novel) • Our Nig (Harriet E. Wilson, 1st African-American woman to publish a novel) • Spirituals (African + European music in poetic text, Biblical imagery –emphasis on suffering and hope) • Slave narrative/autobiography • Frederick Douglass • War literature: (Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane) • Attempts to restore national identity and hope for unity; • Key Question: Heroic (honorable, courageous) soldier or human (panicked, accidental hero,) soldier

20. Realism1865-1919 After the Civil War, writers rejected the idealized version of life romantic writers offered and concentrated on getting the facts right. Many writers of this time period started their careers as journalists

21. “I hear American singing, the varied carols I hear.” Walt Whitman • Abandonment of Romanticism, New England, scholarly, moralistic gentlemen; Adoption of writers from a variety of regions • Regionalism (local color) writing emerges • Characters more diverse (varied, unsavory) • Local dialect/regional diversity • Dime novels (cheap, popular) • Tall tales (legend of the Wild West) • Writers • Samuel Clemens (western boom towns, Mississippi River valley) • Bret Harte (West) • George Washington Cable (Louisiana bayou country) • Joel Chandler Harris (African American in the South) • Edward Eggleston & James Whitcomb Riley (Hoosiers of backwoods Indiana) • Sarah Orne Jewett & Mary Wilkins Freeman (backwoods New England)

22. Realism • Portraits from life; grim depictions of realties; unsentimental • Ambrose Bierce (“Chickamauga,” “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”) • Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) Individual quest for freedom • Dean Howells (Novels: The Rise of Silas Lapham, Annie Kilburn, A Hazard of New Fortunes, Quality of Mercy) breakdown of traditional values ; misery of the poor in urban America • Psychological Realism: exploration of the interior lives of characters) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman (“The Yellow Wallpaper” • Henry James (Portrait of a Lady, The turn of the Screw)

23. Naturalism • Refinement of Realism • Based on theories of the French novelist Emile Zola • Zola inspired by naturalists Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley: people’s actions and beliefs resulted not from free will but from the arbitrary, outside forces of heredity and environment • Novelists could write “scientific” fiction that demonstrated the exact causes of human behavior. • Premier American example: Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage and“A Man Said to the Universe”) • Crane: Because humans are pawns manipulated by cruel and indifferent forces of nature & society, humans must unite in kindness and compassion to counter these forces • Frank Norris (McTeague and The Octopus) • Jack London (The Call of the Wild) • Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie; An American Tragedy)

24. Modernism1919-1945

25. New Forces in the 20th century • Technology (electric lights) • Culture (mass merchandising) • Mass media (TV, movies) • Transportation (automobiles, airplanes) • Communication (telephone anywhere in the world) • Medicine (antibiotics, anesthesia) • War (weapons of mass destruction: atomic, nuclear) • Architecture (suburban housing, skyscrapers) • Work (labor unions, women in the work force) • Population (explosion) • Politics (ideologies of Communism and Fascism)

26. Remember “the old verities and truths of the heart.” William Faulkner 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance address “However the world might change, some things—such as the human capacity for courage, compassion, sacrifice, honor, and pride—remain the same.” (The American Tradition 476)

27. Before the War • Traditional, regional, portraits of life throughout the country: Regionalism • Edgar Lee Master Spoon River Anthology (Illinois) • Edwin Arlington Robinson (poet) • Jack London (North country)

28. Impact of WWI • The Lost Generation (participants in the war) • John Dos Passos • Ernest Hemingway • e.e. Cummings • Gertrude Stein • Emerging society : chaotic, destructive, meaningless • The real American had been lost, distorted; feeling of dislocation or alienation, cut off from the past • Individuals dominated by environs and dehumanized by work conditions in modern industry, urban living conditions in cities for poor immigrants

29. Questioned tenets of American dream (Horatio Alger stories & Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography: hard work, industry, self-reliance = a piece of the dream for anyone; ideals of individualism and free-market capitalism questioned) • Writers adopted socialist or communist ideals (Karl Marx, German political theorist argued that the exploitation of the workers would lead to the collapse of capitalism and establishment of states in which workers controlled the means of production.) • Sympathetic to socialist ideals - even joining in fighting against fascism in the Spanish Civil War 1936-37. Disillusioned with Stalin’s socialism that led to purges of political opponents and his treaty with Hitler.

30. Rebellion of the Young • New York become center of literary scene • Home to publishing houses, newspapers, magazines • Home to avant-garde, bohemian writers, artists, intellectuals (esp. in Greenwich Village) • Eugene O’Neill • Thomas Wolfe • Algonquin Round Table • Dorothy Parker • Robert Benchley • George S. Kaufman

31. The Expatriates • More authentic beliefs and forms of expression found outside the the U.S. (Paris & London, salons and cafes) • Fitzgerald • Hemingway • Stein • Ezra Pound • Edna St. Vincent Millay • T.S. Eliot

32. Modernism “make it new" Ezra Pound's credo • Rejection of literary conventions of the past • Response to the perceived breakdown of modern culture; attempt to give order and coherence to the decay; “retreat from new social vision into the cold comfort of a purely literary or imaginative order” (The American Tradition 480) • Irony - signature technique of Modernist literature • Conveyed a sense of hopelessness • Experiments in form: • free verse, stream-of-consciousness prose – an example of subjectivism: reality is not absolute and orderly, depends of the point of view of the observer 1st person Elimination of narrator or speaker (presenting the experience, sense perception of the character without the emotions/opinions of the author intruding) Alienating, understated, ironic, impersonal, lacking in transitions between ideas, full of odd juxtapositions and sophisticated references, or allusions

33. Notables • Edith Wharton (the Age of Innocence - the breakdown of traditional ways of life for the wealthy) • F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby- disillusionment and ambivalence about the morality of the “self-made man” in American society) • John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath – effects of the Great Depression and Great Dust Bowl of 1930s) • Upton Sinclair (the Jungle – scathing expose of meatpacking industry) • Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt, Elmer Gantry – excesses of materialism, hypocrisy & greed of small-town real estate dealers and showman preachers) • Richard Wright (Native Son – explosive results of discrimination against African Americans)

34. 20th century: golden age of American women writers • Edith Wharton • Eudora Welty • Willa Cather • Katherine Anne Porter • ZoraNeale Hurston • Amy Lowell • Marianne Moore • Edna St. Vincent Millay • Shirley Jackson • Lillian Hellman • Denise Levertov • Gwendolyn Brooks • Anne Sexton • Sylvia Plath • Alice Walker • Lorraine Hansberry • Joyce Carol Oates

35. Another way to look at it…”a momentary stay against confusion.” Robert Frost • Find renewal in the United States itself • Used ideas and techniques of Modernism • Not Modernist: traditional forms, expression of traditional values • Postwar regionalists who wrote “American” literature about local, rural areas, strength and hope in these works • Robert Frost (rural New England) • Sherwood Anderson (Ohio) • Zora Neale Hurston (novels of African American experience in rural South) • William Faulkner (regional settings and lost traditional values) • Southern regionalism: Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter

36. The Fugitives & New Criticism • The Fugitives (led by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren) • Southern literary school rejected northern urban, commercial value • Advocated a return to the land, esp. in Southern American traditions • New Criticism: close readings and attentiveness to format (patterns of imagery, metaphors, metrics, sounds, and symbols) and their suggested meanings (rather than a focus on history and biography)

37. Postwar Literature 1945-1960

38. The era following WWII • Prosperity in the United States • High employment as economy reverted to peacetime production • Women = housewives & moms; Men = breadwinners • Urban sprawl (suburbia) developed with better cards • Mobile society facilitated by 33 billion from Congress for an interstate highway system (Holiday Inn, A & W, drive-in theaters) Auto = success • Social characteristic: traditional, stable, but undercurrent of disapproval, distrust and disillusionment with the status quo • The “Silent Generation”: traditionalists, experimenters, and iconoclasts (one who attacks widely accepted ideas/beliefs)

39. Postwar LiteratureAmerica is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain…Our fate is to become one, and yet many. --Ralph Ellison 1945-1960

40. The era following WWII • Television:: Middle-class appeal and ideal families • The Tonight Show (Steve Allen) • Toast of the Town (Ed Sullivan) • Father Knows Best • I Love Lucy • Ozzie and Harriet • Rock & roll emerges • Bill Haley & the Comets: “Rock around the Clock” (1954) • Elvis: “Hound Dog,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Don’t be cruel” • Popular Reading • The Cat in the Hat Dr. Seuss • Baby and Child Care: Dr. Benjamin Spock Pat Boone (the all-American) vs James Dean (the outcast) Underneath: surface prosperity is turmoil: pervading loneliness (David Reisman: The Lonely Crowd (1951) & Rebel without a Cause (film with James Dean whose character laments the adult world that abandoned him): & J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye: “the adult word is phony”

41. Folk Music craze/fold song army • The Kingston Trio (“Tom Dooley”) • Woody Guthrie (“This Land is Your Land”) • Pete and Peggy Seeger • Peter, Paul, and Mary • Satirical songs about American life • Guitars & banjoes • The voice of the youth protest movement (hippies) and flower children) of the 1960s

42. The Politics in the era following WWII • Dwight David Eisenhower & Richard M Nixon 1952 election; Ike reelected 1956 • Cold war (1945- 1989) • Ideological (independence vs collective), political (democracy vs communism), and economic (market vs command) tensions between United States & Western Europe vs. USSR and Eastern Europe • political (conservatism) Liberals were often given epithets: pinko/commie • Anticommunist paranoia • Hollywood blacklists for Communist Party affiliation ( pressure to identify communist sympathizers) • Senator Joseph McCarthy “witch hunt” in the U.S. Senate (inspiration for The Crucible – Arthur Miller) (mass hysteria and guilt by association) • On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan) suggested that one should “sing” or “rat on” ones corrupt friends • Space Race - 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik leading to U.S. moon landing 1969 • Korean was (1950 – 19593) Sotho Korea 7 its ally U.S. vs North Korea and ally Communist China

43. Civil Rights Movement • African-Americans left in the old and decaying inner cities where increased poverty and unemployment fostered social unrest. • mid-1950s Civil Rights movement had begun • Rosa Parks (refused to give up her seat on the city bus and was arrested) • Martin Luther King, Jr. led the boycott against public transportation & Supreme Court ruled segregation laws in Montgomery unconstitutional • 19574 Brown vs.. The Topeka Board of Education: Supreme Court rules Plessey vs.. Ferguson (“separate but equal”) was inherently unequal and unconstitutional, so schools had to be integrated. First major challenge came in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957

44. Emergence of several black writers • Richard Wright ( Black Boy 1945) • Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man 1952) • James Baldwin ( Go Tell it on the Mountain 1953) • Gwendolyn Brooks (Bronzeville Boys and Girls 1956) • Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun 1958)

45. Literary Scene • Literature emerging from the war • Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead) • James Jones (From Here to Eternity) • Early 20th century writers become powerhouses: • William Faulkner (Nobel Prize for literature 1950) • John Steinbeck (East of Eden 1952) • Katherine Anne Porter • Earnest Hemingway (Nobel Prize for literature 1952)

46. New genre: Nonfiction novel: • Hiroshima (1946) John Hersey combination of journalism and literature (literary techniques + factual air of reporting to describe real events) • “The most significant piece of journalism in modern times” • Jewish writers: the Holocaust and life in America • Saul Bellow The Adventures of Augie March (1953) • Henderson, the Rain King 9159 • Seize the Day (1956) • Bernard Malamud • The Natural (1952) • The Assistant (1957) • “The Magic Barrel 1954 • Isaac Bashevis Singer • Gimpel the Fool 1953 • The Family Moskat 1950

47. Fugitive School: Southern writer’s rebellion against Northern materialism and against science and progress • John Crowe Ransom • Robert Penn Warren • Allan Tate • Other Southern Writers • Flannery O’Connor • Walker Percy • Eudora Welty • Truman Capote • John Cheever • John O’Hara • John Updike

48. Flowering of American Drama • Arthur Miller • Tennessee Williams • William Inge • Eugene O’Neill • Lillian Hellman

49. Postwar Poets • Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Marianne Moore • T.S. Eliot (poetry should be “an escape from emotion and personality”) Nobel Prize for literature 1947 • E.E. Cummings (experimented with parts of speech, capitalization, and punctuation to explore the essence of language) • William Carlos Williams (there should “be no ideas except in things”) • Black Mountain School in North Carolina: Charles Olsen, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan experimented with the rhythms and sounds of words in lines based on breath pauses. Poetry itself creates a thing, an artifact • Confessional poets: John Berryman, Robert Lowell: used haunting, stark images to reveal intensely personal experiences. • Theodore Roethke: a new romantic, based poetry on childhood experience, using his father’s greenhouse as metaphor • Berryman & Lowell: inner demons, strained and broken marriages, alcoholism

50. Postwar Poets • The Counterculture begins in the mid-1950s on the West Coast • 1955 Six Gallery poetry reading Allen Ginsberg: “Howl” spontaneous composition written to jazz rhythms that challenged every aspect of American life and language • 1953 Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Martins: City Lights Bookstore, 1st all-paperback bookstore in the U.S. & haven for writers • This “new “literati” challenged the social malaise and traditional forms • Abstract Expressionism • New York Poets: John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch: experimented with new perceptions & poetry forms; tried to duplicate in words what the expressionists artists accomplished in paint. • The Beats (the Beat generation centered in bookstores around the U.S.): Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Kenneth Rexroth • Beat poems based on existential and Eastern philosophy; strove to cut through superficial facades, denouncing and reviling thoughtless conformity, to embrace life itself