Literature of the Gilded Age

1. Literature of the Gilded Age • Progressivism • Palefaces & Redskins • Modernism • Test

2. Literature of the Gilded Age • How do writers stand in relation to dominant social thinking? • 1865 – 1890 : economic expansion • 1890 – 1912 : Progressivism

3. Progressivism • Muckrakers • Who are they? • Charles Foster Kane • Upton Sinclair • The Jungle (1906)

4. Plot Immigrant comes to work in Chicago Becomes ”wage slave” Loses family – turns to socialism Chicago stockyards Working conditions (12-hour shifts) Quality of meat used Leads govt to start FDA The Jungle

5. Literature of the Gilded Age • Division from Europe achieved? • American Literature still not taught. • Era of Palefaces & Redskins?

6. European Boston /New England 19th century highbrow consciousness American Frontier 20th century middlebrow experience Palefaces Redskins

7. Henry James on Whitman "To become adopted as a national poet, it is not enough to discard everything in particular and to accept everything in general, to amass crudity upon crudity, to discharge the undigested contents of your blotting-book into the lap of the public. You must respect the public which you address; for it has taste, if you have not."

8. Henry James Nathaniel Hawthorne Emily Dickinson T.S. Eliot Mark Twain Ernest Hemingway Walt Whitman Beat Generation Palefaces Redskins

9. VI. Literature of Modernism(1912 – 1945) Significance of dates?

10. Characteristics • Break with the past • Experimentation (free verse, stream of consciousness) • Fragmentary

11. Modernists • Sigmund Freud • Albert Einstein • Stravinsky – ”The Rite of Spring” • Ezra Pound - poetry

12. ”Nude Descending Staircase” • by French painter Duchamp • Shown at NY art exhibit in 1913

13. ”Nude Descending Stairs”

14. William Carlos Williams so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.

15. The Lost Generation • Who? • What? • Where? • Why?

16. The Lost Generation Gertrude Stein to Ernest Hemingway: "All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation." "Really?" I said. "You are," she insisted. "You have no respect for anything..."

17. Fitzgerald Hemingway John Dos Passos Paris 1920s Bohemian lifestyle Lost Generation

18. Test Sample questions

19. Test • Outline of literary/historical era (20 points) • Terms (authors, works, characters, literary phenomena) (20 points) • Text identification (40 points) • Short answer (10 points)

20. Text identification • Identify the following passage. You should indicate: • Title of work • Author • How you identified passage • How passage relates to theme of work

21. Poor fellow! thought I, he means no mischief; it is plain he intends no insolence; his aspect sufficiently evinces that his eccentricities are involuntary. He is useful to me. I can get along with him. If I turn him away, the chances are he will fall in with some less indulgent employer, and then he will be rudely treated, and perhaps driven forth miserably to starve. Yes. Here I can cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval. To befriend (him); to humor him in his strange wilfulness, will cost me little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my conscience.

22. Answer • ”Bartleby” • by Herman Melville 3 points out of five

23. Answer? The story is about a strange man who works for a lawyer, but he refuses to do any work. The lawyer wants to get rid of him; however, Bartleby doesn’t leave. The lawyer moves out but later he has Bartleby arrested and taken to jail. He dies there. This was a strange story.

24. Answer 0 points. Do not re-tell the story.

25. Answer? The word ”conscience” reminded me of the story.

26. Answer 0 points. How does that word explain the passage or theme?

27. Answer? It’s on Dora’s paper.

28. Answer 0 points. Honesty is always a good policy, but no credit received for this answer.

29. Answer? The narrator is talking about one of his employees—in this semester we read ”Bartleby” which fits this description. Besides, it talks about the employee starving to death, and this is what happens to Bartleby.

30. Answer + 1 point Tells how the text was identified. Now at 4 out of 5 points

31. Answer? It talks about an employee who starves to death, and this is Bartleby. Additionally, the passage talks about the employer’s motivations for helping Bartleby. This is a central question Melville explores and the passage suggests the narrator helps B. because he is ”useful” to him. Is the narrator helping B. or simply buying himself a good conscience? Why do people have ”good” behavior?

32. Answer +2 points Answers how the passage was identified and how the passage relates a/the theme of the work.

33. It was like travelling into a far country, such as I had never expected to behold, to lie there for one night.  It seemed to me that I never had heard the town-clock strike before, nor the evening sounds of the village; for we slept with the windows open, which were inside the grating.  It was to see my native village in the light of the Middle Ages, and (it) was turned into a Rhine stream, […] I was an involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever was done and said in the kitchen of the adjacent village-inn -- a wholly new and rare experience to me.  It was a closer view of my native town.  I was fairly inside of it.  I never had seen its institutions before. This is one of its peculiar institutions; […]  I began to comprehend what its inhabitants were about.

34. The arrangement commended itselfto his judgement as simple and effective. His face had notbeen covered nor his eyes bandaged. He looked a moment athis "unsteadfast footing,„then let his gaze wander to theswirling water of the stream racing madly beneath his feet.A piece of dancing driftwood caught his attention and hiseyes followed it down the current. How slowly it appearedto move! What a sluggish stream!

35. Test • Friday, May 30 • 10 AM • Lecture hall XXVIII (B/2) kék terem