North American - PowerPoint Presentation

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North American Literature II

N2/N3 18:50-20:30 2019/1Luciano Cabral temporary lecturer

Introduction

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ecture 1

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After Civil WarRealism and NaturalismRealism and Naturalism face a

threefold initial difficulty:Is there any advantage in conceptualizing the richly diverse expression of this period in terms of such inherent simplification as realism and naturalism

?The attraction, for many theorists, of a deconstructive stance has bred skepticism toward interpretive enterprises that posit such communities of belief and expression as those subsumed under the headings of realism and naturalism.New Historicism refuses traditional historical divisions in the study of American literature on the ground that they obscure underlying ideological similarities present in all American writing since the Civil War.

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Thomas Cole (1801-1848)

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Thomas Cole (1801-1848)

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North American RomanticismRalph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), Herman Melville (1819-1891), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), and Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), are commonly celebrated by scholars for being the ones who set the foundations of a North-American literary tradition.American Renaissance

: Washington Irving (1783-1859), William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), and Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867). Inspired by the writings of Emerson, the first-half-19

th-century North American literature (or the American Renaissance) may have reached its zenith under works such as Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855

).North American Romantic writers: straddling between past and future; works worthy of a great nation.

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North American RomanticismWriters in the 1820s were concerned with founding a truly American literary tradition, which deals with American-only incidents: works that could ‘differ essentially from those which exist in Europe’. So, what would be different from Europe?

Language?Democratic republic X Monarchical systemNatural resources and landscape X Industrialized EnglandNative Americans, Immigrants

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1820

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Before Civil War (1861-1865)The US begins to change into an industrial and urban society.In its first years, the US had been a republic of small landholders, without sharp contrasts of wealth. Now the nation becomes a land of contrasting riches and the pauper. The number of ‘millionaires’ multiplies, as does the number of poor people.By the 1850s, the level of education and risesInventions:

Cotton gin (1793)Sewing machine (1790)Telegraph (1840) Railroads (the Union Pacific transcontinental railroad is completed in 1869)

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Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854)chapter SOUNDS“The startings

and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village day. They go and come with such regularity and precision, and their whistle can be heard so far, that the farmers set their clocks by them, and thus one well-conducted institution regulates a whole country. Have not men improved somewhat in punctuality since the railroad was invented? Do they not talk and think faster in the depot that they did in the stage-office? There is something electrifying in the atmosphere of the former place. […] To do things ‘railroad fashion’ is now the byword; and it is worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerely by any power to get off its track”. (p. 91)

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Romantic General FeaturesThough pluralistic and particularly varied, the Romantic period frequently shares certain general features:(a) Moral enthusiasm(b) Faith

in the value of individualism and intuitive perception(c) Presumption that the natural world is a source of goodness and man’s societies a source of corruption.

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Jacob Riis (1825-1914)

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The Age of Realism and NaturalismSettlements pushing US’s borders westwardMexican-American War (1846-1848): annexing Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, CaliforniaThe discovery of gold in California (

1849)Settlers in the West establishing farms, villages, cities and railroads.

New technologies (electric lightbulb in 1879, telephone in 1876, telegraph in 1840, etc.) converted the country’s natural resources into industrial products.The Civil War (1861-1865)

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The Age of Realism and NaturalismThe Transcontinental railroad (1869).Mineral wealth: coal, oil, iron, gold, silver.Urban growth: immigrants in New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco.

Spanish-American War (1898): annexing Hawaii as a colony.Industrial monopolies, the ‘robber barons’Population growth: in 1870, 38.5 million; by 1910, 92 million; by 1920, 123 million (mostly due to the arrival of immigrants)

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NewspapersJoseph Pulitzer’s Post-Dispatch (1878), in St. Louis, and

World (1883), in New York.William Randolph Hearst’s The San Francisco Examiner

(1863), in California, and Journal (1895), in New York. Hearst is also known for sensational “yellow journalism”.Abraham

Cahan’s Jewish Daily Forward (1897).

Magazines

Harper’s New Monthly Magazine

(1850), in New York and Boston.

Scribner’s Monthly

(1870)

Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine

(1881)

The

Atlantic Monthly

(1857)

The Galaxy

(1866)

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Periodicals, or “the literature of argument”Writings in sociology, psychology, and philosophy, such as:

Henry D. Lloyd’s Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894)

Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1879)

William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s

Women and Economics (1898)

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The Age of Realism and NaturalismNew themes, new forms, new subjects, new regions, new authors, and new audiences all emerged in the half century following the Civil War. In fiction, characters rarely represented before the Civil War became familiar figures: industrial workers and the rural poor, ambitious business leaders and vagrants, prostitutes and unheroic soldiers

.Women from many social groups, African Americans, Native Americans, ethnic minorities, immigrants: all wrote for publication, and a rapidly burgeoning market for printed works helped establish authorship as a possible career for many. begin to grow or increase rapidly; flourish.

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And poetry?“a crucial expression of the human spirit”Walt Whitman (1819-1892): open form for the ‘open road’

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886): elliptical verses with a sense of the psychological interior.[185]

“Faith” is a fine inventionFor Gentlemen who

see!But Microscopes are prudent

In an Emergency!

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William Dean Howells’s definition of RealismRealism “is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material”.

Characters in Howells’s novels were ‘representative’, that is composites of the sort of people readers thought they already knew, people without fame or huge fortunes, without startling accomplishments or immense abilities.

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The Age of RealismHenry James hoped to convince readers – most of whom were from the middle class – that inner lives of the privileged were in accord with the truths of human nature.

Realist writers believed in the power of language to represent reality in ways that were aesthetically satisfying and true to their sense of the world. Mark

Twain and Henry James understood that language was interpretation of the real rather than the real thing itself.

As a western writer, Twain’s vernacular tale-telling was later acclaimed as the essence of a truly American style [said by Ernest Hemingway]

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The Age of NaturalismCharles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1870)Herbert Spencer’s ‘the survival of the fittest’, in Principles of Biology (1864)

Literary naturalists, unlike the realists for whom human beings defined themselves within recognizable settings, wrote about human life as it was shaped by forces beyond human control.Characters’

fates are seen to be the outcome of degenerate heredity, a sordid environment, and the bad luck that can often seem to control the lives of people without money or influence.

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The Age of Naturalism. Émile Zola (1840-1902) wrote in his influential essay ‘The Experimental Novel’ (1880):“We must operate with characters, passions, human and social data as the chemist and the physicist work on inert bodies, as the physiologist works on living bodies.

Determinism governs everything. It is scientific investigation; it is experimental reasoning that combats one by one the hypotheses of the idealists and will replace novels of pure imagination by novels of observation and experiment”.

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The Age of NaturalismAmbrose Bierce’s stories as “Chicamauga” and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” reveal his awareness of fiction as a tool to explore inner truths

.Jack London’s “Law of Life”: “Nature did not care. To life she set one task, gave one law. To perpetuate was the task of life, its law is death”.

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MARK TWAIN (Samuel L. Clemens) 1835-1910Born in the village of Florida, Missouri; grew up in Mississipi

River town of Hannibal, Missouri.St. Petersburg: Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn1851: Together with his brother, he became a publisher in his hometown.1853: three-year trip to St Louis, New York, Philadelphia, Iowa,

Cincinatti.1856: a riverboat pilot.1872: disappointment for the West is not a place to make money.

Pen name: Mark Twain = “two fathoms deep” or “safe water”.Experienced traveler X boyhood memories: Tom Sawyer (1876) Huck Finn (1885)

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Mark Twain’s “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865)What is the plot?Who speaks?

Who are the characters?HOW SIMON WHEELER IS DESCRIBED BY THE NARRATOR?Vernacular Language: Narrator X Simon WheelerWHAT DO THESE LANGUAGES TELL US ABOUT THE CHARACTERS?

How is Wheeler’s narrative described by the narrator?How is Jim Smiley described?Where does the narrative humor come from?