American litterature Flashcards
AMERICAN ROMANTICISM
1820-1865
Philosophy : The transcendentalists
* Ralph Waldo Emerson : Nature (1836), “Self-Reliance” (1841):
» “I must be myself. […] If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. ” “Insist on yourself; never imitate.”
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Henry David Thoreau ** : *A Week on the Concord and Merrimack River (1849) ; Walden or Life in the Woods (1854) ; “Resistance to Civil Government” *(known as “Civil Disobedience,” 1849):
»_space; “I heartily accept the motto, –’that government is best which governs least;’ […]”
»_space; “Do we call this the land of the free?” (“Life Without Principle,” 1863)
“The American renaissance”
1830-1865
FICTION :
* **James Fenimore Cooper **(1789-1851) : set his novels around his native homeland of Burlington. With the westward expansion, top, native Indian territory was almost wiped out by the end of the nineteenth century.
* Daniel Boone (1734-1820) : American pioneer and frontiersman whose exploits made him one of the first folk heroes of the United States. He became famous for his exploration and settlement of Kentucky, which was then beyond the western borders of the Thirteen Colonies.
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Nathaniel Hawthorne (Salem 1804-1864) : The Scarlet Letter (1850): “America’s first undoubtedly great novel” ; *The House of the Seven Gables *(1851) “God will give you blood to drink” ; *The Blithedale Romance *(1852) (Brook Farm)
Hawthorne claimed a distrust of “the Present, the Immediate, the Actual”.
He wrote romances: “[…] somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet […]” (The Scarlet Letter) - ** Herman Melville **(1819-1891) : “It is with fiction as with religion; it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.” (Melville, The Confidence Man)
- Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) : The master of the macabre/The forerunner of the detective novel : “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) etc etc
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Walt Whitman (1819-1892) : Leaves of Grass
; “Song of Myself” : in Song of Myself he celebrated America and all its citizens. “En-Masse.” He used both lyricism and slang, sophisticated English words and native terms. He rejected poetical conventions by choosing free verse without rhymes or stanzas - **The witch trials, Salem, Massachusetts, **
Bonus : Scarlett Letter, summary
Set in 17th-century Puritan Boston, Hester Prynne gives birth to an illegitimate child and is condemned to wear the scarlet letter ‘A’ as a sign of her adultery. Hester refuses to reveal the identity of her lover, and is forced to lead a life of humiliation.The moral of The Scarlet Letter is that secret sin leads to guilt and pain. Hester is publicly punished, which causes her pain, but through this, she is strengthened and gains independence.
Witch trials
**The witch trials, Salem, Massachusetts, **1692-1693 : + than 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft—the devil’s magic—and 20 were executed. In 1711, colonial authorities pardoned some of the accused and compensated their families.
B) REGIONALISTS, REALISTS, NATURALISTS
1865-1915
* The** south vs the North**
* The** fugitive slave laws (1793, 1850)**
* The civil War (1861-1865)
- Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) : Uncle Tom’s Cabin : Uncle Tom’s Cabin focuses on the struggles of a slave, Tom, who has been sold numerous times and has to endure physical brutality by slave drivers and his masters. One of Stowe’s central themes is that Tom, despite his suffering, remained steadfast to his Christian beliefs.
President Lincoln about Harriet Beecher Stowe: “So this is the little lady who made this big war.” - Regionalism: from the local to the national and universal
- John William De Forest “The Great American Novel,” 1868 “a picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence”
- E. Eggleston: “Write of what you know! Write of your very own.”
1) REGIONAL REALISM, LOCAL COLOR
- Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835-1910) : *The Adventures of Tom Sawyer *(1876) : Humor, satire, burlesque, picaresque, bildungsroman, colloquial speech, skaz and slang.
- Kate Chopin (1850-1904) : The Awakening (1899).. : **Local color > regionalism mixed with the first manifestation of realism
- regionalism mixed with the first manifestation of realism & Feminism **
ex : “Désirée’s Baby” (1893) is about miscegenation - **Willa Cather **(1873-1947) : From Virginia to Nebraska (1883) ; The Frontier (closed in 1890) ; A Western myth to be reconquered by women ; O Pioneers! (1913) ; My Ántonia (1918) ; Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940)
II. Naturalism
French vs American Approach
- The French approach: **heredity and environment **( Zola, Goncourt)
- The American approach: mainly environment : Social Darwinism, Freudian theories, William James’s Principles of Psychology (1890 )
Post civi war America
The gilded age
* 1869, 1st transcontinental railroad
- J.D. Rockefeller (1839-1937) : oil/railroad
- J.P. Morgan (1837-1913) : Banking, steel, electricity, mechanics
- A. Carnegie (1835-1919) : Steel
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Muckraking literature : since Henry Adams’ Democracy (1880). A story of political incompetence and corruption
» Un muckraker peut être un journaliste, un écrivain ou un photographe. Il dénonce les travers, souvent cachés, de la société. Son but est d’attirer l’attention de la population mais surtout des élus sur ses découvertes afin de susciter des réformes
The Chicago Renaissance
“[…]** during the 1890s realism in American fiction gave way to naturalism.** Such new writers as** Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser** turned from the parlor to the slum, from middle-class manners to urban squalor, from polite society, the arena of realist fiction, to the brutal struggles of business and the underclass―from genteel courtship to what keeps being called … raw sex.”
(Michael D. Bell, The Problem of American Realism, 1993, p. 109)
* Frank Norris (1870-1902) Mc Teague : The novel should give “a sincere transcription of life”, Exploring “the unplumbed depths of the human heart, and the mystery of sex”.
- Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) : Sister Carrie (published in 1900, then withheld from circulation until 1907)
- Stephen Crane (1871-1900) : Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893) ; The Red Badge of Courage (1895) : “The youth was horrorstricken. He stared in agony and amazement.”
- ** Jack London **(1876-1916) : The Road (1907) ; The Call of the Wild (1903) ; White Fang (1906).
- The Battle of Chancellorsville, 1863, a Confederate victory.
Poetry
- Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
- Robert Frost (1874-1963)
C) EARLY MODERNS
- Henry James (1843-1916) : *The American (1877), The Portrait of a Lady (1881).. *
- Edith Wharton (1862-1937) : *The Age of Innocence (1920, *Pulitzer Prize)//
D) THE LOST GENERATION AND MODERNISM
> > “ You are all a lost generation.” Gertrude Stein (E. Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 1926)
A disillusioned generation shattered by World War I : Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, Dos Pasos
> > “I talk with the authority of failure, Ernest with the authority of success” (Fitzgerald)
“All of us failed to match our dream of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. To try something you can’t do, because it is too much [to hope for], but still to try it and fail, then try it again. That to me is success.” (Faulkner)
PROVINCIAL AMERICA
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Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
Nobel Prize (1930 )
Main Street (1920)
Babbitt (1922)
Expatriated americans
American expatriates
The jazz age
* * ** F. Scott Fitzgerald** (1896-1940) : This Side of Paradise (1920); The Great Gatsby (1925) ; Tender Is the Night (1934) ; The Last Tycoon (1941)
» “It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.” (F. S. Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age”, 1931)
- ** Zelda Fitzgerald** (1900-1948) : Save Me the Waltz (1932)
- ** Ernest Hemingway** (1899-1961) : Nobel Prize (1954) ; The Sun Also Rises (1926) ; A Farewell to Arms (1929) ; For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) ; The Old man and the Sea (1952) ; A Moveable Feast (1964) ; The Nick Adams Stories (1972)
» “[…] going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.” (The Sun Also Rises) - **John Dos Passos **(1896-1970) : Three Soldiers (1921) ; Manhattan Transfer (1925) ; U.S.A. (1938) (A 3-volume set)
» “I aimed at total objectivity by giving conflicting views” (Dos Passos)
