Fiction Notes Flashcards
My Antonia & Regionalism
Through dint of a nostaligic recollection of childhood on the plains, seems to effortlessly discover, to project, a sense of cultural authority & normativity with regard to the early settlement, when pioneer virtue was leavened by the spirit of cosmopolitanism.
But Jim Burden: “there was nothing but land: not country at all, but the material out of which country was made”
Dreaming himself into the story of Peter & Pavel, Jim is drawn in a sledge “through a country that looked something like Nebraska & something like VA”
Only at the end does he “feel at home again” in the Midwest
The Great Gatsby (1925): conservative treatment of place
NY: “racy adventurous feel”
All too fluid, threat: wealthy white man encounter of “modish” Negroes in a limousine
Social hierarchy symbolically undermined: undifferentiated desolation of the Valley of the Ashes through which commuters from Long Island suburbs must pass
Gatsby’s confused sense of geography: claims he is the scion of midwest family from San Fran
Nick Carraway, reactionary version of an exile’s return: West “warm center of the world”, idealizes the kind of city “where dwelling are still called through decades by a family’s name:
The hybrid entanglements spawned by a polyglot metropolis may be confined, somehow, to the dangerous “East”
Native Son (1940), expressionistic not naturalistic
Ways of seeing are simultaneously ways of not seeing; B & W characters, shaped by their radically different experiences do not see the same city
City never objectively described
Young communists (Jan Erlone & Mary Dalton) able to admire grand skyline, which are meaningless to Bigger (treacherous & airless labyrinth).
Nightmarish urban scenes of the novel’s 2nd section (like gangster films), reveal Bigger’s vulnerability, entrapment, & alienation.
“windows gape blackly, like the eye-sockets of empty skulls”
Modernist POV isn’t just personal, but political & ideological
Lawyer provides him with momentary perspective: “a pinnacle of feeling upon which he can stand & see vague relations he had never dreamed of”
Winesburg, Ohio’s generic oscillation
Generic oscillation between traditional Bildungsroman & a form of serial composition (fractured)
Series of structurally identical stories (townspeople, one after another, reveal themselves to George Willard, no development except climactic moment when the characters articulate (or fail to) their desires, disappointments, or loneliness
Cowley: exist separately, timelessly
Yet three closing stories “Death,” Sophistication,” & “Departure” impose the narrative of George’s acquisition of maturity onto the preceding series of fragments
The grotesques (the protest against the commercialism of modern world) threaten to become ‘but a background on which to paint the dreams of George’s manhood”
Fractured, lyrical temporality when experience is
the sense of immediate sensations & more novelistic temporality when experience is felt as the skills developed over a long period of time
Modernist novel traits
Attention to the word
- -Hemingway terse diction, “nice”
- -Hurston’s folksy mostropolous”
- -Faulkner’s ponderous adjectives
Attention to POV & Experimenting w/ Time
- -Interiority
- -Private time
- -negotiate uneven modernity
“The Problem of Old Harjo”
Marriage & Intimate politics
–Elminate the national domestication problem (the Indian problem, what to do with a domestic dependent nation) by dissolving tribal organization and converting individual Indians from federal wards to American citizens.
–Marriage was one mechanism
could move land and individuals out of the tribal national domestic into the settler national domestic.
–The US depended upon the heterosexual, white patriarchal structure of the family as a guiding principle to attack indigenous kinships and family structures to carry out allotment and boarding school policies.
–The site that Evans chooses “moral rehabilitation”: “Creek’s own home where the evidences of his sin should confront him”
Idle sinful existence?
– finds neat, well-organized homestead, doing well: corn, hogs, turnips and potatoes, cows, horses,
–H was surviving the tranistion to farming in a market economy that came with the dissolution of the Indian Territory: “Harjo was solvent…date”
Racial Melodrama in UTC
The use of tears of the powerless (long staple of sentimental fiction) used to cross racial barriers, to create new pictures of interracial amity and emotional intimacy
–Tom, Aunt Chloe, Mrs. Shelby, children weeping together in the beginning: “in those tears they all shed together, the high and the lowly, melted away all the heart-burnings and anger of the oppressed”
– slaves weep for Eva, she weeps for their enslaved state
–Tom & St. Clare crying together over Eva’s death
South in The Squatter & the Don
South linked to the patriarchal, –gentlemanly Southern California estates at the hands of an abusive government
–Novel ends with the line: “pray for a Redeemer who will emancipate the white slaves of California”
Gender in The Squatter & the Don
–Homosocial romance between Clarence & Victoriano
–Victoriano & Gabriel lose masculinity: Tona can’t work (becomes crippled because of illness), and Gabriel becomes a poverty-level mason who is injured on the job & can’t support himself
–Role of the mothers: American mother’s right perspective, Spanish mothers overly concerned with a dying, too strict code of conduct; Roper loses political clout cause he parades his illegitimate birth, dishonoring his mother
–Fathers die first: Don Mariano, Mr. Mechlin, Darrell turns into an old man after he feels he killed Don Mariano
Gothic in the House of the 7 Gables
–haunted dwellings, obsessive individuals, the self-punishing guilty, the murderous if not murdering
–emphasizes heightened states of feeling, emotion, passion, terror, sublimity; sentimentality dark double;
–hints of aberrant female sexual behavior with Gothic fixtures
–Deep foundations of the house built “over an unquiet grave”
–Relationship between originals & reproductions (the mirror, the daguerreotype, ancestors, Clifford introduced as a replica in miniature) that highlights the instability of origins, amplifying anxiety regarding inheritances
Wynema & the South/Nation
–Connects the Sioux uprising to the Confederacy (“Among the Rebels”, “It is a lost cause” (89))
–& American national identity: “Patriotism has inspired men to greater deeds. Paul Revere and Philip Sheridan have been made famous for a terrible ride” (88); Wildfire: “longs for freedom, yea, even the freedom of death” (81)
Greeson’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin
- -Mrs. Shelby: “How can I bear to have this open acknowledgment that we care for no tie, no duty, no relation, however sacred, compared with money?”
- -Mrs. Shelby as model for metropolitan readers, understanding themselves as primpary victims of the old order
- -Become good imperial masters, like Ophelia, Miss Feely
Brown on James’s THE AMERICAN
–Mumford “America may be defined by its possessions, or by the thing it lacks”
–the captains of industry tried to overcome this lack with a ‘predatory notion of culture’ looking east to acquire the cultural objects of Europe just as the had looked West to acquire the land of the NA’s.
–Christoper Newman seeking to conquer Europe (the girl as the object needed to complete his life)
Brown on Norris’s THE OCTOPUS
The fluid & flourishing economies effectively normalize the perverse economies of Vandover (excessive spending) and McTeague (excessive saving) with the machinery of corporate and finance captialism.
Brown on SISTER CARRIE
–a “victim of the city’s hypnotic influence, the subject of the mesmeric operations of super-intelligible forces” is mesmerized by the retail world of the city:
–“Carrie passed along the busy aisles, much affected by the remarkable displays of trinkets, dress goods, shoes, stationery, jewelry…She could not help feeling the claim of each trinket & valuable upon her personally…all touched her with individual desire.”
–The claim that each individuated object has on Carrie, and the way that such claims seem to individuate her.
–Captivated by their aesthetic value
–Dreiser’s subjects “externalize themselves with the act of buying things” (Brown)
