FINAL EXAM Flashcards
What is modernism?
A literary movement that began sometime around 1910 and exploded with the catastrophe of the First World War, which wiped out a generation of young men in Europe.
What is the Harlem Renaissance?
A great flowering of African American art and culture are rooted in the end of the Reconstruction Era when legal segregation made living conditions for African Americans in the American South all but unbearable.
What was Southern Gothic all about?
The name given to a literary movement with its roots in the Romantic and Gothic traditions of British literature & practiced in America in the 19th century by Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, etc.
-violence & crime
-sense of place
-madness & deformity
What was Hemingway’s “iceberg theory?”
If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows, and the reader, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. 1/8 above water. A good writer does not need to reveal every detail of a character or action. “Hills Like White Elephants” procedure = abortion.
“I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife”
Zara Neale Hurston
“The world is not a prison house, but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.”
Edwin Arlington Robinson
“Good fences make good neighbors”
Frost
How does the woman in “Sunday Morning” view religion?
isolation from the joy on Earth. Rejects the ideology of realism.
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
-inability to create meaning for himself in the modern world
-social anxiety
“I should have been a pair of claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas”
The comparison of Prufrock’s to merely an insignificant, bottom feeding crab that scuttles sideways & never gets anywhere. Similar to John Marcher.
“Babylon Revisted”
-Charlie is sober
-Honoria’s dad
-Helen’s ex-husband
-memory & regret
-changed man
“A Rose for Emily”
-Southern Gothic
-Southern setting
-flawed characters
-thought to highly of herself to marry a local
-buys aresenic to poison Homer Barron because everyone she has ever been with has left her
-his dead body is found in her home
“Barn Burning”
-Sarty’s internal conflict of whether to side with his family or abandon them
-Father’s history of arson
“The Chrysanthemums”
-Elisa is not satisfied with her life
-unhappy marriage
-trapped in a mans world
-Tinker brings a glimmer of hope
-he also disappoints her
“Sonny’s Blues”
-unnamed brother is protagonist
-educated & intelligent
-doesn’t understand Harlem, Sonny, or the culture
-Sonny’s pursuit of a jazz pianist is frivolous
-scotch & milk cocktail
“A Good Man is hard to Find”
-grandmother considers herself as good
-car crash/murdered by misfit
-treats family poorly
“Everyday Use”
-Heritage & tradition
-display vs. passed down
