1. Survey of American Literature
Junior English
Mrs. Montgomery

2. Origins of the American Tradition Puritanism 1620-1750

3. Native American Literature
Oral tradition
Iroquois Constitution: Dekanawida, Huron who established the Iroquois League
Message of unity: Great Law of Peace
Song
“Song of the Sky Loom”: Pueblo people of the Southwest; interdependence with nature

4. Early American Writing
Religion dominant influence/presence
Types of writing
Nonfiction
Sermons (Puritan intellectuals and ministers: Cotton Mather & Jonathan Edwards)
Impact of European Enlightenment (late 17th century)
empirical (study of the natural world) evidence + human experience = one needs to feel/experience God, not just intuit his existence from one’s belief or from the Bible; result: Great Awakening (1734)
Colonial histories: John Smith’s General history of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles
Texts: The New England Primer (first textbooks produced in American; circa 1690) – sold into the 19th century
Personal diaries
Poetry
“To My Dear and Loving Husband” (Anne Bradstreet)
Great Awakening: origination with Jonathan Edwards’s Northampton congregation, then spread to Boston then throughout the colonies
called for a return to stricter church membership requirements and proof of an awakening/conversion (He was removed from the pulpit in 1750)
Locke and Newton: Empirical inquiry (the study of human experience and the natural world) was the means to true knowledge
Empirical study rather than medieval theories of innate knowledge derived from God; Locke = we are blank slates who build up knowledge from sense impressions

5. Puritan beliefs “Puritan Ethic”
Community service
Importance of community
Goal: “city upon a hill” (Biblical reference) - a selfless, harmonious community directed by God
Strict moral propriety
Original sin: all people are born sinful and must be saved by divine grace
Hard work
Predestination (God’s elect)
Material and social successes are signs of salvation
So…fate cannot be changed by force of will & watch for proof of salvation (being among the elect)
Puritans were on a grand historical and religious mission to purify the Christian church by establishing a “city upon a hill” as a model for the world

6. What did Puritans write about?
Explores story of spiritual struggles
Events are emblems (allegories) of the progress of souls or of God’s design
Expressed both:
official Puritan views & beliefs
Jonathan Edward’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”
struggles with orthodoxy and conformity
Anne Bradstreet critical of distorted view of women

7. The Age of Reason/Enlightenment 1750-1800

8. The Thinking behind the Constitution
Philosophers during the Age of Reason/Enlightenment were concerned with the perfection of the human being through reason/science
Enlightenment
Isaac Newton: through reason people could discover the principles that guarantee social and political harmony
Joseph Addison– discovery of natural laws can ensure peace and tranquility
Thomas Hobbes, certain natural rights exists and cannot be turned over to a sovereign
John Locke - to preserve natural rights, people must balance the power of the sovereign against the power of Parliament, retain the right to rebel against oppression
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (French philosopher) - governments are instituted as asocial contract between the people and the government
Didn’t reject, but questioned the heavy reliance on spirituality of the Puritans
Romantic movement (18th and 19th century): championed democratic ideals & rights of the individual
Encouraged by discoveries in the natural sciences (Newton),
Neoclassicists: Addison, Hobes, Locke, Rousseau

9. Literature of the Revolutionary Period
Articulation of Independence and Liberty
Speeches
Patrick Henry speech in the Virginia Convention (“Give me liberty or give me death”)
Declaration
The Declaration of Independence (Thomas Jefferson)
Letters (John & Abigail Adams)
Pamphlets
Common Sense and Crisis (Thomas Paine)
Poetry
Phillis Wheatly “To S.M. a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works”
Christianity, American independence, abolition of slavery

10. The New England Renaissance 1800-1865
Romantics rejected the scientific and rational emphasis of the previous time period. They were more interested in emotion, nature as a reflection of the divine, etc.

11. Cultural & Literary Movements
Romanticism (18th & 19th centuries)
Valued private, subjective experience (emotions & creativity)
Metaphysical truths: A higher form of reason different from ordinary understanding of the physical world of sense perception
Nature not just evidence of the operation and regularity and laws and life more than practical advancement of social systems of organization
Nature: repository and stimulus for intuition of higher truths in the individuals
Highest authority: individual conscience rather than authority and external control

12. Transcendentalism (a variation of European Romanticism)
Established American writers as distinct literary force

13. Practical implications
Goal of these writers: pursuit of forging new ground
Henry David Thoreau (Walden articulated American individualism)
Utopian communities
Hawthorne and Poe collectively responsible for the development of the modern short story: a brief fictional work designed to create in the reader a single dominant impression
(Alcott and Hawthorne later became disillusioned with these efforts & wrote about them)
Hawthorne satirical The Blithedale Romance (based on Brook Farm utopian community)
Louisa May Alcott satirical short story “Transcendental Wild Oats” (based on Fruitlands)

14. A change in thinking Material success less important (Irving)
Dismissed tradition and social convention (it may violate the individual conscience)
Celebrated the self, rather than deny it; self-awareness not selfish but a way to understand the universe
The soul of the individual was a microcosm of the larger world
Study the self to know the universe and its God
(self-realization, self-expression, self-reliance were coined)
Respect for multiple, divergent viewpoints
Optimistic
Nature/human nature is benevolent and good– Emerson & Thoreau
Knickerbockers writers
Washington Irving – critical of material success and social advancement

15. The flip side Human nature is dark
Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter (sin)
Herman Melville (evil and obsession)
Edgar Allan Poe (psychology of madness and terror)

16. Social Purpose: Writers wanted to change society through literature
Live simple life in nature (Walden)
Better yourself by changing your thinking and lifestyle (Emerson)
Fireside poets (Schoolroom poets) wrote about slavery)
Idealized, romantic, morally uplifting views of the nation
Created a popular interest in poetry
Emily Dickinson
Focus on a vivid present/uncertain future
Poems about time, isolation and death
Some humor
Precise/ compressed
Transcendental writers not popular (700 copies of Walden’s 1st edition, most unsold and returned to Thoreau who sold them himself
Some popular: James Fenimore Cooper Last of the Mohicans
Melville: Typee and Omoo
Not possible to make a living in American as a professional writer, copyright laws enacted in the states in 1841, no international copyright protection until 1891 (American books sold legally in England w/o paying royalties to American author; English books sold in American w/o royalties to the English author, cheaper to publish a book from abroad since royalties made American books too pricey, they sold them w/o claims to royalties

17. 19th Century
Robert DiYanni, Pace University claims: These three writers—Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson—have been the primary and seminal influences on the American poets of the twentieth century:
Emerson for his philosophical perspective;

18. Dickson for her finely discriminating probings of the soul in a spare poetic style, original in its elliptical syntax, its metaphorical daring, and its unconventional rhythm and rhyme.
Whitman for his public celebration of the American themes of democracy, idealism, solidarity, equality, and love of nature;

19. Slavery & the Civil War Newspapers Speeches & Debates Novels
The Liberator (William Lloyd Garrison)
Freedom’s Journal (John Russwurm & Samuel Cornish)
The North Star (Frederick Douglass)
Speeches & Debates
Senatorial candidates Stephen Douglas & Abraham Lincoln
Slavery in Massachusetts” (Henry David Thoreau)
Novels
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe)
Clotel (William Wells Brown, 1st African American to publish a novel)
Our Nig (Harriet E. Wilson, 1st African-American woman to publish a novel)
Spirituals (African + European music in poetic text, Biblical imagery –emphasis on suffering and hope)
Slave narrative/autobiography
Frederick Douglass
War literature: (Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane)
Attempts to restore national identity and hope for unity;
Key Question: Heroic (honorable, courageous) soldier or human (panicked, accidental hero,) soldier
Apologists for slavery: slaver owners treat their valuable property well

20. Realism
After the Civil War, writers rejected the idealized version of life romantic writers offered and concentrated on getting the facts right. Many writers of this time period started their careers as journalists

21. “I hear American singing, the varied carols I hear.” Walt Whitman
Abandonment of Romanticism, New England, scholarly, moralistic gentlemen; Adoption of writers from a variety of regions
Regionalism (local color) writing emerges
Characters more diverse (varied, unsavory)
Local dialect/regional diversity
Dime novels (cheap, popular)
Tall tales (legend of the Wild West)
Writers
Samuel Clemens (western boom towns, Mississippi River valley)
Bret Harte (West)
George Washington Cable (Louisiana bayou country)
Joel Chandler Harris (African American in the South)
Edward Eggleston & James Whitcomb Riley (Hoosiers of backwoods Indiana)
Sarah Orne Jewett & Mary Wilkins Freeman (backwoods New England)

22. Realism
Portraits from life; grim depictions of realties; unsentimental
Ambrose Bierce (“Chickamauga,” “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”)
Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) Individual quest for freedom
Dean Howells (Novels: The Rise of Silas Lapham, Annie Kilburn, A Hazard of New Fortunes, Quality of Mercy) breakdown of traditional values ; misery of the poor in urban America
Psychological Realism: exploration of the interior lives of characters)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (“The Yellow Wallpaper”
Henry James (Portrait of a Lady, The turn of the Screw)

23. Naturalism Refinement of Realism
Based on theories of the French novelist Emile Zola
Zola inspired by naturalists Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley: people’s actions and beliefs resulted not from free will but from the arbitrary, outside forces of heredity and environment
Novelists could write “scientific” fiction that demonstrated the exact causes of human behavior.
Premier American example: Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage and “A Man Said to the Universe”)
Crane: Because humans are pawns manipulated by cruel and indifferent forces of nature & society, humans must unite in kindness and compassion to counter these forces
Frank Norris (McTeague and The Octopus)
Jack London (The Call of the Wild)
Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie; An American Tragedy)

24. Modernism

25. New Forces in the 20th century
Technology (electric lights)
Culture (mass merchandising)
Mass media (TV, movies)
Transportation (automobiles, airplanes)
Communication (telephone anywhere in the world)
Medicine (antibiotics, anesthesia)
War (weapons of mass destruction: atomic, nuclear)
Architecture (suburban housing, skyscrapers)
Work (labor unions, women in the work force)
Population (explosion)
Politics (ideologies of Communism and Fascism)

26. Remember “the old verities and truths of the heart
Remember “the old verities and truths of the heart.” William Faulkner 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance address
“However the world might change, some things—such as the human capacity for courage, compassion, sacrifice, honor, and pride—remain the same.” (The American Tradition 476)

27. Before the War
Traditional, regional, portraits of life throughout the country: Regionalism
Edgar Lee Master Spoon River Anthology (Illinois)
Edwin Arlington Robinson (poet)
Jack London (North country)

28. Impact of WWI The Lost Generation (participants in the war)
John Dos Passos
Ernest Hemingway
e.e. Cummings
Gertrude Stein
Emerging society : chaotic, destructive, meaningless
The real American had been lost, distorted; feeling of dislocation or alienation, cut off from the past
Individuals dominated by environs and dehumanized by work conditions in modern industry, urban living conditions in cities for poor immigrants

29. Questioned tenets of American dream (Horatio Alger stories & Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography: hard work, industry, self-reliance = a piece of the dream for anyone; ideals of individualism and free- market capitalism questioned)
Writers adopted socialist or communist ideals (Karl Marx, German political theorist argued that the exploitation of the workers would lead to the collapse of capitalism and establishment of states in which workers controlled the means of production.)
Sympathetic to socialist ideals - even joining in fighting against fascism in the Spanish Civil War Disillusioned with Stalin’s socialism that led to purges of political opponents and his treaty with Hitler.

30. Rebellion of the Young New York become center of literary scene
Home to publishing houses, newspapers, magazines
Home to avant-garde, bohemian writers, artists, intellectuals (esp. in Greenwich Village)
Eugene O’Neill
Thomas Wolfe
Algonquin Round Table
Dorothy Parker
Robert Benchley
George S. Kaufman

31. The Expatriates
More authentic beliefs and forms of expression found outside the the U.S. (Paris & London, salons and cafes)
Fitzgerald
Hemingway
Stein
Ezra Pound
Edna St. Vincent Millay
T.S. Eliot

32. Modernism “make it new" Ezra Pound's credo
Rejection of literary conventions of the past
Response to the perceived breakdown of modern culture; attempt to give order and coherence to the decay; “retreat from new social vision into the cold comfort of a purely literary or imaginative order” (The American Tradition 480)
Irony - signature technique of Modernist literature
Conveyed a sense of hopelessness
Experiments in form:
free verse, stream-of-consciousness prose – an example of subjectivism: reality is not absolute and orderly, depends of the point of view of the observer
1st person
Elimination of narrator or speaker (presenting the experience, sense perception of the character without the emotions/opinions of the author intruding)
Alienating, understated, ironic, impersonal, lacking in transitions between ideas, full of odd juxtapositions and sophisticated references, or allusions

33. Notables
Edith Wharton (the Age of Innocence - the breakdown of traditional ways of life for the wealthy)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby- disillusionment and ambivalence about the morality of the “self-made man” in American society)
John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath – effects of the Great Depression and Great Dust Bowl of 1930s)
Upton Sinclair (the Jungle – scathing expose of meatpacking industry)
Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt, Elmer Gantry – excesses of materialism, hypocrisy & greed of small-town real estate dealers and showman preachers)
Richard Wright (Native Son – explosive results of discrimination against African Americans)

34. 20th century: golden age of American women writers
Edith Wharton
Eudora Welty
Willa Cather
Katherine Anne Porter
Zora Neale Hurston
Amy Lowell
Marianne Moore
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Shirley Jackson
Lillian Hellman
Denise Levertov
Gwendolyn Brooks
Anne Sexton
Sylvia Plath
Alice Walker
Lorraine Hansberry
Joyce Carol Oates

35. Another way to look at it…”a momentary stay against confusion
Another way to look at it…”a momentary stay against confusion.” Robert Frost
Find renewal in the United States itself
Used ideas and techniques of Modernism
Not Modernist: traditional forms, expression of traditional values
Postwar regionalists who wrote “American” literature about local, rural areas, strength and hope in these works
Robert Frost (rural New England)
Sherwood Anderson (Ohio)
Zora Neale Hurston (novels of African American experience in rural South)
William Faulkner (regional settings and lost traditional values)
Southern regionalism: Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter

36. The Fugitives & New Criticism
The Fugitives (led by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren)
Southern literary school rejected northern urban, commercial value
Advocated a return to the land, esp. in Southern American traditions
New Criticism: close readings and attentiveness to format (patterns of imagery, metaphors, metrics, sounds, and symbols) and their suggested meanings (rather than a focus on history and biography)

37. Postwar Literature

38. The era following WWII
Prosperity in the United States
High employment as economy reverted to peacetime production
Women = housewives & moms; Men = breadwinners
Urban sprawl (suburbia) developed with better cards
Mobile society facilitated by 33 billion from Congress for an interstate highway system (Holiday Inn, A & W, drive-in theaters) Auto = success
Social characteristic: traditional, stable, but undercurrent of disapproval, distrust and disillusionment with the status quo
The “Silent Generation”: traditionalists, experimenters, and iconoclasts (one who attacks widely accepted ideas/beliefs)

39. Postwar Literature America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain…Our fate is to become one, and yet many. --Ralph Ellison

40. The era following WWII
Television:: Middle-class appeal and ideal families
The Tonight Show (Steve Allen)
Toast of the Town (Ed Sullivan)
Father Knows Best
I Love Lucy
Ozzie and Harriet
Rock & roll emerges
Bill Haley & the Comets: “Rock around the Clock” (1954)
Elvis: “Hound Dog,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Don’t be cruel”
Popular Reading
The Cat in the Hat Dr. Seuss
Baby and Child Care: Dr. Benjamin Spock
Pat Boone (the all-American) vs James Dean (the outcast)
Underneath: surface prosperity is turmoil: pervading loneliness (David Reisman: The Lonely Crowd (1951) & Rebel without a Cause (film with James Dean whose character laments the adult world that abandoned him): & J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye: “the adult word is phony”

41. Folk Music craze/fold song army
The Kingston Trio (“Tom Dooley”)
Woody Guthrie (“This Land is Your Land”)
Pete and Peggy Seeger
Peter, Paul, and Mary
Satirical songs about American life
Guitars & banjoes
The voice of the youth protest movement (hippies) and flower children) of the 1960s

42. The Politics in the era following WWII
Dwight David Eisenhower & Richard M Nixon 1952 election; Ike reelected 1956
Cold war ( )
Ideological (independence vs collective), political (democracy vs communism), and economic (market vs command) tensions between United States & Western Europe vs. USSR and Eastern Europe
political (conservatism) Liberals were often given epithets: pinko/commie
Anticommunist paranoia
Hollywood blacklists for Communist Party affiliation ( pressure to identify communist sympathizers)
Senator Joseph McCarthy “witch hunt” in the U.S. Senate (inspiration for The Crucible – Arthur Miller) (mass hysteria and guilt by association)
On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan) suggested that one should “sing” or “rat on” ones corrupt friends
Space Race Soviet launch of Sputnik leading to U.S. moon landing 1969
Korean was (1950 – 19593) Sotho Korea 7 its ally U.S. vs North Korea and ally Communist China

43. Civil Rights Movement
African-Americans left in the old and decaying inner cities where increased poverty and unemployment fostered social unrest.
mid-1950s Civil Rights movement had begun
Rosa Parks (refused to give up her seat on the city bus and was arrested)
Martin Luther King, Jr. led the boycott against public transportation & Supreme Court ruled segregation laws in Montgomery unconstitutional
19574 Brown vs.. The Topeka Board of Education: Supreme Court rules Plessey vs.. Ferguson (“separate but equal”) was inherently unequal and unconstitutional, so schools had to be integrated. First major challenge came in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957

44. Emergence of several black writers
Richard Wright ( Black Boy 1945)
Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man 1952)
James Baldwin ( Go Tell it on the Mountain 1953)
Gwendolyn Brooks (Bronzeville Boys and Girls 1956)
Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun 1958)

45. Literary Scene Literature emerging from the war
Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead)
James Jones (From Here to Eternity)
Early 20th century writers become powerhouses:
William Faulkner (Nobel Prize for literature 1950)
John Steinbeck (East of Eden 1952)
Katherine Anne Porter
Earnest Hemingway (Nobel Prize for literature 1952)

46. New genre: Nonfiction novel:
Hiroshima (1946) John Hersey combination of journalism and literature (literary techniques + factual air of reporting to describe real events)
“The most significant piece of journalism in modern times”
Jewish writers: the Holocaust and life in America
Saul Bellow The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
Henderson, the Rain King 9159
Seize the Day (1956)
Bernard Malamud
The Natural (1952)
The Assistant (1957)
“The Magic Barrel 1954
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Gimpel the Fool 1953
The Family Moskat 1950

47. Other Southern Writers
Fugitive School: Southern writer’s rebellion against Northern materialism and against science and progress
John Crowe Ransom
Robert Penn Warren
Allan Tate
Other Southern Writers
Flannery O’Connor
Walker Percy
Eudora Welty
Truman Capote
John Cheever
John O’Hara
John Updike

48. Flowering of American Drama
Arthur Miller
Tennessee Williams
William Inge
Eugene O’Neill
Lillian Hellman

49. Postwar Poets
Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Marianne Moore
T.S. Eliot (poetry should be “an escape from emotion and personality”) Nobel Prize for literature 1947
E.E. Cummings (experimented with parts of speech, capitalization, and punctuation to explore the essence of language)
William Carlos Williams (there should “be no ideas except in things”)
Black Mountain School in North Carolina: Charles Olsen, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan experimented with the rhythms and sounds of words in lines based on breath pauses. Poetry itself creates a thing, an artifact
Confessional poets: John Berryman, Robert Lowell: used haunting, stark images to reveal intensely personal experiences.
Theodore Roethke: a new romantic, based poetry on childhood experience, using his father’s greenhouse as metaphor
Berryman & Lowell: inner demons, strained and broken marriages, alcoholism
Black Mountain School centered around Black Mountain College, an experimental liberal arts college in Asheville, N.C. where poets, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley taught in the early 1950s
Ed Dorn, Joel Oppenheimer, Jonathan Williams were students
Paul Blackburn, Larry Eigner, Denise Levertov published experimental work in the school’s magazines (Origin and the B lack Mountain Review)
Manifesto for the Black Mountain poets by Charles Olson: in the essay “Projective Verse (1950): emphasize the creative process, in which the poet’s energy is transferred through the poem to the reader, and conversational language.

50. Postwar Poets
The Counterculture begins in the mid-1950s on the West Coast
1955 Six Gallery poetry reading Allen Ginsberg: “Howl” spontaneous composition written to jazz rhythms that challenged every aspect of American life and language
1953 Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Martins: City Lights Bookstore, 1st all-paperback bookstore in the U.S. & haven for writers
This “new “literati” challenged the social malaise and traditional forms
Abstract Expressionism
New York Poets: John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch: experimented with new perceptions & poetry forms; tried to duplicate in words what the expressionists artists accomplished in paint.
The Beats (the Beat generation centered in bookstores around the U.S.): Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Kenneth Rexroth
Beat poems based on existential and Eastern philosophy; strove to cut through superficial facades, denouncing and reviling thoughtless conformity, to embrace life itself

52. Early Contemporary Literature
1960 to 1980

53. Turbulent sixties John F. Kenney: Cold War & arms race, civil rights
Bay of Pigs Invasion
Cuban Missile Crisis
Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.: Civil Rights Movement & race relations
President Lyndon Johnson
Civil Rights Act 1964
Voting Rights Act 19675
“Great Society” – series of social welfare measures (housing, Medicare, Medicaid, education)
Conservatives: more defense spending; less on domestic programs
Liberals: more spending on domestic programs, less on defense
Expansion of Viet Nam War (“police action”) – divisive; antiwar demonstrations throughout the U.S.
Counterculture rebellion of American youth, prosperous but challenged the war and traditional materialistic values; extreme styles of dress, speech, of hippie movement)
Race riots: 1965, 1967, 1968
Assassinations: John F. Kennedy (1963); King & Robert Kennedy (1968)

54. The seventies
Richard Nixon elected by landslide; later becomes 1st president to resign from office
Détente (improved relations) with the Soviet Union
Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (SALT)
Improved relations with China (1972)
Withdrew from Vietnam (1973)
Improprieties during the ‘72 lection campaign including burglary led to resignation
Vice President Gerald Ford finished the term
Jimmy Carter elected in 1976, promoted human rights around the world
Brought Israel and Egypt to negotiating table
U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran taken over by Islamic fundamentalists (Iran Hostage Crisis)

55. The Women’s Movement Call for equal rights for women
Women’s movement or women’s lib
Renewed interest in feminism
Spearheaded by found of Ms. Magazine (19781)
Gloria Steinem
Betty Friedna
Bella Absuz
Shirley Chisholm
Nationals Women’s Political Caucus
Gender roles fell under question L

56. Types of literature Radical experimentation
“happenings” – spontaneous expressions of creative freedom (precursors of performance art)
Found poems - bits of language collected from the culture at large (billboards, graffiti, subway posters, etc.)
Concrete poems – designed to appeal to the eye
Confessional poetry – extremely personal verse that described intimate, often troubled experiences
Robert Lowell
Anne Sexton
Sylvia Plath
John Berryman

57. Types of literature Topics Antiwar poetry
Robert Bly
Denise Levertov
Poems about race and discrimination
Leroi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka)
Nikki Giovanni
Gwendolyn Brooks
Mari Evans

58. Types of literature Fiction/Fact? Novels/Reportage Truman Capote
New Journalism – volumes of nonfiction reportages the relied heavily on techniques of fiction or that frequently manipulated the facts, reshaping them to add to the drama and immediacy of the story being reported (subjective valued over the objective).
Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, John Barth, Richard Brautigan, John Irving
Concern for the absence of morals and ethics; critical of empty experimentation; rather, fiction should reflect ethical values that would make sense of the human condition
Walker Percy, Joan Didion, John Gardner
Chronicles of the Vietnam War
described intimate, often troubled experiences
Tim OBrien
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) - Wolfe
Fear and Loathing n Las Vegas (1972) – Kesey, Thompson
Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968) – Mailer
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) – Kesey (mental hospital patients with staff who is more disturbed than patients)
Lost in the Funhouse (1968) Barth; regarded the interior self as supremet to the external world
Trout Fishing in America (1967) whimsical fantasy (Brautigan)
The World According to Garp (1978) Irving – turned social conventions on their head
Slaughterhouse Five (1969) Vonnegut – great anti-war novel centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden Germany WWII
The Moviegoer (1962)
The Last Gentleman (1966)
The Second Coming (1980)
All three examine civilization and its discontents with a wry but moral eye
Play It A It Lays (19670) Didion: decadent purposelessness of Hollywood
Grendel (1971)
Nickel Mountain (1973)
October Light (1976) moral acts and values can lead to a life worth living
On Moral Fiction (1978) argued that some of the most acclaimed authors were distraction themselves with empty experimentation Gardner called instead for fiction that reflected ethical values that would make sense of the human condition
Obrien: If I Die in a Combat zone (1979): intelligent perspective to help Americans understand how the war had divided their country
Going After Cacciato (1978): considered by some to be the best novel about eh Vietname war (National Book Award)

59. Types of literature
“Women’s literature about “women’s issues” as well as other topics
Black women made notable advances
Multicultural literature emerged
Deconstruction: a tool for evaluating texts constantly questioned the nature of “reality”

60. Reemergence of regionalism: “New Regionalism” decentralization of the publishing industry
No longer exclusive to New York; now small literary presses and little magazines emerged funded by colleges and universities or loyal readers, writers and editors
Able to promote new regional and experimental works in ways the big commercial publishing houses could or would not
More expansive and diverse from East to West
William Kennedy: Albany , New York
Joyce Carol Oates: Northeast
Anne Tyler: Baltimore, Maryland
Pat Conroy: South Carolina low country
Jane Smiley – farms in the heartland
Leslie Marmon Silko and Cormac McCarthy: American Southwest
Wallace Stegner: Far West
Joan Didion: California
Raymond Carver: Pacific Northwest
Playwrights: Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Lanford Wilson, Beth Henley: regional theater movement

61. Contemporary Literature
1980 to Present

62. Cultural Events of 1980s End of American hostage crisis in Iran
Election of Ronald Reagan (end of Jimmy’s Carter’s presidency)
Iran-Contra scandal
SDI (Star Wars)
Family farms in depression
Fall of the Soviet Union/End of the Cold War/Berlin Wall comes down
Increasing Arab animosity for the United States (esp. Libya, Iraq, and Iran)
Economy takes off leading to increase in consumerism
Earth Day revived: manmade disasters includes nuclear accidents in Bhopal, India, Chernobyl, Ukraine, Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania,
Exxon Valdez oil spill Alaska, emission of greenhouse gases, detection of “hole” in the ozone layer of Antarctica

63. Cultural Events of 199s Boomers (World War II babies) become Yuppies
Valued success in corporate world
Generation X
Nobodies, nameless, depressed, both working parents (poor economy and feminism): selfish, cynical, dependent, demanding, “materialists”
MTV; consumerism and economic boom
1989: hyper-text-transfer protocol (http) invented
1993: World Wide Web open for public use
Information Superhighway: reality shaped by the information we collect for ourselves
Global Village (Marshall McCluhan) become reality: national boundaries weaken, cross-cultural marketing and consumerism
HIV: the AIDS virus spreads dramatically

64. Contemporary Literature
Writers examine events from perspectives of those who are not in power and who do not justify the status quo
Awareness of diversity yet searching for unity

65. Contemporary Literature
Mixed-media forms, performance art and installation art. Laurie Anderson United States (1984)
Poetry Slams: open poetry reading contests held in literary bookstores and cafes
Performance poetry (rap music)
New Formalists: champion a return in poetry of form, rhyme, and meters (19h century themes, contemporary attitudes and images, musical language and traditional closed forms)
Multiculturalism: American literature increasingly characterized by an unprecedented interest in a promotion of diversity especially women and people of color (vs predominantly white male literary canon)

66. Creative Nonfiction
Definition: creative nonfiction mixes literary techniques more common to fiction with nonfiction
Origins: A term the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) began using in the early 1970s to refer to contemporary nonfiction such as essays, memories, biographies, and a personalized style of reportage,
Examples: Truman Capote: In Cold Blood, (1965) Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) John McPhee: The Control of Nature (1990)
John Berendt: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994)
The Control of Nature: The Control of Nature is John McPhee's bestselling account of places where people are locked in combat with nature. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking is his depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those attempting to wrest control from her - stubborn, sometimes foolhardy, more often ingenious, and always arresting characters.
In Cold Blood: On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues.
As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. In Cold Blood is a work that transcends its moment, yielding poignant insights into the nature of American violence.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia's Blue Ridge valley. Annie Dillard sets out to see what she can see. What she sees are astonishing incidents of "mystery, death, beauty, violence."
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: Shots rang out in Savannah's grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. John Berendt's sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative reads like a thoroughly engrossing novel, and yet it is a work of nonfiction. Berendt skillfully interweaves a hugely entertaining first-person account of life in this isolated remnant of the Old South with the unpredictable twists and turns of a landmark murder case.
It is a spellbinding story peopled by a gallery of remarkable characters: the well-bred society ladies of the Married Woman's Card Club; the turbulent young redneck gigolo; the hapless recluse who owns a bottle of poison so powerful it could kill every man, woman, and child in Savannah; the aging and profane Southern belle who is the "soul of pampered self-absorption"; the uproariously funny black drag queen; the acerbic and arrogant antiques dealer; the sweet-talking, piano-playing con artist; young blacks dancing the minuet at the black debutante ball; and Minerva, the voodoo priestess who works her magic in the graveyard at midnight. These and other Savannahians act as a Greek chorus, with Berendt revealing the alliances, hostilities, and intrigues that thrive in a town where everyone knows everyone else.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is a sublime and seductive reading experience. Brilliantly conceived and masterfully written, this enormously engaging portrait of a most beguiling Southern city has become a modern classic.

67. Minority literature
Hispanic-American poets: Gary Soto, Alberto Rios, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Pat Mora, Jimmy Santiago Baca
Chicano (Mexican-American) poets: rich oral tradition in the corrido or ballad, form. Recent works stress traditions of the Mexican community and the discrimination it has sometimes experienced from whites

68. Native American writers of poetry and prose:
vivid evocations of the natural world, almost mystical; tragic sense of the irrevocable loss of a rich heritage
Leslie Marmon Silko, Simon Ortiz, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie
Beet Queen trilogy (Erdrich)
Ceremony (Silko)
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (Alexie) Movie: Smoke Signals (1998)

69. African-American Poets Novelists Short Story writers
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)
Lucille Clifton
Michael Harper
Nikki Giovanni
Rita Dove
Novelists
Toni Morrison
Alice Walker
Charles Johnson
Short Story writers
Toni Cade Bambara
Maya Angelou
(Gorilla, My Love (Bambara)
On the Wings of Morning (Angelou) read at the inauguration of Pres. Clinton 1993
(1993 Nobel Prize for literature winner for The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved)
(1993 Poet Laureate of the United States and 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner for Thomas and Beulah

70. Asian –American (American writers of Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Koran, Thai all with distinct cultural heritages)
Poets
Li-Young Lee
Cathy Song
Garrett Hongo
David Mura
Janice Mirikitani
Prose
Maxine Hong Kingston
Amy Tan
Frank Chin
Sylvia Watanabe
Gish Jen
Gus Lee

71. American writers Prose Poets Allan Gurganus Tim O’Brien Diane Ackerman
Anne Beattie
Louise Cluck
Anne Tyler
Phillip Levine
Barbara Kingsolver
Sharon Olds
Jane Smiley
Charles Wright
Tom Wolfe
Donald Hall
Frank McCourt
Garrison Keillor
E. Annie Proulx
Isaac Asimov
Kathleen Norris
John Updike