Thursday, May 5, 2016

Romantic - Nathanial Hawthorn - "The Birthmark"

  • Spiritual nature
  • Man of science = Aylmer
  • Ammidab - earthly nature
  • Spiritual affinity with Georgiana
Love of science rivals Love of women
Love of science wins
The mark changed with emotion. Are women more emotional?
Lack of perfection on earth - she is subject to sin, sorrow, decay, and death
Her happiness depends on his acceptance
Frankenstein?
You can tell a person's nature by their outward appearance
Aylmer never achieved his goals, never felt good enough. Is this why Georgiana isn't good enough?
The furnace looks like hell
As she dies she is the perfect unblemished woman
She essentially commits suicide to make him happy

Themes:
  • Science has its limitations
  • Perfection is not possible on earth
  • obsession
  • tragic flaw of Aylmer - ambition, search for perfection
  • Nature of marriage
Science - desire to play God and blind faith in science

Georgiana does become perfect in physical nature and understanding. Aylmer never does

Hawthorne as a romantic trying to denigrate devotion to science?
Don't try to become God.

Humans are imperfect and that's Ok
Dark romanticism - emotion, Psychology, Philosophy, morality, rejection of the age of enlightenment

Story is didactic
  • Lesson 1 - Man is inherently & necessarily flawed
  • Lesson 2 - Science isn't everything
  • Lesson 3 - Know a good thing when you have it


  • A man of science
  • Spiritual affinity
  • Love of science to rival the love of women
  • He had devoted himself, however, too unreservedly to scientific studies ever to be weaned from them by any second passion
    • Doesn't want to see her as a sexual being
  • Ah, upon another face perhaps it might, replied her husband, but never on yours
  • Not a little similarity to the human hand
  • female competitiveness
  • After his marriage
  • with every pulse of emotion that throbbed within her heart
    • women are more emotional?
  • Mark shows the fragile nature of life? Lack of perfection on earth
  • Georgiana's heart
    • Mark becomes a symbol of her heart
  • Truth in dreams? A form of supernatural
  • Her happiness depends on his acceptance
  • Scene of all his previous triumphs
  • Frankenstein
  • He seemed to represent man's physical nature; while Aylmer's slender figure, and pale, intellectual face, were no less apt a type of spiritual element
    • You can tell a person's nature by their outward appearance
  • magic circle
  • Husband possessed sway over the spiritual world
  • Alchemy
  • elixir of life
  • Your case demands a remedy that shall go deeper
  • He handled physical details as if there were nothing beyond them; yet spiritualized them all, and redeemed himself from materialism by his strong and eager aspiration toward the infinity 
  • Never achieved his goals
  • Confession and continual exemplification of the shortcomings
  • Never feel good enough
  • It was a sensation in the fatal birthmark, not painful, but which induced a restlessness throughout her system
  • Hell
  • How different from the sanguine and joyous mien that he had assumed for Georgiana's encouragement
  • Go, prying woman, go
  • The parting breath of the now perfect woman passed into the atmosphere
    • exactly what her husband wants

Modern: William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury


  • 3 first person central narrators
    • Benjy
    • Quentin
    • Jason
    • (followed by Dilsey)
  • Each telling story of their relationship with their sister and by extension the remainder of the family and each other
    • Quentin - oldest child/son
      • ashamed of his father's disregard for traditional Southern values of honor & virtue when it comes to Caddy's pregnancy
      • Mr. Compson disregards Quentin's thoughts which leads to his initial depression and finally his ultimate demise. 
      • Feels the burden to live up to the families honor & name
      • paralyzed by his obsession with Caddy and Southern code of conduct and morality
    • Caddy (Candace) - Second oldest/only daughter
      • Perhaps the most important character as all 3 boys have an "obsession" with her
      • As a young child steps in as a motherly figure for Quentin & Benjy
      • Caddy's muddying of her underwear foreshadows her later promiscuity and the shadow her promiscuity leaves on the family name.
    • Jason - third born/son/assumes responsibilities after Father dies of Alcoholism and Quentin commits suicide
      • Steers clear of the other children
      • Infatuation with Caddy but to get her in trouble.
      • Only child to receive Mrs. Compson's affection
        • No capacity to accept, enjoy, or reciprocate her love and eventually manipulates it to steal money from Miss Quentin (Caddy's daughter) behind Mrs. Compson's back.
      • Not only rejects familial love but also romantic love
        • Only romantic love is found in a prostitute from Memphis
      • Thinks only about the present and immediate future.
      • Extremely motivated but without ambition
      • Can't move on past Caddy's losing his job at the bank, but becomes head of the household after Mr. Compson dies which further shows the low the once prominent family has come to.
    • Benjy - Youngest son/child/Mentally ill.
      • Totally dependent on Caddy and her affection (the only affection he receives)
      • because of his illness doesn't perceive time, cause and effect, or right and wrong.
      • He can sense anything that is bad, wrong, or out of place.
      • Senses Quentin's suicide thousands of miles away
      • Senses Caddy's promiscuity
      • Takes notice of the families falling, but unable to do anything other than moan and cry about it
  • Looking at the same reality and getting radically different tales = multiple people's perspective
  • Quintin's problem is that he wants to commit suicide and masquerades as a sane person. He goes progressively insane. We're seeing the end stage of his insanity.
  • Jason is the most in touch with reality of any of the three brothers, but he's a psychopath
  • In terms of first person narration, this is as close as you can come to reliable stories with regards to what it was like to grow up in this family
    • A sense of the shrinking significance of the individual
    • Benjy=ultimate powerless individual, even 12 year old can torment him, looks in fire door in kitchen and flames soothe him (Lester can shut door and tease him)
  • Quentin=no value. Ultimately judges that he is of no value to himself and his family, so ends his life
  • Quentin's world is shattered as well, but in his case it's that shattering that causes him the greatest pain. Can't agree with his father, has mother that doesn't love him, has sister who is unchaste (doesn't go with his moral code), so has world that is so shattered (fragmentation) that he feels he can't put it back together and ends his life
  • Inadequacy of Language = Benjy. Someone who not only is uneducated but has no voice at all. Gives Benjy language so we have insight into his inner life. Can't speak other than wails.
  • Quentin - language is disintegrating. As you go along you lose capital letters/punctuations. Faulkner indicating that shattering of Quentin's world is going along as time is
  • Quentin's memory is complicated because it is largly intertwined with his fantasies.
    • sometimes it is difficult to tell which of his memories are based on events that accually occured and which are based on fantasy or wishful thinking.
  • Watches and time play a significant roll in the telling of Quentin's story.
  • So ultimate absolute is lost. If there is no God or truth, then left with human perceptions
  • ends with church service. Three 3rd person POV's and then 3rd person omniscient. No mistake that spends a good deal of time at church service in which black preacher preaches first part of the sermon like white man and then voice changes into sort of musical chant "recollection in the blood of the lamb" <-- illogical, but gives Dilsey some sense of peace.
  • Aspects of Modernism
  • Fragmentation (partial knowledge, inadequacy of language (Benjy's section))
  • Benjy's section is major stream of consciousness
    • It jumps around as memories come to Benjy.
      • this fact makes it difficult to follow sometimes
    • Easiest way to tell present from past is if you feel the presence of Luster.
    • Luster is a key element to the present
    • Benjy's voice offers narrator of the tragic events and circumstances without commentary
    • his narrative gradually gives us the knowledge of the relationship that governs the family
    • Benjy shows the differing personalities of the Compson siblings.
  • Isolation
  • Alienation
  • Focus on self (intense subjectivity, self-absorption)
  • Disillusionment & sense of pointlessness, nothingness
  • Moral relativism and paralysis
  • Loss of faith in old systems of order and authority
  • The parallel lines between Caddy and her daughter Miss Quentin show that the downfall of the family does not stop with Caddy's generation.
    • Because Caddy set the scene doing the promiscuous things, Miss Quentin doesn't feel bad for her actions.
  • Dilsey shows considerable strength
  • Deceptiveness of appearances (Irony, complexity, skepticism, unreliability of perception)
  • Preoccupation with trivial, the shallow
  • Search for stimulation
  • Dilsey
    • The family's nurse maid
    • The only sense of the stability the children receive
    • only detached character to experience the downfall from start to finish
    • lives her life on the same fundamental values that the family was once built on...
      • family, faith, personal honor, and so on
    • Raises the Compson children as well as her own children and grandchildren at the same time
  • Dilsey narrates the last section through the voice of Faulkner himself.
    • It is written in a third-person perspective
    • This viewpoint takes the reader a step back from the inner world and gives a panoramic view of the tragedy that has unfolded
    • Her voice is an objective one
      • similar to Benjy in its ability to view the Compson world without resentment
        • Unlike Benjy, Dilsey relies on a mere traditional mode of storytelling
  • Themes
    • Corruption Southern Aristocratic Values
      • Traditional Values 
        • Gentlemen: displaying courage, moral strength, perseverance, and chivalry in defense of the honor of their family
        • Women: feminine grace, purity, and virginity until it came time to provide children to receive the family inheritance
    • Resurrection and Renewal
      • The novel takes place on or around Easter
      • Dilsey represents strength and hope
    • Failure of Language and Narrative
      • While there are 4 different perspectives, 3 in 1st person, Even the last of the voices in 3rd person doesn't tie up all lose ends of the novel
      • Faulkner had difficulty in writing through the different perspectives because while there were some that answered questions, other questions arrived
    • Time
      • Benjy cannot distinguish time
      • Quentin is trapped in time
      • Jason can only see time as personal gain
      • Dilsey is the only character at peace with time
    • Order and Chaos
    • Shadows
      • serve as a subtle reminder of the passage of time
    • Water
      • Cleansing and purity
    • Quentin's Watch


Post WWII: "Everything that Rises must Converge" Flannery O'Connor


  • January 1965
  • 3rd Person POV through Julian
    • recent college grad and self-styled intellectual who lives with his mother because he can't afford his own lodgings with the salary he hears as a typewriter salesman
  • Mother's world 
    • racism of the mid-20th C South
      • Blacks are free to rise
        • But should do so separately from whites
    • wary of riding the bus because of racial integration on the Public transportation system
  • Julian resentfully agrees to escort his mother
    • If only out of duty to the woman who paid for college
    • and continues to support him now
      • declares that he will make money one day
      • wants to move to the country
    • His mother encourages him to dream big
  • Confrontational bitterness and thoughtless prejudice bring the circumstances to a boil
    • on the bus joined by widely disparate cast of characters
      • 2 black men with vastly different social status
        • One in a nice suit reading the newspaper
          • Julian imagines striking up a conversation with him.
          • Instead asks for a light in spite of the no-smoking and no cigs
  • Julian tries to screw with his mother
    • loosens his tie to which his mother says he looks like a thug
  • Mother points out there are only white people on board
  • Discussion turns to Julian
    • Mother says he's a typewriter salesman but wants to be a writer
    • Julian withdraws
      • dreams of bringing a black lawyer or professor home for dinner to cause his mother to need to be treated by a black doctor
      • interracial relationships
  • Stern-looking black woman boards the bus with her young son
    • boy sits next to mother
      • Mother likes all children regardless of race
    • mother sits next to Julian
      • Black mother seems familiar but unsure why
        • places it to the ugly hat she wears and his mother also wears
        • Calls out angrily to her son, Carver
        • Julian's mother tries to play Peek-a-boo with the boy
        • Black woman ignores her and chastises her son
  • Julian and the black woman pll the signal cord at the same time
    • Mother always gives a nickel to kids
      • Can only find a penny
    • Goes to give it to Carver
      • Mother clobbers mother with purse yelling "He don't take nobody's pennies!"
    • Julian berates his mother as he helps her up
    • Lectures his mother saying that she should learn from her encounter with the woman on the bus 
      • All African Americans distaste for condescending handouts
  • Mother reaches out to grab Julian
    • Strange expression on her face
    • says to call for grandpa or nurse Caroline
    • crumbles to the pavement
  • Julian rushes to her and finds her face distorted
    • Starts to run for help but quickly returns to her side.


Post WWII: "A Good Man is Hard to Find" Flannery O'Connor



  • Grandmother tries to convince her son to take the family to east Tennessee for vacation instead of Florida
  • There is an escaped convict heading toward Florida
  • Cat, Pitty Sing, gets hidden in a basket in the car
  • dress attire
    • dress and hat with flowers
    • Wants people to know she is a lady
  • In a cotton field, grandma tells the young boy that there are graves in the middle that belonged to the plantation
    • Jokes that the plantation has "Gone with the Wind."
  • Suitor brought her watermelon every week
    • carved his initials in which were EAT (Edgar Atkins Teagarden)
    • Little black child ate because he thought it said to "eat"
  • Restaurant owner, Red Sammy Butts complains people are untrustworthy 
    • His wife doesn't trust anyone, including him.
  • Red Sam says "A good man is hard to find."
  • The family drives deep into the woods seeking a house
    • Grandma then remembers it's in Tennessee not Georgia
  • Bailey wrecks the car when Pitty Sing escapes the basket and startles him.
    • The mother breaks her shoulder
  • Grandma doesn't tell about her mistake
  • Wants to visit a plantation she once visited nearby
    • Says the house has 6 white columns and was at the end of an oak tree driveway
      • Lied to make the house seem interesting
    • Head down a gravel road
  • A passing car stops, three men get out carrying guns
  • Grandma thinks she recognizes one of them
    • One wearing glasses and no shirt
      • tells the children's mother to make the children set down because they make him nervous
    • Misfit
      • The man doesn't like that she recognizes him.
      • Takes the father and the boy into the woods
      • The mom and the two girls go into the woods
      • gun shots come from the woods
      • Grandma says you wouldn't kill a lady
      • Misfit shoots grandma in the chest 3 times when she calls him "one of my own children"
      • The misfit observes that grandmother could have been a good woman if someone had been around "to shoot her every minute of her life.
      • The misfit says life has no true pleasure
  • Themes
    • definition of "Good Man"
    • Unlikely recipients of good grace
    • Nostalgia
    • The grandmother's hat.

Post WWII: "Good Country People" Flannery O'Connor


  • Published in 1955
  • Mr. and Mrs. Freeman help Mrs. Hopewell run her farm in rural Georgia
  • Mrs. Hopewell's daughter, Joy - 32, lost her leg in a childhood accident.
  • Joy focuses her life in education receiving a Ph.D. in Philosophy
    • Her mother thinks this is non-sensible
  • Joy changes her name to "Hulga"
    • The ugliest name to rebel against her mother.
  • Manley Pointer, a bible salesman, visits the farm
    • He's invited to stay for dinner
  • Mrs. Hopewell believes he is "good country people
  • Pointer invites Hulga to a picnic the next evening
    • she imagines seducing him
  • During the date, he persuades her to go up into the barn loft where he persuades her to remove her prosthetic leg and glasses
  • He the produces a hollowed-out bible
    • whiskey, sex cards, and some condoms
  • He tries to get her to drink, she refuses
  • He leaves with her leg claiming he collects prostheses from disabled people and is an atheist.
  • a stranger - deceptively polite but ultimately evil - intrudes upon a family with destructive consquences
  • Divided into 4 distinct sections
    • O'Connor is able to establish sbutle parrallels between the characters
      • Mrs. Freeman & Manley Pointer
      • Mrs. Hopewell and Hulga
    • While at the same time providing details which appear to emphasize the different facets of the four individual characters.
  • Part of the "A Good Man is Hard to Find" short story collection
  • Hulga holds grudges against Mrs. Freeman's daughters.
  • The names all play a significance in the telling of the story
    • Hope well
    • Free man
    • Pointer
    • Joy to Hulga



Post WWII: Flannery O'Connor


  • 1925-1964
  • Wrote 2 novels and 32 short stories
  • Southern Gothic Style writer
  • relied on regional settings and grotesque characters
  • Irony
  • depravity
  • Puritan ideals
  • hypocrisy
  • anti-protestant; but doesn't care for Catholics yet says everyone gets a moment of grace & could've been saved, but do most people take it?
  • 7 deadly sins


Post WWII: Gwendolyn Brooks


  • Black author
  • Kansas City --> Chicago
  • Writes about poverty
    • Usually black characters: Bean eaters, New Johannesburg Boy, To those of my sisters
  • First black author to win a Pulitzer Prize
  • Poetry consultant for the Library of Congress
  • Many of Brooks's works display:
    • a political consciousness
      • especially those from the 60's and later
      • several of her poems reflect the civil rights movement
  • Bridge the gap between the academic poets of her generation in the 40's and the young black militant writers of the 60's
  • Born in Topeka, KS
  • Brooks was13 when her first published poem, "Eventide" appeared in American Childhood
  • At 17 she was publishing poems frequently in the Chicago Defender
    • Chicago's black population newspaper
  • Her poems focused on urban blacks, that would be published in her first collection, A Street in Bronzeville.
  • Describes her work as "folksy narrative."
    • She varied her forms, using free verse, sonnets, and other models.
  • Published one novel in the 1950's
    • Maud Martha
  • Later works took a far more political stance
    • Just as her first poems reflected the mood of their era
    • Her later works mirrored their age by displaying "an intense awareness of the problems of color and justice."
  • Some say they are more about bitterness than bitter in themselves
  • Activism and interest in nurturing black literature
    • Caused her to leave Harper & Row in favor of fledgling black publishing companies
      • 1970's - Dudly Randall's Broadside Press
    • Did not regret having supported small publishers dedicating to the needs of the black community
    • Believed that some books only got small notability because literary establishments didn't want to encourage Black publishers. 


Post WWII: Beloved - Toni Morrison


  • House is alive
  • Sons to run away
  • Haunted house
  • Sweet home --> plantation --> Lives with husband's mother. lives in the North
  • Sexual desire
    • local carnival (Paul D)
      • Young woman ( Beloved)
  • Told out of order
    • Symbolism around breasts
  • Based on True Story

Characters
  • Sethe
  • Denver
  • Beloved
  • Paul D.
  • Baby Suggs
  • Stamp Paid
  • Hale
  • Garner's - Benevolent



Post WWII: Allen Ginsberg

"Howl"

  • Inspired by Kerouac's spontaneous composition
  • Common themes:
    • angry rant, futility
    • religion: Jewish, Christian, Buddhist (Moloch, Jesus, Buddha, Angel)
    • Explicit imagery: homosexuality, heterosexuality, genitals, drug use
    • Condemning: people, government, industry, society
    • Time/eternity
    • War imagery
    • Neal Cassady
    • Jack
    • Burroughs
    • Carl Solomon
    • Madness
    • Nakedness
    • Poetics (craft of poetry)
    • Mother
  • "Howl" began in 1954 when Ginsberg was high on peyote and saw SF skyline transform into an evil monster (moloch)
  • First read in public Oct 7, 1955 at Six Gallery
  • Published in November 1956 by City lights
  • Ferlinghett: city lights owner, and Shigeyoshi murao, manger, arrested for disturbing obscene materials. Later, judge stated that the poem had social importance
  • Some influences on "Howl"
    • Hospitalized in mental hospital after arrested for storing stolen goods for friends
      • experienced depression, loneliness, concerned he was insane, confusion about sexual identity
    • Carl Solomon - met Solomon in mental hospital where he stayed 7 months. 
      • Solomon was eccentric & intellectual, interested in surrealist & Dadaism art movements. Like Ginsberg, he had suicidal thoughts while hospitalized
  • Ginsberg's mother Naomi, suffered severe mental illness and attempted suicides. She was in/out of hospitals all his life
  • William Carlos Williams, older Modernist poet, befriended Ginsberg & advised him to use concrete imagery & use everyday speech. Encouraged Ginsberg to move away from form, meter, & rhyme
  • William Blake influenced Ginsberg's sense that poetry can convey mystical, visionary material
  • Christopher Smart - Ginsberg was inspired by the sound & rhyme of Smart's long line and anaphora
  • Walt Whitman influenced Ginsberg's use of long line & rhyme & sound of the long line. Whitman was also an influence in terms of subject matter, as a poet who openly wrote about sexuality, the connection between the cosmic realm & the lowly details of everyday life, about the spiritual connection of all aspects of experience, etc.
Summarizing structure of "Howl"
  • Part I: Crossing American (and world) with social outcasts, rebels. Despondent but ecstatic tone, embracing the energy of rebelliousness, despair, & madness
  • Part II: Mythical space, but also the space of modern industrial, commercial, Urban America. Moral Outage at American culture
  • Part III: Setting is a specific mental institution with one ind. person compassion, sense of connection, & solidarity between 2 people
Analysis: Part I
  • Best minds destroyed - addictions controlling them; self-destroyed (old) in order for new to be created
  • Burning - yearning for; consumed by
  • Dynamo - Machine creating energy; energetic people
  • Arkansas replaces anarchy because anarchy is too abstract with a better "thing-name" 
  • Page 12 - Plotinus developed Plato's idea of the ideal
  • St. John developed idea of suffering, decline of individual self to meet God
  • Ginsberg is equating newer writers/thinkers with older ones - newer ones that his generation would definitely know: Bop, Poe with older ones: Plotinus, St. John - gnostic belief here
  • Pg 13 - Ginsberg grew up in politically charged home. His parents were communists. Handed out pamphlets as a child
  • Pg. 20 - My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?
  • Ginsberg (and the others0 takes all of the experiences, emotions, and forms them into writing.
Analysis: Part II
  • Pg. 21 - Sphinx - guardian - no one could pass with without solving riddle
    • Modern day, breaks open skulls, eats brains and imaginations
    • Calls modern day sphinx "Moloch." the killer of Children
    • Moloch section moves from physical to spiritual
      • Good comps oint to make: structure
    • appears that everyone survived & escaped - water (flood) is cleansing - last 2 stanzas/lines
    • however, Ginsberg calls/refers to "the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit"
    • "ten years" refers to the beat generation
Analysis: Part III

  • referring to Solomon in the mental institution
  • a lot of American imagery
    • "Star-Spangled"
    • "United States"
    • "America"
  • 2nd to last stanza - electrified awake out of a coma - soul is now free
    • War imagery
    • oxymorons everywhere: angelic bombs; electrified (scary or excited?)
  • Echoing T.S. Eliot's "Wasteland" with the word "Rockland"?
  • "A supermarket in California" pg 29
  • Self-conscious =  self-aware?
  • fruit - derogatory slang for gay men
  • husbands... wives... could be a possible remark about available prostitutes
    • may be saying they're out of place (as families) since he's gay and not his perception of a family
  • Portrays Whitman as an old, lonely man
    • eyeing the grocery boys (gay tendencies)
    • "poking" among the meats
  • Ginsberg "wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans" (cans=rear ends)
  • Traveling imagery (pg 30)
  • "love" for Ginsberg often meant affection between two people, not just sex, many times between men
  • Whitman = poet of democracy, of all people according to Ginsberg
    • Father figure for Ginsberg
  • desire for connection with Whitman, returning to a cottage
  • Written on the 100th Anniversary of "Leaves of Grass"
  • "Sunflower Sutra," (p 35)
    • "sutra"=lesson, usually spiritual
    • Thesis/lesson - everyone is beautiful, regardless of outward appearance
      • new idea in Ginsberg's time - his era was about conformity and playing your designated role
    • Surroundings don't define you
  • "Kaddish," (p 77 PBR)
  • Ginsberg upset there weren't 10 Jewish men to perform the Kaddish as required
    • This poem attempts to atone for that.
  • apocalypse - cold war/nuclear war threat; emotional destruction; mortality & end of own life with loss of parent
  • earthly existence, reincarnation, pg 78.


Uses of concrete names to discuss abstract concept
Spontaneous prose
Sect I

  • Madness
  • Rebellion
  • Religion
  • Eclectic
    • outsider figures
    • travel
  • Nakedness
Sect II
  • Corruption
  • Cities
  • Soullessness
  • cities as monsters
  • capitalism
  • war
  • industry
Sect III
  • Carl Solomon
  • Rockland
  • Mother
  • Connection between people
  • Empathy
  • Nakedness





Post WWII: David Henry Hwang - M. Butterfly Notes (Not to be confused with Madame Butterfly)


  • David Henry Hwang
  • 1988
    • Characters
      • Gallimard
      • Song
    • Themes
      • Gender roles
      • Homosexuality
      • Orientalism
      • Occidentalism
      • Society Expectation
      • Role Reversal
    • Setting
      • Japan
      • Paris Prison
Play reflects Madama Butterfly by Puccini in which an American marries a Japanese woman he names Butterfly. After marriage he leaves, but returns with an American wife three years later. He discovers that he should have stayed with Butterfly because she is perfect, but Butterfly kills herself from his rejection.

Alternatively, Gallimard, is a French civil servant for the French Chinese Embassy. He marries Song and lives with her for twenty years. He is imprisoned for leaking state secrets to Song and discovers Song is actually a man. His belief that Song's modesty was a feminine ideal and his view of Song as the perfect woman results in his own suicide. This "hidden gender" is reflected in Hwang's title, as the "M." creates the expectation of Madama rather than Monsieur or Mister. The play addresses the Occidental expectation that the Orient is feminine, because of the quietness and artsy of the culture. Despite Gallimard's thought that Song's behavior is due to femininity, it is Song that adopts these behaviors to take advantage of Gallimard's expectations. Gallimard is ultimately emasculated because of his twenty year homosexuality relationship in which he identified a man as the perfect woman.

Objectives
  • Learn some context for Hwang's M. Butterfly
  • Introduce Said's concept of "Orientalism" & discuss the history of "Asiaphilia" as a colonial practice
  • Discuss characterization & sexuality in M. Butterfly
  • Contrast themes in Hwang with depictions of sexualityism other words from the core exam
  • Questions about 20th C. American list in general
19th Century 
  • Madame Chrysanthéme (novel, 1887)
  • "Madam Butterfly" (short story, 1898)
Early 20th Century
  • Madama Butterfly (Opera, 1904)
  • The Toll of the Sea (Film, 1922)
  • Madame Butterfly (Film, 1932) (Cary Grant)
Late 20th Century
  • M. Butterfly (Play, 1988) --> Racist stuff -->response to that
  • Miss Siagon (musical, 1989)
  • Pinkerton (album, 1996
M. --> French for Monsieur or Madam

Postmodern
  • Formally similar
    • Polyphonic devices
    • Stream of Consciousness
  • Non-linear
    • Break in structure
*extradiegesis - older (Gallimard) rotting in prison
                              --> Retrospective (Inside-out)
*Intradiegesis - younger free (Gallimard) dealing with current relationship
                              --> Réne - outside-in character

Orientalism & the Fetishization of Asian sexuality
(Western fantasies of Eastern)
Orientalism is "a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in the European Western Experience. Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also a place of Europe's greatest & richest & oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations & languages, its cultural constant, & one of its deepest and most recurring images of the other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the west) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization & culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally & even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocab, scholarship, imagery, doctrines even Colonial bureaucracies & colonial styles"

*2 influences - Puccini's Opera and Ben Johnson's Epicoene
*Does Hwang successfully subvest the "favorite fantasy of Westerners" featuring "the submissive Oriental female" and her lover, "The cruel white man?"
*Allegory for the geopolitics scene
*Does Hwang's framing of Gallimard's (least masculine because of military rank) desire for Song represent homosexuality as a source of derision

A Comparative Discussion 
  • Consider how sexuality is thematized in the following works from the core list
    • Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter
    • Kate Chopin - The Awakening
    • William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury
    • Zora Neale Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God
    • Toni Morrison - Beloved
    • Tennessee Williams - A Streetcar Named Desire
  • Relationship between the lover and the lover object the writers reveal through characterizations of protagonist? Explore consequences of immoderate desire in his/her work?
  • How do literary representations of sexual sin or sexual identity change from the Romantic period to the Postmodernism era?



Post Modernism: 1950- Present


  • Began in the late 1960's (??) and continues into the present in some aspects of literature and culture
  • Attitudes influenced by catastrophic events of WWII and the potential for catastrophe that followed:
    • Fascism
    • Nazism
    • The Holocaust
    • the atomic bomb (and later the hydrogen bomb)
    • then the cold war with it's large nuclear arsenals
  • Postmodernism often involves an ironic attitude toward life, culture, and meaning: a loss of faith in culture, political, and religious authority. But whereas Modernist writers were distrubed by this loss of traditional values, postmodern writers revel in the ridiculousness of the human experience. 
    • Humor, Absurdity, Satire, and Parody are often used in postmodern literature, even when seemingly serious subjects are addressed. 
      • Everything is a joke, everything is a play.
  • Accepts that fragmentation is a characteristic of contemporary life and beliefs. There's a sense that nothing may have any one clear meaning that everyone agrees on, but postmodernism embraces the chaos. The literature laughs at the twists and turns of the human psyche as we try to find meaning in a world where truth is constantly shifting. Life is not meaningless; it is endlessly full of multiple meanings. We do not have a lack of truth; instead, we have an infinite number of possible truths.
  • Language itself is unstable and indeterminate; language is play
    • We can never say what we mean because meaning attaches to meaning in an infinite chain.
    • We have nothing upon which to base a final, definite meaning for anything
  • Focus on the process of writing and on the disordered flow of thought and ideas--seeking a set meaning is not the goal.
  • Mixing of blurring the line between "high" and "low" culture. 
    • "high culture" = opera, theater, classic literature, etc
    • "low culture" = TV sitcoms, trashy literature, movies, comic books, etc
  • Authors include John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, and many more
  • Examples from popular culture: "The Simpsons, The Daily Show, Shrek, YouTube, the Internet, etc.
  • Mixing of fantasy with nonfiction; blurs lines of reality for readers
  • No heroes
  • Concern with individual in isolation
  • Detached, unemotional
  • Usually humorless
  • Narratives
  • Metafiction
  • Present tense
  • Magical realism
  • Erodes distinctions between classes of people
  • Insists that values are not permanent but only "local" or "historical"
  • Criticism of consumerism
  • Appreciation of freedom & spontaneity
  • Indeterminacy: nothing is certain
    • partly due to fragmentation - with the death of God, everything else is fragmented - this is an on-going process.
    • This can be seen in the breaking of forms, mixing of genres
  • Reuses old forms in new ways
  • Intertextuality
    • Deceptiveness of appearances (irony, complexity, cynicism, inadequacy of reason, unreliability of perception)
  • Literature shifts from omniscient narrator, comforting, all-knowing absolute, to mult. subjectivities:
    • If you have no "truth" to fall back on, what is reality?
    • id takes over --> ego has to try to maintain control
    • Left with imperfect human position
    • rise of 1st person, central narrator
  • Preoccupation with the trivial, the shallow
    • makes own values
  • search for stimulation on diversion or escape rather than purpose or meaning.
  • Key aspects of Modern Poems:
    • stylistic individuality
    • formal experimentation
    • subjective voice
    • image
    • symbol
    • ellipses
    • opacity
    • irony
    • fragmentation
    • impersonality
    • avoidance of generalizations, morals, and messages
Trends in American Literature and Culture since 1950
  • The Beat generation
    • The so-called "Beat Generation" was very influential from the mid 1950's into the 1960's. Beat poets included Allen Ginsberg (one of the founders of the movement), Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and others while Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs were important novelists. The term "beat" refers to the sense of being weary or worn out, but also to the term "beatific," meaning spiritually blessed or blissful. The beat writers rebelled against social conventions of the 1950's, criticizing American culture as hollow, overly commercialized, and spiritually dead. They favored individualism, non-conformity, and experimentation of all kinds: with literary form, drugs, sex, spirituality (especially Buddhism), and with the "hip" lingo of jazz musicians. Ginsberg's "Howl" is one of the earliest and most famous poems defining Beat attitudes.
  • Confessional poetry
    • Term applied to a number of poets in the 1950's-60's, including Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Allen Ginsburg, Robert Lowell, W.D. Snodgrass, and John Berryman. Confessional poetry typically uses the first-person "I" and reveals autobiographical information, often including the author's emotional and psychological experiences related to death, depression, relationships, trauma, or other aspects of private experience. Later poets such as Sharon Olds have continued the confessional tradition into the present day.
  • Black arts movement
    • The Black Arts Movement was founded by the poet and playwright Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) following the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965. This movement in theater, poetry, and fiction involved the creation of a new, experimental Black aesthetic meant to accompany the political and social protest of the Black Power movement. The movement's poetry often included a vibrant, tough tone, new spellings, old or absent punctuation, strange line breaks. The literature often used a "street" vocabulary, and the subject matter and rhythms were often allied with African American music, including jazz, blues, soul, and funk. The movement is closely connected to the concept of Black Pride, which one sees in 1960's slogans such as "Black is Beautiful" and singer James Brown's rallying cry, "Say it loud, I'm Black and I'm proud!" A good example of the style is Amiri Baraka's poem "Black Art" (1965), which states that "we want 'poems that kill.'/ Assassin poems, Poems that shoot"; the poem concludes with these lines
      • Let Black people understand
        that they are the lovers and the sons
        of warriors and sons
        of warriors Are poems & poets &
        all the loveliness here in the world

        We want a black poem. And a
        Black World.
        Let the world be a Black Poem
        And Let All Black People Speak This Poem
        Silently
        or LOUD
  • Multicultural literature
    • This term refers to literature written by authors from a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds, including African American literature, Asian American literature, Native American literature, and Latino American literature. It can also include authors who draw on other kinds of cultural identity: working class authors, disabled authors, and so forth. Although multicultural literature has existed throughout the entire history of the United States, the concepts of multicultural literature and multicultural education became especially prominent in the 1980's and beyond, due in part to the effect of various civil rights movements during the 1960's-70's: the Black Power movement, women's rights, gay rights, the American Indian movement, and so forth. During the 1980's and after, more and more works by multicultural authors (such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Julia Alvarez, Sherman Alexie, Amy Tan, and many others) were published and sold. Additionally, multicultural literature became increasingly prominent in education at both the high school and college levels. After many public debates over the direction of American education, today the literary canon (the collection of texts considered to be the most important "great works" or "classics") has greatly expanded to include more diverse texts than it used to.


Henry David Thoreau - "Resistance to Civil Government"


  • Went to the woods to live individually.
  • Abolitionist 
    • Activists in favor of abolishing slavery
  • Daniel Webster 
    • was a well known American orator, lawyer, and politician. As a US Sentor, he was an eloquent defender of a strong national government. He opposed the war with Mexico and was instrumental in passing the compromise of 1850 on slavery, for which many Northerners denounced him. He also served as Secretary of State for Presidents William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, and Millard Filmore
  • Mexican-American War
    • 1846-1848
    • was fought over boundary disputes between the two countries; the Americans believed that it was their "Manifest Destiny" to expand their territory. During the war, U.S. forces invaded Mexico and occupied its capital, eventually gaining the land that would later constitute California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming.
  • Transcendentalism
    • A philosophy that became influential in the late 18th century and 19th century. 
    • Rejects the idea that knowledge can be fully derived from experience and observation of the physical world; rather, an individual should examine the way she comes to know things - in other words, the thought process itself - and focus on her connection to the divine, which exists beyond the sense but which can be known through intuition and feeling.
    • Reached its peak in New England in the 1840s, under the leadership of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson argued that, while the physical world is important, providing us with necessary goods and frequent beauty, people should live their lives based on truths grasped through reason, not just physical perception. People will find truth within themselves; therefore, self-reliance and individuality are critical. Emerson served as a mentor to Thoreau, who became another leading American transcendentalist.


Modern: Langston Hughes

One of the first to address what became the primary concern of African American writers of the 20th Century, raising the sense of dignity and self-worth of African Americans, Hughes was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920's, the focus of which was to create and sustain art rooted in the real lives of black Americans, as opposed art that tried to accommodate itself to the white world. This change required writers to reinvent/redefine poetry and the poet as black and also to define in words the "black experience" that before then had had little value or voice in American art or culture. Hughes and other writers had to invent a new aesthetic and a new language, and they found the basis for these new forms in the black church, the "new" music of jazz and blues, in the rural life of black people in the south, and in the street life of black people in the urban North. The new black aesthetic developed in its rhythms and sounds a strong "oral" flavor.

The movement of African American writers in the early 20th century broke into two parts: those that felt that poetry should be free of race and politics (represented primarily by Countee Cullen) and those that felt that poetry had to be used to better the condition of the African American people (represented primarily by Hughes).

Hughes' first book, The Weary Blues (1926), used the sounds of rhythms of jazz and blues for its forms and the street life of Harlem for its subject, and sought to forge the beginnings of the black aesthetic. Hughes felt that the blues contained the essence of the black response to life in America: a vehicle for transforming misery, anger, sorrow, fear, and despair into hope and faith, leavened with a deep vein of humor, that his people would endure and prevail. Hughes sought not merely to lift up his race, but also to restructure society to properly value black art, through different from white art. Hughes's characters and their experiences are presented as representative of black people's hardships and sufferings rather than as individualized portrayals, which would be left to later black writers.

Classic definitions of Modernism, which is often seen as a white, male movement, don't comfortably fit the experience of black writers -- as they don't comfortably fit most women writers. But the fault is in the definition, not the writers or the literature. Hughes and other black writers were "modern," in that they gave voice to the particular way in which African American people experienced the forces of modern life in American society: alienation, isolation, fragmentation, disillusionment, etc. Modernism for black writers and black people was not an intellectual phenomenon, but a way of life. In order to give this way of life a voice, black writers had to "make it new," by experimenting with new styles, new language, new forms that anticipated postmodern pluralism and multiculturalism and art as a political force.
  • When high modernism was happening, it was primarily white males
    • Women weren't permitted to be full members of the movement
  • Hughes is another special case (with women) because he's black - marginalized - forced into real of virtually insignificance
    • encharged in 1920's as spokesman for African American voice
    • Almost had to invent new language & forms
  • Invented 1st legit African American Voice
    • used sounds & rhythms of jazz & blues contained voice of true African American
      • Voice of misery, sorrow, anger, and despair into hope
  • wanted to restructure society to view black art as worth while
  • Modernism wasn't intellectual movement; but way of life
    • blacks still lynched from 1920's to 1940's

Essay: "Negro Artist & Racial Mountain"
  • be aware of what you're fighting and fighting for.



  • "Dream Boogie"
  • jazzbeat
  • riffing on slave song in which you hear despair, grief - du Bois & Douglass
    • Underneath
    • On surface, it's happy
  • Beat and "beat"
  • Double Consciousness
    • Described an individual whose identity is divided into several facets



Modern: Robert Frost

A traditionalist in form and a Modern in subject matter. He is not strictly a humanist, and not strictly a nature poet. He writes about people for whom the present has been too much of a burden, who have been physically, psychologically, mentally, and spirtually worn out. They seek refuge in the past, in isolation, insanity, solitude, and even death. He writes about the individual's limits in relation to nature. He treats his rural landscapes, not in a nostalgic or sentimental way, but frequently as a place of escape or refuge, isolation, and eccentricity. A shadow of melancholy and sorry often overcasts his poetry. His poetry often deals with the processes of the natural world, but not in a comforting or reassuring way, as in Bryant and Whitman. Rather the natural world is a place of threat, fear, and death. The woods are a moral desert -- wild, untamed, uncivilized, and lawless. This view could be seen as a similar to the views of the early Puritans, except that he offers no assurance of salvation in the so-called civilized places rather (farm, village, city, etc). In fact, he portrays the outer world as a desert that mirrors the desert of the inner self. He offers no large or lasting solutions; his "truths" are only monetary. He saw modern despair and new deal politics as equally dangerous in subverting the will and ability of the individual to act Frost wrote his poems in the common language of informal speech, which runs counter to the formal quality of his verse. His strict forms seem to represent an attempt to control the power of the creative imagination, to impose order on chaos. In his writings, he made many memorable statements about poetry:
  • Art strips life to form
  • Poetry is a way of remembering what you didn't know you knew
  • Poetry is a clarification of life
  • A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom
  • A poem is a momentary stay against confusion
Until Lionel Trilling's famous toast at Frost's 85th birthday party in 1959, the prevailing view of Frost was of kindly old man dispensing homely bits of folk wisdom through his poems: "Good fences make good neighbors," etc. Frost with his white suits and white hair and avancular public persona, deliberately played this role as well. Trilling, however, in calling him "the poet of adrenalin" and "the bard of terror," succeeded in opening critics' eyes to the hard edge of Frost irony and pessimism. A couple of Frost's other statements about poetry seem to reflect this darker view:
  • Poetry is written in a kind of code so the wrong people won't understand and be saved.
  • Poetry is a means of taking life by the throat.
  • Not modernist in form; but great ironist
    • King of Irony/Master
      • Dark twist even if they don't mean to
  • all wisdom is suspect - anyone who says they have it should be eyed with suspicion
  • Regionalist
    • Nature
      • Writes about nature, but not comforting like Whitman
        • about death and threatening things
    • Writes in blank verse
      • didn't like free verse
    • pays attention to reader's impressions of his poetry
      • how sounds make you feel
  • Ironic intentions
    • so wrong people don't understand the meaning
  • Common vernacular
"Birches"
  • About swinging on trees
  • Shows "swinging motion" between ideas he discusses
  • Transcendence ideals - swings upward and doesn't want to come back down
"Road not taken"
  • Paths were actually the same
  • will go back down the other day, but he may actually not
  • contradictory intentions
    • hasn't made all the difference
    • wants to go back, but may never
    • sighs, showing lack of care
  • Road less traveled - really doesn't matter
"Snowy Evening"
  • Death/dying
Mending wall
  • helping neighbor build wall
    • alienation/isolation
Home burial
  • Interpretations
  • Freud

Modern: T.S. Eliot

  • 1888-1965
Though a member of a prominent New England family, T.S. Eliot was born in St. Louis and lived there until 1898 when his family moved back to Boston. Eliot took his A.B. and M.A. at Harvard and completed most of the requirements for his doctorate in philosophy but never completed the degree. In 1914, he left for Europe and England and never returned to America to live. He spent most of his time thereafter in London, where he married (unhappily) and became a leading poet and literary critic in the literary establishments of England and America.
Like Pound in The Cantos, Eliot chose to construct his poetry, especially up through The Waste Land (1922), from bits and pieces gleaned from his reading. These fragments function as images of a sort and reflect the crisis of western culture as Eliot perceived it: alienation from nature and community and loss of a sense of purpose. Unlike Pound (and other writers), however, who thought that poetry could take the place of religion and save culture and the individual, Eliot came to believe, in his later period, after his own conversation to Orthodox Anglicanism, that poetry could be best redirect and perhaps refresh the individual's search for religious renewal. In his earlier period, he saw poetry as a means of giving an ultimate definition to the horror, the ugliness, and the boredom of the endless, purposeless, monotonous circling of modern life. Eliot's poetry, therefore, has two purposes: to dramatize the emptiness of modern life (up through TWL), and to refresh and redirect the individual in a search for purpose and meaning (after TWL) through religious belief that might bring head, heart, intellect, and emotion back into harmony and conjunction.
For Eliot, the world is a place of unreal fantasies and unreliable and transitory sensory stimulation, and the people who populate it have been numbed and drugged into a sort of half-life where they prefer to remain rather than risk being awakened to full consciousness of their desperation. The poetry of his early period can be seen as marking the end of the viability of Whitman's "simple, separate person." Eliot instead portrays the single soul broken under the pressures of modern life and alienated from the traditions and values of the past.
Eliot is not strictly an Imagist poet, but he devised a theory of the "objective correlative," based on a type of imagery he observed in the English metaphysical and French symbolist poets, which consists of an object, some concrete particular in a poem, that calls forth in the reader a particular emotion.

Modern: T.S. Eliot - The Wasteland

  • Gave its name to an era
  • Published in 1922
  • Fitzgerald sets Great Gatsby in summer of 1922
  • When first came out, people didn't understand it. Thought it was a cry of despair, it's not. Proofrock is cry of despair. Ends up with most pessimistic outcome. Not even love can save him. Not that someone won't love him, it's that he can't love himself?
  • At beginning, narrator (whom Eliot identifies as .... not Eliot, not first person... actually narrator is fictional character Tyresius from Greek myth - Blind prophe; Tyresius got turned both female and male - man turned into a woman and then back into a man and then asked who has greater pleasure men or women)
  • Tyresius is essentially giving reader guided tour through everything he remembers. In other words, he realizes that his life is shattered and he's going to look at every single little last fragment of it in an effort to make some sense out of it.
  • And then at the end he says "these fragments I have shored against my ruin." His life is a ruin... I've looked through all these fragments and braced them up. My life may not make lots of sense but at least its mine - I've looked at all of the fragments/pieces and I'm achieving peace.
  • Wasteland isn't despair, it's first step on route back. First step back ins for individual to find a way to impose a little bit of order on his or her corner of the world as they see it.
  • People first thought it was a cry of despair, but it's not
  • bits of pieces of different kinds of literature, lyrics
  • Narrator in Tyresius: the blind prophet from Greece
    • gives reader guide tour through everything he remembers
    • realizes his life is shattered, and tries to examine it to make sense
    • At the end, he says his life is a ruin, tries to brace the shards up and keep them together
    • He says that at least he can know
    • this is the first step on the road back to finding order from shattered world.

Modern: T.S. Eliot - The Love Song of J. Alfred Profrock

  • His inner monologue as he goes from his bachelor apartment to the streets and his intent for making this trip. His special intent=to declare his love for a woman there (special acquaintance) and his reason for doing so is that he doesn't want to grow old alone.
  • In short, he was afraid. of rejection? Sure, but more indifference. Indifference=opposite of love/commitment
Alienation = Being separated from (result in isolation)
  • The forces of the modern world, the individual psyche is not strong enough to stand up to them
  • Result in (like Proofrock) too much (unhealthy) focus on self.
Proofrock = monumental inferiority complex
  • All dressed up, proud of his appearance, and yet worried about what people will say about him. An ego that is so large that he can never get out of bounds of it, and yet cares what other people think. Not free with his freedom.
  • Trip from his bachelor pad to a party with the intention to profess his love to a woman because he doesn't want to grow old alone
    • Can't do it, paralysis, afraid of her indifference
  • Retreats into a kind of fantasy world after
  • Isolation, loneliness

Modern: Tennessee Williams - A Street Car Named Desire

  • Born in Columbus Mississippi in 1911
  • Born as Thomas Lanier Williams III
    • Tennessee was a nickname from college
      • honor of his southern accent and his father's home state
  • 1918 the family moved to St. Louis
  • The family moved 16 times in 10 years.
  • Williams was shy/fragile, ostracized and taunted in school (bullied)
  • At 16 Years of age, won a prize in national writing competition
    • "Can a good wife be a good sport?"
    • Published in Smart Set magazine
  • Attended the University of Missouri to study journalism
  • Worked at a Shoe Factory for 3 years
    • minor breakdown
    • This was the cause to return him to college.
  • Attended Washington University in St. Louis
    • Eventually dropped out but enrolled at the University of Iowa
      • Graduated in 1938
  • St. Louis theater group produced two of his plays The Fugitive Kind and Candles to the Sun.
    • Plays influenced by members of southern literary renaissance
      • Robert Penn Warren, William Faulkner, Allen Tate, and Thomas Wolfe
  • Received a Rockerfeller grant and studying playwriting at the New School in New York
  • Officially changed his name to Tennessee Williams in 1939 after publication of "The Field of Blue Children
  • Scriptwriter in Hollywood
  • A Streetcar Named Desire premiered ~1952 at the Barrymore Theater in NYC
    • Set in Contemporary times
    • Describes the decline and fall of a fading Southern Belle named Blanche DuBois.
    • The characters are trying to rebuild their lives in postwar America
      • Stanley & Mitch served in the war
      • Blanche had affairs with young solders
    • Cemented Williams's reputation 
      • garnered him a Drama Critics' Circle Award
      • Pulitzer Prize
    • Received another Drama Critic's award and Pulitzer for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955
  • Pathos found in his drama stemmed from his own life
    • Alcoholism, depression, thwarted desire, loneliness, insanity
    • Female characters
      • modeled after Edwina and Rose
    • Male characters
      • modeled after his own father
  • Setting of the plays were in the South
    • Themes rendered Universal so he was able to appeal to international audiences
  • Early plays connected with new American taste for realism following the Depression and WWII.
  • Died in 1983
    • Choked on a medicine-bottle cap
    • Alcohol involved
    • Elysée Hotel in NYC
  • 25 full length plays (5 made into movies)
  • 5 screen plays
  • 71+ one-act plays
  • hundreds of short stories
  • two novels
  • Poetry
  • a Memoir
_____________________________________________________
  • Epigraph
    • Taken from a Hart Crane poem entitled "The Broken Tower."
  • Blanche Dubois arrives at the New Orleans apartment of her sister Stella Kowalski
    • school teacher from Laurel, MS
      • Given leave notice due to bad nerves
    • Heavy drinker
  • Plans to stay with sister for unspecified amount of time.
  • Tells Stella she lost Belle Reve
    • Their ancestral home
    • Lost due to Foreclosure
  • Hates the cramped quarters of the Kowalski's two-room apartment
    • noisy, diverse, working-class neighborhood.
  • Stella's husband - Stanley
    • auto-parts supply man
    • Polish Decent
    • Distrusts Blance
  • Stella
    • left behind social pretensions of her background in exchange for sexual gratification she gets from her husband.
    • Pregnant with Stanley's baby
  • Blanche tries to convince Stella to leave Stanley for a better man who is her social equal.
  • Suggests assistance from Millionaire Shep Huntleigh 
  • Stella laughs; Blanche admits she's completely broke.
  • Stanley walks in as Blanche is making fun of him. 
  • He hears the secret conversation of Blanche and Stella.
    • Threatens Blanche with hints that he has heard rumors of her disreputable past.
  • Unhappiness that accompanies the animal magnetism of Stella & Stanley's marriage reveals itself with a drunk poker game.
  • Blanche gets under Stanley's skin
  • Wins the affections of his close friend Mitch
  • Stanley throws the radio out of the room
  • Stanley beats Stella for defending Blanche
  • Blanche and Stella escape to Eunice's apartment.
  • Stella returns to Stanley and embraces him passionately
  • Mitch meets Blanche to comfort her.
  • Paperboy shows up one night for money.
    • Blanche doesn't have money so hits on him and gives him a lustful kiss.
  • Blanche is uneasy for the rumors Stanley mentioned.
  • Blanche reveals greatest tragedy of her past to Mitch.
    • Years ago her young husband committed suicide after she discovered and chastised him for his homosexuality
    • Mitch describes his own loss of a former love
      • Tells Blanche they need each other.
  • A month has passed
  • Afternoon of Blanche's Birthday
  • Stella is preparing dinner for Blanche, Mitch, and Stanley
  • Stanley tells Stella the news of Blanche's sordid past
  • Blanche moved into a fleabag motel after losing DuBois mansion
    • evicted because of numerous sexual liaisons
    • Affairs with teenage student
      • fired from job
  • Stella is horrified to learn Stanley has told Mitch these stories.
  • Birthday dinner comes and goes; Mitch never arrives
  • Stanley indicates to Blanche he is aware of her past
  • Gives her a one-way ticket back to Laurel
  • Stella is upset with cruelty and appears that they might break up
    • Onset Labor disrupts that.
  • Stanley returns from hospital to find Blanche drunk.
  • She tells him she will be leaving New Orleans with her former suitor Shep Huntleigh
  • Stanley knows this is untrue but is happy about his baby so proposes to celebrate their good fortune
  • A fight almost breaks out
  • When Blanche tries to step past Stanley, he refuses to move.
  • Blanche becomes terrified that she smashes a bottle on the table
    • threatens to smash Stanley in the face
  • Stanley says it's time for the date they've had set up since she came into town
  • Blanche resists, Stanley uses physical strength to overcome her
  • Pulsing music indicates that Stanley rapes Blanche.
  • Blanche sits in an empty apartment drunk
  • Mitch shoes up and repeats all he has learned from Stanley.
  • Blanche confesses the stories are true; reveals need for human affection after husband's death
  • Mitch can never marry her
  • Mitch tries to have sex with Blanche but she forces him to leave by yelling "Fire
  • Weeks Pass
  • Stella and Eunice pack Blanche's bags
  • Blanche is in the bath, Stanley playing poker with his buddies
  • A doctor will soon arrive to take Blanche to an insane asylum
  • Blanche believes she is leaving to join her millionaire
  • Stella can't believe Blanche's assertion that Stanley raped her.
  • Doctor and nurse arrive
    • Blanche initially panics and struggles against them
  • Eunice holds Stella back from interfering
  • Mitch begins to cry
  • Dr. convinces Blanche to leave with him.
  • She does not look back or say good bye
  • Stella sobs with her child in her arms
  • Stanley comforts her with loving words and caresses

Modernism: 1914-1950

Modernism is a huge concept that refers to wide-ranging trends in literature, music, the visual arts, and culture as a whole. Although it is associated in particular with the United States and Europe, the movement had a worldwide impact. It is such a large concept that some people prefer the plural term modernisms to indicate that there is not just one definition. Here are some key features:
  • Lasted from around 1910-1940, though Modernist influence continued long past that period.
  • Experimentation with form and subject matter; a period of transition from traditional forms to looser, less-structured forms. Old forms were seen as an inadequate means for expressing 20th C experience
  • Sense of fragmentation and disruption of culture; sense of alienation and a feeling of pessimism about the world. Fear that human culture is meaningless or unable to exert a positive influence on the world, leading to a sense of impotence that could be spiritual, sexual, and psychological. Some literature is intentionally fragmentary and disunified to reflect these feelings
    • Along with the sense of fragmentation comes the use of multiple perspectives in literature and art, often representing a sense that it is no longer possible to accept that there is one universal "truth" upon which everyone agrees.
  • Influenced by WWI. After witnessing trench warfare and worldwide devastation, it was hard to accept old ideas that gave life meaning: that war is glorious and honorable, that religion and the arts give life meaning, that human culture will gradually improve over time.
  • Forces
    • Science (Darwin, Einstein) and technology
    • Psychology (Freud)
    • History (Marxism)
    • Urbanization, industrialization, economics, labor, unrest
    • The literary movements of Realism and Naturalism
    • New aesthetics redefining the understanding and representation of the physical world, time and space.
  • Sense of shrinking individual's significance, which imparts a sense of powerless & diminishing sense of the value of the individual life
  • The modern poem must tell the truth
    • The truth is not nice, decent, ordered, or reassuring; instead it is subject to and suffers from all the maladies of the modern world:
      • Fragmentation (partial knowledge, inadequacy of language)
      • Isolation
      • Alienation
      • Focus on the self (intense subjectivity/self-absorption, coupled with impersonality)
      • Disillusionment, a sense of pointlessness, nothingness, death-in-life
      • moral relativism and paralysis
      • Loss of faith in old systems of order and authority (religion, government, language)
  • The key aspects of the modern poem: stylistic individuality, formal experimentation, subjective voice, image, symbol, ellipses, opacity, irony, fragmentation, impersonality, and an avoidance of generalizations, morals, messages
  • Science had an impact on intellectual issues
    • In the late 1800's, Darwin suggested that people are basically animals, not special creatures made in the image of God. Darwin argued that natural selection involves random changes in a species, so evolution does not lead people forward according to a preordained plan.
    • In physics, Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity concluded that time is relative, while quantum physics (including Werner Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle") suggested that the fundamental nature of reality is less orderly and less predictable than people once assumed
    • Sigmund Freud theorized that people are driven by unconscious psychological motives, a death wish, and an animalistic impulses associated with the "id." If our motives are unconscious, can we understand even our own individual reality? Freud also called humans "the neurotic animal."
  • Influenced by philosophy:
    • In the late 1800's, Nietzsche famously declared that "God is dead" and argued that people would come to reject any sense of universal objective truth
    • Also in the late 1800's, the economic and social philosopher Karl Marx argued that the inequality caused by industrialization and capitalism would lead to a social upheaval and revolution
These other people were
  • In human psyche there is a vast dark area that the conscious mind does not have access to. Two levels: unconscious (area of forgetting and repression) and the id (area of the human psyche that has no direct ___________ to the human mind)
    • There are no absolutes. And if there are no absolutes
  • Shift from third person omniscient perspective where there is a comforting authorial voice that knows everything about world writer is writing about to fictional perspective governed by multiple objectives
  • Have to rely on human being's perspectives
    • Id = amoral; compels behavior that we have no control over
    • Ego = has to maintain uneasy negotiation between forces of conscious and unconscious
Multiple Versions of Modernism
  • TS Eliot and William Carlos Williams were both modernists, but had strong disagreements about the direction poetry should take
  • Additionally, many writers did not participate in Modernist experimentation
    • Edna St. Vincent Millay and Robert Frost, for example, continue to use traditional poetic forms and techniques (sonnets, meter, rhyme, etc) while Robinson Jeffers was influenced more by Whitman than by the Modernists of his own time period.
    • Another example, Langston Hughes created "modern" verse forms, but he was influenced less by Modernism and more by Jazz, blues, and black vernacular language
  • Major American Modernists: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Marianne Moore, H.D., Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and others
  • Major European Modernists: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, Marcel Proust, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, and others
Imagism was a short-lived but important movement in poetry. Led by Ezra Pound, several poets published Imagist work between 1914 and 1917. According to Pound, Imagism involves concise, direct phrasing and the "direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective": in other words, an impression of an object, situation, or feeling without any unnecessary words and no commentary by the narrator. Imagism in Poetry:
  • sort of at the heart of modernism poetry
  • the revolt against conventional art at the end of the 19th century was across the board. Everybody was experimenting with new forms. In poetry, that revolt took initial form of imagism
  • represented a revolt of the conventions of mainstream victorian poetry
  • intention was to loosen meter
  • language of poetry should represent as close as possible the language of ordinary speech
  • an attempt to return poetry to that point in order to allow thought and emotion to dictate the cadences
  • stresses the primacy of the concrete particular as opposed to moralizing, generalizations, abstractions, mere rhetoric
  • a poetic image is an instance of sensory perception expressed in representational language that resists definitive analysis or interpretation
  • an image in a poem is a representation in language of something in a physical world but that representation in language resists interpretation
    • it is to be first and foremost itself
  • imagist poem is highly condensed poem which focuses on concrete particulars and has a meaning but meaning is felt rather than expressed in....
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Highly black dialect
  • Zora Neale Hurston:
    • Frame story
    • comes into town & tells her friend where they've been
  • Woman empowering
    • Realism to modernism
    • dialect/realistic/not much experimentation
      • like Mark Twain
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T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land
  • 1922 (Great Gatsby)
    • Tyresius (both female/male)
      • man-->woman-->man - who has greater pleasure -->woman
  • Fragmentation
    • Not equipped to stand up to Modern world like the human psyche
  • Physical level in the poem
  • Myth/popular songs/Eliots only ideas
  • 1st copies Chaucer's ideals
  • April is the cruelest month
  • Profrock - passive agent (crying for help
  • 1st step on the road back
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J Alfred Prufrock
-->party to confess his love because doesn't want to grow old alone
paralyzed - scared of her indifference
-->Rather be a pair of scuttly claws across the ocean
isolation & loneliness
Modern world
Alienation
Unhealthy focus on self
Unable to stand up to modern world
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High modernism was white movement
  • Langston Hughes (Harlem Renaissance)
    • Dialect
    • Jazz in word form
  • Marginalized, Alienated, isolated, then & historically
  • Chief black voice of the time
  • Authentic African American voice
  • Involve black art
    • Intellect way of life
________________________________________________________
  • Imagination is the heart of modernist poetry
  • Revolt against mainstream Victorian poetry/meter
    • Wordsworth
    • Coleridge
  • Every day man voice
    • Emily Dickinson
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African American Culture and the Harlem Renaissance
  • Early 1900's: The Washington - Du Bois debate
    • Booker T. Washington
      • A leading African-American public figure; published his autobiography Up from Slavery in 1901
      • Founded several schools, including Tuskegee Institute (Alabama)
      • Advocated education for blacks, including vocational training (manual labor, factory work, farming)
      • Said to be the first black man invited to the White House as a guest (by Theodore Roosevelt)
      • Favored non-confrontational, assimilationist approach: African-Americans should improve themselves and work within the system in order to make a place for themselves within white society
    • W.E.B. du Bois
      • Editor, author, sociologist, historian; a leading African-American public figure
      • Major founder of the civil rights group NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People)
      • Published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903
      • Favored more direct confrontation of white domination; disagreed with Booker T. Washington
      • Favored liberal arts education; more intellectual and less focus on vocational training
      • Was an editor during 1920's, published Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer
      • Used the term "double consciousness" to describe the African-American experience "twoness": a feeling of conflicted identity as both a black person and as an American.
  • The Harlem Renaissance
    • Resulted partly from the Great Migration in which southern African-American moved north to urban centers from around 1915-1930: New York City, Detroit, Chicago, Boston, Kansas City, St. Louis, etc.
    • Harlem Renaissance was a "flowering" of African-American culture during the 1920's, centered in New York
    • Included musicians (jazz and blues), painters, poets, playwrights, fiction writers, political activists.
    • Some funding came from progressive white patrons, who could influence the content of black writers' work
      • Fad for "primitivism" (raw, natural, untrained art and emotions): writing in dialect, etc
      • Some black writers felt compelled to follow white literary traditions
      • Some music venues, such as The Cotton Club, featured black performers playing to white-only audiences
    • There were also many attempts to develop a black voice in literature (e.g. Langston Hughes's use of jazz and blues rhythms) and to create a distinctively black culture
    • Major authors= Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer
    • Faded after the stock market crash of 1929, which led to an economic crisis and the Great Depression of the 1930's
    • Paved way for African-American literature of the 1930s-40's, the Black Arts Movement of the 1960's-70's; has continued to influence present-day authors such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker
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    • Modernism was predominantly a white, male movement
    • Women weren't allowed to be full participants in modernism when it was happening though there were a lot of women writers <-- special case
    • Langston Hughes and other African American writers = other special case because not white
    • Women were also alienated and isolated, as were African Americans