EN 210 Exam 1

The Life of Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass and Civil War -How many volumes of Leaves of Grass? -Describe the first, second, third editions. -What did Leaves of Grass use and not use? -What did he do during The Civil War? -How did his opinions change during The Civil War? -Where did he work post Civil War? When Lilacs Last In the Dooryard Bloom'd

-First volume of poems in 1854 in Brooklyn. Copyrighted LOG, 12 untitled poems, sprig of grass in gilt of cover. -PREFACE to being the American bard. -In his daguerrotype, rejected the convention of suit, button-up, high collar. Instead, had one arm akimbo, workingman's hat, shirt unbuttoned at collar, looking at the reader. -Poems of absent verse or stanza patterns. -Use of catalogs - journalistic or encyclopedic listings - hallmark of his style. -Immediate response from Emerson through a private letter, who he appropriate his review letter in the New York Tribune. Wrote some reviews of his own. -Edition 2 had 33 poems like Crossing Brooklyn Ferry (Sundown Poem). -Back to misc journalism. Free soil hopes for natural expansion that does not entail slavery. -Edition 3 began to group his poems according to theme like "Children of Adam" (amative love a man his for a woman versus the adhesive love for men in "Calamus") -6 total editions of LOG. THE CIVIL WAR... -Visited the wounded (in New York Hospital) and offered help as a nurse. Visited his wounded brother which led to his career in open-air military hospitals at D.C. -Voiced his anguish from his heroic celebration of the war to despair at the carnage. (Drum taps portion of LOG) -Assassination of Lincoln - added O Captain My Captain and When Lilacs Last In the Dooryard Bloom'd -Became a clerk at the Department of Interior, fired for his obscene book. Depicted bodily functions and heterosexual love. -Democratic Vistas, book conveying his condemnatory appraisal of postwar democratic culture. -Had stroke at 73. Moved with brother. Government did not hold his job as clerk at the attorney general's office after 2 years. Relied on occasional publication in papers and magazines. -By the 1870s and 80s, noticed by leading current writers in England and the younger generation of American writers. American writers organized speeches for him like on Paine and Lincoln. Opposition of his poetry dissipated. -6th edition nearly led to prosecution by Boston district attorney for obscenity -Second stroke, prepared for death two years later in 1890 through granite mausoleum called his 'burial house' fit for a national bard. His deathbed edition of LOG had 300+ poems.

Dickinson Poetic Analysis -Poem 320 -Poem 372 -Poem 591 -Poem 1263

-Poem 1263: Circuit: starts and finishes in one place, a circular line -Tell the truth in a successful way through a roundabout way. The truth all together is too much for our fragile, frail selves to be told directly. "Tell all the truth, success in circuit LIES" Wink wink. -Lightning - give explanation/euphemism to sway children's minds -Final line - allusion to Paul (wisdom through making him blind) -'Dazzle (immediate striking, makes us notice instantly) gradually' - oxymoron. Take words that don't belong together. Dickinson was a word alchemist. -Capitalize substantive words (nouns) [Truth] "When a truth is conveyed indirectly sometimes it resonates more clearly." -Poem 320: Gothic -Nature wears the color of the spirit. We often project our feelings onto the weather (when it rains we call it gloomy, not really because it is gloomy, but because that is us humans projecting and metamorphosing how the weather makes US feel) -Trying to express the inexpressible 'There's a certain slant of light' unsure how to describe it -Slant of light through clouds - people associate that with God - heft of Cathedral tunes (describe the sun with a sound) - describe the sound as 'heft' that's the sense of touch. SYNESTHESIA, overlapping separate senses. -Heavenly Hurt - a good hurt or is Heavenly not good in this sense? -Naming despair, but the kind that is powerful, possibly sent from air as if from Heaven. -Where is the source of depression when it comes seemingly out of nowhere? Grief without a pang (Get to the bottom of their sadness; where does it come from?) -When it comes, nature wears the color of our spirit (our view of the world around us changes). -When this despair comes out of nowhere and then it goes on the distance on the look of death (nobody knows when death will come back). -NATURE OF DEPRESSION and where it comes from. -Poem 372: -'Formal,' 'ceremonious,' 'stiff,' 'tombs' Dickinson describing a funeral -Was it He that bore? When a great pain happens, is this what Jesus went through? -Death of a loved one? Could be other great pains. 'And yesterday or centuries before?' Ambiguous -You become mechanical - go through the motions especially if you have to take care of a business following the departure of a loved one. -Nonetheless you grow regardless (lack of regard, how do you grow through a lack of something?) -Quartz countenance - headstone, an acceptance (contentment) -The hour of lead (heavy) Either you die early or you die late and never be the same -Someone's death by freezing - letting go - a type of death when you finally let the grieving stop, the memory of someone in a way dies a second time. -Trying to express the inexpressible, poetry trying to make something familiar (pain) and make it seem strange. A new way of looking at it. -Poem 591: -Narrative like a story, beginning, middle, end -What the final perception of death is gonna be. May seem familiar to us but we really don't know. -Synesthesia (buzz of the fly is blue) -Describe people as their body parts (372 used nerved), this poem uses eyes wrung dry and breaths firm for that last onset (the beginning of a new beginning for the soul) -Typical 19th century death scene, people come around and hope to see some sign of afterlife in room -Gothic: someone speaking from beyond the grave. Express the inexpressible, we will all have a final perception on this Earth and we hope it will be a loved one's face, but the last thing she sees is this fly (which she never describes as ugly or welcoming). Also what people see as a sign of God ends up being a fly. Could be that God is representative in nature, something created from nature as is everyone around her, her family. -"See to see" double meaning of the physical and mental seeing.

*Nowhere was the anxiety about the state of American lit and its relationship to the populace more prominent than in the debates of the last two decades of the 19th century. Forms of Realism -What is realism? -How would realism benefit America? -What were the criticisms of Howells? -Describe regional writing and mass magazines. What did they influence? -What grew along with dialect lit, folktales, color sketches? Who did that benefit?

-Realism refers to literary fiction that was rooted in the observation and documentation of the details of everyday life. Began in Britain and continental Europe (Eliot, Turgenev, Ibsen). -William Dean Howells claimed realism had a place in democratic America by representing a diversity of social classes through the documentation of the speech and manners of a variety of people to be a foster for a shared democratic culture [Empathetic bonds to hold the nation together]. To stand equal on the world stage to contribute to world letters. "Men are more alike than unlike one another: let us make them know one another better, that they may be all humbled and strengthened with a sense of their fraternity." -> Howells championed his contemporaries, maintaining close ties with both writers (Twain, James). Promoted younger writers (Crane, Cahan, Dunbar, Chesnutt). -Critics to Howells said that realism abandoned the moral purpose of art for the vulgar or commonplace. Or relies too much on dull observation over dramatic storytelling. -Interest in forms of literary realism especially welcoming of regional writing throughout the US. Regional writing flourished due to mass magazines - catered to urban audience with intention in learning of distant people and cultures. Launched Western American writers (Twain: The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, Harte: Luck of Roaring Camp). -"Local colorists" capture the natural, social, linguistic features of a region. -Showcase regions through a locale perspective under stress of change. -Regionalism and literary realism influenced the portrayal of racial and ethnic 'others' through the use of distinct vernacular among Black characters and hyping up the whites' interest in African American folk beliefs. -A dialect is the variation of a language particular to a group or region, change in spelling and punctuation in written dialogue as well as vocabulary. -"Non-standard English" extended to the representation of all those thought to be outside the mainstream society of middle- to upper-class Anglo-America dialects for African Americans, immigrants, urban poor. (Difficulty of reader understanding the writing of the period) represented the social distance among characters as well as the distance between the characters and the readers. -Literary interest in the folk! (Bayou Folk [Chopin's tales of rural LA], The Souls of Black Folk [DuBois's collection of essays about race and racism in the US]) The interest in realism allowed for a more socially engaged literature, boundaries of fiction and non-fiction blurred. -Publication of dialect literature, folktales, local color sketches coincided with the professionalization of social science. -The rise in anthropology among Native Americans led to the documentation of languages, cultures, religions they were assimilated against [sponsored both by federal government and universities]. Transcribed songs, stories. Natives were published this way. Reminded Americans Indians would continue to persist outside of museums.

-What is the poetic style of Whitman? -What do his poems lack? -What are catalogs and what do they do? -Describe anaphora and epistrophe. -Whitman also uses colloquial language or slang ('reckon) to identify himself with the common people. Levi's Go Forth "America" commercial, use wax recording (a precursor to records) of Whitman's voice near the end of his life circa 1890s. Many businesses use Whitman's idea of diversity to sell their products. -Volvo commercial - cars often use literary figures in their works to sell products like Robert Frost poems in Jeep. They are highly persuasive. -"Song of Myself" and "Leaves of Grass" generally is one of the first expanded experiments of the free-verse form.

FREE VERSE! -Lack of metrical regularity; lack of conventional rhyme -Use of initial repetition, anaphora (40% of L.o.G.) -Use of terminal repetition, epistrophe (section 3) ANAPHORA: Start of successive lines like "Have you / Have you / Have you" or "You shall / You shall" to charm us into paying attention with its song-like effects. Speech writers like MLK often incorporate anaphora in their speeches. -Use of catalogs (sections 8, 15, 33) [listing things]: -> Provides a rhythmic pattern normally lacking in free verse -> Displays the variety and the vastness of the world and conveys a sense of reality -> Records Whitman's own experiences, his reactions to the multiplicity of life; helps him posit the individual as a manifestation of the collective soul -> Demonstrates the unity Whitman finds in the diversity of the universe (Emerson's "Unity in Variety") -"Song of Myself" and "Leaves of Grass" generally is one of the first expanded experiments of the free-verse form.

Strains of American Realism: -> William Dean Howells: What did he concentrate on? What did he want to report? -> Henry James and Edith Wharton: What did they concentrate on? -> Describe James's 'power to guess the seen from the unseen' -> Does James agree with Howells? How does he differ?

•William Dean Howells (The Rise of Silas Lapham, 1885) advanced a type of realism that concentrated on affectionate portrayals of ordinary, middle-class characters to make the novel more democratic and inclusive. Wanted to report "just the facts," much like a newspaper journalist would, in his fiction. •Henry James (Daisy Miller, 1878) and Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth, 1905) focused on refined, interior mental states, rather than exterior surfaces and surroundings. Their "psychological realism" was all about depicting the emotional and moral dilemmas of upper-class characters. -What kind of experience is intentional? Experience is a passive, receptive act. Paying attention to things in observation. -Experience from a writer's point of view than a person's perspective more or less. -Example of the English novelist - commanded an impression of native Protestant youth. Once in Paris passed open door to catch a glimpse of children around the table of a pastor. Power to trace the implication of things, power to guess the unseen from the seen. Guess the backstory on what someone else is saying based on the heard phone call of someone else (we all make impressions). This can be turned to experience. Literary realism is the dominant style of the period, but "realism" meant different things to different writers. Consider Howells's desire to report "just the facts," much like a newspaper journalist would, in his fiction. Contrast Howells's desire to accurately depict surface detail with the opposite tendency in James and Wharton to probe the interior mental states of their characters: for James and Wharton, realism is all about accurately depicting the emotional and moral dilemmas of upper-class characters. •"Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spiderweb of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every airborne particle in its tissue." (961) •"The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it." (962) •"Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!" (962) •"The only classification of the novel that I can understand is into that which has life and that which has not." (963) In the cluster on realism and naturalism, the excerpt from James's "The Art of Fiction" gives us a sense that James sided with William Dean Howells, in a general way, with regard to keeping faith with truth and representing life as we (or some of us, anyway) actually experience it. In that famous essay, he writes, "The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life." But unlike Howells, who asserts a reality that is referential and shared, James places greater emphasis on the inner reality, on "life" as mediated through the mind. He insists on "the power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern" and also contends that "Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spiderweb of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue." The phrase "chamber of consciousness" is particularly evocative: What does it suggest? In this same statement, James describes experience as a passive, receptive act—paying attention to things—rather than as an active one. Does that differ from what we think of as "experience"?

Walt Whitman's introduction to "Leaves of Grass" What does it call for? -What did he include in his portrait (daguerreotype)? Why does he do it? -How does he choose to identify himself?

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body . . ." -If you follow "these steps," it would indicate you have a satisfied life and manifest it in your looks. -Common to include a daguerreotype on the inside of the book jacket. He wants to seem ordinary, common in name and image. Could have used his full name 'Walter Whitman.' Instead, he goes by Walt. He cocks his hat, he's looking AT you. He defies convention to align with the common man. Used the daguerreotype to defy convention and align himself with the working people to be an inclusive poet and the democratic poet for all. -Whitman is ecstatically optimistic.

New American Empire -What needed to be 'shaped' properly? -What did the Spanish American war accomplish? What did it cause?

-'New Women' women who were increasingly assertive made it more imperative to shape American manhood properly. -White men preparing for Darwinist struggle by becoming mentally and physically fit. Seen in movements like muscular Christianity. -Americans looked abroad as 'idleness and luxury made men flabby.' Wars like the Spanish-American War, the 'splendid little war' in Cuba, and FDR's rough riders. -The Spanish-American War due to the independence of Cuba, though Cuba remained a protectorate for many years, led to a) Access to new markets, eased the fear of overproduction. b) Established the US as rival to European imperial powers c) New proving ground for American men d) New territories in Puerto Rico, Philippines, Hawaii -Filipino independence movement - revolt against US military forces. The American Anti-Imperialist League, supported by Twain and Howells. -End of 1910s... death of Twain and much of those who lived during the Civil War. Now onto Modernism.

American Realism: A LITERARY response to a Transforming Nation -> What did realism attempt to accurately represent? What did they use to help them achieve that? -> What was it a literary reaction to? Describe its predecessor. -> What new character types emerged after the Civil War?

-> To face the challenge of representing these dynamic cultural changes, American authors turned to the international aesthetic of Realism, whose European practitioners included Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, and Gustave Flaubert. -> American Realism was an attempt to accurately represent life as authors saw it using ordinary details that readers would recognize from their own lives.* -> Reaction to Romanticism, which typically depicts fantastical situations (not magic but beautified more glamorous than real life, romanticized), tends to beautify or make things more appealing, and emphasizes morality (good guy always wins, happy ending) -> New character types emerged in post-Civil War literature: industrial workers, the rural poor, ambitious business leaders, vagrants, prostitutes and "fallen women", unheroic soldiers "New themes, new forms, new subjects, new regions, new authors, and new audiences all emerged in the half century following the Civil War. In fiction, characters rarely represented before the Civil War became familiar figures: industrial workers and the rural poor, ambitious business leaders and vagrants, prostitutes and unheroic soldiers. Women from many social groups, African Americans, Native Americans, ethnic minorities, immigrants: all wrote for publication, and a rapidly burgeoning market for printed works helped establish authorship as a possible career for many"

Unseen Forces -What new theory emerged following literary realism? -Who was Charles Darwin? Herbert Spencer? -What did Darwinism justify?

-Americans soon saw that society was changing by forces not of their control like corporations obeying their own laws, communication networks of telegraphs and telephones, energy and electricity brought to cities. X-rays to penetrate secrets of the body. -With this came an emerging theory of evolution through Charles Darwin ("The Origin of Species" "Descent of Man"). Changed how Americans understood the physical and social world. -Darwin believed humans developed over the ages from nonhuman forces of life, adapting successfully to environmental conditions. -Darwin did not initially indulge in the idea of competition among people. English philosopher Herbert Spencer used the theory of natural selection as a lens for understanding the competition among people (coined term 'survival of the fittest'). Darwin would include this in his later editions of "The Origin of Species." -Ideas about evolution, natural selection, competition would shape American thought over the next half century. His theory on natural selection became justified by leading American businessmen like Carnegie (justified capitalism) for the sudden economic boom and new economic order of the country. Capitalists believed unrestrained competition was the equivalent of a law of nature designed to eliminate those unfit for the new economic order. -Darwinism justified other forms of violence too. -Racial character of America (fear of Asian blood dominating - led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, prevented Chinese immigration to America). -Evolution 'destined' natives to the margins of history according to white Americans. Led to the Americanization of Friends of the Indians. -Southern suppression of Black Americans through terrorizing and lynching, white supremacy (protect the purity of white women and keep the future of the white race). -Too easy to understand any form of group violence as nothing more than the expression of natural law.

Stephen Crane: -> Describe his life generally. What did he pay attention to? Which two groups of literary fiction did he a) draw from and b) later inspire in his work? -> Describe his family history. What did he develop an interest in but did not pursue? -> What was his first novel? Was it a success? -> What was his second novel? Was it a success? -> Describe his volume of poetry. -> How did his life take a major turn in New York in 1896? -> After leaving New York, where did he go and what did he do? -> What prompted Crane to write 'The Open Boat?' -> Who did Crane seek approval of? -> Describe Crane's final years of life. -> Describe 'The Monster.'

-Brief, hectic career of literary celebrity seems in retrospect incomparable in its intensity and contradiction. Lived the life of a penniless artist, yet he sought the approval of the literary establishment. -His attention to the rhythms of speech and quotidian detail earned him the praise of literary realists, while his skepticism of moral judgment would make him a favorite among a later generation of modernists. -Youngest of 14, family rooted in traditions of reform Christianity. Mom's side generations of Methodist ministers, father also a Methodist minister. Eventually rejected the religious faith of his family and its moral judgments. -Developed an interest in the military, shaped by stories of ancestors who served in the Revolutionary War and War of 1812. Attended a Methodist boarding school and considered applying to West Point (U.S. military academy), but later decided against military. Went to Lafayette College and Syracuse University - his fascination of warfare fueled his imagination. Left college to move to New York at 19, divided life between seedy apartments of his art friends and living with his brother, Edmund, in Lake View, NJ. -Accepted a variety of journalist assignments even as he worked on his sketches of urban life. In 1893, first book, "Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (A Story of New York)," at his own expense even hiring four men to advertise the book by reading it on the elevated train. Praise from Garland and Howells. Revealing portrait of urban poor and its deployment of carefully crafted dialect. Maggie, a tenement girl who seems driven by powerful forces into prostitution, was not a commercial success even when it was later published by a more prestigious publishing house after Crane became better known. -Next novel, "The Red Badge of Courage," made him a literary celebrity. Prompted by the vogue in the 1880s-90s for magazine articles about Civil War battles and generals, articles that emphasized the movements of troops and strategies of war but that frequently said little about the experiences of enlisted men. Staging a psychological drama of complexity and ambiguity. Protagonist, Henry Fleming, as much an anti-hero as a hero, experiences neither the glory nor the valor of war but rather profound alienation. First syndicated in newspapers to immediate acclaim, and the same syndication company hired him as a roving reporter in the American West and Mexico. -Published a volume of poetry, 'The Black Riders and Other Lines,' Garland and Howells responded favorably to Crane's spare original unflinchingly honest poetry. 'Carried the sting and compression of Dickinson's verse,' which had finally in that decade become widely available for the first time. Although Crane's experimental, philosophical verse failed to win a large audience, in the decades after his death reviewers would regard it as a forerunner of the Imagist movement. -Life took major turn in 1896, New York Journal hired him to report on that city's notorious Tenderloin district, night life of drugs, prostitution, and corruption. Challenged the wrongful arrest of a prostitute after a hashish parlor and then appeared in court to defend her. The story made headlines, and the scandal chased Crane from NY. -Left the city to report on the insurrection of Cuba, where rebels were fighting for independence from Spain. Met Cora Howorth Taylor, who he lived with for the last 3 years of his life. Successfully arranged transport to Cuba, only to face disaster. Crane's ship, The Commodore, sank off the coast of Florida. He reported this harrowing adventure a few days later in the New York Press, led to his composition of one of the best known and widely reprinted of all his American stories, "The Open Boat." -"The Open Boat" reveals Crane's characteristic subject matter - physical, emotional, intellectual responses of people under extreme pressure, nature's indifference to the fate of humanity, and the difficulty of arriving at moral judgment. Located Crane within literary naturalism with Norris, London, Dreiser. Achieved his mature style, one characterized by irony and brevity, qualities later associated with literary modernism. Career in many ways demonstrates the limits of categories such as realism, naturalism, and modernism. Also offers a way of understanding the continuities among these literary movements. -Crane deliberately sought the approbation of figures like Garland and Howells, whom he treated sympathetically in his journalism and who in turn esteemed his work highly. -Final years of life a flurry of frenetic activity and financial freefall. Became a war correspondent, covering first Greco-Turkish War and the US invasion of Cuba. Settled in England. Health rapidly declined while he engaged in furious attempts to earn money through his writing (drafted 13 stories in the fictional town of Whilomville, second volume of poetry 'War is Kind,' novel 'Active Service,' and American edition of 'The Monster and Other Stories.') -'The Monster' is a daring exploration of the hypocrisy and cruelty of racial prejudice. Wrote nine articles on great battles and completed the first 25 chapters of the novel The O'Ruddy before dying after a near death experience from a lung hemorrhage six months later.

Reconstructing America -Which sources did Americans use to rebuild? -What was the cost for Americans' prosperity? -Urbanization led to? -Describe immigration at that time. -Which two groups of people did not wish for reform in what it meant to be an American? -Describe the Homestead Act of 1862, Dawes Severalty Act

-Civil War involved 620k soldier deaths, 2% of population. 50k civilian deaths. -Re-imagination of what it meant to be an American. -To rebuild, the Americans looked at multiple sources a) Immigrant populations for labor to grow economy b) West - abundant land resources c) South - entrepreneurial investors take the chance over what was lost d) Looking to foreign lands by the end of the 20th century, U.S. looking to become an imperial power e) Leisure activities, market exchanges for everyday citizens -All sources working for purpose of material prosperity. -Prosperity at a cost -> Though income of laborers (blue- and white-collar workers) increased, the gains and fortunes were far larger for the industrial capitalists who controlled a larger portion of the economy each year. -Expansion of railroad network caused many landowners under the Homestead Act to donate their land for its cause, large-scale farming gave farmers greater agricultural yields, but forced farmers and their families to move to cities, which caused rapid urbanization. -Urbanization [families moving to cities] -> dangerous working conditions -> industrial labor movements [violence in cities]. -Unprecedented levels of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe caused a change in what it meant to acquiring an American identity. As Israel Zangwill said, "America is God's crucible and the great Melting Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming!" -However, not everyone wished for reform. -American Indians' political and cultural autonomy was threatened. -Natives ceded land reserved for themselves, which became what we now think of when we think of native reserves (federal government limiting native nations into land they designate). -"Friends of the Indian" assimilated Native Americans to white culture (religion, schooling, town settlement, agriculture). -Dissolving communal land among tribal reservations and assigning smaller parcels of land to individual natives through the Dawes Severalty Act. -African Americans - Civil War promise to equality in 1865. 12 years later, the promise was abandoned. -Republican Party before the landlocked election of Rutherford B. Hayes removed soldiers from South and appropriated funds to the railroad. -White Americans focused on North versus South reformation and less on the disempowerment of African Americans.

Realism and Naturalism -How were they closely related terms? What did they both represent? -How are the terms slippery or elastic? Are these two styles distinct literary periods? -What did realism imply? How were characters presented? -What did realists reject? -What did proponents of realism believe (what it could do and where it came from)? -Was realism a coherent movement? -Describe some of the realist writers (Twain, James, Jewett, Cahan). -What did naturalists believe of realists? -What did they frequently draw off of? Particularly to describe? -Why were they pessimistic about society? -What did their interest in primal forces driving human conflict lead to? -What questions did they ask? How do they influence what we believe?

-Closely related terms when debating the purpose of literature, role of literature in a democratic society, and the future of literary expression. Both terms used as a rejection of the past - to make the claim that writers in the current generation were doing something new and distinct from their predecessors. -Slippery and elastic terms (used so widely): sometimes used interchangeably, sometimes appeared as opposites. Because they are such close cousins, realism and naturalism are better understood as a set of attitudes and tendencies rather than as clearly distinct literary periods or categories. Realism: -In the last two decades of the 19th century, realism was commonly identified as an emerging force in American fiction, both novels and short stories. -Implies a rejection of romantic, heroic, exaggerated, and idealistic views of life in favor of detailed, accurate descriptions of the everyday. Characters are presented as ordinary people involved in the normal and moral dilemmas of life. -Proponents understood American realism as an adaptation borrowed from the best European fiction. However, because it focused on the manner and speech of common people, some also believed it could play a special role in the United States by representing a variety of populations with accuracy and sympathy. In this way, literature could reflect and cultivate a democratic society. -More a label of convenience for critics than a coherent movement. Works diverged in significant ways... a) Twain's fiction employed regional and class dialects to comic effect, often with a sharp satiric edge. b) James extended his dramas of upper-class life into the flow of interior thoughts, pushing realism towards stream of consciousness and other characteristics of literary modernism. c) Jewett emphasized how a way of life could be deeply rooted in landscape and its history in depiction of coastal Maine. d) Cahan turned similar attention to lives of working-class Jews in NY. Naturalism: -In spite of this diversity, naturalists asserted that realists focused too narrowly on the middle and professional classes. They claimed the lives of the poor and marginalized required a more dramatic form of literature to depict the powerful forces that were shaping American life at the turn of the 20th century. -Frequently drew on the social interpretations of Darwinian evolution, which they employed as a lens to understand the struggles that they saw around them, particularly economic contests between capital and labor. -Frequently pessimistic about the ability of contemporary society to deliver justice, because they understood the human world as driven by animal instincts that lay barely beneath the surface of polite society (Dreiser: civilization scarcely human because it not wholly guided by reason, scarcely animal because it not wholly guided by instinct). -With this interest in primal forces driving human conflict, naturalist fiction frequently relies on plots with incidents of dramatic violence. -By asking questions about the fundamental laws of humanity and human progress, naturalist fiction provided means of deep inquiry into the meanings of human existence in a world that could be both hostile and cruel. -Subject matter ranged from awed and terrified Union soldier (Crane), to exposés on capitalism (Norris and Sinclair) to the portraits of psychopathic characters (Norris and London). London's The Call of the Wild was at once a profoundly naturalistic novel and intensely romantic fable: in London's fiction though human nature seems inevitably to go wrong, it may be saved in rugged environments where civilized notions of self-gain are no longer useful.

Kate Chopin -You could make a comparative analysis (Gilman and Chopin both discuss women's issues at the same time. Discuss the structure of marriage and its repression on women's lives.) Main difference is Gilman attempts to say treatment of women (not allowed to say they were unhappy or they would literally be hospitalized, this hospitalization) led to isolation which led to further problems, contributed to the stigma of mental illness among women. Husbands also expected to be protectors, received bad medical advice, puts them in a bind as they can no longer protect them. -Difference among Gilman and Chopin is that the repressiveness of men in TYW is very different from the seemingly good relationships in Chopin's work. -Similar in that the outer weather reflects the inner weather of the women (Story of an Hour - reflection, spring, happiness from despair. Landscape is listening).

-Father was a successful businessman, dead at 5. Grew up in company of independent women, never remarried all widowed young. This could have inspired her to writer this idea that she doesn't need a man to prosper either after her husband's own death. -She writes on the tensions between an individual's erotic inclination and social mores placed to constraint the individual's desire. Also writers on the challenges of women in a male dominated society to find an aspect of their lives not already controlled or restrained. (She described directly and without moral judgment the challenge of women to the male-dominated culture that limited all aspects of women's lives—even the lives of comfortably situated women—and tried to control their psyches as well.) -Considered a realist, writing in regional dialect. -The death in "The Story of an Hour," told she was afflicted with heart trouble in the first sentence. In the last she dies of heart disease - joy that kills. Societally, for the story to be published, she HAD to kill off the wife as a sort of revenge for feeling happiness at her husband's death. Was really not joy that killed her. -"The Storm" - Southern Louisiana, 'A 'Cadian Ball' becomes 'A Cajun Ball' dialectically. The episode between Calixta and Alcée ... -Was really the first hookup between Alcée and Calixta, almost did at Assumption, but did not happen. -'Birthright' sexuality is natural among women, not simply for the domain and control of men. This is the first time she really had sex and enjoyed it. Marriage of obedience perhaps is what she is in. -Bobinôt and Bibi worried about being late, she was seen as this overscrupulous housewife. Bobinôt has a serious solicitude (anxiety/worry) entering the home, they go cautiously, but she was happy. Turns out Alcée was what she needed to rejuvenate her life and his wife Clarisse was tired of giving it up. -Imagery of the monumental white bed (innocence and purity) matched with her white neck, throat, whiter breasts, white flame, white as the couch. The chinaberry tree and the lightning that strikes it - represents a sort of omen/sign to strike a Holy tree whose flowers makes rosaries. -The levees breaking also a sexual innuendo (keeping the water or passion held back) "The generous abundance of her passion, without guile or trickery, was like a white flame which penetrated and found response in depths of his own sensuous nature that had never yet been reached." "Now—well, now—her lips seemed in a manner free to be tasted, as well as her round, white throat and her whiter breasts." "She was a revelation in that dim, mysterious chamber; as white as the couch she lay upon. Her firm, elastic flesh that was knowing for the first time its birthright, was like a creamy lily that the sun invites to contribute its breath and perfume to the undying life of the world." -Both stories use imagery of 'breath' or visible relief at their sudden liberation.

The Life of Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain: -Describe Twain's childhood. -How did Twain first become a western writer? Get his pen name? What does Mark Twain mean? -What was Twain's first major success as a writer? Who helped him? -Describe Twain's first two novels, Innocents Abroad and Roughing It. -How were Twain's novels sold? -Did Twain's travels obscure the material of his Missouri boyhood? What did this boyhood lead to? Tom Sawyer, Old Times/Life on the MS. -What was the controversy of Huck Finn at the time of its release? Today? -Describe Twain's novels post-Huck Finn. (2 novels with biting satiric commentary) -Describe Twain's later years (health and family, relationship to the press, his change of perspective in writings he leaves unfinished/unpublished). -Describe Twain's biography efforts.

-Grew up in the larger Mississippi River town of Hannibal, MO, a place he reimagined in his writing as St. Petersburg, the most famous boyscape in American literature. -Father died at 12, Twain worked to support himself and the rest of the family. Apprenticed to a printer, later worked for his brother Orion at his print shop in Hannibal. Soon left as he was being paid virtually nothing for his work, often running the entire operation himself. -Traveled three years as an itinerant journeyman printer (STL -> NY -> PHIL -> Keokuk -> CIN). Left Cincinnati for NOLA to apprentice himself to Horace Bixby, a MS riverboat pilot to become a pilot. Left the trade in 1861 following the Civil War ending commercial river travel. -Participated in an unorganized Confederate militia (though MO was not a Confederate state, but did have slavery legalized). -The MS River was soon blockaded by the Union, so Twain went west with Orion who was a secretary of the Nevada territorial government. There Twain became a western journalist: Territorial Enterprise, Californian. The fashion of journalism at the time called for a pen name. Clemens went with Mark Twain, from a columnist of the New Orleans Times-Picayune meaning 'two fathoms deep' or 'safe water' in riverboat jargon. -His early writing was modeled on the humorous journalism of the day, especially his friend/roommate Dan De Quille. -Western writer Bret Harte, particularly important in launching Twain's career as his editor at the Californian, considered the leading writer of San Francisco. Landed his first success as a writer by retelling the well-known folk tale, "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." Did more than introduce Twain to a national audience, inaugurated a new chapter in the literature of the American west. -Soon signed with Sacramento Union to write series of letters covering newly opened steamboat passenger service from San Fransisco to Honolulu. Used a fictitious character, Mr. Brown, to present inelegant idea, unorthodox views, attitudes, information in impolite language. Say just about anything he wanted as long as he convincingly claimed it was simply reporting what others said. This deadpan approach became a staple for his lectures. -Twain's first book of the period, Innocents Abroad, were of letters he wrote for the Alta California, on the Quaker City to the Mediterranean and Holy Land. Running account of the first great modern American tourist raid on the Old World. Wrote hilarious satires of his fellow passengers and the pretentious/decadent/undemocratic Old World as viewed by a citizen of a young country on the rise. -Another book of this period, Roughing It, covered Twain's stint in San Fran as a reporter and his half-hearted gold mining in the Sierra NV mountains. Debunked the idea of the West as a place where fortunes could easily be made and showed its disappointing and even brutal side. Joined a group of writers who tried to tell Eastern readers what the West was really like, while exalting in the freedom and outright craziness of western startup towns, operating far from Eastern laws/orthodoxies/common sense. -Most of his books at the time were bought through subscription. Door-to-door salespeople offered gaudy, lavishly illustrated volumes of his books as diversion and entertainment. Subscription houses accounted for 2/3 of American bookselling in the 1870s. Twain's understanding of the dynamics of the publishing industry and importance of lining first-rate illustrators helped to establish him as a popular author of the time. -Twain's many travels including his later lectures around the world did not obscure the rich material of his MO boyhood. Probed this material as early as 1870 with first version of Tom Sawyer, A Boy's Manuscript. Depicted the idyllic sometimes dangerous river towns of the antebellum border states that proved to be the creative landscape which made Twain famous. Wrote Old Times on the MS in 7 installments for the Atlantic Monthly. Make his magazine writings into Life on the MS, after a monthlong steamboat trip on the MS, along the way to visit Hannibal. Resulting book was a critique of the southern romanticism he believed made the Civil War inevitable, a theme that would reappear in his masterpiece Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. -Married Olivia Langdon, daughter of wealthy coal dealer. Twain now in higher stratum of society on top of his increasing fascination with wealth, created a constant struggle in his work to balance the conventional and disruptive. See the contrast between the entrepreneurial and respectable Tom versus the disreputable friend Huck. -Began Huck Finn in 1876 as sequel to Tom Sawyer, did not complete for several years (8 years). Thinking about HF and his story changed and matured considerably. The racial and racist implications of HF have been subjects of critical debate recently as have questions about the racial beliefs of the author. Similar questions on gender and sexuality in Twain's life and work. -HF was banned in many libraries and schools around the county in Twain's day for 'encouraging' boys to swear, smoke, run away. -Broke literary ground as a novel written in vernacular and established the vernacular's ability to yield high art. Emobided a widely shared dream of innocence and freedom. Recording a vanishing way of life in pre-Civil War MS Valley. Sold 51k copies in its first 14 months. -Later novels, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, sharp satiric bite. Yankee Hank Morgan transported 13 centuries to Arthurian England to introduce the 'great and beneficent civilization of the 19th century' that resulted in the massacre of 1000s of knights. -The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead offered another dark and troubling view of 19th century American values. Tragic consequences of switching 2 babies at birth, one free, one slave of the same white, slave-owning family. Absurdities of defining individuals in relation to race; the impact on personality and fate of labels like 'white' and 'black'; biological/legal/social descriptions of human identity. -Time following Pudd'nhead, series of calamities. Poor judgment as investor and panic of 1893, filed for bankruptcy. Death of one daughter, among other family problems, his own health turned bad. Writing was both agonized labor and necessary therapy. -Scholars continue to study the large bulk of Twain's unfinished or largely unpublished writings and have called for re-evaluation of his work from the decade after 1895. -The content Twain declined to see published reveal a darkening worldview and upwelling of anger against orthodoxies of every sort, organized religious beliefs, international capitalism/colonialism. -Later years became an international celebrity. Consulted by the press on every subject of general interest. Outspoken opponent of US and European imperialism. However, only confessed to his best friends the depth of his disillusionment. -1906, Twain embarked on a scheme to dictate his autobiography. Allowed himself to wander freely through his reminiscences, often speaking from bed, kind of diary and history combined. FULL PRODUCT would not be available until 100 years after his death, so he could speak freely of his subjects w/o fear of hurting his subjects' feelings or their reputation. Though he published excerpts while alive, he stuck to his plan. Twain's appeal endures because of his deep understanding of the culture that produced him. Remains America's most celebrated humorist and its most caustic critic.

The Woman Question -What new advantages did women have at this time? -What were women's clubs? Were they all the same? -Was it just one woman question? -Talk about the suffrage movement. -How did Black and native women write? -What was The Gilded Age a time for?

-How the role of women would be defined in American life changed during the Gilded Age. -Middle to professional-class women led to increased access to secondary and higher levels of education. New forms of mass entertainment and urbanization led to new forms of cultural and political activity. Consumer culture gave women increased opportunities to assert their own wants and desires. -Women's clubs invited speakers or select books for the facilitation of current political and cultural discussion. Were often identified in the popular press with liberal attitudes about gender roles, but this was not always the case. -Women's clubs could be liberal or conservative, separate by race and class. Examples: Immigrant and working-class women might discuss the challenges of urban environments. African American women might make agenda of racial advancement and achieve the middle-class respectability often denied them in their daily lives. -Not just one woman question; related to a list of questions stemming from education to workforce and social influence like temperance. Divorce laws led to an increase in the idea of female autonomy on the institution of marriage (as marriage and matrimony originally defined the conventional roles of women in all classes). -Suffrage. Membership in the National Women Suffrage Association grew but so did ethnic and racial divisions. White women raised their claims by deriding the fact that others they deemed less worthy like immigrants and African Americans could vote. Black women were often excluded from national events and many made their own organizations. -Black women wrote on how racism created a social landscape that was even more challenging compared to white women. Discussing topics of lynching, anti-Black violence (Ida B. Wells). -Native women talked about the pressures of assimilation for women who tried to get an education (Zitkala-Ša). (Hopkins) call to question the social fictions that upheld racial inequality. -Women upset by the 15th Amendment did not get their suffrage until the 19th Amendment in 1920. The years between the end of the Civil War and World War 1 (pre-19th) proved to be a time period where Americans sensed women were claiming new forms of autonomy. -Questions and anxieties about the changing place of women in American culture reverberated... -> James: 'American girl' attempting to navigate world of leisure and desire -> Gilman: Medical regime of the late 19th attempted to contain the creative energies of women -> Chopin: Protagonists who attempt to achieve autonomy and fulfill their desires -> Wharton: Comedy and pathos in an upper-class world in which divorce was common -The Gilded Age was a time where people realized that writing had a vital function in helping Americans to understand the complex problems of the time. These works reveal categories like race and gender could mean quite distinct things to writers at the turn of the 20th.

Kate Chopin (Katherine O'Flaherty) -Describe her early years and how her family inspired her. -What influenced her most during her school-age years? -What did she describe in her writing generally? (2) -Describe her time with Oscar Chopin. -What led to her emergence as a local colorist/regional writer? -What won her national recognition as a colorist? -What did she not concern herself with in her writing? -How did French writing influence her own writing? -What was her major work? What criticisms did it receive? -When was her work re-discovered?

-Irish immigrant father was a successful businessman who died in a train wreck when she was 5. Family enjoyed high places in St. Louis society, mother/grandma/great-gram were active, pious, Catholics of French heritage. Company of loving, intelligent, independent women. All were widowed at young age and never remarried. -Great-gram was a compelling and tireless storyteller, may have influenced Chopin's later development as a writer of short fiction and novels. -Entered St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart at 9, already well-read in English and French authors. Nuns of academy instructed her further in literature, history, science. It was French writers both classical and contemporary (Flaubert, de Staël, Maupassant) who influenced her the most. -Similar to Maupassant, a man who escaped tradition and authority, entered into himself and looked out upon life through his own being, direct and simply told us what he saw. -Described the tension between individual erotic inclination and the constraints placed on desire - especially on women's sexual desire - by traditional social mores. Whether she was using St. Louis, NOLA, or LA countryside. -Described directly and without moral judgment the challenge of women to the male-dominated culture that limited all aspects of women's lives, even the lives of comfortably situated women, and tried to control their psyches as well. MODERN PERSPECTIVE OF FEMALE SEXUALITY, paralleled her with the themes of Dreiser and Wharton. -Married Oscar Chopin at 19, spent next decade in NOLA, husband first prospered then failed as a cotton broker. Lived in Cloutierville, village in NW LA, he opened a general store and managed a family cotton plantation. DIED of swamp fever. -Shortly after, her mother died. Left her to raise her 6 children alone. -Recognized the marketplace for 'local color,' or regional fiction and decided to fashion a literary career out of her experiences with the cultural diversity of LA. Depicted Cajuns (descendants of French immigrants who arrived in LA after being deported from Canada in the 18th century) and French Creoles (elite members of LA society whose ancestors who included French and Spanish). Both groups tried to distinct themselves from the recently arrived Americans. -Wrote on impulse, 'completely at the mercy of unconscious selection,' and the polishing up process always proved disastrous. In the few years of her writing career, just over a decade, wrote 3 novels, 150 sketches/stories, substantial body of poetry, reviews, criticisms. Also translated Maupassant's stories. -First novel, At Fault, self-published. -It was her stories on LA rural life in the collection BAYOU FOLK that won her national recognition. A second collection of stories, A Night in Acadie, increased her reputation as a local colorist 3 years later. -Did not concern herself with the prewar South, only focusing on her own time. Stories like "Desirée's Baby" didd reveal the residues of an outdated social ideology. -The influence of French fiction showed in stories that were much more erotic - and guilt-free - than the American norm. Her awareness of a disconnect between her work and American culture could be why she did not submit "The Storm" for publication. -Major work, "The Awakening," traces the sensual and sexual coming to consciousness of a young woman, around the hostility of contemporary reviewers. Edna Pontellier not a 'new woman' demanding social, economic, political equality. She can appear to be a psychologically confused sensualist, leading some critics to charge how the book was 'essentially vulgar' and unhealthily introspective and morbid in feeling. Called out Chopin's writing as exquisite and sensitive a style to be so trite and sordid a theme. Readers who objected Edna's behavior missed the psychological turmoil she portrayed. -Only published response to reviews of the novel was to claim, "I never dreamed Mrs. Pontellier making such a mess of things and working out her own damnation as she did." -After her death, fell into obscurity for over half-a-century until the 1970s when The Awakening and a number of her stories were recognized as major achievements of the turn-of-the-century American literary culture.

The Yellow Wallpaper as Gothic Fiction (qualities) 1. coaaf 2. uomn 3. eops 4. ag, s, p, s 5. awid 6. d, d kwd, oatd, th 7. rvr -How did Gilman esccape the conventions of gothic fiction? -> Unreliable narrator and irony (examples in TYW) [What is verbal irony and dramatic irony?] -> Progression of mental deterioration, similar to progression of physical exhaustion in The Open Boat -> So ... why wallpaper? What do the patterns represent? -> Significance of TYW, what it really means (Page 855). Use of the verb creep: Indicative of a feminist resistance. [think of military] verb 1. move slowly and carefully, especially in order to avoid being heard or noticed. 2. occur or develop gradually and almost imperceptibly.

-Like Edgar Allen Poe, part of Romanticist writing. Traditionally presents: -Confusion of actuality and fantasy -Unreliable or misguided narrators -Emphasis on psychological states -Apparent ghosts, spirits, specters, phantoms [only specters we see are a woman's figment of imagination, still making it a piece of realist literature) -A woman in distress -Detached, dispassionate keepers who dominate, or attempt to dominate, the heroine -Rationality vs. Romanticism [a STRUGGLE!] -> The practical, rational caretaker (John) versus the unreliable, distressed heroine (Jane) -Gilman still escapes the convention of Gothic literature with TYW through a realist lens, the mad woman confessing her story in the form of a diary. "It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer. A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity—but that would be asking too much of fate! Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it. Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted? John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage. John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures." -Verbal Irony: words are used to convey the opposite of their literal meaning -Dramatic Irony: contrast between the reader's knowledge and the narrator's knowledge. Much of the dramatic irony in "The Yellow Wall-Paper" functions because we, as readers, are aware of the narrator's mental illness but she is not. Examples of dramatic irony: -Page 845: first clues we are not in a relative's mansion or vacation home, the 'airy room,' 'first a playroom then gymnasium due to barred windows and chains.' No, chains were used to tie patients and the bars were to keep people from escaping. In a sanitarium. Not in a nursery at all. -Page 846: Heavy bedstead, bed nailed down, gate at head of stairs. Mental deterioration progression - Shorter entries - Increased obsession with the wallpaper -> Page 845: "One of those sprawling, flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distances they suddenly commit suicide, plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions." -> Page 847: "The wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then. But in the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so - I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about in behind that silly and conspicuous front design. -> Page 850: "On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind. The color is hideous enough and unreliable enough and infuriating enough but the pattern is torturing. You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following it turns a back somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face knocks you down and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream." -> Page 851: "At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern, I mean, and the woman behind it as plain as can be." -> Page 852: "I really have discovered something at last. Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move, and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. [Here the wallpaper starts to become a metaphorical image.] So why wallpaper? -Patterns represent the domestic patterns that keep women trapped (domestic life, the structure of marriage, medicine). The subordination of women in 19th century marriages. Page 855: "I got out at last! In spite of you and Jane! And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" In essence, Jane lost herself to find herself (someone totally different, stranger to herself all along - free from the constraints of her previous domesticated life). First mention of 'Jane,' Jane being the narrator's name and representative of her previous domesticated self.

The Life of Emily Dickinson: -What was known of Dickinson during her lifetime? How was she described at that time? -Where did she live? -What is there a risk in observing Dickinson's poetry? -What did her poems consist of? How did she present her poetic ideas? -Describe poems of death, religion, nature, and romance. -Describe the length and look of her poems. -Was she a confessional poet? -What did her poetic forms seem to be? How were they actually? -How many surviving poems does Dickinson have? -What is their debate on with Dickinson's poetry?

-Little was known of her in her own lifetime. She was first publicized in a mythic way as a reclusive, eccentric, death-obsessed spinster who wrote in fits as the spirit moved her, the image of the woman poet at her oddest. -She lived in her parent's home (The Homestead) all but one year (when Edward Dickinson was a US representative, D.C. and on the way home stayed in Philadelphia) of her life and was acutely aware of current events. Home was a place of infinite power. -There is a risk of interpreting any poem as only referring to particular events in her life, but there are also risks in overemphasizing Dickinson's isolation from current events and pop culture. Dickinson regularly responds to the 19th century world, which she engaged in through her readings, conversations, friendships, epistolary. -Dickinson often presented her poetic ideas as terse, striking propositions, or dramatic narrative scenes, in a highly abstracted moment or setting, often at the boundaries between life and death. -Her poems consisted of compressed statements composed of startling imagery and an extraordinary vocabulary on a wide range of subjects from psychic pain and joy, relationship of self to nature, intensely spiritual, intensely ordinary. -Poems of death confront its grim reality with honesty, humor, curiosity, but above all a refusal to be comforted. -Poems on religion expressed going from consolation to a rejection and hostility of doctrinal piety and a querying of God's plans for the universe. -Poems on nature are precise observations that are often as much psychological and spiritual as they are on the specifics of nature. Dickinson's nature is much more resistant to human scheme, and the poet's experiences of nature range from a sense of its hostility to an ability to become an Inebriate of air. -In poems of love her personae reject conventional gender roles through openly expressive sexual and romantic longings. -She was not a confessional poet. She used personae (first-person speakers) to dramatize the situations, moods, perspectives she explored in her lyrics. -She was nearly 1,800 surviving poems. -No one could trace when Dickinson went from a somber Girl to the young woman who began writing poetry with a distinctive voice, style, and transformation of the traditional form. -Dickinson found poetic freedom in the confines of the meter of the fourteener - seven-beat lines broken into stanzas alternating four and three beats. The form of nursery rhymes, ballads, church hymns. Strongly rhythmical, easy to memorize and recite, but Dickinson veered sharply from this form's expectations. -Poetic forms that seemed to be predictable, simple, and safe were altered by Dickinson's language experiments. -There is debate on whether posthumous publication of Dickinson's manuscript poetry violates the visual look of the poem - their inconsistent dashes and some of the designs Dickinson added in particular poems.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman -How did she live much of her life? -Describe her family and early life. -Describe her time before her marriage, her marriage, and childbirth. -Who was she persuaded to go to 'rest' for through the advice of her brother and mother? How did her treatment go? What did it lead to? -What did Gilman convince threaten her sanity? What did she do about it? Did the press take to it well? -Describe Women and Economics. -What did she make in response to editors and publishing not releasing her 'controversial' fiction and nonfiction work? -How did Gilman react to naturalism of the time? How did she call for her form of literary realism? -Describe her later nonfiction work (Manmade World, His Religion and Hers) -Describe her poetry and fiction. -Describe her later life.

-Lived much of her life on the margins of society whose economic assumptions about and social definitions of women she vigorously repudiated. Out of her resistance to conventional values she described as 'masculinist,' she produced a large body of polemical writings and self-consciously feminist fiction that made her a leading theoretician, speaker, writer on women's issues of her time. -Born in Hartford, CT. Father, Frederic Beecher Perkins, belonged to famous New England Beecher family (theologian Lyman Beecher, minister Henry Ward Beecher, novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe). Gilman's father deserted his family and left for San Francisco shortly after her birth, mother returned to Providence, where she supported herself and her 2 children with great difficulty. Apparently withheld physical expressions of love hoping to prevent their later disillusionment over broken relationships, described childhood as painful and lonely in autobiography. -Between 1880 and her marriage in 1884 to Charles Stetson, Providence artist, Gilman supported herself as a governess, art teacher, designer of greeting cards. She had increasingly become aware of the injustices inflicted on women, begun to write poems, one even in defense of prostitutes, developed her own views on women's rights. -Entered into marriage reluctantly, anticipating difficulties of reconciling her ambition to be a writer with the demands of wife/mother/housekeeper. In 11 months, only child Katharine was born. Gilman became increasingly despondent and marital tensions increased. -Husband and mother persuaded her to go to Philadelphia for treatment by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, most famous American neurologist of the time. Specialist in 'women's nervous disorders,' prescribed a 'rest cure' consisting of total bedrest for several weeks and limited intellectual activity after. -Treatment led her to the edge of madness, she drew back by returning to her life as a writer and contributor to Boston Woman's Journal. Few years later, Gilman wrote most famous story (The Yellow Wallpaper). Writing did not keep Gilman from suffering all her life with extended periods of depression. -Convinced her marriage threatened her sanity, she and her daughter moved to Pasadena in 1888, 1894 she granted for a divorce. Husband married her best friend and writer Grace Ellery Channing, Gilman sent Katharine to live with them not long after. -Gilman was criticized for her actions through publicity and hostility in the press, but nothing kept Gilman from pursuing her double career as writer and lecturer on women/labor/social organization. -Published Women and Economics in 1898, book earned her immediate celebrity and considered her most important nonfiction work. Argues that women's economic dependence on men has stunted the growth of the entire human species. Because of the dependency women have on men for food and shelter, the sexual and maternal aspects of their personalities have been developed excessively and to the detriment of their other productive capabilities. To free women to develop in a more balanced and socially constructive way, Gilman urged reforms like centralized nurseries and professionally staffed collective kitchens. -Tired of being rejected by editors and publishers who found her feminist provocations too controversial, founded the Forerunner magazine in 1909. Already published her most famous literary work, TYW in 1892, as well as several important works of nonfiction, Women and Economics in 1898. Monthly magazine for seven years, a one-woman operation. Included serialized novels and treatises, commentary, poetry, humor, advice column all written by herself. Circulation was small, but found readers far as Australia and India. -'Masculine Literature' appeared as part of larger work focused on damage men had inflicted on the world through their emphasis on aggression and competition. Literary authors focus too much on the domain of men, to the detriment of both art and society. Reaction to tendency in literary naturalism to focus on virile action and brute force. In calling for literature to represent the lives of women in their full complexity and nuance, Gilman presents her own case for a kind of literary realism. -Later in The Manmade World, 1911, contrasted competitiveness and aggressiveness of men to the cooperativeness and nurturance of women. Until women play a larger role in national and international life, social injustice and war would continue to characterize industrialized societies. -His Religion and Hers, 1923, Only when women influenced theology would the fear of death and punishment would cease to be central from religious institutions and practices. -Gilman's poetry and fiction primarily written well past she turned 40, extended her feminist inquiry into the role of gender in social organization. Her stories and utopian novels (Moving the Mountain, Herland, With Her in Ourland), offered vivid dramatizations of the social ills and potential remedies that result from a competitive economic system in which women are subordinate to men and accept their subordination. In Herland, Gilman offers vision of an all-female society in which caring women collectively raise children in a world that is both prosperous and ecologically sound. -Committed suicide in 1935 after being diagnosed with inoperable cancer. Writing influenced feminism for generations, works offer intellectual historians a remarkable window into questions of gender and sexuality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Yellow Wallpaper remains her most widely read and discussed literary work, immediately regarded as a masterpiece by her contemporaries and more recently rediscovered by new generations of readers.

The Gilded Age (1865-1915) -Writers of the book? -How was society in post Civil War rapidly changing? -How did the two writers describe America? -What did writers present at this time that they did not before? -How did Gilded Age writers see the world? What did their writing center and NOT center on? -Who was the proponent of the movement? -What FOUR things fundamentally changed societally after The Civil War? *Historians recently worried The Gilded Age has been too narrowly defined. One defines what is 'real' often according to where one sits in society. Many of these authors were located in the urban centers of America and focused primarily on native-born whites. *Some have called the 21st century a second Gilded Age.

-Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner - US is a nation consumed by greed and corruption [get rich quick]. "Americans from country villagers to big-city dwellers who were caught up in the fantasy of making an easy fortune, willing to sacrifice their scruples for the sake of material success." -Post Civil War lit trends: privileged the description of a rapidly changing society (population composition, peoples' customs, economy), not centered on introspection. Scrutinized the world around them often with social commentary or comic wit. -Measured, pragmatic way of looking at the world. "See things as they are." not as they "Ought to be." -Present a series of distasteful truths. Excesses of foibles of urban environments -> Advancing an aesthetic of realism. -The proponent of the movement is considered to be William Dean Howells, editor of Atlantic and Harper's. -Twain reflected the world that surrounded him and shaped how his readers understood it. -Influx of immigration, questions on racial equality and violence, gender roles shattering, and concentration on wealth.

Authors at the end of the 19th began to grapple more explicitly with the meaning of evolution and other social forces in the development of literary naturalism. Literary Naturalism -What did Naturalists believe in (6 things)? a) Obligation to? b) Depict what? c) Explore how ___, ____, ____ shaped? d) Characters from? e) Character fate due to? f) Emphasized? -What did commentators believe among men?

-Overlapped with literary realism. *Believed realists were too focused narrowly on the manners of upper and professional classes -Naturalists believed a) They had an obligation to bring up social conflicts b) Realism failed to depict genuine violence they saw in the modern world c) Explore how biology, environment, material forces shaped the lives of the people, particularly the lower class [those who had less control over their lives than those who were better off] d) Characters from fringes or depths of society - far from middle class, those whose lives really DO spin out of control e) Character fate seen out of degenerate heredity, sordid environment, or bad luck that can 'control' the lives of people without influence or money f) Emphasize plot. Engage deliberately with romance and myth -> Stories with emphasis on men in action, portrayed a world of masculine violence [London, Norris, Dreiser, Sinclair]... (below) -London take this romantic turn further in his adventure novels and stories, works that often returned to the theme of bestial instincts that lay beneath civilization. Drama turns on a clash between the power of social environment and the primal force of instinct. -Commentators believed men were 'growing soft' due to increasingly higher rates of men working in occupations that did not require strength and women responding to increased cultural, economic, political power. The concerns of 'overcivilization' [growth of professional and white-collar occupations, anxiety shaped by growing material prosperity of upper and professional classes, who increasingly worked in occupations that did not rely on physical strength. Also response to increase cultural/economic/political power by women. Wringing hands about what the fluctuating roles of men and women would mean for the future of American civilization.]

The Life of Walt Whitman: Early Life to Pre-Leaves of Grass -Who did he respond to? About what? -What did he reject? What did he celebrate? -What did he first do in his mid-teens? -What did he do in Brooklyn? Manhattan (New World, Aurora, Democratic Review)? Then Brooklyn (LI Star, Brooklyn Eagle, Brooklyn Freeman)? -Describe his political life and contributions.

-Responded to Emerson's call for "The Poet" or an American bard - to put the living, breathing, sexual body at the center of his poetry. -Rejected tradition of poetic scansion (meter) and elevated diction, improvising his form to be called free verse. -Celebrated the mystical and divine potential of the individual. -An urban poet - wrote the sights, sounds, energy of a modern metropolis. -Born in Long Island, 1 of 8 to Quaker parents. -His father became a carpenter after farming, moved to Brooklyn, then the most urbanized part of LI. -Whitman quit schooling at 11, employed at a printing office of a newspaper - contributed to newspapers in mid-teens in Brooklyn. -Taught 5 years -> country and small town schools of LI -> started a newspaper at 19. -Moved to Manhattan at 21. Stopped teaching. Literary work at New World, editor of Aurora (fired due to laziness) -Political career at Democratic rallies as speaker and writer for Democratic Review. -Returned to Brooklyn, assigned to Manhattan events for LI Star, attended operas -> without the emotions of opera, he might not have written Leaves of Grass. -Fired from Brooklyn Eagle (literary reviews) for being a free-soiler (opposed to the acquisition of land for the expansion of territory for slavery). Delegate to the Buffalo Free-Soil Convention and helped found newspaper Brooklyn Freeman.,

Henry James and "The Art of Fiction" -What did James attempt to describe? -What did he dismiss? Who did he write in response to? -What was his rebuttal? -What was his interest in? -What does he content as the deepest quality of a work of art?

-The most famous description of realism. An essay. -Dismisses all prescriptions for novelistic success. Writing in response to English novelist and critic Walter Besant, who believed the good novel had to be overtly moral. -James offered a rebuttal that rejected all categorical requirements of the novel. The great novelist will be keenly attuned to the environment and able to deduce larger truths from understanding the meaning of small details. -James's interest is in fine-grained ambiguity, his idea of consciousness - a sort of spiderweb of the very atmosphere of the mind - means that the question of the moral in a work of fiction is irrelevant. -James contends the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer. No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.

The Literary Marketplace -Who remained literary figures? -What were the four literary changes during the period? -What is the International Copyright Law of 1891? -How did the publishing industry transform? -What other trend rose to prominence during this period? -How did cultural expansion grow?

-Whitman, Stowe, Emerson remained influential figures. Dickinson became widely known post Civil War. -Divide of literature into distinct historical periods. Publication of anthologies (a coherent history of literature), college courses. -Literary changes seen during the Gilded Age: a) Standardization of book reviewing b) Circulation of best-seller lists c) Simultaneous growth of middle-class readers through book clubs and the well-educated white-collar readers d) Increasingly literate working class (newspapers and dime novels) -International Copyright Law of 1891: Extended copyright to foreign writers in the US and protection of American writers overseas. -Publishing industry moved from New England to New York. Became a specialized and professional enterprise. -Rise of the 'literature celebrity' such as Mark Twain, whose statements would be circulated among papers. -Growth of cultural expression among not just one unified reading public - white naturalists fearful at visible diversity (number of Eastern and Southern European immigrants) -Middle class and white-collar readers had newspaper subscriptions, much like today's magazine subscriptions (Atlantic, Harper's).

-What is the poetic style of Dickinson? -Defining characteristic? -Type of vocabulary? -Type of forms? -What did her style focus on? -What do her poems attempt to express? -Why did she make poetry?

COMPRESSED LYRIC! -Compression, or density, is the most salient/noteworthy characteristic -Vocabulary is highly "associative" and abstract, suggestive -Used familiar forms: nursery rhymes, ballads, church hymns (only to break their rules) -Used dashes and syntactical fragments to convey her pursuit of a truth that could best be communicated indirectly -Used enjambment (syntactical technique of running past the conventional stopping place of a line or stanza break ......... break a line and have to carry it over to the next to complete the whole thought) to force her reader to pause to collect the sense before reading on, often creating dizzying ambiguities -Also used off or slant rhyme in conjunction -Focused on the speaker's response to a situation rather than the details of the situation itself (psychological) -With Dickinson, the answer to "does she mean X or Y or Z?" is usually...Yes! -Poems attempt to express the inexpressible -Remember she represents the introvert. -TIGHT, ELLIPTICAL (meanings harder to pinpoint, the 'deep thinker') verses. -Poetry is better than any written art form in aiding to the process of speaking on what cannot be easily said. Usually we think of writing as functional, persuasive (like in news articles or legal documents) to affect some action. This is why poetry can be so frustrating, words put into new configurations like unfamiliar sentence structures and using language unconventionally. -Most of her poems found after her death, numbered meticulously and bound in tidied books. Process was the product, not to be ambitious and be prominent or make recognition. For Dickinson, she did it because it made her happy.

Whitman and Emily Dickinson -How are they influential? -What do they represent? -How are they different? -What can provide extra meaning or reinforce the meaning of a poem? Describe Whitman and Dickinson.

Two of the most influential American poets, devoted to the idea that poetry was a crucial expression of the human spirit. -They represent divergent styles that would influence later generations of writers: -Whitman promoted an expansive, gregarious open form fit for the "open road" of American life. -Dickinson's tight, elliptical verses reflect a sense of the psychological interior where meanings are made and unmade: "internal difference- / Where the Meanings, are-" (#320, 97). -Whitman: Extraverted, he had a lot more to say and needs more space to say what he was thinking. -Dickinson: Introverted, reflected in the tight, elliptical verses (elliptical meaning they skirt around the true meaning and do not go right out and tell you what they are thinking) -The form or shape of the poem if done correctly is an extension of the poem (the content of the poem) and the poet. Form can add extra meaning to poems and reinforce their meaning. Whitman's form, for example, is more hospitable to an expansiveness. Goes back to his extraversion.

Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" -What does he respond to? An effort to be? -He attempted to write the divisions among Americans in order to what? -Levels of language

Whitman uses many different levels of language in his poem in an effort to be the poet for all Americans, or as Emerson puts it, to "stand among partial men for the complete man, and apprise us not of his wealth, but of the commonwealth." He attempted to write the divisions among Americans in order to unify them. -> Abstract vs. Concrete -> Speech of the streets, common talk, the "blab of the pave" -> Speech of the crafts and trades (blue-collar work) -> Language of the professions (white-collar work) -> Language of the arts (music, painting, dance, theatre, architecture, etc.) -> Vocabularies of science and technology

Strains of American Realism: -> Mark Twain: What was he devoted to? What did he use to help readers sympathize with his roguish heroes? What did he reject? Who did he reject? -> Rejects them on the basis that romantic literature has a negative impact on society. Who was Twain more interested in? -> Fenimore's Literary Offenses -> How does Twain react to Sir Walter Scott?

•Devoted to rendering the vernacular dialects and colloquialisms of his ordinary characters, often using humor to help readers sympathize with roguish heroes like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. •Rejected the extravagances and illusions of Romanticism as seen in the novels of Fenimore Cooper and Sir Walter Scott*, among others. *Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) was an immensely popular Scottish historical novelist of chivalrous tales, mostly set in the Middle Ages. Unlike James and Wharton, Twain was more interested in working-class, rural characters than he was the urban elite. He also located realism in the language patterns of his characters, drawing upon a long tradition of vernacular storytelling that attempted to recreate the speech patterns of everyday people. Twain's style of realism is often characterized as "regional" or "local color". Twain accuses Cooper of routinely employing unrealistic gimmicks in his novels, "cunning devices, tricks, artifices for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with." Such as the broken twig, moccasin hiding trail due to moccasin of enemy, marksman shooting. -> Example in modern television: the house exploding after a woman is saved from a burning house, in a crime show the first 4 or 5 suspects are never the real killer. A type of hyperbolic sarcasm and humor Twain uses in his criticisms that still hold up today. Twain expresses a needed shift from romanticism to realism, this (Fenimore Cooper's Lit. Offenses) is as close to a statement of defiance from Twain as you will get. -> "Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote." -> "But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner . . . would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is [in 1883]. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations." -> "Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war. The change of character can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter's influence than to that of any other thing or person."

Identify the literary work ("Song of Myself") and more on the poem -What type of voice is present in his poems? -How does he start and end each verse of Song of Myself? -What does he establish a connection to?

-"Song of Myself" has no even lines. It is expansive - the type of form and how we read is open, free-flowing voice. Verse 1: I celebrate myself, and sing myself,And what I assume you shall assume,For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul,I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,Hoping to cease not till death. Creeds and schools in abeyance,Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,Nature without check with original energy. -Establish a connection to the reader, we are the same. It's really Song of YOURSELF, to see yourself through me. -Summoning a muse (source of inspiration in my soul). -Careful in his free verse to never repeat a vowel sound twice in a row. Influenced by OPERA. -Establish a connection to the land. -Give a sense there is no death, only new beginnings. -Suspend beliefs, go along with him. Speaks to everyone somehow in his poem. Verse 52: I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,Missing me one place search another,I stop somewhere waiting for you. -What I said might have gone past your head, but go back and look. -Everyone can find themselves somewhere in his poem. -Begins the entire poem with 'I' and ends with 'You.'

"The Open Boat" -> Title -> Progression of exhaustion -> Cinematic quality -> Naturalistic elements -> Brotherhood -> Existentialism / nihilism -> Tonal shift from the perspective of the correspondent/author -Backstory to novel: Crane was the correspondent who left Jacksonville, Florida on the boat The Commodore to cover the insurrectionists in Cuba. Sank the next day, was for another morning before he and three others were rescued at Daytona Beach.

"The OPEN Boat" exposed to the elements (animals, weather, a physical exposure), brotherhood among men (emotional understanding and transparency) -Irony in that there is the open sea, boat, yet held captive and cannot go anywhere. -> Forces competing with: sea, weather, physical and mental exhaustion. -EXHAUSTION: The progression of the body and slipping into the desires of the mind. Passing the burden requires a mental alertness and physical capacity. a) Page 1052: Shipwrecks are apropos for nothing (come on short warning, happen out of nothing). Cannot prepare for it. 2 nights without sleep and much food to eat. 'Neither man was fond of rowing at this time' Authorial detachment, ironic understatement (using sarcasm/irony to make fun of something) b) Page 1055: Oiler rowed, then correspondent, then oiler. Was a weary business (ironic understatement). Back was the seat of more aches/pains than suggested in books for composite anatomy. c) Page 1060: Slow/gradual disentanglement (from the bottom of the ship) - soon touch comfort of seawater at bottom of boat. Deep in sleep. Sleep so good to him but felt only a moment before he heard the last stages of exhaustion from his companion. -Similar to after a GREAT PAIN (exhaustion) a formal feeling comes. Mechanical way giving themselves over to exhaustion. d) Page 1062: Monstrous inshore rollers. Expression of eyes singularly unafraid but feel meaning of situation is still shrouded. The correspondent's mind was dominated at the time by his muscles, muscles said they did not care. If drowning happened, would be a shame. e) Page 1063: Struggle to reach the captain and the boat (the correspondent). Felt drowning must be a comfortable arrangement, cessation of hostilities accompanied by a large degree of relief. Cinematic Qualities -Begin the story in a panoramic vista view (none of them knew the color of the sky). 'Them' being a collective. -Zoom in, imagine this being filmed, the cook squatting in the bottom, pan left to the oiler steering an oar, pan left to the correspondent pulling at the other, pan left to the injured captain. ***These serve as catalogs of those performing their task similar to Whitman. NATURALISTIC ELEMENTS: -> Page 1060: Canton flannel gulls. Birds sat comfortably in groups, envied by some in the dingey. Unblinking scrutiny, seemed uncanny/sinister. Intentionally omniscient/transient portrayal of the birds as if they knew what they were doing. Why? Gulls were just in their element, much larger are humans in the food chain than seagulls, BUT their fate/circumstance led them to be put in a situation where they are at a disadvantage. *** This represents the human tendency to project. 'Nature wears the color of the spirit.' Looking for something to blame or this predicament - what is realized at the end is there is NOTHING to blame, Darwinian irony (food chain disparity, disadvantage of circumstance). -> People on shore not saving them. 'I feel like socking them just for luck.' Again projecting on what they see. Brotherhood and emotional openness -> Page 1051: Friends in a curiously iron-bound degree than common. Captain spoke calmly but cover never command a more ready crew. Comradeship even outside of devotion to the commander. -> The correspondent was taught to be cynical of men (as a reporter), but he opened himself from this skepticism of why am I here (as he is the most college-educated, well-read, white-collar of the four). -> Collective anger at people on the shore. From the cook remarking nonchalantly 'Funny they don't see us.' to all of them saying it. - 'Fair to say no life saving station was for 20 miles in either direction,' authorial detachment (I cannot do anything about it as the author, fallacy, but I know this as fact). Ironic understatement (use of word 'fair,' makes it comical). -> Realization these people are vacationers in on a winter resort omnibus (Gallows humor - sense of wit in a hopeless situation. Dry irony). EXISTENTIALISM/NIHILISM: ->What does that idiot with the coat mean? If he would do x, y, z there'd be some REASON in it. Look for some reason to save them but things do not run according to clocks or make sense. When you face potential tragedy, try to find some reason this is happening to me. Humans are not in control of things most of the time. Begin to see the random power of nature and has no 'concern' for justice/fate when humans are not significant, vulnerable. -> "If I am going to be drowned, why would I be able to have the sense of sand and trees (get so close just to die)?" Personifying fate as though fate is a person or something tangible. -> Page 1059: 3rd person limited (we are seeing over the shoulder of the correspondent, as the correspondent most closely resembles Crane though it is not the direct perspective of the correspondent). Up against nature and still thinking of injustice, maybe the gods DO want me to drown, but nature does not regard the lives of anyone. -> The use of temples: symbol of faith - idea that there is some greater power, civilization erects temples as dedication to gods, believe life is looked over by higher powers. Maybe they do not exist at all, no justice, fate, or faith. All random events (NIHILISM, naturalism). -> Page 1061: If no help is coming, go to the surf right away. See a wind tower: Standing with back to plight of ants. Serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual. Unconcern of universe. Idea of nature shifts from malignancy to flat indifference, the realization that nature is neither beneficiary nor malignant. Realization of injustice to nature is not out to hurt them/be hostile or cruel OR be kind. **********Shift, then, to I want to be a better person. Not that there is no point/despair, but we need to be responsible to giving our own lives meaning. Because only we are responsible. Could this be a contradiction to naturalism? EXISTENTIALISM: Not a 'death to gods' but in the face of nihilism, we must create our own meanings to life. Kind of optimistic, all but one, the oiler, dies, which gives the story a realist end that not everyone lives and oftentimes the strongest, quiet type, or the heroic type will die (not an ending of morality). -> BUT you do see a man at the end, appearing as a saint to rescue the correspondent. Figure shining like a saint or godlike. Could be that Crane is engaging in magical realism OR that the act of helping is simply what makes one appear saintlike to others.

Despite the bleak and unforgiving features of naturalist writing... -How did naturalists often present their characters? *** -How was the aim of objectivity among naturalists handled? ... What are the general characteristics of literary naturalism? *** (10) ad l-c human life shaped ns: sotf sd vs fw ehp f = dh + se + bl spow stof siss ... Stephen Crane's characteristic themes (3) -Naturalism has never left us: modern day films where characters are against things that seem impossible make for a good story, but it is always mixed with elements of fantasy (Walking Dead, Hunger Games [environment with forces outside of control], Underground Railroad series)

-> Naturalists often present their characters as case studies to suggest social solutions: -> Crane's "The Open Boat," for example, emphasizes the individual frailties of its protagonists in order to commend how they eventually band together and survive. -> The aim of total objectivity among naturalists clashed with their frequent sense of outrage over social injustice, setting up a literature that is often internally conflicted. (How can we defeat self-determination when it seems like fate/life cannot be controlled?) -> Not only natural occurrences themselves, though these are the most concrete examples. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . -> Authorial detachment; objective, "scientific" tone -> Lower-class or marginalized characters -> Human life shaped by forces beyond human control: -> Darwinian theory / natural selection: survival of the fittest -> Social determinism vs. free will -> Fate = degenerate heredity + bad environment + bad luck -> Events happen randomly -> Strong prey on the weak -> Surprising twists of fate -> Story implies social solutions: acts of imagination, compassion, connection, and altruism can give meaning to human existence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . -> The physical, emotional, and intellectual responses of people under extreme pressure -> Nature's indifference to the fate of humanity -> Need for compassionate collective action

American Literary Realism - Responding to Transformation -> Industrialization -> Describe monopolies. -> How much capital invested in manufacturing increase between 1850-80? -> Did industrial workers have political leverage? -> When was child labor put to an end? -> How did newcomers and immigrants begin their works as laborers?

-> The amount of capital invested in manufacturing quadruples between 1850 and 1880 -> Monopolies allow a small number of men to control profitable enterprises -> Immigrants (and their children) provide the labor force for the Industrial Era -> A vast disparity in wealth emerges between the very rich and the very poor "Between 1850 and 1880, capital invested in manufacturing more than quadrupled and factory employment nearly doubled . . . Major industries were consolidated into monopolies, allowing a small number of men to control such enormously profitable enterprises as steel, oil, railroads, meatpacking, banking, and finance, among them Jay Gould, Jim Hill, Leland Stanford, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller. Called 'robber barons' by some and celebrated as captains of industry by others, these men squeezed out competitors and accumulated vast wealth and power. The new millionaires formed a wealthy class whose style of life, reported on in the mass media, offered a startling contrast to the lives of ordinary people". "Industrial workers had little political leverage before the 1880s, when the American Federation of Labor emerged as the first unified voice of workers. But not until collective bargaining legislation was enacted in the 1930s did labor acquire the right to strike". Men and women sew busily in a New York City sweatshop on Ridge Street. Immigrants and newcomers to the city often worked in situations like this, where jobs were plentiful and wages were poor The National Child Labor Committee, an organization whose goal was to end child labor, was formed in 1904, but it was not until 1938 that the Fair Labor Standards Act put an end to child labor in the United States.

The Life of Emily Dickinson: -Who was her family? Father? -Where did she attend school? Why did she fail? -What did Dickinson pursue long-term? -How many poems were published during her lifetime? -When were half of her extant poems written? -Describe the love life of Dickinson. -Who was Samuel Bowles? Thomas Wentworth Higginson? -Did Dickinson like publishing and having her poems edited? -What were Dickinson's fascicles? -Describe the final decades of Dickinson's life. -Who was Mabel Todd? Martha Dickinson Bianchi? What did they do with Dickinson's poetry following her death?

-Family was one of the most prominent families economically, politically, and intellectually in Amherst, Massachusetts. -Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a lawyer, then state representative and senator. Helped found Amherst College as a Calvinist alternative for the liberal Harvard and Yale. -Her life-long allies with her siblings, Austin (The Evergreens) and Lavinia. -Dickinson never completed her three-year study at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary due to adamantly belonging with the group of students who claimed to find 'no hope.' Students were regularly queried as to whether they had professed faith, hope, or no hope. Students' religious development was monitored as students looked looked to become missionaries. -Dickinson failed to convert out of defiance and saw it with comic glee. Dickinson went on to assert that it was her failure to conform to the conventional expectations of her evangelical culture that helped liberate her to think on her own. -Dickinson stayed at home, which was common for many unmarried middle- and upper-class women of the time. -Amherst experienced an exodus of men due to the California Gold Rush years and the carnage of the Civil War. -Dickinson pursued a lifelong course of reading. Her deepest literary debts to The Bible and classic English authors as Shakespeare, but through national magazines her family subscribed to and books from Boston, she encountered the full range of American and English literature of the time. -Dickinson looked especially up to the successful contemporary woman poet Elizabeth Browning. -Half of her extant poems were written during the Civil War and appeared to be inspired by the specifics of the war (battles, courage, enormity of the carnage). -Dickinson fell in love a number of times, often to married men and once with a woman, her later sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson. -Dickinson had approximately 500 letters dedicated to her, of which many contained drafts of her latest poems (one of Dickinson's forms of self-publishing). The relationship melded love, art, friendship, and intellectual exchange. -The exact nature of these relationships is hard to determine because her poems/letters could just as well be poetic meditations on desire as writings to specific people. -Another she loved was Samuel Bowles, editor of Springfield "Republican." Dickinson wanted to be published, but only around a dozen of her poems were during her lifetime. She sent many to Bowles. Though he published a few, he also edited them into more conventional shape. -She sent poems to contributing writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Atlantic Monthly). He saw her innovations as imperfections, but he remained intrigued by her. He asked if she would visit him in Boston. When she refused, he visited her and would become an editor of her posthumously published poetry. -Dickinson viewed publishing as an auction of the mind, and was often unwilling to submit to the changes made by editors. In many ways Dickinson's letters constituted a form of publication. -Dickinson began to record her poems on unlined paper and marking moments of textual revision. She then folded/stacked those sheets and sewed them in groups together in what are called fascicles. She had 30, between 16-24 pages. She worked the groupings thinking on chronology, subject matter, and specific thematic orderings for each. -It could be speculated that Dickinson believed she would not be published during her lifetime due to her unconventional poetry and become a sort of self-publisher. These fascicles were collected after her death, which were neatly stacked in a drawer. -Dickinson's final decades were marked by health problems and a succession of losses. She experienced eye pain and fear of losing her vision, her dad died a year later after injecting morphine for pain, her mother would have a stroke and be bed-ridden until her death another year after, and the death of her nephew and childhood friend (Helen Jackson who asked to be Dickinson's literary executor) would occur. -It could be speculated that Dickinson's seclusion later in life may have been a response to grief at these losses and concern of her own health or the supposed eccentricity of her desire for privacy could draw attention to the number of poems she wrote (she may well have secluded herself for her vocation). -Wife of astronomer David, Mabel Todd arrived in Amherst to direct the Amherst College Observatory. Todd and Dickinson's brother, Austin, would have an affair. After viewing Emily's body in her coffin, Mabel sought a friendship with the poet calling her in many respects a genius without actually meeting her. -Through her sister's invitation, Todd transcribed many of her poems and persuaded Higginson to help post a posthumous collection of poems to print (3 volumes). The poems were edited heavily (SOME of them) to fit how it would have been printed in the 19th century. -Susan Dickinson and her daughter (Martha Dickinson Bianchi) also published a few of Dickinson's poems in journals like The Century. -The three editions of poetry [2 from both Todd and Higginson, the 3rd from Todd as well as a published set of letters] were popular and saw over 10 printings and sold more than 10,000 copies. -By 1900, Dickinson's work fell out of favor, and BIANCHI resumed publication of her aunt's poetry in 1914. 8 volumes between. Without her contributions, Dickinson might never achieved the audience it has today. Made her poetry available to modernists.

W.E.B. DuBois -What did he influence in the 20th century? -Describe his school-age. First time he visited the South? -What did he accomplish while at Harvard University? -Describe his teaching career. His time at UPenn. -What did he rigorously study during his 13 years at Atlanta University? -How did The Soul of Black Folk come to be? -What new, fundamental concepts did he present in this novel? -Which chapter caused quite a stir? Who was it against? -What led to DuBois's shift to radicalism? Which organizations did he become invested in? -After leaving ATL, where did he move to? What did he accomplish for the next 25 years? -What subject did he shift to post-1920? -Describe the last few years of his life.

-No writer of the early 20th century influenced how Americans thought about, studied, talked about race in the U.S. Modeled practices that shaped the African American intelligentsia of the 20th century, ideas contributed to the vocabulary that we still use to address questions of racial difference and inequality. -Father deserted his family, mother (Mary Burghardt DuBois) raised him with the help of extended family. Attended predominantly white schools and churches as a child, said he experienced no discrimination as a child. -Visited South for the first time to attend Fisk University in Nashville. Bachelor's degree. Attended Harvard, earned a second bachelor's degree and a master's degree. -Before returning to Harvard, studied at University of Berlin, where his studies influenced his thinking on both race and history. His doctoral dissertation at Harvard, 'The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the USA' was the first volume in the Harvard Historical Studies series. -Could not secure an appointment at a major research university, instead taught first at Wilberforce College, a small, poor, black college. Offered Greek, Latin, German, English - subjects far removed from his real interest in the emerging field of sociology. Spent a year at University of Pennsylvania, where he did the research on The Philadelphia Negro, the first sociological monograph on an African American community. -Moved to Atlanta University, for the following 13 years produced a steady stream of important studies on AA life. -Dedicated to the rigorous, scholarly examination of 'the Negro problem,' increasingly understood his scholarship and activism to be intertwined. Writing for national publications like The Atlantic Monthly and The Dial, urged Americans to face the devastation racial inequality wreaked on the lives of AAs. -Collecting a series of these essays and adding new material, published a book, 'The Souls of Black Folk,' a book of signal importance in American intellectual history. Book combines autobiography, social science, political commentary, musicology, even fiction to explore the implications of its dramatic and prophetic announcement that 'the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line.' -First chapter, 'Of Our Spiritual Strivings,' DuBois introduced a key concept that would inform his thinking for the rest of his career, the notion of 'twoness' of AAs. An American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.' Described what DuBois named 'double-consciousness.' -Another one of DuBois's important ideas was the 'Talented Tenth,' title of an essay he published as the second chapter of The Negro Problem. A college-educated elite that could provide leadership for AAs after Reconstruction. -The chapter in TSOBF that particularly caused a stir when the volume was first published was the one that challenged the enormous authority and power that accumulated in the hands of one Black spokesman, Booker T. Washington. Washington founded Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to train AAs in basic agricultural and mechanical skills and had gained national prominence with his Atlanta Exposition speech in 1895. His address seemed to many people to accept disenfranchisement and segregation and settle for low level of education in exchange for white 'toleration' and economic cooperation. By the early 1900s DuBois rejected Washington's position, with the publication of TSOBF his public defiance against Washington put the two men in lasting opposition. -Almost immediate repudiation of TSOBF by his allies reinforced DuBois's emerging radicalism. He became a leader of the Niagara Movement, which aggressively demanded for AAs the same civil rights enjoyed by white Americans. Left ATL for NY, served next 25 years as editor of The Crisis, the official publication of the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization he helped create. Reached an increasingly large audience, 100k by 1919, powerful messages that argued the need for Black development and white social enlightenment. Continued to write in a variety of genres, novel on the southern cotton industry (Quest of the Golden Fleece), massive historical study of Black Reconstruction in America, full-length autobiography (Dusk of Dawn). -Frustrated by lack of fundamental change and progress in the condition of AAs, after 1920 he shifted his attention from the reform of race relations in US through research and political legislation to the search for longer-range worldwide economic solutions to the international problems of inequality among the races. Joined the US Communist Party in 1961, became a citizen of Ghana in the year of his death.

Whitman Poems to Consider: -Section 3 -Section 6 -Section 11 -Section 8 -Section 15 -Section 33 -Section 50, 51, 52

-Section 3: A good example both of anaphora (Section 2 "Have you / Have you") and epistrophe ("... than there is now / ... than there is now"). Sounds like music with rhythm though it is free verse. Whitman has a sense of live in this moment urgency. You are never younger than you are right now. -The argument generally over the whole poem is that we have more in common than what separates us. That common thing is the nature that flows through us. It is also our intensely sexual nature -- how to dress to make ourselves look attractive, even if not for a sexual favor or urge, it is the procreant urge (the urge of procreation) that we cannot cease. -Section 6: As seen in Section 1 with leaning and loathing the ease of summer grass... we see Whitman's sense of uncertainty anaphorically ("I guess / I guess"). For someone who has so much to say - he is comfortable to acknowledge uncertainty. -This is known as "negative capability" or the writer's ability to write through and accept uncertainty. In this case, Whitman is uncertain on grass and its symbol of democracy or commonality. -Whitman goes from an inclusivity among races ("uniform hieroglyphic") to sensing it as the "uncut graves of men." Whitman has these wide spaces to indicate a pause and purposeful and meaningful silence. -He has an innocence and child-like wonder as asked by the child (this grass is far darker than the white beards of men). He believes there really is no death and those dead are well somewhere. He provides a hopeful thought on how to live. -He provides an aspect of physics - the law of conservation that energy is never created or destroyed - when we die we remain a part of the process both physically and through the memories of our loved ones. Being eternally optimistic. -Section 11: Unconventional and risqué at that time Whitman was way ahead of his times with gender equality (opposite equals advance as in Section 3). The woman admires the bathing men in a homoerotic way. She is a voyeur, she is unmarried, but is wealthy enough to own a home. -To be unmarried at 28 at that time meant 38 or 48 in today's terms. She upheld a different standard of beauty liking the homeliest of men. -In her imagination, though, she is out with the men and the men do not know of her presence. This is an early female masturbation scene. The idea that women can enjoy sex threatened most men at that time. This idea of sexual equality among women. "The Swimming Hole" painting. -Section 8: Good use of catalogs. First begins in 3 couples (or 2 line stanzas) that depict the sad life cycle of one person (little one, youngster, suicide). There is an implied connection among the 3 couplets through the wide space of 'episodes.' -However, in the next stanza the sad life is replaced. As all goes onward and outward. We see life going on. The living (what is said aloud) and buried (what is kept hidden) speech vibrates here. -Section 15: Good use of catalogs. Listing the types of people he sees. Types of people in America generally. He is conscious of the sounds being read aloud throughout the poem, musical elements without a need for rhyme or conventional metric. -Lines are short enough to contain an image but also have a backstory. An example is the parenthetical he has for the 'lunatic' and prostitute. The lunatic is human as seen in the ( ), he had a mother, he was loved [an added layer of depth]. And for the prostitute, the only thing separating her and the bride (as read earlier) is the opium eater (drugs like heroin that ruin lives). -He juxtaposes disparate items to show how close they are and this is the world we live in, that things like this exist and we should not forget they do. -However, with the backstory, by the grace of God I go. And he leaves it there. Never settling too much on one person, after all, he is the poet for all. The section ends as the city and country sleeps. And ends as the "Song of Myself," the thesis. See all these people? I and we are all of them. -Section 33: Another use of catalogs. Animal catalogs. In his imagination, he is soaring and soars over cities and over these images of all these different animals. -Occasionally changes the first word ("Over," "Walking," "Where"). He believes animals also have a purpose and follow this natural law. In Section 32 he alludes he'd rather live with animals than people at times. The only time we really get a complaint for Whitman on people, his sudden impatience after original optimism. -Section 50: He seems so uncertain ("I guess"). He spent 49 sections forcefully on his ideas and what he sees but now he has dashes (hesitation) and uses the vague pronoun of "It." He tries to express, like Dickinson, the often inexpressible. He talks of something he does not understand in hopes of understanding it. "I think it is Happiness" -It is the belief of humanity and specifically Americans that we all have a destiny for something. -Section 51: The most quoted passage. "Do I contradict myself?" He is speaking of himself personally. He contradicts what he said in earlier verses in this poem alone. But, "I contain multitudes." America is seen in the "I contain multitudes." America with all of its contradictions and hypocrisies. We are not all our worst attributes or worst actions. It is impossible not to contradict ourselves from time to time. -Section 52: Ends with the hawk sweeping by (Whitman was always the elevated one, looking down on everything). The hawk says he is talking too much, almost a form of self-deprecation. He comes back down to Earth. He implores readers to go back and try again. You will find understanding or pieces of yourself somewhere - it is normal to be confused. Be open to trying again. A very ambitious poem all in all.

The Yellow Wallpaper: -> S. Weir Mitchell's 'rest cure' and Gilman's experience with Mitchell -> Involuntary Blepharospasm (eye twitching) : What is Gilman's story an outgrowth of? -> Literatures of Argument : What type of realist fiction did the post-Civil War era inspire? What effect did TYW have on medical practice in her day? -> Gilman's Early Life : Describe her marriage and later childbirth. How can her early life be described? What does it also shed light on? Which event was most defining to Gilman? What was TYW loosely a response to? Gilman wrote "The Yellow Wall-paper" as a loosely autobiographical response to the treatment she endured for her depression, with the goal of better educating the public regarding women's mental health. -> Gilman's Feminist Activism : Describe her fiction and non-fiction work.

1. This is the physician and novelist S. Weir Mitchell, the man who prescribed the "rest cure" for Gilman that went on to inspire "The Yellow Wall-paper." Mitchell was "the most famous American neurologist of the day [and] a specialist in women's 'nervous' disorders" (NAAL 848). Fifteen years after publishing her short story, Gilman wrote in "Why I Wrote 'The Yellow Wall-paper'" that the doctor "sent me home with the solemn advice to 'live as domestic a life as . . . possible,' to 'have but two hours' intellectual life a day,' and 'never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again' as long as I lived." Gilman writes that following the doctor's advice brought her "so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over." She concluded her essay, "It ['The Yellow Wall-paper'] was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save them from being driven crazy." -Leading American neurologist of the day, specialized in 'women's nervous disorders.' As we can see, a mind already anxious can deteriorate when forced into inactivity. Page 850: "(Really dear you are better) Better in body perhaps -" stern reproachful look, never let that idea enter your mind. Demonstration of OMITTING mental illness. 2. Gilman's story is an outgrowth of the nineteenth-century medical profession's struggle to understand women's emotional states. Physicians often prescribed counterproductive measures such as the "rest cure"—isolation to one's bedroom when the patient actually needed exercise, human contact, and intellectual stimulation—for women suffering from postpartum depression. This image depicts "involuntary blepharospasm," a neurological disorder affecting the muscles around the eyes, from Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpetriere by Professor Jean Martin Charcot (1825-1893), published in Paris in 1889. Books such as this were dedicated to understanding the mysteries of women's emotional states. "The Yellow Wall-paper," in many ways, is a response to such books. -Often caused by stress, fatigue, insomnia, depression, anxiety, but not knowing what the cause is, can lead to a faulty diagnosis. Along with affliction itself, cast aside and hospitalized in asylums (snowball effect), outgrowth of struggles of the medical profession. Page 844: Temporary depression, hysteria (wide variety of disorders among women, known for Greek 'hystericos,' ailment of the uterus. Gendered term as we see in today's 'hysterical,' calling someone effeminate or weak. 3. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), writer and women's rights advocate, addressing members of the Federation of Women's Clubs, June 4, 1916. As the introduction to Volume D of NAAL explains, the post-Civil War period was a time when the impulse towards literary realism led to the development of "the literature of argument," a body of sociological literature that argued eloquently for the reform of social ills, as well as a body of literary texts with a strong reform agenda of their own. Few writers more neatly capture the "literature of argument" than Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who wrote both nonfiction treatises and fiction novels, all of which advocated for the rights of women. -Post-Civil War impulse for literary realism - respond to changes of country led to a literature of argument (lit with a reform agenda). Gilman wrote nonfiction and fiction, effect caused her specialist (Mitchell) to alter Neurastenia (weakness of the physical nerves) 4. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1860 Married at age 23, she worried that her duties as wife and mother would interfere with her writing career Gave birth at age 24; experiences postpartum depression and is prescribed the "rest cure" that leads her to write "The Yellow Wall-paper" The story of Gilman's early life can feel a tad melodramatic—abandoned by her father at birth and raised by a single mother who deliberately distances herself from her children in hopes of preventing any future disillusionment they may feel when personal relationships fail them—but it also sheds light on her burgeoning feminist activism and her career-long goal of creating a better world in which women could live and work. A defining moment in Gilman's early life as both a feminist activist and fiction writer came soon after the birth of her first child—a daughter—when she was suffering from postpartum depression (a condition not widely understood) and prescribed a "rest cure" that confined her to her bedroom for several weeks and discouraged her from pursuing intellectual activity. Gilman wrote "The Yellow Wall-paper" as a loosely autobiographical response to the treatment she endured for her depression, with the goal of better educating the public regarding women's mental health. 5. Early writings—such as a poem in defense of prostitutes—display a desire to support women's causes Nonfiction works include Women and Economics (1898), The Man-Made World (1911), and His Religion and Hers (1923) Utopian feminist novels include Moving the Mountain (1911) and Herland (1915) While "The Yellow Wall-paper" is Gilman's most well-known contribution to American literature, she is also the author of many nonfiction works of feminist prose. Her 1898 work, Women and Economics, argued that "women's economic dependency on men stunts not only the growth of women but that of the whole human species. More particularly, she argued that because of the dependency of women on men for food and shelter the sexual and maternal aspects of their personalities had been developed excessively and to the detriment of their other productive capacities" (NAAL 791). The book was an immediate success and profoundly influenced feminist thought at the turn of the century. Other works, such as The Man-Made World (1911) and His Religion and Hers (1923), argued for increasing women's role in politics and religion, respectively. While her nonfiction works argued against the patriarchal structures that limited women's opportunities, her fiction often imagined a female-centered world, as did the utopian novel Herland (1915), which "offers a vision of an all-female society in which caring women raise children (preproduced by parthenogenesis) collectively in a world that is both prosperous and ecologically sound" (NAAL 791).

Literary Naturalism: -What was it an aesthetic response to? What theory did it build off of? -How was human life shaped? What were humans victim to? What were they unable to do? What did this application of life apply to? -How did Naturalists like Stephen Crane try and represent life? -What character types did naturalists use? -What did naturalists emphasize more? ... Characters in Naturalist Fiction -Where did they tend to be socially? *** -What worlds did they exist in? *** -How was their fate determined? ***

An aesthetic response to the late 19th century, naturalism can be thought of as a version of realism... -> Built upon theory of natural selection in Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) -> Wrote about life as it was shaped by forces beyond individual human control: -> Humans are victims of the struggle for survival won by the strongest, unable to shape their own destinies; applied to labor vs. capital, railroads vs. farmers, men vs. women, and other political struggles. -> Naturalists like Stephen Crane tried to represent life more scientifically rather than providentially (Romanticists: good things happen to heroic people because they deserve it as God was looking out for them. Providential means that things happen to people because it was ordained by God). Tended to evoke authorial detachment (tone: what happens to characters beyond their control is subject to whims of nature and author has no control over subjects (which is a fallacy as authors can control the fate of their characters however they wish).; author often tries to maintain a tone and attitude that will be experienced as 'objective.' -> Continued the realist attempt to represent new and unfamiliar types of characters, but naturalists concentrated on lower-class and marginalized people and merged the realist attention to detail with a belief in social determinism (fate based on pre-determined factors like the environment as where someone is from or who their parents are) rather than free will. -> Naturalists emphasized plot to a greater degree than did earlier realists; engaged more deliberately with romance and myth, even when the result was to deflate conventional notions of heroism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . -> Tend to be from the fringes and depths of society, whose lives often spin out of control. -> Exist in worlds where heredity and social environment determine fate, events happen randomly, the strong prey on the weak, and protagonists often have neither the intelligence nor the wealth/influence to overcome adversity. Fate determined by: -> Degenerate heredity -> Squalid environment -> Bad luck -> Often encounter surprising twists of fate.

American Literary Realism - Responding to Transformation -> Immigration -> Where was it coming from? Describe population statistics from 1870, 1910, 1920. -> What was New York's gateway for millions of immigrants? -> Which part of Manhattan represented high population density? What negative impacts came with high population density?

Rapid population growth -> 1870 population: 38.5 million -> 1910 population: 92 million -> 1920 population: 123 million -> Most population growth is from European immigration -> Rural population declines as urban population increases The statistics for population growth in the postbellum United States are staggering, with the exponential growth coming largely from immigrants from "southern and eastern Europe: Russia, Poland, Italy, and the Balkan nations" (NAAL 6). Whereas prior to the Civil War the majority of the U.S. population was centered in rural areas, following the Civil War most Americans lived in cities such as New York and Chicago. "New York grew from half a million to nearly 3.5 million between 1865 and the turn of the twentieth century. Chicago, with a population of only 29,000 in 1850, had more than 2 million inhabitants by 1910". This undated photograph of an Italian mother with her three children after their arrival on the Ellis Island immigration station—which opened in 1890—represents the common immigrant experience for Europeans in the late nineteenth century. "From 1892 to 1954, New York's Ellis Island was the gateway for millions of immigrants to the United States". This is an image of Mulberry Street in New York City, ca. 1900. Mulberry Street was part of the infamous Five Points district, an area of Manhattan with high population density and the attendant ills that come with it: disease, crime, murder, unemployment, prostitution, and so on. It was also an area of intercultural contact as European immigrants—including the despised Irish—rubbed shoulders with newly freed African Americans.

American Literary Realism - Responding to Transformation -> Territorial Expansion -What three factors describe this piece of transformation? -Describe Native American life at this time. American Realism like all literary movements under an umbrella, usually evolve as a reaction to something that had come before. The literature, types of style, delivery methods prior to and the conditions in the world/America.

Transcontinental Railroad: In 1869 the first transcontinental railroad was completed, making it "possible to cross the country quickly and inexpensively". Linked West to Midwest, facilitated travel across U.S. Perception of time increased, you could travel to places more quickly. The frontier "closes" in the 1890s: According to the 1890 census, there was "no place in the United States with fewer than two people per square mile" (NAAL 5). The historian Frederick Jackson Turner used this statistic to argue that the American frontier was officially "closed." The closing of the frontier led many Americans to look elsewhere for expansion and growth, such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Hawaii. Expansion beyond the continent: Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii -> Impact on Native Americans -> Reservations -> The Dawes Allotment Act - divided tribal land into allotments for individual Indians, meant to help assimilate them into American society While U.S. territorial claims were growing across the continent and across the globe, Native Americans continued to lose their claims to the land. The outgrowth of the policies of Indian Removal Act from the 1830s put Native tribes on increasingly diminishing tracts of land in reservations across the United States. In 1887 the Dawes Allotment Act—which divided tribally held land into individually owned parcels—resulted in even more loss of Native land as individual tribe members sold their plots of land in business deals that were either poorly thought out or outright fraudulent. The Dawes Act "reduced the Native land base by some 90 million acres". Following the Civil War, "White Americans, mostly of English, Scottish, German, and French descent, settled across [the West], increasing the pace by which the U.S. government was forcibly relocating Native American tribes. From their homelands to places further west, and attempting to force Hispanic Americans south of the new border with Mexico. As these settlers moved into the extensive terrain west of the Mississippi River, they leveled vast stands of timber, exterminated the buffalo and other wild game in favor of cattle and sheep, and established farms, villages, cities, and the railroads that linked them to markets in the Midwest and East".