US Lit Midterm

Supported themselves through their writing

-Mark Twain -Jack London

Localists

-Mark Twain -W.D. Howells -William Carlos Williams -William Faulkner

Radicals

-W.E.B. Du Bois -Malcolm X

A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal, "Water, water; we die of thirst!" The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back, "Cast down your bucket where you are." A second time the signal, "Water, water; send us water!" ran up from the distressed vessel, and was answered, "Cast down your bucket where you are." And a third and fourth signal for water was answered, "Cast down your bucket where you are." The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River. To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbour, I would say: "Cast down your bucket where you are"—cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded.

Booker T. Washington "Up from Slavery"

The fog comes on little cat feet.It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.

Carl Sandburg "Fog"

"It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works"

Ezra Pound

"Make it new!"

Ezra Pound

"Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something...Use either no ornament or good ornament"

Ezra Pound "A Retrospect"

"My sister ain't the best!" the child declared. "She's always blowing at me [....]My father ain't in Europe; my father's in a better place than Europe [....]My father's in Schenectady. He's got a big business. My father's rich, you bet."

Henry James: Daisy Miller

Who was the founder of Social Darwinism?

Herbert Spencer

The old pond —A frog leaps in,And a splash.

Matsuo Basho "Makoto Ueda" (a haiku)

Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin"

The Masterpiece of American Sentimentalism

"They Dream Only Of America" by John Ashbery

They dream only of America To be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass: "This honey is delicious Though it burns the throat."

Consider, you who peruse me, whether I may not in unknown ways be looking upon you....

Walt Whitman "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"

"Whut's de mattah, ol' satan, you aint kickin' up yo' racket?" She addressed the snake's box. Complete silence. She went on into the house with a new hope in its birth struggles. Perhaps her threat to go to the white folks had frightened Sykes! Perhaps he was sorry! Fifteen years of misery and suppression had brought Delia to the place where she would hope anything that looked towards a way over or through her wall of inhibitions.

Zora Neale Hurston "Sweat"

[Winterbourne] felt that he had lived at Geneva so long that he had lost a good deal; he had become dishabituated to the American tone.

estrangement in Daisy Miller

I think those young Italian aviators we met at the Embassy invited them to fly to Tarquinia for tea."

estrangement in Roman Fever

Never, indeed, since he had grown old enough to appreciate things, had he encountered a young American girl of so pronounced a type as this. Certainly she was very charming; but how deucedly sociable! Was she simply a pretty girl from New York State- were they all like that, the pretty girls who had a good deal of gentlemen's society? Or was she also a designing, an audacious, an unscrupulous young person? Winterbourne had lost his instinct in this matter, and his reason could not help him. Miss Daisy Miller looked extremely innocent. Some people had told him that, after all, American girls were exceedingly innocent; and others had told him that, after all, they were not. He was inclined to think Miss Daisy Miller was a flirt - a pretty American flirt. He had never, as yet, had any relations with young ladies of this category.

free indirect thought report

Frost's modernism

rejection of "poetic diction"; colloquial "plain" style

They were a fair type of nearly the lowest order of shop girls,—careless, rather slouchy, and more or less pale from confinement. They were not timid however, were rich in curiosity and strong in daring and slang.

social reality in Sister Carrie

Mark Twain "Huckleberry Finn"

"What's a feud?""Why, where was you raised? Don't you know what a feud is?" "Never heard of it before—tell me about it.""Well," says Buck, "a feud is this way: A man has a quarrel withanother man, and kills him; then that other man's brother kills him; then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another; then the cousins chip in—and by and by everybody's killed off, and there ain't no more feud. But it's kind of slow, and takes a long time."

sentimentalism

--literature designed to evoke feeling/emotion instead of rational judgement. The assumption is that responding emotionally/sympathetically to characters will make readers better people, and might even motivate them to take action to help others --often associated with women novelists, i.e. it is gendered

Reformists

-Booker T. Washington -Martin Luther King Jr.

What is realism "realistic" about?

-Everyday incidents (vs. "adventures") -The look of things: description -The sound of speech -The way we live now: social reality -Perspectivism

Cosmopolitans

-Henry James -Edith Wharton -Gertrude Stein -Ezra Pound -T.S. Eliot -Ernest Hemingway

Charlotte Perkins Gilman "The Yellow Wallpaper"

-Hypothesis 1: Supernatural horror -Hypothesis 2: Diary of a mad housewife -Hypothesis 3: Victim of patriarchy

Withholding of Information (secrets) in Roman Fever

-Mrs. Slade: "I know what was in that letter because I wrote it!" -Mrs. Ansley: "He was there .... I answered the letter. I told him I'd be there. So he came." -Mrs. Slade: "After all, I had everything;I had him for twenty-five years. And you had nothing but that one letter that he didn't write."

Kept their day jobs

-William Carlos Williams -Wallace Stevens

Anderson's modernism

-colloquial "plain" style, adapted from Huckleberry Finn -story-cycle structure of "Winesburg, Ohio", adapted from Joyce's "Dubliners"

avant-garde writing

-connotations: military, political -manifesto

How does Realism achieve effect of reality?

-expertise/local knowledge -estrangement

free indirect thought report

-narrator is describing someone's thoughts, but without directly quoting -one of the tools of stream of consciousness

free verse

-poetry lacking both regular meter and end-rhyme: unrhymed, unmetered -examples: Walk Whitman, Pound and the Imagists, T.S. Eliot

blank verse

-poetry that maintains a regular meter (iambic pentameter) but lacks end-rhyme -examples: Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Frost

Anderson's modernity

-themes of sexual repression and resistance to gender roles -modernization of small-town America

Glaspell's modernity

-traces of modernization: rural telephone service -women's situation in middle-class family; recall Gilman's "Yellow Wallpaper"

Varieties of English in "Huckleberry Finn"

1. Standard educated English. Ex: Sherburn's speech to the Lynch-mob, chapter XXII 2. Non-standard white English (in varying dosages) Ex: Huck's English 3. Black American English: Jim's English, and that of other slaves

How do you build a long(er) poem that still adheres to Imagist principles?

1. the collage method: juxtapose one image with another and another (ex: Wallace Steven's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird") 2. the narrative method: string images on a story-line (ex: T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock") 3. Both (ex: Eliot's "The Waste Land")

Some day there will be no war,Then I shall take out this afternoonAnd turn it in my fingers,And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate,And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves.To-day I can only gather itAnd put it into my lunch-box,For I have time for nothingBut the endeavour to balance myselfUpon a broken world.

Amy Lowell "September 1918"

This afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight;The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves;The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves,And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows.Under a tree in the park,Two little boys, lying flat on their faces,Were carefully gathering red berriesTo put in a pasteboard box.

Amy Lowell "September 1918"

To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race: "Cast down your bucket where you are." Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labour wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible ... the progress of the South. .... As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, nursing your children, watching by the sickbed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defence of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one. In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.

Booker T. Washington "Up from Slavery"

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.Shovel them under and let me work— I am the grass; I cover all.And pile them high at GettysburgAnd pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.Shovel them under and let me work.Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor: What place is this? Where are we now? I am the grass. Let me work.

Carl Sandburg "Grass"

If we must die, let it not be like hogsHunted and penned in an inglorious spot,While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,Making their mock at our accursèd lot.If we must die, O let us nobly die,So that our precious blood may not be shedIn vain; then even the monsters we defyShall be constrained to honor us though dead!O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!What though before us lies the open grave?Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Claude McKay "If We Must Die"

Applauding youths laughed with young prostitutesAnd watched her perfect, half-clothed body sway;Her voice was like the sound of blended flutesBlown by black players upon a picnic day.She sang and danced on gracefully and calm,The light gauze hanging loose about her form;To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palmGrown lovelier for passing through a storm.Upon her swarthy neck black, shiny curlsProfusely fell; and, tossing coins in praise,The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls,Devoured her with their eager, passionate gaze;But, looking at her falsely-smiling faceI knew her self was not in that strange place.

Claude McKay "The Harlem Dancer"

His spirit is smoke ascended to high heaven.His father, by the cruelest way of pain,Had bidden him to his bosom once again;The awful sin remained still unforgiven.All night a bright and solitary star(Perchance the one that ever guided him,Yet gave him up at last to Fate's wild whim)Hung pitifully o'er the swinging char.Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds came to viewThe ghastly body swaying in the sun:The women thronged to look, but never a oneShowed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue;And little lads, lynchers that were to be,Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.

Claude McKay "The Lynching"

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,And did He stoop to quibble could tell whyThe little buried mole continues blind, Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,Make plain the reason tortured TantalusIs baited by the fickle fruit, declare If merely brute caprice dooms SisyphusTo struggle up a never-ending stair. Inscrutable His ways are, and immune To catechism by a mind too strewn With petty cares to slightly understand What awful brain compels His awful hand. Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Countee Cullen "Yet Do I Marvel"

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,We people on the pavement looked at him:He was a gentleman from sole to crown,Clean favored, and imperially slim.And he was always quietly arrayed,And he was always human when he talked;But still he fluttered pulses when he said,"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—And admirably schooled in every grace:In fine, we thought that he was everythingTo make us wish that we were in his place.So on we worked, and waited for the light,And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,Went home and put a bullet through his head.

E.A. Robinson "Richard Cory"

First excerpt from "Huck Finn"

EXPLANATORY In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary "Pike County" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech. I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding. THE AUTHOR.

"I was just thinking ... what different things Rome stands for to each generation of travelers. To our grandmothers, Roman fever; to our mothers, sentimental dangers - how we used to be guarded! - to our daughters, no more dangers than the middle of Main Street."

Edith Wharton: Roman Fever

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn .... it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."

Ernest Hemingway

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn .... it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."

Ernest Hemingway "The Green Hills of Africa"

Why does Winterbourne have such a hard time "placing" Daisy Miller in society?

Estrangement. He has been away from America for so long, yet is still a foreigner in France, therefore he is out of his element and doesn't know where she belongs.

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman -I have detested you long enough.I come to you as a grown childWho has had a pig-headed father;I am old enough now to make friends.It was you that broke the new wood,Now is a time for carving.We have one sap and one root -Let there be commerce between us.

Ezra Pound "A Pact"

An 'Image' is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time .... It is the presentation of such a 'complex' instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.

Ezra Pound "A Retrospect"

In the spring or early summer of 1912, 'H.D.', Richard Aldington and myself decided that we were agreed upon the three principles following:1. Direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective.2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.3.As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.....

Ezra Pound "A Retrospect"

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.

Ezra Pound "In a Station of the Metro"

Realism is very excellent so far as it goes, but it goes no further than the Realist himself can actually see, or actually hear. Realism is minute; it is the drama of a broken teacup, the tragedy of a walk down the block, the excitement of an afternoon call, the adventure of an invitation to dinner. It is the visit to my neighbor's house, a formal visit, from which I may draw no conclusion. I see my neighbor and his friends - very, oh such very! probable people - and that is all. Realism ... says to me ... "That is life." And I say it is not.

Frank Norris "A Plea for Romantic Fiction"

He remembered the advice of the old-timer on Sulphur Creek, and he smiled. The old-timer had been very serious in laying down the law that no man must travel alone in the Klondike after fifty below. Well, here he was; he had had the accident; he was alone; and he had saved himself. Those old-timers were rather womanish, he thought. All a man had to do was to keep his head, and he was all right. Any man who was a man could travel alone. But it was surprising, the rapidity with which his cheeks and nose were freezing. And he had not thought his fingers could go lifeless in so short a time.

Free indirect thought report in Jack London's "To Build a Fire"

She could not begin to believe that she would take the [job], modest as her aspirations were. She had been used to better than that .... This place was grimy and low; the girls were careless and hardened. They must be bad-minded and -hearted, she imagined. Still a place had been offered her. Surely Chicago was not so bad if she could find one [job] in one day. She might find another and better later.

Free indirect thought report in Sister Carrie

Independently wealthy

Gertrude Stein

"We met Ezra Pound ... he came home to dinner with us and he stayed and he talked about Japanese prints among other things. Gertrude Stein liked him but did not find him amusing. She said he was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not. It was the first time any one had talked about T.S. Eliot at the house. Pretty soon everyone talked about T.S."

Gertrude Stein "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas"

Every one is one inside them, every one reminds some one of some other one who is or was or will be living. Every one has it to say of each one he is like such a one I see it in him, every one has it to say of each one she is like some one else I can tell by remembering. So it goes on always in living, every one is always remembering some one who is resembling to the one at whom they are then looking. So they go on repeating, every one is themselves inside them and every one is resembling to others, and that is always interesting. There are many ways of making kinds of men and women. In each way of making kinds of them there is a different system of finding them resembling. Sometime there will be here every way there can be of seeing kinds of men and women. Sometime there will be then a complete history of each one. Every one always is repeating the whole of them and so sometime some one who sees them will have a complete history of every one. Sometime some one will know all the ways there are for people to be resembling, some one sometime then will have a completed history of every one.

Gertrude Stein "The Making of Americans"

Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. "Stop!" cried the groaning old man at last, "Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree."

Gertrude Stein "The Making of Americans"

"Final Farewell" by Tom Clark

Great moment in Blade Runner where Roy Batty is expiring, and talks about how everything he's seen will die with him — ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, sea-beams glittering before the Tannhauser Gates.

Supported by others

H.D.

Whirl up, sea—whirl your pointed pines,splash your great pineson our rocks,hurl your green over us,cover us with your pools of fir.

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) "Oread"

"It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig," the man said. "It's not really an operation at all."The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on." I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig. It's really not anything. It's just to let the air in."The girl did not say anything."I'll go with you and I'll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it's all perfectly natural.""Then what will we do afterward?""We'll be fine afterward. Just like we were before.""What makes you think so?""That's the only thing that bothers us. It's the only thing that's made us unhappy."

Hemingway "Hills Like White Elephants"

The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid.

Hemingway "Hills Like White Elephants"

"Oh, blazes; it's har-r-d!" he exclaimed, pronouncing the adjective in a peculiar manner. Winterbourne had immediately perceived that he might have the honour of claiming him as a fellow-countryman.

Henry James: Daisy Miller

"Well, I guess you had better be quiet [.... ]I guess you have had enough candy, and mother thinks so too [....] "I guess my mother won't go, after all," she said. "She don't like to ride round in the afternoon."

Henry James: Daisy Miller

She was dressed in white muslin, with a hundred frills and flounces, and knots of pale-coloured ribbon. She was bare-headed; but she balanced in her hand a large parasol, with a deep border of embroidery; and she was strikingly, admirably pretty.[....] Winterbourne had not seen for a long time anything prettier than his fair countrywoman's various features- her complexion, her nose, her ears, her teeth. He had a great relish for feminine beauty: he was addicted to observing and analysing it; and as regards this young lady's face he made several observations. It was not at all insipid, but it was not exactly expressive; and though it was eminently delicate, Winterbourne mentally accused it - very forgivingly - of a want of finish.

Henry James: Daisy Miller

The child, who was diminutive for his years, had an aged expression of countenance, a pale complexion, and sharp little features. He was dressed in knickerbockers, with red stockings, which displayed his poor little spindleshanks; he also wore a brilliant red cravat. He carried in his hand a long alpenstock, the sharp point of which he thrust into everything that he approached - the flowerbeds, the garden-benches, the trains of the ladies' dresses.

Henry James: Daisy Miller

The shore of the lake presents an unbroken array of establishments of this order, of every category, from the "grand hotel" of the newest fashion, with a chalk-white front, a hundred balconies, and a dozen flags flying from its roof, to the little Swiss pension of an elder day, with its name inscribed in German-looking lettering upon a pink or yellow wall, and an awkward summer-house in the angle of the garden.

Henry James: Daisy Miller

It goes without saying that you will not write a good novel unless you possess the sense of reality; but it will be difficult to give you a recipe for calling that sense into being. Humanity is immense and reality has a myriad forms [...] It is equally excellent and inconclusive to say that one must write from experience [...]What kind of experience is intended, and where does it begin and end? Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative [...] it takes to itself the faintest hints of life

Henry James: The Art of Fiction

It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way; or if it be not an incident, I think it will be hard to say what it is [...] When a young man makes up his mind that he has not faith enough after all to enter the church as he intended, that is an incident, though you may not hurry to the end of the chapter to see whether perhaps he doesn't change once more. I do not say that these are extraordinary or startling incidents. I do not pretend to estimate the degree of interest proceeding from them, for this will depend upon the skill of the [writer] [...] the only classification of the novel that I can understand is into that which has life and that which has not.

Henry James: The Art of Fiction

She told him that they were going to Rome for the winter - she and her mother and Randolph. She asked him if he was a "real American"; she wouldn't have taken him for one; he seemed more like a German - this was said after a little hesitation, especially when he spoke. Winterbourne, laughing, answered that he had met Germans who spoke like Americans; but that he had not, so far as he remembered, met an American who spoke like a German. Then he asked her if she would not be more comfortable in sitting upon the bench which he had just quitted. She answered that she liked standing up and walking about; but she presently sat down. She told him she was from New York State - "if you know where that is."

Indirect speech report

picture if you can, this cream-colored solitary girl sitting at a tenement window looking down on the indifferent throngs of Harlem. Better that she listen to folk-songs by dusk in Georgia, you would say, and so would I. Or, suppose she came up North and married. Even a doctor or lawyer, say, one who would be sure to get along—that is make money .... See her out and out a prostitute along State Street in Chicago.

Jean Toomer "Fern" from Cane

Hair - braided chestnut,coiled like a lyncher's rope,Eyes - fagots,Lips - old scars, or the first red blisters,Breath - the last sweet scent of cane,And her slim body, white as the ash of black flesh after flame.

Jean Toomer "Portrait in Georgia"

Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts,Bootleggers in silken shirts,Ballooned, zooming Cadillacs,Whizzing, whizzing down the street-car tracks. Seventh Street is a bastard of Prohibition and the War. A crude-boned, soft-skinned wedge of n[...] life breathing its loafer air, jazz songs and love, thrusting unconscious rhythms, black reddish blood into the white and whitewashed wood of Washington. Stale soggy wood of Washington. Wedges rust in soggy wood. . . Split it! In two! Again! Shred it! . . the sun. Wedges are brilliant in the sun; ribbons of wet wood dry and blow away. Black reddish blood. Pouring for crude-boned soft-skinned life, who set you flowing? Blood suckers of the War would spin in a frenzy of dizziness if they drank your blood. Prohibition would put a stop to it. Who set you flowing? White and whitewash disappear in blood. Who set you flowing? Flowing down the smooth asphalt of Seventh Street, in shanties, brick office buildings, theaters, drug stores, restaurants, and cabarets? Eddying on the corners? Swirling like a blood-red smoke up where the buzzards fly in heaven? God would not dare to suck black red blood [...] He would duck his head in shame and call for the Judgement Day. Who set you flowing?

Jean Toomer "Seventh Street" from Cane

I, too, sing America.I am the darker brother.They send me to eat in the kitchenWhen company comes,But I laugh,And eat well,And grow strong.

Langston Hughes "I, Too"

I am ashamed for the black poet who says, "I want to be a poet, not a Negro poet," as though his own racial world were not as interesting as any other world. I am ashamed, too, for the colored artist who runs from the painting of Negro faces to the painting of sunsets after the manner of the academicians because he fears the strange unwhiteness of his own features. An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he must choose.

Langston Hughes "The Negro Artist and the Mountain"

One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, "I want to be a poet--not a Negro poet," meaning, I believe, "I want to write like a white poet"; meaning subconsciously, "I would like to be a white poet"; meaning behind that, "I would like to be white." And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet. But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America--this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.....

Langston Hughes "The Negro Artist and the Mountain"

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. [....] If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

Langston Hughes "The Negro Artist and the Mountain"

I've known rivers:I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.My soul has grown deep like the rivers.I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.I've known rivers:Ancient, dusky rivers.My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Langston Hughes "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, I heard a Negro play. Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light He did a lazy sway . . . He did a lazy sway . . . To the tune o' those Weary Blues. With his ebony hands on each ivory key He made that poor piano moan with melody. O Blues! Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool. Sweet Blues! Coming from a black man's soul. O Blues!

Langston Hughes "The Weary Blues"

In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan— "Ain't got nobody in all this world, Ain't got nobody but ma self. I's gwine to quit ma frownin' And put ma troubles on the shelf." Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor. He played a few chords then he sang some more— "I got the Weary Blues And I can't be satisfied. Got the Weary Blues And can't be satisfied— I ain't happy no mo' And I wish that I had died." And far into the night he crooned that tune. The stars went out and so did the moon. The singer stopped playing and went to bed While the Weary Blues echoed through his head. He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.

Langston Hughes "The Weary Blues"

Men & women are enemies, with the enmity of the exploited for the parasite, the parasite for the exploited - at present they are at the mercy of the advantage that each can take of the others sexual dependence—. The only point at which the interests of the sexes merge—is the sexual embrace.

Mina Loy "Feminist Manifesto"

They rose when she entered—a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand.

Modernism in "A Rose for Emily"

"The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,With conquering limbs astride from land to land;Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall standA mighty woman with a torch, whose flameIs the imprisoned lightning, and her nameMother of Exiles. From her beacon-handGlows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes commandThe air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame."Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries sheWith silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

We is gathahed hyeah, my brothahs,In di howlin' wildaness,Fu' to speak some words o comfo'tto each othah in distress.An' we choose fu' ouah subjic'Dis—-we'll 'splain it by an' by;"An' de Lawd said, "Moses, Moses,"An' de man said, Hyeah am I.'"Now ole Pher'oh, down in EgyptWas de wuss man evah bo'n,An' he had de Hebrew chillunDown dah wukin' in his co'n;'Twell de Lawd got tiahed o' his foolin',An' sez he: "I'll let him know'Look hyeah, Moses, go tell Pher'ohFu' to let dem chillun go."

Paul Laurence Dunbar "An Ante-Bellum Sermon"

We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask. We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask!

Paul Laurence Dunbar "We Wear the Mask"

"Eliot has actually trained himself AND modernized himself ON HIS OWN"

Pound to Harriet Monroe

Warren,' she said, 'he has come home to die:You needn't be afraid he'll leave you this time.''Home,' he mocked gently. 'Yes, what else but home?It all depends on what you mean by home.Of course he's nothing to us, any moreThan was the hound that came a stranger to usOut of the woods, worn out upon the trail.''Home is the place where, when you have to go there,They have to take you in.' 'I should have called itSomething you somehow haven't to deserve.'

Robert Frost "The Death of the Hired Man"

When she was ill and sat by the window in her room he sometimes went in the evening to make her a visit. They sat by a window that looked over the roof of a small frame building into Main Street. By turning their heads they could see through another window, along an alleyway that ran behind the Main Street stores and into the back door of Abner Groff's bakery. Sometimes as they sat thus a picture of village life presented itself to them. At the back door of his shop appeared Abner Groff with a stick or an empty milk bottle in his hand. For a long time there was a feud between the baker and a grey cat that belonged to Sylvester West, the druggist. The boy and his mother saw the cat creep into the door of the bakery and presently emerge followed by the baker, who swore and waved his arms about. The baker's eyes were small and red and his black hair and beard were filled with flour dust. Sometimes he was so angry that, although the cat had disappeared, he hurled sticks, bits of broken glass, and even some of the tools of his trade about. Once he broke a window at the back of Sinning's Hardware Store. In the alley the grey cat crouched behind barrels filled with torn paper and broken bottles above which flew a black swarm of flies. Once when she was alone, and after watching a prolonged and ineffectual outburst on the part of the baker, Elizabeth Willard put her head down on her long white hands and wept. After that she did not look along the alleyway any more, but tried to forget the contest between the bearded man and the cat. It seemed like a rehearsal of her own life, terrible in its vividness.

Sherwood Anderson "Mother"

"Poets, in our civilization as it exists at present, must be difficult"

T.S. Eliot

William Dean Howells: Editor's Study

Talks about a grasshopper and how it is pointless to describe a wire, or cardboard grasshopper. Says this is what romanticism writers are doing. They are just talking about something that isn't real enough, and you will never truly know what a grasshopper is like if we keep writing in this fashion.

"Wear do you want to go?" he inquired."I want to see the manager," she replied."Wot manager?" he returned, surveying her caustically."Is there more than one?" she asked. "I thought it was all one firm.""Naw," said the youth. "Der's six different people. Want to see Speigelheim?""I don't know," answered Carrie. She colored a little as she began to feel the necessity of explaining. "I want to see whoever put up that sign.""Dot's Speigelheim," said the boy. "Fort floor."

Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie

This man did not know cold. Possibly all the generations of his ancestry had been ignorant of cold, of real cold, of cold one hundred and seven degrees below freezing-point. But the dog knew; all its ancestry knew, and it had inherited the knowledge. And it knew that it was not good to walk abroad in such fearful cold.

Unseen forces in "To Build a Fire"

Carrie passed along the busy aisles, much affected by the remarkable displays of trinkets, dress goods, shoes, stationery, jewelry. Each separate counter was a show place of dazzling interest and attraction. She could not help feeling the claim of each trinket and valuable upon her personally and yet she did not stop. There was nothing there which she could not have used—nothing which she did not long to own. The dainty slippers and stockings, the delicately frilled skirts and petticoats, the laces, ribbons, hair-combs, purses, all touched her with individual desire, and she felt keenly the fact that not any of these things were in the range of her purchase.

Unseen forces in Sister Carrie

The city has its cunning wiles no less than the infinitely smaller and more human tempter. There are large forces which allure, with all the soulfulness of expression possible in the most cultured human. The gleam of a thousand lights is often as effective, to all moral intents and purposes, as the persuasive light in a wooing and fascinating eye. Half the undoing of the unsophisticated and natural mind is accomplished by forces wholly superhuman.

Unseen forces in Sister Carrie

"On or about December 1910, human character changed."

Virginia Woolf

"...the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line"

W.E.B. Du Bois

"the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line"

W.E.B. Du Bois

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, —a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—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.

W.E.B. Du Bois "The Souls of Black Folk"

Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people give up, at least for the present, three things,—First, political power,Second, insistence on civil rights,Third, higher education of Negro youth,—and concentrate all their energies on industrial education, and accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South. This policy has been courageously and insistently advocated for over fifteen years, and has been triumphant for perhaps ten years. As a result of this tender of the palm-branch, what has been the return? In these years there have occurred:1. The disfranchisement of the Negro.2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro.3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro.

W.E.B. Du Bois "The Souls of Black Folk"

it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt .... Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the worlds I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine.

W.E.B. Du Bois "The Souls of Black Folk"

on the whole the distinct impression left by Mr. Washington's propaganda is, first, that the South is justified in its present attitude toward the Negro because of the Negro's degradation; secondly, that the prime cause of the Negro's failure to rise more quickly is his wrong education in the past; and, thirdly, that his future rise depends primarily on his own efforts. Each of these propositions is a dangerous half-truth.

W.E.B. Du Bois "The Souls of Black Folk"

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh'd,Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried,Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick-stem'd pipes of steamboats, I look'd.

Walt Whitman "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"

I loved well those cities;I loved well the stately and rapid river;The men and women I saw were all near to me;Others the same—others who look back on me, because I look'd forward to them ....

Walt Whitman "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"

On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose;And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

Walt Whitman "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong, The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam, The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work, The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck, The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands, The wood-cutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown, The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing, Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else, The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly, Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

Walt Whitman "I Hear America Singing"

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.

William Carlos Williams "The Red Wheelbarrow"

The young writer who attempts to report the phrase and carriage of every-day life, who tries to tell just how he has heard men talk and seen them look, is made to feel guilty of something low and unworthy by the stupid people who would like to have him show how Shakespeare's men talked and looked, or [Sir Walter] Scott's, or [William Makepeace] Thackeray's, or [Honore de] Balzac's, or [Charles] Dickens's; he is instructed to idealize his personages, that is, to take the life-likeness out of them, and put the literary-likeness into them.

William Dean Howell's: Editor's Study

I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored.

Zora Neale Hurston "How It Feels To Be Colored Me"

when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen--follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop [....] I want to slaughter something--give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly."Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.Music! The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.

Zora Neale Hurston "How It Feels To Be Colored Me"

He allus wuz uh ovahbearin' n[...], but since dat white 'oman from up north done teached 'im how to run a automobile, he done got too biggety to live-an' we oughter kill 'im ....

Zora Neale Hurston "Sweat"

It was eleven o'clock of a Spring night in Florida. It was Sunday. Any other night, Delia Jones would have been in bed for two hours by this time. But she was a wash-woman, and Monday morning meant a great deal to her. So she collected the soiled clothes on Saturday when she returned the clean things. Sunday night after church, she sorted them and put the white things to soak. It saved her almost a half day's start. A great hamper in the bedroom held the clothes that she brought home. It was so much neater than a number of bundles lying around.

Zora Neale Hurston "Sweat"

haiku

a form adapted from Japanese: three-lined poem, unrhymed, 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables

The Hemingway style

abrupt beginning, minimal exposition; the reader fills the gaps by inference

Charles Chesnutt "The Wife of His Youth"

around the edges of her bonnet could be seen protruding here and there a tuft of short gray wool. She wore a blue calico gown of ancient cut, a little red shawl fastened around her shoulders with an old-fashioned brass brooch, and a large bonnet profusely ornamented with faded red and yellow artificial flowers. And she was very black,so black that her toothless gums, revealed when she opened her mouth to speak, were not red, but blue. She looked like a bit of the old plantation life, summoned up from the past by the wave of a magician's wand ...

Daisy's grave was in the little Protestant cemetery, in an angle of the wall of imperial Rome, beneath the cypresses and the thick spring flowers. Winterbourne stood there beside it, with a number of other mourners [....] he stood staring at the raw protuberance among the April daisies.

beyond social reality: the REALLY real...Winterbourne is looking at Daisy's grave and still cannot seem to place her

indirect speech report

by a third person narrator (more of a summary)

literary allusion

cross-referring to another text, and inviting the reader to bring relevant information from that other text to bear on THIS text Think: clicking on a link

irony

disparity between what is apparently meant and what is really meant...in the case of Huckleberry Finn, disparity between Huck's (and Buck's) judgement and Mark Twain's (and our) judgement

ANYTHING WITH WEIRD LOWER CASE LETTERS AND STRANGE SPACING

e.e. Cummings.

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

e.e. cummings

William Dean Howells

editor of the Atlantic Monthly; was the gatekeeper for realists such as Mark Twain, Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, and Paul Laurence Dunbar

[Winterbourne to Mrs. Costello, chapter IV]"You were right in that remark that you made last summer. I was booked to make a mistake. I have lived too long in foreign parts."

estrangement in Daisy Miller

She declared that the hotels were very good, when once you got used to their ways, and that Europe was perfectly sweet. She was not disappointed -- not a bit. Perhaps it was because she had heard so much about it before. She had ever so many intimate friends that had been there ever so many times. And then she had had ever so many dresses and things from Paris. Whenever she put on a Paris dress she felt as if she were in Europe.

free indirect speech report

Charles Chesnutt "The Wife of His Youth"

her face was crossed and recrossed with a thousand wrinkles, and around the edges of her bonnet could be seen protruding here and there a tuft of short gray wool. She wore a blue calico gown of ancient cut, a little red shawl fastened around her shoulders with an old-fashioned brass brooch, and a large bonnet profusely ornamented with faded red and yellow artificial flowers. And she was very black,so black that her toothless gums, revealed when she opened her mouth to speak, were not red, but blue.

free indirect speech report

in between direct quotations and simply indirectly reporting it

Glaspell's modernism

indirection; information withheld; recall Wharton's "Roman Fever"

Three years ago in Paris I got out of a "metro" train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion.

inspiration for Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro"

estrangement

making everyday experience interesting and visible (palpable) again, rescuing it from habit, by presenting it strangely: e.g., Tolstoy's story from the perspective of a horse

It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps—an eyesore among eyesores.

modernity in "A Rose for Emily"

In her girlhood and before her marriage with Tom Willard, Elizabeth had borne a somewhat shaky reputation in Winesburg. For years she had been what is called "stage-struck" and had paraded through the streets with traveling men guests at her father's hotel, wearing loud clothes and urging them to tell her of life in the cities out of which they had come. Once she startled the town by putting on men's clothes and riding a bicycle down Main Street. In her own mind the tall dark girl had been in those days much confused. A great restlessness was in her ....

modernity in Sherwood Anderson's "Mother"

Peyton Fahrquhar as a narrator

perspectivism in "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"...psychological realism...not a reliable narrator because he actually dies but it leads us on making us think he's actually still alive...the reader-trap sprung

So these two ladies visualized each other, each through the wrong end of her little telescope.

perspectivism in Edith Wharton's Roman Fever

There was much more passing now than the mere words indicated. He recognized the indescribable thing that made for fascination and beauty in her. She realized that she was of interest to him from the one standpoint which a woman both delights in and fears .... Here were these two, bandying little phrases ... both unconscious of how inarticulate all their real feelings were. Neither was wise enough to be sure of the working of the mind of the other. He could not tell how his luring succeeded. She could not realize that she was drifting, until he secured her address. Now she felt that she had yielded something—he, that he had gained a victory.

perspectivism in Sister Carrie

the man dropped into what seemed to him the most comfortable and satisfying sleep he had ever known. The dog sat facing him and waiting. The brief day drew to a close in a long, slow twilight. There were no signs of a fire to be made, and besides, never in the dog's experience had it known a man to sit like that in the snow and make no fire. As the twilight drew on, its eager longing for the fire mastered it, and with a great lifting and shifting forefeet, it whined softly, then flattened its ears down in anticipation of being chidden by the man. But the man remained silent. Later, the dog whined loudly. And still later it crept close to the man and caught the scent of death. This made the animal bristle and back away. A little longer it delayed, howling under the stars that leaped and danced and shone brightly in the cold sky. Then it turned and trotted up the trail in the direction of the camp it knew, where there were the other food-providers and fire-providers.

perspectivism in To Build a Fire

Here was a type of the traveling canvasser [salesman] for a manufacturing house—a class which at that time was first being dubbed by the slang of the day "drummers." He came within the meaning of a still newer term which had sprung into general use among Americans in 1880, and which concisely expressed the thought of one whose dress or manners are such as to impress strongly the fancy, or elicit the admiration, of susceptible young women—a "masher."

social reality in Sister Carrie

manifesto

statement of a group's intentions, motives, program, plans ex: Marx and Engel's "Communist Manifesto"

modernity

the new conditions of modern experience that the new techniques were developed to express, the WHAT of modern writing

modernism

the new techniques developed to express the experience of the modern era; the HOW of modern writing

eye-dialect

w'en, wuz, b'long, w'ite, etc