Modern American Literature

Junot Díaz

"Drown" by Junot Díaz is a great example of the kind of work being done by many short fiction writers today. Díaz focuses a lot of his narrative energy on describing the setting and developing the characters. As far as plot goes, however, "Drown" doesn't seem to follow a conventional narrative arc with exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. Indeed, the consistently flat tone of the narrator throughout the story seems designed to work against plot development of any kind as he presents everything that happens to him with the same steady gaze, whether it's meeting with an army recruiter or talking with his mother about his relationship with his estranged father. What's Díaz up to? Is he deliberately avoiding the narrative ups and downs that we have come to expect from a work of fiction, or is he just asking us to work a bit harder to identify the high and low points of the narrator's experience?

Sam Shepherd

Ah, it's a jungle out there—or in the case of True West, it's a desert, with predatory coyote packs ready to pounce in the dark. Sam Shepard and David Mamet pioneered a tough-guy school of playwriting, featuring desperate men, blunt harsh language, and struggles for power, money, sexual dominance, the dynamics of a baboon troop in a postmodern and supposedly civilized setting. Because there are many recent films which explore (or exploit) similar themes—by Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, and Shepard and Mamet as well—your students may feel that they are on familiar ground here, and part of the challenge of teaching True West is de-familiarizing the play, discovering its variations from this pop culture mode. If you have been doing a chronological course and have spent some time with literary naturalism at the turn of the twentieth century, you may have another initial point of reference, and possibly a stronger one, than the contemporary context. Literary historians like to arrange modes and movements and to assign them beginning dates and endings; but if your students remember an experience with Norris, Crane, Dreiser, Jack London, or other "golden age" American naturalists, you could begin by asking them about naturalism's return and the tonal and thematic kinship of Shepard and Mamet to work from a century ago. But like the insistent stage directions for True West, the play's adornments of hard-core authenticity could be a deception or an enigmatic map for finding a different kind of "truth"—a psychological wilderness within one man's mind. Part of the fun of teaching the play, in other words, comes from raising the question of whether Lee and Saul and the returning mother are "really" there at all or only the figments of Austin's lonely and troubled imagination.

John Berryman

Berryman and Sexton are key figures in the mode loosely described as "confessional" or "confessionalist"; their poems often present painful personal experience and psychological responses emanating from and relating chiefly to their private lives. Many students probably think that all poetry is, by definition, intimate and confessional. (Those among them who write poetry may have their own stash of works hidden from prying eyes in a secret file on a hard drive or in a closely guarded notebook.) Discuss with students that the notion of poetry as a confessional act has a relatively recent history—Emerson thought of the poet as bard, speaker for a tribe or nation, at the same time that Emily Dickinson was writing well over a thousand poems that would never be published in her lifetime—as a way of helping them see how poets like Berryman and Sexton contributed to a definition of poetry that they have come to accept as a given.

Sandra Cisneros

Born and raised in a large family in Chicago, and with American academic training, Cisneros writes in English for an English-speaking audience about a way of life that is in some ways between worlds: the experience of growing up Hispanic in various places in North America. She commonly writes from deep within that world, within the consciousness of her protagonist, whose sensory experiences and quick cultural and psychological responses and clauses can convey (at the outset) a sense that she does not really understand her own cultural situation. Cleofilas is a young woman in a small town—in Mexico, somewhere close to the Texas border, and she has lived her life in two "villages of gossips," small towns defined by disappointment: dull, low-paying jobs, exploitive, overbearing men, and the constrictions of a daily experience in which everyone's business is known by everyone else. How, then, does Cisneros's story become a document in the cultural history of the United States? We can put that large issue before a class at the outset and ask other, more manageable questions to get a grip on it.

Tracy K. Smith

Smith is a poet of tremendous range. The few brief selections new to the Ninth Edition of NAAL cover themes related to religion, illegal immigration, violence in the third world, alien life forms, and interplanetary travel. The best guide through this diverse spectrum of poems might be the concluding stanzas of the poem "Thirst," which ask over and over again how the poet will make sense of her recent experiences ("Maybe this is a story / About . . ." and "Or maybe it's a story about . . ."). Like Emily Dickinson before her, Smith is observant, attentive, and inquisitive. As she surveys the world around her, she invites us to ask what stories could be told out of the raw poetic material that she supplies us with.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Students who have been moving through the fiction chronologically, worrying over the symbolic dimensions or pretensions of various writers before this point, may panic when they get to this story, so it's a very good idea to try to relax them and suggest that "Schrödinger's Cat" may be a tale about not knowing rather than a story with all sorts of concealed profundities. Le Guin is writing about a paradox that shadows the life not only of the writer interested in science, science fiction, and fantasy but of any sentient person who tries to understand worldly experience: that there are powerful and seductive theories out there that are imaginatively almost ungraspable or that threaten to overthrow or render absurd any attempt to make sense of our own situation. The story is in some ways about quantum physics, a body of thought that most of us outside that discipline do not understand at any level beyond the superficial. The story is about that puzzlement, about what can happen to our imaginative life when we try to grasp the principles of uncertainty, of the inherent instability or contingency of what (for several centuries) we had taken (again, perhaps without much real understanding) as the fixed laws by which the universe operates. Nonetheless, this story (as well as the other Le Guin selection, "She Unnames Them") seems lighthearted, playful: this is not a portentous alle- gory but something like a giddy hallucination or reverie of a sort that an informed modern consciousness might undergo in a hypnogogic state or a daydream. You might ask students to toy with and analyze the first long paragraph. What is the tone? What kinds of expectations are set up in this moment? What kinds of expectations and readerly habits do we need to drop to move on into the story? If students seem tense, draw them into a recognition that they deal with surrealism, crazy visual situations, and nar- rative discontinuities all the time: in rock videos and in big-budget films that they queue up to see on summer weekends. If they can surrender their interpretive anxieties in those situations, then why not here? The answer, of course, is that when a narrative moves into a classroom or an anthology, it becomes a "text," and what would beguile and amuse before becomes threatening now. That's an idea very much worth developing in regard to Le Guin and many other texts that you have been encountering this semester.

Modernism

T.S. Eliot Ezra Pound Gertrude Stein William Carlos Williams Wallace Stevens Marianne Moore F. Scott Fitzgerald Eugene O'Neill Ernest Hemingway (Naturalism) William Faulkner (Naturalism) Claude McKay (Harlem Renaissance) Langston Hughes (Harlem Renaissance) Zora Neal Hurston (Harlem Renaissance) Modernists experimented with literary form and expression, adhering to Ezra Pound's maxim to "Make it new." This literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of their time. Initially, some modernists fostered a utopian spirit, stimulated by innovations in anthropology, psychology, philosophy, political theory, physics and psychoanalysis. The poets of the Imagist movement, founded by Ezra Pound in 1912 as a new poetic style, gave Modernism its early start in the 20th century, and were characterized by a poetry that favoured a precision of imagery, brevity and free verse. This idealism, however, ended with the outbreak of World War I, and writers created more cynical works that reflected a prevailing sense of disillusionment. Many modernist writers also shared a mistrust of institutions of power such as government and religion, and rejected the notion of absolute truths. Early modernist writers, especially those writing after World War I and the disillusionment that followed, broke the implicit contract with the general public that artists were the reliable interpreters and representatives of mainstream ("bourgeois") culture and ideas, and, instead, developed unreliable narrators, exposing the irrationality at the roots of a supposedly rational world. They also attempted to take into account changing ideas about reality developed by Darwin, Mach, Freud, Einstein, Nietzsche, Bergson and others. From this developed innovative literary techniques such as stream-of-consciousness, interior monologue, as well as the use of multiple points-of-view. This can reflect doubts about the philosophical basis of realism, or alternatively an expansion of our understanding of what is meant by realism. For example, the use of stream-of-consciousness or interior monologue reflects the need for greater psychological realism. Modernist works such as T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) were increasingly self-aware, introspective, and explored the darker aspects of human nature. Jo Handout: Master Narratives and metanarratives of history, culture, and national identity as accepted before WWII (American-European myths of progress). Myths of cultural and ethnic origin accepted as received. Progress accepted as driving force behind history. (Early modernists) Faith in "Grand Theory" (totalizing explanations in history, science, and culture) to represent all knowledge and explain everything. (Again, early) Faith in, and myths of, social and cultural unity, hierarchies of social-class and ethnic/national values, seemingly clear bases of unity. (Early) Sense of unified, centered self; "individualism," unified identity. Idea of "the family" as central unit of social order: model of the middle-class, nuclear family. Heterosexual norms. (Willa Cather, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Eugene O'Neill) Faith and personal investment in big politics (Nation-state, party). Root/Depth trops. Faith in "Depth" (meaning, value, content, the signified) over "Surface" (appearances, the superficial, the signifier). Crisis in representation and status of the image after photography and mass media (Nathanael West, Day of the Locust) Faith in the "real" beyond media, language, symbols, and representations; authenticity of "originals." Dichotomy of high and low culture (official vs. popular culture). Imposed consensus that high or official culture is normative and authoritative, the ground of value and discrimination. Mass culture, mass consumption, mass marketing. Art as unique object and finished work authenticated by artist and validated by agreed upon standards. Centering/centeredness, centralized knowledge and authority. Determiacy, dependence, hierarchy. Seriousness of intention and purpose, middle-class earnestness. Phallic ordering of sexual difference, unified sexualities, exclusion/bracketing of pornography.

Li- Young Lee

Thanks to the popularity of haiku as a poetic form (and writer workshop exercise) through much of the past century, and of Japanese and Chinese prints as both art and decor in American galleries and hallways, Asian American poets such as Lee may be linked, fairly or otherwise, to a tradition that is both a treasure and a burden. Use this complex relationship to haiku form to navigate Lee's poetry.

Rita Dove

The headnote for Dove suggests connections to the early work of Bishop, a poet known for meticulousness, craft, and an unsettling mix of detachment and passionate engagement in regard to her subjects. Students might want to compare "Rosa" to others works in which a poet imagines a figure from history—for instance, Kinnell on St. Francis, Sexton on Plath, Robert Lowell on Jonathan Edwards, or Harper on Charlie Parker.

Jhumpa Lahiri

"Sexy" is an easy and enjoyable work of postmodern fusion—not only of East and West but also of the literary and the pop. Very quickly your students will figure out where they are, at least with regard to the mass-culture cousins of this story. Young women working in urban settings far away from home; chance encounters with enigmatic dark men and subsequent affairs, equally enigmatic; secrets in the cubicle next to you at the office; precocious children who spill the beans on the love life of parents—the lineaments of "Sexy" will recall, for your students, television shows like Sex in the City and Desperate Housewives, or telenovelas on Spanish-language cable channels, or any number of soaps and romance novels about love in the metropolis. You might want to air these connections early in the discussion, to assure that your group understands that you're not wonderstruck by tropes and archetypes that they encounter out of class all the time, and to build a firm footing for launching into Lahiri's variations on standard themes. Good questions can put the story into bold relief against this background.

Edward P. Jones

"The First Day" comes from a collection of short stories about Jones's hometown, Washington, D.C. Your students may know D.C. only as the nation's capital or as the home of the Smithsonian museums, but for Jones it is an African American city, and he is deeply invested in exploring the lives of its citizens. (The Library of Congress guide to digital materials about Washington, D.C. could help your students get to know the city beyond its government affiliations: www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/states/dc/home.html. Explain to them—or have them do a little research of their own into—the culture and demographics of northeast, northwest, and southeast D.C.) Have your students read "The First Day" with a map (either digital or hard- copy) in hand, and ask them to trace out the journey that the narrator takes beginning at her home at 1227 New Jersey Avenue and continuing as she and her mother "cross New York Avenue, we cross Pierce Street" and so on until they arrive at the Seaton Elementary School across from Mt. Carmel Baptist Church. You'll notice that Jones is fudging a bit on the geography, which will be worth a conversation: Why is it important that the school be across from the church? What is Jones trying to suggest about the lived geography of the city? You may want to ask your students to draw maps of their own neighborhoods, and to write (or talk) about their own first days at school as young children. Jones's story does an excellent job of capturing the wide-eyed experience of childhood, and anything you can do to help your students to recover that feeling from their own lives will help to immerse them into the narrative. Some of your students may have had a similar experience to that of the narrator of "The First Day": their street address may have excluded them from enrollment at one of the better public schools in their area. Some of your students may never have thought twice about how they ended up at the schools where they spent their formative years. Use those experiences— whatever they may be—to highlight the shock of realization at the heart of this story that serves to transform the narrator's life in subtle but meaningful ways. After they read the story, ask your students if they noticed that Jones gave away this conclusion in the first sentence: "On an otherwise unremarkable September morning, long before I learned to be ashamed of my mother, she takes my hand and we set off down New Jersey Avenue to begin my very first day of school" (emphasis added). Have your students identify those moments in the story when the narrator learns to be ashamed of her mother. What are the small moments that diminish her mother in her eyes? How does the mother retain her strength and authority? What larger historical forces are buried in this small, intimate account of a child's first day at school, and what clues does Jones leave of those forces?

Gwendolyn Brooks

"We Real Cool" To say that Gwendolyn Brooks has a unique voice is a bit of an understatement: she has several unique voices, and an uncanny ability to choose which is most appropriate for a given work. Despite being the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize and a former poet laureate, Brooks can nevertheless seem like a defiant outsider. Students may be drawn to the outsider persona of Brooks's poetry, or be put off by it. A good place to start a discussion of Brooks's poetry would be "We Real Cool," a deceptively simple poem about a group of pool players gathered at a local hangout whose tough-guy persona—they boast about dropping out of school, staying out late, and celebrating a life of sin—is undercut by a self-awareness that their self-destructive behavior will lead to an early death. Begin by discussing the hyperformal quality of the poem: the tight, controlled rhyme; and the identical pattern of the stanzas. Then talk about the oddity of Brooks's use of the line breaks to split all but one sentence in an unconventional way (i.e., instead of "We left school / We lurk late." it is "We / Left school. We / Lurk late. We"). Why does she do this? What is the effect? When she read the work at poetry readings, Brooks would often whisper or swallow the "We" at the end of each line. (The Academy of American Poets includes an audio clip of Brooks reading and explaining the poem: www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15433.) Does this oral performance shape the poem differently from its appearance on the page? Does it change the meaning at all? After introducing students to Brooks's subtlety and skill in "We Real Cool," you can turn to poems with more challenging subject matter: "the mother" is about abortion; "The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmet Till" is about a lynching; and "the white troops had their orders but the Negroes looked like men" is about police brutality. Brooks's subtlety is on display in these longer, more difficult poems as well, and students should look for the same attention to form, rhythm, sound, and word choice that is in "We Real Cool."

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)

(1886- 1961) "Helen" Imagism--compare her work with that of Amy Lowell, Williams, and Pound. Explore H.D.'s sense of herself as a woman writing about female confinement, specifically the woman writer's entrapment within male literary conventions, as well as her search for images of female divinity and prophecy. (cf. Amy Lowell)

John Dos Passos

(1896- 1970) U.S.A Stylistically, Dos Passos's U.S.A. is a prose equivalent of Eliot's The Waste Land: fragments of cultural detritus are amassed in an effort to make sense of a rapidly changing world. Politically, however, U.S.A. differs significantly from The Waste Land. Whereas Eliot sought refuge in the rejuvenating powers of ancient cultures and religions, Dos Passos was a committed reformer who believed in the power of literature to call attention to—and, ultimately, transform—social ills.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

(1896- 1940) The Great Gatsby Students who have read The Great Gatsby will sense that in some ways "Winter Dreams" is a compact version of Fitzgerald's most famous novel, and that obsessions and mixed emotions that characterize Nick Carraway are also present here, in Dexter Green and the nameless narrator, who often sounds like Nick in his uncanny mix of adulation and contempt for what he sees in the world of the rich and the glamorous. To start the conversation a bit enigmatically and get the students to look at Fitzgerald from fresh perspectives, you could put two famous epigrams on the board. One from Nietzsche: In the end one loves one's desire, not the thing desired. and one from Oscar Wilde: There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. Some students will recall moments in The Great Gatsby that resonate strongly with "Winter Dreams"—the moments where Nick imagines Gatsby acquiring Daisy after so much longing and feels regret and a measure of disappointment that the quest is now over. Nick himself, as the narrator of Gatsby, has similar moments with Jordan Baker: his desire for her rises when she moves out of his reach. All of which can lead up to a more complex conversation about the narrator of "Winter Dreams" and his unsteady empathy with Dexter Green. There are moments when this narrator seems superior to and dismissive of this Black Bear Lake world of golf and fashion and money and a bit contemptuous of young Dexter for falling for it. At other times, however, the narration seems as breathlessly credulous as Dexter does. Or else it seems to present a strange commingling of the two sentiments, the wonder and the contempt. "Babylon Revisited" comes from an array of stories about men and women who have made it, people who have lived beyond the year or two of glory that Gatsby achieved before he died, perhaps mercifully, in his own West Egg swimming pool. These are stories of people who move unhappily through glorious locales: the Riviera and Paris, the comfortable private places in midtown Manhattan, the exclusive resorts of Switzerland. An opening topic for your class: discuss the differences between this kind of story and the modern trash novel, the kind sold in drugstores or beach-supply shops, about the woes of being a supermodel, a Hollywood sex symbol, a magnate in fashion or the perfume trade. If students hesitate, you might grab a paragraph or two and suggest the difference: no matter how dissipated or dislikable the Fitzgerald protagonist or how unsympathetic—or voyeuristic—we might feel toward the general situation that the story offers us, there are gorgeously phrased moments of insight about human nature, the mingled emotions of going back and coming home, the internal conflicts of wanting and not wanting in the same instant. As flush times and bad times come and go, Fitzgerald's reputation will have to rely on his prose to carry him through, and with the sound and pace and agility of his prose your discussion can begin and end.

Tennessee Williams

(1911-1983) The loss of "Belle Reve" seems to establish the tarnished American Dream as one of Williams's central themes in A Streetcar Named Desire. Some students may see Blanche DuBois as a conventional symbol for the loss of that dream: as an unmarried, aging belle, she worries about her clothes, her appearance, and her ability to attract men and uses alcohol to ease her loneliness. But is the loss of desirability, or desire itself, the play's subject? Does Blanche want to find an object for her desire or to be a desired object? Williams might have made desire itself a symbol; instead, throughout the play, he focuses on explicit sexuality. What particular scenes define desire as sexual in the play? Ask students to discuss in particular the relationship between Stanley and Stella. Their attraction for each other is sexual, and most students will equate sexuality with heterosexuality and, as it is presented in this play, with a hierarchy of physical dominance (the men in the play, especially Stanley, use physical abuse as part of sexual power; see Stanley's comment to Blanche, " 'Oh! So you want some roughhouse!' "). But this play revolves around that moment in Blanche's past when she married a "young boy" who tried to find "help" in Blanche for his homosexuality. When she discovers him with "an older man who had been his friend for years" and that day tells him how much he disgusts her, he blows his head off. For most students, presuming that heterosexuality is "normal" and homosexuality "deviant," this moment will establish Blanche's tragedy as a conventional one—she has loved young and lost—and the moment in which homosexuality enters the play will quickly recede. Raise the possibility that from this moment on, Blanche's sexual identity becomes ambiguous, despite the fact that Williams has made her a woman in the play, and suggest also that although Stanley and Stella both seem secure in their gender identities, their very insistence on continuing to reaffirm their sexual relationship by means of violence—thereby asserting Stanley's "manhood" and Stella's "womanliness"—begins to raise the question of the origins of gender determination as well. What would it mean to say that Blanche's sexual identity becomes ambiguous in the play? Near the end she tells Mitch, "I don't want realism. I want magic! . . . I don't tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth." What are Blanche's props for her "magic"? Ask someone to study her array of furs, costumes, jewelry, and perfume in the play; she wears all of the trappings of gendered femininity, like the legendary Mae West (the statuette Mitch wins for Blanche at the amusement park). But her success in establishing her appearance depends on her avoiding the sun and even electric light. Without the costumes, who would Blanche be? What would it mean to call her a "woman"? And who are her consistent objects of desire? Williams is exploring the way female identity is made, not born. Ask students to think about Stanley's response to Blanche. What motivates Stanley to rape her? What does she represent that makes him want to humiliate her? Blanche sees Stanley—with his phallic "genius"—as subhuman; Stanley sees Blanche as undermining his control over Stella ("You remember the way that it was? Them nights we had together? God, honey, it's gonna be sweet when we can make noise in the night the way that we used to and get the colored lights going with nobody's sister behind the curtains to hear us!" But Stanley is also acting out of a variation on homophobia—or is homophobia a variation on misogyny? Stanley hates Blanche because she insists on wearing women's costumes and yet refuses to define herself as degenerate or to excuse her sister for her submission to Stanley. In raping Blanche, he is raping the wearing of women's costumes, the flaunting of sexuality by women (or by men who refuse to be "phallic"). No wonder that Stella tells Eunice, "I couldn't believe her story and go on living with Stanley." The sexual "stories" Blanche and Stanley tell totally contradict each other. Blanche exhibits desire without violence; Stanley achieves his through violence and humiliation. Ask students to talk about Stella's grief at the end of the play: "What have I done to my sister?" How has she betrayed Blanche? Has she also betrayed herself? In what version of sexual desire does the "truth" lie? The play ends with Stanley and Stella, having eliminated Blanche from their world, returning to their hierarchical heterosexual roles: Stella weeps in luxurious abandon, Stanley unbuttons her blouse. Is this desire? Or a more destructive lie than Blanche's "magic"?

Bernard Malamud

(1914-1986) "The Magic Barrel" works well with Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire because there are similarities between the works that help students formulate their questions. Salzman's idea of paradise is to find a good woman for Leo, the rabbinical student, and to keep Leo away from his own daughter, Stella, a "fallen woman." (Is Williams's Stella also "fallen"?) When Leo falls in love with Stella's picture and arranges to meet her at the end of the story, Malamud depicts their meeting in "fallen" terms: Stella is dressed like a streetwalker, Leo runs forward "with flowers outthrust" (or as if he and Salzman had exchanged places, and Leo is now a cupid or the FTD florist's winged messenger bearing flowers), and Salzman, convinced that there is no good man, chants prayers for the dead. But Leo pictures in Stella "his own redemption," and Malamud suggests that although Leo becomes less than a rabbi by the end of the story, he becomes consequently more of a man, more of a human being. Simply loving, in this story, does recreate Paradise because it makes it possible, once again, for Leo to love God—and even to create God in a human image. In Malamud's terms, Leo's love for the fallen Stella makes him a good man, and although Salzman mourns, the story has a happy ending. Less is more for Leo. As he becomes the "diminished thing" in Salzman's eyes, he is more capable of human love. In short, this is a parable, and students will enjoy speculating on Malamud's connections to some of the oldest kinds of storytelling in the Western tradition.

Saul Bellow

(1915-2005) One of a handful of American Nobel Prize winners, Bellow had a reputation for being dauntingly intellectual: in a Bellow story, one ordinary-looking man, not especially successful or even known, walking down one New York street on one ordinary day will open up as a cosmos, an inner world where Conrad, Marx, Hegel, Henry James, Condorcet, and a mob of other thinkers and public and private personalities will riot and conjoin in amazing thought patterns. The worst and saddest mistake to make in reading Bellow, or in presenting him to a college class, is to take cadenzas of this kind as some sort of showing off, for usually the opposite is true: throughout his career, Bellow wrote good-natured, human satires about the seductions of the intellect, how we hunger to know so much, and how little good it does in handling the streets of modern America or the big questions about the human condition. At the end of his most celebrated novel, Herzog, a compulsive professorial letter writer, arguer, and last-word seeker decides to just shut up and not even tell his cleaning lady what to do; other Bellow heroes resort ultimately to one sort of silence or another, yet rarely is it a silence of defeat or of contempt for other human beings. James's old adage, that literature is a celebration of life, is strong throughout the Bellow canon. The Adventures of Augie March is in some ways an attempt to refresh and modernize the picaresque novel, a mode that flourished in England in the eighteenth century and that was epitomized, in American literature, by Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. These loosely plotted narratives offer a different sort of suspense: will the protagonist or the teller of the story (frequently they are one and the same) succeed in constructing a coherent identity out of a hodgepodge of experience—personal adventures and mischief, encounters with others, and a jumbled and miscellaneous cultural legacy—and achieve some manner of wisdom? The voice of a memorable picaresque narrator is often a blending. To help students get a feel for Bellow's rhetorical style and for the plot or "suspense" in Augie's memoir, ask them to read a couple of paragraphs aloud, with special sensitivity to the voice they hear on the page, to peculiarities in the structure of sentences, and to surprising allusions and juxtapositions. What are the effects, for example, of referring to Heraclitus in the second sentence of a personal account and to a grandmother's overfed "wind-breaking" poodle on the same page? Of mixing Tom Brown's School Days, a Victorian Anglo-Saxon popular novel and something of a classic, with outbursts of Yiddish and secondhand accounts of an old lady getting a set of false teeth?

Gary Snyder

As contemporary poets with a special interest in the natural world, Kinnell and Snyder share connections with the open-form experimentation of Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, and various "naked poetry" schools and movements from the 1960s on. They are poets with a sense of humor. While Snyder's poems often echo strongly with theology and aesthetics drawn from Zen and classical Japanese culture, Kinnell's work recalls pastoral poets of his New England and figures and tropes from the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Donald Barthelme

Before you launch into Barthelme, you might encourage students not to feel frustrated if they don't see some special significance in "The Balloon" or sense that the narrator has a palpable emotional stake in the telling of the story. The voice here is classic Barthelme, and times change. Barthleme's heyday was during the period of happenings, put-ons, and general resistance to notions that logic, literary and artistic conventions, official analyses and histories, and other attempts to guide cultural con- duct or individual thought were really worth anyone's time. In the history of the modern short story, overtly engaged tellers are a strong tradition, running back to Wharton. In the works of fiction by Fitzgerald, Ellison, Malamud, Bellow, Baldwin, Paley, and others, we can imagine the narra- tor as passionately engaged in an act of remembrance, a variant of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, telling the tale because he or she is compelled to do so. Against this tradition of passionate engagement, Vonnegut and Barthelme offer resistance, and in that sometimes overheated context, the drably objective voice of "The Balloon" may seem radical or refreshing. There is a tradition behind that too: some of your students may recall Mersault in Camus's The Stranger or the voice in Samuel Beckett's Malloy or some of the postwar essays and plays of Jean-Paul Sartre. As in those earlier texts, the mood of Barthelme's tale is unsettling not because of what happens (which is not much) but the matter-of-fact way in which those events are received and remembered. Your students may want to know right away what you think the balloon signifies or argue the matter among themselves—but it might be well to duck that question for a while and attend first to the style of this narrative. If you have been suggesting that hearing a work, apprehending a tone, is very important to opening its meaning, this is a good place to try out that principle. Ask a student to read a bit of "The Balloon" aloud, giving it the tone that he or she thinks is appropriate. Ask other students if they agree with the reading and to try their hand at a sentence or two. If you hear lassitude or melancholy evolving in that succession of readings, ask where it's coming from, where in the words on the page. Focus on the verbs in one of those longer paragraphs. Compare the paragraph you chose to a passage of similar length from Bellow, Baldwin, Le Guin, Fitzgerald, or some other author whose verbs can dance and buzz on the page. One of the oldest rules in creative writing workshops is to try for interesting verb choices—yet Barthelme favors variants of is and was, passive expressions, verbs with little or no vividness or action. You can spread out from here into speculations about this story as a commentary on contemporary everyday urban life and the possibility that cities and city habits can condition us to take everything as only a minor variant on the routine. Oh. Look. A giant balloon. Uh huh. What else is new? A massive, mysterious thing appears over midtown, and the reportage from this narrator is even duller than a weekend local newscast or a talk show on a Sunday afternoon. Predictable interpretive arguments break out and fill hours and pages, and to no avail. The last words of "The Balloon" are "awaiting some other time of unhappiness, some time, perhaps, when we are angry with one another."

Post-postmodernism

David Foster Wallace Michael Chabon, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay Lydia Davis Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (named after Gaddis's The Recognitions) Tao Lin, Taipei "New Sincerity" Rejection of irony, return to sentimentality: postironic sentiment. In practice, this could be simple earnestness without irony or a belief that irony and sentimentality are not contradictory or mutually exclusive. A text can contain both.

Lydia Davis

Davis's "Break It Down" is on the long end of the genre of flash fiction— very short prose works that leverage their brevity to tell a story through means other than a rising action-climax-falling action structure. Ask your students to identify the features that make "Break It Down" distinctive: second-person narrative, run-on sentences that flirt with stream of consciousness, a claustrophobic focus on character and action that makes it difficult to know what is going on and who is driving the action, an obses- sive accounting of what love is worth in financial terms, and so on. Ask your students if they find the love story that Davis describes to be "relatable" or "emotional." Does Davis's stylistic approach dull her ability to talk about a love affair in affective ways? Or does it summon feelings that might otherwise seem clichéd or overdone? Two other pieces from Davis in NAAL on the topic of love are more characteristic of both the brevity and the impact of flash fiction. "The Outing" isolates a single moment in a relationship when "An outburst of anger" affects a couple on what should have been a peaceful walk in the woods. Ask your students to consider how much time passes over the course of "The Outing." Despite being only one sentence, "The Outing" describes an experience that unfolds over several hours, with implications for many years of heartache in the life of the couple both before and after the event itself takes place. How does the brevity of the story serve to (paradoxically) accentuate the long-lasting damage to the relationship? What gaps in the story are we left to fill in, and how does that demand for our participation as readers contribute to the story's emotional impact? Similarly, "Happiest Moment" paints a portrait of a married couple whose happiness is described in so unconventional a manner that we don't quite know where to begin to fill in the gaps in the story. Ask your students to describe the "happiest moment" that the story relates (a wife's recounting to her husband of a trip to Beijing that she took without him), and then to speculate on some of the questions that the story raises: What makes this moment happy? Why would a married couple's happiest moment involve time spent apart? What does this suggest about the couple and their rela- tionship? Furthermore, what do we make of the frame within which this story of the married is narrated—the question of "what is a favorite story she [presumably Davis herself] has written." There is a curious parallel between the frame of the story (about the author) and the story itself (about the Chinese couple): "she will hesitate for a long time and then say . . ." and "The student hesitated for a long time. At last he smiled with embar- rassment and said . . ." What is the effect of this parallel? Does it provide any commentary on the nature of the relationship between the man and woman? On an unstated (but implied) relationship that the author herself is involved in? On the nature of happiness and "happy moments"?

Rudolfo Anaya

Elsewhere in this guide we have cautioned against conversations that group minority writers only with other "ethnic" writers, for that kind of attention can degrade unintentionally into ghettoizing. Anaya writes from a tradition that extends in many directions. There is a cinematic quality to his construction and arrangement of scenes, and from that perspective he is very much a writer of now, in and for a culture in which the video screens light up rooms in a diverse range of neighborhoods. But Anaya's style of writing also shows its connections to earlier generations of Americans who have written about dramatic and extreme situations among the poor—writers like Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Willa Cather, and Jack London.

Harlem Renaissance

Jean Toomer Langston Hughes Claude McKay Zora Neale Hurston Many critics point out that the Harlem Renaissance could not escape its history and culture in its attempt to create a new one, or sufficiently separate from the foundational elements of White, European culture. Often Harlem intellectuals, while proclaiming a new racial consciousness, resorted to mimicry of their white counterparts by adopting their clothing, sophisticated manners and etiquette. This "mimicry" may also be called assimilation, as that is typically what minority members of any social construct must do in order to fit social norms created by that construct's majority.[39] This could be seen as a reason that the artistic and cultural products of the Harlem Renaissance did not overcome the presence of White-American values, and did not reject these values. In this regard, the creation of the "New Negro" as the Harlem intellectuals sought, was considered a success. The Harlem Renaissance appealed to a mixed audience. The literature appealed to the African-American middle class and to whites. Magazines such as The Crisis, a monthly journal of the NAACP, and Opportunity, an official publication of the National Urban League, employed Harlem Renaissance writers on their editorial staffs; published poetry and short stories by black writers; and promoted African-American literature through articles, reviews, and annual literary prizes. As important as these literary outlets were, however, the Renaissance relied heavily on white publishing houses and white-owned magazines. A major accomplishment of the Renaissance was to open the door to mainstream white periodicals and publishing houses, although the relationship between the Renaissance writers and white publishers and audiences created some controversy. W. E. B. Du Bois did not oppose the relationship between black writers and white publishers, but he was critical of works such as Claude McKay's bestselling novel Home to Harlem (1928) for appealing to the "prurient demand[s]" of white readers and publishers for portrayals of black "licentiousness".[40] Langston Hughes spoke for most of the writers and artists when he wrote in his essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926) that black artists intended to express themselves freely, no matter what the black public or white public thought.[41] Hughes in his writings also returned to the theme of racial passing, but during the Harlem Renaissance, he began to explore the topic of homosexuality and homophobia. He began to use disruptive language in his writings. He explored this topic because it was a theme that during this time period was not discussed.[42] Certain aspects of the Harlem Renaissance were accepted without debate, and without scrutiny. One of these was the future of the "New Negro". Artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance echoed American progressivism in its faith in democratic reform, in its belief in art and literature as agents of change, and in its almost uncritical belief in itself and its future. This progressivist worldview rendered Black intellectuals—just like their White counterparts—unprepared for the rude shock of the Great Depression, and the Harlem Renaissance ended abruptly because of naive assumptions about the centrality of culture, unrelated to economic and social realities. Langston Hughes article: What was it about the New Negro Renaissance that Hughes reacted against? In the opening essay of The New Negro: An Interpretation, Alain Locke articulates the principal objective of the New Negro cultural reawakening: the promotion of black enlightenment through a non-radical ideology. Above all, Locke says, the New Negro is focused on producing "folk-expression" ("New" 7), and, as Locke asserts in another contribution to The New Negro, "Negro Youth Speaks," the New Negro movement's aim is to spawn a revival of folk culture that is comparable to what the Irish Renaissance generated for the subjugated Gaelic peoples (50). Soothing white anxiety that blacks are seeking radical transformation, Locke states, "fundamentally for the present the Negro is radical on race matters, conservative on others, in other words, a 'forced radical,' a social protestant rather than a genuine radical" ("New" 11). The New Negro, in other words, is not an Irish rebel or, worse, a black Bolshevik, according to Locke's characterization, so the recently arrived black immigrant is not bent on overthrowing the state. Rather, the New Negro is merely attempting to recover and hold on to his black Southern folkloric traditions so as to fashion a "Renaissance" ("Negro" 47, 50). The very term renaissance implies well-mannered high culture and therefore the antithesis of violent revolution, so both nervous white as well as conservative black readers can relax. Locke's New Negro Renaissance is not a political insurgency, and eventually—note the qualifier, "for the present"—even the contemporary militant outcry on race matters will fade as blacks, permitted to enjoy the benefits of the capitalist bourgeois American dream, enter the mainstream ("New" 11). Up until the end of the 1920s Hughes, like his ultimately estranged friend Zora Neale Hurston, produced a literature that celebrated the black folkloric, such as the pair's unfinished and finally contentious play Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life (1930). Nevertheless, during the 1920s another major New Negro cultural voice would articulate a very different view than Locke's on the role of New Negro literary art, and Hughes would reject this view as well. W. E. B. Du Bois's well-known "Browsing Reader" reaction to Claude McKay's 1928 Home to Harlem, published in Crisis, proceeds [End Page 426] from the idea that McKay is cashing in on the exploitation of black primitivism, the sort of deed that Carl Van Vechten's unwisely titled novel ****** Heaven (1926) epitomized for black reviewers. Du Bois was in part charging McKay's novel of black proletarians with reproducing racist stereotypes, an even worse transgression than the white Van Vechten's appropriation of Negro life. During the 1920s, black critics encouraged Negro writers to produce literature of the "Talented Tenth," as Du Bois designated the ten percent of African American society who made up the professional striving class in The Souls of Black Folk (65). White writers, including allegedly well-meaning authors, had generated enough stereotypes, so it was high time for more positive images. Moreover, if the renaissance was going to improve the grim condition of the vast majority of black people in American society—among the often-stated intentions of the New Negro movement—then the art it produced should elevate rather than denigrate Negroes.5 Du Bois's denunciation of McKay's first novel was also, then, a deep reaction against what the black bourgeoisie saw as the sordid character of Home to Harlem, in other words, the valuing of the primitive, McKay's nascent negritude—most notoriously sexual difference—in the narrative as a means toward black social revolution. Du Bois's denunciation of McKay's novel, moreover, points to the trace of an additional motivation for the black press's condemnation of Home to Harlem. His censure, that is, also suggests a fervent reaction against the perceived contagious trend among modernist authors toward generating texts that portray the postwar devotion to the sensual, embodied by the writing of such Greenwich Village and Left Bank sexually renegade authors as Edna St. Vincent Millay and Djuna Barnes and chronicled for a wider readership in Ernest Hemingway's 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises. Du Bois advocated a black social protest literature that promoted African American struggle and was therefore anxious that transatlantic modernist literature would contaminate second-generation New Negro writing. Du Bois's apprehension was focused on the bohemian modernist tendency to promote a universalist aesthetic and therefore apparent rejection of political art as well as its concentration on human sexuality. Du Bois reacted disapprovingly against what he regarded as McKay's mimicking of sexually explicit subcultural modernist literature because the author of the inspiring, nascent call for black struggle, "If We Must Die" (1919), was influential among second-generation New Negro writers like Countee Cullen, Wallace Thurman, and Langston Hughes. Du Bois's anxieties were well founded, as the example of Thurman's Harlem Renaissance novel, Infants of the Spring, confirms. Thurman's novel portrays the New Negro artists as a black lost generation [End Page 427] undergoing the last stages of a decadent period with no sense of a stable future, where a clear moral bearing will be regained. Thurman's satire on the New Negro movement not only borrows heavily from Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, but it also depicts this dissipation in terms of an uncertainty over stable sexual and gender identity, including, as McKay's novel had shown, Harlem as a laboratory for sexual experimentation and bohemian revolution.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Kingston's "No Name Woman," from her memoir The Woman Warrior, provides students with the opportunity to explore the relationship between personal identity and family history. The Woman Warrior as a whole represents Kingston's effort to make sense of her identity as the child of Chinese immigrants in America, and the "No Name Woman" chapter, in particular, highlights Kingston's desire to fill in the gaps of her family's stories with thoughtful speculation on what it has meant—and what it could mean—to be a woman in Chinese and Chinese American culture. Point out to students that the first part of the narrative is a very brief retelling of the story of the No Name Woman by Kingston's mother and that the balance is Kingston's meta-commentary on this story. Kingston stresses the important role that this story played in her development as an individual, but students may miss the various strategies that Kingston uses in making sense of this story and its place in her life. Discuss Kingston's comments on how and when the story is told and how the story became a vehi- cle for teaching certain cultural lessons. Then ask students to explain how Kingston takes this story out of her parents' hands and appropriates it for her own purposes. What does the story of the No Name Woman come to mean for Kingston? What possibilities does the No Name Woman suggest for her sense of personal identity? By the end of the narrative, how does Kingston feel about her relationship to the No Name Woman? Does she have a clear sense of who this woman was, and of who she herself is? How does Kingston's uncertainty on this issue exemplify some of the challenges inherent in recovering the past?

Realism

Mark Twain Broadly defined as "the faithful representation of reality" or "verisimilitude," realism is a literary technique practiced by many schools of writing. Although strictly speaking, realism is a technique, it also denotes a particular kind of subject matter, especially the representation of middle-class life. A reaction against romanticism, an interest in scientific method, the systematizing of the study of documentary history, and the influence of rational philosophy all affected the rise of realism. Many critics have suggested that there is no clear distinction between realism and its related late nineteenth-century movement, naturalism. In American literature, the term "realism" encompasses the period of time from the Civil War to the turn of the century during which William Dean Howells, Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, Mark Twain, and others wrote fiction devoted to accurate representation and an exploration of American lives in various contexts. As the United States grew rapidly after the Civil War, the increasing rates of democracy and literacy, the rapid growth in industrialism and urbanization, an expanding population base due to immigration, and a relative rise in middle-class affluence provided a fertile literary environment for readers interested in understanding these rapid shifts in culture. In drawing attention to this connection, Amy Kaplan has called realism a "strategy for imagining and managing the threats of social change" (Social Construction of American Realism ix). Renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail. Selective presentation of reality with an emphasis on verisimilitude, even at the expense of a well-made plot Character is more important than action and plot; complex ethical choices are often the subject. Characters appear in their real complexity of temperament and motive; they are in explicable relation to nature, to each other, to their social class, to their own past. Class is important; the novel has traditionally served the interests and aspirations of an insurgent middle class. (See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel) Events will usually be plausible. Realistic novels avoid the sensational, dramatic elements of naturalistic novels and romances. Diction is natural vernacular, not heightened or poetic; tone may be comic, satiric, or matter-of-fact. Objectivity in presentation becomes increasingly important: overt authorial comments or intrusions diminish as the century progresses. Interior or psychological realism a variant form. In Black and White Strangers, Kenneth Warren suggests that a basic difference between realism and sentimentalism is that in realism, "the redemption of the individual lay within the social world," but in sentimental fiction, "the redemption of the social world lay with the individual" (75-76).

Gloria Anzaldúa

NAAL offers Anzaldúa in several roles—as polemical poet, writer of personal reminiscence, and editorialist on the problems of literary, linguistic, racial, and sexual identity. In "La conciencia de la mestiza" the personal alienation moves through layer after layer of complexity: the essay offers little hope that anyone in her predicament can shake off these constraining special traits and dive happily into some available group identity. Students may be puzzled by these sustained refusals and want to debate the importance of any single characteristic as a source of specialness or exile.

Philip K. Dick

New to the Ninth Edition of NAAL is a pair of texts that deal with the kind of end-of-the-world, post-apocalyptic tropes that became increasingly common in twentieth-century fiction and film, the legacy of which your students will no doubt recognize from popular franchises such as The Hunger Games and Divergent. Philip K. Dick is one of the most influential science fiction writers of his generation, and his short story "Precious Artifact" is a great example of trends that many students may already be familiar with. Start your discussion with this sense of familiarity, asking students to identify elements of the story that they recognize from film, fiction, or television. You may get a list that looks something like this: The in medias res opener and the slow unfolding of the backstory that has led to this post-apocalyptic moment The keep-you-guessing-till-the-end sense of uncertainty surrounding not only the characters and their motivations, but also the very sense of what constitutes reality (the revelation in the final sentence that even the kitten is a machine may strike your students as either a delightful trick or a terrible cliché) The need to colonize other planets in the solar system because the earth has become uninhabitable The alien threat of human genocide (here by the mysterious "Proxmen") The unsettling realization that everything is an illusion orchestrated by powers far greater than humanity could ever grapple with Have your students make a list of films, books, and television shows where these tropes appear (the 2013 film Oblivion hits every one of these beats). Ask them why they think such tropes are so prevalent: What does it say about American culture in the past fifty years that we have been repeatedly drawn to these themes and images? What political or cultural commentary do they suggest? After using Dick's "Precious Artifact" to set up this discussion, turn to "The Airborne Toxic Event" from DeLillo's White Noise, which is more of a pre-apocalyptic text than a post-apocalyptic one in that it sets up the possibility of a global catastrophe rather than present us with the aftermath of such a catastrophe. (In this sense, "Precious Artifact" is analogous to the 1968 film Planet of the Apes, whereas "The Airborne Toxic Event" would be the 2011 and 2014 prequels Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.) As opposed to Dick's philosophical ruminations, DeLillo wears his politics on his sleeve: the threat to humanity isn't the alien Proxmen; rather, the threat to humanity is human beings themselves. How does DeLillo use these science fiction tropes to make a political commentary about environmental disaster and human greed? Do the science fiction elements undercut his political commentary, or do they enable it? Such questions could lead to a broader discussion about the cultural or political commentary in the list of films, books, and television shows that your students generated previously. Is science fiction intellectual junk food? Or can it make a substantive contribution to public culture? Another related set of issues that "Precious Artifact" and "The Airborne Toxic Event" share surrounds the nature of reality, a question that arises in a variety of works of postmodern literature. Introduce your students to the notion of the simulacrum. (Jean Baudrillard's short essay "Simulacra and Science Fiction" is a good place to start, and is available through Depauw University's online Science Fiction Studies journal: www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/55/baudrillard55art.htm.) Pair comments from Dick's story about the questionable nature of reality (for example, "it's typical of the Terran mind to fasten onto phantoms. That might help explain their defeat in the conflict; they were simply not realists") with the SIMUVAC ("simulated evacuation") in DeLillo. How are both texts questioning our ability to apprehend reality for what it is? How do both texts broach the possibility that reality as we experience it can be manipulated by outside forces?

Natasha Trethewey

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey was the U.S. poet laureate from 2012 to 2014. Discussing briefly with your students the history of the office of poet laureate and the function that such a position has played in American national culture can provide an excellent frame of reference for understanding how Trethewey's poems engage with questions of national memory and historical trauma. (The website for the Library of Congress provides a brief introduction to the office of poet laureate, including a list of past poets laureate since 1937, at www.loc.gov/poetry/about_laureate.html. A 2012 Library of Congress blog post, "What Do Poets Laureate Do?" provides additional information about the office: http://blogs.loc.gov /catbird/2012/02/what-do-poets-laureate-do/.) Discuss why a nation would appoint a poet to a recognized government office. What purpose does such a position serve? What does it say about the desire to create and articulate national identity? What burdens does it place on a poet to formally repre- sent her nation as its official poetic voice? What opportunities does it pre- sent to a poet to use the bully pulpit of her office to shape and define her national culture? The Trethewey poems included in NAAL all center on questions of history and memory, whether personal, cultural, or national. Specifically, as the daughter of an African American mother and a white father, Trethewey has allowed her multiracial heritage to inform her meditations on foundational moments in national memory, and how those moments appear when refracted through issues of race. For example, "Native Guard" tells the story of the first officially sanctioned regiment of African American soldiers in the Union Army during the U.S. Civil War, while "Vignette" meditates upon the photographs taken by John Ernest Joseph Bellocq of the prostitutes from the legalized red light district of Storyville, New Orleans, at the turn of the twentieth century. "Miracle of the Black Leg" looks back even further in history to a fourteenth-century account of a European man who successfully received a transplanted leg from an Ethiopian. "Graveyard Blues" and "Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971" reflect on the poet's own family history while offering opportunities to think about race, class, and gender more broadly. A general discussion of how Trethewey works with history is an important foundation for successfully introducing students to her poetry; close readings that focus on specific word choices and the formal struc- tures of her poems, however, are absolutely essential to understanding her contribution to twenty-first-century American poetry.

Ishmael Reed

Reading an excerpt of an Ishmael Reed novel is challenging, in large part because reading an entire Ishmael Reed novel—let alone a decontextualized snippet—is itself a formidable challenge. Reed is the preeminent master of African American postmodern fiction, and as a postmodernist he understands his work to be the intertextual borrowings of earlier texts, particularly those in the canon of African American literature. If you can follow Reed's allusions, you're in for a real treat as you watch in awe as an intelligent, snarky writer deconstructs generations' worth of assumptions about race, identity, aesthetic value, and history. If you can't follow his allusions—and many students will probably fall into this category—Reed's texts can feel like the ramblings of a madman. If this is your students' initial response—that Reed is, indeed, writing like a crazy person—ask them why they think this way. What is it about the world that he's describing that seems absurd, insane, or preposterous? Make a list with your students of specific moments characters, and events that are particularly crazy. Note the details on the chalkboard as a reference point to return to later, after students have acclimatized themselves (at least somewhat) to Reed's ludic style. Once students have expressed their gut reaction to Reed, ask them how much (if any) of the excerpt Reed expects us to take seriously. Is realism his goal at all, or has realism given way to a literary experience based on parody, pastiche, and irreverent humor? Your students are probably comfortable with parody as a genre, having watched it on programs like Saturday Night Live or in the films of the Scary Movie franchise that hastily cobble together a plot line as an excuse to lam- poon popular culture in sketch-like vignettes. Students are probably not expecting irreverent parody in a literature course, and they may be even less likely to expect a black writer from the 1970s to parody a classic from the canon of African American literature, like Richard Wright's Native Son. Nevertheless, that is precisely what Reed does in the NAAL selection from The Last Days of Louisiana Red. You'll need to spend some time with your students reviewing the allusion to the iconic scene in Native Son in which Bigger Thomas, a young African American, finds himself in the bedroom of a young white woman, Mary Dalton, whom he murders after a series of events that all but force Bigger to take her life in order to preserve his innocence. There are multiple other allusions in the text that you'll need to help students work through: Hattie McDaniel (the Academy Award- winning African American actress from Gone with the Wind); Papa LaBas (a figure in Haitian voodoo who mediates between the spirit world and the world of humans); I Was A Teenage Werewolf (a 1957 horror film); Jack Johnson and Joe Louis (African American boxing champions); Father Divine (an African American preacher and, some would argue, cult leader); Sam Cooke (a popular African American recording artist); and others. As you help students grasp these references and allusions, you can maintain a running metacommentary, asking not only "Who are these figures?" but "How is Reed changing our understanding of the cultural value of these figures by bringing them together in such a playful and chaotic way?" Reed's "Neo-HooDoo Manifesto" offers similar challenges to students: the allusions are dense, and Reed offers little to no background informa- tion to help his readers along. Nevertheless, as a manifesto whose goal is ostensibly to lay out the agenda for a cause or a movement, "Neo-HooDoo" does have a purpose that students can work to identify. Start with the tone: If you can't determine what, exactly, Reed is proposing, can you at least tell what he takes seriously and what he deems worthy of ridicule or scorn? What past cultural practices does he recover in the present? What dominant cultural practices from our own time does he call into question? The final line of the manifesto is, "You can't keep a good church down!" Is Reed talking about a specific church, or is the Neo-HooDoo Church more of a concept? What would the articles of faith of this "church" be?

David Mamet

Students may find Mamet familiar territory for a number of reasons. Several of his plays and screenplays have been made into successful films, which have been available for years. House of Games, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Verdict, and others were box-office successes—to the extent that the Mamet style of hard-boiled language, laconic conversation, and unprincipled, ruthless action have been widely imitated in Hollywood films and television dramas. The proliferation of Mamet imitations, in fact, may cause students to wonder what is special about Mamet. If you have been doing a chronological survey of the nineteenth century, then your students will recall the heyday of literary naturalism, and they will have no trouble seeing a relationship between Mamet's work and selections from Dreiser and Stephen Crane. You may want to have a free- wheeling conversation about whether the usual dates assigned to naturalism (c. 1890-c. 1920) make sense at all, if naturalism went to the movies and entered pop literature and culture rather than gave way to other literary movements. You can also return to the dilemma raised by Norris: that a naturalistic narrative or drama isn't a breakthrough from art into truth but a mode that is stylized in a variety of ways. Have two students read, with some conviction, a page or two of dialogue from this play and see if they hear the odd cadences of a classic Mamet exchange—the repetitions, the little rituals that sometimes make his supposedly realistic characters seem to speak like creatures from some other planet. This will lead into broader speculations about whether the literary arts can ever, in any mode, represent things as they really are and human behavior as we really know it. If you are feeling daring at this point in the course, you might ask about recent films that students have seen, films that seem somehow to borrow Mamet-type characters, speech patterns, and situations. You may hear about a number of films that you haven't seen, haven't heard of, or simply don't want to see: Django Unchained, The Social Network, The Wolf of Wall Street, Straight Outta Compton, Moneyball, and others that, as the students describe them, might astound you. But the conversation will be worthwhile if students become more aware of modern cross-pollination between the supposedly separate worlds of art and popular culture.

Michael S. Harper

With Harper, we encounter an African American facing challenges that arose for many American authors who sought to write passionately about personal ordeals and social injustice at a cultural moment when romanticism, gothicism, and sentimentality were thriving in the print media and visual arts, and melodrama was in ascendancy on the Anglo-American stage. To put the problem bluntly: how can a terrible truth be told, with the intensity that such truth requires, when all around you hyperbole and stylistic extravagance are threatening to exhaust the English language? How, for instance, can a true slave narrative, told in graphic detail, compete for attention in a flood of sensational (as well as fictional) tales of villainy, torment, narrow escape, and heroic demise? These questions aren't rhetorical, and they aren't antique: your students will probably know of many situations in which spectacular Hollywood "special effects" and outlandish adventure stories have numbed a generation to real-life catastrophe, unfolding in the streets of the world. The NAAL selections from Harper's work attest to her understanding that in the American cultural arenas of her time, fact and fable were blending together, and readers of national and regional journals were ingesting literary brews so highly spiced that discrimination among truth, partial truth, and outright fantasy was often difficult. Ascending to national prominence just before the outbreak of the Civil War, and boasting a wartime circulation of well over one hundred thousand copies, Harper's Weekly made a habit of publishing bathetic short stories of love and loss in the same pages and columns as reportage from the battlefields. And for all its benefit to the abolitionist cause in the North, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin deepened a popular taste for stories of fictional African Americans—over and above factual accounts of the travails of actual people.

Ezra Pound

(1885- 1972) "The Cantos" Modernist Manifesto: "A Retrospect" Associated with Modernism. Practiced imagism and vorticism, both Modernist movements. Resented Amy Lowell's imagism.

Eugene O'Neill

(1888- 1953) "Long Day's Journey into Night" Long Day's Journey into Night demonstrates that one of the strong features of twentieth-century American literature is the continuation of what O'Neill's Edmund calls late in the play "faithful realism." But O'Neill's realism differs from that of the late-nineteenth-century writers even as it seems to extend some of their concerns. In fact, O'Neill's play sometimes seems a compendium or a spectrum of American ideas that long precede the late nineteenth century, for he presents the Tyrones both as deeply conditioned by their past and as characters who face in their daily life (in this classically unified one-day's play) the fragmentation that is one symptom or consequence of the modernist sensibility. Mary's descent into the madness of morphine addiction becomes the play's emblem, and although O'Neill is writing, in part, about his own mother here, he is also sensitive to Mary's position as woman in the American family and in American history. As the play unfolds the history of Mary's medical treatment and of her husband's attitudes toward her condition, students will make connections between Mary Tyrone and both Edna Pontellier and the narrator of "The Yellow Wall-paper." O'Neill suggests that modern life is more difficult for women than for men: Mary might have played the piano but married instead, thereby depriving herself of the coherence of vocation. In marriage, and especially in marriage to the peripatetic James Tyrone (rootlessness itself becomes a modern condition), she cuts herself off from having woman friends with whom she might ease her loneliness (O'Neill adds early scandal to the fact of marriage as a way of doubly cutting Mary off from other women). And in choosing to ease her loneliness by following Tyrone on his tours, she is forced to reject even the traditional solace of making a home for her children, so that the series of choices becomes irreversible, and her need for something to ease her emotional pain and to dull her perception of her own meaninglessness increases. Within the family structure, Mary also suffers the anachronism (in the twentieth century) of not being able to move beyond the scrutiny of external forces that seem to control her. When she tells her husband, "You really must not watch me all the time, James. I mean, it makes me self-conscious," she is experiencing the radical emotion that led the deist Founding Fathers to revolution in the 1770s. But, unlike the deists, who experienced a fundamental shift in worldview when they accepted the idea that God might not be watching them all the time and fought for self-determination from the system of divinely ordained British monarchy, Mary Tyrone is only made "self-conscious" by Tyrone's scrutiny. She suffers self-consciousness and is not inspired by it. She is not self-conscious in a way that leads other modernists to insight; she is only increasingly made aware of her own worthlessness. O'Neill underscores that worthlessness by presenting the role of wife as one based on constant humiliation and defined by Tyrone's need to feel he has made "good bargains" in life—he makes others pay the price he won't pay. Throughout the play, O'Neill presents Mary as someone living in a kind of dream state (especially as she becomes more and more detached by the effects of taking morphine) that might have made sense for Rip Van Winkle but, protracted into the twentieth century, simply compounds her sense of disorientation and alienation. She says at one point, early in the play, "None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever." For students who have studied Irving, the language Mary uses here will seem reminiscent of Rip's "identity crisis" when he returns to the village after his twenty-year sleep. Later in the play, thinking aloud to the hired woman, Cathleen, Mary ties that disorientation to the death of what students might see as her own American Dream. She says, about the fog, "It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you any more." Her language clearly echoes Irving's here, but it also conveys the isolation of American self-reliance carried to its historical extreme and epitomized in the role of twenty-century American wife and mother—Mary must be self-reliant to survive and must do so in a world devoid of human context other than her own family. She asks the play's central question: "What is it I'm looking for? I know it's something I lost." Her son Edmund, the autobiographical voice for O'Neill himself, is the only character who understands his mother's drug addiction as the play progresses and who suffers the consequences of trying to articulate the kind of pain she feels. In Edmund's statements, students who have read twentieth-century European literature will hear connections to Camus and Beckett. Edmund also feels the absence of home; and referring to his nebulous, nameless lack of power to control his life, he says, "They never come back! Everything is in the bag! It's all a frame-up! We're all fall guys and suckers and we can't beat the game!" Later he calls himself "a stranger who never lives at home." Like Mary, he would like to "be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself," but he chooses poetry rather than morphine to ease his own pain, and then must confront his own failure as a poet. In a scene with his father, Edmund says, "I just stammered. That's the best I'll ever do. I mean, if I live. Well, it will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people!" In depicting Edmund's "stammering," O'Neill underscores both the need to express modern consciousness and the difficulty of finding the words for it. Other twentieth-century writers will take some comfort in making the attempt; Edmund's "faithful realism" prevents him from idealizing his "stammering." In brother Jamie's cynicism ("The truth is there is no cure") and father James's despair ("A waste!, a drunken hulk, done with and finished!"), O'Neill completes his portrait of the disintegration of the American psyche and American family life and yet presents that portrait within the conventions of literary realism.

Langston Hughes

(1902- 1967) Before the Harlem Renaissance writers of the 1920s (Hurston, Toomer, Sterling Brown, Hughes, and Cullen are all associated with this period), most black writing took the form either of the slave narrative of the middle nineteenth century or of "racial uplift" literature or polemical writing characteristic of the turn of the twentieth century (and represented in NAAL by Booker T. Washington and Du Bois). While most African American writers wrote for white audiences, Hughes may be the first African American writer to view his white readers' interest, and his role as speaking voice, as a form of encounter not unlike those early encounters between Europeans and Native peoples during the period of exploration and colonization. You can begin teaching Hughes with "Visitors to the Black Belt" and discussing the two-sided perspective this poem gives about Harlem. More than an exercise in language ("Across the railroad tracks" versus "here / On this side of the tracks"), the poem ends with a simple question and answer that resonates with the problem of postcolonialism. "Who're you, outsider? / Ask me who am I." In these lines, the poet teaches the reader, by means of the expected question, how to ask the speaker who he or she is rather than to assume he or she already knows. If the outsider learns to know his or her place as outside, then the person on the inside ("To me it's here / In Harlem") has room to define himself. So Hughes is pleading with his white audience not to draw conclusions about black life without asking him, without allowing him, to define its reality and meaning and—in other poems (such as "I, Too," "Madam's Calling Cards," and "Freedom [1]")—what it means to be an American. The other side of the experience of encounter involves the responsibility it places on the poet. Echoing Whitman in "I, Too" and self-conscious about both calling for a black American poet and responding to that quasi-Emersonian call in "Note on Commercial Theatre," Hughes responds very simply: "I reckon it'll be / Me myself! / Yes, it'll be me." From the perspective of literature of encounter, if Hughes can imagine a white readership "encountering" black experience and black art with genuine interest (perhaps for the first time on a large scale during the Harlem Renaissance), then he has the responsibility to make certain that experience and that art don't become "colonized," commercialized ("You've taken my blues and gone—"). The person who recognizes that colonization is taking place must struggle against it, especially by resisting being appropriated in a white someone else's image. Thus Hughes moves beyond Brown, whose poetry stresses contrast and counterpoint, to include contradiction and the two-way experience of encounter. Students will also find in Hughes's work an appreciation for black women's struggles and an attempt to represent women's experiences. In one of his greatest poems, "Mother to Son," he also connects his own answer for the modernist question to a woman's voice and a woman's experience. If you read this poem closely with students, you might focus on the contrast between the mother's description of the stairway itself and the image she arrives at ("Life for me ain't been no crystal stair") as a controlling metaphor for her vision. The poem shows the mother arriving at modernist order in the chaos of "sometimes goin' in the dark" by making this particular image. Ask students to consider the numerous connotations of the image of the "crystal stair" as well as the way Hughes is experimenting with levels of diction, in effect raising the level of diction in this phrase. Raising the level of diction and "racial uplift" become ground notes in his work; see, for example, "Genius Child," in which Hughes moves beyond protest to a transcendent belief in the "genius" of black life ("Kill him—and let his soul run wild!"). And in the Alberta K. Johnson poems (here represented by "Madam and Her Madam" and "Madam's Calling Cards"), Hughes demonstrates the complexity of the relationship between black woman and white woman. When Alberta responds to her Madam's profession of love by saying, "I'll be dogged / If I love you," Hughes is making a simple statement of fact: if relationship with the Madam means that Alberta Johnson has to work even harder, she will indeed be "dogged," for it will kill her, and indeed, Alberta must stop short of "loving" the woman she works for if she is to love herself at all. And that she does love herself is clear in "Madam's Calling Cards": "I hankered to see / My name in print." Both like and unlike other characters from this period, Alberta Johnson wants to be an American but doesn't consider herself an immigrant: "There's nothing foreign / To my pedigree."

James Baldwin

"Going to Meet the Man" "Sonny's Blues" "Going to Meet the Man" is an imaginative leap as well as a political risk: an African American writer exploring, from the inside, the mind of a Southern white racist. Furthermore, brutal as he is, Jesse is not portrayed without a measure of sympathy: Baldwin presents him as the victim of an upbringing in a deep, inescapable culture of race hatred, culminating in a lynching that, for all the talk around him and from him about the non-humanity of black people, terrifies him and awakens in him a human empathy that he seems to be spending the rest of his life trying to suppress. The small-town world that Baldwin creates is rich and intense, and sexuality, racist dogmas, direct firsthand experience, and deep, almost wordless, anxiety and guilt seem to contend in the consciousness of this protagonist. Nonetheless, we now read in an era when writers and directors are regularly chided for straying too far from home territory and for presum- ing to imagine the psychological life of someone from the other gender or from a different race or culture. "Sonny's Blues" similarly puts the narrator at something of a remove from the primary focus of readers' emotional energy. Sonny is a drug addict and gifted musician whose struggles we witness through the unnamed narra- tor (his brother). The narrator's life is, in comparison, relatively stable. If you have your students read both "Going to Meet the Man" and "Sonny's Blues," you will want to ask them why Baldwin chooses to approach his subjects in this way. What is gained from this type of perspective? If your students have read other texts that employ a similar narrative style (such as The Great Gatsby, which tells the story of Jay Gatsby's rise and fall from the perspective of his friend Nick Carraway), have them describe how it shapes their relationship to the main character by seeing him through someone else's eyes.

John Ashbery

"Illustration" "Soonest Mended" "Self- Portrait in a Convex Mirror" "Myrtle" Merwin, Wright, and Levine were born within six months of each other; they were raised in working-class communities before becoming successful poets (Scranton, Pennsylvania; Martins Ferry, Ohio; and Detroit, respectively); and they each won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (Merwin won it twice). The NAAL selections from the three contemporaries share a commitment to exploring each poet's relationship to memory. In different ways, each poet is concerned with both the ethics and the mechanics of remembering: How do we remember? What should we remember, and when should we forget? How does poetry in particular and language in general provide a home for our memories?

Toni Cade Bambara

"Medley" You can expect that your students will come to Bambara with other African American writers and stories in mind: there's a good chance that some of them will have read James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, or other works favored in high school classes and entry-level college courses as glimpses into modern African American experience and experimental literary forms. An opening question, therefore, about the form of "Medley" could bring out generalizations (half-remembered from some other context) about resemblances between this tale and the forms and improvisations of modern jazz. An observation like that can be helpful, but it can also beg some impor- tant questions having to do with the realist tradition and certain basic expectations and practices in storytelling. To be absolutely true to life as we know it, true to the meanderings, cadences, and interludes of ordinary experience can be to tell no "story" at all. Analogues from the world of music may not answer the question: does "Medley" go anywhere or say anything? If students find that problem interesting, then a good way to proceed might be to start with a specific, limited passage and work outward. "Medley" is in some ways a story about telling stories, and there are several moments when Sweet Pea, our narrator, muses on the talents of other people as tellers of tales and of the worth of any story, told badly or well. The paragraphs about Hector as a "bad storyteller," omitting and blurring the details of his reminiscences from the funeral business, offer much to talk about, especially if some attention is paid to Hector as "an absolute artist on windows," clearing the dirt away so that something, however mundane, can be seen clearly, as if for the first time. To what extent is that the experience of reading "Medley"?

Denise Levertov

"The Jacob's Ladder" "Caedmon" Levertov is often described as a "mystical" or "mysterious" contemporary poet. However, descriptions of her work may talk of her indebtedness to William Carlos Williams and others who thought of themselves as working against metaphor, mystery, and any sense of the immaterial. In moving onward from Williams, Levertov conserves his form and sound but challenges his thinking about the fundamental poetic act. In other words, the specialness of Levertov, and her contribution to postwar poetry, might lie in her power to create a magical aura within forms that some of the moderns pioneered: plain-sounding, simple-looking lines that engage directly with the world as found.

Flannery O'Connor

"The Life You Save May Be Your Own" "Good Country People" "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" In "Good Country People," Mrs. Hopewell says, "'Everybody is different. . . . It takes all kinds to make the world,'" but she doesn't really mean it. She would prefer that all the world, and especially her daughter, be "good country people" like herself. As unlikely as it might have seemed, Hulga has chosen as a love object a person who both infantilizes her and tries to idealize her—someone whose psychological connection with her resembles her mother's own. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" similarly presents us with an unlikable and hypocritical mother figure, as well as a nihilistic and destructive man. The only sympathetic characters in both stories are rela- tives of the old women (Hulga and the members of Bailey's family). Why does O'Connor seem so interested in the dynamic of putting likable char- acters between an emotionally manipulative mother figure and an evil man? Taken together, do the two stories rise to the level of allegory? What do these patterns suggest?

Galway Kinnell

"The Porcupine" "Blackberry Eating" "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps" "Cemetery Angels" As contemporary poets with a special interest in the natural world, Kinnell and Snyder share connections with the open-form experimentation of Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, and various "naked poetry" schools and movements from the 1960s on. They are poets with a sense of humor. While Snyder's poems often echo strongly with theology and aesthetics drawn from Zen and classical Japanese culture, Kinnell's work recalls pastoral poets of his New England and figures and tropes from the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Patricia Highsmith

"The Quest for Blank Claveringi" is a bizarre and wonderful story that may lead your students to ask, quite sincerely, "Wait, what?" The premise is, in and of itself, odd enough to make your students wonder why they should be invested in the story of second-rate scientist who longs to discover a new species of gastropod. But the story's conclusion, which features Professor Clavering being chased into the ocean by fifteen-foot-tall snails, feels like the height of absurdity. Is this a work of science fiction, magical realism, comedy, or horror? Is it an allegory of some sort, or is it merely the flight of fancy of a talented writer? Have a brief class discussion about the different kinds of genres that this text could fall into, and then list these genres on the board. After you have a sizable list, divide your class into groups and ask each group to make the case for why we should read the story as a work of science fiction, or magical realism, or comedy, etc. Give the groups some time to work together, and then have them make their cases to the class. (Depending on the personality of your class, you could even have them vote on which group made the most compelling case for the story's genre; depend- ing on your own generosity, you could give extra credit to the group who wins the vote.) The purpose of this exercise is not to definitively identify what kind of story "The Quest for Blank Claveringi" really is; rather, the goal is to introduce your students to the genre-bending spirit of postmodern playfulness that defines so much post-1945 U.S. literature. That "The Quest for Blank Claveringi" invites classification under a variety of generic forms— while not really fitting comfortably under any—is one of the characteristics of the boundary-pushing literature from this period. (Also—and you may want to save this till the end—Highsmith just really, really liked snails. She kept pet snails in her purse and took them with her on her outings.)

Willa Cather

(1873- 1947) My Antonia (author). Continuation of a realist tradition that rolls back through Sarah Orne Jewett and William Dean Howells and forward through one of Cather's popular contemporaries, Laura Ingalls Wilder? Or mix of realism and literary naturalism that might include Hamlin Garland, Ole Rolvaag, Sinclair Lewis, and so on, perhaps all the way up to Larry McMurtry. A major drawback of above: situating Cather in this way eclipses the possibility that she is a writer who understood the broader literary and cultural contexts of her time, that her work responds—not flamboyantly, perhaps, but deeply—to the high modernism. In other words, see her as a key figure in the creation of a modernist pastoral, a mode that countenanced everything that Pound and Eliot saw and spoke of, but presented those moods and perceptions on the American Great Plains rather than in the context of the city. The romance of the prairies that is on display in My Ántonia is, if not completely absent, significantly muted in "The Sculptor's Funeral," replaced instead with a sense of disdain for the provincial manners of rural life. It may be tempting to debate whether My Ántonia or "The Sculptor's Funeral" reflects Cather's "true" feelings on her upbringing in Nebraska (she moved to New York City in 1906 and lived there the rest of her life), but it would ultimately be more productive to discuss how both the novel and the story depict a tension between the city and the country, the East and the West, and how those tensions play out in the lives of specific individuals (such as Henry Merrick and Jim Burden) whose sense of what it is to be an American is complicated by their experiences in geographically and culturally distant sections of the nation.

Amy Lowell

(1874- 1925) "The Captured Goddess" "Venus Transiens" "Madonna of the Evening Flowers" Some critics feel that Lowell is too sentimental to be a great poet; others believe that these emotional dimensions are no problem at all and even a strength. Lowell's voice will make room for early discussions of female mythological characters that will inform much poetry by women and men in the twentieth century (in "The Captured Goddess" and "Venus Transiens") and will introduce what the headnote calls "appreciations of female beauty" in poems by women. Indeed, a few of the poems included here—"Venus Transiens" and "Madonna of the Evening Flowers"—may be considered love poems to specific women or to women in general.

Gertrude Stein

(1874- 1946) "Tender Buttons" "Objects" The pictures don't fit the words; the words are sometimes nonsense. An approach like this tends to make Stein seem a contingent writer, responding to and in a sense resisting certain mainstream Western habits of prose and poetry (and the perhaps artificial categorical differences between the two), but understanding first what Stein is not doing is an effective way of opening a discussion of what she accomplishes as new American writing.

Robert Frost

(1874- 1963) "The Road Not Taken" "Home Burial" "The Oven Bird" "The Figure a Poem Makes" (essay) Like Cather, Frost retains elements of realism, and like her, he portrays moments in which his speaker's changes in perception are central to his poetry. "The Oven Bird" deserves an important place in our discussion, because Frost's other poems, his essay "The Figure a Poem Makes," many other works of literature by modern writers, and even the concept of modernism itself seem contained and articulated in the poem's last two lines: "The question that he frames in all but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing." The bird and the poet ask questions that express the central modernist theme: How do we confront a world in which reality is subject to agreement or lacks referentiality altogether? How do we express the experience of fragmentation in personal and political life? How do we live with the increasing awareness of our own mortality—whether we face the prospect of human death (as the speaker does in "Home Burial"), the death or absence of God, or mere disappointment at our own powerlessness?

Sherwood Anderson

(1876- 1941) Winesburg, Ohio (shorty story collection) "Hands" "Mother" "Adventure" Anderson as writing in the fresh wake of realism, of naturalism, and of the regionalist and local colorist traditions. These are traditions that he both respects and resists in achieving an individual voice. Several related themes characterize the anthologized stories from Winesburg. Anderson portrays conflict between inner emotions and outward behavior; Alice Hindman and Elmer Cowley share this conflict although they express it differently. Sexual repression and displaced aggression enter American fiction in Winesburg, and each of the anthologized stories shares this theme. In Elizabeth Willard, sexual repression and repressed identity become interconnected, and in "Adventure," Anderson hints at "the growing modern idea of a woman's owning herself and giving and taking for her own ends in life," although his own fiction explores the stunting of women's lives, not their "modern" alternatives.

Susan Glaspell

(1876- 1948) Trifles (play) As social observation, however, the play regains interest if it is situated with other imaginative literature about the crisis facing countless women through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a crisis of isolation, of thwarted creativity, of marriages founded on a lack of understanding or love. Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper," Chopin's The Awakening, Frost's "Home Burial," Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio stories—if some of these are opened along with Trifles, students will be encouraged to see the predicament of these women as a recurring important theme rather than an excuse for a mild dark drama.

Carl Sandburg

(1878- 1967) "Fog" Sandburg also works well as an example of the imagist school that includes Modernist poets such as Amy Lowell, H.D., and William Carlos Williams. Sandburg's "Fog" is a great example of an imagist poem that uses brief, succinct, and evocative detail to capture an image of the fog rolling in on the city. Sandburg's implied metaphor of the fog as a cat predates by several years T. S. Eliot's similar metaphor in the opening stanzas of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

Wallace Stevens

(1879- 1955) "Anecdote of the Jar" "Sunday Morning" "Of Modern Poetry" Poems such as Frost's "The Oven Bird" and "Desert Places" allow students to experience modernist feeling; Stevens translates the central thematic concern of modern writers into an intellectual framework. The headnote directs the reader's attention to two repeated activities in Stevens's poems: (1) looking at things and (2) playing musical instruments or singing.

William Carlos Williams

(1883- 1963) "The Young House Wife" "A Sort of a Song" Imagist: some of the central features of imagism: exactness, precision, compression, common speech, free verse.

Marianne Moore

(1887- 1972) "Poetry" Moore's avoidance of women's experience in her poetry and the increasing attention poets later in the century pay to women's experience. She writes either with a gender-neutral first person (in "Poetry" and "In Distrust of Merits") or about a generic "one" (as in "Marriage"). Only nature is feminized (as in "The Paper Nautilus"). Women of Moore's generation could not find or present themselves as part of a great tradition. What Moore does do, like many of her contemporaries, is rein- vent poetry for herself or find a new form for what she thinks poetry should be.

T. S. Eliot

(1888- 1965) "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" "The Waste Land" Find images in the poem that serve as Eliot's "objective correlative" for Prufrock's particular emotions and for the state of feeling in the modern world (as Eliot saw it). The Waste Land raises a problem students have with modernism generally: that so many twentieth-century poets make extensive use of classical allusions or interweave references to Renaissance painters or quote writers in languages other than English. Although Eliot presents a "waste land" as his variation on the "diminished thing" that symbolizes human personality and culture in the modern world, his answer to the oven bird's question is not to make something (entirely) new or to show Stevens's snow man confronting "the nothing that is not there" and inventing a "supreme fiction" but rather to surrender the individual personality of the poet. The poem becomes a medium that expresses the essential history of the culture. Eliot writes in his essay that "Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality." He combines traditions from mythology and legend, anthropology (with references to vegetation myths and fertility rites), classical literature and culture (including Shakespeare and Wagner), the Tarot, and comparative religious cultures, and he juxtaposes these traditions with images of isolation, fragmentation, uncertainty, and waste, hoping to use "these fragments" to "shore against" the ruins that are Eliot's variation on Frost's "diminished thing."

Claude McKay

(1889- 1948) "The Harlem Dancer" "Harlem Shadows" "The Lynching" "If We Must Die" "Africa" "America" McKay is a strong inclusion in any survey of modern American literature, especially if the course is intended to look into complex relationships between form and content in verse. McKay's form choices may come as a surprise, for the notion still seems to run deep (not only among students but also among critics and teachers) that "free verse" or at least unrhymed, loosely metered verse signifies honesty, spontaneity, and emotional intensity whereas sonnets, rhymed couplets, and other traditional patterns all suggest accommodation to social practices, conventional beliefs, and ordinary values. McKay is a passionate writer and a political radical, and he writes sonnets, uses rime royal, and frequently employs forms reminiscent of Pope, Wheatley, and Longfellow.

Katherine Anne Porter

(1890- 1980) "Flowering Judas" Because Porter's stories show considerable range in subject and rhetorical style, "Flowering Judas" cannot be read as "typical" of her fiction—except as an example of her carefulness and polish as a storyteller. Working firmly in the realist tradition, Porter creates narratives that echo with the major themes and defining moods of other modernists. We have in Laura a protagonist in a crowd of others, yet somehow alone, caught up in consequential, dangerous action, yet somehow detached from it, watching herself as well as her world. If the wealth of astute observation in "Flowering Judas" recalls realists like James, Howells, and Wharton, the tale may also resonate with moments in Eliot, Stevens, or McKay. Similarly, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a largely autobiographical novella based on Porter's bout with influenza while living in Denver, uses the 1918 epidemic as the realistic backdrop for a story of romance that, in many ways, draws on the sentimental tradition of an earlier generation (in an ironic twist, for example, the female protagonist of the novella is nursed back to health by a soldier serving on the home front, only to have him die from the very disease that she was suffering from). As a realist writer, then, Porter is just as likely to gesture toward modernist detachment as she is to sentimental attachment. In discussing this tendency with students, you may conclude that Porter's flexible notion of realist writing allows her to avail herself of aesthetic effects from disparate literary traditions. Or you may conclude that our rigid sense of literary history is too quick to distinguish among Romantic, realist, and modernist traditions, and that a writer like Porter demonstrates a much more complex relationship with these perhaps simplistic categories.

Zora Neale Hurston

(1891- 1960) "Sweat" "The Eatonville Anthology" "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" There Eyes Were Watching God Hurston worked as an anthropologist as well as an author and wrote "The Eatonville Anthology" after graduating from Barnard College and returning to her birthplace, in Eatonville, Florida, to transcribe the folktales and folkways she remembered from childhood. Like her later Mules and Men (1935), both the "Anthology" and the essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" explore origins of consciousness—both collective and individual—that Hurston transforms into mythology, her attempt to explain the creation of the universe, to understand why the world is the way it is. Mythology does not overpower Hurston's fiction; rather, it empowers her use of folk history. Ask students to locate suggestions of mythology in "The Eatonville Anthology"; see, in particular, the opening of Section XIV: "Once 'way back yonder before the stars fell all the animals used to talk just like people." Sweat "Sweat" is a provocative story about a battered woman that is new to the Ninth Edition of NAAL. (You may want to include a trigger warning for students who have been the victims of abuse, or who grew up in an abusive household.) A good introduction to the pathos at the heart of this story comes from the following passage from Hurston's most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937): Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly. Discuss with your students what this passage says about gender roles and the different expectations placed on men and women. If your students struggle to understand this passage, ask them to rewrite sections of it in their own words, focusing on what the passage has to say about men's forward-looking behavior and women's memories of the past. How do these principles apply to the characters in "Sweat"? What indication do we get of Sykes's dreams having been "mocked to death by Time"? Are we to feel any sympathy for this character, or is he completely reprehensible and utterly irredeemable? What do we learn about Delia's ability to strategically forget and remember the past? About her willingness to "act and do things accordingly"? In "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" Hurston allows that "At certain times I have no race, I am me." Would Delia be able to say the same thing about her gender, or does the story make the case for a dif- ferent sort of orientation towards the gendered self?

Nella Larsen

(1891- 1964) Passing Nella Larsen's Passing opens with an excerpt from one of the most important poems of the Harlem Renaissance, Countee Cullen's "Heritage" (which also appears in this volume of NAAL): One three centuries removed From the scenes his fathers loved, Spicy grove, cinnamon tree, What is Africa to me? Reading this excerpt (or the entire poem) with your students can help set the stage for the issues that Larsen grapples with throughout Passing. Does Larsen appear to be putting the question "What is Africa to me?" into the mouths of Irene Redfield, Clare Kendry, and Gertrude Martin? Does this question resonate differently for these light-skinned characters than it does for other African Americans given that they are not only "three centuries removed" from African culture, but also several degrees further distanced from black culture by virtue of their decision to pass for white? It's a provocative use of the Cullen poem that puts Passing directly into the cultural and intellectual milieu of the Harlem Renaissance, and if you've assigned Passing alongside works by Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Sterling Brown, using the Cullen poem to tee up Passing can help to broaden your conversation to include a variety of perspectives on racism and colorism from within the Harlem Renaissance. You could also share with your students excerpts from W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (in Volume C of NAAL) on the phenomenon he describes as "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 twoness,—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." The "twoness" that Du Bois describes resonates on a somewhat different frequency for the characters in this novel who pass for white—literally moving back and forth between black and white subject positions based on circumstance, need, or desire. Ask your students to talk or to write about what double consciousness means for individuals who can pass as white versus those who cannot. Would Du Bois need to modify his definition based on the actions of Irene, Clare, and Gertrude? Following on that last question, it's worth asking your student to consider how Larsen sets up the three main women characters in the novel to comment on different aspects of the passing experience. Thadious M. Davis has written that "Irene, Gertrude Martin, and Clare represent a triangulation of perspectives on passing: Irene passes on occasion for the perks of being white . . . Gertrude passes daily without ever admitting that she only self-identifies with whites . . . [and] Clare passes permanently by having erased all traces of her mixed-race heritage." You could either propose these categories to your students and ask for discussion on the topic, or you could ask an open-ended set of questions about what the different women represent and how they chose to enact their racial identities. Another useful perspective from Davis is how the three women's passing reflect "attitudes towards race as arbitrary, skin color as a commodity, and identity as express- ible within social roles, especially wife and mother." As either an in-class discussion, small-group work, or a take-home assignment, students could take these three categories—(1) race as arbitrary, (2) skin color as a commodity, and (3) identity as a social role—and find specific passages from the novel that align with them.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

(1892- 1950) In two of Millay's love sonnets—"I Think I Should Have Loved You Presently" and "[I, being born a woman]"—the speaker is a woman addressing a man. There are plenty of love sonnets in the Anglo-American tradition, but the usual pattern is for male voices to speak to or about women; and when women poets respond on the subject of love or sexuality, their poems have, by convention, been abstract and spiritual. Like Claude McKay, Millay uses tight traditional forms to achieve intensity: disturbing and heretical themes in poised, polished stanzas. When she writes about love, passion, or faith, she uses plain language. To read Millay is to experience an often-astounding contrast between the urbanity and civility of her lines and the surprising thoughts that erupt within them.

E. E. Cummings

(1894- 1962) Consider what it would mean to ask whether Cummings is a "serious" poet. Describe the ways in which he experiments with language in poems such as "anyone lived in a pretty how town" or "my father moved through dooms of love" and consider their effects. Ask students to read "Buffalo Bill 's" or " 'next to of course god America I" out loud and discuss what happens to poetry that is meant to be read, not spoken. Locate modern themes in Cummings; place him in context with Frost (compare "pity this busy monster,manunkind" with Frost's "Departmental").

Jean Toomer

(1894- 1967) Discuss "Georgia Dusk" as a variation on Emerson's call for an American poet a century earlier. What, for Toomer, will be the characteristics of that "genius of the South"? And what will be the literary tradition for that "singer"? Locate Toomer in the context of other black writers or writers about black experience in NAAL, for example, Harris and Chesnutt. What does it mean, in Toomer, to make "folk-songs from soul sounds"? Analyze "Fern," first from the narrator's point of view and then focusing on Fern herself. What is happening within the speaker as he imaginatively recreates Fern? What is the literary analogue in Toomer for Du Bois's "double consciousness"? How does Toomer evoke "the souls of black folk" in this excerpt from Cane? Place Fern herself in the context of other works by American male writers, such as Poe's "Ligeia" or Anderson's "Mother." Toomer gives Fern a moment of speech when she asks, "Doesn't it make you mad?" and then his narrator interprets what she means. Does he give her a voice? Consider the last sentence in "Fern": "Her name, against the chance that you might happen down that way, is Fernie May Rosen." What, in this sentence, gives the reader more clues to Fern's identity than Toomer's earlier idealization of her? Is there any "real" Fern beneath Toomer's portrait of her as his narrator's muse? Note Toomer's reference to the black woman who "once saw the mother of Christ and drew her in charcoal on the courthouse wall." The allusion is one piece of evidence to suggest that black women, as well as men, have tried to record their visions; they have been artists as well as inspirations for art.

William Faulkner

(1897- 1962) As students begin to read As I Lay Dying, they experience fragmentation and dislocation. After assigning only the first five or ten monologues, you might spend much of the first class period allowing students to discuss the expectations they bring to a novel as readers and how As I Lay Dying disrupts those expectations. The initial confusion they feel as a result of Faulkner's disparate narrative sections and points of view can help them understand modernism as a challenge to their ways of seeing the world. If allowed to express their own disorientation, they begin to use Faulkner's novel as an exploration of ways of knowing (epistemology) as well as of ways of being (ontology) in a disordered universe. We begin with a preliminary discussion of the book's title in light of earlier thematic discussions of modernism. What does the reader expect, given this title? And how does the novel, from its opening sections, thwart those expectations? Who is the "I" of the title? Just Addie Bundren? What or who else does that first-person point of view include? And how does the past tense of the title create a preliminary absurdity before the reader begins the novel? In eliciting students' initial confusion about the opening sections, try to give them the experience of posing Faulkner's own questions as he lets his characters speak. What do they know as they read, and how do they know it? You might closely read Darl's opening section. Where does Faulkner "locate" the reader? Part of what "lies dying" for readers new to Faulkner is any reliance on the author as someone who will facilitate knowing. Faulkner shows readers only what his characters know, not what readers may feel the need to know. As students proceed through the novel (over the span of an additional two or three class periods), you can spend class time describing what Faulkner is doing. A class might want to consider novelistic conventions—character development, plot, use of a narrator, chronology, narrative form—and assess the extent to which Faulkner uses or rejects traditional elements of the novel. In the collective act of description, students make numerous statements about As I Lay Dying: they note the number of narrators (fifteen by the novel's end) and sections (fifty-nine separate monologues); they distinguish among the narrative voices by making descriptive observations: Darl has, by far, the most sections; some central characters—Jewel and Addie—have only one monologue; monologues by Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell, Anse, Vardaman, Cash, and Addie create a nexus of family dynamics; other characters—Cora, Tull, Peabody, Samson, Whitfield, Armstid, MacGowan, Moseley—express a wide range of possible social responses to the Bundrens. These descriptive statements may make some students feel that they have "figured out" the novel, and you may observe that their attempts to "solve" the novel may be premature and may actually be covering over their uneasiness as readers, lest they become lost in a work without omniscient authority. They also establish collective understandings about the characters in the novel that become shared facts and that serve as a prelude to interpretation. The attempt to bury Addie becomes the family members' ostensible reason for the journey to Jefferson, which provides Faulkner with his novel's narrative structure; but most of the Bundrens also have other reasons for the trip. Cash wants the free ride back to Tull's, where he is supposed to work on his barn, and he dreams of a "talking machine." Vardaman remembers something in a store window (the toy train) that Santa wouldn't have sold to town boys. Anse wants to get some new teeth. Dewey Dell hopes to buy a drug-induced abortion. Darl twice narrates events at which he could not have been present and in other sections appears to "know" things that others have not told him (he knows Dewey Dell is pregnant and that Anse is not Jewel's father). Among all of Addie's survivors, Jewel seems best able to feel the depths of his connection to his mother, to mourn her death, and to achieve emotional resolution. (At the end of Cora's section just preceding Addie's monologue, Addie tells Cora that Jewel "is my cross and he will be my salvation. He will save me from the water and from the fire," and indeed, Jewel first saves Addie's coffin in the ford and later from the fire Darl has set to Gillespie's barn.) The group effort to figure out what can be known in reading the novel becomes a pedagogical analogue to the Bundrens' own journey. The parallel tensions of burying Addie (for the Bundrens) and figuring out what is happening in the novel (for the members of the class) comment on the act of modernist reading: without the storyteller/guide of traditional narrative, the task of arriving at an understanding of Faulkner's text (analogous to bringing the coffin to Jefferson) places much of the burden of creation on the act of reading itself. As a result of description, students move toward interpretation. The elements of form they observe lead to their perceptions of character. For example, they note the repetition in the form of the images Jewel and Vardaman create as a way of grieving for Addie: "Jewel's mother is a horse" and "My mother is a fish." Then they can ask, which image works best to help the character resolve grief? In responding to the question, they explore the relationship between image and feeling, between word and meaning, between the novel as a form and the attempt to order the fragments of human consciousness. Central to exploring Faulkner's search for theme, meaning, and order is Addie's single monologue, placed off-center in the novel in the second half, long after Addie has died and the Bundrens have begun their journey to Jefferson. To what extent does Addie exist in the novel? Although she gives the other characters their ostensible reason for action, she herself does not act. Neither does she speak, except to acknowledge Cash as he builds her coffin. Her monologue in the novel may appear to give her a voice, but her death has already silenced her and prevents her from making her genuine presence known. She exists for others as their own projected need. Interestingly, what occupies her thinking in her monologue is the uselessness of words. Discuss Addie's various statements about words: "words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at"; a word is "just a shape to fill a lack"; a name is a "word as a shape, a vessel . . . a significant shape profoundly without life like an empty door frame"; words are "just sounds" that people have "for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words." In the narrative structure of Faulkner's novel, Addie is herself "just a shape to fill a lack." The visual image of the coffin that appears in Tull's third monologue typographically disrupts, once again, the reader's expectations; for although Faulkner has violated readers' expectations of linearity and wholeness in narrating As I Lay Dying, he at least uses words. With the visual image of the coffin, followed later by Addie's description of words, Faulkner creates a series of concentric visual images or shapes that serve both to contain his novel's meaning and to express the limits of narrative form. In Faulkner's thinking, each of the following is associatively synonymous: the visual figure of the coffin, the name Addie, the narrative form he has chosen for the book (it is spatial, a world laid out by compass and rule), and the book itself. As I Lay Dying effectively becomes Addie's coffin, a fiction in which she is silenced by the title. And like her family in Jefferson cemetery, she might be listening to the other fifty-eight monologues, but she'll "be hard to talk to." As I Lay Dying can have a profound effect on students who are themselves struggling to emerge from silence and to explore the world's order and form, to discover whether it has any or whether they must join the human collective task of making form and meaning. Students may empathize with Addie's silence and may find it reflected in Vardaman's obsession with his mother as a fish or in Cash's inability to speak except to focus on the coffin's construction or need for balance. As I Lay Dying demonstrates the novelist's own struggle to emerge from silence, and students may believe that it is only partly successful or that Faulkner is saying that it is possible to achieve only partial success. In evaluating the relationship between the construction of form—as a coffin or a novel—and of meaning, ask students to think about Darl. Is he crazy? If so, what makes him crazy? Interestingly, Darl has by far the least difficulty with silence; he can speak for others as well as for himself. Is he a mere scapegoat at the novel's end? Do the other members of his family believe he "knows too much"? Or has he failed in some basic way to create a form for what he knows? Darl is the only character who cannot make a connection between himself and some concrete object. He has no coffin, horse, fish, abortion, or reason to go to town. Students may find it difficult to believe that Darl "goes crazy" at the end of the novel, in part because, in many of his monologues, he closely resembles a traditional omniscient narrator, one whose own identity does not intrude. Who then is Darl? If he cannot express his connection in terms of an image, a form—coffin or novel—his knowledge and creativity become destructive. Darl simply cannot "be contained" in a form; therefore, as Cash realizes at novel's end, "this world is not his world; this life his life." In Darl's failure to achieve a form for human consciousness, Faulkner implies his own struggle for meaning. What to make of a diminished thing?—make something of it, find a word to fill the lack, write a novel that will reconcile human need for form with the formlessness of human consciousness. Cash's briefest monologue locates As I Lay Dying in the progression of Faulkner's career as a novelist: "It wasn't on a balance. I told them that if they wanted it to tote and ride on a balance, they would have to." As I Lay Dying rides precariously, a book about silent knowing necessarily told in words. Expecting to be told, students emerge from As I Lay Dying with the uneasy knowledge that words no longer—for the modernist—carry ultimate authority. As Addie expresses it, "the high dead words in time seemed to lose even the significance of their dead sound." Perhaps literary authority itself is at least a part of what "lies dying" in Faulkner's modern fictional universe. "Barn Burning" and "A Rose for Emily" All three of the Faulkner selections in NAAL are set in Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional region in rural Mississippi that Faulkner created as the backdrop for many of his novels and short stories. Faulkner drew a map of this apocryphal county for his 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom! and signed it "William Faulkner, Sole Owner & Proprietor." However much Faulkner you choose to have your students read, they would benefit from knowing that the various plots and characters of Faulkner's oeuvre are set in a fictional county that Faulkner describes with such detail and precision that it's hard to believe he didn't actually live there at some point in his life. Taken together, "Barn Burning" and "A Rose for Emily" provide two important perspectives on Yoknapatawpha, with the lower-class characters of "Barn Burning" struggling (however impotently) against a social system that has all but doomed them to a life of wage slavery, and the middle-class characters of "A Rose for Emily" locked in their own struggle to maintain propriety and a fragile social compact in the small town of Jefferson, Mississippi. Like As I Lay Dying, "Barn Burning" is as much a tale of frustrated lower-class aspirations as it is an existential drama. Similarly, Emily, in "A Rose for Emily," is as enigmatic a character as Addie Bundren, a figure as disturbing in her silence as in her antisocial behavior. Asking students to identify what motivates the main characters of these stories—Abner Snopes and Emily Grierson—can help them understand Faulkner's larger purpose with the stories themselves and Yoknapatawpha County as a whole.

Hart Crane

(1899- 1932) "The Bridge" Crane can be hard to engage with in a quick-moving survey course. His prosody varies; as a visionary poet and a twentieth-century bard, he takes on immense subjects; his verse presents a first-time reader with a bewildering range of moods and temperaments; and the story of his short, tumultuous life can shadow the poetry so much that the verse can become subordinate to the biography, mere exhibits in an investigation of the man. If you want students to appreciate, on the fly, Crane's ambitions as a poet and the variety of voices that he mastered, the best way to begin might be to take two extended stanzas from two different parts of The Bridge and examine them closely and comparatively. Whitman tried to embrace all of American experience, but his prosody did not show this kind of variety.

Ernest Hemingway

(1899- 1961) Both of the selections from Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway center on the lives of British and American expatriates living in Europe during the 1920s. Hemingway himself was a part of this community— which Gertrude Stein famously referred to as a "lost generation" of writers and artists—and much of his best fiction dealt with the conflicts, malaise, and trauma of these men and women. An initial discussion about the similarities in setting, tone, and characters shared by "Hills Like White Elephants" and Chapter III of The Sun Also Rises can help orient students both to the common concerns at the heart of the two pieces and to the aes- thetic techniques that Hemingway employs. Asking students to describe the surface-level commonalities between the two pieces can lead to more profound contemplation of the larger issues at stake: Setting: Both pieces take place in exotic locales described in an exhausted, world-weary manner that evacuates them of all romance. Action: Both contain discussions of alcohol and other entertaining pursuits (travel, dancing, etc.) that have since grown wearisome ("That's all we do, isn't it—look at things and try new drinks?" says the woman in "Hills Like White Elephants"). Dialogue: Conversation between characters is clipped and elliptical. Characters rarely say precisely what they mean, preferring instead to talk around topics without ever clearly articulating them ("I got hurt in the war," says the narrator of The Sun Also Rises; "It's really an awfully simple operation," the man in "Hills Like White Elephants" says in reference to the abortion that he hopes his female companion will have). Characters: Hemingway provides very little description of his characters, either their external appearance or their interior thoughts (in "Hills Like White Elephants" we never learn the names of the man and the woman in the story, and in The Sun Also Rises the limited character details include a description of Lady Brett Ashley as "damned good-looking" and an anti-Semitic dismissal of Robert Cohn as looking "a great deal as his compatriot"—the biblical prophet Moses—"must have looked when he saw the promised land"). Conflict: Relatively little action takes place in either piece, but con- flict on the level of uneven power dynamics between the characters— particularly between the men and the women—shows up regularly ("Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?" begs the woman in "Hills Like White Elephants," while in The Sun Also Rises Jake tells Georgette that Pernod is "not good for little girls," to which she replies, "Little girl yourself"). Following this initial discussion of the similarities between the two pieces, ask your students more pointed questions about the aesthetic practice at work (the "iceberg principle") and the cultural contexts within which that aesthetic operates.

Sterling Brown

(1901- 1989) Brown chooses the principle of contrast between white man and black man as his subject in "Mister Samuel and Sam" and "Master and Man." In these poems, the differences between white and black are settled by the common denominators of death and harvest time, and yet as the poems appear to resolve differences, they also end by highlighting the inequalities within those common denominators (both Samuel and Sam may die, but the harvest is more bounteous for the Master than for the Man). Other poems (such as "He Was a Man") also derive their form from the principle of contrast, but the holding back of detail in early stanzas typical of a ballad about the life of a man yields to more detail, and the ballad's "story" turns out to be the progress by which this "man" is reduced to not a man in the eyes of white people. The promise of unfolding in the ballad form is negated (and demonstrated by the poem's consistent use of negatives—"It wasn't about," "Didn't catch him," "It didn't come off")—by the poem's ultimate irony, that it's impossible to write a story of a man's life when he isn't viewed as a man. Thus the title's assertion ("He Was a Man") becomes the poem's primary message. "Break of Day" continues the ballad/blues form and a variation on the same theme: "Man in full" becomes "Long past due" by the poem's end.

John Steinbeck

(1902- 1968) Of Mice and Men "The Chrysanthemums" Many students will be familiar with Steinbeck, having read either The Grapes of Wrath or Of Mice and Men in high school. The Steinbeck selection in NAAL, "The Chrysanthemums," contains many of the same themes and images in those better-known works: the trials faced by rural, working-class laborers in central California; the struggle to find a place for yourself in the world, both financially and emotionally; and the necessary, yet extremely fragile, nature of human relationships. In "The Chrysanthemums," those themes are illustrated through the characters of Elisa and Henry Allen and an unnamed man who passes through their small farming community. Hemingway's "iceberg principle" is at work in this story, as the brief interaction between Elisa and this man is fraught with both sexual and economic anxiety. Ask your students to point to specific passages that hint at what's going on beneath the surface for each of the characters. While Elisa should be given the majority of the class discussion, Henry and the unnamed man are also dealing with internal conflicts that only barely emerge. Are all three characters facing similar concerns? Or does Steinbeck want us to see that gender (for Elisa) and social class (for the man) produce qualitatively different forms of suffering than what Henry may experience? As you discuss the unstated challenges that the characters face, ask your students why no one seems to be communicating effectively with anyone else in the story. Why do they all seem to be talking past one another as their indi- vidual concerns go unheard and their private struggles remain unaddressed? What is Steinbeck hoping to communicate with this tale of silent heartbreak? Is it a commentary on the tenuous economic position of migrant workers? Is it a feminist critique of women's stifled opportunities? Is it an absurdist account of the quiet suffering that all people face regard- less of their social position?

Nathanael West

(1903- 1940) The Day of the Locust New to the Ninth Edition of NAAL is Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, a challenging but ultimately rewarding text that you'll need to spend a fair amount of time guiding your students through. Despite being published in the 1930s, The Day of the Locust feels much more like the post-modern novels of a later generation, with Thomas Pynchon's 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49 a sibling or very close cousin. The modernist texts that resonate on similar frequencies with The Day of the Locust include Eliot's The Waste Land, Toomer's Cane, and Dos Passos's U.S.A., all three of which appear (either as excerpts or complete texts) in Volume D of NAAL. If you have assigned your students to read any of these works, a good way to tee up their experience with West is by asking them to list the texts' common aesthetic elements, such as their fragmentation, allusiveness, and sense of being burdened by the trauma of history. The Day of the Locust shares these concerns, but its immersion in popular culture veers the texts toward postmodernism. One quick example you could share with your students of the pop-culture sensibility of the text would be in the name of the theater where the climactic mob scene appears: Mr. Kahn's Pleasure Dome. Clearly a reference to Coleridge's 1816 poem "Kubla Khan" (which begins, "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree"), West's allusion to the literature of an earlier historical period resonates with the dense allusiveness of Eliot's The Waste Land, but it does so with a deliberate sloppiness (the name Khan is misspelled Kahn) that is rerouted through low culture (a billboard with ten-foot-high letters advertises the theater, "MR. KAHN A PLEASURE DOME DECREED") in a way that seems to evacuate the allusion of all meaning. Here are some questions to ask as a way to signal the transition from modernism to postmodernism that The Day of the Locust provides: Once we've spotted the allusion to "Kubla Khan," what do we do with it? What does Coleridge's poem teach us about 1930s Hollywood? (The answer to this may be, "Nothing at all.") Does "Kubla Khan" give us a key to understanding The Day of the Locust, or is it a red herring that provides surface texture with little to no depth? How do texts like The Waste Land, Cane, and U.S.A. treat literary and historical allusions? What is different about the allusions in The Day of the Locust? After discussing the "Kubla Khan" allusion with your students, point them toward some of the passages where West describes California as a simulated environment rich with surface detail but void of depth: Read the passage from Chapter 1 beginning "An army of cavalry and foot was passing" and ending ". . . the Scotch with bare knees under plaid skirts." This description of a setting is deliberately disorienting. We don't know where we are at this early point in the narrative until we are shouted at by an unnamed character, "Stage Nine—you bastards—Stage Nine!" Once it's clear that this artificial environment is part of the "movie magic" that all of us are now familiar with, ask your students if they have ever been to Universal Studios or watched any behind-the-scenes documentaries about their favorite films. When you watch a movie, you're taken into its simulated life-world. When you visit a studio set or watch behind-the-scenes footage, what's the experience like? How does it alter your relationship to the fictional world of a film to see how it's been constructed? The Hollywood soundstage isn't the only place where Tod Hackett feels like he's experiencing a simulated environment. In Chapter 1 read with your student the paragraphs beginning "He left the car at Vine Street" and ending "At this time Tod knew very little about them except that they had come to California to die." What's similar about the environment of a Los Angeles street and a Hollywood soundstage? What's different? What is West trying to say about the fantasies on the screen and the fantasies of day-to-day life? In particular, the list of characters that includes "The fat lady in the yachting cap [that] was going shopping, not boating" highlights this disconnect between appearance and reality. T. S. Eliot was very concerned with the "unreal city" he chronicles in The Waste Land. What's different about the "unreal city" of Los Angeles? And why did all of these characters "come to California to die"? Also in Chapter 1 is a brief description of the natural environment bleeding into a human-manufactured one, beginning "The edges of the trees burned with a pale violet light" and ending ". . . they were almost beautiful." Have your students explicate this passage, paying particu- lar attention to the image of the light reflecting off the trees "like a Neon tube." What is West trying to communicate with this blending of the natural and the artificial? How do these images in Chapter 1 lay the foundation for larger issues throughout the text? Other images of simulated environments to discuss: "the Southern colonial architecture" in Chapter 4, with a "Chinese servant" addressed as a "black rascal"; the "Irish" and "Spanish" neighborhoods in Chapter 7; the Inuit family in Chapter 17 "who had been brought to Hollywood to make retakes for a picture about polar exploration"; the side-by-side desert and jungle sets in Chapter 18; and "Turtle's Trading Post" from Chapter 26. Why does West fill The Day of the Locust with images of unreal and simulated environments? Is it just a throwaway gag about the artificial nature of Hollywood moviemaking, or is he introducing a larger commentary about twentieth-century American culture? Because The Day of the Locust is such a densely allusive text, assign your students to research the historical, literary, artistic, and musical references that West makes. The value of these allusions resides in what each indi- vidual reference provides by way of a commentary on the text, as well as in their aggregate effect. Topics to research include: The 1815 Battle of Waterloo, which is the subject of the "Waterloo" film discussed in the novel. Direct your students to the Waterloo 200:1815-2015 website (http://waterloo200.org/). A variety of songs appear throughout the novel, from folk songs to religious hymns. Through simple Internet searches your students can learn about the history of these songs. The Library of Congress, for instance, hosts a 1939 recording of Zora Neale Hurston singing "Mama Don't Want No Peas, No Rice," which appears in Chapter 19 of The Day of the Locust (see www.loc.gov/item/flwpa000016/). What would these songs have signaled for West's readers? West references a variety of painters, authors, and actors, such as Winslow Homer, Thomas Ryder, Francisco Goya, Honoré Daumier, Gertrude Stein, Juan Gris, and Mae West. Is there a common thread running throughout these different historical figures? Does West cite them as a way to guide readers toward an interpretation of the novel, or do they play a different role? The title of the novel itself may be an allusion to the plague of locusts in the Book of Exodus from the Bible. Have your students read this passage from Exodus 10:1-20, as well as the sections of the Exodus narrative preceding it, to help them understand how the story of the plague illustrates the phrase from the Judaic tradition regarding God's willingness to use his power to support the chosen people "with a strong hand and an outstretched arm." Does a similar plague afflict Hollywood/the United States/the modern world in The Day of the Locust? Is this novel ultimately a biblical parable, or is the allusion to the Bible yet another play of surfaces without real and meaningful depth? Gender and sexuality play a major role in The Day of the Locust, especially Faye Greener and the men's reactions to her. Ask your students to describe their own reaction to Faye. Does she come across as a fully rounded character with emotions and personality? Or is she a blank slate upon which men project their desires? What would it be like to tell The Day of the Locust from Faye's perspective? Does West give us enough to go on to re-create the text from Faye's point of view, or is this ultimately a male-centered text? What about other women characters, like Alice Estee, Joan Schwartzen, Audrey Jenning, Maybelle Loomis, Mary Dove, and Romola Martin? In Chapter 5, the characters watch the first reel of Le Predicament de Marie, which appears to be a pornographic film. The central character, Marie, is the object of desire of every member of the family she works for, both male and female. The projector breaks down before the characters are able to see the film through to what we imagine will be a sexual conclusion. Does the depiction of women as sexual objects in this film provide any metacommentary on the women in West's novel? Can we use this film as a point of reference for understanding West's treatment of women in The Day of the Locust? In Chapter 11 we are told that "Faye enjoyed being stared at," soon after which Faye gives an erotic performance of the song "Jeepers Creepers," which appeared in the film Going Places (1938) one year before The Day of the Locust was published. (Louis Armstrong's performance of the song in the film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song.) Is this a straightforward scene where Faye is made a victim of the male gaze? Or is there evidence elsewhere in the text that Faye is in control of such situations? Chapter 13 gives us a fascinating account of Faye as a storyteller. What do we learn about Faye from this story? What do we learn about Faye's ability to tell a story—to be an artist—in the context of Tod's desire to become an artist himself and the larger context of movie artistry? This is the same chapter where Tod's sexual desire toward Faye is expressed in explicitly violent terms: "Nothing less violent than rape would do." We also learn that in Tod's painting The Burning of Los Angeles, "Faye is the naked girl in the left foreground being chased by the group of men and women who have separated from the main body of the mob." What are we to make of the contrast that this chapter provides between Faye's power as a storyteller and her status as a potential victim of rape and violence? Does West have a particular commentary in mind? Do the details in the text suggest a potential interpretation of Faye's character (and the role of women in Hollywood) that West himself may not have envisioned? The culminating episode of the novel, the moment when the metaphorical plague of locusts finally descends, is the mob riot outside of the Kahn cinema. The text aggressively alludes to this moment through repeated refer- ences to Tod's painting The Burning of Los Angeles. Once the moment finally arrives, however, what impact does it make? Does it feel inevitable? And if so, are we to respond to that inevitability with horror or a sense of detachment? Does it serve as a final moral judgment on the movie indus- try, the United States, and/or the modern era? Does the tone of the narra- tive at this point of the novel express particular distress at the violence and mayhem unleashed upon the city? What contrast is there between the scene unfolding and the way it is described? The nineteenth-century precedent for this mob scene is the Astor Place Riot. The Internet Archive hosts an 1849 text titled Account of the Ter- rific and Fatal Riot at the New-York Astor Place Opera House (see https://archive.org/details/accountofterrifi00hmra). Have your students read through sections of this text and compare it to both the subject and the tone of the mob scene in The Day of the Locust. Ask your students to keep track of references to the painting The Burning of Los Angeles throughout the novel. When does the narrator mention it? When does Tod think about it? What role does it play in his life? Is the painting something of a prophecy of the coming riot? How does it illustrate the old adage about art imitating life (or vice versa)? Does West use the painting as a way to break down the dis- tinction between art and life, or to reinforce the idea that some things are real while others are mere illusions?

Countee Cullen

(1903- 1946) He rhymes, he scans, he sounds Shakespearean here, like Keats or Tennyson or Dickinson there—it's not surprising that Cullen's achievement, in his brief life, should have gone through a phase of dismissal after his death. When critics call, as they periodically do, for rough and flamboyant authenticity, such "Phi Beta Kappa verse" can look contrived, a performance to please a wrong audience. To read Cullen that way is to miss the intensity of his struggle within and against a tradition, to master it, join it, and resist it all at the same time. If that description suggests an irrational or paradoxical drive, then it is also human and rich—and because of those conflicts you might consider reading Cullen in light of other conflicted American masters, like Bradstreet and Dickinson, both of whom seem to resound in the NAAL selections. You could start with the last two quatrains of "Uncle Jim," quatrains that your students might guess were straight out of Dickinson if they came upon them in another context. You could move from here to the ending of "Incident" and again ask how the poem is and is not a contemplation in the Dickinson manner. If students sense that Cullen is in a "lover's quarrel" with a literary tradition that both schools him and excludes him, and if they have some experience with canonical British writers, you might try "Yet Do I Marvel" as a poem that pushes back, as it were, against the sonnet tradition of Shakespeare and Milton. Look at the grammar and syntax here: they seem defiantly unmodern at times and far from an African American vernacular.

Robert Penn Warren

(1905-1989) "Bearded Oaks" "Audubon" "Mortal Limit" Warren is a good place to begin when surveying poetry since 1945, because he is committed to both the traditional poetic forms of rhyme and meter and to free-verse expression. In addition to keeping a foot in both the old and the new, Warren is a master of nature poetry. By focusing on the ways in which Warren situates human subjects in the natural world, students can begin to appreciate the sophisticated models for understanding our place in the world that contemporary poetry provides. The poems from his 1969 book-length poem Audubon: A Vision are a great place to start thinking about the transition from (and the continuities between) nineteenth-and twentieth-century relationships between human beings and the natural world. If your students are unfamiliar with the work of naturalist John James Audubon, share with them the University of Pittsburgh's online exhibit Audubon's "Birds of America" (http://digital.library.pitt.edu/a/audubon/). After discussing Audubon's life and work, ask how he serves as a frame of reference for Warren's poems. Does Audubon represent an idyllic, prelapsarian state of nature for Warren, or does Audubon represent an era in American history in which the natural world was in conflict with industrialization? When Warren describes a scene in the American West (as in "Mortal Limit") or an anonymous stand of trees (as in "Bearded Oaks"), is his goal to defamiliarize natural settings that have become overly familiar with time, or is it to nurture a collective experience with the natural world shared by all Americans? Is he forcing us to see things anew, or is he giving us the literary equivalent of comfort food?

Richard Wright

(1908- 1960) "The Man Who Was Almost a Man" Since "The Man Who Was Almost a Man" was published within a year of Wright's great novel Native Son, we can look for similarities in theme and in the motivation of characters. This is a story of a crisis brought on by desperation and sudden bizarre circumstance, a crisis that could change or ruin a young man's life forever. In some ways the story reads like a prologue to Native Son: set in the Deep South, the tale ends with a potentially dangerous protagonist, in isolation, heading off into the darkness of his fate—perhaps to a place like Chicago.

Eudora Welty

(1909-2001) "Petrified Man" "Petrified Man," like many of Welty's great stories about small-town Southern life, is a comic marvel but a challenging narrative. As students become happily lost in the blather of the beauty shop, they may miss the fact that there is a plot here and a meditation on the entanglements of truth, human nature, and the arts of telling. The story is almost entirely dialogue, and Welty gives us very few cues as to where we are or what to think of these people, other than the cues they give about themselves. Discuss the relationship that emerges for us between Leota and Mrs. Fletcher. Also, you might want to discuss at some point the undercurrent of violence in "Petrified Man."

John Cheever

(1912-1982) "The Swimmer" Cheever makes an excellent foil for Tennessee Williams, and he offers a demonstration of how postwar American literature has brought us a proliferation not only of regional works but of different possibilities regarding the presentation of temperament. Rightly or otherwise, Williams has become associated with hot climates, hot passions, overt sexuality, and spectacular (if not always eloquent) breakdown scenes in which primordial desire and deep pain are exhibited and confessed. Cheever's associations are in some ways the opposite: his landscape, physically and psychologically, is often the suburban landscape of southern Connecticut and Westchester County, New York—upscale neighborhoods two hours or less by train or car from New York City, landscapes in which urban comforts blend (sometimes attractively, sometimes grotesquely) with a real or contrived pastoral setting and in which people may try to balance and sustain their inner lives in part by keeping their lawns, houses, and outward personalities well tended. The classic Cheever breakdown, so strongly contrasted with Williams's, is of a sort he associated with prep-schooled, Ivy League-trained professional men and their façade-conserving wives: a sudden wave of anomie, of deracination, an unexplained compulsion to take on or persist in some bizarre or self-destructive activity or to quietly tear the fabric of the artificial life that surrounds them and their families. Students can work back and forth between Cheever and Williams, strengthening their own powers to compare and discuss works in light of one another and musing on how deep the class differences and regional differences still run in contemporary America.

Ralph Ellison

(1914-1994) Students by this point in your course will have much to say about the use and abuse of symbolism—to draw them into the power of Invisible Man and to encourage them to read the entire novel, it's worth pausing to see how Chapter I works both as an allegory and as a splendid piece of realistic narrative. Compare Ellison's protagonist with Dave Saunders in Richard Wright's "The Man Who Was Almost a Man." The two might seem incomparable in educational background and social possibilities; discuss how they may be set up against different barriers.

Arthur Miller

(1915-2005) Death of a Salesman gives American family life itself the power to create character—almost as if the play were about the inability of any playwright to invent roles he or she has not already played or watched in the tragedy of family life. The family is both the play and the playwright. And in this play, the family prescribes certain roles for each of the four main characters that they continue to reenact in the process of discovering what they are. Students, following Linda's cue, will focus on Willy Loman himself: "Attention must be finally paid to such a person." Neither of his sons is able understand why he has so much trouble communicating with them. Unlike Mary Tyrone or Blanche DuBois, Linda Loman has no identity of her own. Miller implies that Linda has kept her husband from going to Alaska and "conquering the world." Miller leaves the interpretation of his character's intentions out in the open, which will provide some profound class discussion material.

Grace Paley

A conversation about Paley can range far: into modern writers and American politics, the status of women in urban cultural and professional contexts, the transformations and development of realist motives as they interconnect in various ways with ideas associated with modernism and postmodernism. If you are uneasy about classifying Paley in one clutch or another of contemporary writers (and she resists classification), you might enter this tale as a story about storytelling—not a self-indulgent or self-promoting exercise about individual genius or the supposed magic of fiction but about writers and intended audiences, about whether any mode of narration can achieve simple and profound truth, and about whether all this making of fiction really serves any purpose in a world grown so complex, changeful, and forgetful of the struggles and the rich inner life of the private self. Some of your students have probably been wondering about such issues all term, and Paley can bring those concerns eloquently into the open. It's a disarming tale that students will probably like very much, as it respects and celebrates creative intentions that in other circumstances are scorned or condescended to: pleasing people whom you love, sharing the heartfelt perception with a father or mother, respecting the life and thoughts of fairly ordinary human beings—people who may not belong in art films but who nonetheless are capable of powerful insight. There is a kinship evident here not only among Paley, Malamud, and Bellow, but also between Paley and American writers at least as far back as Rebecca Harding Davis, and students will help you speculate on those relationships.

Philip Roth

As is true in many of his novels and stories, Roth mixes broad comedy with a serious moral and identity crisis in "Defender of the Faith." The historical context is crucial to understanding what is at stake here, and you might want to spend some time describing the odd season between VE Day (the surrender of Nazi Germany) and VJ Day (the surrender of Japan). Millions of American troops, in Europe, in the Pacific, and at home, were expecting an all-out assault on the Japanese mainland, and redeployments and high anxiety were everywhere. There was also significant tension between combat veterans and new recruits—the men who had seen battle and those who had passed through four years of war in relative safety.

George Saunders

Ask your students if they've ever visited a living history museum such as Colonial Williamsburg (www.history.org/), Old Sturbridge Village (www.osv.org/), or This Is the Place Heritage Park (www.thisistheplace.org/), or if they've ever participated in a Civil War reenactment or Renaissance fair. What is the appeal of such ventures? If your students have never participated themselves, have them spend some time with the websites of Living History Worldwide (http://livinghistoryworldwide.com/) and the Association for Living History, Farm, and Agricultural Museums (www.alhfam.org/) to get a sense of what drives people to re-create and inhabit the past. "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" takes a cynical look at this subculture, populating it with desperate, pathetic, and broken souls. What is the source of Saunders's animus? What is it about attempts to recover the past that Saunders deems worthy of satire and critique? The name "CivilWarLand" is clearly riffing on the world's most famous amusement park, Disneyland. Is Saunders's critique of living history museums tied to the corporatization of family fun that is embodied by the Disney parks? Or is it a critique of our relationship to history itself? You may want to ask your class about the different versions of the history of the Civil War that they have been exposed to, either in school or through other sources: Was it a war about slavery? About states' rights? About federalist power? Without spending too much time on this discussion, you can help your class see that Americans' relationship to this pivotal moment in the mation's history remains deeply unsettled, and that a work such as Saunders's can help us see that history anew through the funhouse mirror of satire. The conclusion of the story deserves a good amount of class discussion: What are we to make of our narrator being murdered yet continuing to narrate the events of the story? Does this tell us something about how we relate to the ghosts of the past? And what is Saunders telling us when the narrator is suddenly able to look deep into the troubled mind of his assailant? What does this suggest about the need to be aware of the unknowable suffering of the past?

Leslie Marmon Silko

At that point early in "Lullaby" at which Ayah does not want to think about her dead son, she thinks instead "about the weaving and the way her mother had done it." Craft defends against sorrow, for Ayah, and for Silko, who weaves the loss of Pueblo culture into Ayah's lullaby at the end of the story. Yet the promise passed down from generation to generation of Pueblo children from their mothers has been broken: "We are together always / There never was a time / when this was not so." Ask students to explore thematic similarities between Silko's story and others in Volume E of NAAL. Like Walker and Beattie, Silko portrays the family in dissolution; however, Ayah has lost her children to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and to cultural assimilation with white people. It is not possible for her to reclaim them or to restore her sense of family. The loss of the possibility of family affects the relationship between Ayah and Chato, and Chato and many other Native American men in "Lullaby" turn to alcohol to numb their despair. Ayah does not drink; her experience makes the men afraid of her and to look at her "like she was a spider crawling slowly across the room."

Ann Beattie

Beattie's "Weekend" alludes to the film of the same name by Jean-Luc Godard, and what violence takes place in this New Yorker story takes place only in the language and as disjunction. Houseplants play a significant role in this story (the contemporary writer's concession to the loss of the external green world?), and Lenore projects and simultaneously contains her own violent fantasies when Beattie writes about her that she "will not offer to hack shoots off her plant for these girls." Otherwise, nothing happens in this story; Lenore, the "simple" character, asks Beattie's quintessential contemporary question, "Why do I let what go on?" Ask students how they interpret Lenore's statement that she is "simple." What does it mean to be simple in contemporary life? "It is true; she likes simple things." Yet Lenore's life and Beattie's "Weekend" are more complex than that. Does the word "simple" for Lenore allow her to defend against noticing the full extent of the lack of communication between her and George? "Weekend" presents a simple world of women, in which women are out of place; all of George's guests are "girls," and living with George without being married offers Lenore only the illusion of choice. George joins a large list of contemporary characters who drink their way through their fictions, and as George drinks, Beattie shifts to passive voice: "another bottle has been opened." The point of the sentence seems to be that no one knows who has opened the bottle; agency unknown reflects the postmodern dysfunction.

Billy Collins

Because Collins began a term as poet laureate of the United States in 2001, students may want to know what the fuss is about—in other words, what distinguishes his work, and why would he be chosen from thousands of living American poets. Since newspaper reviews of Collins often use the word "accessible" to describe his verse, you might have a free- wheeling discussion about accessibility as a virtue or a weakness in contemporary art and why some critics use the term as a pejorative. Collins favors familiar words and opening situations, and his poems often begin with lines that suggest oral discourse rather than laboriously crafted verse. To discover where the poems change and complicate, students could do some core sampling, reading the first stanza and a stanza that comes much later in one of the longer poems ("Tuesday, June 4, 1991" and "Osso Buco" would work well for this) and speculate on the process by which the poem gets from here to there. Logic? Free association? Some complex intuitive process?

Mary Oliver

Because Oliver is very much a New England pastoral poet, it makes sense to encourage students to read her with other such poets in mind. The long, rich tradition of Anglo-American pastoral poetry can actually be a burden for the individual modern artist, if the quest is to achieve an original voice among so many other writers, living and dead, working in similar modes. Students who are comfortable with the overt control and polish of Frost, Wilbur, and Bishop may be disconcerted by the apparent freedom and spontaneity of Oliver's lines. If the objective is to distinguish Oliver's voice, you might begin with "The Black Snake" as a rewrite of or response to William Stafford's famous short elegy "Traveling through the Dark," which takes similar risks with a similar situation: an animal found dead along a highway, a poet trying to bear witness without descending into bathos or forced consolations. In some ways, Oliver goes further with her contem- plation than Stafford does, saying things that he left unsaid. In "In Black-water Woods" she opens a pastoral poem with prosody adapted from William Carlos Williams—not a poet known for conspicuous spirituality or for general truths garnered or glimpsed from observations of nature.

Amy Tan

Because of her heritage and her favored subjects as a writer, Amy Tan can be thought about as continuing and enriching a tradition extending back to Sui Sin Far, the woman author who first wrote vividly about the Chinese American experience in the American West. If your class has read the Far selections in NAAL, they will immediately feel the differences in how Tan connects to the stories she tells. Far prefers the third-person voice, the bodiless and ostensibly impartial observer; Tan tells of Chinatown and these families as a full participant in the action, and one of the obvious contemporary "American" dimensions to this excerpt is her some- times playful, sometimes rueful self-portrait as a rebel and a victim. In assuming that role and tone she joins a big and raucous chorus of twen- tieth- and twenty-first-century voices: Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin—the list goes on and on. The mother's voice in heavy dialect, old-world, insistent, judgmental; the daughter's voice colloquial, "like us," variously affectionate and exasperated—to some of your students, this kind of pairing will probably suggest another Asian-American woman voice that they know well: Margaret Cho, who also grew up in San Francisco, thriving in and fighting with her own Korean heritage, and struggling—hilariously, in her stand-up comedy routines—to be herself rather than fit into any of an array of available stereotypes. Students may want to contrast the poise and witty restraint of Amy Tan's voice to the sometimes outrageous anecdotes of Margaret Cho, as they each negotiate a personal and a family past.

James Dickey

Dickey gives us a great opportunity to think about the way contemporary poets deal with questions of metaphysics and the possibility of an afterlife. "The Heaven of Animals" presents itself as a religious poem, although it's open to debate if the religion in question is Judeo-Christian or animistic. Similarly, "Falling" begins with a clipping from a New York Times article about the death of an airplane flight attendant and proceeds to meditate on both the physiological and the spiritual implications of death. Whether Dickey seeks to understand the immortal souls of animals or of people, he demonstrates a contemplative posture toward the afterlife; ask students if earlier American poets display similar outlooks. Read Dickey with Bryant's "Thanatopsis," Dickinson's poems on death, or Taylor's "A Fig for Thee, Oh! Death." How has American poetry changed in its views on the afterlife, both in subject matter and in tone? Read Dickey with his contemporaries on the same topic: Sharon Olds's "My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead" and Anne Sexton's "The Truth the Dead Know." Do these poets share an attitude toward the possibility of an afterlife? Help students push beyond the question of what these poets may or may not actually believe about life after death; ask them instead to think about what the possibility of an afterlife offers to the poetic imagination.

Louise Erdrich

Erdrich is one of the most widely respected contemporary Native American writers; and the short story "Fleur" is packed with incident: violence, natural catastrophe, tense confrontations, and, at the center, a woman of mystery. So much is going on here that a reader can drift into an assumption that "Fleur" is an unspooling of personal experience, raw narration, whose only source—for event, character, and form—is Chippewa life in northern Minnesota. Part of the challenge of teaching Erdrich, therefore, is to encourage your students to see how highly literate a writer Erdrich is, "literate" not just in Native American lore, history, and contemporary expe- rience but in techniques of modern American fiction, the predominantly white traditions of telling. Cather is here, and Faulkner, and O'Connor, and Hemingway, and many others as well—but to discuss Erdrich's implicit conversation with such other writers is not to present her work as ancil- lary to this tradition. NAAL includes several poems by Erdrich, and by reading them in company with "Fleur" your students can gain a stronger sense of the moods and perspectives that this writer favors. As a poet of the northern woods and prairies, she shows us natural and human experience mediated by cold air and reduced autumn and winter light. If there are outbreaks of anger here, they seem tempered by wind, snow, and a sense of long ages and passing time.

Allen Ginsberg

Howl Chroniclers of modern and contemporary American poetry often identify the 1955 San Francisco reading of Ginsberg's Howl as a turning point in postwar verse, the beginning of new directions and modes. The Beats, as Ginsberg and other writers of the 1950s such as Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and William Burroughs came to be called, caught on with the public—including a public that had little experience with poetry and only vicarious interest in alternative lifestyles. Proclaiming his indebtedness to Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, Ginsberg nonetheless established himself as a major poet in his own right, with his distinct voice and verse forms. At around the same time and on the other side of the continent, in New York City, Frank O'Hara and the New York School (including poets such as John Ashbery and artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning) were also pioneering new modes of aesthetic expression. Both Ginsberg and O'Hara wrote intensely personal poetry, but neither fits comfortably within the label "confessional." Rather, they attempted—as had Whitman—to make their individual voices reflect the cultural milieu of the world they lived in. If their work is to be read autobiographically (as it probably should be), an important moment to identify in the work of both poets occurs when the speaking voice of a given poem no longer represents that of an individual person and becomes the collective utterance of "the best minds of my generation" (in Ginsberg's phrase from Howl).

Louise Glück

If Glück is read in a clear context, as a poet establishing one voice self-consciously amid a chorus of postmodern American verse and within a well-established and academically sanctioned poetry tradition, your students will probably have much better luck with her work than if she is read alone or in a scattering of American poets from the late nineteenth century into the late twentieth and early twenty-first. Glück writes very much in the wake of other writers—Dickinson, Williams, Plath, and Robert Lowell—but at the same time her strategy of not saying, of closing a poem with a mysterious and personal image or an emotion only partially expressed, achieves importance as a kind of resistance, as a rejoinder to the Lowell-Plath way of closing poems with a kind of crushing finality. To be mystical, Glück leaves things open-ended: hers is a kind of agnostic mysticism. Students may want to talk not only about the contextual specialness of her vision in comparison to contemporaries (Wilbur, Dickey, and Rich would work well for contrasts) but also about whether they find this kind of indeterminate spirituality convincing and sufficient as poetic discourse. In other words, Glück can be a very good mirror to the reading self, as it considers what it requires from contemporary poetry.

Charles Simic

If Simic's verse is characterized by short, flat, declarative sentences and by opening stanzas that seem dead set against overtly poetic effects, then students may want to look for and discuss moments in which these poems seem to shift suddenly in pace, language, and theme. Simic is an intensely well-read poet, and like many postwar writers, his verse rings with the sounds and experiments of the other great writers of his era.

Frank Bidart

In Bidart's "Ellen West" and Davis's "Break It Down" (both new to NAAL) we have two stunning portraits of postmodern love in poetry and prose, respectively. "Ellen West" is a dramatic monologue and as such is part of a long poetic tradition that flowered in the Victorian period among poets such as Robert Browning and Christina Rossetti. If your students are unfamiliar with this genre, reviewing a few stanzas of poems such as Browning's "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" or "My Last Duchess" can help them appreciate the intended impact that poets seek when they adopt a voice other than their own and attempt, in relatively short space, to paint a portrait of that character. Like many postmodern writers, Bidart is self-consciously using an older poetic form to comment on the ways in which our lives are socially and textually constructed. What are the different tex- tual forms that appear throughout the poem? (In addition to the free-verse poetry, your students should be able to point out passages of third-person prose, letters, journal entries, etc.) What assumptions do those different textual forms carry? How does Bidart take advantage of those assumptions to round out—or complicate—his portrait of Ellen West? What does this postmodern approach (i.e., the pastiche of different textual forms) offer that rhymed couplets in iambic pentameter (Browning's preferred style) cannot? What might be lost in building a poem from an amalgam of texts? What do Bidart's formal experiments tell us about his subject matter—love?

Amiri Baraka

In the fifties and sixties, Baraka's relationship with experimental writers was complex, and his poetry might be read as a commentary on that unpredictable mix of intimacy, exploitation, and hostility that, as a black artist among white artists and literary camp followers, he experienced firsthand. However, some of the continuing power of his poetry is that it looks at more dimensions of urban and interracial experience than just the literary. Have students read a few selections of Ginsberg's Howl, or other high-intensity poetry from the Beats, and see if there isn't a resemblance there—a resemblance that can help locate Baraka's poetry in a particular period of American letters and set it apart from the work of his contemporaries.

N. Scott Momaday

In the selections from The Way to Rainy Mountain, Momaday interweaves a Kiowa past to which he is connected by his bicultural memory, family, and tradition and a Native American literary future (or "renaissance," in the terms of critics) that re-creates in words a culture that exists only "tenuously," in memory. It proves to be Stanford-educated Momaday's thor- ough acculturation in what his nineteenth-century predecessors would have called "white" or "government" education as well as his command of the English language that makes both possible at once: the preservation of the past and a vision of a future for Native Americans. Unlike most of the Native American texts included in NAAL, Momaday's is not transcribed from a non-English language or from an oral performance—although he collects Kiowa tales and myths, with his father as translator—and he is writing simultaneously to native peoples and Euro-Americans. He is also writing for himself and for others like himself who want to hold on to a Native American heritage. This can include students, even white students, in the American literature classroom. In some ways, The Way to Rainy Mountain becomes a "final exam" of the Native American materials in NAAL, a way of testing students' knowledge and integration of their earlier readings. For understanding the form of the work requires at least some acquaintance with American Indian myths and history. The work begins with Momaday's contemporary rendition of the Kiowa myth of creation—an emergence myth, like that of the Navajo Creation Story included in Volume A. Momaday traces the migration of the Kiowas and the legends they make, such as the legend of Tai-me, and their relation to other gods in the sky; he gives his grandmother, Aho, a position of reverence and a godlike voice from Kiowa history; he relates the devel- opment and loss of the Sun Dance ritual, what his grandmother remembers as "deicide"; he works through (with his father's help in translation) a series of Kiowa myths, counterpointed (or as if in encounter with) other voices—a voice of family and cultural history and a third personal voice of reflections on his place in the schemes of history and myth; and he ends with a poem, "Rainy Mountain Cemetery," which conveys his own vision. The Native American poet in the late 1960s has been to the mountain, an Indian Moses, and has brought back his vision of "the early sun," on the mountain that "burns and shines," in an image of a new dawn approaching "upon the shadow that your name defines"—an unmarked dark stone that must serve as the marker for the beautiful woman buried in an unmarked grave near his grandmother's house, for all of the unmarked dead Kiowas, for the end of Kiowa culture itself. It is as if, for Momaday, the end of the Sun Dance ritual—like the end of the Ghost Dance religion (both of which occurred in 1890)—required a new vision a century later, and the Native American poet writes a version of the Messiah Letter, one that combines myth, song, and rituals of ceremonial prayer.

Audre Lorde

It's tempting, for a number of reasons, to pigeonhole Lorde into one or another of the identities that she has claimed for herself as an African American, a feminist, and a lesbian. Balancing a desire to let Lorde express her sense of group identification with a desire to highlight her accomplishments as a poet sheds light on the seriousness with which Lorde took her commitments to projects for social justice and the poetic craft. Discussing the relationship between aesthetics and politics should enhance understanding not only of Lorde but of the social role of contemporary poetry.

Naturalism

Jack London Stephen Crane Edith Wharton, House of Mirth Upton Sinclair, The Jungle Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio John Dos Passos, U.S.A. trilogy Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March William Faulkner Ernest Hemingway Joyce Carol Oates, them Don DeLillo Cormac McCarthy The term naturalism describes a type of literature that attempts to apply scientific principles of objectivity and detachment to its study of human beings. For naturalistic writers, since human beings are, in Emile Zola's phrase, "human beasts," characters can be studied through their relationships to their surroundings. [T]he naturalistic novel usually contains two tensions or contradictions. The first tension is that between the subject matter of the naturalistic novel and the concept of man which emerges from this subject matter. The naturalist populates his novel primarily from the lower middle class or the lower class. . . . His fictional world is that of the commonplace and unheroic in which life would seem to be chiefly the dull round of daily existence, as we ourselves usually conceive of our lives. But the naturalist discovers in this world those qualities of man usually associated with the heroic or adventurous, such as acts of violence and passion which involve sexual adventure or bodily strength and which culminate in desperate moments and violent death. A naturalistic novel is thus an extension of realism only in the sense that both modes often deal with the local and contemporary. The naturalist, however, discovers in this material the extraordinary and excessive in human nature. The second tension involves the theme of the naturalistic novel. The naturalist often describes his characters as though they are conditioned and controlled by environment, heredity, instinct, or chance. But he also suggests a compensating humanistic value in his characters or their fates which affirms the significance of the individual and of his life. The tension here is that between the naturalist's desire to represent in fiction the new, discomfiting truths which he has found in the ideas and life of his late nineteenth-century world, and also his desire to find some meaning in experience which reasserts the validity of the human enterprise. Frequently but not invariably ill-educated or lower-class characters whose lives are governed by the forces of heredity, instinct, and passion. Their attempts at exercising free will or choice are hamstrung by forces beyond their control; social Darwinism and other theories help to explain their fates to the reader. See June Howard's Form and History for information on the spectator in naturalism. Frequently an urban setting.

James Merrill

Like Robert Lowell, James Merrill was born to a patrician New England family and educated at elite schools—and like Lowell, Sexton, Berryman, and Plath, Merrill eventually wrote poetry about family and personal experience, poetry that could be called "confessional." But Merrill's verse stands apart, for Merrill believed in the imagination and the educated intellect as human powers that can transform the past, including personal anguish, and give it meaning, not just expression. In a Merrill poem, the speaker recollects with a measure of Wordsworthian tranquillity and celebrates the power of thoughtful retrospection and of the poem itself to give form and even a measure of beauty to what Jarrell called "the dailiness of life."

Sherman Alexie

One standard way to relegate Native Americans to secondary status in our collective cultural life is to confine them to a realm of nostalgia, to regard them as a people of the past; another strategy is to represent them as a people static and apart, untouched by or essentially oblivious to the action that rocks the world of everyone else. Just as Sherman Alexie's subjects rove far beyond sweat lodges and kivas and kachinas, his literary echoes and quarrels aren't limited to the reservation either. He shows us Native Americans living in the world, and he does so with literary voices that lay claim to much larger territory.

Lucille Clifton

Short poems in open forms by a minority poet—the temptation might be strong to read Clifton for racial and political themes, subordinating the depth and resonance of her voice and the broad poetic heritage she draws upon. There is anger here, and also grief, and pride, and stoic affirmations of life—but these poems also show wit and outbreaks of lightheartedness and here and there a touch of mystical insight suggesting other sources and traditions than those of the west.

Joy Harjo

The first inclination of the class may be to talk about Harjo's prosody as a continuation or modernization of Native American songs and chants of the sort represented in Volumes A and B. This is a starting point, but you may want to help students see that there is a broad and paradoxical literacy behind and within Harjo's poems and that these poems, though private in their demeanor, speak to a varied audience. She is writing contemporary poetry in English; and like Kingston, Bambara, and others, she seeks to achieve a voice reflecting the totality of her experience as an American of mixed racial and cultural heritage. Some questions to get the conversation moving can center on the variety in Harjo's prosody: do these variations reflect shifts in mood, subject, and voice? There is considerable emphasis on sound—as an effect but also as a subject. Talk, radio noise, church voices, sudden silences—all are accorded special eloquence and spirituality.

Robert Pinsky

The headnote for Pinsky suggests relationships between his work and poetry of Bishop and W. C. Williams; but what students may find most striking—and initially daunting—about Pinsky's work is his vast range of associations and allusions, his apparent faith (a bit like Bellow's) that everything is connected somehow to everything else and that finding and rel- ishing those connections is a source of consolation and hope. A contemplation of an ordinary imported shirt will take you, imaginatively, to the other side of the world, to moments in American history, to other American and British poets—and from George Herbert to "a Black / Lady in South Carolina." Students can enjoy a ride with Pinsky if they first can see that his leaps and allusions are not pretentious, not proffered to make students feel ignorant and small and to give professors something to footnote. These poems celebrate the act of thinking and the motions of the informed, experienced mind. A good way to proceed, therefore, might be to ask students to read passages from the long poem "At Pleasure Bay" aloud and with a bit of feeling, not stopping to worry about "Ibo dryads" or "the Soviet northern-most settlements" but thinking instead about a poetry that tries to cross boundaries of culture, time, and private experience.

Raymond Carver

The headnote points out that when Carver died, in 1988, his work was widely admired and imitated in academic circles, but since critical attention has focused on Carver as a refuser of many narrative conventions and a practitioner of a "stripped down" minimalist sort of realism, students may wonder what is going on here beyond a gesture of resistance against other kinds of fiction that were in favor in the seventies when Carver began to publish his collections. Your class is not likely to be interested in a transient and parochial dispute, and the challenge may be to open up "Cathedral" as a story that does take chances and that affirms the validity of engaging with the world imaginatively. Since Carver is usually classified as a latter-day realist, students may be reluctant to see any symbolic dimensions to the key action in the story: the rediscovery of the majesty of a cathedral, not by seeing but by moving the hands and feeling. A little nudging of the story to bring out those dimen- sions will open up the possibility that even a work as austere as this can resonate in this way and can be about the recovery of the capacity for won- der, even in times of disbelief. The magic, if we can call it that, may lie in how we perceive and how we refresh our own ways of examining the world.

August Wilson

The headnote to Wilson's Fences draws explicit comparisons to another twentieth-century masterpiece, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman: "Both plays risk sentimentality in their underlining of the hero's plangent complaints, but at their best those complaints have idiomatic force and resonate with a true voice of feeling." Like Willie Loman, Troy Maxson is an aging working stiff who struggles to provide for his family and cheats on his wife. If you have your students read both plays—and the two make a good pairing—ask them if they notice any other similarities. Does the fact that one play is about a white family and the other an African American family change your perception of the two otherwise similar main characters? How does Wilson himself highlight race as a salient factor in Troy's gradual downfall as a man? (You might remind students here that Troy, unlike Willie Loman, had a promising career as an athlete cut short because of the racism in Major League Baseball at the time.) Besides this comparison with Death of a Salesman, Fences offers a number of other rich possibilities for discussion. For example, in the second act of the play, Troy has a dramatic monologue in which he describes the fence he is building as an attempt to protect himself from his own mortality. This is a fascinating moment of theatricality in an otherwise naturalistic play. Students who have read Shakespeare will be familiar with the dramatic monologue as a device for conveying plot details or for providing insight into a character's motivation. How does Wilson use the dramatic monologue in Fences? Is the device out of place in a play that strives for verisimilitude? If your students think that the dramatic monologue is better suited to Elizabethan England than to Broadway, encourage them to give Wilson the benefit of the doubt and to consider why a contemporary playwright would knowingly incorporate an antiquated theatrical device into his play. Apart from what it reveals about the character of Troy, how does this dramatic monologue alter our experience with the play? Does it pull us out of the realistic setting that Wilson has worked so hard to achieve, or does it bring an element of psychological depth to the play as a whole?

Thomas Pynchon

The short story "Entropy" includes some classic Pynchon themes and strategies: the high-intensity anxiety about nearly everything in human experience, from worldly human foibles to frightening laws of physics and uncrackable conundrums in epistemology. We also have the fast-moving, sometimes eloquent, but essentially flat characters orating and tearing about in the foreground: if asked for analogues, and encouraged to be free-wheeling, some of your students will suggest similarities with the Simpsons, other dark-toned comics by Matt Groening and Berke Breathed, and some of the more bizarre Hollywood dystopic comedies. Pynchon has been around long enough and has been popular enough to have had his admir- ers and imitators in television and film.

Adrienne Rich

The works of Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath have greatly influenced the construction of a feminist poetics, a poetics that resists the prescriptions of Emerson, Whitman, Eliot, and others who affirm that the poet must achieve dominion over worldly experience, rather than conduct an open-ended dialogue with life and its circumstances. Plath is often read as a martyr, dying young in a milieu hostile to the fuller expression she sought; Rich as a poet of deep and daring transformations—of herself, of her voice and prosody, and of her role as a poet in postwar America.

Sylvia Plath

The works of Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath have greatly influenced the construction of a feminist poetics, a poetics that resists the prescriptions of Emerson, Whitman, Eliot, and others who affirm that the poet must achieve dominion over worldly experience, rather than conduct an open-ended dialogue with life and its circumstances. Plath is often read as a martyr, dying young in a milieu hostile to the fuller expression she sought; Rich as a poet of deep and daring transformations—of herself, of her voice and prosody, and of her role as a poet in postwar America.

Yusef Komunyakaa

There is a unique voice here, and if you're doing a quick tour through contemporary writers at the end of the semester, Komunyakaa provides good reason to hit the brakes and look at these recent poems as poems, ambitious adventures with the English language and the accumulated and miscellaneous culture of the West. The danger in a fast flip through the later pages of any thick anthology, as we have said before, is that you'll come away with an impression of an array of contemporary representative "types"—personalities and ethnicities rather than conscientious artists who show us something new. With regard to Komunyakaa, it's important to read the entire set, as these selections provide a good introductory encounter with his reach: how much personal and collective experience he brings to bear, the claim he lays to a poetic and cultural heritage extending far beyond his own region and immediate experience, and his courage in mixing it up.

Postmodernism

Thomas Pynchon Don Delillo Donald Barthelme William Gaddis John Barth David Foster Wallace Kurt Vonnegut Ursula K. Leguin Ishmael Reed Leslie Marmon Silko Octavia Butler, Kindred Alan Moore, Watchmen David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress, Vanishing Point Louise Erdrich Sherman Alexie Joshua Cohen, Four New Messages, The Book of Numbers Kathy Acker Both modern and postmodern literature represent a break from 19th century realism. In character development, both modern and postmodern literature explore subjectivism, turning from external reality to examine inner states of consciousness, in many cases drawing on modernist examples. In addition, both modern and postmodern literature explore fragmentariness in narrative- and character-construction. The Waste Land is often cited as a means of distinguishing modern and postmodern literature.[citation needed] The poem is fragmentary and employs pastiche like much postmodern literature, but the speaker in The Waste Land says, "these fragments I have shored against my ruins". Modernist literature sees fragmentation and extreme subjectivity as an existential crisis, or Freudian internal conflict, a problem that must be solved, and the artist is often cited as the one to solve it. Postmodernists, however, often demonstrate that this chaos is insurmountable; the artist is impotent, and the only recourse against "ruin" is to play within the chaos. Playfulness is present in many modernist works (Joyce's Finnegans Wake or Virginia Woolf's Orlando, for example) and they may seem very similar to postmodern works, but with postmodernism playfulness becomes central and the actual achievement of order and meaning becomes unlikely. Gertrude Stein's playful experiment with metafiction and genre in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) has been interpreted as postmodern. Characteristics: Irony, playfulness, black humor (Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo, Donald Barthelme) Intertextuality: Since postmodernism represents a decentered concept of the universe in which individual works are not isolated creations, much of the focus in the study of postmodern literature is on intertextuality: the relationship between one text (a novel for example) and another or one text within the interwoven fabric of literary history. (Thomas Pynchon in "Entropy", Donald Barthelme) Pastiche: "paste" together, multiple elements. In Postmodernist literature this can be an homage to or a parody of past styles. It can be seen as a representation of the chaotic, pluralistic, or information-drenched aspects of postmodern society. (Thomas Pynchon again, Robert Coover?) Metafiction, Temporal distortion, Technoculture and hyperreality, Paranoia, Maximalism, Minimalism, Fragmentation Jo's Handout: Suspicion and rejection of Master Narratives for history and culture; local narratives, ironic deconstruction of master narratives: counter-myths of origin. "Progress" seen as a failed Master Narrative. Rejection of totalizing theories; pursuit of localizing and contingent theories. Social and cultural pluralism, disunity, unclear bases for social/national/ethnic unity. Skepticism of idea of progress, anti-technology reactions, neo-Luddism; new age religions. Sense of fragmentation and decentered self; multiple, conflicting identities. Alternative family unites, alternatives to middle-class marriage model, multiple identities for couplings and childraising. Polysexuality, exposure of repressed homosexual and homosocial realities in cultures. (Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove?) Subverted order, loss of centralized control, fragmentation. Trust and investment in micropolitics, identity politics, local politics, institutional power struggles. Culture adapting to simulation, visual media becoming undifferentiated equivalent forms, simulation and real-time media substituting for the real. Hyper-reality, image saturation, simulacra seem more powerful than the "real"; imags and texts with no prior "original." "As seen on TV" and "as seen on MTV" are more powerful than unmediated experience. Disruption of the dominance of high culture by popular culture. Mixing of popular and high cultures, new valuation of pop culture, hybrid cultural forms cancel "high"/"low" categories. (Thomas Pynchon in Against the Day, Inherent Vice). Demassified culture; niche products and marketing, smaller group identites. Art as process, performance, production, intertextuality. Art as recycling of culture authenticated by audience and validated in subcultures sharing identity with the artist. Navigation through information overload, information management, fragmented, partial knowledge; just-in-time knowledge. Dispersal, dissemination, networked, distributed knowledge. Indeterminacy, contingency, polycentric power sources. Play, irony, challenge to official seriousness, subversion of earnestness. Hybridity, promiscuous genres, recombinanat culture, intertextuality, pastiche. Cyborgian mixing of organic and inorganic, human and machine and electronic. Androgyny, queer sexual identities, polymorphous sexuality, mass marketing of pornography, porn style mixing with mainstream images. Hypermedia as transcendence of the physical limits of print media. The Web as infinitely expandable, centerless, inter-connected information system.

John Updike

Updike will be well known to you not only for his best-selling novels and respected short stories but also for his enormous literacy and accomplishments as a critic of art, film, poetry, fiction, and American culture. The challenge in teaching him lies in conveying the range of cultural experience that can make itself felt within a fairly conventional-looking tale of middle-class trouble. To show how this story might stand apart from a legion of tales about "middleness," separations, divorce, and the failure of love, why not start from the beginning and end and work toward the middle? Turn to the last paragraphs and talk a little about the risks inherent in closing a story with a question like "Why?"

Alice Walker

Walker's depiction of her mother-daughter bond differs considerably from Flannery O'Connor's. While Mrs. Hopewell defines herself and her daughter by listening to the voices of conventional "good country people," the mother who narrates "Everyday Use" listens to her inner voice and creates her own values, even if she has to silently defend those values from her older daughter's belligerent attacks. For many readers, it seems as if Walker wants us to side with the narrator and Maggie against Dee/Wangero. Is this the only way to read the story, though? Is Dee/Wangero the necessary antagonist of the story, or is Walker setting up a more complex dialectic between her characters?

Richard Wilbur

Wilbur was one of the first American poets laureate; he has also been president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has won nearly every major prize that is given for poetry and translation. But in a century that favored blank verse and open forms, Wilbur has preferred to work in traditional modes: sonnets, villanelles, ballads—producing poem after poem that rhymes and scans in intricate, skillful ways. His dedication to those "traditional" arts and values can cause us to stop and wonder—when free verse is the mainstream fashion, and has been so since about 1920, what kinds of work, in poetry, might be genuinely avant-garde?

Toni Morrison

You may find that your students have previous experience with Morrison, because The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon have become regulars in advanced high school courses and first-year English sections. It is likely, however, that they haven't previously read a work as concise as this by Morrison. Since at least the 1980s, her work has defied easy categorization; so rather than begin with possible connections between this story and American realism and naturalism, you might ask what other narratives "Recitatif" reminds them of—other works by Morrison or works by other fiction writers, dramatists, or screenwriters. The tale has many kin in contemporary American literature; after all, it is a story of two women, formerly childhood friends, who meet by chance and struggle to rediscover some key memories, evade some other ones, and find grounds for intimacy and empathy despite the effects of time and personal experience. There are stories and films in profusion that cover such ground, but rarely in this way and with the themes that Morrison emphasizes here. Twyla and Roberta don't struggle to impose meaning on life, but rather to find meaning within their personal experience, to accept and engage with the realities that have overwhelmed them since childhood and to discover, as Twyla puts it, "How to believe what had to be believed." Circumstances change and they change again: the late sixties culture gives way to the materialism of the seventies and eighties, and each of these people is carried along and to some extent transformed. Can students see any connection between that general theme and Twyla's emphasis on food and her interest in matching up "the right people with the right food"? Why does she stay at the demonstration, carrying her sign, even when the disorder of the group has made her own placard meaningless? Words seem to fail her, and cultural correlatives (like Jimi Hendrix) keep changing, and people not only shift social classes but shift values and attitudes along with those classes. But is this a pessimistic story? Or do identity and friendship show themselves as transcendent somehow undam- aged in their essence by change? And why is the story called "Recitatif," which, as the headnote observes, is a narrative that is sung in a free-form way? Is there a suggestion, implicit in this title, that the music of experience is more important than wordy, prosy explications?

Jack Kerouac

Your students may already be familiar with Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation. If not, you may want to show them excerpts from the 1999 documentary The Source: The Story of the Beats and the Beat Generation, or share with them some of the materials from the Utah State University Libraries' collection of Beat movement poetry and broad-sides (see http://digital.lib.usu.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/Beat). To get a good conversation going, take a few steps back and talk about the broader cultural context of On the Road: the mythology of California and the Beat legacy; the lure of the "beatnik," "hippie," and "bohemian" life; the succession of famous American stories that celebrate the open road (such as Huckleberry Finn), the meandering sea voyage (Moby-Dick), and the trek into uncharted territory (any of the Leather- stocking Tales) as an American rite of passage. In fact, the first chapter of On the Road lines up almost exactly with the first chapter of Moby- Dick ("Loomings," which appears in Volume B of NAAL) in that both present us with a down-on-his-luck narrator who finds an escape from the suicidal depression of everyday life by embarking on an adventure on the open road (or sea). Similarly, Walt Whitman's 1856 poem "Song of the Open Road" (which you can find on The Walt Whitman Archive at http://whitmanarchive.org/) celebrates the life-affirming qualities of setting out into uncharted territory. Have your students compare these classic nineteenth-century texts with On the Road, which was published in 1957. Do these shared themes say something about American culture trans-historically? About white American men in particular, or about a general desire to manifest one's independence?