American Literature: A Historical Overview from the Colonial Period to Transcendentalism -, Apuntes de Idioma Inglés

¡Descarga American Literature: A Historical Overview from the Colonial Period to Transcendentalism - y más Apuntes en PDF de Idioma Inglés solo en Docsity! TOPIC 1: HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN HISTORY -The Mayflower Compact: William Bradford: Kind of book, but smaller. It contained a list of regulations and principals that organizes people who were on the boat. It is important the good relationship between the Indians and the pilgrims at the beginning. The Indians held the white people to survive. The narrator quotes William Bradford. Many people survived, but they managed to endure themselves because of their belief of being the Chosen ones and their foundation of a community. Without the help of the Indians, these white people would have not survived. Chronological overview of American Literature: 3 main periods: the Colonial Period (the 17thc.), the Enlightenment (the 18thc.), the 19th century. -The 19th century: divided into two parts: -FIRST PART: 1800-1865 -CIVIL WAR: 1861-1865 -SECOND PART: 1865-1900 (Postwar period) ABOLITION OF SLAVERY (1863) Lincoln abolished slavery in a legal way, but the war continued for two more years. Emancipation Proclamation. Emergence of the Classical authors of the American Literature. (Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain…). -Mark Twain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn. American Literature: Preliminary Remarks: a result of the meeting between the land, the settlers, the Indians and the literate cultures of Renaissance Europe. COLONIAL LITERATURE: -Indian Captivity Narratives: text which accounts for the experience of the white people who were captive by the Indians, and after they were released they wrote down their experience and why were they treated as hostages. Indian Captivity Narrative example: Mary Rowlandson. -<<Puritan>>: Sermons, philosophical essays (with religious under tongue), jeremiad (a specific Puritan sermon), poetry. -Non-imaginative: based on real facts, not fiction. Puritans considered themselves as part of the English Church. The Pilgrim Fathers did not, but they held Puritan ideas. TOPIC 1: Literary Culture in the Colonies (the 1660s) KING PHILIP’S WAR (1675-1676). It promoted the creation of the Indian Captivity Narratives written by Mary Rowlandson. Greed of the Indian land. Crash between the Puritan and the Indian way of life. The Indians could have killed the pilgrims when they arrived at the beach, but the Wampanoag received them with wide arms, for preventing the Indians to kill them. AN INDIAN NEVER FORGETS A KINDNESS, BUT NEVER FORGIVES A WRONG. -Metacomet, leader of the Wampanoag -Execution in Plymouth of three of his tribesmen. -1616-1619: epidemic -1200 houses were burned, 600 colonials dead and 3000 Indians killed. MARY ROWLANDSON (1636-1678) -The Narrative of the Captivity and the Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682). -It became a prototype of all Indian captivity, very popular (1) and frequently reprinted. -Language reminiscent of the Old Testament. -Maniqueistic vision (2) -An enactment of the Puritan American myth. (3) -Plain style, striving for accurate representation (4) (1) In order of reinforcing the arguments of white people to hate Indians and to categorize Indian people as evils. (2) You’re either a good person or a bad person, but you can’t be both at the same time. It is a closed, dogmatic and conservative view of reality. (3) God had made me special to resist and to survive, in order to write down my experience with the Indians-, M. Rowlandson (Puritans’ ideal). She represented herself in her story as a martyr, although she didn’t die. (4) Rowlandson doesn’t engage in using a complicated language. Her language is very subjective. Her words are filled with a very clear intention. TOPIC 4: THE EARLY REPUBLIC WASHINGTON IRVING AND JAMES FENIMORE COOPER THE EARLY REPUBLIC (1776-1820) -1803: purchase of the Louisiana territory from France. -The 1812 War -The 1823 Monroe Doctrine: “further efforts by European nations to colonize land or interfere with states in North or South America would be viewed as acts of aggression, requiring U.S. intervention”. THE ISSUE OF NATIVE ORIGINALITY AND AN INDEPENDENT AMERICAN LITERATURE: “America has opened new views to the naturalist and politician, but has seldom furnished themes to the moral painter. That new springs of action and new motives to curiosity should operate; that the field of investigation opened to us by our own country should differ essentially from those which exist in Europe, may be readily conceived”. (Charles B. Brown). WASHINGTON IRVING (1783-1859) -Born into a prosperous merchant family in New York City. -Spent 17 years living in Europe, Spain included. -Used pseudonyms: Diedrick Knickerbocker in “A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the end of the Dutch Dynasty”. -The “Knickerbocker School”. -“The Legends of the Alhambra” (1832), is based on his 1829 residence in Granada. -“A tour of the Prairies” (1835) and “Astoria” (1836): based in frontier romances. -1819-1820: “The Sketch Bok of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.”: collection of essays and stories, classics of American folklore: “Rio Van Winkle”, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”. JAMES FENIMORE COOPER: -The Leatherstocking Series: two main stereotypes (the pioneer and the Indian) -The pioneer: Natty Bumppo or Leatherstocking. Romantic archetype. -“The pioneers” (1823) -“The Last of the Mohicans” (1826) -“The Prairie” (1827) -“The Pathfinder” (1840) -“The Deerslayer” (1841) -Simplistic style and characterization. Violating probability -However, his achievement consisted in making American history a ready subject for narrative. -He inaugurated the American romance. TOPIC 5: TRASCENDENTALISM The American Renaissance -1830-1860s -F. O. Matthiesen’s “The American Renaissance” (1941) -Diverse movements: temperance, abolitionism, feminism, transcendentalism. AUTHORS: -R.W. Emerson. Philosophical essays -H.D. Thoreau. Philosophical essays -Herman Melville. Fiction -Nathaniel Hawthorne. Fiction -E. A. Poe. Fiction -Walt Whitman. Poetry -Emily Dickinson. Poetry TRASCENDENTALISM -Calvinism (Puritanism) -> Unitarianism -> Radicalization -> Transcendentalism (1836) -Transcendental Club “The Dial” (1840-1844). Margaret Fuller. It started as a religious movement for REFORM, but it ended up as a new way of thinking about human beings, God, political. UNITARIANISM -Dominant religion in Boston during the early 19th century. -Developed in the late 18th century, as a branch of the liberal wing of Christianity, which had separated from Orthodox Christianity during the First Great Awakening of the 1740s. -Principles of Unitarianism: rejected inherent depravity (all human beings are evil, according to the Calvinists), intellectual reason as the path to divine wisdom (it is not confined to the Elect, everybody can reach intellectual reason, and everybody can reach the path to divine wisdom) and rejected divine trinity. UNITARIAN BELIEFS -Stability -Harmony -Rational thought: empirical investigation. -Progressive morality (moral judgments have to change, are bound to the very circumstances), voluntary ethical conduct, free conscience (the liberty of believe, the liberty of making your own decisions). -Individuals could discover the ordered and benevolent nature of the universe and of God’s laws. ROLE OF HARVARD DIVINITY SCHOOL -Harvard was dominated by Unitarians as professors of Divinity during the 1st decade of the 19th century. -Most of the students who would later become Transcendentalists graduated from HDS. EVOLUTION FROM UNITARIANISM TO TRANSCENDENTALISM -Unitarian ministers critical with Unitarian ideology felt that Unitarianism was too sober (serious), mild and excessively calm and rational. -These ministers needed a more intense spiritual experience. -The evolution was over when they decided to abandon some Unitarian principles and adopt Transcendentalist ones. Their intention was to “transcend”. FUNDAMENTAL TRANSCENDENTALIST PRINCIPLES -Rejected the notion of original sin (DISOBEDIENCE). -Rejected the concept of inherent depravity. -Finding God depended on one’s inner striving toward spiritual communion with the divine spirit. -Received influence from English and German Romanticism (emphasis in individual expression and freedom). -Developed the concept of “human reason” that corresponds to what we call “INTUITION” nowadays: subjective intuition was at least as reliable a source of truth as empirical investigation. -Rejected the idea of “miracles”: God displayed his presence in every aspect of the natural world, and not only at isolated times. RELEVANT TRANSCENDENTALISTS -Orestes Brownson: identified the spirituality of the Transcendentalists with liberty and democracy. -George Ripley: graduated from Harvard Divinity School, founder of Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Mass., an experimental community in 1841 -> equality (equal pay), sharing of profits, and voluntary choosing of tasks in the fields. -Brownson Alcott: teacher, philosopher and reformer in education. Avoidance of physical punishment, conversationalist style in teaching, advocate of a vegan diet, abolitionist and advocate of women’s rights, father to Louisa May Alcott. DEFINITION OF TRANSCENDENTALISM -An idealist philosophical tendency among writers in and around Boston in the mid-19th century. Growing out of Christian Unitarianism in the 1830s under the influence of German and British Romanticism, Transcendentalism affirmed Kant’s principle of intuitive knowledge not derived from the senses, while rejecting organized religion for an extremely individualistic celebration of the divinity in each human being. If God is everywhere, you don’t need to go to the Church. TRANSCENDENTALIST WRITERS -Ralph W. Emerson: 1836, “Nature”; 1837, “The American Scholar”; 1841, “lñSelf-reliance”; 1841, “The Over-Soul”; 1844, “The Poet”. -Henry D. Thoreau: 1849, “Civil Disobedience”; 1854, “Walden”. HERMAN MELVILLE. -Personal connection with Hawthorne. His admiration for Hawthorne triggered Melville’s essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850): “Some may start to read Shakespeare and Hawthorne on the same page… but Shakespeare has been approached. There are minds that have gone as far as Shakespeare into the universo… Believe me, my friends, that men not very much inferior to Shakespeare are this day being born on the banks of Ohio. And the day will come when you shall say, ‘Who reads a book by an Englishman who is modern?’” To Melville, American literature innovates, is more new than English literature. -Life marked by obscurity and sad events. “Economic” orphan and displaced person. -1841 => Acushnet (along voyage into the Pacific): whalers. -Existentialism, sense of tragedy, maniqueist perspective: -Good VS. Evil -God VS. Satan -Individual VS. society -American Romantic Innocence VS. Dark Experience. MAIN WORKS (the titles are very significant) -Best-sellers (travel writing) 1846 => Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. 1847 => Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas. -1850 => Moby Dick. He described it as a botch work (chapucero), because the book developed as a tragedy in which human power is challenging divine power. Defies God and nature. -1856 The Piazza Tales: “Bartleby the Scrivener, a Story of Wall Street”. ESSAY. Similar ideas with Thoreau about civil disobedience. Famous phrase => “I would prefer not to”. -Billy Budd=> topic: American Romantic innocence VS. Dark Experience. Moby Dick => Connection between the sea and the mood (references to death). What Melville demonstrates is that human nature can be defiant, completely irrational and obsessed. Whales can be white but can’t be great. The captain emphasizes the fact that Moby Dick is white. Blasphemy references (meant the name of God in vain). EDGAR ALLAN POE -Decadent imagination, in opposition to Emerson. -His works call into question Transcendentalist optimism. -Life experiences determinant in his poetics: sense of psychic and geographical estrangement. Foster parents (with no good relationship with his foster father). Poe became alienated since very young because his orphaned. -University of Virginia (he was expelled afterwards), West Point Military Academy. -Literary executor, Rufus Griswold (person in-charge of dealing with the writer’s private state), accountable for Poe’s depraved and neurotic satanic legendary portrait. -Unconventional love life. -Poète maudit (Baudelaire: “The Flowers of Evil” and French Symbolists) => a writer who lives on the margin of society, and normally he is a challenger of social conventions, and also uses taboo topics that show the dark side of life and citizens avoid those topics. Dark and bright sides coexist together. Human nature is more complex than what transcendentalists believe. -Evolution from being a “European” writer in his own day to being a classical American writer nowadays. -He died very young: with 40 years old he perished under strange circumstances (frozen in the streets or inside a bar). -He married one of his cousin, not illegal but a bit strange (she was 14 years old and died with 18 or 19 years old). Three perspectives => Fiction writer, Literary Critic (“The Philosophy of Composition”, 1846), Poet. Definition of poetry (the highest literary language for him): “We would define in brief the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Beyond the limits of Beauty its province does not extend. Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience it has only collateral relations. It has no dependence, unless incidentally, upon either Duty or Truth…” The poem is important because it is beautiful. Musicality is central, an important characteristic. “The philosophy of composition”. Explanation of “The Raven” -Poem = mathematical problem. -Effect -Length: brevity (100 lines), in order to keep the unity of impression. -Objective: the contemplation of beauty (its highest manifestation is associated with sadness or melancholy). -Death: the most universally melancholy topic. -Death of a beautiful woman (The death would be the most beautiful topic in a poem) HE INVENTED THE DETECTIVE GENRE, after followed by authors like Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. CATEGORIES/TYPES OF TALES: -Synthetic -Analytic: “The Tell-Tale Heart” -Tales of ratiocination: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, “The Purloined Letter”, “The Mystery of Marie Roget”. -Grotesque tales. -Tales of the Arabesque. -Tales of terror. (“The Pit and the Pendulum”). -Tales of death. MAIN TOPICS: -Working of the human mind. -Psychological troubles. Feelings of guilt, fear, remorse, terror. -Irrational drives and emotional excesses. -Exploration of Reason and Unreason; Madness and Sanity (“A Poe character is never more insane than at the moment he begins to reason with us”, Larzer Ziff). No one is completely mad and completely sane. Actions without our rational control, and is absurd to deny it. ANTECEDENT OF SIGMUND FREUD (theory of the unconscious). AMERICAN FICTION IN THE 2ND HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY -Regionalism or Local Color. Literary movement. -Realism. Literary movement. -Naturalism. Literary movement. -They are contemporary trends which coexisted in the same historical period, namely, from 1865 to 1900 and offer a clear contrast to the fiction produced in the first half of the century. Romanticism is opposite to Realism. Main features of Realism and Regionalism -All of them are anti-romantic and exhibit these features: -REALISM -> story that chooses characters resembling real people. Language not metaphorical, simple and colloquial language. Kind of situations and events (common, normal, typical of a normal daily life) depicted in the novel. -VEROSIMILITUDE -> the writer has to be the impression that what he tells is based on real life. -SIMPLE LANGUAGE -DEMOCRACY -> a novel tends to include people coming from different social classes, different backgrounds and even different racial groups. MARK TWAIN. MARK TWAIN -Main Regionalist writer. -Specific location: the Mississippi Riverbank (3770 km) (Hannibal -> village where the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn take place). Material for his work. That’s why he is considered Regionalist apart from Realistic. -Pseudonym -> (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). -Linguistic accuracy -> precise, reproduce exactly the language that people really use. Mark Twain did not refined the language, no adaptation. -Humor. -Tall-tale (tradition started by A. B. Longstreet): “The Celebrated Jumping Frof of Calaveras County” (1865), Mark Twain. -Focus on a given area of the US: the Mississippi River. -The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. -The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. KATE CHOPIN (1850-1904) HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: -Realism centered on women’s personal and social condition. -The Woman Question. -The New Woman: called into question the foundations of patriarchal society. -The Dress Reform Movement. -Precedents of the Suffragist and Feminist Movements. The Declaration of Sentiments at the Seneca Falls Convention (New York, 1848). -Affiliated to Realism and local-colour (Louisiana: state texts base). -Creole: offspring between people (father and mother) that come from the country that had colonized this place. The Awakening (1899) and short stories. -Symbolic language and codified meanings. -Her fiction gained acceptance under the rubric of “local-color”. -True “region” (physical, geographic or mental): female consciousness. -Superb use of irony. -The novel of “awakening” VS Bildungsroman. -Realistic critique of women’s social and personal limitations. -Analysis of the language. -Topic/theme. -Characterization: narrative point of view (how the narrator is in the story). -Women in the Early 20th Century (video.about.com/history199s/Women-in-the-Early-20th- Century.htm.)