Lecture 4 American literature Literature

1. Дудченко М.М. Література Великобританії і США. Навчальний посібник для студентів вищих навчальних закладів (англійською мовою). – 2-ге вид., доп. – Суми: ВТД «Університетська книга», 2006. – 445 с. – С. 379-432.

2. Зарубежная литература ХХ века: Учебник для вузов/ Под ред. Л.Г. Андреева. – 2-е изд., испр. и доп. – М.: Высш. шк., 2003. – 559 с. – С. 490-518.

3. Пронин В.А., Толкачев С.П. Современный литературный процесс за рубежом: Учебное пособие М.: Изд-во МГУП, 2000.- 168 с. On line at: www.hi-edu.ru/x-books/xbook026/01/part-006.htm

4. VanSpanckeren Kathryn. Outline of American literature. – Chapters 7-10. - On line at: http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/oal/oaltoc.htm

5. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_literature

Main characteristics of American literature.

American literature is rather young that is why it didn’t have many periods or stages, which were common for other literatures.

This literature didn’t originate from folklore like many other national literatures: its beginning came from personal journals, religious writings and travel accounts of the first settlers, and its development was closely connected with development of journalism.

Thus, prose predominates in American literature, especially short stories, novellas and novels.

America is called “a melting pot of nations”, and it is true because American culture has been formed by accumulating and melting many cultures. It means that it is multicultural and heterogeneous by nature.

From the beginning, the Americans have examined and attempted to explain themselves in their literature, and the perplexing question “What is an American?” has never lost its interest either inside or outside the American boundaries. Thus, the problem of identity (national, cultural, class or sexual) is one of the main aspects of American literature.

European tradition of writing was, on the one hand, the ideal for many American writers, but, on the other hand, they always tried to reject it and create something new.

The majority of the first settlers were English that is why English became the main language of American literature. Among the immigrants the Puritans predominated. They were the religious people with strict moral rules such as necessity of hard work, honesty, thrift and absence of amusements. The Puritans followed many ideas of the Swiss reformer J. Calvin, who considered people to be basically evil. Their religious consciousness was rather symbolic that is why since their times symbolism has been playing a great role in American literature.

Such features of American literature as rhetoric, moral instruction and pragmatism are the results of the Puritanical influence. They are closely linked to the Age of Reason, or Enlightenment, when a young American state was formed. The ideals of democracy were the spiritual bases of the nation and its literature as well.

American literature has a unique combination of traditionalism and experimentation, pragmatism and romanticism. Dangerous life and beautiful nature influenced this literature even more than moralist principles, thus, romanticism became very important in American culture, and the romantic tradition has been the leading one in the USA.

A term “wilderness” is characteristic of American literature. It defines a wild natural environment that makes a person lonely and abandoned. Man and nature remain the main motifs for American literature too.

Periods of American literature.

1620-1776 – early American and colonial period.

1776-1820 – democratic origins and revolutionary writers.

1820-1860 – the romantic period

1860-1914 – the rise of realism

1914-1945 – modernism and experimentation

1945-1965 – realism and experimentation

1965–up to the present – postmodernism, multiculturalism and experimentation.

The Ukrainian scholars researching contemporary American literature.

The most prominent Ukrainian scholars are Tamara Denysova and Nataliya Vysotska (Kyiv), Tetiana Potnitseva and Victoria Lipina (Dnipropetrovsk).

The social and political situation in the post-war USA.

On April 25, 1945, representatives of 50 nations met in San Francisco to erect the framework of the United Nations. The U.S. Senate promptly ratified the U.N. Charter by an 89 to 2 vote. This action confirmed the end of the spirit of isolationism as a dominating element in American foreign policy. The Cold War was the most important political issue of the early postwar period. It grew out of longstanding disagreements between the Soviet Union and the United States. During World War II, the two countries found themselves allied, but at the war's end, antagonisms surfaced again.

Containment of the Soviet Union became American policy in the postwar years and was the focus of the Truman Doctrine. Containment also called for extensive economic aid to assist the recovery of war-torn Europe. This program was known as the "Marshall Plan." In April 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed. Arms control became an integral component of U.S. national security policy. The United States also responded to challenges in Asia and the Korean War (1950 - 1953) brought armed conflict between the United States and China.

The Cold War had a profound effect on domestic affairs. Foreign events and espionage scandals contributed to strong anti-communist feelings. The most vigorous anti-Communist warrior was Senator Joseph McCarthy. Relying on extensive press and television coverage, he charged top-level officials with treachery. But finally his public support waned and the Senate condemned him for his conduct.

In the decade and a half after World War II, the United States experienced phenomenal economic growth. The war brought the return of prosperity, and the United States consolidated its position as the world's richest country. A sense of uniformity pervaded American society. Conformity was common, as young and old alike followed group norms rather than striking out on their own. At the same time, African Americans became increasingly restive. The civil rights movement began. In the late 1950s, the Supreme Court ruled the segregation of schools and buses to be unconstitutional. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 authorized federal intervention in cases where blacks were denied the chance to vote.

David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd: a change of the mental paradigm of American character.

In his influential sociological study The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (1950), Riesman describes three social types--"tradition-directed," "inner-directed," and "other-directed"- and uses the categories to explain the conformity of the era. So are his distinctions between the way these different cultures control their members through negative self-assessment: tradition-oriented = shame; inner-directed = guilt; other-directed = anxiety. Riesman writes about the change in American character from inner-directed individualist to other-directed person who is like radar seeking out social cues.

A classic of American sociology, Riesman's book still rings true to a great extent in its preternatural sense of the (then) coming break between the modern and post-modern era.

The later works by Robert Penn Warren, John Steinbeck, Katherine Anne Porter, Ernest Hemingway.

Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)

Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic, and was one of the founders of The New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. While most famous from the success of his novel All the King's Men (1946), Warren also won two Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry.

Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky on April 24, 1905. He graduated from Clarksville High School (TN), Vanderbilt University in 1925 and the University of California, Berkeley in 1926. Warren later attended Yale University and obtained his B. Litt. as a Rhodes Scholar from New College, Oxford, in England in 1930. That same year he married Emma Brescia, from whom he divorced in 1951. He then married Eleanor Clark in 1952. They had two children, Rosanna Phelps Warren (b. July 1953) and Gabriel Penn Warren (b.July 1955). Though his works strongly reflect Southern themes and mindset, Warren published his most famous work, All the King's Men, while a professor at The University of Minnesota and lived the latter part of his life in Fairfield, Connecticut, and Stratton, Vermont. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in Italy during the reign of Benito Mussolini. He died on September 15, 1989 of complications from bone cancer.

All the King's Men (1946) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. It portrays the dramatic political ascension and demise of Willie Stark ("the Boss"), a populist governor in the American South during the 1930s. The novel is narrated by Jack Burden, a political reporter who comes to work as Governor Stark's right-hand man. The trajectory of Stark's career is interwoven with Jack Burden's life story and philosophical reflections: "the story of Willie Stark and the story of Jack Burden are, in one sense, one story." (p. 157)

The novel was an outgrowth of an earlier version of the story, a verse play entitled Proud Flesh.

JOHN STEINBECK 1902-1968

John Ernst Steinbeck is one of the best-known and most widely read American writers of the 20th century. A winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, he wrote the novella Of Mice and Men (1937) and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1940), both of which examine the lives of the working class and the migrant worker during the Great Depression. Steinbeck populated his stories with struggling characters and is often considered an exponent of the naturalist school. His characters and his stories drew on real historical conditions and events in the first half of the 20th century. His body of work reflects his wide range of interests, including marine biology, jazz, politics, philosophy, history, and myth.

Seventeen of his works, including Cannery Row (1945), The Pearl (1947), and East of Eden (1955), went on to become Hollywood films, and Steinbeck himself achieved success as a Hollywood writer, garnering an Academy Award nomination for Best Writing for Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat, in 1945.

He was known by many as a regionalist, naturalist, mystic, and proletarian writer. He was also respected for his empathy for the migrant workers of the time.

The Grapes of Wrath won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and established Steinbeck as one of the most highly regarded writers of his day. Steinbeck produced several more successful works during his later years, including Cannery Row (1945), The Pearl (1947), East of Eden (1952), and Winter of Our Discontent (1961).

Toward the end of his life, Steinbeck achieved a gratifying success with the award of the Nobel Prize in 1963, and with the publication in that year of Travels with Charley, a nostalgic account of a trip across America with his aged poodle Charley. But his reputation is grounded on those earlier novels which portray California as the real and symbolic land of American promise.

Steinbeck creates vivid portraits of the landscape and demonstrates how people are shaped and manipulated by their environments. John Steinbeck's themes come from the poverty, desperation, and social injustice that he witnessed during the Great Depression of the 1930's, a time when many people suffered under conditions beyond their control. His works reflect his belief in the need for social justice and his hope that people can learn from the suffering of others. Though many of his characters suffered tragic fates, they almost always managed to retain a sense of dignity throughout their struggles.

Winter of Our Discontent (1961)

The story is about a Long Islander named Ethan Allen Hawley who works as a clerk in a grocery store he used to own, but is now owned by an Italian immigrant. His wife and kids want more than what he can give them because of his lowly clerkship.

Feeling the pressure from his family to achieve more than his current station, Ethan considers letting his normally high standards of conduct take brief respite. He finds out that the immigrant that owns his store is an illegal alien, turns him into the Immigration and Naturalization Service and receives the store by deceiving the immigrant. Ethan continues to have feelings of depression and anxiety brought about by his uneasy relationship with his wife and kids, risky flirtation with Margie Young-Hunt, and consideration of a bank robbery scheme.

The story resolves when Ethan gives the town drunk - his childhood friend Danny - enough money to get so incredibly intoxicated as to die shortly thereafter of acute alcohol poisoning; due to an arrangement made with the drunk prior to his death, Ethan then becomes a "somebody" in the town by inheriting a large, valuable tract of land needed by local businessmen to build an airport. This puts him post-story in the position of being able to get in on and even manipulate and control the behind-the-scenes dealings of the corrupt town businessmen and politicians. (Somehow Ethan assuages his guilt, having known fully well beforehand what the drunk would do with the money, apparently by telling himself that dying is what, in fact, the drunk/bum really wanted.) No longer will he or his family want for anything. Contrary to what one might think, Ethan is not satisfied with his newfound financial success. His family is not immune to problems either; his son won a nationwide essay contest entitled 'I Love America' and earns fame until it is known that he plagiarized almost all of his essay. Ethan contemplates suicide, but does not go through with it lest "another light go out," a reference to his daughter Ellen who is portrayed as a mirror image of Allen.

Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899 –1961)

Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist.

His distinctive writing style (iceberg method) is characterized by economy and understatement and had a significant influence on the development of twentieth century fiction writing. Hemingway's protagonists are typically stoics, men who must show "grace under pressure." Many of his works are considered classics in the canon of American literature.

Hemingway, nicknamed "Papa", was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, as described in his memoir A Moveable Feast, and was known as part of "the Lost Generation", a name he popularized. He led a turbulent social life, was married four times, and allegedly had various romantic relationships during his lifetime. Hemingway received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

In 1961, he committed suicide using a shotgun. He was 61 years old.

(1950) Across the River and Into the Trees

(1952) The Old Man and the Sea

(1970) Islands in the Stream (Posthumous publication)

The Old Man and the Sea is a novella by Ernest Hemingway written in Cuba in 1951 and published in 1952. It was the last major work of fiction to be produced by Hemingway and published in his lifetime. One of his most famous works, it centers upon an aging Cuban fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. Though it has been the subject of disparate criticism, it is noteworthy in twentieth century fiction and in Hemingway's canon, reaffirming his worldwide literary prominence and significant in his selection for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

The Old Man and the Sea recounts an epic battle between an old, experienced fisherman and a giant marlin said to be the largest catch of his life.

It opens by explaining that the fisherman, who is named Santiago (but only directly referred to outside of dialogue as "the old man"), has gone 84 days without catching any fish at all. He is apparently so unlucky that his young apprentice, Manolin, has been forbidden by his parents to sail with the old man and been ordered to fish with more successful fishermen. Still dedicated to the old man, however, the boy visits Santiago's shack each night, hauling back his fishing gear, feeding him, and discussing American baseball—most notably Santiago's idol, Joe DiMaggio. Santiago tells Manolin that on the next day, he will venture far out into the Gulf to fish, confident that his unlucky streak is near its end.

Thus on the eighty-fifth day, Santiago sets out alone, taking his skiff far into the Gulf. He sets his lines and, by noon of the first day, a big fish that he is sure is a marlin takes his bait. Unable to pull in the great marlin, Santiago instead finds the fish pulling his skiff. Two days and two nights pass in this manner, during which the old man bears the tension of the line with his body. Though he is wounded by the struggle and in pain, Santiago expresses a compassionate appreciation for his adversary, often referring to him as a brother.

On the third day of the ordeal, the fish begins to circle the skiff, indicating his tiredness to the old man. Santiago, now completely worn out and almost in delirium, uses all the strength he had left in him to pull the fish onto its side and stab the marlin with a harpoon, therby ending the long battle between the old man and the stubborn fish.

Santiago straps the marlin to his skiff and heads home, thinking about the high price the fish will bring him at the market and how many people he will feed. The old man determines that because of the fish's great dignity, no one will be worthy of eating the marlin.

While Santiago continues his journey back to the shore, sharks are attracted to the trail of blood left by the marlin in the water. The first, a great mako shark, Santiago kills with his harpoon, losing that weapon in the process. He makes a new harpoon by strapping his knife to the end of an oar to help ward off the next line of sharks; in total, seven sharks are slain. But by night, the sharks have devoured the marlin's entire carcass, leaving only its skeleton. The old man castigates himself for sacrificing the marlin. Finally reaching the shore before dawn on the next day, he struggles on the way to his shack, carrying the heavy mast on his shoulder. Once home, he slumps onto his bed and enters a very deep sleep.

Ignorant of the old man's journey, a group of fishermen gathers the next day around the boat where the fish's skeleton is still attached. Tourists at the nearby café mistakenly take it for a shark. Manolin, worried during the old man's endeavor, cries upon finding him safe asleep. The boy brings him newspapers and coffee. When the old man wakes, they promise to fish together once again. Upon his return to sleep, Santiago dreams of lions on the African beach.