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Lesson5-Modernism1.docxLesson 5—Modernism
Answer the following questions about the Twentieth and Twenty-first centuries.
1 What event was the dividing line between the nineteenth century and modern literature?
2 Realism and Naturalism were still forces in American literature and Dreiser set forth a naturalistic portrayal of life in what novel?
3 Yet, most Americans’ sensibilities still preferred what philosophy in literature?
4 What was the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution? The Twenty-first? The Nineteenth?
5 Writers writing after WWI, like Fitzgerald and Hemingway, were called “The ______________________________.” Why?
6 What is the most significant American poem of the Twentieth Century, penned by T.S. Eliot?
7 Drama began to gain respectability and playwrights began to depict distinctively American drama. Name one American dramatist and three plays by him.
8 The production of literature by black Americans in the 1900s-1940s started a movement called the “___________________________________________.” Name three important African American writers of this movement.
9 What happened in 1929 and following that event in 1930 that changed the complexion of American society?
10 What happened to the gap between the rich and poor during this time (1945-present)?
11 In the 1960s what disenfranchised groups strove to gain a voice in American society?
Modern Poetry (c. 1914 to Present)
--Modern literature’s beginning roughly corresponds with World War I (1914-1918), the great dividing line between the 19th century literature and contemporary literature.
--Some DIFFICULT ISSUES OF 20TH CENTURY LIFE that have concerned and inspired modern writers of both poetry and fiction are the following: population explosion, rapid technological advances, industrialization, religious confusion, foreign wars, domestic and foreign terrorism, a pluralistic society, violence and racism, drugs, and a feeling of helplessness about politics and current events in general.
--These issues and problems of the modern world lead to certain PERVASIVE THEMES IN MODERN POETRY:
1 anxiety about foreign and domestic issues (examples listed above)
2 nature (a source of solace, solitude, philosophical truths)
3 complexity of human relationships (Freud introduces psychological elements into our understanding of human behavior, involving both love and hate)
--Whitman and Dickinson stand at the doorway of modern poetry with their use of free verse (loose or non-existent rhythm and rhyme) and bold experimentation with subject matter. Modern poets continue the trends begun with them.
--Modern poets are abstract and impressionistic, offering a fractured view of the world. T.S. Eliot shows these characteristics in The Waste Land, the most significant American poem of the 20th century.
--Modern poetry is experimental. Poets are continually searching for new forms of poetic expression and therefore embrace A VARIETY OF STYLES:
1 Imagists-a group of poets who present short concrete poems in which each word contributes to one central image (Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams)
2 Free association-a “stream of consciousness” poem which appears to have no logical sequence, much as life has no logical sequence (e e cummings)
3 Shaped verses-typographical innovations in which a poem’s appearance on the page is as important as sound and meaning of words
4 Protest poems-“beatnick” poems of the 1950s protesting societal conventions and confusion (Allen Ginsberg); Vietnam protest poems of the 1960s and ‘70s; today’s protest poems protest war, racism, homophobia
5 Traditional forms- some modern poets rework traditional styles, such as the sonnet (Edna St. Vincent Millay), lyrical poetry and conventional rhyme (Frost). Frost referred to this as “old-fashioned ways to be new.”
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
--Known as the New England Poet, Frost was actually born in San Francisco.
--At age 10 after his father’s death, his family moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where nine generations of his ancestors had lived before him.
--Attended Dartmouth College for two months; worked at odd jobs (mill hand, reporter, teaching assistant); attended Harvard University for two years but never earned a degree.
--Although academic routine bored him, he did not lack ability; he was co-valedictorian of his high school class with his future wife, Elinor White.
--After leaving school and marrying, he moved with Elinor to a farm in New Hampshire where he spent eleven unprofitable years farming, teaching, and unsuccessfully submitting poems to magazines.
--A strange farmer who milked his cows at midnight, he longed for success as a poet. Tallying up his profits, he found his poetry had earned him only $200 in twenty years.
--Deciding to take a chance and devote his time solely to writing poetry, he sold his farm and moved to England, where the cost of living was lower; he was 38 years old.
--Within two years, he had published two books of poetry (A Boys’ Will and North of Boston); both were immediately successful in England, and American publishers took note.
--Returning to America three years after having left, he found that he had achieved the reputation he had sought; as he continued publishing volumes of poetry, lecture invitations poured in, and he was appointed professor of English at Amherst.
--In his later years, Frost was the most widely honored and respected poet since Longfellow. He won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry four times and received honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge and forty-two other colleges and universities.
--The U.S. Senate passed resolutions commemorating his 75th and 85th birthdays, and he wrote and recited “The Gift Outright” for the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy.
HIS WORK
--Because most of Frost’s poems show an interest in nature and a belief that it has lessons to teach, he is generally thought of as a Romantic; some of his poems, however, (i.e., “Out, out—”) reveal a universe where man stands alone and confused. This ties him to the Naturalist movement.
--Perhaps his naturalist views were shaped by the difficulties of his personal life: his father died when Frost was ten; his first child died in infancy, his only son committed suicide; one daughter died in childbirth; another was mentally ill; and, it has been reported that his embittered wife refused to see him as she lay dying.
--Frost’s philosophy of poetry writing can be summed up in two quotes: a poem, he said, should “begin in delight and end in wisdom.” His poems will many times begin with a tree, a road, a snowstorm, and end with a profound insight into life.
--“I’m always saying something that’s just the edge of something more.” Apparently simple poems turn out to be rich in hidden meanings. A reader must be alert for interpretations other than the apparent surface meaning.
The Harlem Renaissance (The Black Renaissance; The New Negro Poets)
--This movement arose in the 1920s; no fixed or generally agreed on work or event pinpoints its origin.
--Many of the writers did not actually live or work in Harlem; Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen are notable exceptions. The writers initially met at an NAACP meeting.
--These writers had a common purpose and meaning in their works:
1 They celebrated their individual identities, taking pride in being black. (Gwendolyn Brooks, a black female poet, said of Langston Hughes, he was a man who “believed in the beauty of blackness before it became the fashion.”)
2 They also celebrated their collective identity, taking pride in their ethnic background and heritage.
3 They shared a faith in the fine arts (i.e., art, music, literature, story-telling, quilting, gardening) as a means of defining and reinforcing their racial pride.
4 They often combined romanticism and realism within a single work.
Realism:
Second class citizens
Segregated from the mainstream of American life
American dream closed to them
Romanticism:
Collective strength of the black race
Optimism about the future and eventual acceptance
Langston Hughes (1902-1967)
--Called the “Poet Laureate of Harlem,” Hughes was the most influential black writer in the history of American literature.
--He was born in Joplin, Missouri, and spent most of his youth in the mid-West. Hughes was multi-racial, having ancestry that included Negro, Jewish, Scottish, English, and Cherokee blood, but he was reared in the black world and culture of pre-civil rights America.
--While attending high school in Cleveland, Ohio, he began to write for the school newspaper. When his parents separated, Hughes went to live for a time with his father, a lawyer and engineer, in Mexico.
--Hughes’ father had disavowed all connection with American blacks and wanted his son to study engineering; Hughes came to hate his father and decided to immerse himself in the black American experience.
--In 1921, he went to New York to attend Columbia University; he then became a seaman on a merchant ship and traveled to Africa and Europe. Returning to America, he lived in Washington, D.C., for a time before settling in Harlem, which he called “the great dark city.”
--It was in Washington, D.C., that he got his break. While working at a D. C. hotel, Hughes recognized Vachel Lindsay, an established poet of the day. Hughes left some of his poems by Lindsay’s plate, and the next morning, journalists were waiting for Hughes outside the restaurant, asking for the “Negro bus-boy poet.” Hughes’ career took off from there.
--His first book of poems, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926. Hughes’ talent was not confined to one genre; during his career, he wrote ten volumes of poetry, nine books of fiction, two autobiographical works, and an opera. He also wrote children’s literature and humorous sketches in his job as a journalist. He was the first black American to be able to support himself as a writer.
--A recurring character in his newspaper sketches was Jesse B. Semple (called “Simple” by his friends), an innocent, downtrodden elderly Negro, whose commentary on everything from war to racism to feminism provided Hughes with a means for satirizing both black and white and a forum for criticizing government and societal injustice.
--At an NAACP meeting in Harlem, Hughes met Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and other black writers, but more so than any other writer of the time, he is associated with Harlem.
--His works focus on the experience of the black common man—working class blacks in Harlem. Hughes’ work contains harsh realities of black life (realism), but he shows hardship and injustice being faced with humor and with, in many cases, hope for a better future (romanticism).
--Black intellectuals were sometimes critical of Hughes’ realistic portrayal of the life of poor blacks. They believed black writers should show black life at its best, but the black reading public saw in his writing a reflection of their music, their language (through dialect), their experiences, and their despair as well as their hopes.
Modern Fiction
--American writers have always excelled in fiction—short stories and novels. British writers excel in poetry and drama.
--The form of short fiction was begun by Washington Irving (the “short tale”) in America; Poe literally defined it in his essay on the single effect theory; and Hawthorne refined it—reshaped it—with his use of allegory.
--Realism and Naturalism remained vital forces in American literature preceding World War I, and Theodore Dreiser was America’s greatest literary naturalist. His book Sister Carrie was a failure when first published in 1900, but when it was reissued in 1907, it won high praise for its grim, naturalistic portrayal of American society. However, most Americans still preferred genteel tradition and romanticism in their literature.
--After World War I, there arose a group of young American writers who took the fiction genre (short stories and novels) to new heights. They are termed the Lost Generation and include such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos, among others.
--These writers belonged to a generation disillusioned by World War I, which was to have been the war fought to make the world “safe for democracy” and the “war to end all wars.”
--After the war, many of these writers (some participated, some did not) felt isolated from mainstream America—its values, goals, expectations—and sought a new way to live and write.
--Their search took them to Paris, where they were influenced by the lifestyle and writing style of Gertrude Stein, an American expatriate. She gave them their name when she said to Hemingway concerning their search: “You are all a lost generation.”
--Some observations about these writers:
1 They revolted against established writing techniques, looking for a new perspective.
2 They spent time in Paris and were strongly influenced by Gertrude Stein, their “mother literary figure.”
3 Their thinking and story ideas were influenced by Sigmund Freud, the famous father of psychology, who developed new theories concerning underlying reasons for the emotions and reactions of the individual.
--American drama also emerged after the First World War. Experimental playwrights created plots, dialogue, staging, and acting that differed radically from the bland dramatic flare of Europe. The most prominent of the new dramatic playwrights, Eugene O’Neill, established an international reputation with such plays as The Emperor Jones, Anna Christie, and The Hairy Ape.
--Also after World War I, reform efforts for temperance and women’s rights gathered strength. In 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, prohibiting the sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States. However, the manufacture and sale of alcohol flourished, and during the Roaring Twenties, drinking alcohol increased by “respectable” Americans. Prohibition had failed to purify America.
--After fourteen years, America finally acknowledged its failure to legislate virtue; with the ratification of the Twenty-First Amendment in 1933, prohibition was repealed.
--Less than a year after the war ended, Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. This was a huge step in women’s rights.
--After the stock market crashed in 1929 and the Great Depression followed, American society was transformed. The abrupt end of what had seemed to be permanent prosperity weakened the nation’s confidence in its government, its political leaders, and even in its fundamental democratic ideals. American artists began producing works of political and social criticism.
--The years from the 1960s to the end of the century brought the greatest expansion of civil rights in the history of the nation. Groups such as the Black Panthers and Weather Underground thrust themselves into public awareness, often using violence and militant radical behavior to attempt social change.
--Fiction has continued to evolve in the 20th and 21st centuries. The following are some fiction writers of our time and some issues with which their fiction deal:
Saul Bellow—Nobel Prize winning novelist who died in 2005; deals with family complexities (Seize the Day, Hertzog)
Toni Morrison—Nobel Prize winning novelist; deals with black American experiences (The Bluest Eye, The Song of Solomon)
John Updike—deals with the struggle for wealth and acceptance in American life (Rabbit series: Rabbit, Run, Rabbit is Rich)
Joyce Carol Oates—deals with violence in American society and family dysfunction (With Shuddering Fall)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
--More than any other writer, Fitzgerald responded to the spirit of the 1920s and became the spokesman for the “Jazz Age,” a term he coined.
--In his writing and his life, he celebrated the glitz, the glitter, and the gluttony of the Roaring 20s; in his later life, he described the time as a delusion and a nightmare.
--With the stock market crash in 1929 came the depression, and Fitzgerald described this as the “morning after” the wild party of the 1920s.
--He was born into a St. Paul, Minnesota, family with social pretensions but not enough money to live up to them.
--Always accepted into the best social circles because of his charm, good looks, and wit, he always felt inferior among the wealthy because he had not been born rich.
--“The very rich are different from you and me” is his signature line, and this was a theme that obsessed him throughout his life—in life and in the stories he wrote. No matter how much money Fitzgerald accumulated, he never felt part of the “inner circle.”
--He attended Princeton University briefly and was popular but not a good student. In 1917, he enlisted in the army but never served overseas during WWI.
--In 1918 while stationed in Montgomery, Alabama, he met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre, a famously beautiful southern belle, who was to become the prototype for most of Fitzgerald’s heroines—rich, beautiful, spoiled, cold, unattainable.
--Zelda refused to marry Scott at first, but with the success of his novel This Side of Paradise, she changed her mind, and, at the age of 24, he found himself famous, wealthy, and married to “the most beautiful girl in Alabama and Georgia.”
--Their life together was a whirlwind of parties, drinking, dancing, traveling nationally and internationally, publicity stunts, and spending fast and recklessly. In 1921, they had a baby girl, Scottie.
--Eventually, Fitzgerald’s view of the rich changed from total fascination to distrust and disillusion. He came to see the rich as decadent and destructive. This is the tone and the subject of his greatest novel, The Great Gatsby.
--The “party” soon ended for the Fitzgeralds as well. Zelda, a writer herself, felt overshadowed by Scott’s talent and reputation. As most of Fitzgerald’s plot lines were autobiographical, Zelda came to feel that their lives and difficulties were far too public.
--In 1930, Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown and spent most of the remainder of her life in sanitariums. Scott said, “Our love was one in a century. If she would get well, I would be happy again.”
--Fitzgerald struggled during these years with debts, Zelda’s insanity, his own alcoholism, and public quarrels with Ernest Hemingway, a writer he had helped but whom he eventually felt overshadowed him. “I don’t write anymore,” Scott wrote to a friend, “Ernest has made all my writing unnecessary.”
--Despite the comment, Fitzgerald continued to write brilliant short stories and a novel Tender Is the Night that was a commercial failure, but one that scholars and critics praise.
--In the late 1930s, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, where he was known as a “has been” and a hack writer of screenplays. He worked for a time on the script of Gone with the Wind but was dismayed at the distrust of his writing: “I am utterly miserable at seeing months of thought negated in one hasty week. Can’t producers ever be wrong? I’m a good writer—honest.”
--In 1940, while working on a new novel that painted a portrait of Hollywood life, Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack brought on by years of excessive drinking and abuse of his health. He was 44. Zelda died eight years later in a sanitarium fire. Their daughter, Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith, died in 1986 and is buried alongside her parents in St. Mary’s Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland.
--His final unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously with notes and outlines to supplement it, and it is believed that it would have been one of his finest and would have reestablished his reputation.
--At his death, Fitzgerald was considered to be a failure who squandered his genius, but his literary reputation has steadily risen, and he is now considered to be one of America’s finest fiction writers.
Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961)
--Born in Illinois, Hemingway was early on initiated into the manly sports with which he would be so closely associated. His doctor father introduced him to the rituals of hunting and fishing, and in high school, he boxed and played football.
--He worked as a reporter after high school, and, when World War I broke out, he was looking forward to Army service but was rejected because of poor vision.
--Volunteering with the American Red Cross, he served as an ambulance driver in France for a time, and then was transferred to duty on the Italian front.
--Here he was seriously wounded in the explosion of a mortar shell and spent three months hospitalized. He received a medal for valor but never felt he deserved it. He used this experience in several short stories and one novel, A Farewell to Arms.
--After the war, Hemingway worked as a reporter again, but feeling displaced and confused, he joined other writers in Paris, a place of great intellectual life, creativity, and experimentation.
--More than any of the other Lost Generation writers, Hemingway was influenced by Gertrude Stein. She taught him the use of simple language, the importance of repetition, and the economy of words.
--Hemingway referred to his style of writing as the “iceberg style”: for every 1/7 of the story he tells, there is 6/7of it that we as readers must delve below the surface to figure out.
--In 1926, using this new writing technique, he wrote his first successful novel, The Sun Also Rises, which captured the hard-living, heavy-drinking lifestyle of the Lost Generation writers living in Paris.
--Hemingway became a very famous and recognizable character on the world-wide literary scene. His activities solidified his reputation as a hard-living, macho man: he survived two wars, three car accidents, and two plane crashes; he married four times and had many public affairs; he quarreled publically with friends, notably Fitzgerald, who had given him his start; he traveled the world over to deep sea fish, big game hunt, and run with the bulls in Spain.
--He is associated with Key West, Florida, where he lived for the latter part of his life and became known as “Papa Hemingway.”
--The height of his literary career came in 1954 when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, based mainly on the strength of his most famous novel, The Old Man and the Sea, published in 1952.
--In 1961, he found himself unable to write even one line for a book to be presented to John F. Kennedy. “It just won’t come anymore,” he said. In that year, he committed suicide, as his father had before him.
--Hemingway’s main theme had to do with wounds. Everyone is wounded in life, he believed, either physically, spiritually, or emotionally. The wound is not as important as how one reacts to the wound: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
--Hemingway also created a type of “code hero” known as the “Hemingway Hero.” The attributes of this character are as follows:
1 He is a courageous adventurer who has been wounded by life but carries on.
2 He finds honor in suffering with dignity, not whining or talking about his pain.
3 He exhibits “grace under pressure,” meaning that in moments of extreme danger, even when faced with death, he carries himself honorably and stoically.
4 He lives by a code of his own choosing—it may be of sportsmanship, of honor, of order, or principle—and never forsakes it.
“The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber”
--The story reveals Hemingway’s ideas on several issues: manhood, American women, marital relationships, the “code hero.”
*Manhood
Main character Francis Macomber is one of the “great American boy-men.”
Outwardly a man (in good physical condition, athletic), he, in fact, has never grown up.
This is because he has never faced fear to see what he’s made of. When he is confronted with his own fears, he shows great cowardice; this is the basis for the story.
*American women
Margot, Francis’ wife, is the typical Hemingway woman: a wealthy, spoiled, domineering, cool, beautiful, cruel, emasculating bitch.
Note Margot’s reaction to Macomber’s show of cowardice. Rather than being comforting and supportive, she “pours salt on the wound.”
*Marital relationships
Hemingway saw marriage as an institution that was based on the mutual weaknesses of the partners; he stays with her because he’s not good with women; she stays with him because he’s rich and her beauty is fading as she ages.
Their conversations make this arrangement clear. Neither will leave the other despite their mutual dislike of and disgust with each other. (Her marital infidelity with Wilson follows a pattern she has established with others apparently.)
*The Code Hero
Wilson is the typical Hemingway hero:
1 adventurer
2 suffers with dignity
3 exhibits “grace under pressure”
4 lives by a code
*Manhood, American women, Marital relationships, the Code hero
This all comes together when Francis faces the buffalo and exhibits “grace under pressure.” Wilson recognizes this as Francis’s “coming-of-age,” becoming a man at the age of 35.
This affects Margot deeply because it will change the entire dynamic of their relationship; Hemingway has Wilson notice Margot’s recognition of this change, but his only comment is after the shooting when he comments, “He would have left you too.”
**Why is the title appropriate?
Regionalists (Southern Writers)
--Around 1920s, in reaction to industrialization and the increasingly urban quality of life, there arose a group of writers called regionalists, whose interest was in portraying men and women in rural settings.
--Although some wrote of regions like California (John Steinbeck), the South produced the greatest wealth of regional literature (Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter).
--Southern writers with their varied understandings and interpretations of the South and its people have dominated the major fiction in the 20th century the way New England writers dominated the 19th century.
--The varied understandings of the South can be understood by looking at two Southern regionalists as examples: Faulkner and Welty. Both wrote of Mississippi (Welty of the delta area, Faulkner of the area in and around Oxford), but Faulkner concentrated on unpleasant and sordid aspects of a society in turmoil and decay after the Civil War and Reconstruction; Welty, on the other hand, looks upon the South and her characters with fondness and sympathy.
William Faulkner (1897-1962)
--He was born in New Albany, Mississippi, but at age five, his family moved to Oxford, where he lived on and off for the rest of his life.
--A private person who led an unflashy life, little is known of Faulkner’s private thoughts and feelings, except what we can glean from his writing.
--He had a sporadic formal education and was mostly self-educated; he did attend Ole Miss (University of Mississippi) for two years.
--During World War I, he went to Canada and joined the Royal Flying Corps; he later traveled extensively, living for a time in Europe and New Orleans.
--Faulkner made his home in Lafayette County in the town of Oxford, which his ancestors had helped build; these ancestors included many members of the aristocratic “Old South”: a governor, a Civil War Confederate colonel, prominent bankers, and railroad workers. These relatives were the prototype for many of his famous characters.
--In Oxford, Faulkner bought an old mansion and renovated it; Rowan Oak still stands as a museum and memorial to Faulkner.
--During his career, he wrote sixteen novels, seventy short stories, and numerous Imagist poems; among his famous novels are The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!
--His popular and critical success was limited in the 1930s and 40s; by 1944, his books were nearly out of print, but his reputation slowly grew, and in 1949, he won the Nobel Prize in literature.
--Today he is considered by many scholars to be the greatest writer of fiction that America ever produced.
--Faulkner’s subject is the mythical town of Jefferson (patterned after Oxford) in the mythical county of Yoknapatawpha (patterned after Lafayette County).
--He was very specific about its location (northern Mississippi), population, even racial make-up. The main characters come mainly from two families: the Sartoris family and the Snopes family.
--The Sartoris family are decaying aristocrats. Cultivated and well-born, they suffer from the sin of slavery on their land and are now afflicted with genteel poverty, alcoholism, insanity, or incest.
--The Snopes family consists of lower class “white trash” itinerant workers who are claiming the rivers, forests, and farms for themselves and their offspring; they abuse the land and resent the wealthy.
--Faulkner said that he regarded all of his stories and novels to be a single work; each fills in the story of this mythical place and its people with recurring characters in each work.
--His themes are violence, perversion, sex, murder, racial discord; his stories show sordid people living sordid lives, facing darkness and confusion in their lives.
--A few escape this disorder and discord by following simple, natural occupations like farming and by respecting the life-sustaining soil, the wilderness, and all living things.
--Faulkner’s style can be difficult: involved syntax, sudden shifts in time and subject matter, frequent use of symbolism and allegory, and a great interest in the psychology of the individual.
“Barn Burning” William Faulkner
--“Barn Burning” is a “coming of age” story; Sarty becomes a man at age ten when he makes a choice between the essential conflicting elements of the story: the “old fierce pull of blood” versus truth and justice.
--Snopes family is typical of Faulkner’s “white trash” families of the South; they are itinerant share croppers who have moved at least twelve times in the years Sarty can remember.
--Members of the family:
· Abner, the father, is in constant trouble with landowners and the law, rapes the land, does not respect or appreciate its life-giving force; he is a thief, violent, destructive, shows a disregard for common decency, a hatred of and disrespect for authority, and a jealous, vengeful rage against anyone who is better off than he. Fire is his sacred weapon, which gives him power over others against whom he normally feels powerless.
· Lennie, Sarty’s mother, and Lizzie, her sister, are the only two decent members of the family besides Sarty (notice the mother’s actions concerning Sarty’s cuts after his fight, the de Spain’s rug, the fire incident at the end of the story; notice the aunt’s comments during the preparation for the fire at the end of the story).
· Older brother, who, like Abner, has something in him innately inferior, careless, destructive that wouldn’t change even if the family had money. He will follow in his father’s thieving footsteps.
· Two older sisters are described by Faulkner as “bovine” and are lazy whiners.
· Sarty is “small and wiry like his father,” but has his mother’s nature: he likes to work, is not violently envious of others, and has an innate sense of justice.
--The conflict is made the more wrenching because of Sarty’s young age. Although the story is not told in first person, Faulkner allows us to see into Sarty’s mind in two ways: the italics are his ten-year-old thoughts and other commentary comes from the grown up Sarty.
--Notice that Sarty
· Desperately wants to believe that blood ties are enough but must constantly try to convince himself (page 1853)
· Can never finish his true thoughts about his father (page 1854)
· Holds false hopes that something will change his father (perhaps the power of the de Spains) (page 1859)
· Always hopes for an end to this terrible struggle that rages within him (page 1861)
--In the end, despite the lectures on the importance of “stick[ing] to your own blood,” he chooses the stronger pull of truth and justice. Sarty’s conflict is twofold: once he has decided he won’t help his father, he must go further and decide if he will hurt him by reporting the impending crime.
--Once the decision is made, he must turn his back (literally and figuratively) on his family. Notice Faulkner’s use of symbolism in the end: stiffness (mimics Abner’s walk), birds singing, warmth of the sun, etc.
Study Guide
Lesson 5: Frost-Faulkner
1 Make a list of all authors studied and all works we read by them. As you study, add titles of novels, stories, etc., that we did not read but that I asked you to associate with that author. Make sure you know exact titles; pay attention to spelling.
2 Approximately what year did the period of modernist poetry begin?
3 What are three pervasive themes in modern poetry? What world events influenced the writers of the time?
4 What two poets from our previous study foreshadowed modern poetry?
5 Name and explain several forms that modern poetry has taken.
6 What area of the U.S. did Frost write about?
7 What events led to Frost’s finally achieving fame in the U.S. (lack of success in U.S., farming, move to England, etc.)?
8 What are some honors Frost received in his old age?
9 What two quotes of Frost’s sum up his writing style?
10 Look over the Frost poems we discussed and the notes you took on each. What are three possible interpretations of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”?
11 What four shared attributes can be seen in the Harlem Renaissance writers’ works? How were they able to use realism and romanticism within one work?
12 How did Langston Hughes’ experiences with his father in Mexico affect his work?
13 With what area of New York is Hughes closely associated?
14 What is the story behind Hughes’ being dubbed the “Negro bus-boy poet”?
15 What is the title of his first book of poems?
16 Who is Jesse B. Semple and what did this persona allow Hughes to do within his work?
17 What distinction among black American writers does Hughes hold?
18 What are some themes and concerns of Hughes’ works?
19 Refamiliarize yourself with the poems we read by Hughes. Look over the notes you took on each. What previously studied poet influenced Hughes’ poems? How do we see this influence in “I, Too” and “Theme for English B”?
20 Review your modern fiction notes. Who began the form in the U.S.? Defined it? Refined it?
21 What name did Gertrude Stein give to the group of writers to whom she was “mother literary figure” in the 1920’s? Where did they “study” with Stein?
22 What four attributes did they have in common?
23 Name two living American fiction writers who will likely be studied among the “greats” in years to come (first and last names).
24 Discuss Fitzgerald’s feelings about the rich. How did this background contribute to this feeling?
25 Name some ways in which his fiction paralleled the events of his life. What was his wife’s name?
26 He was the spokesman for what age?
27 What was his greatest novel?
28 At what age, where, and from what did he die?
29 What unfinished novel of his was published posthumously? What is the critical appraisal of this novel?
30 Review your notes on “Winter Dreams.”
31 What were Hemingway’s experiences in World War I?
32 Who greatly influenced Hemingway’s style?
33 Describe Hemingway’s style. What term did he use to describe it and what did he mean by that description?
34 What was his first successful novel? What is his most famous novel?
35 In 1954, he achieved what world-renowned prize?
36 How did he die?
37 In life, what were Hemingway’s interests and pursuits?
38 What is Hemingway’s main theme?
39 Describe a “Hemingway Hero.”
40 Review your notes on “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” In what way does Francis’ life (in the beginning) parallel Anson Hunter’s? What leads Francis to his “coming of age”?
41 In what ways does Robert Wilson fit the definition of “Hemingway Hero”?
42 What is a regional writer?
43 What section of the country has produced the most regionalist writers?
44 Southern regionalists have varied understandings of the South, its people, its past, its future. Explain this using Faulkner and Eudora Welty to illustrate.
45 From the age of five until his death, where did Faulkner live and write? What was his connection to the “Old South”?
46 What world-renowned prize did he win in 1949?
47 Discuss Faulkner’s use of the fictional town of Jefferson and county of Yoknapatawpha in his writing.
48 Discuss the types of people that populate the county—what does the Sartoris family represent? The Snopes family? What did Faulkner believe was the only escape from a life of disorder?
49 What are Faulkner’s themes? What did Faulkner himself say his theme was?
50 Name one of Faulkner’s famous novels.
51 Review the events of “Barn Burning” and the notes that you took.
