Week One  **indicates questions that everyone must answer

Tuesday

Introduction

Thursday

Twain: "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences" (412-420); Harte: "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" (427-435)

• ** What is the basis of this critique of Cooper? Is it valid? Explain. What is the narrator suggesting are Cooper's "greatest offences"? What is he suggesting about literary taste and literary criticism
• ** Explain the significance of the statement that Oakhurst was "at once the strongest and yet the weakest of the outcasts of Poker Flats."
   
• Twain's commentary on Cooper and on Romantic fiction is a forthright statement about the Realism that he supposedly championed.  We can see in this comic piece that Twain's "realism" is reactive, a rejection of the extravagances and illusions of Romantic narrative, and that Twain's mode defines itself by what it isn't at least as much as by what it is.  What is realism and what isn't realism according to Twain? How does Harte's story meet Twain's guidelines?
• Harte creates central characters who become the object of perception by someone outside the setting or region. Oakhurst is the outsider; and the reader's views of the other characters are all filtered through Oakhurst. When Oakhurst kills himself at the end of the story, Harte presents this scene also as a tableau for other outsiders--his readers--to see.  Does Harte achieve humor at the expense of any particular characters more than others?  Had he tried to depict the experience of western life from Mother Shipton's point of view, would we have a different story?  How much does Harte assume that his readers will find women, in general, and western prostitutes, in particular, laughable?  Is he laughing at or with his characters?

Tuesday

Lecture: Realism and Regionalism/Local Color (click on links for lecture);
Freeman: "The Revolt of Mother" (733-744)

• ** What is the nature of the "revolt" in this story? Why does Freeman call it a revolt? What is suggested by this word? How does Sarah Penn revolt?
   
• Compare the humor in Harte and Freeman.
• "The Revolt of Mother" portrays a woman who triumphs over the material conditions of her existence. Describe the nature of that triumph and the process by which she achieves it.
• Compare Oakhurst in Harte and Freeman's Adoniram Penn. Do they triumph or are they defeated men?

Thursday

Jewett: "A White Heron" (595-604); Chopin: "The Storm" (629-633)

• ** Explain the significance of the White Heron from 2 of the characters' perspectives. What does the heron represent and what does the character's reaction to the heron say about the character?
• ** Explain Chopin's use of the storm. What is its function in the story? How is this setting important or symbolic? 
   
• Discuss the portrayal of women characters and women's experience in regionalist writers Jewett, Chopin, Freeman.
• Analyze sexual imagery or attitudes toward sexuality in Jewett and Chopin.
• The tree, the hunter, the cow, and the heron all seem to possess mythical significance in "A White Heron." Choose one to discuss in relationship to Sylvy and explore the way Jewett combines elements of folk or fairy tale and literary realism.
• Chopin and Freeman are often classified as local colorists or regionalist writers. What do you see as the implicit emotional relationship between each of these authors and the place they write about? Are their ambitions the same? Do you find local colorist a descriptive term or a limiting one, for describing these texts and authors?

Tuesday

Lecture: Resisting the Plantation Tradition; Chesnutt: "The Goophered Grapevine" (782-788)

• Explore the way in which Chesnutt manipulates point of view and the effect this has on the story's ending.

Thursday

Du Bois: "The Souls of Black Folk" (877-901)

• ** DuBois begins this section with a quotation from Byron and music from Black spirituals. What effect do these two elements have on this piece? What assumptions or questions do they raise?
   
• Examine the political discourse of Chesnutt and DuBois in the context of political discourse in earlier periods of American literature (think of Twain, Chopin, or Freeman). What similarities and variations do you see? How do Chesnutt and DuBois respond, implicitly and otherwise, to new and prevailing literary styles of the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries?

Week Four

Tuesday

Lecture: American Indian Boarding School; Zitkala-Sa: "The School Days of an Indian Girl" (1008-1019

Thursday

Zitkala-Sa: "The School Days of an Indian Girl" (1008-1019)

• Discuss Zitkala-Sa's account of her removal from the reservation and attempted assimilation into white culture as a twist on the Indian captivity narrative of the colonial period.
• Like the regionalists, Zitkala-Sa depicts a female-centered universe and her own refusal to be silenced, and she triumphs on behalf of the disenfranchised "squaw" when she writes of winning the oratory contest; but her estrangement from her own mother only deepens as she proceeds with her autobiography.

Week Five

Tuesday

Gilman: "The Yellow Wall-paper" (832-844); "Why I Wrote the 'Yellow Wall-paper" (844-845); Sui Sin Far: "Mrs. Spring Fragrance" (867-875)

• ** Describe Gilman's symbolic use of the yellow wallpaper. What is it symbolic of and how does it evolve as a symbol?
   
• Even during the period of Realism and Naturalism, many writers continued to use dreams and fantasy as important elements in their work. Discuss Jewett and Gilman, focusing on how the use of dream, vision, or altered perception affects the realism of the fiction.
• Consider "The Yellow Wall-paper" as Gilman's portrait of the American woman as writer. What does the story suggest about the literary authority of the woman writer? What obstacles stand in the way of her creation? What is her ultimate work of art?
• Some of the wit and poignancy of "Mrs. Spring Fragrance" stems from Far's portrayal of Chinese-American society as a hybrid, a mix of traditions and social practices. Discuss.
• How does Far portray her special interest in the predicament of women. Compare the challenges and complications of the setting she observes, and the challenge of making these narratives important to a broad audience.

Thursday

Glaspell: "Trifles: A Play in One Act" (1203-1212); Mary Austin: "The Walking Woman" (online only)

• ** Both the men and the women are doing investigations of the situation. Compare the two investigations. How are they similar? How are they different? Whose methodology works best?
• ** What is the symbolic significance of the bird? What is the significance of the quilt? What role does it play?
   
• Discuss the portrayal of women characters and women's experience in regionalist writers Jewett, Chopin, Freeman. Add to this a portrayal of women characters and women's experience in Gilman, Sui Sin Far, Glaspell, and Austin. Looking at these portrayals as a group, what generalizations occur to you about the status of women in various communities in late-nineteenth-century America?
• Glaspell's short story may seem like an ordinary script for a half-hour TV detective drama. As social observation, however, the play should be situated with other 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.  Discuss the predicament of the women in Glaspell and other female characters we have read about so far as a recurring important theme.
• Write about the play as a commentary on isolation in the rural New England landscape.

Week Six

Tuesday

Lecture: Modernism; William Carlos Williams: "The Red Wheelbarrow" (1271); Pound: "In A Station of the Metro" (1286)

• ** What depends on a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens?
• ** Why does Pound choose the word petals in the last line? What does this image suggest?
• ** Williams and Pound write in the form of imagism.  Some of the central features of imagines include exactness, precision, compression, common speech, and free verse.  Discuss these central features in relation to their poetry.

Thursday

H. D.: "Oread" (1305) and "Leda" (1305-1306); Marianne Moore: "The Paper Nautilus" (1331-1332)

• ** Examine "Oread" as an Imagist work. What makes it an example of Imagism?
• ** Examine H.D.'s treatment of the swan. How is it constructed? What is that significant to the poem or the subject matter?
   
• Trace H. D.'s formal uses of the image in her poetry, and compare her work to Williams and Pound.  Her work also influenced Moore.  Compare and contrast H. D. and Moore.
• Moving beyond discussions of Imagism and Modernism, 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.

Week Seven

Tuesday

Eliot: "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1425-1428); "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1420-1423)

• ** Examine Eliot's discussion of tradition. What does he say is important or significant about tradition and literature? What, according to Eliot, should be the poet's relationship to tradition?
• ** Analyze the effect of Eliot's use of repetition of phrases, words, and sounds. Why might Eliot have chosen this particular effect?

  Describe carefully the persona of the speaker in "Prufrock" by examining the way he sees the world.

• 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).

Thursday

Eliot: "The Wasteland" (1430-1443)

• ** Discuss the poem in context with "Tradition and the Individual Talent," in which Eliot defends his own method and describes the good poet as the one who is able to "develop or procure the consciousness of the past." 
   
• Describe the progression and interconnection of images and themes in "The Wasteland," locating the central image in each of the five sections of the poem.
• Eliot himself considers "The Waste Land" to be "a poem in fragments." Explain why this is an appropriate description of the poem, how it addresses Eliot's twentieth-century worldview, and how he attempts to resolve the fragmentation at the end of the poem.

Week Eight

Tuesday

Lecture Material: Harlem Renaissance; McKay: "The Harlem Dancer" (1459), "The Lynching" (1459), "America" (1460), "If We Must Die" (1461)

• ** In "If We Must Die," to whom do you think the "we" is referring? Do you think it is a general "we" or a specific "we?" Who is the "common foe?" What does McKay reveal about this enemy?"
• ** Examine McKay's description of America. How does he describe it? What diction or imagery does he use to describe it?
   
• McKay's form choices may come as a surprise, for the notion still seems to run deep that "free verse" or at 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 rhyme royal, and frequently employs forms reminiscent of Pope, Wheatley, and Longfellow. What's going on here? Does compression and control in such forms diminish the strength of their intention? Or does confinement, in some way, seem to increase their heat? Is there an element of defiant performance here? In other words, does McKay's demonstration of such expertise, in what has been predominantly a white European literary practice, parallel or support some purpose that can be found in the content of these verses?
• Discuss ways in which McKay refreshes and personalizes traditional poetic forms. Is it legitimate to call McKay a modernist poet? Why do you think so? Refer to specific poems as you answer.

Thursday

Midterm Exam

Hughes: "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1892); "The Negro Artist & the Racial Mountain" (online); Johnson: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1-47)

• ** Examine Hughes's use of rivers as a metaphor and/or a symbol. Why has Hughes chosen to mention the rivers he has? What do they suggest?
• ** Would you describe Hughes's poetry as modernist in its themes, use of images, and style? Locate specific points at which you can see Hughes's modernism, and demonstrate it.

Johnson: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (48-91)

Lecture on Contemporary Period; Johnson: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (92-154)

Miller: "Death of a Salesman" (2109-2176): poetry explication due next Tuesday (click on link for instructions); see next week for poem to explicate

• American playwrights have often used sibling within a family to stand for divisions within the self or for two opposing forces. Consider the relationships between Biff and Happy in Miller.
• Miller gives American family life itself the power to create character. 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. Why doesn't Loman accomplish anything? Why does he have such trouble really talking to his sons? Neither of his sons is able to catch on how do they all get derailed?
• Is Miller realistic in his portrait of Linda? What was her role in Loman's decline? Miller implies that Linda has kept her husband from going to Alaska and "conquering the world"; is she to blame or has she seen inadequacies in her husband that he was unable to recognize in himself? Does she never criticize Loman or want to defend Biff against his father? Who raised these children anyway?
• Is the role of American father as provider a myth without basis in fact? What does "provide" in this play? And what is Miller indicting? Capitalism? Family life in general? American fatherhood?

Bishop: "At the Fishhouses" (2719-2720), "The Moose" (2727-2730); Explicate "In the Waiting Room" (2725-2726--due today)

• ** The poem is called "The Moose" yet the incident with the moose happens quite late in the poem. Why might the moose have been chosen as the title's image? How does the moose relate to the rest of the poem?
• ** What does the narrator mean by "you are an I, / you are an Elizabeth / you are one of them?"
   
• Many of Bishop's poems concern themselves with loss and exile, yet the tone of her poems is often one of reserve, of detached observation. Is such a tone appropriate to Bishop's themes? Where do you see tone and theme combining (or contrasting) most effectively in these poems?
• Contemporary poets have written about nature in many different ways. Explore Bishop's use of nature in "The Moose." Does nature become the object of perception and the reason for precision in language? Does it serve as the symbolic projection of human emotions and fears? Does it provide an alternative world within which the poet can locate a coherent vision?

No Class

Baldwin: "Going to Meet the Man" (2191-2202)

• Baldwin makes 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.  Does Baldwin succeed at this difficult and dangerous artistic feat? Is a bold act of understanding like this, published in the very midst of the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, an important political or moral act or a gesture that resonates beyond the usual reach of imaginative fiction?
• While contemporary writers no longer take upon themselves the responsibility for "defining" what it means to be an American, many continue to reflect on what Norman Mailer once described as "the forces now mounting in America" and "the intensely peculiar American aspect" of contemporary life. Discuss commentaries on recent or current American life in Miller and Baldwin.

Morrison: "Recitatif" (2253-2266)

• ** Morrison mentions that Roberta and Twyla are of different races but she does not specify who is white or who is black. Why might Morrison have left their races ambiguous?
   
• 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. What is the connection between this 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, undamaged in their essence by change?
• 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?

Updike: "Separating" (2267-2275)

• First, turn to the last paragraph and talk a little about the risks inherent in closing a story with a question like "Why?" Can the story about a middle-class family bear the weight of a question like that? What does the young boy mean by that question, and what does his father hear in it? This is a breakthrough moment, but a breakthrough from what kind of confinements?
• Next, turn to the opening pages and look at two passages: one of descriptive narrative and one of human speech. What kinds of details does Updike pack into his opening paragraph, and why? What kinds of language--what vocabularies--are Joan and Richard using when they speak to each other? What are the effects of those word choices? If this is a couple encumbered, and perhaps undone, by the bric-a-brac of ordinary routine, acquisitions, and professional aspirations, are they encumbered also by a baggage of English words?
• White middle-class suburban life and marriage become a central subject for several contemporary writers. Discuss the different treatment of this subject in Miller and Updike.

Anzaldua: "La Conciencia de la Mestiza" (2435-2446)

• Who is the implicit audience for Anzaldua's essay? Whom do you assume her words were written for? What kinds of accommodation, or resistance of accommodation, do you see in her text?

Walker: "Everyday Use" (2469-2475); reader response due

• ** Explain the irony and significance of Dee's statement that the mother and Maggie don't understand their heritage. Connect this statement with Dee's and Maggie's actions and statements.
• ** The mother in Walker's story listens to her own inner voice and creates her own values. What are her values? How are Dee and Maggie different? What explains Dee's decision to rename herself Wangero? How do the quilt's values change for her and what do they mean to Maggie and the narrator? What does Walker mean by valuing "everyday use," even though the quilts may be, as Dee claims, priceless?

 Cisneros: The House on Mango Street (1-55)

• ** Betrayal by mothers--or sisters--is one variation of the exploration of the influence of family on contemporary life. Explore relationships between women in Welty, Morrison, Walker, and Cisneros.

Cisneros: The House on Mango Street (56-110)

• ** Cisneros is crossing borders as a writer: writing in English for an English-speaking audience and writing about a world that is in some ways between worlds, the experience of growing up Hispanic in various places in the United States. She takes risks in others ways, writing from within that world and entirely within the consciousness of her protagonist, whose sensory experiences and clipped phrases an clauses can convey (at the outset) a sense that she does not really understand her own cultural situation. How does she convey her protagonist's growth and change? What stays constant, conveying some continuity of self? Are these stories nostalgic, in some way, for the experience of girlhood? As Cisneros presents it, what are the costs and the gains of growing up and coming to terms with your own ethnicity in a world that both is and is not your own?

Final Exam