6. The Contemporary Period (1945Present) 6.1 Background 6.2 Prose - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

• 6. The Contemporary Period

(1945–Present)

6.1 Background 6.2 Prose 6.3 More Prose

6.4 Poetry 6.5 More Poetry 6.6 Drama

6.1 Background

At this phase, from post- war America, on through the civil rights era, through the cultural revolutions and economic seesaws, we have a collection of writers from all walks of life, presented in chronological order, that contribute their own voices to American letters.

Some of these writers are still alive today, and, once again, not everyone is included, nor is everything included about each writer. This is especially difficult to see with the most recent writers of today.

6.2 Prose

Eudora Welty (1909-2001)

• A prose writer of the

South, like William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor

• Another writer of

grotesque characters,

• nes that are

transparent in their physical and mental limitations, their lack of education and understanding, their racism and sexism, their humanity.

• Some of her works are

A Curtain of Green, Music from Spain, The Golden Apples, Moon Lake and Other Stories.

• Also an accomplished

photographer of the Great Depression. Connected photos to writing – snapshots of a deeper contextual

• meaning. An example of

this is her short story “Why I Live at the P.O.”

• It is inspired from a

photo she took of a women ironing at the back of a post office. It is an example of southern realism.

Other short stories that are anthologized are “Petrified Man” and “A Worn Path”. “A Worn Path” is a short story about an older African-American woman who walks a rural road to get medicine for her grandson.

She reveals her pain and feeling, the immediacy of her experience and the goal of getting the medicine: love over circumstance.

The Optimist’s Daughter (1972)

• It is a Pulitzer Prize

winning novella about Laurel, a women who goes to New Orleans to take care of her father after he has eye surgery.

• He doesn’t recover and

dies.

• Her father's young second

wife, Fay, exasperates the situation with her presence, but the two of them have to return the body to Mississippi, where he will be buried.

• Laurel rediscovers her life

before moving away and feels connected to her town and its people.

• This contrasts with Fay,

who is an unwelcomed

• utsider.
• Laurel has feelings and

a connectedness that Fay will never understand.

Ralph Ellison (1913-1994)

• African American

novelist and literary critic, professor at NYU

• His novel Invisible Man

(1952) is his best work. It won the national book award in 1953.

• He also published

Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of essays about politics and social issues.

• Juneteenth is a

posthumous novel that was published from some 2000 pages of notes he left after his death.

Invisible Man

• It is the story of an

unnamed African American whose race makes him “invisible”.

• He narrates his

experiences living in racist America of the early 20th century.

• He lives underground in

a room wired with stolen electricity.

• He tells of his

experiences at an African American college, life in Harlem and his work with African American nationalism and its connections to Marxism and other African American intellectuals.

• It is a novel of identity

and discovery, a voice for others with similar experiences.

Bernard Malamud (1914-1986)

• As much of what we

have seen about individuals navigating in a different and sometimes hostile world, here we see this from a Jewish perspective.

• He is best known for his

first novel, The Natural (1952), which was made into a popular movie with Robert Redford and Kim Basinger, among others.

• His novels, such as The

Assistant (1957) and The Tenants (1961), and short story compilations, such as The Magic Barrel (1958), are about the lives of middle-class Jews in America, about their failures and successes, how love can help overcome strife.

• You might want to read

the story “The First Seven Years” from The Magic Barrel.

• The Fixer (1966) is a

novel about antisemitism in the Tsarist era of Russia and a trial in 1913 which drew attention from around the world. It won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

• The Natural is not about

the Jewish American experience; it’s about baseball.

• Roy Hobbs is a

promising young player who meets a star ball player named Whammer.

• Whammer’s girlfriend

shoots Roy when Roy says he will be the best. Fifteen years later, Roy enters the profession and becomes successful.

• The owner asks him to

throw the game for a bribe.

• He refuses but strikes
• ut anyhow, and is

discovered.

• The film’s ending is

totally different.

Saul Bellow (1915-2005)

• Jewish American writer
• Won the National Book

Award three times, the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature

• His best-known works

include The Adventures

• f Augie March (1953),

Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), Humboldt's Gift (1975) and Ravelstein (2000).

• His books explore the

Jewish American experience after WWII and the Holocaust.

• Much of what he writes

about reflects his own experiences as a youth.

• His second novel, The

Victim (1947), for example, is about a middle-aged man, Asa Leventhal, who is confronted with someone from his past who blames Leventhal for his misfortunes.

• Leventhal must

confront this an other challenges (his sick nephew, Anti-Semitism, etc.) to self-examine his

• wn values.

• Bellow’s characters live

in a disinterested and

• ppressive society, but

still search for their place in the world.

• The picaresque novel

The Adventures of Augie March, which won him his first National Book Award, is about Augie March during the Great Depression.

• It is a growth novel, a

bildungsroman, about a boy’s transition to adulthood.

6.3 More Prose

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

• Father of the Beat Generation (a group of

artists in the 1950s that rebelled against mainstream values with topics of drug experiments, radical politics, open sexuality, explicit promiscuity and Eastern mysticism. From NYC, they settled in San Francisco’s artistically hippie iconoclastic culture).

On the Road (1957)

• The book of the Beat

Generation.

• It’s a semi-

autobiographical work about a cross country trip with Kerouac’s (Sal Paradise’s) friend Neil Cassidy (Dean Moriarty).

• They come across some

eclectic figures on the way.

• What happens is not

important – a statement

• n the random journey
• f life.

• The narrative style is

continually experimental, with stream of consciousness, non- connectedness of thoughts and super-long sentences questioning the American status-quo and pushing the limits of individual expression and non-conformity.

Joseph Heller (1923-1999)

• He wrote novels, short

stories and drama

• Known for his satire,

especially in his most known work, Catch-22 (1961) which has become a common lexicon in English to describe a situation that has no easy way out, a contradictory choice with a negative resolution.

Catch-22

• A third-person
• mniscient non-

chronological narration told by a number of different characters.

• It takes place during

WWII and follows the experiences of captain Yossarian and other airmen who try to keep things together while still having to complete their service so that they can go home.

• Pilots mentally unfit to

fly did not have to do so, but because of the bureaucracy involved, could not actually be excused, thus the term Catch-22.

James Baldwin (1924-1987)

• Essayists, novelist,

playwright, poet, critic

• f the African American

experience

• Moved to Paris when he

was 24 to escape the racism in America

• Wrote about sexuality

much before the subject was mainstream in literature

• His work can have a

liturgical style (influenced by his religious upbringing), strong social commentary and characters that reflected issues Baldwin faced.

• Notes of a Native Son

(1955), influenced by Richard Wright, is a compilation of ten essays on race in America and Europe.

• Many of Baldwin’s

writings explore homosexuality and

• bisexuality. Giovanni’s

Room (1956) is about an American man living in Paris who tells of his exploits there.

Going to Meet the Man (1965)

• Collection of short

stories about African Americans, crime and justice, childhood and family, sexuality and racism.

• From this book you

should look at “Sonny’s Blues” (about brotherhood, drugs and personal obligation) and “The Rockpile” (about feelings of negligence and isolation).

Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964)

• A novelist and short-

story writer of the South

• Life cut short at 39

because of illness

• Southern Gothic

style: regional settings, grotesque characters (other writers include Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, etc.), although she didn’t like this categorization

• Her work also

explored morality and human behavior, being influenced by her Roman Catholic faith.

• O'Connor wrote two

novels: Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and has two books of short stories: A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (posthumously, 1965).

• She won the National

Book Award in 1972.

• In the short story

“Revelation”, you see the visible religious context.

• In “The Life You Save May

Be Your Own” there is a negative outcome when a stranger with malicious intentions comes upon an unsuspecting family (the same thing happens in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” with its terribly grotesque and dramatic ending, and in “Good Country People”).

• Her characters are real.

They are ridiculous and “grotesque”.

• For example in “Good

Country People”, one character, Pointer, a Bible salesman, invites another, Joy, on a date.

• He coaxes her up to the

barn loft where she then removes her prosthetic leg at his request.

• He then opens a

hollowed-out Bible and takes out some whiskey, condoms and sex cards.

• She refuses his

advances, and he runs

• ff with her leg and

reveals he is a atheist and a nihilist, which she does not foresee, despite her Ph.D. and understanding of belief systems.

Harper Lee (1926–2016)

• Wrote To Kill a

Mockingbird (1960) for which she won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize. In it, “Scout” tells us about Atticus Finch, a lawyer in the South, who defends an African American against an undeserved rape charge.

• Also wrote Go Set a

Watchman (2015)

Toni Morrison (1931- )

• Won the Pulitzer Prize,

the American Book Award in 1988, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

The Bluest Eye (1970)

• It is about African

American Pecola Breedlove’s suffering around her desire to have “white beauty”.

• Told from various

perspectives, such themes as incest, racism and child abuse come into play.

• Some of her other well-

known novels are Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), and Beloved (1987). Beloved is a Civil War story about subjection and choice in slavery.

John Updike (1932-2009)

• Novelist, poet, writer of

short stories, critic.

• Multiple times won the

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

• Work appeared The

New Yorker starting in 1954.

• Most famous work is

"Rabbit" series (the novels Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest). They are books of the life Harry "Rabbit Angstrom, a middle- class man, over several decades, from young man to tomb.

6.4 Poetry

Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)

• A poet that returns to

traditional form and meter, but maintains ambiguity and tension in word choice.

• His

semiautobiographical poems that reflect personal experiences from his upbringing and Midwest origins are strong on their imagery and reflection.

• Won Pulitzer Prize for

The Waking (1953), and the National Book Award for Poetry twice for Words for the Wind (1958) and The Far Field (1964).

Poems of his to read are “My Papa’s Waltz”, “Cuttings” and “Elegy for Jane”. Here is “Root Cellar”: Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch, Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark, Shoots dangled and drooped, Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates, Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.

And what a congress of stinks! Roots ripe as old bait, Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich, Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks. Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

John Berryman (1914-1972)

• A confessional poet

(Confessional poetry was a subjective, highly personal voice that made transparent the intimacies and secrets of the writer – sex, family, drugs, politics, etc.), Berryman lived a turbulent life of multiple marriages, alcohol and depression.

• He worked at Harvard,

Princeton, the University of Minnesota, among others. Like his father, he committed

• suicide. He was 57.

“Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” is a 57-stanza poem about her personal struggles with her Puritan

• lifestyle. There are a

number of voices, including Berryman’s

• wn. It is a mix of lyrical

and narrative forms (excerpt):

[55] Headstones stagger under great draughts of time after heads pass out, and their world must reel speechless, blind in the end about its chilling star: thrift tuft, whin cushion—nothing. Already with the wounded flying dark air fills, I am a closet of secrets dying, races murder, foxholes hold men, reactor piles wage slow upon the wet brain rime.

• Berryman’s most known

work is The Dream Songs, split into two books of poetry, 77 Dream Songs (1964) and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968).

• He won the National

Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for this work.

• It is reminiscent of long,

subjective poems like Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. It’s a semiautobiographical work in which "Henry” is an self-deprecating, self- conscious character who thinks about women, suicide, depression and solitude.

• Its personal connection

to Berryman’s life is connected to his own struggles with his father’s suicide.

Robert Lowell (1917-1977)

• A confessional poet

who started as a formalist.

• Formalists, or New

Critics, looked at the poem as an entity upon itself without falling into the biographical fallacy that could contextually cloud its meaning: they looked at the poem’s form, expression and use of literary devices.

• Lowell in this tradition

published Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) for which he won the national poet laureate position in 1947, among other awards.

• In a change in style,

Lowell wrote Life Studies (1959), which some see as the start of confessional poetry.

• In this line he also wrote

For the Union Dead (1964) and Notebook (1970).

• His confessional poetry

steeped into the past of America “For the Union Dead”, and into his own traditional Puritan upbringing.

• Some other poems to

read by him are “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” and “Memories of West Street and Lepke”. Here is “The Ruins of Time”:

(EXCERPT) (Quevedo, Mire los muros de la partia mia and Buscas en Roma a Roma, (!)O peregrino!) I saw the musty shingles of my house, raw wood and fixed once, now a wash of moss eroded by the ruin of age furning all fair and green things into waste.

I climbed the pasture. I saw the dim sun drink the ice just thawing from the boldered fallow, woods crowd the foothills, sieze last summer's field, and higher up, the sickly cattle bellow. I went into my house. I saw how dust and ravel had devoured its furnishing; even my cane was withered and more bent, even my sword was coffined up in rust— there was no hilt left for the hand to try. Everything ached, and told me I must die.

6.5 More Poetry

Allen Ginsburg (1926-1997)

• A notable poet of the

Beat Generation.

• Prototypical of Beat

poetry, Ginsberg’s “Howl” is an open verse, highly controversial piece written in first person.

• A bookstore owner who
• ffered to publish it was

taken to court for

• bscenity charges

(which here later dropped because it was recognized that a new cultural voice was emerging).

“Howl” (excerpt – the beginning) I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold- water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

Anne Sexton (1928-1974)

• A confessional poet

who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her book Live or Die (1967).

• Themes of her poetry

common to this genre are depression, struggling with suicidal tendencies, psychiatric problems, gender, and personal and familial intimacies.

• She committed suicide

when she was 45.

• Some poems to read by

her are “Housewife”, “Courage” and “Cinderella”.

• Here is Sexton’s “Her

Kind”

I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

• ver the plain houses, light by light:

lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind. and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods; fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned. A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind.

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

• Very well educated.

Lived in America and

• England. Was married

to poet Ted Hughes. She committed suicide at age 30.

• Of her noted

contributions to confessional poetry are The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) and Ariel (1965), as well as the novel The Bell Jar (1963). She won the Pulitzer Prize for The Collected Poems (1981) posthumously.

• She went from writing

conventional style poetry to more confessional, intimate and loosely structured verse.

• Some of Plath’s poems to

read are “The Applicant”, “Edge”, “Daddy”, “Mirror”, “Morning Song”. Here is and excerpt from “The Colossus”:

Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of lysol I crawl like an ant in mourning Over the weedy acres of your brow To mend the immense skull plates and clear The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.

A blue sky out of the Oresteia Arches above us. O father, all by yourself You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum. I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress. Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered

Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)

• Post-confessional

poetry, personal poetry with a universal appeal.

• She started in

traditional form but moved to freer, less structured verse in Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), and thereafter.

• Involved in women’s

rights, social justice, lesbian issues, etc. Extensive writing on different issues beyond

• poetry. Of Woman Born

(1976) is an example of this.

Some poems of hers to read are “Diving into the Wreck”, “Planetarium” and “Power”. Here is “Snapshots of a Daughter-in- Law” (excerpt):

3 A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. The beak that grips her, she becomes. And Nature, that sprung-lidded, still commodious steamer-trunk of tempora and mores gets stuffed with it all: the mildewed orange-flowers, the female pills, the terrible breasts

• f Boadicea beneath flat foxes' heads and orchids.

Two handsome women, gripped in argument, each proud, acute, subtle, I hear scream across the cut glass and majolica like Furies cornered from their prey: The argument ad feminam, all the old knives that have rusted in my back, I drive in yours, ma semblable, ma soeur!

6.6 Drama

Tennesse Williams (1911-1983)

• Tumultuous personal

history played out in his work: deception, violence, loneliness

• “Tennessee” given

because of southern drawl (he was from Mississippi)

• Semiautobiographical The Glass Menagerie

(1945) about Tom’s remembrance of his mother, Amanda, and mentally unstable sister who is fascinated with a collection of glass animals, Laura, and how he tries to set up Amanda with a suitor for marriage, but eventually leaves home to never return.

• His greatest work is A

Street Car Named Desire (1947), which was also made into a move starring Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh.

• It is a criticism of the

American Dream.

• The interchange

between Blanche, who moves to New Orleans to “make it”, her sister, Stella, and Stella’s husband, Stanley, are full of lies, suffering, and dislike.

• Stanley rapes Blanche,

people don’t believe her accusation, and she is institutionalized in the end because of a mental breakdown.

Arthur Miller (1915-2005)

• All of My Sons (1947) is

a story of a businessman father during WWII. It has been adapted to radio, television and film.

• The Crucible (1953) is

about the Salem Witch Trials, which mirrored his own experience before the House Un- American Activities Commission about accusation against his

• wn political

viewpoints.

• Miller’s most known

work is Death of a Salesman (1949), winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

• Another work of the

time that questions the American Dream.

• Willy Loman, returning from a failed

business trip, finds himself surrounded by his family, yet thinking through a series of flashbacks and real-time daydreaming how hard life is now compared to how it was in the past, the thoughts become more intense and drive him from his family and eventually to his own demise.