Contemporary Fiction

This week's reading explores contemporary fiction. It deals with authors Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Sandra Cisneros, to name a few. Their stories, like the contemporary poetry, are bold in both style and subject matter. My personal favorite from this selection is "Woman Hollering Creek" by Sandra Cisneros. Cisneros writes in English, but her style incorporates certain Spanish words and phrases into her work. A few examples are "en el otro lado," "farmacia," "burro," and "arroyo." The efect is that her work is very regional, in the sense that we never forget Cisneros's background. However, her subject matter--gender inequality--is so universal that it is not limited to any particular region.

Her work differs from other writing about gender discrimination in that it takes a very informal approach. That is, her language is conversational rather than flowery. Cisneros creates an image of a woman holding the "bloody fork she used to salvage her good name"--a reference to an abortion--describes her husband as a "man who farts and belches and snores," and says that the flowers are so red that they appear to be "bleeding a thick menstrual color." Before this contemporary period, literature focusing on women's rights did not take such a vulgar tone. But I believe the point of this period we are in is to challenge convention, to do something that has not been done before, and Cisneros accomplishes that.

The story has a happy ending: Cleofilas escapes her abusive husband in a pick-up (not some "pussy car," Cisneros says) and experiences cathartic laugher as she crosses Woman Hollering Creek--a symbolic name because not many places in the area are named after women. Cleofilas succeeds in fleeing from her inferior position in the relationship, therefore Cisneros succeeds as a women's rights advocate. I like her style because she empowers women to take a stand without presenting an angry critique of males in general and without glorifying women to the point that they almost appear on a higher pedestal than men. Her work is fresh and that is a nice change of pace from the classic literature to which our society gives so much importance.

[BONUS] Irish Folk Music Concert

I just returned from a concert performed by two Irish folk singers: Mairtin de Cogain and Jimmy Crowley. The music was very pleasant and I had a great time. The concert was held outdoors in the Shell and the weather was perfect. I expected more decorations for the event, but the layout of the stage was very simplistic--two microphone stands, two speakers, and an Irish flag. This layout facilitated enjoying the music without being distracted by visuals, which was nice.

Mr. de Cogain played an instrument I had never seen before; it resembled a tambourine without the bells and is played using something similar to a drumstick. The music was very relaxing and a few of the songs were funny. One song was about a female character who nagged too much and was drowned in the river for being a neusance. My personal favorite was about a woman named Maria de la Rosa. She is described as having green eyes and red hair, and as their singing created a beautiful mental image for me. I laughed when they said that she sings in Spanish, given the Irish theme of the event. I also enjoyed de Cogain's description of Ireland's geography--it is a big, fuzzy, green teddy bear lying down on its right side. Each time he provided the origin of one of the songs he would point to the part of his body that represents its location on the bear, err....country.

I am very glad that I attended this event as it was more entertaining than anything else I would have done. Also, this opportunity does not present itself often so I feel blessed to have been part of the audience. Now my desire to visit Ireland is greater than ever before!

Contemporary Poetry

This week's reading focuses on contemporary poetry. Authors include Rita Dove, Michael S. Harper, and Adrienne Rich. Having come even after the modernist movement, I expected the poems of these authors to be to most bizarre yet. I expected that they will find new ways to challenge old conventions of poetry and to create a style that did not exist before their time. In some instances, my expectations were met, but I found some of them to be surprisingly ordinary.

Rita Dove's poem "Fox Trot Fridays" is interesting in that the first 8 stanzas have two lines each and the final stanza only has one line. This form lends itself to rhyme with 8 couplets, but there is no rhyme scheme anywhere in the poem. Dove also uses enjambment a lot--most of the time there is no punctuation at the end of her lines, or even at the end of her stanzas. Her stanzas also often begin in lower-case. As for her subject, she seems to delight in the ordinary. In "Banneker" the subject does nothing but "lie under a pear tree," and she says of Parks in "Rosa" that "doing nothing was the doing."

Like Dove, Harper too celebrates African American culture. He wrote a poem for John Coltrane, a famous jazz musician, in which he immortalizes Coltrane's birthplace, music, and instrument. The form of this piece resembles jazz in that there is no overall pattern. It is not governed by rhyme, meter, or rules of grammar. Harper pays tribute to the four black girls killed in a church in Alabama in "American History" and to Martin Luther King Jr. in "Martin's Blues."

Rich is like Harper in that she admires civil rights leaders. Rich herself has struggled with homosexuality and her role as a female in society. Just as the girl in "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" is only a family member by default (there is no blood connection), females were not always welcomed in the male-dominated world of the past. She advocates gender equality in "Diving into the Wreck" by giving account of both the mermaid and the merman, also by following with "I am she: I am he." In her final stanza she says, "We are, I am, you are." The idea is that we are all one and the same; gender should not be a discriminating factor. Poems like this make her, in a way, a sort of civil rights activist herself.

After This- Alice McDermott

This week we are reading and discussing the novel "After This" by Alice McDermott. McDermott has been selected by the college to receive the Corrington Award. One of the things that sets her novel apart from others is its unusual structure--there is no distinguishable beginning, middle, and end. McDermott begins in medias res and does not wrap everything up neatly at the end. Some may think that this makes McDermott an inferior writer, but this is simply her style. Her goal is not to create and develop characters in the same fashion as other novels do, but rather to tell a story through a series of events. Another technique of hers is to bypass an entire decade in a single sentence. Therefore it is important that readers say alert while reading her work, lest they miss important details.

The novel is not only unusual in its structure, but also because of the many paradoxes it presents. For example, the docile son gets sent off to fight a war while the one who would make a good soldier stays in school to further his education. McDermott also gives accounts of fond memories as well as sad moments, making the tone both nostalgic and melancholy. This pair of conflicting tones emphsizes what seems to be her central point: there are good times and there are bad times, but life goes on.

Mid-Century Modernism

This week's selection was written some years after the early modernist works we have read. It includes Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath. It seems that these authors, having written a little later, are more comfortable discussing controversial topics as well as personal issues than were the modernist authors from the previous week's assignment. They also do something interesting with the structure of their work.

In his poem "Howl" Allen Ginsberg writes about underwear, "pubic beards," alcohol, marijuana, and "cock and endless balls." He takes a big risk in making this decision, as sex is an uncofortable topic for most audiences and inappropriate or some; furthermore, drug usage is illegal in America and alcoholism has its own set of problems. His inventive poetic style mimics his bold choice of topics--he arranged his poem so that the word "who" appears in nearly every line and may be traced in a straight line down the page. Another example of Ginsberg addressing a controversial topic is homosexuality in "A Supermarket in California."

Elizabeth Bishop's structure is particularly interesting in "The Fish." She uses at least six similes so the poem describes an ordinary incident--catching a fish--in very figurative terms. Furthermore, she enriches the account with constant details of color. The skin is brown, the interior flesh and sea-lice are white, the weeds are green, the swim bladder is pink, the eyes are yellow, the thread on the hook is black, and the boat engine is orange with rust. At the end of the poem Bishop uses the word "rainbow" four times. The poem itself is like a rainbow and it is easy to create a mental image of the scene because of her elaborate description.

Sylvia Plath's father died when she was eight years-old, and it seems to have had a great impact on her writing. The idea behind "Lady Lazarus" is ressurection of the dead. She presents several words connoting death: "grave," "skin and bone," "worms," "dying," and "scars." Right alongside these, however, are "miracle" and an allusion to a phoenix--a mythological creature which dies by fire and then rises from its own ashes. It can be argued that this peom expresses Plath's longing for companionship with her father. Her poem "Daddy" has an interesting structure with repetition in the eighth, ninth, tenth, and twelfth stanzas. The subject seems to be a stepfather whom she views as a sort of vampire, contributing to the idea that she misses her biological father.

The writers from this week have interesting subjects: risky ones such as alcoholism and drugs in Ginsberg and personal ones found in Plath. They also structure their work in an interesting way; Bishop lists a series of colors which constructs the rainbow she mentions in her final stanza of "The Fish." Ginsberg, too, takes care with his structure in "Howl," including "who" in nearly each line and aligning the word down the page. All of these techniques add flair to their writing and contribute to the overall enjoyment of their work.

The Rise of Modernism: Fiction

Sadly spring break has come to an end, but fortunately I am back safe and sound. This week's reading includes fiction by Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Anne Porter, and Ernest Hemingway. Like the modernist poetry from the previous week, these short stories are very different from any I have read before. They are very personal in that elements of the stories are unique to their authors.

In "The Gilded Six-Bits" Hurston describes her "Negro yard around a Negro house in a Negro settlement." The story is regionalistic in both its dialogue and Biblical allusions. The characters' dialect is distinct of the South, a region known as the Bible Belt. There are references to the Jordan River, Samson (Judges 13-16), and Lot's wife (Genesis 19). These elements reflect Hurston's background as an Alabama native and the daughter of a preacher.

Katherine Anne Porter expresses conflict between a character's "way of living and her feeling of what life should be" in "Flowering Judas." Laura, like most us, wants the American Dream. She is discontent with her current way of life and wishes to achieve something fantastic which lies outside of her immediate reach. Porter's biography makes the point that she lived in several different places and perhaps Laura's unhappiness with her current situation mirrors Porter's nostalgia for home.

Ernest Hemingway tells "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" through a narrator who can be described at best as a jerk. He calls his wife a "rich bitch" and blames her as the source of his misfortune and unhappiness. But she should not be at fault on the sole basis that she possesses wealth. We sympathize with the wife and realize that she has done nothing wrong; the man has destroyed his own talent. This unfavorable description of the male is interesting when considering a fact about Hemingway's life--his father committed suicide and Hemingway blamed his mother. This story may be an attempt to gain redempion for this accussation by portraying woman as an innocent figure.

Next week we are reading more modernism, this time a mix of poetry and fiction, so I am looking forward to identifying characteristics of later works from the same period as these. Maybe the same ones will exist but will be handled in a different way by the younger authors. See you then!

Rise of Modernism

This week's reading focuses on poetry written by modernists. This poetry is different from other things we have read in a few key ways. It often takes the form of free verse, meaning it lacks both rhyme and meter. It also presents discreet images using very few lines, so that readers may offer several interpretations. Many of the poems seem fragmented--they join many images which are often random into a sort of literary collage. Finally, some of them are self-conscious, such as Langston Hughes's "Theme for English B" and Marianne Moore's "Poetry."

William Carlos Williams's "The Young Housewife" is an example of few lines from which many questions and interpretations arise. The speaker compares a woman to a fallen leaf and then drives over dried leaves with his car. It is unclear whether Williams means to say that the woman is frail and that the man has power over her, or if his smile and bow reveal that he has no harmful intentions.

T. S. Eliot gives an example of fragmentation in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." He speaks of "cheap hotels," "sawdust restaurants," "yellow smoke," and before we know it women are talking about Michelangelo. We do not know for sure why the smoke is yellow or who the women are. Mysteriously he speaks of being "pinned and wriggling" on a wall and then he throws an allusion to Shakespeare into the mix. Eliot does not spend much time developing any given image before he moves on to the next and the connection between them, if any exists, is not evident.

"Anecdote of the Jar" by Wallace Stevens seems to elevate art through the image of a jar. It sits upon a hill around which the widerness gathers, "no longer wild." Creations of nature and one of mankind are juxtaposed here and it is nature which devotes its attention to the jar. It is uncertain whether nature is in awe of the work of man or if nature views it with uncertainty and as an imposter. However, there is no implication that nature wishes the jar to disappear.

In short, modernist poetry is unique in the way it strings together unrelated images without explaining their significance. The result of this is that readers are left to interpret the poem in a variety of ways. They are deceptively complicated in their short length and raise many questions.

Chopin- The Awakening

This week's text is The Awakening by Kate Chopin. The novel is the story of Edna, a woman who is unhappily married to the busy Leonce, and her quest for happiness. In her husband's absence she finds herself developing feelings for two other men--Alcee and Robert. The former eventually gets dismissed when Edna realizes the extent of her feelings for Robert. She dreams of venturing off to a distant island with him so that they may be alone together. As her affection for Robert grows, that which she has for Leonce diminishes, as does her obedience to his orders. She begins to loosen the chains that have bound her by demonstrating acts of independence.

One thing Edna does to show her rebellion is to stop attending social gatherings on Tuesdays. This shows her strong desire to be her own person rather than to conform to the person that society wants her to be. She also remains outside on the hammock one night, refusing to go inside when Leonce tells her to. This marks her change from the submissive role she has assumed until this point in the relationship to one in which she has control over herself. Her demonstrations of independence reach a climax when she moves out of the house with all of the things her husband has bought and into one of her own.

The sea symbolizes both freedom and rebirth. It serves as a means by which Edna may escape the life she has grown tired of. Her immersion in the water stands as a sort of baptism--the ocean is boundless and, by surrendering herself to it and becomining one with it, Edna too is free.

Realism and Naturalism

This week's readings explore the themes of realism and naturalism. Works that fall under realism are characterized by aspects of everyday life. Their concerns are of marriage, work, family, human interaction, and other things having to do with society. Naturalism, on the other hand, deals with things outside of the social sphere. It is more concerned with the environment and animals.

"A White Heron" by Sarah Orne Jewett tells the story of a girl named Sylvia who discovers a beautiful white bird (a symbol of innocence) and develops a great deal of admiration for it. She chooses fellowship with the bird over communion with other human beings. A hunter asks her to take him to the heron and she refuses--disclosing its location would mean giving its life away. She does not want the bird's song to be hushed and its "pretty feathers stained and wet with blood." Sylvia is able to connect with nature and appreciate its beauty, while the hunter desires to take away its life and turn it into a trophy for his wall. Therefore Sylvia stands to represent a naturalistic view while the hunter manifests a more realistic one. However, the story itself does not take a naturalistic tone; if it emphasized naturalism where the law of man does not govern wild animals, the bird would have bitten off Sylvia's head and fed it to the nest.

Race and Gender Discrimination

This week's reading includes work by Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Fanny Fern. All of these authors wrote about oppression--some about race and others about gender. I found these pieces to be very powerful and filled with emotion. It is incredible to me that they could present such strong feelings in the form of words on a page.

Jefferson wrote about the tension between Indians and white men in "Notes on the State of Virginia." A chief named Logan fed hungry whites and clothed naked ones until an Indian stole from them. The outraged whites slaughtered Logan's entire family. Logan says, "There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature," and "Who is there to mourn for Logan? Not one." These two lines convey the pain wrought by one side punishing the innocent in order to get revenge for a trivial act that shoud have been negotiated.

Frederick Douglass criticized America for claiming to be the land of the free and argued that it is hypocritical. Slavery should not exist in such a place, yet he is reminded of its reality every Fourth of July as he watches people around him celebrate their freedom--a luxury he does not participate in. He claims that a black person is a man and that men are entitled to liberty. He also states that light is not strong enough to make his point, but rather he needs fire to reveal the injustice he faces on a daily basis. This burning passion is one of the things that makes him such a powerful voice of literature during this period.

Sojourner Truth spoke up for women's rights in a speech she delivered at a convention. She stated the following: "I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man." Her point is that her physical worth equals that of a man, therefore she should not be treted as an inferior. She further argues that Jesus comes from God who created Him and woman who bore him, giving women a divine importance.

Fanny Fern (an alias) responded to male criticism on ladies' books. A man once said that no topic other than courtship and marriage should be expected from a feminine novel. Fern retorts that this is a theme existant in men's novels also and that the speaker knows as much about reviewing a woman's book as she does about navigating a ship. With her bold exposure of the weaknesses of men, Fern is famous for breaking the stereotype that females are only capable of being soft-spoken and gentle writers.

The conflict between whites and black, men and women has improved dramatically over the last few decades in our country's history, but my struggle as a student lives on! The midterm for this class is tomorrow so I am off to study. Until next week!

Melville- The Confidence Man

Mardi Gras break has come and gone so it's time to get serious once again. This week the class is discussing Herman Melville's The Confidence Man. We will have a class discussion, exam, and essay in addition to this blog.

The book begins with an image of a sign above a barbershop on a boat. It reads, "No Trust," which basically means that the barber does not accept credit and wants payment immediately following his services. This is logical since the reason for his work is to provide for his family; by allowing a customer to leave without paying, he runs the risk of not being compensated for his work and being unable to support his family.

Subsequent chapters involve other characters who are rigid in their beliefs but are pursuaded to be more trusting. An example is Pitch, a man who has 15 years' experience with 35 slaves. He despises them because they steal, give him an attitude, require food, and hesitate to get out of bed in the morning. Pitch desires to find a machine that will do work for him, as none of these concerns exist with machines. However, after a lengthy conversation with a philosopher, he comes to realize that boys are like corn--both require cultivation and will not become great if neglected. He eventually decides to purchase another boy as an "experiment."

Other accounts of characters (including a medicine man and an herb doctor) agreeing to be more trusting occur before the end of the book, where the barber is revisited. A persistent customer badgers him about removing the sign outside his shop while he receives a shave. He finally succeeds in convincing the barber to trust people. This trust in fellow mankind--this notion that there is virtue in all men--seems to be both a common theme as well as a moral of Melville's book. It therefore stands as a sort of conduct manual for how we should live our own lives. However, the book may also be read as a satirical account of placing too must trust in people. Different characters speak in each chapter, but there is always one who convinces another to take on his own position on a certain topic. It can be argued that these characters are all the same--the devil taking on different forms to manipulate people. At one point the text says that a butterfly is a caterpillar in a "gaudy cloak" of wings which disguise his true wormy form. The book's subtitle, "His Masquerade," also supports this idea of deception.

So there are several different ways to analyze this novel, but in any case it is very different from other novels of its time.

Transcendentalism and The Gothic

At the heart of transcendentalism lies the idea that God infuses all things in the universe with some degree of divinity. It places a great importance on the connection between the individual and the world around him. Therefore it is common for works from this period to involve some sort of quest for fellowship.

In Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," Robin, a boy of 18 years, visits a foreign land to search for his uncle. He asks several strangers for any clues about the location of his kinsman and his quest takes a very long time. At its end the country boy has grown "weary of a town life" and asks to be shown to the ferry so that he may return home. So Hawthorne's character is an example of one who goes off to a strange land to find something, but quickly longs to return to his place of comfort.

Henry David Thoreau gives a very different account of a quest in Walden. He tells the story of how he lived in the woods for an extended time--2 years, 2 months, and 2 days--in order to commune with nature. His morning ritual here involves bathing in the pond; this activity represents a type of spiritual purification. By separating himself from the duties of society, he is able to appreciate the things God created and to achieve a higher level of spirituality. However, Thoreau eventually leaves the woods because he feels that he has other lives to lead.

There are also a few Gothic works from this week's assignment which critique the stereotype of outer beauty. Hawthorne's "The Birthmark" tells the story of Georgiana, a beautiful woman whose countenance is rendered "hideous" by a birthmark. The spot is considered a flaw and becomes a symbol of her "liability to sin, sorrow, decay, and death"--foreshadowing to the end of the story. Her lover, Aylmer, begins to be troubled by this mark and desires to remove it from Georgiana. However, he is careless with the procedure and his crazed passion to rid the spot at all costs leads to the loss of his love. The lesson here seems to be to look beyond outward beauty and to see the part that truly counts--the inside.

Edgar Allan Poe comments on stereotypical beauty in "The Fall of the House of Usher." The story cites the poem "The Haunted Palace," which compares a house to a woman. Certain stanzas address specific body parts. For example, the house is said to have "two luminous windows" which stand to represent eyes. There are also golden banners which float on the roof (hair) and a ruby door with shiny pearl border (mouth and teeth). This poem's inclusion also serves the purpose of personifying the house as a vampire and fortifies the Gothic elements of the story.

Next week class is cancelled due to Mardi Gras break, so there will be no post until the week of February 12. In the meantime I will be reading Herman Melville's The Confidence Man. Until then, take care.

Puritans and the Age of Reason

I am still waiting for the textbook to arrive, but my professor posted links to the material on his website so here is the review of my first assignment. Hope you enjoy.

The poems we read by Anne Bradstreet have a very personal subject matter; they often focus on her family and her religion. She addresses her own writing in "The Author to Her Book" and dedicated a peom to her "Dear and Loving Husband." Another of her poems gives an account of how she felt after the burning of her house. She considered the event to be an act of God rather than a horrible tragedy and maintained a positive attitude. Bradstreet states that her hope and treasure lies outside of the material world.

Edward Taylor's "Meditation 96" also has religion as its base. At the end of the poem he says that he, like Bradstreet, desires to "lodge" in the love of the Lord. Taylor also wrote about the rewards of attending church--the experience is compared to riding in a coach which brings one closer to Heaven. Johnathan Edwards also placed a great importance on church attendance and warns of straying from God in his long and graphic speech "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."

Benjamin Franklin wrote about the Indians in North America and how they were considered savages by the white men. When they entered a white village they were surrounded and stared at as though they were some other species, mysterious and not to be trusted. His account illustrates other ways in which the natives were treated as subordinates and thus takes racism as it's primary theme.

Another author from this section who wrote about racism is Phyllis Wheatley. "On being brought from AFRICA to AMERICA" contains the idea that "Their [black people's] colour is a diabolic die." But it is an interesting piece in that Wheatley's account of slavery is not the negative one many people might expect. Rather, it is quite a pleasant one. Her owners were like family to her and taught her how to read. Wheatley's story is a rare exception in that she was not subjected to the rigorous labor that most other slaves during her time suffered. She also writes a few lines about religion and gives thanks to God for delivering her from her "Pagan land."

In summary, because many of the works from this week's reading were written by Puritans, the majority of them center on religion and faith in God. However, there are other themes as well: Bradstreet's love for her family and Franklin and Wheatley's accounts of racism. These works seem to represent the major issues from the time period during which they were produced. Freedom of religion was a hot topic as the Puritans/Separatists founded the colonies and racism was introduced along with the unfamiliar people in the new world.

Update on the book situation

I visited the bookstore Friday to see if our textbook had come in, but the company shipped the Norton Anthology of ENGLISH Literature and our course calls for the Norton Anthology of AMERICAN Literature. Our professor and the bookstore are currently working with the company to get the correct ones shipped, but in the meantime I will be unable to read any assignments. Hopefully they will come in soon!

Introduction

This entry will serve as a test, as well as in introduction to this blog. I will make weekly posts here which will consist of an analysis of works by representative American authors. I plan to compare and contrast works (according to style, theme, and subject matter) with others--both from the same period as well as with those from other periods. I will use this blog as a place for me to write and share my thoughts on the texts; it will also serve as a tool to help me prepare for the final exam.

While my primary hope for this site is to receive feedback from my instructor, if other readers have an opinion that differs from my own on any given text, I welcome comments.

I am currently waiting for my school's bookstore to receive the textbooks for this class, so I will make another post as soon as the material for my first assignment becomes accessible to me. Until then take care!