Englisch (Fach) / North American Literatures & Culture (Lektion)

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• Temperance movement one of the 19th-century Reform Movements American Temperance Society, 1826 consumption of strong alcohol in U.S. in 1820s experience meetings Women's Christian Temperance Union (1874) – largest organization of women in C19th Prohibition a) on state level; b) on national level: 1919-1933
• Women's movement 19thCentury Reform Movements intellectual roots in enlightenment, human rights, natural rights– Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)– Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820), "On the Equality of the Sexes" (1790) organizational roots in abolitionist movement ( cf. Übung 2)– Angelina Grimké (1805-1879) & Sarah Grimké (1792-1873)– 1st World Antislavery Convention, London, 1840: meeting of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) & Lucretia Mott (1793-1880)-Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, NY State: July 19 & 20, 1848"Declaration of Sentiments"  adaptation of rhetoric of "Declaration of Independence"
• Transcendentalism philosophical and literary movement; merges romantic, idealistic, mystical, and individualist beliefs – one of the most consequential moments of the history of ideas in America– ideas of social reform, reform pedagogy, utopian thinking– tendency towards pantheism, belief of God's immanence in world– promotion of individualism & individual responsibility --> self-reliance
• American Renaissance first flowering of American literature: philosophy, novel, short story, poetry ca. mid 1830s - 1860s ambiguity of term: continuation & noveltycontinuity & discontinuity 
• The Flowering of Narrative Voices - Herman Melville Moby-Dick (1851): had a big afterlife inspring many paintings, literature and music
• Moby Dick (Herman Melville) main characters: Ahab, Ishmael, Queequeg, crew; ship: Pequod novel explodes novelistic conventions by mixing genres large amount of "sources" and references self-reflexivity (question of representatoin) & functionality of this mix American epic; story of a demagogue; adventure novel  American Renaissance 1851 --> multi-dimensional
• Characters in Moby Dick (Herman Melville) Ahab: monomaniacal quest for Moby Dick, attempt to eliminate evil quest for truth / the nature of evil meaning of human existence & suffering Ishmael:  quest for meaning in the world everything can potentially carry meaning but nothing carries a fixed meaning Ishmael the sailor vs. Ishmael the narrator Pequod: microcosm of American society the world as ship destabilization of distinctions between savagery and civilization: Pequod as "cannibal" of a ship
• late 18th- & early19th century American poetry: "Singing America" little formal innovation; American themes 
• the Fireside Poets/ Schoolroom Poets Henry Longfellow Oliver Wendell Holmes James Russel Lowell John Greenleaf Whittler considered epitome of national culture; little innovation impact of European Romanticism & Victorian cultural values
• Women's Poetry (American Renaissance) poetry considered a suitable genre for women/women wirters: realm of feelings; "light"  gender differences; separate spheres - projected on to literary realm greater diversity in second half of 19th century; influence of British writers 
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• Walt Whitman (1819-1892) Leaves of Grass (1855 - 1892) breaking of traditional patterns, forms, laws free Verse long ambulating lines swinging rhythm of American speech, colloquial language thematic concerns: "The United States are essentially the greatest poem" (Whitman, preface to 1st edition) opennes & plurality, freedom, individualism, optimism, identification, empathy incorporation of the heterogeneity of outside world, news, daily life, ... pantheism: immanence & unity; syncretism, synthesizing of opposites Influence for future poets William Carlos Williams or Blackmountain poets
• Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886) poetry mostly unpublished during her lifetime formally highly innovative formal features: short, condensed, elliptical;  little punctuation opennes through syntactical structure few rhymes  common meter (alternating lines of liambic tri- and tetrameter) play with metrical patterns & rhythm of speech images & metaphors --> openness; ambivalence through semantic & syntactic means subjecitvity central - introversion & self-reflection external reality II inner experience
• Civil War 1861 - 1865 dividing line - second foundational moment Emancipation Proclamation 1863 13th Amendment 1865 14th Amendment 1868 Reconsturction 1865 - 1877
• Photography Civil War Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre --> daguerreotype (positive process, unique image)  William Henry Fox Talbot --> negative-positive process  social and national functions of photography ostensible truth: character & objectivity
• Realism fidelity to reality, verisimilitude, mimesis based on variable communicative conventions Todorov/Culler: dimensions of versimilitude:  natural laws culturally accepted knowledge literary conventions realism as communicative convention, based on intention to "naturalize" certain world views; attempt to influence definition of that which is considered as "real"
• William Dean Howells take on Realism civilizing role of literature; intersubjective insight and consensusjuxtaposition of realism with "romance" & other literary conventions "wrong" perceptions of reality might be harmful to community & individual emphasis on experience  characters of different social backgrounds, travels, marriage plots novel of development is prototypical genre of realism typical features: limitation of authorial narrative voice, increasingly "dramatic" mode of representation wealth of detail - reder has to put these into an overall context exemplary learning processes emphasis on situations and characters drawn from ordinary life use of authentic speec and dialogue little action --> detailed characterization
• Elizabeth Stoddard (1823 - 1902) Realism The Morgesons (1862) transitional text between romanticism & realism set in New England ca. 1830s - 1850s, Surrey Morgeson family and Somers family story of development of main character, exploration of possibilites of female existence, individual psychology & social analysis chronological, structured by three journeys: Barmouth, Rosville, Belem maturation: emancipation & disciplining first person narrator: limited perspective; no authorial comments as guidance for the reader scenic representation dialogues are often unassigned --> creating ambiguity and openness omissions & abrupt transitions
• Regionalism & Realism interset in American regions / regional writing after the Civil War local color fiction/regional writing: interest in regional peculiarities not new and not uniquely American distintive in the US "the extent to which it dominates the field of literary creation" (Brodhead) was triggered due to the economic changes and changes in lifestyle literary market opened up to the culturally marginal  readership: educated east coast audience demands, expectations, formulas, characteristics, implications about social / cultural power
• regionalism customs and manners of a specific place or region, often nostalgic, eccentricities of character regional specificity episodic, sketch, short story, tall tale verisimilitude reader/protagonist: confrontation with unfamiliar world as a "civilized" observer testing of cultural norms, mutual education, but hierarchy relationship between margin and center authors: Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, Herriett Beecher Stowe, Helen Hunt Jackson
• Mark Twain / (1835 - 1910) Samuel Langhorn Clemens journalist, lecture tours & performances, travel writing, essays, poetry, fiction participation in realism & explosion of its boundaries regional writing - tradition of tall tale - western humor
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884 / 85) aspects of realism & local color / regionalism in HF Huck as focalizer: limited point of view - lack of education & naiveté perspective and vernacular speech - distance form social norms use of humor  education/mis-education
• Huckleberry Finn as boyhood nostalgia popular readings of HF time of innocence that contrasts to industrializations & problems of late 19th century central "meaning" invisual representations and media adaptations
• HF as social critique Huck and Jim as united in quest for freedom from civilization? micro-social utopia? vernacular protest against the mores of society Huck's inner conflict: "sound heart" vs. "ill-trained conscience" (Twain) viability of alternative social vision?
• Huckleberry Finn and issues of race race & narrative voice race & plot: novel's ending: toying with Jim's freedom? race / character description: use of racial stereotypes in the minstrel tradition
• The New York School poets: Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch,Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch • proximity to NY painters – abstract expressionism• art criticism• emphasis on the moment, on process
• The Black Mountain School Black Mountain College, North Carolina• reform college• experimental community• poets: Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov• interdisciplinary• John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem DeKooning, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg
• Confessional Poets Poets: Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath , W.D. Snodgrass, John Berryman rejection of role expectations aesthetically  thematically  focus on representation of subjectivity, intensely, personal themes, inner biography, social taboos "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but anescape from emotion; it is not the expression ofpersonality, but an escape from personality" - T.S. Eliot
• Postwar Culture: The Complacent Fifties and Problems To Be Named wish to return to normalcy, "the good life" economic boom, consumer goods/consumerism, suburbanization, baby boom, conformity idealized concepts of family, traditional role models, domesticity but: surface complacency & prosperity vs. social exclusion, dissatisfaction, dissent, & growing process rise of Cold War, Red Scare, McCarthyismpolicy of containment, military-industrial complex roots of second wave feminismBetty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963): the "problem that has no name"conservative backlash and social values of 1950s and traditional gender roles stifling to many women young generation critiquing the values of their parents and political establishment
• Postwar Culture: expressions of dissent in 1950s literary culture Postwar Drama continuities with modernist aesthetics & socio-political concerns of postwar era exposure of conflicts at work underneath complacent surface of everyday life --> "pipe" dreams, materialism, nostalgia example: Arthur Miller (1915-2005), Death of a Salesman (1949) critique of American Dream, drama of the common man dual reality: memories/illusions // history/fiction interrelatedness and discrepancies between social, psychic, and outer "realities"
• Ralph Waldo Ellison, Invisible Man (1952) Postwar Fiction picaresque plot pattern: testing of various places and "roles" society offers to protagonist none of these turns out to be satisfying to protagonist who seeks to be individual, man, black man symbolic violence through pressure to conform and prescribed roles
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• 1950s Poetic Dissent "dissent" on the level of content (American society & social norms) shortcomings of Am. society pressure to conform, limitation through prescribed roles  literary texts: exploration/ denunciation/ redefinition of the relation between individual, roleshe is supposed to assume, and society-->  "The personal is political": systemic basis of "personal" or "private" experiences of dissatisfaction
• The Beats; Black Mountain School/Poets/College; New York School/Poets; Confessional Poets emphasis on process rather than form (form as process, as temporal) poetry of open form  role of the physiological in writing  thematic emphasis on personal, unconscious, mental activities  affinity of poetry/writing to other arts (e.g. music, painting)  orientation on modernists that had previously remained marginal to literary establishment & canon (--> “homemade” traditions, e.g. William Carlos Williams & Wallace Stevens)  plurality of approaches and styles
• What is Postmodernism a construct, plural manifestations, no clear-cut boundaries different areas: literary studies, architecture, visual arts, music, pop. culture, … condition of knowledge (Lyotard)/contemporary human condition liberating vs. the epitome of the logics of late capitalism? 'origins' of term in architecture (Henry Jencks)
• terminology & definition Postmodernism postmodernism vs. postmodernity modernism vs. modernity POSTmodernISM (Ihab Hassan) continuity vs. definitive break evolving forms and aesthetics vs. something radically new. 3rd position: postmodernist as a sensibility and aesthetic attitude rather than tied to a cultural epoch
• deconstructive/poststructuralist theory: Jacques Derrida (et al.) Postmodernism  Western thought based on binary dichtomies  conceptual opposites contain hierarchies which reflect traditional value systems  opposites depend upon one another for definition and imply one another  deconstruction to reveal hidden interdependencies  notions about language as a sign system ( Ferdinand de Saussure) Derrida: différance  to differ and to defer; dissemination  deference of 'meaning' <--> logocentrism, metaphysics of presence, transcendental signified
• postmodernism in/and literature international phenomenon: Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Julio CortázarJohn Barth, "The Literature of Exhaustion" (1967) & "The Literature of Replenishment" (1980) hallmarks: parodic attitude, recycling and remixing of pre-existing cultural materials, intertextuality, heightened selfreflexivity, meta-fictionality, linguistic play, dissolution of generic boundaries, references to commodity culture, mass entertainment, popular culture, dissolution of high-low
• detection and postmodernism  postmodern detective fiction: use of a popular genre to dissolve dichotomy between high culture and popular culture  detective fiction as formula fiction provides easily recognizable patters & avantgarde play with form variety of audiences addressed structural function of detective story in postmodernism: undermining of epistemological and/or ontological convictions as traditionally transported by the genre
• traditional detective fiction: puzzle tradition (Poesque, British tradition): puzzle element, systematic collection of clues, ratiocination, intellectual suspense, intellectual/rational powers of detective, re-establishment of order. hard-boiled tradition: emphasis on action and violence, criminal is chased physically rather than merely or even primarily intellectually; differences in terms of time structure, setting, and personell; hardboiled detetctive as loner and common man, high but personal moral standard
• John Winthrop "A model of Christian Charity" 1603 structural and stylistical characteristics of NE sermons  Puritan sense of mission & "prep talk": mutual dependence & moral principlesof new community  images of hierarchy & dimension of essential equality  central image: community as a body in Christ, held together by ligament of love  justice & mercy as principles of community  covenant with God rhetoric of peril: community in peril, metaphorical shipwreck city upon the hill ideology of consensus (Bercovitch)
• William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) The Prairies celebration of unique American landscape panoramic vision construction of ancient history, model of historical change nature: important motif already in colonial writing competing conceptualizations: wilderness vs. Garden Eden exceptional nature, American exceptionalism poem
• James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851): Last of the Mohicans (1826) historical novel frontier: confrontation of different stages of civilization different outcome than in Scott: impossibility of integration/assimilation
• Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867): Hope Leslie (1827) interrogation of genre implications, social norms, justice elements of historical novel & sentimental novel
• Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), Little Women (1868/69) novel of female development / female Bildungsroman set in New England during CW, March family: Marmee, Jo, Meg, Beth, Amy & Mr. March (chaplain), bildung/development of March sisters, submission to dominant cultural values from aspiring girls to "little women; " pilgrimage as metaphor & plot pattern; marriage plot overt vs. covert messages: transgressive potential, costs of female self-sacrifice, dissatisfaction with cultural norms and social roles, inner struggles, repressed anger – Civil War as metaphor Victorianism
• T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), The Waste Land (1922) reputation of epitome of modernist poetry 434 lines, 5 sections, irregular length of stanzas & lines only short sections of metric regularity (blank verse) formal experimentation, collage, fragmentation dense layer of imagery & references from cultural tradition  demanding search for meaning in fragments of tradition: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins" modern world as scene of ruin (cf. title) – loss of traditions, values, beliefs is bemoaned
• Ezra Pound (1885-1972) shaping influence for American modern poetics & highly controversial ( facist Europe) Cantos (1922-1969) earlier: imagism  "In a Station of the Metro" (1913) image: "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time" ("Imagist Manifesto," 1913) "objective correlative" of experience of inner state concision emphasis on perception as a means for insight/understanding swinging rhythm ( traditional meter
• Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) "I, Being Born a Woman " exploration of conceptualizations of love & gender relations related to changing norms & lifestyles in urban centers revisions/transformations of a traditional form of love poetry (sonnet) female sexual desires, sexual freedom; physical love vs. romantic love sex as source of creativity (poetological poem?)
• William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) wheelbarrow emphasis on the local, American traditions & language to develop a modern(ist) literaturevisual style, colloquial language, short lines, enjambementsprecise visual image used to evoke emotion"no idea but in things""The Red Wheelbarrow" (1923) – ordinary object as focus of art, democratization of subject matterattempt to break patterns of perception, defamiliarization; challenge to norms & values"Spring and All": a spring poem, like "The Waste Land," also very ambiguousscene of birth/rebirth; resistance, perserverance
• Elizabeth Stoddard (1823-1902) The Morgesons (1862) transitional text between romanticism & realism complicates "neat" divide between romanticism & realism set in New England ca. 1830s-1850s, Surreycharacters: Cassandra & Veronica Morgeson; Locke & Mary Morgeson (parents), Mercy (mother's sister),Charles Morgeson & wife Alice; Ben & Desmond Somers, Mr. and Mrs. Somersstory of development of main character, exploration of possibilities of female existence, individualpsychology & social analysischronological, structured by three journeys: Barmouth, Rosville, Belemmaturation: emancipation & discipliningfirst person narrator: limited perspective; no authorial comments as guidance for the readerscenic representation, dialogues often unassigned  ambiguity and opennessomissions & abrupt transitions
• Zora Neale Hurston – Six Gilded Bits Harlem Renaissance Hurston’s text is about an African American couple and their conflictsconsidering money, love and jealousy. Joe is a hard working man, and hiswife Missy Mae cooks for him. They talk about Slemmons, an AfricanAmerican man who supposedly is in possession of gold. One day Joe returnsfrom work and finds Slemmons and Missy in bed. Slemmons convinced herto sleep with him by promising her the piece of gold. Joe stays with Missyand by coincidence has the piece of gold which was promised to Missy.Missy gets pregnant, and it is later revealed that the piece of gold is fake.Joe stays with her and buys her candy as the baby is born. Hurston grew up in an all-black town named Eatonville, and later on studiedthe folk traditions and language of it. Thus, she was able to write livelydialogue, true to the language spoken in Eatonville, while simultaneouslynarrating in standard English. Even though there is a striking contrastbetween the narration and the dialogue, the narrator does not look downupon the language used by the characters – they are portrayed to be at anequal level. Throughout the story, the racial conflict between black and white is seldomeven mentioned. The only white people are the source of Slemmon’s goldand the man working in the sweet shop. This reflects another part ofHurston’s biography – growing up in an all-black town, it is likely that herstory does not revolve around blackness in relation to being white, butrather about a fragment of the everyday lives of African Americans. Theman working in the sweetshop relies on stereotypes in terms of hisimpression of black people to which the story forms a counterpart. Insteadof focusing on the differences, the story focusses on the similaritiesbetween black and white, on universal conflicts. It is by not being primarilypolitical that the story forms its political force; not every story written by anAfrican American person has to revolve solely around racial conflicts.Nevertheless, especially the appearance of a white character in the lastpages of the story provides a commentary on the existence of stereotypesand lack of understanding the humanity of African Americans on the part ofthe white population. Insofar, the issue is still important.

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