WEEK 1 Americká literatúra 2 B-UAAJ-121 2011-12

 After the table of contents include: - an introductory essay - “What Do I Expect from the Course American Literature 2 - write a thoughtful, well organized statement about what you e

REQUIRED READINGS Americká literatúra 2 B-UAAJ-121 Winter semester 2011/2012 WEEK 1

Texts for the seminar:

1 Plan of the Course – Text W1/1

2 How to Organize Your Portfolio Text W1/2

3 Interpreting texts - Text W1/3

4 Periods of American Literature Part II Abrams - Text W1/4

TEXT W 1/1 - Plan – See the link to the course

TEXT W 1/2

HOMEWORK TASK:

1 Prepare your portfolio

2 Write an essay – topic: “What do I expect from the Course American Literature 2?”

- 150 words printed Submit in the seminar Week 2

How to Organize Your Portfolio - 2011/2012

 Present your portfolio in a neat folder using some kind of a binder

 Include a cover (front page)

The design of the front page is left up to you Be sure to indicate the study group, the instructor´s name, your own name and the school year

 Label the individual documents.

Identify all of the parts of the portfolio and specify the page on which each part begins Make sure it is easy to see the title pages or covers of the

 Include a table of contents

The table of contents should appear at the beginning of the portfolio Identify all of the parts (lecture notes, texts, reading notes, annotated texts) of the portfolio and specify the page on which each part begins

 After the table of contents include:

- an introductory essay - “What Do I Expect from the Course American Literature 2

- write a thoughtful, well organized statement about what you expect from the course)

- a reflective essay on your work and learning - “What have I Learned in the Course

”American Literature 2“

(write a thoughtful, well organized statement about what you have learned)

 Sequence all your materials and documents

Order all your work Make sure i tis easy to pull out documents and replace them

TEXT W1/3

INTERPRETING TEXTS

1 Text analysis: Close reading; explication

2 Writing about Literature: annotation, clustering, summary (synopsis),

Close reading

A close reading accounts for setting, character, theme, plot, style, action, and other important elements of literature in fiction By identifying those elements and by understanding how they work, you prepare yourself to read closely and interpret well."

(from Mary Jacobus, 1999 Psychoanalysi and Literature, p 68)

In literary criticism, close reading describes the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief

passage of text Such a reading places great emphasis on the particular over the general, paying close attention to individual words, syntax, and the order in which sentences and ideas

unfold as they are read

The technique as practiced today was pioneered (at least in English) by the New Critics of the mid-twentieth century It is now a fundamental method of modern criticism

Close reading is sometimes called explication de texte, which is the name for the similar tradition of textual interpretation in French literary study, a technique whose chief proponent was Gustave Lanson

A truly attentive close reading of a two-hundred-word poem might be thousands of words

long without exhausting the possibilities for observation and insight To take an even more extreme example, Jacques Derrida's essay Ulysses Gramophone, which J Hillis Miller

describes as a "hyperbolic, extravagant… explosion" of the technique of close reading,

devotes more than eighty pages to an interpretation of the word "yes" in James Joyce's great modernist novel Ulysses

(Source: http://209.85.135.104/search?

q=cache:Zhq7Vl31NgMJ:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_reading+close+reading

%2Bdefinition&hl=sk&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=sk)

Explication

A formal and close analysis of a text: its structure, style, content, imagery – indeed every aspect of it As a method of elucidation it is commonly practiced in French schools, and to a certain extent now in England since the 1920s

(From CUDDON, J A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory London: Penguin Books, 1992 p 318.)

A line-by-line or episode-by-episode commentary on what is going on in a text is an explication (literally,

unfolding or spreading out) It takes skill to work one´s way along without saying, “In line one in the second line in the third line One must sometimes boldly say something like, “The next stanza begins with and

then introduces And, of course, one can discuss the second line before the first line if that seems to be the best way of handling the passage

An explication does not deal with the writer´s life or times, and it is not a paraphrase, a rewording – though it

may include paraphrase Rather, an explication is a commentary revealing your sense of the meaning of the work To this end it calls attention, as it proceeds, to the implications of words, the function of rhymes, the shifts

in point of view, the development of contrasts, and any other contributions to the meaning

(from BARNET, S A Short Guide to Writing about Literature, 7 th edition, New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1996.p 36)

HOW TO DO A CLOSE READING

The process of writing an essay usually begins with the close reading of a text Of course, the writer's personal experience may occasionally come into the essay, and all essays depend on the writer's own observations and knowledge But most essays, especially academic essays, begin with a close reading of some kind of text—a painting, a movie, an event—and usually

with that of a written text When you close read, you observe facts and details about the text

You may focus on a particular passage, or on the text as a whole Your aim may be to notice all striking features of the text, including rhetorical features, structural elements, cultural

references; or, your aim may be to notice only selected features of the text—for instance,

oppositions and correspondences, or particular historical references Either way, making these observations constitutes the first step in the process of close reading

The second step is interpreting your observations What we're basically talking about here is inductive reasoning: moving from the observation of particular facts and details to a

conclusion, or interpretation, based on those observations And, as with inductive reasoning, close reading requires careful gathering of data (your observations) and careful thinking about what these data add up to

How to begin:

1 Read with a pencil in hand, and annotate the text

"Annotating" means underlining or highlighting key words and phrases—anything that strikes you as surprising or significant, or that raises questions—as well as making notes in the margins When we respond to a text in this way, we not only force ourselves to pay close attention, but we also begin to think with the author about the evidence—the first step in moving from reader to writer (…)

2 Look for patterns in the things you've noticed about the text—repetitions, contradictions,

similarities

What do we notice in the previous passage? First, Eiseley tells us that the orb spider taught him a lesson, thus inviting us to consider what that lesson might be But we'll let that larger question go for now and focus on particulars—we're working inductively In Eiseley's next sentence, we find that this encounter "happened far away on a rainy morning in the West." This opening locates us in another time, another place, and has echoes of the traditional fairy tale opening: "Once upon a time " What does this mean? Why would Eiseley want to remind us of tales and myth? We don't know yet, but it's curious We make a note of it

Details of language convince us of our location "in the West"—gulch, arroyo, and buffalo

grass Beyond that, though, Eiseley calls the spider's web "her universe" and "the great wheel

she inhabited," as in the great wheel of the heavens, the galaxies By metaphor, then, the web becomes the universe, "spider universe." And the spider, "she," whose "senses did not extend beyond" her universe, knows "the flutter of a trapped moth's wing" and hurries "to investigate her prey." Eiseley says he could see her "fingering her guidelines for signs of struggle." These details of language, and others, characterize the "owner" of the web as thinking, feeling, striving—a creature much like ourselves But so what?

3 Ask questions about the patterns you've noticed—especially how and why

To answer some of our own questions, we have to look back at the text and see what else is going on For instance, when Eiseley touches the web with his pencil point—an event "for which no precedent existed"—the spider, naturally, can make no sense of the pencil

phenomenon: "Spider was circumscribed by spider ideas." Of course, spiders don't have ideas, but we do And if we start seeing this passage in human terms, seeing the spider's situation in

"her universe" as analogous to our situation in our universe (which we think of as the

universe), then we may decide that Eiseley is suggesting that our universe (the universe) is also finite, that our ideas are circumscribed, and that beyond the limits of our universe there

might be phenomena as fully beyond our ken as Eiseley himself—that "vast impossible shadow"—was beyond the understanding of the spider

But why vast and impossible, why a shadow? Does Eiseley mean God, extra-terrestrials? Or something else, something we cannot name or even imagine? Is this the lesson? Now we see that the sense of tale telling or myth at the start of the passage, plus this reference to

something vast and unseen, weighs against a simple E.T sort of interpretation And though

the spider can't explain, or even apprehend, Eiseley's pencil point, that pencil point is

explainable—rational after all So maybe not God We need more evidence, so we go back to the text—the whole essay now, not just this one passage—and look for additional clues And

as we proceed in this way, paying close attention to the evidence, asking questions,

formulating interpretations, we engage in a process that is central to essay writing and to the whole academic enterprise: in other words, we reason toward our own ideas

Copyright 1998, Patricia Kain, for the Writing Center at Harvard University

(Source: h ttp://www.fas.harvard.edu/~wricntr/documents/CloseReading.html

IMPORTANT:

BE SURE THE TEXT (extract) IS PRINTED PROPERLY (riadkovanie 2) so that you can add your notes directly in the body of the text

TEXT W1/4

SET 1

1 REALISTIC PERIOD (1865 – 1900)

The cataclysm of the bloody Civil War and of the Reconstruction, fo11owed by a burgeoning industrialism and urbanization in the North, profoundly altered the American sense of itself, and also American literary modes 1865 – 1900 is often known as the Realistic Period, by

reference to the novels by Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Henry James, and the

Black novelist Charles W Chesnutt These works, though diverse, are often labeled

„realistic“ in contrast to the „romance“ of their predecessors in prose fiction, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville Other authors wrote regional, or local colour, forms of realistic fiction; these

include (in addition to Mark Twain's novels on the Mississippi region) Bret Harte in California, Sarah Orne Jewett in Maine, Mary Wilkins Freeman in Massachusetts, and

Kate Chopin in Louisiana Chopin is now viewed as a nearly and major feminist novelist.

Whitman continued writing poetry up to the last decade of the century and (unknown to him

and almost everyone else) was joined by Emily Dickinson; although only seven of

Dickinson’s more than a thousand short poems were published in her lifetime, she is now

recognized to be one of the most distinctive and eminent American poets Sidney Lanier

published his experiments in versification based on the meters of music; the Black author

Paul Lawrence Dunbar published both poems and novels between 1893 and 1905; and in the 1890s Stephen Crane, although he was only 29 when he died, published short novels that

look forward to two later narrative modes, naturalism and impressionism William duBois and Booker T Washington are well known names for their scholarship and literary contributions

in African-American affairs

Self-study

1 Regional Voices, National Voices (national literature, post-war fiction, psychological

novel, major national, political, social and economic developments reflected in literature,

realism, naturalism) In: Heath Anthology, Vol II., pp 192 – 194; 1.1 Issues and Visions in Post-Civil War America; 1.2 New Explorations of an „American Self“ In: Heath Anthology,

Vol II., 1.1 pp – 738; 1.2 pp – 850

II NATURALISTIC PERIOD (1900 – 1914)

Although James, Howells, and Twain were still writing, the years 1900 – 1914, are discriminated as the Naturalistic Period, in recognition of the powerful though sometimes

crudely wrought novels by Frank Norris, Jack London and Theodore Dreiser, which

typically represent characters who are joint victims of their instinctual drives and of extra sociological forces

III MODERNISM (1914 – 1939)

The era between the two wars, marked also by the trauma of the great economic depression beginning in 1929, was that of the emergence of what is still known as „modem literature“, which in America reached an eminence rivaling that of the American Renaissance of the mid-nineteenth century; unlike most of the authors of that earlier period, however, the American modernists also achieved great International recognition and influence

POETRY

Among the no table poets were Edgar Lee Masters, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Robinson Jeffers, Marianne Moore, T S Eliot, Edna St Vincent Millay, and E E Cummings –

authors who wrote in an unexampled variety of poetic modes These included

• the IMAGISM of Amy Lowell, H D (Hilda Doolittle), and others;

• the metric poems by Frost and the free-verse poems by Williams in the American vernacular;

• the formal and typographic experiments of Cummings;

• the poetic naturalism of Jeffers, AND

• the assimilation to their own distinctive uses by Pound and Eliot of the forms and procedures

of French symbolism, merged with the intellectual and figurative methods of the English metaphysical poets

PROSE

Among the major writers of prose fiction were Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, Ellen Glasgow, Willa Carter, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and John Steinbeck America produced in this period its first great dramatist in Eugene O'Neill.

The writers of this era are often subclassified in a variety of ways

The flamboyant and pleasure-seeking 1920s are called JAZZ AGE, a title popularized by F S

Fitzgerald's Tales of the Jazz Age (1922).

The same decade was also the early period of the HARLEM RENAISSANCE After World War I, the population of the area of upper Manhattan known as Harlem was almost exclusively Black, and became the national centre of African-American culture, including the arts o f theater, music, and dance Distinguished writers – poets, novelists, playwrights, and

essayists – who lived in Harlem or wrote about Harlem include James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, W E B DuBois, and (in later decades) James Baldwin.

Many prominent American writers of the decade following the end of WW I, disillusioned by their war experiences and alienated by what they perceived as the crassness of American culture and its „puritanical“ repressions, are often tagged (in a term first applied by G Stein to young Frenchmen of the time) as THE LOST GENERATION A number of these writers became „expatriates“, moving either to London or to Paris in their quest for a richer literary and artistic milieu and a freer way of life Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and T S Eliot lived out their lives abroad, but most of the younger „exiles“, came back to American in the 1930s

Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night are novels that

represent the mood and way of life of two groups of American expatriates In „the radical '30s“, the period of the great depression and of the economic and social reforms in the New Deal inaugurated by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, some authors joined radical political movements, and many others de alt in their literary works with pressing social issues

of the time – including, in the novel (Faulkner, Dos Passos, Wolfe and Steinbeck) and in drama (O'Neill, Odets and Anderson)

Self-study:

1 Modern Period (toward modernism, characteristics of modernism, centers of modernism,

Lost Generation, modernism and the Self, modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, popular

culture and media) In: Heath Anthology, Volume II., pp 933 – 962.

2 Alienation and Literary Experimentation (break with using the traditional or standard

forms of expression, experimentalism of modernism, Imagism) In: Heath Anthology, Volume II., pp 1163 – 1164

IV CONTEMPORARY PERIOD (1939 – TO THE PRESENT)

World War II, and especially the disillusionment with Soviet Communism consequent upon the Moscow trials for alleged treason and Stalin's signing of the Russo-German pact with

Hitler in 1939, largely ended the literary radicalism of the 1930s For several decades the New

Criticism – dominated by conservative southern writers, the AGRARIANS, who in the 1930s

had championed a return from an industrial to an agricultural economy – typified the prevailing critical tendency to isolate literature from the life of the author and from society and to conceive a work of literature, in formal terms, as an organic and autonomous entity The eminent and influential critics Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling, however – as well as other critics grouped with them as „the New York Intellectuals“, including Philip Rahy, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe – continued through the 1960s to deal with a work of literature humanistically and historically, in the context of its author's life, temperament, and social milieu, and in terms of the work's moral and imaginative qualities and its consequences for society Since the latter 1970s, a number of American critics have adopted various forms of poststructural theories and practice, derived in large part from French and European thinkers

(see POSTSTRUCTURALISM) The writers of this era are often subclassified in a variety

of ways

Self-study:

Contemporary period (Beat Generation, postmodernism, realities of contemporary

existence, issues of race, gender, economics, new feminism, women's literature, exploration of

difference, development of „new literatures“, American drama) In: Heath Anthology, Vol II,

pp 1764 – 1785

IV.I LITERATURE OF THE 40s

The war itself had elicited some of the strongest fiction of the forties and early fifties

Dangling Man (1944), Saul Bellow's first novel, explored the misgiving and meditations of a

young man as he nervously awaits his draft notice Norman Mailer and James Jones both m

a de use of their wartime experiences in the South Pacific in their first novels Mailer's The

Naked and the Dead (1946) offers a naturalistic inquiry into the contest between will and

force

IV II LITERATURE OF THE 50s

The 1950s, while often regarded in retrospect as a period of cu1tural conformity and complacency, was marked by the emergence of vigorous establishment and anti-traditional literary movements:

 THE BEAT WRITERS such as Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs;

 The American exemplars of the literature of the ABSURD;

 The „Black Mountain Poets“ Charles Olson and Robert Creeley;

 The „New York Poets“ Frank O´Hara, Kenneth Koch and John Ashberry.

It was also time of CONFESSIONAL POETRY and the literature of extreme sexual candor,

marked by the emergence of Henry Miller as a notable author (his autobiographical and

fictional works, begun in the 1930s, had earlier been available only under the counter) and the

writings of Norman Mailer, William Burroughs and Vladimír Nabokov (Lolita was published

in 1955)

IV III LITERATURE OF THE 60s – 90s

The counterculture of the 1960s and early T970s continued some of the modes of the 1950s, but in a fashion made extreme and fevered by the rebellious youth movement and the vehement and sometimes violent opposition to the war in Vietnam (which meant the destruction of established forms, genres and canons, and all official structures of power)

POETRY

Representatives:

Sylvia Plath, Elisabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Adriene Rich.

AFRICAN-AMERICAN WRITERS

Representatives:

A) Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin.

B) Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Cade Bambara, Nikki Giovanni

POSTMODERN AMERICAN FICTION

The world „postmodern“ entered the lexicon of American life in the 1960s – at least its academic life – as part of a broader cultural questioning of social conformity, political inequality, and the necessity for a unified national ethos Within literary postmodernism, this broad cultural skepticism manifested itself as an assault upon traditional definitions of narrative Postmodern writing was a remarkable and plural mixture of forms ranging from the documentary to the reflexive from historical narrative to grotesque and absurdist black humour and surrealism

Representatives:

1 Breaking the Frame: Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, Kurt Vonnegut, Grace Paley;

2 Fact Meets Fiction: Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Aude Lorde, Gloria Andaldua;

3 Popular Culture and High Culture Collide: Jay Cantor, Lynda Barry, Curtis White, Bobbie Ann Mason;

4 Revisiting History: Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Leslie Marmon Silko, E L Doctorow, Joseph Heller, Sherman Alexie;

5 Revising Tradition: Joyce Carol Oates, John Barth, Maxine Hong Kingston;

6 Technoculture: Don DeLilo, Neal Stephenson, Douglas Stephenson, Douglas Coupland

(Source: Postmodern American Fiction, A Norton Anthology)

V AMERICAN DRAMA – an overview

Representatives: Eugene O´ Neil, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee.

Bibliography:

M H Adams: A Glossary of Literary Terms Hartcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1985.

2 P Geyh, F G Leebron, A Lewy: Postmodern American Fiction A Norton Anthology, Norton and Company, 1998.