Survey of American Literature

Junior EnglishMrs. Montgomery

Origins of the American Tradition

Puritanism1620-1750

Native American Literature

Oral tradition

Iroquois Constitution: Dekanawida, Huron who established the Iroquois League Message of unity: Great Law of Peace

Song “Song of the Sky Loom”: Pueblo people of the

Southwest; interdependence with nature

Early American Writing Religion dominant influence/presence

Types of writing Nonfiction

Sermons (Puritan intellectuals and ministers: Cotton Mather & Jonathan Edwards) Impact of European Enlightenment (late 17th century) empirical (study of the natural world) evidence + human

experience = one needs to feel/experience God, not just intuit his existence from one’s belief or from the Bible; result: Great Awakening (1734)

Colonial histories: John Smith’s General history of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles

Texts: The New England Primer (first textbooks produced in American; circa 1690) – sold into the 19th century

Personal diaries Poetry

“To My Dear and Loving Husband” (Anne Bradstreet)

Puritan beliefs“Puritan Ethic”

Community service Importance of community Goal: “city upon a hill” (Biblical reference) - a

selfless, harmonious community directed by God

Strict moral propriety Original sin: all people are born sinful and must be

saved by divine grace

Hard work Predestination (God’s elect) Material and social successes are signs of salvation So…fate cannot be changed by force of will & watch

for proof of salvation (being among the elect)

What did Puritans write about?

Explores story of spiritual struggles Events are emblems (allegories) of the

progress of souls or of God’s design

Expressed both: official Puritan views & beliefs

Jonathan Edward’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”

struggles with orthodoxy and conformity Anne Bradstreet critical of distorted view of

women

The Age of Reason/Enlighten

ment1750-1800

The Thinking behind the Constitution

Philosophers during the Age of Reason/Enlightenment were concerned with the perfection of the human being through reason/science Enlightenment

Isaac Newton: through reason people could discover the principles that guarantee social and political harmony

Joseph Addison– discovery of natural laws can ensure peace and tranquility

Thomas Hobbes, certain natural rights exists and cannot be turned over to a sovereign

John Locke - to preserve natural rights, people must balance the power of the sovereign against the power of Parliament, retain the right to rebel against oppression

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (French philosopher) - governments are instituted as asocial contract between the people and the government

Didn’t reject, but questioned the heavy reliance on spirituality of the Puritans Romantic movement (18th and 19th century): championed

democratic ideals & rights of the individual

Literature of the Revolutionary

Period Articulation of Independence and Liberty

Speeches Patrick Henry speech in the Virginia Convention (“Give me liberty

or give me death”)

Declaration The Declaration of Independence (Thomas Jefferson)

Letters (John & Abigail Adams)

Pamphlets Common Sense and Crisis (Thomas Paine)

Poetry Phillis Wheatly “To S.M. a Young African Painter, on Seeing His

Works” Christianity, American independence, abolition of slavery

The New England Renaissance1800-1865

Romantics rejected the scientific and rational emphasis of the previous time period. They were

more interested in emotion, nature as a reflection of the divine, etc.

Cultural & Literary Movements

Romanticism (18th & 19th centuries)

Valued private, subjective experience (emotions & creativity)

Metaphysical truths: A higher form of reason different from ordinary understanding of the physical world of sense perception

Nature not just evidence of the operation and regularity and laws and life more than practical advancement of social systems of organization

Nature: repository and stimulus for intuition of higher truths in the individuals

Highest authority: individual conscience rather than authority and external control

Transcendentalism (a variation of European Romanticism) Established American writers as distinct

literary force

Practical implications

Goal of these writers: pursuit of forging new ground

Henry David Thoreau (Walden articulated American individualism)

Utopian communities

Hawthorne and Poe collectively responsible for the development of the modern short story: a brief fictional work designed to create in the reader a single dominant impression

A change in thinking

Material success less important (Irving) Dismissed tradition and social convention (it may violate

the individual conscience) Celebrated the self, rather than deny it; self-awareness not

selfish but a way to understand the universe The soul of the individual was a microcosm of the larger

world Study the self to know the universe and its God (self-realization, self-expression, self-reliance were coined)

Respect for multiple, divergent viewpoints

Optimistic

Nature/human nature is benevolent and good– Emerson & Thoreau

The flip side

Human nature is dark

Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter (sin)

Herman Melville (evil and obsession)

Edgar Allan Poe (psychology of madness and terror)

Social Purpose: Writers wanted to change society through literature

Live simple life in nature (Walden)

Better yourself by changing your thinking and lifestyle (Emerson)

Fireside poets (Schoolroom poets) wrote about slavery)

Idealized, romantic, morally uplifting views of the nation

Created a popular interest in poetry

Emily Dickinson Focus on a vivid present/uncertain future Poems about time, isolation and death Some humor Precise/ compressed

19th CenturyRobert DiYanni, Pace University claims: These three writers—Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson—have been the primary and seminal influences on the American poets of the twentieth century:

Emerson for his philosophical perspective;

Whitman for his public celebration of the American themes of democracy, idealism, solidarity, equality, and love of nature;

Dickson for her finely discriminating probings of the soul in a spare poetic style, original in its elliptical syntax, its metaphorical daring, and its unconventional rhythm and rhyme.

Slavery & the Civil War Newspapers

The Liberator (William Lloyd Garrison) Freedom’s Journal (John Russwurm & Samuel Cornish) The North Star (Frederick Douglass)

Speeches & Debates Senatorial candidates Stephen Douglas & Abraham Lincoln Slavery in Massachusetts” (Henry David Thoreau)

Novels Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe) Clotel (William Wells Brown, 1st African American to publish a novel) Our Nig (Harriet E. Wilson, 1st African-American woman to publish a

novel)

Spirituals (African + European music in poetic text, Biblical imagery –emphasis on suffering and hope) Slave narrative/autobiography Frederick Douglass

War literature: (Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane) Attempts to restore national identity and hope for unity; Key Question: Heroic (honorable, courageous) soldier or human

(panicked, accidental hero,) soldier

Realism1865-1919

After the Civil War, writers rejected the idealized version of life romantic writers offered and concentrated on getting the facts right. Many writers of this time period started their careers as journalists

“I hear American singing, the varied carols I hear.”

Walt Whitman Abandonment of Romanticism, New England, scholarly, moralistic gentlemen; Adoption of writers from a variety of regions

Regionalism (local color) writing emerges Characters more diverse (varied, unsavory) Local dialect/regional diversity Dime novels (cheap, popular) Tall tales (legend of the Wild West)

Writers Samuel Clemens (western boom towns, Mississippi River valley) Bret Harte (West) George Washington Cable (Louisiana bayou country) Joel Chandler Harris (African American in the South) Edward Eggleston & James Whitcomb Riley (Hoosiers of backwoods Indiana) Sarah Orne Jewett & Mary Wilkins Freeman (backwoods New England)

Realism Portraits from life; grim depictions of realties;

unsentimental

Ambrose Bierce (“Chickamauga,” “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”)

Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) Individual quest for freedom

Dean Howells (Novels: The Rise of Silas Lapham, Annie Kilburn, A Hazard of New Fortunes, Quality of Mercy) breakdown of traditional values ; misery of the poor in urban America

Psychological Realism: exploration of the interior lives of characters) Charlotte Perkins Gilman (“The Yellow Wallpaper” Henry James (Portrait of a Lady, The turn of the Screw)

Naturalism Refinement of Realism

Based on theories of the French novelist Emile Zola Zola inspired by naturalists Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley:

people’s actions and beliefs resulted not from free will but from the arbitrary, outside forces of heredity and environment

Novelists could write “scientific” fiction that demonstrated the exact causes of human behavior.

Premier American example: Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage and “A Man Said to the Universe”) Crane: Because humans are pawns manipulated by cruel and

indifferent forces of nature & society, humans must unite in kindness and compassion to counter these forces

Frank Norris (McTeague and The Octopus)

Jack London (The Call of the Wild)

Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie; An American Tragedy)

Modernism1919-1945

New Forces in the 20th century

Technology (electric lights)

Culture (mass merchandising)

Mass media (TV, movies)

Transportation (automobiles, airplanes)

Communication (telephone anywhere in the world)

Medicine (antibiotics, anesthesia)

War (weapons of mass destruction: atomic, nuclear)

Architecture (suburban housing, skyscrapers)

Work (labor unions, women in the work force)

Population (explosion)

Politics (ideologies of Communism and Fascism)

Remember “the old verities and truths of the heart.” William Faulkner 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance address

“However the world might change, some things—such as the human capacity for courage,

compassion, sacrifice, honor, and pride—remain the same.” (The American Tradition 476)

Before the War

Traditional, regional, portraits of life throughout the country: Regionalism

Edgar Lee Master Spoon River Anthology (Illinois)

Edwin Arlington Robinson (poet)

Jack London (North country)

Impact of WWI

The Lost Generation (participants in the war) John Dos Passos Ernest Hemingway e.e. Cummings Gertrude Stein

Emerging society : chaotic, destructive, meaningless

The real American had been lost, distorted; feeling of dislocation or alienation, cut off from the past

Individuals dominated by environs and dehumanized by work conditions in modern industry, urban living conditions in cities for poor immigrants

Questioned tenets of American dream (Horatio Alger stories & Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography: hard work, industry, self-reliance = a piece of the dream for anyone; ideals of individualism and free-market capitalism questioned)

Writers adopted socialist or communist ideals (Karl Marx, German political theorist argued that the exploitation of the workers would lead to the collapse of capitalism and establishment of states in which workers controlled the means of production.)

Sympathetic to socialist ideals - even joining in fighting against fascism in the Spanish Civil War 1936-37. Disillusioned with Stalin’s socialism that led to purges of political opponents and his treaty with Hitler.

Rebellion of the Young

New York become center of literary scene

Home to publishing houses, newspapers, magazines

Home to avant-garde, bohemian writers, artists, intellectuals (esp. in Greenwich Village)

Eugene O’Neill

Thomas Wolfe

Algonquin Round Table Dorothy Parker Robert Benchley George S. Kaufman

The Expatriates

More authentic beliefs and forms of expression found outside the the U.S. (Paris & London, salons and cafes)

Fitzgerald

Hemingway

Stein

Ezra Pound

Edna St. Vincent Millay

T.S. Eliot

Modernism “make it new" Ezra Pound's credo

Rejection of literary conventions of the past

Response to the perceived breakdown of modern culture; attempt to give order and coherence to the decay; “retreat from new social vision into the cold comfort of a purely literary or imaginative order” (The American Tradition 480)

Irony - signature technique of Modernist literature

Conveyed a sense of hopelessness

Experiments in form: free verse, stream-of-consciousness prose – an example of

subjectivism: reality is not absolute and orderly, depends of the point of view of the observer

1st person

Elimination of narrator or speaker (presenting the experience, sense perception of the character without the emotions/opinions of the author intruding)

Alienating, understated, ironic, impersonal, lacking in transitions between ideas, full of odd juxtapositions and sophisticated references, or allusions

Notables Edith Wharton (the Age of Innocence - the breakdown of

traditional ways of life for the wealthy)

F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby- disillusionment and ambivalence about the morality of the “self-made man” in American society)

John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath – effects of the Great Depression and Great Dust Bowl of 1930s)

Upton Sinclair (the Jungle – scathing expose of meatpacking industry)

Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt, Elmer Gantry – excesses of materialism, hypocrisy & greed of small-town real estate dealers and showman preachers)

Richard Wright (Native Son – explosive results of discrimination against African Americans)

20th century: golden age of American women writers

Edith Wharton

Eudora Welty

Willa Cather

Katherine Anne Porter

Zora Neale Hurston

Amy Lowell

Marianne Moore

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Shirley Jackson

Lillian Hellman

Denise Levertov

Gwendolyn Brooks

Anne Sexton

Sylvia Plath

Alice Walker

Lorraine Hansberry

Joyce Carol Oates

Another way to look at it…”a momentary stay against confusion.” Robert

Frost Find renewal in the United States itself

Used ideas and techniques of Modernism

Not Modernist: traditional forms, expression of traditional values

Postwar regionalists who wrote “American” literature about local, rural areas, strength and hope in these works

Robert Frost (rural New England)

Sherwood Anderson (Ohio)

Zora Neale Hurston (novels of African American experience in rural South)

William Faulkner (regional settings and lost traditional values)

Southern regionalism: Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter

The Fugitives & New Criticism

The Fugitives (led by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren)

Southern literary school rejected northern urban, commercial value

Advocated a return to the land, esp. in Southern American traditions

New Criticism: close readings and attentiveness to format (patterns of imagery, metaphors, metrics, sounds, and symbols) and their suggested meanings (rather than a focus on history and biography)

Postwar Literature

1945-1960

The era following WWII

Prosperity in the United States High employment as economy reverted to peacetime

production Women = housewives & moms; Men = breadwinners Urban sprawl (suburbia) developed with better cards Mobile society facilitated by 33 billion from Congress for an

interstate highway system (Holiday Inn, A & W, drive-in theaters) Auto = success

Social characteristic: traditional, stable, but undercurrent of disapproval, distrust and disillusionment with the status quo

The “Silent Generation”: traditionalists, experimenters, and iconoclasts (one who attacks widely accepted ideas/beliefs)

Postwar LiteratureAmerica is woven of

many strands; I would recognize

them and let it so remain…Our fate is to become one, and yet

many. --Ralph Ellison

1945-1960

The era following WWII

Television:: Middle-class appeal and ideal families The Tonight Show (Steve Allen) Toast of the Town (Ed Sullivan) Father Knows Best I Love Lucy Ozzie and Harriet

Rock & roll emerges Bill Haley & the Comets: “Rock around the Clock” (1954) Elvis: “Hound Dog,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Don’t be cruel”

Popular Reading The Cat in the Hat Dr. Seuss Baby and Child Care: Dr. Benjamin Spock

Pat Boone (the all-American) vs James Dean (the outcast)Underneath: surface prosperity is turmoil: pervading loneliness (David

Reisman: The Lonely Crowd (1951) & Rebel without a Cause (film with James Dean whose character laments the adult world that abandoned him): & J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye: “the adult word is phony”

Folk Music craze/fold song

army The Kingston Trio (“Tom Dooley”)

Woody Guthrie (“This Land is Your Land”)

Pete and Peggy Seeger

Peter, Paul, and Mary

Satirical songs about American life

Guitars & banjoes

The voice of the youth protest movement (hippies) and flower children) of the 1960s

The Politics in the era

following WWII Dwight David Eisenhower & Richard M Nixon 1952 election; Ike reelected 1956

Cold war (1945- 1989) Ideological (independence vs collective), political (democracy vs

communism), and economic (market vs command) tensions between United States & Western Europe vs. USSR and Eastern Europe

political (conservatism) Liberals were often given epithets: pinko/commie

Anticommunist paranoia Hollywood blacklists for Communist Party affiliation ( pressure to

identify communist sympathizers) Senator Joseph McCarthy “witch hunt” in the U.S. Senate

(inspiration for The Crucible – Arthur Miller) (mass hysteria and guilt by association)

On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan) suggested that one should “sing” or “rat on” ones corrupt friends

Space Race - 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik leading to U.S. moon landing 1969

Korean was (1950 – 19593) Sotho Korea 7 its ally U.S. vs North Korea and ally Communist China

Civil Rights Movement

African-Americans left in the old and decaying inner cities where increased poverty and unemployment fostered social unrest.

mid-1950s Civil Rights movement had begun Rosa Parks (refused to give up her seat on the city bus and

was arrested) Martin Luther King, Jr. led the boycott against public

transportation & Supreme Court ruled segregation laws in Montgomery unconstitutional

19574 Brown vs.. The Topeka Board of Education: Supreme Court rules Plessey vs.. Ferguson (“separate but equal”) was inherently unequal and unconstitutional, so schools had to be integrated. First major challenge came in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957

Emergence of several black

writers Richard Wright ( Black Boy 1945)

Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man 1952)

James Baldwin ( Go Tell it on the Mountain 1953)

Gwendolyn Brooks (Bronzeville Boys and Girls 1956)

Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun 1958)

Literary Scene

Literature emerging from the war Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead) James Jones (From Here to Eternity)

Early 20th century writers become powerhouses: William Faulkner (Nobel Prize for literature

1950) John Steinbeck (East of Eden 1952) Katherine Anne Porter Earnest Hemingway (Nobel Prize for literature

1952)

New genre: Nonfiction novel: Hiroshima (1946) John Hersey combination of journalism and

literature (literary techniques + factual air of reporting to describe real events)

“The most significant piece of journalism in modern times”

Jewish writers: the Holocaust and life in America Saul Bellow The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

Henderson, the Rain King 9159 Seize the Day (1956)

Bernard Malamud The Natural (1952) The Assistant (1957) “The Magic Barrel 1954

Isaac Bashevis Singer Gimpel the Fool 1953 The Family Moskat 1950

Fugitive School: Southern writer’s rebellion against Northern materialism and against science and progress John Crowe Ransom Robert Penn Warren Allan Tate

Other Southern Writers Flannery O’Connor Walker Percy Eudora Welty Truman Capote John Cheever John O’Hara John Updike

Flowering of American Drama

Arthur Miller

Tennessee Williams

William Inge

Eugene O’Neill

Lillian Hellman

Postwar Poets Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Marianne Moore

T.S. Eliot (poetry should be “an escape from emotion and personality”) Nobel Prize for literature 1947

E.E. Cummings (experimented with parts of speech, capitalization, and punctuation to explore the essence of language)

William Carlos Williams (there should “be no ideas except in things”) Black Mountain School in North Carolina: Charles Olsen, Robert

Creeley, Robert Duncan experimented with the rhythms and sounds of words in lines based on breath pauses. Poetry itself creates a thing, an artifact

Confessional poets: John Berryman, Robert Lowell: used haunting, stark images to reveal intensely personal experiences. Theodore Roethke: a new romantic, based poetry on childhood

experience, using his father’s greenhouse as metaphor Berryman & Lowell: inner demons, strained and broken

marriages, alcoholism

Postwar Poets The Counterculture begins in the mid-1950s on the West Coast

1955 Six Gallery poetry reading Allen Ginsberg: “Howl” spontaneous composition written to jazz rhythms that challenged every aspect of American life and language

1953 Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Martins: City Lights Bookstore, 1st all-paperback bookstore in the U.S. & haven for writers

This “new “literati” challenged the social malaise and traditional forms

Abstract Expressionism New York Poets: John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch:

experimented with new perceptions & poetry forms; tried to duplicate in words what the expressionists artists accomplished in paint.

The Beats (the Beat generation centered in bookstores around the U.S.): Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Kenneth Rexroth

Beat poems based on existential and Eastern philosophy; strove to cut through superficial facades, denouncing and reviling thoughtless conformity, to embrace life itself

Early Contemporary

Literature1960 to 1980

Turbulent sixties John F. Kenney: Cold War & arms race, civil rights

Bay of Pigs Invasion Cuban Missile Crisis

Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.: Civil Rights Movement & race relations

President Lyndon Johnson

Civil Rights Act 1964 Voting Rights Act 19675 “Great Society” – series of social welfare measures (housing, Medicare,

Medicaid, education) Conservatives: more defense spending; less on domestic programs Liberals: more spending on domestic programs, less on defense

Expansion of Viet Nam War (“police action”) – divisive; antiwar demonstrations throughout the U.S.

Counterculture rebellion of American youth, prosperous but challenged the war and traditional materialistic values; extreme styles of dress, speech, of hippie movement)

Race riots: 1965, 1967, 1968

Assassinations: John F. Kennedy (1963); King & Robert Kennedy (1968)

The seventies Richard Nixon elected by landslide; later

becomes 1st president to resign from office Détente (improved relations) with the Soviet Union

Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (SALT) Improved relations with China (1972) Withdrew from Vietnam (1973)

Improprieties during the ‘72 lection campaign including burglary led to resignation

Vice President Gerald Ford finished the term

Jimmy Carter elected in 1976, promoted human rights around the world Brought Israel and Egypt to negotiating table U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran taken over by Islamic

fundamentalists (Iran Hostage Crisis)

The Women’s Movement

Call for equal rights for women

Women’s movement or women’s lib

Renewed interest in feminism

Spearheaded by found of Ms. Magazine (19781)

Gloria Steinem

Betty Friedna

Bella Absuz

Shirley Chisholm

Nationals Women’s Political Caucus

Gender roles fell under question

L

Types of literature Radical experimentation

“happenings” – spontaneous expressions of creative freedom (precursors of performance art)

Found poems - bits of language collected from the culture at large (billboards, graffiti, subway posters, etc.)

Concrete poems – designed to appeal to the eye Confessional poetry – extremely personal verse

that described intimate, often troubled experiences Robert Lowell Anne Sexton Sylvia Plath John Berryman

Types of literature Topics

Antiwar poetryRobert Bly

Denise Levertov

Poems about race and discriminationLeroi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka)

Nikki Giovanni

Gwendolyn Brooks

Mari Evans

Types of literatureFiction/Fact? Novels/Reportage

Truman Capote

New Journalism – volumes of nonfiction reportages the relied heavily on techniques of fiction or that frequently manipulated the facts, reshaping them to add to the drama and immediacy of the story being reported (subjective valued over the objective).

Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, John Barth, Richard Brautigan, John Irving

Concern for the absence of morals and ethics; critical of empty experimentation; rather, fiction should reflect ethical values that would make sense of the human condition

Walker Percy, Joan Didion, John Gardner

Chronicles of the Vietnam War described intimate, often troubled experiences Tim OBrien

Types of literature “Women’s literature about “women’s

issues” as well as other topics

Black women made notable advances

Multicultural literature emerged

Deconstruction: a tool for evaluating texts constantly questioned the nature of “reality”

Reemergence of regionalism: “New Regionalism” decentralization of the publishing industry No longer exclusive to New York; now small literary presses and little

magazines emerged funded by colleges and universities or loyal readers, writers and editors Able to promote new regional and experimental works in ways the big

commercial publishing houses could or would not More expansive and diverse from East to West William Kennedy: Albany , New York Joyce Carol Oates: Northeast Anne Tyler: Baltimore, Maryland Pat Conroy: South Carolina low country Jane Smiley – farms in the heartland Leslie Marmon Silko and Cormac McCarthy: American Southwest Wallace Stegner: Far West Joan Didion: California Raymond Carver: Pacific Northwest Playwrights: Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Lanford Wilson, Beth Henley: regional

theater movement

Contemporary Literature

1980 to Present

Cultural Events of 1980s

End of American hostage crisis in Iran

Election of Ronald Reagan (end of Jimmy’s Carter’s presidency)

Iran-Contra scandal

SDI (Star Wars)

Family farms in depression

Fall of the Soviet Union/End of the Cold War/Berlin Wall comes down

Increasing Arab animosity for the United States (esp. Libya, Iraq, and Iran)

Economy takes off leading to increase in consumerism

Earth Day revived: manmade disasters includes nuclear accidents in Bhopal, India, Chernobyl, Ukraine, Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania,

Exxon Valdez oil spill Alaska, emission of greenhouse gases, detection of “hole” in the ozone layer of Antarctica

Cultural Events of 199s

Boomers (World War II babies) become Yuppies Valued success in corporate world

Generation X Nobodies, nameless, depressed, both working parents (poor economy

and feminism): selfish, cynical, dependent, demanding, “materialists”

MTV; consumerism and economic boom

1989: hyper-text-transfer protocol (http) invented

1993: World Wide Web open for public use

Information Superhighway: reality shaped by the information we collect for ourselves

Global Village (Marshall McCluhan) become reality: national boundaries weaken, cross-cultural marketing and consumerism

HIV: the AIDS virus spreads dramatically

Contemporary Literature

Writers examine events from perspectives of those who are not in power and who do not justify the status quo

Awareness of diversity yet searching for unity

Contemporary Literature

Mixed-media forms, performance art and installation art. Laurie Anderson United States (1984)

Poetry Slams: open poetry reading contests held in literary bookstores and cafes

Performance poetry (rap music)

New Formalists: champion a return in poetry of form, rhyme, and meters (19h century themes, contemporary attitudes and images, musical language and traditional closed forms)

Multiculturalism: American literature increasingly characterized by an unprecedented interest in a promotion of diversity especially women and people of color (vs predominantly white male literary canon)

Creative Nonfiction Definition: creative nonfiction mixes

literary techniques more common to fiction with nonfiction

Origins: A term the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) began using in the early 1970s to refer to contemporary nonfiction such as essays, memories, biographies, and a personalized style of reportage,

Examples: Truman Capote: In Cold Blood, (1965) Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) John McPhee: The Control of Nature (1990)

John Berendt: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994)

Minority literature

Hispanic-American poets: Gary Soto, Alberto Rios, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Pat Mora, Jimmy Santiago Baca

Chicano (Mexican-American) poets: rich oral tradition in the corrido or ballad, form. Recent works stress traditions of the Mexican community and the discrimination it has sometimes experienced from whites

Native American writers of poetry and prose:

vivid evocations of the natural world, almost mystical; tragic sense of the irrevocable loss of a rich heritage

Leslie Marmon Silko, Simon Ortiz, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie

African-American

Poets Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) Lucille Clifton Michael Harper Nikki Giovanni Rita Dove

Novelists Toni Morrison Alice Walker Charles Johnson

Short Story writers Toni Cade Bambara Maya Angelou

Asian –American (American writers of Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Koran, Thai all with distinct cultural heritages)

Poets Li-Young Lee Cathy Song Garrett Hongo David Mura Janice Mirikitani

Prose Maxine Hong Kingston Amy Tan Frank Chin Sylvia Watanabe Gish Jen Gus Lee

American writers

Poets Diane Ackerman Louise Cluck Phillip Levine Sharon Olds Charles Wright Donald Hall

Prose Allan Gurganus Tim O’Brien Anne Beattie Anne Tyler Barbara Kingsolver Jane Smiley Tom Wolfe Frank McCourt Garrison Keillor E. Annie Proulx Isaac Asimov Kathleen Norris John Updike