short fiction

26
Short Fiction Early American

Upload: haig

Post on 06-Jan-2016

34 views

Category:

Documents


0 download

DESCRIPTION

Short Fiction. Early American. Short Fiction. Fiction has to do with prose which is as opposed to poetry By definition short fiction (stories) are shorter prose shorter than novels—too short to be published on their own - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

TRANSCRIPT

Page 1: Short Fiction

Short Fiction

Early American

Page 2: Short Fiction

Short Fiction

• Fiction has to do with prose which is as opposed to poetry

• By definition short fiction (stories) are shorter prose shorter than novels—too short to be published on their own

• Similar to other forms: fables (moral lesson), folktales (oral tradition), parables (allegory)

• Flourished in the 19th century magazines as publishing became more common as did literacy

• A developed theme• Involve fewer characters• A single plot—such as one or two events• Unlike the less sustained social background of a novel

Page 3: Short Fiction

Short Fiction

• The short story intensifies the narrative process• It draws the reader’s attention to a moment• A genre that invites experimentation• So the fictional elements of time, place, voice,

point of view, and structure are often manipulated

• Developed with publishing and literacy (middle class emergence)

Page 4: Short Fiction

plot,

setting,

character,

dialogue,

tone,

style,

theme

Page 5: Short Fiction

The Development of the Short Story

• The short story really thrived in American and American writers really made it there own.

• Though some argue the first short story is thought to be Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” 1819

• Irving’s short stories are generally made up of summarized narratives, episodic plots, and portraits of magical events

• In the mid19th century American romantic writers moved from a tale to a story with a unified plot, a protagonist, and a single effect.

• We’re talking about Edgar Allen Poe (gothic), Nathaniel Hawthorne (allegories), and Herman Melville (more essaylike and realistic).

Page 6: Short Fiction

Nathaniel Hawthorne• 1805, July 4 Salem, Mass. Died 1864• Father died age 4, family moved to Maine, extended family cared for him,

saw him educated• 1825 graduated from Bowdoin College-writer• Struggled early on as a writer—works he would not acknowledge• Published in small magazines—wake of Amer. Publishing and literature• Worked government jobs—Boston Custom House• Mix of historic and symbolic, history and nightmare, psychological trauma,

Gothic, human emotion and experience • 1837 Twice-Told Tales, • 1841 Brook Farm, transcendentalist communal living and cooperative labor • 1842 Concord, Mass.-Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott,

Ellery Channing, and Margaret Fuller • 1840s science fiction

Page 7: Short Fiction

Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Allegories of the Heart, 1843 The Birth-mark• 1844 Rappaccini's Daughter• 1846 Mosses from an Old Manse • 1845 back to Salem, Mass. Salem Custom House• 1850 The Scarlet Letter• 1850 Lenox, Mass. The House of the Seven Gables and A Wonder-

Book for Girls and Boys, • Europe • Awareness of American history: Family history English, American

Revolution, and Salem witch trails• Political conservative, moralist, private man, Christian, skeptic,

doubted transcendentalism but gave money to political and social causes

Page 8: Short Fiction

Edgar Allen Poe 1809-1849

• Boston both parents died• Raised by John Allan, merchant• 1815-20 England• Allan receives inheritance stops support• 1826 U. VA broke• 1827 Army – 1830 West Point• 1831-35 Baltimore short stories • 1835 license to marry 13 yr. old cousin-VA• 1837-8 NYC-Philadelphia• Nearly starved Virginia died of TB • Love affair between two women suicide attempt

Page 9: Short Fiction

Poe

• Died Baltimore after drunken binge• 1827 Tamerlane • 1831 Israfel, To Helen• 1841-2 literary editor of Graham's Magazine “

The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “ A Descent into the Maelström,” “ The Masque of the Red Death,”

• 1845 Broadway Journal: “ The Pit and the Pendulum,” “ Eleonora,” The Premature Burial,

• “The Philosophy of Composition,” “The Rationale of Verse,” and “The Poetic Principle,”

Page 10: Short Fiction

U.S. Civil War

• Realism– Reflect real life– Multifaceted people/experience– Grows pessimistic

• Local color– Realistic portrayal of regional U.S. dialects,– Harsh realities– Romanticism’ pre-industrial ideals

• Naturalism– Environment shapes behaviors and lives– Lower classes moved by animal passions– Individual has little control

Page 11: Short Fiction

Late 19th to early 20th century American Short Stories

• Move even more toward use of formal elements such as plot, character, and dialogue found in later short fiction.

• After the Civil War, American literature moved from romanticism to realism, and as the name “realism” suggests, the stories were told more realistically. Henry James and Stephen Crane

• “shows one action, in one place, on one day. A Short-story deals with a single character, a single event, a single emotion, or the series of emotions called forth by a single situation.” Brander Matthews in 1901

• Local Color- part of the realism movement realistic images of lifestyles in specific regions of the United States. They portray commonplace scenes and characteristics of their chosen locales, representing character types, speech patterns, and social customs and beliefs. Bret Harte, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mark Twain

Page 12: Short Fiction

Modern• WW I• Great Depression• WWII-Holocaust & Hiroshima • Cold War• Charles Darwin Origin of the Species 1859• Karl Marx Communist Manifesto 1848• Friedrich Nietzsche• Sigmund Freud Interpretation of Dreams 1899• Carl G. Jung • Max Planck quantum theory 1900• Albert Einstein theory of relativity 1905

Page 13: Short Fiction

• Heidegger & Sartre • Dizzying rapid change• Industrial revolution• Global Village• Artist goes within: Literature is subjective• Pre-occupation with self, nature of

consciousness, perception, fragmentation of experience and thought, stream-of-consciousness

• Questions: – Existence of God– Human race as ‘Lord of the Jungle’– Reason over emotion– Life is worth living– Reality

Page 14: Short Fiction

Modernism• Trends in literature in the early 20th century: Symbolism (French poets:

Charles Baudelaire), Futurism (Italian Filippo Marinetti), Expressionism (Kafka, or German playwrights Georg Buchner & Bertolt Brecht), Imagism (US & Brit., Ezra Pound), Vorticism (London also Pound & Wyndham Lewis), Ultraismo (Spanish poets Guillermo de Torre), Dada (Paris Andre Breton), Surrealism (Fr/Sp Andre Breton, automatic writing & free association

• ( A rejection of 19th c. traditions such as: a rejection of realism, or rejection of traditional metre for free verse

• Used different, complex forms and styles including: breaking from chronological storytelling, stream of conscious writing style, fragmentation of images, more abstraction,

• A rejection of historical continuity—places value and consciousness in the individual

• Objective reasoning was the way to understand the world.• Urban (dissociation) but separate from conventional, middle class, or

capitalist values• Multiple points of view, awareness of psychological theories.

Page 15: Short Fiction

Anton Chekhov 1860-1904• Russian• Originally studied medicine• Travelled Siberia to Sakhalin (prison) wrote sociological study • Russian plays and short stories• Plays: Ivanov, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry

Orchard• Short Stories: “A Dreary Story,” “Ward No. 6,” “My Life,” “Ionych,”

“The Man in a Case” • What’s in his works: blends naturalism and symbolism; a threatened

upper class; combines comedy, tragedy, and pathos.

Page 16: Short Fiction

Fyodor Dostoevsky 1821-1881

• Russian prose writer-novelist• Studied St. Petersburg Military Engineering Academy• Arrested as a socialist, sentenced to be executed,

served in a penal settlement and then army• Religious conversion to Russian Orthodox• Travelled Western Europe in 1860s• Influences: Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens• Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The

Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov• Character analysis, religious & political ideas, urban

settings,

Page 17: Short Fiction

James Joyce 1882-1941• Dublin, Ireland• Short writings prose poetry or dramatic vignettes, novel• Royal University at St Stephen's Green began writing in literary circles-

studied languages, math & philosophy, medical school, • Married and taught in Trieste • Not like Yeats-but Yeats brought Joyce to attention of Pound who helped

him publish• Complexity of work, humor, observations of human behavior, description, • 1914 Dubliners• 1914 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, • 1915 WWI Zurich • 1920 Ulysses, moved to Paris• 1924 Finnegans Wake, • WWII moved to Gérand-le-Puy, near Vichy France• 1940 moved to Switzerland

Page 18: Short Fiction

Franz Kafka 1883-1924

• B. Prague, German speaking Jew• Studied law, worked insurance company• Novelist works published posthumously• Works: fable & parable, existential alienation &

guilt• Greatly influenced later writers: Auden, Milan

Kundera, Joseph Heller, Nabokov, Garcia Marquez

• Works: The Trial, The Castle, The Judgment, The Metamorphosis, In a Penal Colony

Page 19: Short Fiction

Katherine Mansfield 1888-1923

• B. New Zealand, studied/lived England• Ill w/TB moved to Italy, Switzland, France• Short stories-free verse & prose-poem• Themes: personal isolation, childhood,

illness, disillusionment, impatience, boredom with cultural conventions,

• Rhythms, imagery, a focus on fleeting moments of emotion

• Influenced by Chekhov

Page 20: Short Fiction

William Faulkner 1897- 1962• American, Mississippi, a life in contradictions: private but public life, various personas, regional

writer but national themes, realist-19th c. romanticism & pastoralism but modern• Great Grandfather, Civil War colonel, founded Gulf & Chicago railroad grandfather & father ran it

but sold before he could • Earned law degree• Wanted to serve in military but was rejected by army; so cadet in Royal Air Force during WW I

trained in Toronto.• Studied art, began writing poetry (Estelle) largely failed, tried playwriting, writing literary reviews,

lived with novelists in New Orleans: Sherwood Anderson and began writing novels• 1925 travelled Europe• Married childhood sweetheart Estelle Oldham, in 1929 after her divorce from her first husband • Modern: stream of consciousness narrative, lack grammar , new, inferior, and usually vulgar

modes of thought and behavior & syntax, social progression between WWs, liberation from societal constraints

• wrote sympathetically about the sufferings of rural, impoverished women, and other disenfranchised people

• WWII changes his ideas of himself as a writer and as a writing on national events and concerns • Worked for Hollywood in the Depression• The Sound and the Fury , As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! • Nobel prize in 1949

Page 21: Short Fiction

Ernest Hemingway 1899-1961 • Oak Park, Ill. Father surgeon, mother artistic opera singer, 6 children-family conservative upper

middle class• Short story writer & novelist• 1917 Kansas City Star greatly influenced his writing: Rule number one “Use short sentences. Use

short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.” Rule number three, “Eliminate every superfluous word.” Other rules address the use of slang and the avoidance of adjectives.

• 1918 volunteer ambulance driver in WWI wounded sent home• 1920 Chicago writing for the Cooperative Commonwealth magazine• 1921 freelance writer for the Toronto Daily Star & married Elizabeth Hadley Richardson • End of 1921moved to Paris with expats. E. Pound, G. Stein the Lost Generation. • Travelled still with Toronto Daily Star begin of WWII aggressions• 1923 back to States birth of son, then back to Paris—1926 divorced• Enigmatic: athlete, war mongerer, womanizer, bullfights, and deep sea fishing, drinker, • The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea • Men without Women and Winner Take Nothing • Settled in Cuba • Nobel Prize in 1954

Page 22: Short Fiction

John Steinbeckthe 20th century American writer

• 1902 Salinas, CA, 1919-25 Stanford University-writer• Great Depression• 1940 Pulitzer Prize The Grapes of Wrath• WWII war correspondent Europe, Africa, Asia, again to Russia in

Cold War, and again to Vietnam• New York, California, Travel abroad• Published in many genres: musicals, movies, political speeches,

novels• 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature • Problems with critics• The Grapes of Wrath; In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men, Cannery

Row, and The Log from the Sea of Cortez; Tortilla Flat, The Long Valley, The Pearl, East of Eden, The Winter of Our Discontent, and Travels with Charley.

• Anti-materialism, plight of working men, connection & symbolism of land, social consciousness, morality

Page 23: Short Fiction

Raymond Carver 1938-• Working class, Pacific Northwest• Married at 19 and began family, responsible at a young age• Moved around a lot; always struggled financially• At Chico State met John Gardner• Finished college at Humbolt State• Accepted to U. Iowa Writer’s Workshop-only 1 year• Alcoholism-left a teaching position in mid1970s • Late 1970s sobriety & teaching: met Tobia Wolff & Richard Ford.• 1979 moved in with poet Tess Gallagher, lifelong companions• Short Stories: subtle, scaled down style of writing and the often

bleak subject matter• Works: Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976)

Furious Seasons and Other Stories (1977) What We Talk about When We Talk about Love (1981) Cathedral (1983)

• Some poetry•

Page 24: Short Fiction

John Updike• fiction, poetry, essays, criticism, a play, children's books, memoirs,

and other prose• Marriage, adultery, family life, and faith, egocentric, existentialism• Small town, middle class, southeastern PA, individual freedom and

social constraints• 1932–1950 Shillington PA (Reading) small town to farm• 1950–1957 Harvard, Harvard Lampoon, Ruskin School of Drawing

and Fine Art at Oxford, The New Yorker • Early Work, 1958–1965 Ipswich, MA publishing poetry, short stories • The Rabbit Saga, 1960–1990 same character different stages of life• 1957–1990 happy town life, travelling, left U.S. during Vietnam,

divorced and remarried small town Mass.• 1968–1990 autobiographical work, self-consciousness, finding place• Since 1990 numerous accolades American Award for Fiction, the

Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters

Page 25: Short Fiction
Page 26: Short Fiction