BOOK - All American Literature in The 20th Century Black
BOOK - All American Literature in The 20th Century Black
BOOK - All American Literature in The 20th Century Black
Menoufyia University
Faculty of Arts
English Department
In
Dar Alkotob
A. Knowledge By the end of the course the students will have developed
and knowledge of the following:
understanding A (1) Learn about the branches of the American literature
A (2) Study at close hand samples of the plays, novels and poetry
By American writers of the twentieth century
A (3) Differentiate between the various trends of American forms of
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letters
B. Cognitive By the end of the course the students will have developed the ability
Skills to:
B (1) Analyze the hierarchical structure of the 2th century American
literature
B (2) Recognize the contexts of various forms of American literature
B (3) Recognize the relationship between the various genres of
American Literature
B (4) Analyze the forms and genres of American literature
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D. General Skills By the end of the course, students will have developed the skills of:
D (1) Working with others collaboratively
D (2) Searching online for information and texts on American
literature
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D (3) Planning, organizing, and setting priorities for their learning
4. Topics Week
Course Introduction
Content Chapter 1: American Fiction and Prose in the 1- 3
20th century
1. What is Modern American Prose?
2. Literary Trends in American Fiction and Prose in the 20 th
century
3. Harlem Renaissance or The New Negro Movement of Afro-
American Novelists or The U.S. Black Literature 18
4. Jewish American Fiction
5. The Beat Generation (1940s -1950s)
6. Literature of Chinese-American Diaspora
7. Indo- American Literature
8. 20th Century Science Fiction in America
9. Fantasy American Literature in the 20th century
Chapter 2: American Drama in the 20th Century 4- 6
1. Modern American Drama -
2. Modernism in American Drama -
3. Experimentalism in American drama
4. Expressionism in American drama
5. The Importance of American Drama in English Literature
6. Features of American Drama
7. Famous American Playwrights in the 20th C
Chapter 3: American Poetry in the 20th Century 7-9
1. Traditionalism in American Poetry
2. Idiosyncratic American Poets
3. Experimental American Poetry
4. The Black Mountain School of American Poetry
5. The San Francisco School of American Poetry
6. The Beat Poets in America
7. The New York School of American Poetry
8. Surrealism and Existentialism in American Poetry
9. Samples of the 20th Century American Poets
5. Teaching and Showing videos on the related set plays and novels
Learning Class discussions
Methods Pair-work (in the practical sessions)
Assignments (for the practical sessions)
6. Teaching and Learning Methods for students with Special Needs
To be suggested.
7. Assessment
A. Method ------------ Final written exam
B. Date Week 13 Set by the Faculty Council
C. Mark Distribution 5 15
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Chapter One
American Fiction and Prose
in the 20th century
Amy Tan
Tan grew up in California and in Switzerland and
studied English and linguistics at San Jose State
University (B.A., 1973; M.A., 1974) and the University
of California, Berkeley. She was a highly successful
freelance business writer in 1987 when she took her
Chinese immigrant mother to revisit China. There Tan,
7. Indo-American Literature
Indian American literature is among the very ‘young’
literature in the United States, hardly forty years old.
Although Indians have been in the America in small
numbers since the 17th century thanks to the East India
Jhumpa Lahiri
Lahiri is the author of four works of fiction: Interpreter
of Maladies, The Namesake, Unaccustomed
Earth, and The Lowland; and a work of nonfiction, In
Other Words. She has received numerous awards,
including the Pulitzer Prize; the PEN/Hemingway
Award; the PEN/Malamud Award; the Frank
O’Connor International Short Story Award; the
Premio Gregor von Rezzori; the DSC Prize for South
Asian Literature; a 2014 National Humanities Medal,
awarded by President Barack Obama; and the Premio
Internazionale Viareggio-Versilia, for In altre parole.
Kiran Desai
Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard is a novel by Kiran
Desai published in 1998. It is her first book and won the
top prize for the Betty Trask Awards in 1998. It is set in
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the Indian village of Shahkot (state of Punjab) and
follows the exploits of a young man, Sampath Chawla,
trying to avoid the responsibilities of adult life.
Kiran Desai based this book on a real-life story in
which a man, Kapila Pradhan lived up a tree for 15
years. This was the author’s inspiration for the book
and there are similarities between the novel and
Pradhan's life in his tree.
The Inheritance of Loss is the second novel by Indian
author Kiran Desai. It was first published in 2006. It
won a number of awards, including the Booker Prize for
that year, the National Book Critics Circle Fiction
Award in 2007, and the 2006 Vodafone Crossword Book
Award.
The Inheritance of Loss won the Booker Prize in
2006. It received glowing reviews from a several
publications and other authors, including being well
regarded by other Booker Prize winners, namely
Salman Rushdie and Marlon James. My impression
though, is that regular readers were less enthusiastic
about the novel and its win.
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai explores
burdensome themes of cultural and national identity
and the immigrant experience, but does so with an easy
technique that makes for effortless reading. Winner of
the 2006 Booker Prize, its relevance has only grown over
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov emigrated with his family from Russia to
the United States and became a biochemistry professor
while pursuing writing. A professor of biochemistry at
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Boston University, Isaac Asimov was a prolific writer.
He wrote and edited more than 500 books, his most
famous work being the Foundation series. Originally a
series of eight short stories published in Astounding
Magazine between May 1942 and January 1950. They
are based on the concepts set forth in Edward Gibbon’s
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
The stories take place in the waning days of a future
Galactic Empire where mathematician Hari Seldon
develops a theory of psychohistory, a new and effective
mathematical sociology that can predict the future of
large populations. Seldon foresees the imminent fall of
the Empire, which encompasses the entire Milky Way,
and a dark age lasting 30,000 years before a second
empire arises. The first three books in the series, now
referred to as The Foundation Trilogy won the one-time
Hugo Award for “Best All-Time Series” in 1966.
Isaac Asimov’s other major series include the Galactic
empire and Robot series. The first book in the Galactic
Empire Series, The Stars Like Dust was described by
The New York Times as “…a rousing adventure story
of the remote future, is the Galaxy, which, with its
hundreds of inhabited planets, has been taken over by a
dictatorial race called, appropriately enough, the
Tyranni. A small group of rebels wage a determined
battle against the dictators, giving Mr. Asimov plenty of
opportunities to plot those involved and subtle twists for
which he is known. It is clear writing and excellent
Marion Z. Bradley
Marion Bradley was a prolific writer, producing
numerous historical, fantasy, and gothic novels and
short stories under her own name and several
pseudonyms. She is, however, best known for her many
science fiction novels and stories. She published her first
important work, the story “Centaurus Changeling,” in
1954. Her first novel, The Door Through Space,
appeared in 1961. Two more novels, The Sword of
Aldones and The Planet Savers, were published in 1962.
Both take place on Darkover, a planet that is home to a
lost Terran (Earth) colony. It became the setting for a
series of more than 20 science fiction novels by Bradley;
other writers also set their own work on Darkover.
Chapter Two
American Drama in the 20th Century
Eugene O'Neill
Eugene O'Neill, the winner of four Pulitzer Prizes for
Drama and the 1936 Nobel Prize for Literature, is
widely considered the greatest American playwright. No
one, not Maxwell Anderson, Tennessee Williams,
Arthur Miller, nor Edward Albee, approaches O'Neill
in terms of his artistic achievement or his impact on the
American theater.
Maxwell Anderson
His plays included Elizabeth the Queen (1930), Mary of
Scotland (1933), Key Largo (1939); Truckline Café
(1945), Joan of Lorraine (1946), Anne of the Thousand
Days (1947), and The Bad Seed (1954). Anderson also
worked on numerous screenplays, including All Quiet
on the Western Front (1930), for which he received an
Academy Award nomination, Invisible Power (1932),
Rain (1932), Death Takes a Holiday (1934), and So Red
the Rose (1935).
Plays of his that were turned into movies were Mary of
Scotland (1936), Saturday’s Children, which was filmed
three times (once as Maybe It’s Love), Winterset (1936),
Thornton Wilder
Thornton Niven Wilder’s Our Town is a major work in
the canon of American theater. Translated and
produced throughout the world, it has been called a
poetic chronicle of life and death. First produced at the
McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, on
January 22, 1938, the play wavered in Boston, was
moved to New York, and, to the surprise of both the
playwright and his collaborators, won a Pulitzer Prize
as the best play of the season. Our Town remains a
perennial favorite among directors, particularly in
small-town productions.
Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams wrote a variety of plays, essays,
poems and memoirs throughout his life, but he is most
celebrated for his plays. His plays are exemplary of the
Modernist period of drama, which often featured
dramatic genres such as realism and expressionism.
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Below is a shortened list of examples of what Williams
has published throughout his career.
Tennessee Williams was a Pulitzer Prize-winning
playwright. He was awarded four Drama Critic Circle
Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes and the Presidential Medal
of Freedom. American dramatist whose plays reveal a
world of human frustration in which sex and violence
underlie an atmosphere of Romantic gentility.
In his dramas, Tennessee Williams deals with disturbed
emotions and unresolved sexuality. Tennessee Williams
was well known for his dramas that tackled
controversial subjects, such as violence and sexuality
that were largely taboo at the time.
For Williams, Sigmund Freud and his exploration of
sexual desire play an important role. His most famous
plays are The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Streetcar
named Desire (1947) about a faded Southern beauty
called Blanche Dubois and her social descend. In the end
she is raped by her brother-in-law and commits suicide.
Tennessee William’s Plays
1) The Glass Menagerie (1944)
2) A Streetcar named Desire (1947)
3) Camino Real (1953)
4) Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)
5) Orpheus Descending (1957)
6) Suddenly Last Summer (1958)
Arthur Miller
In 1944, his first play, “The Man Who Had All the Luck”,
opened to horrible reviews. A story about an incredibly
successful man who is unhappy with that success, “The
Man Who Had All The Luck” was already addressing
the major themes of Miller’s later work. “All My Sons,”
a tragedy about a manufacturer who sells faulty parts
to the military in order to save his business, was an
instant success. Only two years after the success of “All
My Sons,” Miller came out with his most famous and
well-respected work, “Death of a Salesman.” Dealing
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again with both desperation and paternal responsibility,
“Death of a Salesman” focused on a failed businessman
as he tries to remember and reconstruct his life.
Eventually killing himself to leave his son insurance
money, the salesman seems a tragic character out of
Shakespeare or Dostoevsky.
In the 1950s the career of Arthur Miller reached its
peak. His masterpiece Death of a Salesman, about a man
searching for merit and worth in his life, who finally
fails, was published in 1949. Death of a Salesman
combines realism with naturalism - a typical feature of
the late 1940s - and Miller managed to create a round
plot as well as round characters. Although Miller’s
succeeding plays didn’t reach the same level of success,
they were also quite popular. The Crucible e.g. is a
historical play about the Salem witchcraft trials in the
17th century. Although it is set in colonial times it had
quite a topical meaning in the 1950s, for it referred to
Senator McCarthy’s desperate hunt for Communists at
that time. Miller is today still one of the most influential
persons concerning American drama.
In 1956, Miller divorced his first wife, Mary Slattery, his
former college sweetheart with whom he had two
children, Jane Ellen and Robert. Less than a month
later, Miller married actress and Hollywood sex
symbol Marilyn Monroe, whom he'd first met in 1951 at
a Hollywood party. Miller and Monroe were married
for five years, during which time the tragic sex symbol
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struggled with personal troubles and drug addiction.
Monroe and Miller divorced. Monroe died the following
year, and Miller's controversial 1964 drama After the
Fall was believed to have been partially inspired by
their relationship.
Miller's other plays include A View From the
Bridge (1955), Incident at Vichy (1964), The Price (1968),
The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972),
The American Clock (1980) and Broken Glass (1994).
Chapter Three
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American Poetry in the 20th Century
1. Introduction
American poetry and poetry in general was not very
influential in the first years of the 20th century. Between
1900 and the end of World War II, American poetry was
entirely transformed, producing a body of work whose
influence was felt throughout the world. Poetry ranged
between traditional types of verse and experimental
writing that departed radically from the established
forms of the 19th century.
Two New England poets, Edwin Arlington Robinson
and Robert Frost, who were not noted for technical
experimentation, won both critical and popular acclaim
in this period. Robinson, whose first book appeared in
1896, did his best work in sonnets, ballad stanzas, and
blank verse. In the 1920s he won three Pulitzer Prizes—
for his Collected Poems (published 1921), The Man Who
Died Twice (1925), and Tristram (1927). Like Robinson,
Frost used traditional stanzas and blank verse in
volumes such as A Boy’s Will (1913), his first book,
and North of Boston (1914), New Hampshire (1923), A
Further Range (1936), and A Masque of Reason (1945).
The best-known poet of his generation, Frost, like
Robinson, saw and commented upon the tragic aspects
of life in poems such as “Design,” “Directive,” and
“Provide, Provide.” Frost memorably crafted the
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language of common speech into traditional poetic
form, with epigrammatic effect. After the 2nd World
War poetry can be divided up into several main
directions.
Robert Frost
In 1912 Frost sold his farm and took his wife and four
young children to England. There he published his first
collection of poems, A Boy’s Will, at the age of 39. It was
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followed by North Boston (1914), which gained
international reputation. The collection contains some
of Frost’s best-known poems: 'Mending Wall,' 'The
Death of the Hired Man,' 'Home Burial,' 'A Servant to
Servants,' 'After Apple-Picking,' and 'The Wood-Pile.'
In 1916 appeared his third collection of verse, Mountain
Interval, which contained such poems as 'The Road Not
Taken,' 'The Oven Bird,' 'Birches,' and 'The Hill Wife.'
Frost's poems show deep appreciation of natural world
and sensibility about the human aspirations.
In his poems Frost depicted the fields and farms of his
surroundings, observing the details of rural life, which
hide universal meaning.
♣In Summary
Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound is generally considered the poet most
responsible for defining and promoting a Modernist
aesthetic in poetry. Pound’s own significant
contributions to poetry begin with his promulgation
of Imagism, a movement in poetry that derived its
technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry—
stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language,
and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to,
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in Pound’s words, “compose in the sequence of the
musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome.”
His later work, for nearly fifty years, focused on the
encyclopedic epic poem he entitled The Cantos.
Pound published books include A lume spento (1908),
Exultations (1909), Personae (1909), Provenca (1910), Canzoni
(1911), Lustra and Other Poems (1917), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
(1920), Umbra: Collected Poems (1920), Cantos I–XVI (1925), A
Draft of XXX Cantos (1930), Homage to Sextus Propertius
(1934), The Fifth Decade of Cantos (1937), Cantos LII-LXXI
(1940), The Pisan Cantos (1948), Patria Mia (1950), and The
Cantos (1972).
Langston Hughes
His first published poem, The Negro Speaks of Rivers.
Hughes argued, “no great poet has ever been afraid of
being himself.”
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"We younger Negro artists now intend to express
our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or
shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If
they aren't, it doesn't matter. We know we are
beautiful. And ugly too... If colored people are leased
we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't
matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, as
strong as we know how and we stand on the top of
the mountain, free within ourselves. (Langston Hughes’s
“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (June 23, 1926))
Maya Angelou
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.
And
In Don DeLillo's
Summary
The narrator, Jack Gladney, describes the annual
arrival of station wagons at his college, College-on-the-
Hill. He walks into his quiet town of Blacksmith, where
he lives with his wife, Babette, and their four children
by previous marriages -- infant Wilder, Denise, Steffie,
and Heinrich. He is the chairman and inventor of Hitler
studies at the college.
Department of Hitler studies shares a building with
the popular culture department. Jack is friends with
Murray Jay Siskind, a Jewish visiting lecturer on
"living icons." Murray wants to do with Elvis Presley
what Jack has done with Hitler. Jack accompanies
1. Jack Gladney
Jack is the narrator and protagonist of the novel.
He is the inventor and chairman of Hitler studies at
College-on-the-Hill. His obsessive fear of death drives
the novel, and generally influences most of his
reflections on identity, consumerism, science, and more.
His fourth wife is Babette, and they live with their four
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children (from different marriages) in the town of
Blacksmith.
Jack Gladney is the narrator and principal
character of White Noise. Jack suffers from two linked
fears: the fear of his own death, and the fear that he will
be exposed as an essentially incompetent, insignificant
man. As the chairman of Hitler studies at the College-
on-the-Hill, Jack shrouds himself in the distinguished,
stately trappings of a successful academic. He wears
sweeping, dramatic robes whenever he’s on campus and
refers to himself professionally as J. A. K. Gladney. He
builds his career around Adolf Hitler, capitalizing on
Hitler’s reputation as one of the most prominent figures
of modern history. At the same time, Jack realizes that
his own professional persona is mostly fabricated. When
establishing himself as an academic, he added a false
initial in order to give his name more weight and, in the
process, subtly evoke the initials of John F. Kennedy,
another extremely important historical figure. Jack also
feels like an intellectual fraud, since he has never
mastered even the rudimentary basics of the German
language, despite his field of expertise.
Jack also suffers from an acute fear of dying. His
study of Hitler speaks, in large part, to that fear: Hitler
represents death on a large scale; in the face of the
Holocaust, Jack’s own, individual death seems
insignificant and, therefore, manageable. However, his
fear often threatens to overwhelm him, especially when
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he becomes exposed to a toxic chemical called Nyodene
D. The technicians inform him that Nyodene D. remains
in the human body for thirty years and that in fifteen
years they will be able to give him more specific figures
about his chances for survival. Even though these
figures are incredibly vague and, given the fact that
Jack is already middle-aged, don’t actually affect his life
expectancy, Jack becomes increasingly controlled by
fear and anxiety.
Although the fear of death seems unwarranted,
Jack’s worries grow in intensity. Jack’s unspoken fears
speak to greater anxieties at play in late twentieth-
century America. An endless stream of white noise, both
technological and human, characterizes Jack’s life. As
he walks through the never-ending currents of data and
chatter, Jack senses something larger, deeper, and more
primal emanating from behind, or possibly within, all
the noise. Often, this unnamed entity fills Jack with
dread, but just as often Jack—like Murray—finds it
wondrous and potentially transcendent. The experience
of reading White Noise, with its constant digressions and
seemingly pointless anecdotes, resembles Jack’s own
experience of modern life, with its pulsating
interconnectedness and stream of stimuli.
2. Babette
Babette, Jack’s fourth wife, is described as the
quintessential loving mother and spouse. Slightly
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overweight, with a head full of messy blond hair,
Babette bakes cookies for the children, tells her husband
everything, and, in her free time, reads tabloids to the
blind and teaches a course on posture to the elderly. In
her apparent honesty and sincerity, Babette contrasts
with Jack’s previous wives, who were closed off and
secretive متحفظ. Jack takes great comfort from Babette
and the openness that characterizes their marriage.
Babette, however, has secretly been taking an
experimental drug called Dylar. When first Denise and
then Jack confront her about the pills, Babette
completely denies any knowledge of it. Only after Jack
finds a pill and has it analyzed does Babette confess that
she has been sleeping with a doctor in exchange for
Dylar, in the hopes that the drug would relieve her own
overwhelming fear of death. The shift in Babette’s
personality, from open and loving to mysterious and
cynical, reflects the novel’s pervasive concern with the
fluctuating and unstable nature of identity.
Babette reveals to Jack halfway through the novel
that she, too, fears death, and has betrayed him to test
an experimental drug that promises to reduce her fear.
She wants to die before Jack, however, as she fears
loneliness even more. Her other major desire is for her
toddler son Wilder to stay the same.
5. Wilder
Wilder is Babette’s six-year-old son, and the
youngest child in the family. Wilder never speaks in the
novel, and periodically Jack worries about the boy’s
slow linguistic development. Nevertheless, in his
wordlessness, he remains an essential source of comfort
for both Jack and Babette. More than any of the other
children, Wilder seems genuinely open to the kind of
“psychic data.”
Although he never speaks in the novel and has a
limited vocabulary, Wilder is nonetheless an important
figure, as he represents many things to Jack and Babette
-- ignorance of death, rabid consumerism, contentment.
6. Denise
Denise is Babette’s eleven-year-old daughter with
Bob Pardee. Denise is a sharp, often bossy girl and
continually nags Babette about her health. She is the
first person to notice her mother’s memory lapses, and
she discovers Babette’s secret supply of Dylar.
Denise discovers and investigates Babette's use of
Dylar. She worries about her mother's health and
refuses to let her or Jack have the medication back, and
eventually throws it out to protect them from
themselves.
7. Steffie
Steffie is Jack’s seven-year-old daughter with Dana
Breedlove. Steffie is far more sensitive than the other
children in her family and has trouble watching
television shows where characters get hurt or
humiliated.
Steffie has the most limited role of the family
members, but she sheds light about the fear of death in
odd ways. She refuses to take off her mask during the
evacuation, for instance, and she expresses anxiety
about being kidnapped by her mother.
9. Howard Dunlop
Dunlop is Jack’s German teacher. Solitary and
taciturn, Howard lives in the same boardinghouse as
Murray. Dunlop, who lives in Murray's boarding house,
tutors Jack in German. He also teaches meteorology
among other subjects. Jack stops his lessons when
Murray plants the idea in his head that Dunlop finds
dead bodies erotic.
17. Bee
Bee is Jack’s pensive, twelve-year-old daughter
from his marriage to Tweedy Bonner. Bee is a worldly,
cosmopolitan child, and in this regard she makes Jack
highly self-conscious and uncomfortable.
24. Adele T.
Adele T. is a local psychic, called in by the police
to help find the missing Treadwell siblings.
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23. Sundar Chakravarty is Jack’s doctor.
Antagonist:
There is no formal antagonist, but if we define
antagonist as the object of the protagonist’s struggle
and conflict, then death is the antagonist. Jack’s
constant fear of death and the morning when he believes
that Babette’s father is Death are prime examples to
support death as the antagonist.
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Climax:
The climax of the novel comes when Jack tries to
kill Willie and in the process, he is shot himself. This
moment leads to the hospital, where both men are saved,
and the last vestige of hope against death is defeated in
the person of the atheistic German nun.
Mood:
The mood of the novel is ironic. This novel
repeatedly ironizes contemporary culture and life. All of
the clichés and stereotypes about contemporary
America are presented as exaggerations, forcing the
reader to see these not as serious representations but as
ironic renderings.