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Wuolah Free APUNTES LITERATURA NORTEAMERICANA S. XX

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APUNTES-LITERATURA-NORTEAMERICAN...

Anónimo

Literatura Norteamericana: siglo XX

4º Grado en Estudios Ingleses

Facultad de Humanidades
Universidad de Almería

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NORTH AMERICAN LITERATURE: XXTH CENTURY

1. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
INTRODUCTION OF THE PERIOD

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World War I broke out in Europe in 1914, with Great Britain, France, and Russia fighting against
Germany. The United States, which entered the war in 1917 on the side of Britain and France, had
ended its last full-scale conflict, the Civil War, some fifty years previously. In the interval, the
country’s industrial power had grown immensely. In 1914 the country’s network of
transcontinental railroads linked its productive farms, small towns, and industry to urban
centers. Like the Civil War, World War I would mobilize the country’s industries and technologies
and encourage their development. On an even larger scale, World War II would do the same.

At the end of WWI, however, the US was still a nation of small farms and towns. The majority of
Americans were still of English or German ancestry. They were distrustful of international
politics, and after the war ended, many attempted to steer the nation back to pre-war lifestyles.
In 1924 Congress enacted an exclusionary immigration act, which prohibited all Asian
immigration to control the ethnic makeup of the United States.

For other Americans, the war helped accelerate changes in the forms of political and social life.
The long struggle to win American women to vote ended in 1920 with the passage of the
Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Despite the government’s restrictions on leftist
political activity, many Americans looked to the Soviet Union and the international Communist
movement for a model in combating equality and fostering workers’ rights in the United States.

These conflicts acquired new urgency when the stock market crashed in 1929 and led to an
economic crisis. Known as the Great Depression, this period of economic hardship did not fully
end until the United States entered World War II, following the Japanese attack on the American
Fleet at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Japan’s ally Germany also declared war on the USA, thus involving
the country in another European conflict. The war unified the country politically, as it
revitalized industry and put people to work, including women who went into the labor force.
Germany surrendered in the spring of 1945. The war ended in August 1945. While Europe was in

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Literatura Norteamericana: s...
Banco de apuntes de la
ruins, the United States had become the world’s major industrial and political power. The two
wars, then, bracketed a period during which the United States became a fully modern nation.

In the arena of literature and culture, American literary modernism was a pivotal movement
whose main domains were freedom and innovation. It was the search for a purpose in literature

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that marked the movement. It registered all sides of the era’s struggles and debates, while
sharing a commitment to explore the meanings of modernity and the possibility of creating
something entirely new.

Within this period, three issues stand out as dividing writers and schools of writers. One issue
centered on the uses of literary tradition and whether it was necessary or imitative and
old-fashioned. Nonetheless, modernist works often allude to previous literature ironically, or
deliberately fracture traditional literary formulas. A related issue involved the place of popular
culture in serious literature, as it gained momentum and influence. Another issue was the
question of how far literature should engage itself in political and social struggle. Should art
be a domain unto itself, exploring aesthetic questions and enunciating transcendent truths, or
should art participate in the politics of the times?

There was a conflict between choosing tradition or authenticity: some writers wanted to
remain among tradition. However, other authors pretended to be authentic and had an
experimental spirit with complex psychological points of view.

CHANGING TIMES

During the 1920s, it was the only moment where it seemed there were different alternatives to
capitalism. Americans who thought of themselves as Marxists in the 1920s and 1930s were
usually connected with the Communist Party. In 1919, it was the founding of the American
Communist Party.

In 1924, the Immigration act was passed: its main objective was to control the ethnic makeup of
the American population. The main objective was to preserve racial integrity. The presence of
immigration in literature became clear.

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SELF-EXPRESSION AND PSYCHOLOGY

The 20th century meant a radical change for the self-expression and psychology of individuals.
People started to ask questions about themselves. “Whosoever would be a man, must be a non-
conformist” (Emerson).

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- The 18th Amendment to the US constitution was passed, which meant the perfect
culmination of democracy. The prohibition of alcohol-phenomenon of ‘’gangsters’’ was
felt as a limitation of people’s freedom.
- The 1920s also experienced significant changes in sexual ideas: sexuality was being
questioned. One of its key figures was Sigmund Freud, whose main purpose was to
liberate society’s unconscious through psychoanalysis. This also marked the way of
writing.
- The 19th Amendment marked a big change for women. It was the women’s liberation
movement: they were given the right to vote. Those changes affected their education
(professional work), way of dressing, and sexual freedom. A common concept of the time
was the flapper: this female depiction of the new independent woman in the USA was
very particular and quite revolutionary at that moment.

In books, the new position of the female gender would be deeply considered. At the same time,
the opposite vision, i.e., the angel of the house, was also contemplated in literature.

THE FLAPPERS

Flappers smoked in public, drank alcohol, danced at jazz clubs, and practised a shocking sexual
freedom.
Designers like Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli and Jean Patou ruled flapper fashion. Straight and
slim, high heels, rouge lips, and the “bob” hairstyle.
Zelda Fitzgerald: one of the main icons of the flappers. Fitzgerald’s wife represents all the
features of liberty, strong personality, and clothing. Everything related to the flappers was
recognisable through her figure.

Iconic: The tattooed Venus (Betty Broadbent).

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THE ROARING TWENTIES

The 1920s involved a very convulsive period that changed a lot the configuration of the USA.
Some details about this period are:

- Capitalism is flourishing incredibly in the US. The idea of the importance of money in the
American mind started to go high. Inflation rates rocketed (money): it was quite easy to
gain but also to lose money.
- Consumer culture flourished: consumerism as the main need.
- Technological innovations like the telephone and radio. They were considered
something mandatory by society.
- Supremacy of jazz (Harlem Cotton Club). People at that time wanted to have fun and
enjoy life through jazz music. It was much associated with the elite of people, especially
artists and writers, but then it became accessible to everyone.

THE 1930s

In the United States, the Great Depression made politics and economics the salient issues of
public life and overrode questions of individual freedom with fear of mass collapse.
Free-enterprise capitalism had always justified itself by arguing that the system guaranteed
better lives for all. This assurance now rang hollow. The suicides of millionaire bankers and
stockbrokers made the headlines, but more compelling was the enormous toll among ordinary
people who lost their homes, jobs, farms, and life savings in the stock market crash.

The terrible economic situation in the United States produced a significant increase in
Communist Party membership and prestige in the 1930s. Numerous intellectuals allied
themselves with its causes, even if they did not actually become party members. The appeal of
communism was significantly enhanced by its claim to be an opponent of fascism.

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AMERICAN MODERNISM

American Modernism is the breakdown of traditional society under the pressures of modernity: a
fight against tradition. The main correspondence of Modernism in literature was The Waste
Land, the perfect exponent of the world in ruins. The feeling of emptiness is the main aura.

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Modernism involved other art forms— sculpture, painting, dance—as well as literature: the
poetry of William Butler Yeats; James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922)— these were only a few of the literary
products of this movement in England and on the Continent. The sense of experimentation is
shared by the different artistic forms.

Some of the main characteristics of the American Modernism:

- Most literary pieces are built up of fragments: vignettes altogether arranged portraying
the fragmentation of reality.
- Shifts in perspective, voice and tone: not looking at the things with the same approach.
With that different reality, the reader has to create his own interpretation of the story.
- The tone through dialogues and questions is going to suggest how characters behave.
- Ironic rhetoric: texts represented in a rhetorical way. It is not going to be easily offered
to the readers: they have to read between the lines.
- Suggestion of symbols and images instead of statements: with the common tendency of
offering freedom to the reader. They are not categorically stated.
- The search for meaning: the idea that literature should be important to society comes
into the floor of the years. Literature, especially poetry and drama, turns to be the place
where readers could express themselves, finding their own way of criticizing. It was a
forum for debate. Literature performs a role in society.
- Varied content based on the experience/interest of the writer: writers find inspiration
on their own experiences (traumas, tragic experiences, shades of their biographies, etc).
- Concrete sensory image: particular and repeated assumptions in the text as well as a
continuous reference to how images in these books are related to human senses. A very
perceptive way to present the ideas.
- Allusions to literary, historical, philosophical or religious details of the past: for some
authors, the past is also important in literature, even if it is modern. In the literary past,
there can be found the origin of thousands of elements that are needed to keep on
writing about. We should learn from our past background. The Waste Land -T. S. Eliot- is
probably the clearest example of these mixed allusions.

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- Vignettes of contemporary life, elements of popular culture: parts of the real urban life,
of songs, were starting to appear in Modernist texts.
- Use of slang, colloquial and uneducated language: in some texts, informal language is
used.
- First person narrator or one character’s point of view. It suggests the idea of

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individuality: the reader has to create his/her own interpretation of the story. The
narrator could also be omniscient (1st or 3rd person). Even in poetry, it could be
identified as the voice of the speaker, which is normally the voice of the poet.
- ‘’Trust does not exist’’, the main motto of American literature of the 20th c. The text is
the product of a personal interaction with reality, even the experiences of the readers
will affect its understanding. The truth is highly subjective, how an author writes a story
can alter our perception of the truth. The truth can be manipulated by those in power
and the media. Hollywood, politicians, business leaders. Anything can be valid if it is
justified and academically supported.

THE LOST GENERATION

High modernism was a self-consciously international movement, and the leading American
exponents of high modernism tended to be permanent expatriates, such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra
Pound, and T. S. Eliot. These writers left the United States because they found the country
lacking in a tradition of high culture and indifferent, if not actively hostile, to artistic
achievement. They also believed that a national culture could never be more than parochial. In
London in the first two decades of the twentieth century and in Paris during the 1920s, they
found a vibrant community of dedicated artists and a society that respected them and allowed
them a great deal of personal freedom. Yet they seldom thought of themselves as deserting their
nation, they thought of themselves as bringing the United States into the larger context of
European culture. They thought that the USA had a localized and narrow-minded
interpretation of national culture.

The ranks of these permanent expatriates were swelled by American writers who lived abroad
for some part of the period, among them Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Robert Frost.

Those writers who came back, however, and those who never left took seriously the task of
integrating modernist ideas and methods with American subject matter. Not every experimental
modernist writer disconnected literary ambitions from national belonging: Hart Crane, Marianne
Moore, and William Carlos Williams, all wanted to write overtly “American” works. Some

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writers— as the title of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. clearly shows— attempted to speak for the
nation as a whole. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is similarly ambitious, and many writers
addressed the whole nation in individual works.

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THE ORIGIN OF THE TERM

Gertrude Stein is credited for the term “Lost Generation”, though it was famously coined by
Hemingway. “You are all a lost generation” was an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (1926) by
Hemingway, a novel that captures the attitudes of a hard-drinking, fast-living set of disillusioned
young expatriates in post-war Paris.

2. POETRY

2.1. ROBERT FROST (1874-1963)

Robert Frost was born in California but identified with New England: that area was the main
source of inspiration for his poems. His life was characterized by rural environments: he was
between farms and poems, teaching at various colleges. This relationship with natural and rural
elements will be a fundamental part of his poetry.

Frost’s life was also characterised by personal tragedies, something that will affect his literary
pieces: a son committed suicide and a daughter suffered a complete mental collapse.

About his style, it should be highlighted that he did not reject modernist essence, but he was
much more localized in his traditional way of writing and contemplating New England as a
microcosmos. Frost’s poetry is mainly characterized by:

- The clarity of diction (contemporary language): the poems are easily understood.
- Colloquial rhythms: depicting dialogues. A particular musicality.
- Simplicity of images.
- Natural speech or colloquialism (ruralism) with the folksy speaker. His continuous
intention in keeping the importance of rural people. The semantic field of Frost’s poetry
is quite localized.

All these characteristics are intended to make the poems look natural, unplanned. In the context
of the modernist movement, however, they can be seen as a thoughtful reply to high

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modernism’s fondness for obscurity and difficulty. In addition, by investing in the New England
terrain, Frost rejected modernist intentionalism and revitalized the tradition of New England
regionalism. Readers who accepted Frost’s persona and his setting as typically American
accepted the powerful myth that rural New England was the heart of America.

Frost played the rhythms of ordinary speech against formal patterns of line and verse and
contained them within traditional poetic forms. The interaction of colloquial diction with blank
verse is especially central to his dramatic monologues. To Frost, traditional forms were the
essence of poetry, material with which poets responded to flux and disorder (decay) by forging
something permanent. Poetry, he wrote, was “a momentary stay against confusion”.

Conclusively, Robert Frost is not probably the highest exponent of Modernism. One of the
reasons why he is associated more to old-fashioned narrative is because of his language: his
simplicity of diction contrasts with the experimentation within other Modernist writers. Also,
the location of the poems (rural landscapes, New England) favors that notion of traditional
Americanism. In the moment of confusing times, Frost went more for security, for the stay. He
persecuted the permanence of topics and reflections: his messages are absolutely contemporary,
even today; they can be applied to any situation.

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear; (line 8)

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

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And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day! (line 13)

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Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh (line 16)

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— (line 18)

I took the one less traveled by, (line 19)

And that has made all the difference. (line 20)

Summary:

Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ is about the choices and opportunities in life. The poem
highlights the sensation of regret that accompanies all the roads that a person doesn’t take.
Robert Frost’s poetic masterpiece is arguably the most infamously misunderstood poem as of yet.
Marrying elements of form and content, arresting artistic phraseology and metaphors, the poem
is mostly read without being understood. The archetypal conundrum is the primary attraction of
the poem, readers instantly relate to their personal experiences.

Forks and woods are used as metaphorical devices relating to decisions and crises. Similar forks
are representative of an everlasting struggle against fate and free will. Since humans are free to
select as per their will, their fate is unknown to them.

‘The Road Not Taken’ actually steers clear of advising on selecting a definitive path. Frost’s take on
this is slightly complicated. The grassy roads and yellow woods represent the present as the
individual views from a future perspective. This self-realization is pathetic and ironic in itself.
The future self will regret first his decision about taking the road less traveled on. In hindsight,
his regret is everlasting in this case.

In the poem, the individual arrives at a critical juncture in his life, arriving at crossroads at last
near “a yellow wood.” As per him, the paths are equally well-traversed and yield anonymous

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outcomes. The individual comforts with a thought about returning, be it if his path is unsuitable
for him, yet in hindsight, he’s aware of the futility of such thought. Since his current path will
bring upon separate paths in itself, disallowing any consequent reversal. The individual
concludes on a melancholic note of how different circumstances and outcomes would have been,
had it been the “other” path.

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CLASS NOTES:

The topic is the celebration of individualism. Lots of music during the poem. Not a flourishing
poem of rhetorical resources. Alliterations are important (line 8). Lamenting poem in some parts,
but in others there is a tone of resignation; cause the decision is already made. In line 13, the
poet is pointing to the old-fashioned interjection (Oh!) as the classic poetry, the poet uses this
element to be more dramatic. Feeling of lament and sorrow: it marks a change in the tone.

There is a lot of ‘’I’’ -individualism-. There are verbs of ambivalence, doubts… The last stanza is in
future tenses, he is thinking about the consequences of the decision. The tone is anxious (line
16). At the very end, he looks more convinced about the decision. IMPORTANT FEELINGS:
acceptance and resignation. There is no rational reason for doing this. Maybe he is talking to his
future ‘’I’’, his grandchildren, people of his family… He talks about his experience to other
generations.

Almost perfect round structure. (Line 18) there is an emphasis on the ‘’I’’. Focusing the attention
on it. He stops talking to breath, this is a pause. You should stop reading the poem at that
moment. INDIVIDUALISTIC DECISION (his own responsibility).

The last two lines (19-20) are the conclusion. Affirmation of his own voice, he is taking the most
unchosen/unknown, but it is the most difficult. There is the difference, he chose that, maybe it
is not the right answer; but his own answer. There is no correct answer. JUST HIS OWN
DECISION.

Rhyme scheme:

ABAAB CDCCD EFEEF GHGGH (consonant/full rhyme — the poem is musical). The poem
consists of four stanzas of five lines each (quintains). The rhythm scheme mixes iambic
pentameter and iambic tetrameter, depending on some lines. First syllable unstressed, second
stressed.

Structure:

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First part (1st stanza): presentation of the dilemma — intro of the poem. Second part ( 2nd and
3rd stanza): Body of the poem, unfolding pros and cons (why choose this path and not the
other?). Third part (4th stanza): conclusion. Close ending. The poem is almost circular, as the first
line is repeated in the last stanza.

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Title:

The title is a metaphor: he is talking about decisions, or even two ways of living. Some
researchers believe that the two roads refer to two ways of writing (follow his own style or the
popular modernist style). The poem is understood as a thought we all have. He talks about the
road not taken because it is unknown, enigmatic, a mystery. The focus is on the decision you
didn’t make, rather than on the one you take.

Analysis:

The first stanza is very visual. Rural language. ‘Yellow wood’ — autumn. Time of change is
associated with a feeling of melancholy.

- Anaphora: repetition of ‘and’ in the second, third and fourth lines. The anaphora is used to
introduce the idea of addition (of elements). Attempt to justify the reason for his decisions.

- Metaphor: The entirety of "The Road Not Taken" is an extended metaphor in which the two
roads that diverge symbolize life's many choices. In much the same way that people are generally
unable to see what the future holds, the speaker is unable to see what lies ahead on each path.

- Assonance: There is a repetition of the 'o' sound in the words 'roads' and 'yellow'.

- Enjambment: Lines 3, 4, and 5 have a continuous flow with any punctuation mark.

- Personification: The road here is personified as wanting humans to travel down its path.

- Simile: Both the roads have been compared to each other using the words 'as just as fair'.

THE MENDING WALL

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Something there is that doesn't love a wall, (Line 1)

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, (Line 9)

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall: (Line 23)

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. (Line 26)

He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder (line 28)

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If I could put a notion in his head: (line 29)

‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it (line 30)

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. (line 31)

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

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What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall, (Line 35)

That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,

But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

Summary:

‘Mending Wall’ by Robert Frost explores the nature of human relationships. The speaker suggests
there are two types of people, those who want walls and those who don’t. In modern literature, it
is considered as one of the most analyzed and anthologized poems. In the poem, the poet is a
New England farmer, who walks along with his neighbor in the spring season to repair the stone
wall that falls between their two farms. As they start mending the wall, the narrator asks his
neighbor why we need a wall. The poet says that there is something that doesn’t love a wall, but
his neighbor says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

‘Mending Wall’ principally analyzes the nature of human relationships. When you read ‘Mending
Wall’ it feels like peeling off an onion. The reader analyzes, philosophizes and dives deep to
search for a definite conclusion that he is unable to find. Yet the quest is more thrilling and

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rewarding as compared to the Holy Grail itself. The reader understands life in a new way and
challenges all definitions.

At the very outset, the poem takes you to the nature of things. Therefore, the narrator says
something does exist in nature that does not want a wall. He says man makes many walls, but

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they all get damaged and destroyed either by nature or by the hunters who search for rabbits for
their hungry dogs. Hence, as soon as the spring season starts, he (narrator), with his neighbor,
sets out to repair the wall that keeps their properties separated. Though the narrator comes
together with his neighbor to repair the wall, he regards it an act of stupidity. He believes that in
fact both of them don’t need a wall. He asks why there should be a wall, when his neighbor has
only pine trees and he has apples. How could his apple trees go across the border and eat his
neighbor’s pine cones? Moreover there is no chance of offending one another as they don’t also
have any cows at their homes. While the narrator tries to make his neighbor understand that
they don’t need a wall, his neighbor is a stone-headed savage, who only believes in his father’s
age-old saying that, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

CLASS NOTES:

- Cohabitation in society.
- Questioning boundaries/frontiers.
- Fear of invasion?
- Celebration of tolerance and communication.

→ THEORY OF DECONSTRUCTION

The title is a metaphor. Mending is not a typical adjective, but it implies the cooperation of
people. It is paradoxical. It is not straightforward, open to interpretation. Two people mending
the wall!!! The wall is the main metaphor of the whole poem. The 2 neighbors are physically
building the wall, but it is something more.

(Line 1) It is presenting the tone of the poem. Nature is that ‘’something that doesn’t love a wall’’
because it is not naturally made; but humanity did. It is not inherited in nature. A lot of rural
languages. The material of the wall is stone. Another metaphor; it implies an obstacle and
something really hard. It is strong, cold, and thick. It is very difficult to destroy.

(Line 9) The wall is not perfect because there are gaps. There are small gaps and the rabbits are
going that way to cross the wall. Metaphorically speaking, nature is making its own way. Animals
and nature would find their own path; not a perfect wall at all.

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IMPORTANT PART: There is a dialogue between the neighbors. They are creating a giant
separation but they talk to each other. The suggestion of the author is that the only solution to
all problems is dialogue, instead of creating walls.

IMPORTANT PART: (lines 23-26) there is the reason why we do not need the wall. The ‘’:’’ inserts a

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reason; an author’s mark. The reason is that they are not competing themselves. In literary
speaking, it is a personification. This is to emphasize the importance of nature. ‘’My apple trees
will never…’’ they do not need a wall; because there would not be problems between them.

The answer is that he does not agree ‘’Good fences make good neighbors’’ because to make good
relations you have to establish a boundary, you could be attacked. (Lines 28-29) Robert Frost is
philosophical and reflective because it sounds like an American stereotype. We do not need
anything in order to be protected.

(Lines 30-31) There are no animals really, so there is no rational need. He wants to be rational,
but the neighbors are not. They are based on fear and tradition. He is not basing his decisions on
reality, only on presumptions. When you have animals, you need a boundary because of an
economic reason; maybe if we have animals, we can sell them and earn money.

LAST PART (MOST IMPORTANT ONE-CONCLUSION): (Lines 35-up to the final) At the end,
Robert Frost is categorical. Nature wants that wall to be destroyed. There are lots of breaks
(enjambments) in order to make pauses: they break the syntax.

‘’I see him there…’’ - The final image of the neighbor is that he has a strong mind, old thought, a
prehistoric mind. Depiction of the image of the neighbor (a savage person). Quite critical words.
But he is very respectful.

‘’He moves in darkness’’ - It is connected to the old mentality, man of the caves… Not a person
after the enlightenment. It is a metaphor.

‘’He will not go behind…’’ until ‘’He says again…’’ LAST THREE LINES - Reaffirmation of the need
for boundaries. This thought is based on traditional values. America was very much in
confrontation with changes. The poem is a celebration for property (my space, my land, my
territory…).

→ Robert Frost is brave, he is in some poems very traditional, but this poem is a critique to
America; as to how it behaves. They feel superior because of their properties.

IMPORTANT METAPHORS TOGETHER: Darkness, stone and savage (semantic field associating all
those things).

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Topic:

The poem demonstrates how good fences create good neighbors, and how people can preserve
their long-lasting relations with neighbors by founding such walls. The main topics are:

- Individual boundaries.
- National boundaries.
- Doubts about his creative process (this part is linked to the creative process of Robert
Frost). That is, not being radical, no right answer. He does not want to be labeled, as he
believes in tolerance.

Rhyme scheme and structure:

Blank verse is the baseline meter of this poem. There are no stanza breaks nor rhyming patterns.
The vocabulary is simple, short and conversational words → musical pattern. There is no rhyme
pattern: some lines rhyme, but it is coincidental. Not a fixed rhyme scheme. All the length lines
are different. It is written in free/blank verse. There is no stanza division. The poem is a
narrative one: it looks like a narration. Even if the layout is structured in verses, it is a narrative
poem.

There are several repetitions of words; it makes it a musical poem → Short words/mono and
double syllable words. Repetition of ‘’Something there is that doesn’t love a wall’’. It is not full, but
the idea is starting and ending at the same time; almost a circular structure regards the content.
Same with ‘’Good fences make good neighbors’’.

Rhetorical devices:

- Personification: the poet personifies his apple trees as he says that these apple trees will
never cross their limits and eat his neighbor’s pines. He also personifies “fences” by
saying that “Good fences make good neighbors.” Making relationships is a human quality.
- Apostrophe: the speaker uses apostrophe in line nineteenth when he and his neighbor
say that “Stay where you are unless our backs are turned.” Here, they tell the stones to
stay balanced.
- Enjambment: “And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

- Metaphor: The speaker in the poem compares the shape of the stones to the shape of
bread and ball. He says, “, “And some are loaves and some so nearly balls.”

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- Simile: the poet uses simile when he compares his neighbor to a “savage” from the
primitive age. He makes this comparison by using “like.”

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2.2. MAYA ANGELOU

Poet and novelist Maya Angelou—born Marguerite Johnson—is born in St. Louis, Missouri. Her
parents divorced when she was three, and she and her brother went to live with their
grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. When she was eight, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend.
When she revealed what happened, her uncles kicked the culprit to death. Frightened by the
power of her own tongue, Angelou chose not to speak for the next five years.

From this quiet beginning emerged a young woman who sang, danced, and recorded poetry.
However, her plans were put on hold when she had a son at age 16. She moved to San Diego,
worked as a nightclub waitress, tangled with drugs and prostitution and danced in a strip club.
Ironically, the strip club saved her career: She was discovered there by a theater group. In 1959,
she moved to New York, became friends with prominent Harlem writers, and got involved with
the civil rights movement. After leaving her boyfriend, she headed to Ghana, where a car
accident severely injured her son. While caring for him in Ghana, she took a job at the African
Review, where she stayed for several years. Her writing and personal development flourished
under the African cultural renaissance that was taking place.

As a civil rights activist, Angelou worked for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. I Know
Why the Caged Bird Sings is the first of Angelou’s six autobiographies. It is widely taught in
schools, though it has faced controversy over its portrayal of race, sexual abuse and violence.
Angelou’s use of fiction-writing techniques like dialogue and plot in her autobiographies was
innovative for its time and helped, in part, to complicate the genre’s relationship with truth and
memory. Angelou was also a prolific and widely-read poet, and her poetry has often been lauded
more for its depictions of Black beauty, the strength of women, and the human spirit.

I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS (NOVEL)

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is an autobiography in which American author Maya Angelou
describes her early years. Being a black woman, Angelou had to face serious oppression and
discrimination by American society. In this presentation, we will focus on how her race
influenced her life and her experiences and how she gradually became aware of the condition

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she was in as a black woman. Additionally, we will also comment briefly how her oppression as a
black person is worsened by the subjugation she faced for being a woman. It is made evident
throughout the book that Maya is very aware of her position in the world as a black woman. She
understands since she is very little that, as unfair as it sounds, her race is the barrier that is
preventing her from reaching freedom.

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When Maya was three years old, she was sent to stay with her paternal grandmother in Stamps,
Arkansas. However, being black in the South became a great obstacle to build social and financial
bonds. She starts to realize that her skin color determines how she will be treated. She also
begins to understand that being beautiful is tied to being white. For instance, one of her earliest
memories is when her grandmother (or Momma, which is how she calls her) makes her a special
dress for Easter. She recalls that at that moment she wished she would ‘look like one of the sweet
little white girls who were everybody’s dream of what was right’, as she expresses in the book.
Thus, we can see that black people were not considered to be capable of being attractive or
beautiful, and this thought was already very ingrained in Maya.
Maya starts reading literature, especially many black authors and Shakespeare. Although her
Momma approves of her interest in black authors, she doesn’t like Shakespeare that much.
Maya’s grandmother, who owned the most important store in the Negro community of the town,
was often mocked by white customers, even children. This apparently made her resent white
people in general, and thus disliked that her granddaughter enjoyed reading Shakespeare, a
white author. However, Angelou also mentions that her grandmother forced her and her brother
to conform to racist codes of behavior. She states in the book that Momma ‘didn’t cotton to the
idea that whitefolks could be talked to at all [...] and certainly they couldn’t be spoken to
insolently. In fact, even in their absence they could not be spoken of too harshly’. This could
actually be considered an example of internalized racism, which can be defined as ‘a systemic
oppression in reaction to racism that has a life of its own’. In other words, just as there is a
system in place that reinforces the power and expands the privilege of white people, there is a
system in place that actively discourages and undermines the power of people and communities
of color and mires them in their own oppression’. In other words, even if Angelou’s grandmother
resents white people, she still believes that black people are somewhat inferior to white people
and instills this idea on her grandchildren by teaching them to conform to racist standards.

However, and in spite of all the difficulties she faces during her her life, the novel ends with a
glimmer of hope: she is able to get a job as a streetcar driver, being the first black woman to do
so, and even though she gets pregnant accidentally, she finds support in her family and is able to
continue her life.

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CAGED BIRD (POEM)

A free bird leaps

on the back of the wind

and floats downstream

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till the current ends

and dips his wing

in the orange sun rays

and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks

down his narrow cage

can seldom see through

his bars of rage

his wings are clipped and

his feet are tied

so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings

with a fearful trill

of things unknown

but longed for still

and his tune is heard

on the distant hill

for the caged bird

sings of freedom.

The free bird thinks of another breeze

and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees

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and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn

and he names the sky his own.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams

his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream

his wings are clipped and his feet are tied

so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings

with a fearful trill

of things unknown

but longed for still

and his tune is heard

on the distant hill

for the caged bird

sings of freedom.

Summary:

The poem illustrates the contrast between the lives of two different birds: one lives in nature
and the other caged. Thanks to this metaphor, Angelou depicts a critical proposal in which
oppression and discrimination occupy a central position in the lives of black people in America.
As the main character of the poem, the bird embodies the limited experience of being locked in a
cage. It represents the desire of achieving freedom, that is why the caged bird starts singing. This
extended metaphor serves as a means to divulge the great oppression suffered by the Black
Community. The poem offers the experience of being enslaved and dominated. For this, the
caged bird’s feelings symbolize Black Community’s pain and suffering.

In lines 10 to 11, the poem states that the bird ‘’can seldom see through his bars of rage’’, that is,
the bird is not just limited to not seeing anything because of the cage bars, but he is upset by the
cage’s conditions; the bird is blind by the rage. Using this example, the poem exemplifies how
oppression changes your own way of life and yourself in equal parts.

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(Line 13) The singing of the bird is an elementary figure in the poem. His song is full of the hope
of freedom, even if it comes from a sad and desperate situation to be rescued. Angelou tries to
provide historical view of this scene: in the past, those who were against the liberation of the
slaves assured that the dances and songs of the black community were clear examples that they

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were in agreement with their lifestyles. However, they did not know that using music was a way
to relieve pain.

In relation to the confrontation between freedom and captivity, the poem explores the
contradictory feelings which are experienced by two birds. As the free bird lives its life in
absolute independence, he has never stopped to think about freedom. The bird just lives and
does what he just wants to do. However, the caged bird spends all of its time thinking about the
fantasy of being free. The poem argues that freedom should be a natural right for living beings.
Parallel, the same happens to Black people in the United States. They have been historically
oppressed for centuries, suffering the cruelty of racism and accepting that this was their reality.

Also, another effect of being caged is the inability to escape. Angelou makes use of this idea to
show how powerful marginalization can be. While the bird wants to live in nature, he wouldn't be
able to get out of his cage. This is due to the fact of having been stagnant for a lifetime. It is like
riding a bicycle without having been taught before. For instance, this helps reinforce the idea of
oppressive classes: the bird is not able to survive outside the cage, so they just keep it safe inside
it.

Angelou presents freedom as a deep desire that dwells within human beings naturally and that
does not need anything to exist; in other words, it is innate. Considering the bird represents
black people, we can assume that it has always lived in captivity and has not experienced life in
any other way or form. However, it still longs for freedom. The poem expresses this directly: “The
caged bird sings with a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for still”. The bird doesn’t know
first-hand what freedom means or what it entails, but it wants it: freedom is a biological need.

The poem also expresses the resilience black people have shown in their efforts to achieve
freedom and equality: even though they have known nothing but slavery and discrimination, they
do not cease to fight for their rights. The author manages to show this resilience to the reader by
repeating the third stanza in the sixth one: “The caged bird sings with fearful trill of things
unknown but longed for still and his tune is heard on the distant hill for the caged bird sings of

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freedom.” The bird keeps singing and it is heard from afar. In other words, black people do not
stop using their voices to fight, and they are eventually being heard.

CLASS NOTES: Portrayal of the race, sexual and violence. Autobiographical: raped by her
mother’s boyfriend when she was 7 years old, then she turned mute for 5 years. Relationship with

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Mr. Flowers: an educated Afro American man. Fiction-writing techniques: dialogues, plot,
memory and truth. Traces of African-American oral traditions like slaves and work songs.
Individual responses to hardship, oppression and loss.

Rhetorical devices:

- Metaphor: the whole poem is an extended metaphor for the oppression faced by
marginalized communities (most specifically, by Black people in the United States).
- Allusion: the free bird believes its freedom gives it permission to claim ownership over
something that does not belong to it. This idea (which is repeated later in the poem) is
likely an allusion to white colonialism and the American concept of Manifest Destiny, in
which white European and American colonizers felt free to take control over land that
belonged to others.
- Consonance: Note the many /b/, /w/, and /d/ sounds that dominate the stanza, in
words like "bird," "back," "wind," "wing," "dips," and "dares."

3. PROSE

3.1. JOHN DOS PASSOS (1896-1970)

John Dos Passos was born in Chicago of well-to-do Portuguese American parents. He was an
expatriate (member of the Lost Generation).

Dos Passos was characterized for being politically active, especially during the 20s and 30s. In
1926 he joined the executive board of the Communist journal The New Masses. For the next eight
years he took part in Communist activities but never joined the party: he traveled to the Soviet
Union. He wanted to know what these new political ideas were about.

In 1934 the Communists broke up a Socialist rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden; this
event persuaded Dos Passos that the Communists were more interested in power than social

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justice. Soon after he severed his Communist ties. Dos Passos experienced an evolution: he went
from social radicalism to social conservatism (leaving communist ideas behind).

In terms of his literary production, it should be highlighted the following works:

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- Manhattan Transfer: a fragmented collection of short stories about the roaring twenties.
- USA, trilogy: 42nd Parallel, 1919, The Big Money. Its subject is 20th c. America from coast
to coast and at every social level; its portrayal is savagely satirical. At that point, Dos
Passos believed that capitalism led to a division between rich and poor that could be only
remedied by social change.

The main topics he dealt with were:

1. 20th c. American portrayal of society: biographies of big names in America (for instance,
Henry Ford).
2. Protest literature: to criticize the effects of capitalism especially on working classes. He
does it without any fear.
3. Corruption of individuals.
4. Capitalism was a division between rich and poor asking for social change.

Dealing with the form of his works, it is characterized by the use of different techniques:

· Experimental typography and layout.

· Blending fiction/non-fiction: Dos Passos alternated with other kind of material - notably the
‘’Newsreel’’ sections, in which newspaper excerpts and headlines, snippets from popular songs,
and quotations from speeches and documents were brought together in an imitation of the
weekly feature one saw at the movie house before television took over visual newcasting: the
‘’Camera Eye’’ sections, which are impressionistic, emotional, lyrical fragments and biographies of
American notables.

· A morphological phenomenon: blending words such as ‘workingclass’.

· Cinema strategies and techniques.

· Newspaper extracts, trying to be as contemporary as possible. Enhancing the importance of


media.

· Collages, fragments.

· Stream of consciousness technique.

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FROM THE BIG MONEY

The book contains the life stories of several characters, interspersing them with newspaper
clippings, popular songs, and the biographies of famous Americans. The novel begins with the
character Charley Anderson. Charley is an ace fighter pilot who has just returned home from
World War I. Charley is handsome, and popular with young women. He maintains relationships
with several girls, but is reluctant to marry any of them. After his mother dies and leaves him
some money in her will, Charley invests it in an aviation project.

Charley gets several engineering jobs and begins to make a name for himself in the commercial
aviation world. He also maintains an active social life, which leads to him drinking too much and
going into debt. Eventually, he takes a lucrative job in Detroit that also allows him to work on his
personal aviation project. He marries Gladys Wheatley, but their relationship quickly cools.

While testing a prototype plane, Charley crashes. His co-pilot is killed and Charley is badly
injured. The copilot’s widow sues the company, and Charley goes on vacation to escape his
problems. He meets a woman named Margo Dowling and begins an affair with her. He soon
receives word that his wife is divorcing him.

Charley continues to see Margo casually. He is deep in debt and conceives of an insider trading
scheme with a senator friend of his. After a night of drinking, Charley picks up a girl and takes
her for a drive. Their car stalls on the train tracks and they are hit by a train. Charley ends up in
the hospital, where he is visited by Margo who asks him for money, and by his brother Jim who
asks for power of attorney.

The second major character in the novel is Mary Finch, a young woman from a wealthy family.
Mary moves around a lot in her childhood, and eventually settles at Vassar University where she
finds many of the other students frivolous and naïve. Mary and her roommate Ada spend their
summers doing charity work.

Eventually, Mary is forced to leave school to take care of her sick father. After her father dies, she
begins working and becomes active in social movements. She begins dating George Barrow and
starts to do volunteer organizing for his socialist organization. Mary gets pregnant and is worried
that George will pressure her to marry him. She is surprised when George insists she get an
abortion instead.

Mary continues to bounce around socialist organizations. She breaks up with George and begins
seeing a famous organizer named Ben Compton. Mary wants him to propose, but Ben tells her he
doesn’t want to get married. However, while Mary is traveling, Ben meets a rich young woman

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and marries her. Mary continues to do social work, even at the expense of all her personal
relationships.

The final major character is Margo Dowling, who also appears in Charley’s chapters. Margo
comes from a poor family and has an alcoholic father. Her struggling mother leaves Margo’s

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father and begins to date a vaudeville actor, Frank Mandeville. Frank teaches Margo to sing and
dance, and she joins the act. When she is a teenager, Frank begins to sexually assault her.

Margo falls in love with a musician named Tony, and the two of them move to Havana. However,
the couple is unhappy and frequently fights. Margo gives birth to a child who dies soon
afterward. With her mother’s help, she returns to the United States. She gets work as a Zeigfield
Follies dancer and begins to date the son of a millionaire, Tad Whittlesea, and a married casting
director, Jerry Herman. Tad takes her on a vacation, where Margo meets Tony. She takes care of
him when he is sick from drinking too much, and Tony repays her by stealing her money and
jewelry.

Margo bounces between men, dumping them quickly when they no longer have money to give
her. She becomes close to Charley, but has to leave him when his company goes out of business.
She learns of his death in the hospital following his car accident.

After moving from New York to Miami, Margo invests in real estate and makes considerable
money. She takes care of her mother and Tony, who by this point is very sick from alcoholism.
Her stage career as a singer nets her steady work. At the end of her section of the novel, Margo,
Tony and Margo’s mother set off for Hollywood so Margo can become a movie star.

Analysis:

The three novels of the trilogy are critical documents and portraits of the history and life of the
American nation during the first three decades of the 20th century. The Big Money is set in the
1920s. It portrays a society that is economically cohesive, socially divisive, emotionally and
personally destructive. The emotional collapse of the main characters and the economic wasting
of the system run parallel.

The characters are ordinary citizens who represent the American society of that time, they are
average Americans. Their individual stories are “tales of types”. In The Big Money these people are
ex-war aces, movie stars, promoters from Wall Street, social workers, reformers, Communist
leaders, United States Senators. They are all influenced by the kind of living that demands the
quick reward and by the millions that are made today and lost tomorrow.

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3.2. F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (1896-1940)

In the 1920s and 1930s F. Scott Fitzgerald was equally famous as a writer and as a celebrity
author whose lifestyle seemed to symbolize the two decades; in the 1920s he stood for all-night
partying, drinking, and the pursuit of pleasure, while in the 1930s he stood for the gloomy

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aftermath of excess. Babylon Revisited, written immediately after the stock market crash, is
simultaneously a personal and a national story.

Fitzgerald was born in a middle-class neighborhood in Minnesota. He was an expatriate (member


of the Lost Generation): he moved to London in 1924. During this time Fitzgerald published his
best- known and most successful novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), and another book of short
stories, All the Sad Young Men (1926).

The Great Gatsby tells the story of a self- made young man whose dream of success, personified
in a rich and beautiful young woman named Daisy, turns out to be a fantasy in every sense: Daisy
belongs to a corrupt society, Gatsby corrupts himself in the quest for her, and above all, the rich
have no intention of sharing their privileges. The novel is narrated from the point of view of Nick
Carraway, an onlooker who is both moved and repelled by the tale he tells and whose responses
form a sort of subplot: this experiment in narrative point of view was widely imitated.

The Great Gatsby showed some autobiographical traces as well as the corruption of the American
Dream. It was also a portrayal of the roaring twenties. Its structure is compact; the style
dazzling; and its images of automobiles, parties, and garbage heaps seem to capture the
contradictions of a consumer society.

It also depicted the differences and continuous fight between the New Rich and the Old Rich.
Old Riches were discriminative with the New Rich but not because of a question of money: it was
a question of social status. It showed the hollowness and artificiality of the Upper class and its
emptiness in terms of general values. The artificiality of this upper-class is highly criticized in
the novel.

Fitzgerald wrote dozens of short stories during the twenties (Jazz Age). Despite the pace at
which he worked, the Fitzgeralds could not get out of debt. The couple was the symbol of
excesses. The author experienced a turbulent life (economic problems, parties, alcohol). He
became an alcoholic, and therefore he needed to spend periods of his life in sanatoriums.

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THE GREAT GATSBY

Set in Jazz Age New York, it tells the tragic story of Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire, and his
pursuit of Daisy Buchanan, a wealthy young woman whom he loved in his youth. The book is
narrated by Nick Carraway, who recounts the events of the summer of 1922, after he takes a

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house in the fictional village of West Egg on Long Island. There he lives among the newly rich,
while across the water, in the more refined village of East Egg, live his cousin Daisy and her
brutish wealthy husband, Tom Buchanan. As the summer progresses, Nick is finally invited to
attend one of the dazzling parties held by Jay Gatsby, his neighbor.

At Gatsby’s request, Nick invites Daisy to his house, where she and Gatsby meet again and renew
their relationship. Tom soon becomes aware of the affair and confronts Gatsby at the Plaza
Hotel. Daisy tries to calm them down, but Gatsby insists that he and Daisy have always been in
love and that she has never loved Tom. As the fight escalates, Tom reveals what he had learned
from an investigation into Gatsby’s affairs—that he had earned his money by selling illegal
alcohol. Gatsby tries to deny it, but Daisy has lost her resolve to leave her husband, and Gatsby’s
cause seems hopeless. Gatsby and Daisy leave together in Gatsby’s car, with Daisy driving.

On the road she hits and kills Myrtle Wilson, Tom’s mistress, though her identity is unknown to
Daisy, who knew only that Tom was having an affair. Terrified, Daisy continues driving, but the
car is seen by witnesses. The next afternoon George Wilson, Myrtle’s widower, arrives in East
Egg, where Tom tells him that it was Gatsby who killed his wife. Wilson goes to Gatsby’s house,
where he shoots Gatsby and then himself. Afterward the Buchanans leave Long Island, and Nick
arranges Gatsby’s funeral.

Themes:

- The Decline of the American Dream in the 1920s. The main theme of the novel, however,
encompasses a much larger, less romantic scope. Though all of its action takes place over
a mere few months during the summer of 1922 and is set in a circumscribed geographical
area in the vicinity of Long Island, New York, The Great Gatsby is a highly symbolic
meditation on 1920s America as a whole, in particular the disintegration of the American
dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess.

Fitzgerald portrays the 1920s as an era of decayed social and moral values, evidenced in
its overarching cynicism, greed, and empty pursuit of pleasure. Nick and Gatsby, both of
whom fought in World War I, exhibit the newfound cosmopolitanism and cynicism that
resulted from the war. The various social climbers and ambitious speculators who attend
Gatsby’s parties evidence the greedy scramble for wealth.

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In Nick’s mind, the ability to create meaningful symbols constitutes a central component
of the American dream, as early Americans invested their new nation with their own
ideals and values. Nick compares the green bulk of America rising from the ocean to the
green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.

- The Hollowness of the Upper Class. One of the major topics explored in The Great
Gatsby is the sociology of wealth, specifically, how the newly minted millionaires of the
1920s differ from and relate to the old aristocracy of the country’s richest families. In the
novel, West Egg and its denizens represent the newly rich, while East Egg and its
denizens, especially Daisy and Tom, represent the old aristocracy.

- Class. In the monied world of The Great Gatsby, class influences all aspects of life, and
especially love. At the end of the book, class dynamics dictate which marriage survives
(Tom and Daisy), which one is destroyed (George and Myrtle), and which one will never
come to be (Gatsby and Daisy). Only the most affluent couple pulls through the events
that conclude the book.

- The American Dream. The American Dream refers to a shared set of ideals that guide the
spirit of the United States. These shared ideals include a notion of freedom that ensures
all Americans the possibility of upward social mobility, as long as they work for it. Every
character in The Great Gatsby draws inspiration from the American Dream’s promise of
wealth and prosperity. At the same time, the novel itself critiques the notion of the
American Dream. Readers may end the novel wondering if the American Dream is
actually attainable at all. Gatsby suffers the most from the promise of social mobility
inherent to the American Dream. He spends his life believing that if he makes enough
money and acquires enough possessions, he can transcend his lower-class birth and
become equal to Daisy and Tom. However, even though Gatsby succeeds in acquiring
wealth, he is never accepted by the upper class. Gatsby’s failure to attain the American
Dream suggests the Dream is both an unattainable and unwise goal.

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3.3. WILLIAM FAULKNER (1897-1962)

William Faulkner was a native Mississippian. After drifting from one job to another, he started to
write poetry that was a melange of Shakespearean, pastoral, Victorian, and Edwardian modes,
with an overlay of French symbolism, publishing The Marble Faun in 1924. The next year, he went

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to New Orleans where, for the first time, he met and mingled with literary people, including
Sherwood Anderson, who encouraged him to develop his own style, to concentrate on prose, and
to use his region for material. He published his first novel, Soldier’s Pay, in 1926.

Generally, topics such as childhood, families, sex, race, obsessions, time, the past, his native
South, and the modern world can be found in Faulkner’s novels. He invented voices for
characters ranging from sages to children, criminals, the insane, even the dead – sometimes all
within one book. He developed, beyond this ventriloquism, his own unmistakable narrative
voice: urgent, intense, highly rhetorical. He experimented with narrative chronology, and with
techniques for representing mind and memory through the stream of consciousness: how the
mind of the human being works is one of his main fascinations. Faulkner showed different layers
of the subconscious: from the most rational to the most profound part of the subconscious. He
also invented an entire southern county and wrote its history.

Faulkner learned about the experimental writing of James Joyce’s Ulysses or Proust’s In the
Search of Time and the ideas of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis and Bakhtin (sociolect, ‘words
are just words’: this statement presents one of the main discussions in As I Lay Dying. For
Faulkner is very arbitrary: a word is not enough to express a thought).

Faulkner’s second novel was a satire on New Orleans intellectuals called Mosquitos (1927). His
more typical subject matter emerged with his rejected novel Flags in the Dust, whose shortened
version appeared in 1929 as Sartoris. In this work, Faulkner focused on the interconnections
between a prominent southern family and the local community: the Sartoris family as well as
many other characters appeared in later works, and the region, renamed Yoknapatawpha County,
was to become the locale Faulkner’s imaginative world.

The social and historical emphasis in Sartoris was not directly followed up in the works Faulkner
wrote next. The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930) were dramatically
experimental attempts to articulate the inexpressible aspects of individual psychology.

The structure of As I Lay Dying is organized around the loss of a beloved woman. The
precipitating event in the novel is the death of a mother. The story moves forward in
chronological time as the “poor white” Bundren family takes her body to the town of Jefferson

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for burial. Its narration is divided into fifty-nine sections of interior monologue by fifteen
characters, each with a different perception of the action and a different way of relating to
reality. The family’s adventures and misadventures on the road are comic, tragic, grotesque,
absurd, and deeply moving.

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The main topics that Faulkner deals with in As I Lay Dying are the following:

- Existence and Identity.


- Death: how the characters approach death.
- Mind versus words: language as a barrier to express the inner subconscious.

AS I LAY DYING

Summary:

It is the story of the death of Addie Bundren and her poor, rural family's quest and
motivations—noble or selfish—to honor her wish to be buried in her hometown of Jefferson,
Mississippi.

As I Lay Dying is told in individual sections, so that the narration of the story shifts from one
character to another. While most sections are narrated by members of the Bundren family, the
few that are told by neighbors and other observers offer a glimpse of the family from an
outsider's perspective. Each narrator — family members and outsiders alike — is believable but at
the same time unreliable, forcing readers to decide for themselves what is reality and what is
not.

As the novel begins, Addie Bundren lays dying in her bedroom while her son Cash builds her
coffin. Addie's ineffectual husband, Anse, is arranging to have her buried in Jefferson, a town
forty miles away, because Addie has requested this last wish. Anse's motivating reason to go to
Jefferson, however, is to get fitted for new teeth and, if possible, find a new wife. Two other sons,
Darl and Jewel, struggle both with their mother's death and their own mental health. Darl is
perceptive and insightful but taunts others mercilessly, while Jewel knows how to express love
and affection only through violence, because his mother sought violence when she conceived
him during an affair with a preacher.

Daughter Dewey Dell, a simple young woman who is incapable of forming deep, logically
sequenced thoughts, is pregnant and in a hurry to get to Jefferson for an abortion. The youngest
child in the Bundren family, Vardaman, is either much younger than his siblings or is mentally

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retarded; throughout the novel, he confuses his mother with the fish he catches on the day she
dies.

To adhere to Addie's wishes, the family travels the distance to Jefferson during a hot, wet spell in
Mississippi, and throughout the journey, Addie's body proceeds to decay, while buzzards swirl

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menacingly overhead. When they discover that a bridge has washed out, the family must find a
way to get Addie's coffin over the river, and the ensuing scenes are both tragic and comic.

When these events become too horrific for Darl and he comes to understand that his mother
needs to be buried properly, he tries to burn his mother's body and coffin in a barn, an act for
which he is declared mentally insane. His father, Anse, allows Darl to be sent to an insane asylum
because he does not want to reimburse the family for their barn, which was destroyed by the
fire. Jewel, meanwhile, saves his mother's body from the fire, just as he saved her coffin from the
swollen river, thus fulfilling his mother's prophecy that Jewel would save her.

Analysis:

The novel is structured in such a way that the author has virtually removed himself from the
story. He allows his characters to tell their own story. By using a different narrator for each
section, Faulkner accomplishes many things. First, he allows or forces the reader to participate in
the story. Second, the technique allows us to know the inner thoughts of all the characters. We
see into the mind of each character directly and must analyze what we find there. Third, we are
able to see each event from multiple perspectives.

3.4. ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899-1961)

Ernest Hemingway was born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois. He was an expatriate (member of
the Lost Generation): after marrying Hadley Richardson in 1920, he went to Paris. Supported
partly by her money and partly by his journalism, Hemingway worked at becoming a writer. He
came to know Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others in
the large community of expatriate artistic and literary Americans.

His style is characterized by the adaptation of journalistic techniques in telegraphic prose that
minimized narrator commentary and depended heavily on uncontextualized dialogue and
modern and quick rhythm. The principle of the iceberg is, in fact, one of the main techniques in
Hemingway’s production: even if the surface seems simple or basic, the inside is much more
complex.

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A Farewell to Arms, his second novel, appeared in 1929. It described a romance between an
American army officer, and a British nurse, but their idyll is shattered when she dies in
childbirth. Hemingway’s work has been much criticized for its depictions of women. However,
other female characters in his works are strong, complex figures. Overall, Hemingway identified
the rapid change in women’s status after World War I and the general blurring of sex roles that
accompanied the new sexual freedom as aspects of modernity that men were simultaneously
attracted to and found hard to deal with.

As Hemingway aged, his interest in exclusively masculine forms of self-assertion and


self-definition became more pronounced. War, hunting, and similar pursuits that he had used at
first to show men manifesting dignity in the face of certain defeat increasingly became depicted
(in his life as well as his writing) as occasions for competitive masculine display and triumph.
Soon after the publication of The Sun Also Rises (1926), his first marriage broke up; in all he was
married four times. In the 1930s and 1940s he adopted the lifestyle of a celebrity. Some of his
best-known work from these years, such as The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936), treats the theme of
the successful writer losing his talent in an atmosphere of success, adulation, and wealth.

A political loner distrustful of all ideological abstractions, Hemingway was nevertheless drawn
into antifascist politics by the Spanish Civil War. In To Have and Have Not (1937), the earliest of
his political novels, the good characters are working-class people and the antagonists are idle
rich. For Whom the Bell Tolls draws on Hemingway’s experiences in Spain as a war
correspondent, celebrating both the peasant antifascists and the Americans who fought on their
behalf. His one play, The Fifth Column (1938) specifically blames the communists for betraying the
cause.

After WWII ended, he continued his travels and was badly hurt in Africa in January 1954 in the
crash of a small plane. He had already published his allegorical fable The Old Man and the Sea
(1952), and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and was central to his winning the Nobel Prize of
Literature in 1954. However, the plane crash had damaged his mental and physical health, and he
never fully recovered. Subject increasingly to depression and an incapacitating paranoia, he was
hospitalized several times before killing himself in 1961.

Ernest Hemingway as an autobiographic writer whose main topics were: war, politics, hunting,
sex and sex roles, psychological meaning of masculinity, and loss of talent by the writer.

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THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO

The main character in The Snows of Kilimanjaro is a man named Harry. He has gone to Africa on
safari where he is punctured by a thorn and develops an infection. The infection progresses
rapidly and he advances towards a slow death. This realization gives him time for introspection

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about his life, work, and the people closest to him (perhaps his sickness creates hallucinations as
well).

Though he is a writer, he has been reluctant to write, and it seems that he believes some of the
finer things he has seen and realized in his life will remain uncaptured and unwritten. In the
following excerpt (quoted under the fair-use doctrine), Harry expresses some of the regret while
thinking about the woman he loves now (Helen) and the other women that he has loved in his
life.

As he approaches death, Harry seems to lapse into a dream-state where he imagines that a
rescue plane is coming to take him to the top of Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa.
Harry engages the pilot, Compton, in some playful banter and boards the plane. As they head
towards its western summit, called the "Masai "Ngaje Ngai" (the House of God), he sees a
legendary leopard. Harry realizes that the plane taking him to the mountain means his death.
"Just then the hyena stopped whimpering in the night and started to make a strange, human, almost
crying sound." Helen awakens to find that Harry has died in his sleep.

This story has very poignant, autobiographical overtones for Hemingway. The parallels to his life,
particularly during 1936, are unmistakable. And they seem to persist into his future as well,
revealing his realization of his own vulnerability and mortality. When awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 1954, he was injured and unable to attend the ceremony, so he sent a letter which
was read aloud at the event.

Analysis:

The main theme of the short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” by Ernest Hemingway is death.

- Death: Death itself is personified as a visitor who passes by Harry three times before
Harry finally succumbs. Harry's decaying leg symbolizes the slow demise of his life's best
intentions. Death illuminates reality the way it is, not the way Harry and Helen would like
it to be. Death is seen in the guise of many ordinary things—breezes, cycling policemen,
vultures, hyenas, and a presence sitting on Harry's chest and crushing him. Death's
constant presence in the world shows readers how close death is to daily life.

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- Postwar trauma and Loss: The post–World War I generation struggled to find meaning
after witnessing the horrors and chaos of conflict. Harry's memories of the war are
lyrical as well as image and impression based. He keeps the worst horrors buried inside
him; he can't talk or write about them. Harry's most vivid memories highlight people and
places he's lost. Helen has also lost close family members, and these losses define the

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changes she has made in her life. The story emphasizes the inevitability of trauma and
loss.
- Writer’s responsibility: Writing would have been a way to memorialize the people, places,
and events Harry recalls. Since he hasn't documented them, however, these memories
will die with him. As a writer he feels an event not written down is lost to the world.

His dilemma raises questions about the practice and ethics of writing. Is it more
important to recount events correctly or simply to get them down on paper? Which
stories are worth telling? What is Harry's obligation to his readers and to himself? Has
Harry destroyed his talent through "laziness," as he fears, or has he simply run out of
time? As a recorder of the human condition, Harry wonders what he owes to the people
he's observed and how to best embody and honor them.

- Memory and legacy: Harry's memories tell a larger story of World War I in Austria and
Italy—both the mundane lives of the soldiers and the horrific events of battle. They give
insight into European postwar society, particularly in Paris. His memories also speak to
the healing power and indifference of nature. Despite the boredom Harry claims he's felt
throughout his life, his memories sometimes convey thoughtfulness and gratitude.
Hemingway explores how places can come to be associated with trauma through both
individual and collective memory. Harry also recalls dramatic events in which he was
involved, when he could have changed the outcome for someone else (for better or
worse). Instead he lives with the consequences of the choices he made. Ultimately,
because Harry neglected disinfecting his scratch, Harry will die. "The Snows of
Kilimanjaro" explores which moments matter in an individual's life.

3. 5. JOHN STEINBECK

Most of John Steinbeck’s best writing is set in the region of California that he called home.
Steinbeck believed in the American promise of opportunity for all, but believed also that social
injustices and economic inequalities had put opportunity beyond reach for many. His work
merged literary modernism with literary realism, celebrated traditional rural communities along

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with social outcasts and immigrant cultures, and endorsed conservative values and radical
politics at the same time.

After graduating from Salinas High School in 1919, he began to study at Stanford University but
took time off for a variety of short-term jobs. During this period, he developed an abiding

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respect for people who worked on farms and in factories, and committed his literary abilities to
their cause.

With financial help from his father, Steinbeck spent most of 1929 writing. In 1935 he achieved
commercial success with his third novel, Tortilla Flat, a celebration of the Mexican- American
culture of the “paisanos” who lived in the Monterey hills. Steinbeck’s next novel, In Dubious Battle
(1936), contrasted the decency of striking migratory farm workers both to the cynicism of
landowners and their vigilantes, and to the equal cynicism of Communist labor union organizers
who exploit the workers’ plight for their own purposes. Sympathy for the underdog appears
again in Of Mice and Men (1937), a best-selling short novel about two itinerant ranch hands.
Inspired by the devastating 1930s drought in the southern plains states and the exodus of
thousands of farmers from their homes in the so-called Dust Bowl, he wrote Grapes of Wrath
(1939), that told the story of the Joad family, who, after losing their land in Oklahoma, migrated to
California looking for, but not finding, a better life.

After World War II, Steinbeck’s work displayed increasing hostility to American culture, whose
mass commercialization seemed to him to be destroying individual creativity: The Leader of the
People expresses his sense that American’s heroic times are past and locates value in the story’s
socially marginal characters. His most important later works are The Wayward Bus (1947), East of
Eden (1952), Sweet Thursday (1954), and Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), in which
he recounts his automobile tour of the United States. Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in 1963.

The main topics found in Steinbeck’s production are:

- Working class conditions.


- Slavery in relation to white people and the depiction of black people.
- Black and white relationships.
- Immigrant cultures.
- Loneliness.
- Rurality: a celebration of traditional rural communities. Steinbeck praises the sense of
solidarity and communion between the traditional villages. For the author, these
traditional communities must change in some of their aspects but this traditional way of
living is praised as the most authentic one. It is where the real essence of human beings

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can be shown. For him, the rural communities are much more real than like in the urban
cities. The setting is favoring the inherent nature of the human being.
- Failure of the American Dream.
- FORM: literary realism / literary modernism. A very realistic story: lots of description,
logical sequence of events.

OF MICE AND MEN

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