Contemporary Novels in a Postmodern Perspective

Read through the following paragraphs taken from Holt's Elements of Literature.  Pay special attention to the characteristics of contemporary postmodern literature that are listed.  After you read the paragraphs, you will read a summary of a contemporary novel and write about how the novel demonstrates characteristics of postmodern literature.


Contemporary Fiction:  Diversity and Vitality

One of the words most commonly used to describe contemporary American culture is postmodern, a term that, like our age, is still in the process of being defined.  Postmodernism sees contemporary culture as a change--a development or a departure--from modernism, the dominant movement in the arts from about 1890 to 1945.  In literature the great American modernists--notably Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway--forged new styles and new forms with which to express the sensibility of the early twentieth century.  Postmodern writers build with many of the tools the modernists provided, but they are constructing a body of literature that is strikingly different from that produced by the modernists.  

Perspectives in Postmodern Fiction

Postmodern writers of fiction allow for multiple meanings and multiple worlds in their works.  Realistic and literal worlds, past worlds, and dreamlike metaphorical worlds may merge, as they do in Toni Morrison's novel Beloved.  Narrators and characters may tell different versions of a story, or a story may deliberately accommodate several valid interpretations.  The postmodernist asks, "Why choose only one version?  Why limit ourselves?" 

Writers of our time often structure their works in a variety of nontraditional forms.  They do not abide by conventional rules for shaping fiction.  Donald Barthelme's story "Sentence," for example, is a nine-page tale that consists entirely of one sentence.  In Walter Abish's novel Alphabetical Africa (1974) every word in the first chapter beings with the letter a, every word in the second chapter begins with a or b, and so on through the alphabet to z and then, in reverse, all the way back to a.  

Some postmodern works are also intensely self-conscious:  They comment on themselves, criticize themselves, take themselves apart, and encourage us to put them together again.  In his novel Operation Shylock (1993), the author Philip Roth meets a character named Philip Roth and wonders which one of them is real.  In other words, postmodern literature is aware of itself as literature and encourages the reader's self-awareness as well (an example of a self-conscious postmodern point of view in a nonfiction title is Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.).  

The vitality of contemporary fiction lies in its cultural diversity, in it's enthusiasm for blending fiction with nonfiction, and in its extraordinary sense of play.  It also demonstrates a typically American ability to invigorate the old by means of the new.  

Válclav Havel, president of the Czech Republic, said this about postmodernism at Independence Hall on July 4, 1994, after receiving the Philadelphia Liberty Medal:

"There are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended.  Many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born.  It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself, while something else,, still indistinct were arising from the rubble.  

The distinguishing features of transitional periods are a mixing and blending of cultures and plurality or parallelism of intellectual and spiritual worlds.  These are periods when all consistent value systems collapse, when cultures distant in time and space are discovered or rediscovered.  New meaning is gradually born from the encounter, or the intersection, of many different elements. 

Today, this state of mind, or of the human world, is called postmodernism."

Now pick one of the contemporary texts below and read about the plot overview (and any other information on the site).  Write a 1/2 page about how the attributes of the contemporary period are reflected in the text.

Life of Pi     http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/lifeofpi/
The House on Mango Street    http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mangostreet/

Contemporary Literature and Authors

Gwendolyn Brooks

Here is one of the most famous poems written by Gwendolyn Brooks: 

THE POOL PLAYERS.
SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

To learn more about the author and the poem go to: 
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9560637     (the MP3 is on the H: drive if the webiste is taking to long to load.  Look for the title "We Real Cool")

1.  What do you notice about the structure of the poem "We Real Cool" that breaks from traditional poetry? 

To learn about a novel written by Gwendoyln Brooks to to:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6197361&ps=rs  (the MP3 is on the H: drive if the webiste is taking to long to load.  Look for the title "Maude Martha")

2.  How would you interpret the meaning of the phrase spoken by the main character Maude Martha,"if the root was sour what business did she have up there hacking at a leaf?"

3.  What characteristics does Gwendolyn Brooks demonstrate in her literature that show she is a contemporary writer? 


Julia Alvarez

You have already read "Daughter of Invention," by Julia Alvarez.  You can learn more about a nonfictional book she wrote about the Hispanic tradition of the Quinceañera here:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12523050   (the MP3 is on the H: drive if the webiste is taking to long to load.  Look for the title "Julia Alvarez")

4.  Alvarez not only discusses the traditions associated with the celebration of the 15th birthday, but also other social/cultural issues.  What issues about society, cuture, and family does Julia Alvarez confront in her book?

Learn about how Julia Alvarez feels about her native culture and her constructed "American" culture: 
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1150050  (The MP3 is on the H: drive.  Look for the title "Hispanic Heritage.")

5.  Alvarez makes an interesting statement about the type of mentality that causes events like 9/11.  Explain her statement. 

6.  Explain the quote that the interviewer paraphrased: "You consider yourself Dominican-hyphen-American and that as a writer you find that most of the exciting things happen in that realm of that hyphen."  What was Alvarez's response? 


John Updike

John Updike wrote several novels.  You can read an excerpt from his last novel here (scroll down to where it says "Excerpt: 'My Father's Tears.'"http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106358537

7.  Which description of people or places stands out the most to you, personally? 
8.  What sentiments do you feel about the "miniscule restaurant" or the little girl selling flowers? 

Modernist Poetry by Robert Frost

"Nothing Gold Can Stay"
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leafs a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

"Birches"
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust--
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
(Now am I free to be poetical?)
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows--
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

"Mending Wall"
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
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,
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:
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.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
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,
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."

Listen to the excerpt from an interview with Robert Frost.  
"I must have the pulse beat of rhythm..."
[These comments are from an interview in The New York Times in 1917.  Here Frost has been talking about American poetry.]

We're still a bit afraid.  America, for instance, was afraid to accept Walk Whitman when he first sang the songs of democracy.  His influence on American poetry began to be felt only after the French had hailed him as a great writer, a literary revolutionist.  Our own poet had to be imported from France before we were sure of his strength. 

Today almost every man who writes poetry confesses his debt to Whitman.  Many have gone very much further than Whitman would have traveled with them.  They are the people who believe in wide straddling.  

 I, myself, as I said before, don't like it for myself.  I do not write free verse; I write blank verse.  I must have the pulse beat of rhythm, I like to hear it beating under the things I write. 

 That doesn't mean I do not like to read a bit of free verse occasionally.  I do.  It sometimes succeeds in painting a picture that is very clear and startling.  It's good as something created momentarily for its sudden startling effect; it hasn't the qualities, however, of something lastingly beautiful.  

And sometimes my objection to it is that it's a pose.  It's not honest.  When a man sets out consciously to tear up forms and rhythms and measures, then he is not interested in giving you poetry.  He just wants to perform; he wants to show you his tricks.  He will get an effect; nobody will deny that, but it is not a harmonious effect.  

Sometimes it strikes me that the free-verse people got their idea from incorrect proof sheets.  I have had stuff come from the printers with line half left out or positions changed about.  I read the poems as they stood, distorted and half finished, and I confess I get a rather pleasant sensation from them.  they make a sort of nightmarish half-sense...

Read "The Death of the Hired Man" by Robert Frost. The link is here.

Learn about the Harlem Renaissance by watching this short video:   

"The Weary Blues"

The Weary Blues

Langston Hughes

          Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,

          Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,

              I heard a Negro play.

          Down on Lenox Avenue the other night

          By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light

              He did a lazy sway ....

              He did a lazy sway ....

          To the tune o' those Weary Blues.

          With his ebony hands on each ivory key

         He made that poor piano moan with melody.

              O Blues!

         Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool

         He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.

             Sweet Blues!

         Coming from a black man's soul.

             O Blues!

        In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone

         I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan--

             "Ain't got nobody in all this world,

              Ain't got nobody but ma self.

               I's gwine to quit ma frownin'

               And put ma troubles on the shelf."

          Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.

          He played a few chords then he sang some more--

              "I got the Weary Blues

              And I can't be satisfied.

              Got the Weary Blues

              And can't be satisfied--

              I ain't happy no mo'

              And I wish that I had died."

          And far into the night he crooned that tune.

          The stars went out and so did the moon.

          The singer stopped playing and went to bed

          While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.

          He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.

"Harlem"  

Here on the edge of hell
Stands Harlem--
Remembering the old lies,
The old kicks in the back,
The old "Be patient"
They told us before. 

Sure, we remember. 
Now when the man at the corner store
Says sugar's gone up another two cents,
And bread one,
And there's a new tax on cigarettes--
We remember the job we never had,
Never could get,
And can't have now
Because we're colored. 

So We stand here
On the edge of hell
In Harlem
And look out on the world
And wonder
What we're gonna do
In the face of what
We remember. 

Read "Thank You, Ma'am," a short story by Langston Hughes here and then answer the questions on your sheet.

"A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner

 If you have finished writing your poem, you can start reading this short story by Faulkner: 

http://www.teacherweb.com/NM/BosqueSchool/Cummings/ARoseForEmily.pdf

Please answer the following questions in complete sentences on a sheet of paper:
1.  How does Miss Emily behave after her father dies?
2.  Why does the minister's wife send for Miss Emily's relations? 
3.  Who is Homer Barron?  When does he disappear? 
4.  How does Miss Emily spend the last decades of her life? 
5.  What do people discover when they force open the door to the room above the stairs?
6.  What conflicts existed between Emily and her father? 
7.  Colonel Sartoris' white lie to Miss Emily about her taxes is an attempt to spare her pride.  explain how Judge Sevens also takes steps to protect her.  How does the townspeople's shift in attitude about the taxes reflect wider social and economic changes in the South? 
8.  Why do you think Faulkner emphasizes the way that Miss Emily's hair turns gray and the precise time that it begins to happen? 
9.  What significance do you see in the long strand of iron-gray hair on the pillow in the upstairs bedroom?  What exactly do you think happened there, and why? 
10.  What hints or clues throughout the story foreshadow the gruesome ending?  did these hints prepare you for the ending, or were you surprised by it? 
11.  What part do you think Tobe, the African American manservant, plays in Miss Emily's history? 
12.  What sort of person do you think the narrator of this story is?  Is it a man or a woman?  What feelings toward Miss Emily does the narrator show? 
13.  Consider what roses usually symbolize.  Then, defend the title of the story, or propose a more appropriate title. 
14.  Historical details in this story reveal a great deal about its setting.  What do you learn about the times from the white townspeople's attitudes toward the African Americans who live in Jefferson?  Nowadays have such attitudes changed or stayed the same? Explain your response. 

Modernism

The words of poet Ezra Pound, "Make it new," seem to sum up the sentiment of many of the poets in this genre.

You will learn of poets that considered themselves "imagists." Here is an explanation of imagism from Holt's Element's of Literature (with my color markings):

Imagists believed that poetry can be made purer by concentration on the precise, clear, unqualified image. Imagery alone, the imagists believed, could carry a poem's emotion and message. It could do this almost instantly, without all the elaborate metrics and stanza patterns that were part of poetry's traditional mode. The imagists took on the role of reformers. The would rid poetry of its prettiness, sentimentality, and artificiality, concentrating instead on the raw power of the image to communicate feeling and thought.

The imagists issued a "manifesto," or public declaration, proposing "to use the language of common speech," as well as "the exact word, not merely the decorative word." In the same spirit they called for a poetry "hard and clear, never blurred or indefinite." Some of the imagists' inspiration was drawn from Eastern art forms, particularly Japanese haiku, a verse form that often juxtaposes two distinct images and invites the reader to experience the emotion created by the juxtaposition.

Today poems with imagistic technique are commonplace.  BUt at the time the imagists published their manifest on poetry's nature and function, their theory created a great stir.  It insisted that the range of poetic subject matter might include the kitchen sink as well as the rising of the moon, the trash can as well as the Chinese porcelain vase.  The strongest opposition to the imagists was caused by their proposal "to create new rhythms--as the expression of new moods....We do believe that that individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free verse than in conventional forms."  To tradition-minded poets this free verse--poetry without regular rhyming and metrical patterns--was deplorable.  It meant a loosening of poetic standards and an assault on the very craft of poetry.  These poets did not yet realize that successful free verse was at least as difficult to create as verse written in traditional forms.  But the imagist program was not only a call for a new method of organizing line sand stanzas; it was also an invitation to a new way of seeing and experiencing the world.

Use the following website to explore the time period and beginnings of the poetry of the genre American Modernism.

My favorite imagist poets and poems are:
"The Red Wheelbarrow" and "This Is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams
"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" By Wallace Stevens
"9," "Buffalo Bill 's," "anyone lived in a pretty how town," and "r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r" by ee cummings.

song writing websites

Use the following websites to get information on how to write a song:
http://www.robinfrederick.com/write.html
http://www.writeasong.org/

Your song/poem needs to have the following:

• at least 5 stanzas (and at least 20 lines total).  If you choose to do a song, you can have four verses with a chorus (and at least 20 lines total). 
• Specific rhyme scheme and/or meter
• Tone and theme uniform throughout the song/poem
• Poem/song relates to the concept
• written by you (not with a group)

 You will have today (Tuesday, April 19th) to work on your song/poem.  If you do not finish it in class today, you need to do it as homework.  All poems and songs will be due Thursday, April 21st. You will be given the opportunity to present your poem/perform your song on Thursday if you would like extra credit. 
See, anyone can write a song!