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2000 B.C. to A.D. 1620
500 Native American Languages
Different religious beliefs, political systems, and social values
Native American pottery mask 1000-800 B.C.
No written language – Oral Tradition
Native Americans typically believed that man and nature were part of a sacred whole. Man was believed to have a dual nature (Good/Evil).
Example: “The World on the Turtle’s Back” (Iroquois)
Lance Head 1500-1000 B.C.
Columbus’ Journal Epistola 1493
Of Plymouth Plantation, by William Bradford, recorded the history of the Plymouth colony pilgrims.
The General History of Virginia by Capt. John Smith is notoriously full of romantic embellishments.
Puritan sterling tea set
Africans in the New World European slave trade started by Portugal in the 1400s
Africans brought to West Indies to work on vast Spanish sugar plantations
1619 Jamestown, Virginia indentured servants
Silver pendant – slave era African American burial ground artifact
First printing press, free public grammar schools, Harvard College
Massachusetts Bay Colony Gov. John Winthrop saw his colony as “A city on a hill,” a Christian colony and example to the world of God’s love.
Puritan gravestone
Puritan Beliefs Original Sin (Nature of Man is Evil)
Salvation through grace
Calvinism
Bible is supreme authority on Earth
Puritan newspaper article reporting the execution of witches 1682
1620-1800
John Locke’s “natural laws” convinced colonists that they had rights that no king could deny
The Bible – God’s authority over government
Anti-Slavery Movement led by Puritans and others
The Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull 1786
U.S. Government policy was to convert Native Americans to Christianity and assimilate them.
Seneca Chief Red Jacket led resistance to assimilation
1830 Indian Removal Act forced resistant Native Americans west, eventually onto reservations.
Although man must struggle to overcome evil nature, social contracts could result in workable, free society
Native American curved sinew-backed bow with twisted sinew drawstring
Reaction to 1700’s Rationalism and Puritanism
Emphasized the “Limitations of Reason”
Celebrated individual spirit, emotions, imagination
Inspired by nature, some fascinated with the supernatural
Rejected traditional faith and reason
Autumn on the Hudson River by Jasper Cropsey (1823-1900)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Washington Irving (“Rip Van Winkle”) most popular American writers
Romanticism characterized by a preoccupation with atmosphere, sentiment, and optimism
Saw the nature of man as good
Rio de Luz by Frederic E. Church (1826-1900
Derived partly from German Romanticism
“Transcendent Forms” of truth exist beyond reason and experience
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Every individual can discover this higher truth through intuition
Nature of man is good; everyone defines good and evil for himself or herself
Sunday Morning on the Hudson River (1827) by Thomas Cole
Henry David Thoreau was Emerson’s friend and colleague who left society for a time to live in the wilderness, where he wrote Walden, a collection of essays.
Encouraged removing oneself from society, poverty, and isolation as means of finding divine truth.
Notch of the White Mountains by Thomas Cole (1801-1848
Gothic literature is characterized by weird settings and macabre plots.
Purpose was to reveal man’s capacity for evil.
Rejected Transcendental and Romantic views, sometimes attacking them directly.
Gothic glassware 1840’s
Examples of Gothicism Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 1818
Bram Stoker’s Dracula 1897
Edgar Allan Poe
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption, Covington, Kentucky started in 1894, never completed.
Examples of Gothicism (continued) Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick
(contemporary example) Anne Rice
Tavern on the Green, New York 1800’s, originally a sheephold
Inspired partly by Gothic architecture of Middle Ages (400-1500 A.D.) Cavernous Gothic Cathedrals
Gargoyles
La Collégiale church in Germany, completed 1442
Characterized by “imaginative distortion of reality.”
Fascinated with fantastic, demonic, and insane.
Gothic works often have an overtly religious element, such as in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
First Church, Boston 1868
Author Study: Edgar Allan Poe 1841 “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
1845 “The Raven”
Experienced much loss in his own life; often wrote about isolation leading to insanity.
Reputation for alcoholism and drug abuse started by unauthorized biography, probably false.
Edgar Allan Poe
Replaced Romanticism as the dominant literary style
Truthful accounts of ordinary life, rather than the sentimentality of much romantic fiction.
Local-color Realism – Mark Twain (region-specific)
The Cello Player by Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins1896 Oil on canvas
Author Study: Mark Twain Samuel Langhorne Clemens
“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was his first short story
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Life on the Mississippi
Offshoot of Realism – also uses typical people in realistic situations.
Adds a new element: Outside forces are seen as controlling one’s fate, rather than free will.
Stephen Crane
The Women’s Movement – University education for women
1890’s Emily Dickinson
Charlotte Perkins Gilman – “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Kate Chopin – The Awakening
The Night Wind by Charles Burchfield 1918
Author Study: Emily Dickinson
Published 1,775 poems – but virtually unknown in her lifetime.
Much of her poetry reflects her religious speculation and doubt.
She lived in seclusion for almost twenty years, beginning in her thirties.
Of the 1,775 poems she wrote, only seven were published while she was alive.
Unprecedented period of literacy, musical, and artistic production among African Americans that reached its peak in the 1920’s.
Centered in the Harlem section of Manhattan in New York City
The Cotton Club Louis Armstrong
Duke Ellington
Louis Armstrong
Langston Hughes’ The Weary Blues 1925 Praised “Blackness”
Embraced common people as his subjects
Blended elements of blues and jazz into his work
Zora Neale Hurston published stories, novels, essays, and folklore collections
revealing a love of black language and manners.
• Historical Context• World War I
• The Roaring Twenties
• Modernism was a direct response to these social and cultural changes
Modernists were disillusioned by the war.
Appalled by “materialism” of the age
Ezra Pound – “Make it new!”
Modernists feared that individuals, especially artists, were threatened by “mass society”
Carnival by Arthur Dove 1935, Oil and metallic paint on canvas
Characters in a modern work are almost always alienated, withdrawn, unresponsive, hurt by unnamed forces. Like Naturalism, outside forces control fate, but modernists often named the force: corrupt, fractured American society
White Shapes on Blue Background by IlyaBolotowsky, ca. 1939, Oil on canvas
Modernists’ Experimentation in Writing: Katherine Anne Porter – Stream of Consciousness
Ernest Hemingway and Richard Wright – fragmentation
Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot – fragmented poetry
The Little Lake by Joseph Stella ca. 1927
Modern Visual Artists Picasso
Matisse
Duchamp
Cubism, cutouts, collages Untitled collage by Ann Ryan (1889-1954)
Girl with Mandolin by Pablo Picasso (cubism) 1910 Matisse cutout
Modernists Notable for What They Leave Out No narrative voice with explanations, details
Implied Themes, rather than stated
Reader must piece together the story from fragments. Fragmentation in literature or art symbolized a fragmented American society.
Figure by Alexander Archipenko 1917
Author Study: Robert Frost Most Popular American Poet
North of Boston includes the poem “Mending Wall”
1924 Pulitzer Prize for New Hampshire, a collection of poems. He would win three more in his career.
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird
J.D. Sallinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar depicted American society as insane.
Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five presented anti-war themes through satire.
Kurt Vonnegut
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man revealed racial tension in U.S.
Flannery O’Connor’s and Catherine Anne Porter’s short fiction dealt with Christianity, religious doubt, and the search for truth in a nuclear age.
Campbell’s Soup Can by Andy Warhol 1961
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye critiques America’s idea of beauty influenced by racism.
Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses explores isolation and the evil of man.
Don DeLillo’s Falling Man explores mass media and American perceptions of terrorism.
Surreal by Marcus A. Jansen 2009
Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club portrays immigrant life in the U.S.
Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is a collection of stories from the Vietnam War.
Fading Away by Luis Cornejo
Laura Hillenbrand (Seabiscuit, an American Legend, Unbroken) and Sebastian Junger (The Perfect Storm) are “contemporary historians” whose work is considered less “highbrow” but significant.