Literaturas Contemporâneas de Língua Inglesa

Lesson 01
Last quarter of 19th century – great nations becoming fully industrialized and nationalism growing in many countries. After
the WWII, Europe’s power and wealth had vanished. Traditional ways of teaching were inapplicable for this world.
Moreover, science had developed the atomic bomb, making the total destruction of all civilization a real possibility. Writers
began expressing their reaction to this brave new world.

Modernity
The literature from the beginning of the 20th century and afterwards reflected the uncertainties of its time. Living in a
world where time has become a convention, modernist writers searched for refuge in the depths of the human mind or
decided to denounce the oppression of totalitarian and technocratic governments which dominated the first half of the
twentieth. Among the numerous events which marked the first half of the 20th century we would like to point out the
World War I, the development of totalitarian systems and World War II.

What is Modern and Postmodern literature?

Postmodern literature is not only the products of the individual writer´s ideas and experience, but also several general
tendencies. Authors are not part of groups, but share beliefs that make their work have important things in common. An
area of concern is the individual´s search for identity in an unfriendly world and the difficulty of communicating. Language
is not only the means by which the characters´ feelings and beliefs are expressed but an important part of the play,
particularly when it is used for a witty or comic effect to contrast with the seriousness of the themes of the time.
The history of poetry in the twentieth century needs to support the frequent remarks that poetry is essentially a private art
form. Although authors have influences, in the end each poet works as a private and separate person who makes his or her
own world from his or her own deep concerns.
Postmodern literature questions the differences between high and low culture with the introduction of subjects and genres
which have never been considered appropriate for literature.

Quest for identity in the contemporary period

Authors prioritize individual searches for identity in the following areas: legal, social, cultural, sexual and artistic.
Postmodern narrative styles generally present innovation and writers from this period look for places not only for
themselves in the always-shifting canon of contemporary literature, but also for the communities they represent.
A good example of the search for individual identity is found in The house on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros writes the
story of Esperanza, a nascent Chicana feminist growing up in Chicago. Cisneros’s novel — actually, a collection of short
vignettes that cohere to tell the story — highlights the multilayered processes of identification necessary for many
Americans.
The same idea of developing identity as a process can be found in Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues. Establishing a
combination between fiction and autobiography, Feinberg writes of Jess Goldberg, a transgendered individual who
attempts to deal with her own confusion in the face of mainstream society’s often hostile reaction to her sexual variance.

Alienation in contemporary literature

The theme of alienation serves to mirror the feeling within society that people have become increasingly disconnected. In
contemporary literature, this does not mean that the world of the novel must necessarily be a reflection of the modern
world, simply which no matter the setting the theme remains a preoccupation. There are themes which sustain a
harmonious balance of tension between interest and aversion, familiar and not familiar, closeness and distance.
An important literary technique is the use of point-of-view which is a vehicle through which to explore issues of alienation
through the both creation and eradication of distance. This distance can occur between characters in the story, character
and event, or story and reader, with point of view being the tensile force that pushes and pulls the elements towards and
away from one another. A good example of alienation is the book, Beloved, by Toni Morrinson.

Expressionism in contemporary literature

Expressionism contained passionate reaffirmations of individuality. The expressionist rebellions contained impulses
towards the fulfillment and spiritual realization of the individual combined with results against repressive social- cultural
conditions. Herein is contained the ambivalent heritage of Expressionism that at once attacks bourgeois society, yet it is
excessively individualistic and thereby retools traditional bourgeois ideologies of subjectivity. For although most
expressionist rebellions possess elements of social critiques, many of their categories and solutions borrow from traditional
metaphysical and religion doctrine.
According to Kellner (1983): “The Expressionists´ drive toward social change and the creation of new forms of life still
provide us with images and ideas to animate radical individual and social change. Their utopian images of transcendence
contain social and individual alternatives and project examples of struggles to liberate life and creativity from repressive
social and cultural forms.”
We will present a passage in which Holden Caulfield shows how his inner feelings and thoughts are shown:
“When I really worry about something, I don´t just fool around. I even have to go to the bathroom when I worry about
something. Only, I don´t go. I´m too worried to go. I don´t want to interrupt my worrying to go.”
What elements of style are mostly found in contemporary literature?
This literary era defines a time period, but it is very important to notice that it also describes a particular style and quality of
writing. Some see this period as an extension of postmodern literature, but most refer to it as a literary era of its own.
Poetry – has a rhythmical construction. It utilizes specific line breaks associated with verse. It requires the use of rhyming
words at the end of lines, and it is employs brevity and economical use of words.
Prose - refers to written rather than spoken language. As the format of everyday communication, the concept can be
applied to anything from a business letter to a 500-page novel. Prose utilizes some elements of poetry such as the use of
metaphor, the comparison of two unlike objects, and alliteration. Prose can also employ imagery, a term for the use of
specific details that help to create the concrete visual world in the mind's eye. Imagery is like a painting made out of words.
Fiction - In literature, it refers to novels, short stories, and other works of art that do not purport to tell true stories. Fiction
writers create characters, dialogue, and plots entirely from their imaginations.

What is juxtaposition?
In order to show the complexity of human experience, writers will blend and mix up events out of order, juxtaposing
images from different times or spaces together, in order to create a sense or feeling. The term juxtaposition means placing
images that normally aren't seen together, together, and the clash between these images highlights their differences.

Who were the notable influences in the late 19th and early 20th century?
The Latin American literary canon is hugely diverse and includes writers of various styles, genres and political persuasions;
however, several iconic figures hold sway over this literary world, who, through their pre-eminence and influence, have
come to define Latin American literature both within the Americas and beyond. They are Latin America’s most famous
literary exports: Mario Vargas Llosa, Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez.
The Swedish dramatist August Strindberg, the Italian author Luigi Pirandello, and the German playwright and theorist
Bertolt Brech belong to the late 19th and early 20th century and represent an important influence on the aesthetic of
postmodernism.

Movements in the 20th century

Dadaism - In the 1910s, Dadaists contributed to literature by associating the Dadaist movement with playfulness, parody,
chance and the opportunity to question artists´ authority. Collage which used elements from advertisement or illustrations
from popular novels was also a Dadaist influence to contemporary literature.
Surrealism - Surrealism went on with the experimentations with parody and chance with a close connection to works which
explored the flow of the subconscious mind.
Metafiction - Metafiction is often employed to undermine the authority of the author, for unexpected narrative shifts, to
advance a story in a unique way, for emotional distance, or to comment on the act of storytelling.
Fabulation - Fabulation is a term sometimes used interchangeably with metafiction and relates to pastiche and Magic
Realism.

Video Lesson
Premodernity, Modernity and postmodernity
The western world changed dramatically during the 20 th century. The western was admired for its development and was an
influence for other regions.
However, from the 50’s on, there was a decadence of the western world.
For a long time things were quite calm in the world – there weren’t great transformations. The Medieval world, for
example, had a simple social structure and little tensions. Life was simple as well. Renascence started shaking these
structures. At this period, people had more time to other activities, as studying and traveling. The structures start being
shaken and a pre modern world is announced.

Premodernity
Until 1650 AD it was the dominant way people understood their world and gain knowledge about it.  The primary
epistemology of the premodern period was based upon revealed knowledge from authoritative sources.  Revelation,
coming from God or the gods,  provides them with knowledge and understanding of this world.  Religion and the Church
were the primary sources of authority.   Even today it appears to be still very much alive in fundamentalist religions. There
was a close relation between man and religion. It is a strange thought for people nowadays, but religion was the main part
of people’s life and it was totally acceptable.

Modernity
It typically refers to a post-traditional, post-medieval historical period, marked by the move from feudalism (or agrarianism)
toward capitalism, industrialization, secularization, rationalization, the nation-state and its constituent institutions and
forms of surveillance. Charles Baudelaire is credited with coining the term "modernity" (modernité) to designate the
fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience.
Conceptually, modernity relates to the modern era and to modernism, but forms a distinct concept. Modernity denies the
past. It was a way of understanding the word in a scientific the way. Religion is challenged.
The era of modernity is characterized socially by industrialization and the division of labour and philosophically by "the loss
of certainty, and the realization that certainty can never be established, once and for all" (Delanty 2007). With new social
and philosophical conditions arose fundamental new challenges. Various 19th-century intellectuals, from Auguste
Comte to Karl Marx to Sigmund Freud, attempted to offer scientific and/or political ideologies in the wake of secularisation.
Modernity may be described as the "age of ideology." (Calinescu 1987, 2006)
Modernity may also refer to tendencies in intellectual culture, particularly the movements intertwined with secularization
and post-industrial life, such as Marxism, existentialism, and the formal establishment of social science. In context,
modernity has been associated with cultural and intellectual movements of 1436–1789 and extending to the 1970s or later.

From 1650, progressively, a new world view developed: People, like Copernicus and Galileo observed this world from
an empirical perspective. This was later further strengthened by Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and Newtonian mechanics –
our world is governed by laws.
Rationalism, introduced by Rene Descartes (1596-1650), became a very important way of gaining knowledge. Meyer says
he re-appropriated Augustine’s dictum: “I think therefore I am”.  With our minds we can “take” a picture of this world.  “His
basis for knowledge was ‘universal mathematics’ the science of measure and order. …  The thinking or mental subject
became the focal point of his method and self-certainty was the norm for this approach.

Postmodernity
In modernity, no pattern should be followed. Artists should innovate, and that’s why a lot of movements showed up.
Postmodernism is a critique of modernism. In modernism there was an imposition on the artist to create new things. It led
us to uncertain ways of seen life, which was criticized by postmodernism.
It is believed that it started in the end of 19th century.
Postmodernism believe many things we believe are true, are in fact just social constructions.
Some regard postmodernism as a radical departure from modernism, whereas others view it not as a replacement or
contradiction to modernism, but rather as a new beginning outside the framework of modernism.  Postmodernism does
not follow an illogical or irrational framework and in this sense it does not contradict “rational” modernism.
Postmodernism “…stands inside reason, as well as outside the absolute control of reason (rationalism) and affirms endless
commentary, discussion, rhetoric and negotiation. It is a rational abandon of rationalism.
There is disagreement among critics about whether postmodern art actually exists as a distinct movement or whether it is
simply a later phase of modern art.
Trends in postmodern art include pastiche, appropriation and the use of an ironic affect.
Movements that fall under the umbrella of postmodern art include installation, multimedia and  conceptual art.
Hybridization of forms and media is common, as in the work of Jenny Holzer. She is known for her installations, in which
original or appropriated texts are displayed using a variety of media, including electronic displays and projections. These
pieces demonstrate a fusion of electronic art with literature and design.
Eclecticism, juxtaposition and globalization are common threads in postmodernism. In the wake of multiculturalism and
feminist theory, postmodern art tends to deconstruct traditional narratives of race, gender, nationality and family. By
refusing to acknowledge distinctions between high art and lowbrow art postmodern artists further break down class
distinctions in the hierarchy of art criticism.
Postmodern art rejects the high valuation of authenticity and originality in modernism, asserting instead that there can be
no more innovation or progress in art. Thus, according to postmodernists, the use of techniques such as
pastiche, collage and parody are the only authentic ways to produce art. By appropriating history, pop culture and
traditional forms or techniques, postmodern artists manipulate existing symbols and narratives.

Postmodern Literature
It is characterized by heavy reliance on techniques like fragmentation, paradox, and questionable narrators, and is often
defined as a style or trend which emerged in the post–World War II era. Postmodern works are seen as a reaction against
Enlightenment thinking and Modernist approaches to literature.
It is a form of literature which is marked, both stylistically and ideologically, by a reliance on such literary conventions
as fragmentation, paradox, unreliable narrators, often unrealistic and downright impossible plots, games, parody, paranoia,
dark humor and authorial self-reference. Postmodern authors tend to reject outright meaning in their novels, stories and
poems, and instead highlight and celebrate the possibility of multiple meanings, or a complete lack of meaning, within a
single literary work. Postmodern literature also often rejects the boundaries between 'high' and 'low' forms of art and
literature, as well as the distinctions between different genres and forms of writing and storytelling.

Characteristics of Postmodern Literature

Irony, playfulness, black humor - Postmodern authors were certainly not the first to use irony and humor in their writing,
but for many postmodern authors, these became the hallmarks of their style. Postmodern authors will often treat very
serious subjects—World War II, the Cold War, conspiracy theories—from a position of distance and disconnect, and will
choose to depict their histories ironically and humorously.
Pastiche - Many postmodern authors combined, or “pasted” elements of previous genres and styles of literature to create
a new narrative voice, or to comment on the writing of their contemporaries. Thomas Pynchon, one of the most important
postmodern authors, uses elements from detective fiction, science fiction, and war fiction, songs, pop culture references,
and well-known, obscure, and fictional history. – no specific style because authors mix styles.
Intertextuality - An important element of postmodernism is its acknowledgment of previous literary works. The
intertextuality of certain works of postmodern fiction, the dependence on literature that has been created earlier, attempts
to comment on the situation in which both literature and society found themselves in the second half of the 20th century:
living, working, and creating on the backs of those that had come before.
Metafiction - Many postmodern authors feature metafiction in their writing, which, essentially, is writing about writing, an
attempt to make the reader aware of its ficitionality, and, sometimes, the presence of the author. Authors sometimes use
this technique to allow for flagrant shifts in narrative, impossible jumps in time, or to maintain emotional distance as a
narrator.
Historiographic metafiction - This term was created by Linda Hutcheon to refer to novels that fictionalize actual historical
events and characters: Thomas Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon, for example, features a scene in which George Washington
smokes pot.
Temporal distortion - Temporal distortion is a literary technique that uses a nonlinear timeline; the author may jump
forwards or backwards in time, or there may be cultural and historical references that do not fit: Abraham Lincoln uses a
telephone in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada. This technique is frequently used in literature, but it has become even more
common in films.
Paranoia - Many postmodern authors write under the assumption that modern society cannot be explained or understood.
From that point of view, any apparent connections or controlling influences on the chaos of society would be very
frightening, and this lends a sense of paranoia to many postmodern works.
Maximalism - Vilified by its critics for being in turns disorganized, sprawling, overly long, and emotionally disconnected,
maximalism exists in the tradition of long works like The Odyssey. Authors that use this technique will sometimes defend
their work as being as long as it needs to be, depending on the subject material that is covered.
Magical realism - Arguably the most important postmodern technique, magical realism is the introduction of fantastic or
impossible elements into a narrative that is otherwise normal. Magical realist novels may include dreams taking place
during normal life, the return of previously deceased characters, extremely complicated plots, wild shifts in time, and myths
and fairy tales becoming part of the narrative. Many critics argue that magical realism has its roots in the work of Jorge Luis
Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, two South American writers, and some have classified it as a Latin American style. –
Crespusculo
Participation - Many postmodern authors, as a response to modernism, which frequently set its authors apart from their
readers, attempt to involve the reader as much as possible over the course of a novel. This can take the form of asking the
reader questions, including unwritten narratives that must be constructed by the reader, or allowing the reader to make
decisions regarding the course of the narrative.

Lesson 02
Death of a Salesman
Death of a salesman brought Miller international fame, and become one of the major achievements of modern American
theatre. It relates the tragic story of a salesman named Willy Loman, whose past and present are mingled in expressionistic
scenes.
Loman is not the great success that he claims to be to his family and friends. The postwar economic boom has shaken up
his life. He is eventually fired and he begins to hallucinate about significant events from his past. Linda, his wife, believes in
the American Dream, but she also keeps her feet on the ground. Deciding that he is worth more dead than alive, Willy kills
himself in his car — hoping that the insurance money will support his family and his son Biff could get a new start in his life.
Critics have disagreed whether his suicide is an act of cowardice or a last sacrifice on the altar of the American Dream.
Reality versus illusion is a major theme in Death of a salesman. It permeates the story, the structure, the characters and
even the set. In order to get the dream he wants, Willy has created a world of illusion:

• he's great at his job,

• he has material wealth,
• he's well liked and has many friends,
• his sons are on their way to something big.

Willy is so used to lying that he believes his created world is reality. He is dead certain of himself when he tells Howard he
averaged one-hundred and seventy dollars a week, even though Howard knows this is not the case. This is why his eventual
fall is so devastating: Willy has to admit that nothing in his world is true.

The reality/illusion concept is most interesting in how it is interpreted by the other members of the Loman family. Each of
them is fully caught in the web of Willy's illusion:
• Linda can see the reality of the situation but refuses to burst Willy's bubble. She knows Willy has been trying to kill
himself, she knows that he gets money from Charley and pretends it's his salary. She doesn't want “to embarrass
Willy”.
 • Biff has seen reality when he walks in on Willy and his mistress. He has been so pumped up by Willy's illusion that
when he learns 'the dream' is not real it devastates him. And yet, the shreds of the illusion have such a hold on
Biff; he knows what will make him happy, but doesn't chase it.
• Happy so needs his father's approval he picks up right where Willy left off. He creates an illusion of happiness and
success in his life when in fact he's terribly lonely. Right to the end of the play Happy defends Willy's illusion.

In contrast, Charley has no illusions about life and constantly tries to bring Willy back into the real world. But in the end,
when the rest of the Lomans are bewildered and broken over Willy's death, Charley is really the only one in the play who
truly understands why Willy did what he did and why he needed to create another world:

A streetcar named Desire

In the play A streetcar named Desire written by Tennessee Williams, Blanche DuBois, an aging Southern debutante, arrives
at her sister’s home in New Orleans hoping to start a new life after losing her ancestral mansion, her job, and her
reputation in her hometown of Laurel, Mississippi.
Blanche’s brother-in-law, a macho working-class guy named Stanley Kowalski, is so filled with class resentment that he
seeks to destroy Blanche’s character in New Orleans as well. His cruelty, combined with Blanche’s fragile, insecure
personality, leaves her mentally detached from reality by the play’s end.
Although Williams’s protagonist in A streetcar named Desire is the romantic Blanche DuBois, the play is a work of social
realism. Blanche explains to Mitch that she fibs because she refuses to accept the hand fate has dealt her. Lying to herself
and to others allows her to make life appear as it should be rather than as it is.

Stanley, a practical man firmly grounded in the physical world, disdains Blanche’s fabrications and does everything he can
to unravel them. The antagonistic relationship between Blanche and Stanley is a struggle between appearances and reality.
It propels the play’s plot and creates an overarching tension. Ultimately, Blanche’s attempts to remake her own and Stella’s
existences — to rejuvenate her life and to save Stella from a life with Stanley — fail.
One of the main ways Williams dramatizes fantasy’s inability to overcome reality is through an exploration of the boundary
between exterior and interior. The set of the play consists of the two-room Kowalski apartment and the surrounding street.
Williams’s use of a flexible set that allows the street to be seen at the same time as the interior of the home expresses the
notion that the home is not a domestic sanctuary. The Kowalskis’ apartment cannot be a self-defined world that is
impermeable to greater reality. The characters leave and enter the apartment throughout the play, often bringing with
them the problems they encounter in the larger environment. For example, Blanche refuses to leave her prejudices against
the working class behind her at the door.
The most notable instance of this effect occurs just before Stanley rapes Blanche, when the back wall of the apartment
becomes transparent to show the struggles occurring on the street, foreshadowing the violation that is about to take place
in the Kowalskis’ home.

The American Dream in Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire

Death of a Salesman - The American Dream is an ideal of finding happiness and satisfaction through hard work. In Death of
a salesman, Arthur Miller suggests that the American Dream is, for the most part, unattainable. Only those who are lucky
enough to be in the right place at the right time will prosper, and the rest will struggle for their entire lives and never reach
the material and emotional success embodied in the American Dream.
A Streetcar Named Desire - When one speaks about the American Dream, one immediately thinks about the Dream — the
one where everyone in America will be able to live a fulsome, colorful life with an opportunity equal to everyone else's to
rise to the top.
That is a good dream to have, one that is often equaled with the hope for the future, but the key word here is dream, and
the thing about dreams is that they are not quite as real as the reality that one sees when one is awake.
Sadly, by the end of WWII, the Americans have forgotten about this quality of dreams, and because of that, individual
members of their society began to suffer.
In Tennessee Williams' A streetcar named Desire, the main dreamer in the play is obviously Blanche DuBois. The DuBois
family estate was actually called Belle Reve, which stands for "Beautiful Dream". Blanche is a dreamer — a dreamer of
romances and fairy tales, a believer in the power of belief.

Quest for identity

A Streetcar Named Desire
A streetcar named Desire is “a study of sexual frustration, violence and mental aberration set in New Orleans in which
Blanche DuBois has her fantasies of refinement and grandeur brutally destroyed by Stanley Kowalski, her brother-in-law,
whose animal nature both fascinates and repels her.”
It can look from this superficial profile as if Williams is writing this play simply to work out his own fantasies and neuroses,
but in fact his play is nothing less than a study of personal identity: in other words, Williams makes out of his own problems
a play which dramatizes one human individual’s search for a sense of identity.
Blanche does not know who she is: consequently, she is constantly devising strategies in order to keep hold of her sanity. It
slowly becomes apparent that, under pressure from a series of adverse circumstances, her identity has disintegrated and
that she is suffering the pain of a broken identity: in Hart Crane’s words, she is living in a ‘broken world’. In effect, she is
constantly asking, “Who am I?” She has reached the stage at which every relationship into which she enters represents an
attempt at self-definition.

The setting for the play is the cosmopolitan city of New Orleans. It is immensely significant that Williams sets the action in a
poor quarter of the city for which the ironic name is Elysian Fields.
This being so, Blanche’s literal statement –“They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and then transfer to one called
Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at — Elysian Fields!”— is equally a metaphorical statement.
Blanche — having metaphorically ridden ‘a streetcar named Desire’ [= slept around in a search for personal identity] — has
ended up not in any sort of paradise, but on the wrong side of the tracks.
By this single sentence, we are already given to understand that Blanche — both literally and metaphorically — has reached
the end of the line. Tennessee Williams’ moral is that, if one searches for one’s beautiful dream in entirely
materialistic/physical terms, then one’s paradise (Elysian Fields) won’t be half as nice as one expects it to be: in fact, it will
look like a poor quarter of New Orleans.

Death of a Salesman
Death of a Salesman addresses loss of identity and a man's inability to accept change within himself and society. The play is
a montage of memories, dreams, confrontations, and arguments, all of which make up the last 24 hours of Willy Loman's
life. The three major themes within the play are: denial, contradiction and order versus disorder.
Each member of the Loman family is living in denial or perpetuating a cycle of denial for others. Willy Loman is incapable of
accepting the fact that he is a mediocre salesman. Instead Willy strives for his version of the American Dream — success
and notoriety — even if he is forced to deny reality in order to achieve it. Instead of acknowledging that he is not a well-
known success, Willy retreats into the past and chooses to relive past memories and events in which he is perceived as
successful.
The second major theme of the play is contradiction. Throughout the play, Willy's behavior is riddled with inconsistencies.
In fact, the only thing consistent about Willy is his inconsistency.
From the very beginning of act i, scene 1, Willy reveals this tendency. He labels Biff a "lazy bum" but then contradicts
himself two lines later when he states, "And such a hard worker. There's one thing about Biff — he's not lazy."
The third major theme of the play, which is order versus disorder, results from Willy's retreats into the past. Each time Willy
loses himself in the past, he does so in order to deny the present, especially if the present is too difficult to accept.
Denial, contradiction, and the quest for order versus disorder comprise the three major themes of Death of a salesman. All
three themes work together to create a dreamlike atmosphere in which the audience watches a man's identity and mental
stability slip away.
The play continues to affect audiences because it allows them to hold a mirror up to themselves. Willy's self-deprecation,
sense of failure, and overwhelming regret are emotions that an audience can relate to because everyone has experienced
them at one time or another.
Individuals continue to react to Death of a salesman because Willy's situation is not unique: He made a mistake — a
mistake that irrevocably changed his relationship with the people he loves most — and when all of his attempts to
eradicate his mistake fail, he makes one grand attempt to correct the mistake. Willy vehemently denies Biff's claim that
they are both common, ordinary people, but ironically, it is the universality of the play which makes it so enduring. Biff's
statement, "I'm a dime a dozen, and so are you" is true after all.

Video Lesson
Modernism
Some facts were historical markers for American Modernism: the great world wars and the great depression.
Life was never the same after the wars and modernism was a result of the transformations brought by the war.
World War II was the definite end to the way life was led before. It interrupts the way of life of people around the world.
Men lived in a collective way before the war, but after that, they became more individuals with specific needs and desires.
Although we never want a war, it is true that war also brings modernity and technology.
The literature of the modern period reflects the nation’s attempts to come to terms with the many meanings of modernity.
Some writers celebrated modern developments while others lamented them.
Writers of the period debated the uses of literary tradition. Some wanted to honor traditional forms and language and to
include allusions to canonical works of the past.
Writers of the period also debated the place of popular culture in serious literature. Some embraced popular forms while
others rejected them as cynical commercialism.
Writers of the period also debated the place of popular culture in serious literature. Some embraced popular forms while
others rejected them as cynical commercialism.

Changes in Society
 ideological debates argued for more diverse, permissive, and tolerant lifestyles.
 social codes governing sexual behavior became less restrictive, influenced by Freud.
 Women gained the right to vote and new possibilities came with that.
  job opportunities opened up for African Americans, even though they faced racism, segregation, and racial
violence. Black American became visible.
 Class inequality generated intellectual and artistic debate during the modern period. Americans who thought of
themselves as Marxists in the 1920s and 1930s were usually subjected to surveillance.
 Access to electricity, and to modern appliances and devices brought mass popular culture into being (radio and
TV).
 Automobiles became affordable for more Americans.

American Modernism
 a catchall for any kind of literary production in the interwar period that dealt with the modern world.
 “high modernism” works that represents the transformation of traditional society under the pressures of
modernity; high modernist texts interpret modernity as an experience of loss and represent the modern world as a
scene of ruin.
 involved many art forms and media, including sculpture, painting, dance, and music, as well as literature.
 emphasized discontinuity, discordance, and fragmentation as more representative.
 works are self-reflexive, or concerned with their own nature as art.
 reader of a modernist work is often said to participate in the creative work of making the poem or story.
 modernist literature reached only a limited audience. Many readers found it difficult to understand the meaning of
these texts’ fragmentation.

Tenesse Williams and Arthur Miller

They were two postmodernist authors, who were ones of the most famous in their period. Both authors wrote iconic plays.

Tenesse Williams
Tenesse Williams’ plays are known for their lyrical poetic dialogue, and characters on the brink. They are dynamic – it
means they have problems. The men and women in his plays are always flawed, filled with emotion, and locked in the
frustration of straining for something beyond reach. He had a distinct and defined vision for his plays and the style in which
he wanted to present them. There should be no attempt to create a photograph, a copy of the real world on stage.
Tennessee Williams' style is characterized by theme, theme related metaphor, theme supporting scenario, setting, and
poetic language. In each detail of his plays, there is something important. Predominant themes are the dominance of a get-
ahead society over sensitive individuals and the dominance of ambitious people over the poetic-artist. Williams often
illustrated these themes with physical weak or handicapped characters.
One of his most famous plays is A streetcar named Desire. It tell the story of promiscuous Blanche, who lost everything and
comes to live with her sister. However, Blanche and her brother-in-law don’t have a good relationship. The scenario is
decadent and turbulent.

Arthur Miller
He favored the common language of the common man. His protagonists are often working-class Americans, and their
stories don't always end happily. He focused on the struggles of everyday figures and the tragedies of life as well as its
triumphs.
He shined a light on U.S. culture of the period, speaking to the hopes and fears of a populace grappling with a rapidly
changing world. Many of his plays - including "Death of a Salesman“- are now regarded as modern classics.
Miller was shaped by the Great Depression and ruin of his father. It demonstrated to the young Miller the insecurity of
modern existence.
The characteristics and themes of his works are:
 Allegories - he made heavy use of allegory in his plays;
 Morality - Miller's plays deal with strong issues of right and wrong;
 Compassion - Regardless of whether his protagonists hold onto their values or sacrifice them, Miller's style retains
a deep-seated compassion for them.

One of his most famous plays is The Death of a Salesman. It is the tragedy of Willy Loman, a small man destroyed by false
values that are in large part the values of his society.
The themes are:
• Visions of America
• Dreams, Hopes, and Plans
• Lies and Deceit
• Success
• Respect and Reputation
• Appearances
• Pride
• Abandonment
 • Freedom and Confinement
• Betrayal

Miller’s intense understanding of what has been described as "psychological realism" and social reform and his ability to
evaluate contemporary affairs certainly mark him as one of the most significant 20th Century contributors to both
American and World literature.

Lesson 03
Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot

Virginia Woolf
An English writer, author and novelist, Virginia Woolf was a pioneer of modernism in English literature. Among her most
famous works are novels: To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando and an essay - A Room of One's Own.
She was an important figure in the Victorian literary society and is considered one of the greatest modernist literary
personalities of the twentieth century.
She was an innovator of the English literature: her experiment with the 'stream of consciousness' helped her to be
considered an author with a highly experimental language denouncing the traditional literary techniques.

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 and died on 13 January 1941. He was an Irish novelist and
poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century.
One of the best works written by Joyce was Ulysses (1922), and there is a comparison between the episodes of Homer's
Odyssey and Ulysses. They are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominent among these
the stream of consciousness technique he improved greatly.
The short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans
Wake (1939), are other major works. His complete literary works include three books of poetry, a play, occasional
journalism, and his published letters.

Thomas Stearns Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 26, 1888. His first eighteen years were lived in St. Louis.
Eliot and Ezra Pound met in London and Eliot came under Pound’s influence, who recognized his poetic genius at once, and
assisted in the publication of his work in a number of magazines, most notably “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in
Poetry in 1915.
In 1917, Eliot’s first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published and that immediately established him
as a leading poet of the avant-garde.
In 1922, The Waste Land was published and it is now considered by many to be the single most influential poetic work of
the twentieth century. After that, Eliot’s reputation began to grow to nearly mythic proportions.
By 1930, and for the next thirty years, he was the most important figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English-
speaking world.

What’s stream of consciousness?

One aim of serious fiction is to show it is like to be a certain kind of person confronting certain problems. Usually a
character is developed by devising a situation in the plot which will best reveal the character’s significant traits, and then
showing how the character reacts - what he does says, thinks, and feels about the situation.
Most fiction before the twentieth century showed the character’s reaction from the outside, either as another person
might have seen him or as he saw himself, looking back from a later date.
As a literary term, stream of consciousness appears in the early twentieth century at the intersection of three apparently
disparate projects:
 The developing science of psychology (e.g., investigations of the forms and manifestations of consciousness, as
elaborated by Freud, Jung, James, and others).
 The continuing speculations of western philosophy as to the nature of being (e.g., investigations of consciousness
in time by Henri Bergson).
 Reactionary forces in the arts which were turning away from realism in the late nineteenth century in favor of
exploration of a personal, self-conscious subjectivity.

The psychological term was appropriated to describe a particular style of novel, or technique of characterization that was
prevalent in some fictional works. This technique relied upon the mimetic (re)presentation of the mind of a character and
dramatized the full range of the character’s consciousness by direct and apparently unmediated quotation of such mental
processes as memories, thoughts, impressions, and sensations.
It involves a direct presentation of the character’s consciousness, putting down everything just as the character experiences
it at the moment, without the author’s intruding for so much as a “he thought…”.
Stream of consciousness, constituting as it did the ground of self-awareness, was consequently extended to describe those
narratives and narrative strategies in which the overt presence of the author/ narrator was suppressed in favor of
presenting the story exclusively through the (un/sub/pre)conscious thought of one or more of the characters in the story.

Ms. Dalloway’s
What is its summary?
Mrs. Dalloway is the story of a day in June 1923, as lived by a few London citizens. People enjoy the sense of peace of
previous days before the sad and long World War I. There is calm in the air. Mrs. Dalloway deals with people’s inner lives.
It does not possess a dynamic plot.
Memories, regrets, and hopes are part of the plot showing that the real events are secondary. Almost all of the main
characters wonder about what might have been. An omniscient narrator tells the story.
Woolf is greatly interested in psychology and sexuality and these become the themes in the novel. Several of the characters
are ambivalent because they are divided in their feelings towards love.
The actions of the novel are the following: Clarissa Dalloway is giving a formal party. She sees Peter  Walsh, who has
returned from India, and drops in for a visit. During the day and the meeting, Clarissa thinks about the past and the choices
she has made.
Richard, who is Clarissa’s husband, has meetings and lunches, and their daughter Elizabeth has similar plans
herself. Another Londoner, Septimus Warren Smith, is having a bad day, and so is his wife Lucrezia.
Septimus thinks all the time about Evans, a friend who was killed in the war. He is also convinced he receives messages
from the unseen world.
Lucrezia is taking Septimus to two doctors, neither of whom can do much to cure him. To escape his doctors, Septimus kills
himself later in the day and because he feels he has no other alternative.
Clarissa’s party is a success. She hosted the Prime and this is considered a great honor. But Clarissa hears of Septimus’
suicide and although he and Clarissa Dalloway never meet, their lives are connected by external events. News of his death
causes in Clarissa a sense of isolation and loneliness.
"Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded
them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone."

How is it structured?
Mrs. Dalloway, despite its departure from typical novelistic style, was a bestseller both in Britain and the United States in
1925.
To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway have generated the most critical attention and are the most widely studied of Woolf's
novels.
A special problem is created for the novelist, due to this uncommon organizational strategy: how to make characters deep
enough to be realistic while treating only one day in their lives? Woolf used the “tunneling” technique to solve this
problem. This technique refers to the way her characters remember their pasts.
Not being able to experience these characters’ recollections, readers create for themselves a sense of background and
history to characters that, otherwise, a narrator would have had to provide.
We can consider Mrs. Dalloway a flâneur novel, which means it depicts people walking about a city.
There is a similarity of interest between the city and the characters that live in them. Mrs. Dalloway, presents as major
themes, isolation and community, or the possibilities and limits of communicativeness, as shown by Clarissa's increasing
sense of loneliness and by her social abilities, which bring so many people to her parties.

How is the stream of consciousness presented in Ms. Dalloway?

Characters in the classic nineteenth-century novel, from Jane Austen to George Eliot, are presented as social beings with a
subtle and delicate analysis of their moral and emotional inner lives.
Towards the turn of the century, however, reality was greatly located in the private, subjective consciousness of individual
selves.
The stream-of-consciousness novel is said to be the literary expression of a philosophical doctrine that nothing is certainly
real except one's own existence.

Ulysses
Summary and Structure
Ulysses also presents events in the lives of two major characters— Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus — on a single day
in Dublin. Ulysses thoroughly changed our understanding of literature and language with its deep and complex structures.
Ulysses’ construction is endlessly inventive, and labyrinthine. The novel combines a mythical adventure of daily actions and
a splendid portrait of internal psychological processes.
Superb and sparkling, Ulysses is not easy to read, but offers rewards tenfold the effort and attention that willing readers
give it.
The novel represents one of the most appreciated works in the history of English literature. We can affirm that in the
modernist literature, the novel is one of the greatest masterpieces. But, we can also point out that Ulysses is sometimes
seen as so experimental that may become completely unreadable.
Overview
The novel seems to be as difficult to summarize as it is to read, but even though its story is remarkably simple.
Ulysses follows the paths of two characters in a day in Dublin in 1904: they are a middle aged Jewish man by the name of
Leopold Bloom and a young intellectual, Stephen Daedalus.
Bloom goes through his day certain that his wife, Molly, may have been receiving her lover at their home (as part of an
ongoing affair). During that day, he buys some liver, attends a funeral and, watches a young girl on a beach.
During that day, Daedalus goes to a newspaper office, gives a lecture about the theory of Shakespeare's Hamlet in a public
library and visits a maternity ward — where his journey becomes intertwined with Bloom's, as he calls Bloom to go along
with some of his friends on a drunken spree. At a notorious brothel, Daedalus suddenly becomes furious because he thinks
the ghost of his mother is near him.
He uses his cane to knock out a light, and gets into a fight--only to be knocked out himself. Bloom takes him back to his
house, where they sit and talk, drinking coffee into the next hours. In the final chapter, Bloom slips back into bed with his
wife, Molly.
We get a final monologue from her point of view. The string of words is famous, as it is entirely devoid of any punctuation.
The words just flow as one long, full thought.

Stream of consciousness in Ulysses

Joyce’s use of the stream-of-consciousness technique provides a unique perspective on the events of the day; we see the
events from the interior perspective of Bloom, Daedalus and Molly. But Joyce also expands upon the concept of stream of
consciousness.
Dealing with his work as experimental, he plays with narrative techniques in a wide and wild way. In some chapters he
concentrates on a phonic representation of its events; some are mock-historical; one chapter is told in epigrammatic form;
another is laid out like a drama.
Joyce is able to direct the story from several linguistic as well as psychological points of view taking advantage of these
different styles.
Joyce shakes the foundations of literary realism with his revolutionary style. After all, we can ask the following questions:
Aren't there a multiplicity of ways to tell a story? Which way is the right way? Can we fix on any one truthful way to
approach the world?

Structure of Ulysses
Ulysses as a literary experimentation presents a formal structure that is linked in a conscious way to the mythical journey
recounted in Homer's Odyssey (Ulysses is the Roman name of that poem's central character).
There is a mythical resonance in the way Joyce describes the journey of the day. Joyce links the events of the novel to
episodes that happen in the Odyssey.
Publishers generally present Ulysses with a table of parallels between the novel and the Odyssey. The scheme also offers
insight into Joyce’s experimental use of the literary form, as well as some understanding of how much planning and
concentration went into the construction of Ulysses.
Ulysses is considered one of the most relevant examples of modernism’s experimentation with language.
Intoxicating, powerful, and disconcerting, Ulysses is a tour de force by an incredibly truly writer, and a challenge for
completeness in the understanding of language that few could match. We can say that Ulysses very much deserves its place
in the pantheon of truly great works of art.

The Waste Land

Summary
In the opening of The Waste Land takes, we see that its title was taken from a line in the Anglican burial service. Each of the
four vignettes seemed to be produced from the perspective of a different speaker.
The first one is an autobiographical snippet from the childhood of an aristocratic woman, who claims that she is German,
not Russian (this would be important if the woman is meant to be a member of the recently defeated Austrian imperial
family).
The woman mixes a meditation on the seasons with remarks on the barren state of her current existence (“I read, much of
the night, and go south in the winter”).
An apocalyptic invitation to journey into a desert waste is presented in the prophetic second section where the speaker will
show the reader “something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at
evening rising to meet you; / [He] will show you fear in a handful of dust”.
The almost threatening prophetic tone is mixed with childhood reminiscences about a “hyacinth girl” and a nihilistic
epiphany the speaker has after an encounter with her. It’s true that these recollections are filtered through quotations
from Wagner’s operatic version of Tristan and Isolde, an Arthurian tale of adultery and loss.
An imaginative tarot reading is described in the third episode, in which some of the cards Eliot includes in the reading are
not part of an actual tarot deck.
The final episode of is the most surreal. There is a man who walks through a London populated by ghosts of the dead. He
confronts a figure with whom he once fought in a battle that seems to conflate the clashes of World War I with the Punic
Wars between Rome and Carthage (both futile and excessively destructive wars).
The deadly figure is called Stetson and is asked about the fate of a corpse planted in his garden. The episode ends up with a
famous line from the preface to Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal (an important collection of Symbolist poetry), accusing the
reader of sharing in the poet’s sins.

Video Lesson
What does 'stream of consciousness' mean?
It's a style of writing evolved by authors at the beginning of the 20th century to express in words the flow of a character's
thoughts and feelings. The technique aims to give readers the impression of being inside the mind of the character.

Virginia Woolf
English writer Virginia Woolf was raised in a remarkable household. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was an historian and
author, and also one of the most prominent figures in the golden age of mountaineering. Woolf’s mother, Julia Prinsep
Stephen (née Jackson), had been born in India and later served as a model for several Pre-Raphaelite painters. She was also
a nurse and wrote a book on the profession.
As a young girl, Virginia was light-hearted and playful. She started a family newspaper, the Hyde Park Gate News, to
document her family’s humorous anecdotes. She had, however, been traumatized at the age of six when her half-brothers
George and Gerald Duckworth sexually abused her. This dark spot was only made deeper and more permanent when her
mother suddenly died at the age of 49. The hormones of early adolescence and the undeniable reality of this huge loss
spun Woolf into a nervous breakdown, only made worse when two years later, her half-sister Stella also died.
When Virginia was in her early 20s, her sister Vanessa and brother Adrian sold the family home in Hyde Park Gate, and
purchased a house in the Bloomsbury area of London. Through her siblings’ connections, Virginia became acquainted with
several members of the Bloomsbury Group. Leonard Woolf, a writer and a member of the group, took a fancy to Virginia.
By 1912, she and Leonard were married.
In 1925, she wrote Mrs. Dalloway, her fourth novel, was released to rave reviews. The mesmerizing story interweaves
interior monologues and raises issues of feminism, mental illness and homosexuality in post-World War I England.
Throughout her career, Woolf spoke regularly at colleges and universities, penned dramatic letters, wrote moving essays
and self-published a long list of short stories.
Her ability to balance dream-like scenes with deeply tense plot lines earned her incredible respect from peers and the
public alike.
Despite her outward success, she continued to regularly suffer from depression. She committed suicide on March 28, 1941
by drowning into a river with her pockets full of stones.
Virginia Woolf was extremely dissatisfied with the current form of the novel as represented by the great Edwardians,
Bennett, Wells or Galsworthy. The form of the novel that prevailed in the first quarter of this century seemed to her to
obscure or even falsify her experience.
Virginia Woolf had the courage to discard the orthodox linear narrative and used instead a distinctive impressionistic
technique, characterized by lyrical intensity and subtle penetration into the stream of consciousness.

Main traces in Virginia Woolf’s literature:

• No Element of Story—Rendering of inner reality
• The World of Outer Reality not Ignored
• Emergence of an Art Form
• Poetisation of the English Novel
• The Interior Monologue—Stream of Consciousness Technique
• The Distinctive Nature of Reality
• Artistic Sincerity and Integrity
• Aestheticism
• Woman’s Point of View; Feminisation of English Novel
• Limitations of her Range

Mrs. Dalloway
Themes:
 Communication vs. Privacy
 Disillusionment with the British Empire
 The Fear of Death
 The Threat of Oppression

Motifs:
 Time
 Shakespeare
 Trees and Flowers
 Waves and Water
Symbols:
 The Prime Minister
 Peter Walsh’s Pocketknife and Other Weapons
 The Old Woman in the Window
 The Old Woman Singing an Ancient Song

James Joyce
Joyce was one of the most revered writers of the 20th century. His exploration of language and new literary forms showed
not only his genius as a writer but spawned a fresh approach for novelists, one that drew heavily on Joyce's love of the
stream-of-consciousness technique and the examination of big events through small happenings in everyday lives.
He was the eldest of ten children born to John Stanislaus Joyce and his wife Marry Murray Joyce. His father, while a
talented singer, didn't provide a stable a household. He liked to drink and his lack of attention to the family finances meant
the Joyces never had much money.
From an early age, James Joyce showed not only exceeding intelligence but also a gift for writing and a passion for
literature.
His most famous work is Ulysses.

Ulysses
Themes:
 The Quest for Paternity
 The Remorse of Conscience
 Compassion as Heroic
 Parallax, or the Need for Multiple Perspectives
 Love
 Patriotism
 Sex
 Memory and the past
 Life, Counciousness, and Existance
 Religion
 Prejudice
 Mortality
 Prison and Confinement

By creating a novel based around a stream of consciousness narrative, it is clear that James Joyce wrote Ulysses in an effort
to better understand the human mind and the way in which it functions. However, in order to fully understand the human
mind, it is necessary to study both male and female perspectives. For that reason, Ulysses concludes with an episode
focusing on the thoughts of Molly Bloom, the primary female character in Ulysses. Based on the fact that episode eighteen
in the only chapter written from a female perspective, it is apparent that Molly is intended to represent women as a whole
and, for that reason, Molly is portrayed as an extremely ambivalent character.
Joyce uses Molly as a means to convey and understand both the various layers of the female mind and the way in which
women are united despite their differences in mindset and opinions.

T.S. Eliot
His most famous work is The Waste Land. It was published in 1922.
It was composed during a period of personal difficulty for Eliot—his marriage was failing, and both he and Vivienne were
suffering from nervous disorders. The poem is often read as a representation of the disillusionment of the post-war
generation. Before the poem's publication as a book in December 1922, Eliot distanced himself from its vision of despair.
On 15 November 1922, he wrote to Richard Aldington, saying, "As for The Waste Land, that is a thing of the past so far as I
am concerned and I am now feeling toward a new form and style."
The Waste Land is a poem known for its obscure nature—its slippage between satire and prophecy; its abrupt changes of
speaker, location, and time. This structural complexity is one of the reasons that the poem has become a touchstone of
modern literature, a poetic counterpart to a novel published in the same year, James Joyce's Ulysses.
Among its best-known phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of dust" and "Shantih
shantih shantih". The Sanskrit mantra ends the poem.
It may be—along with Joyce’s Ulysses—the greatest work of all modernist literature.
Eliot received a great deal of guidance from Ezra Pound, who encouraged him to cut large sections of the planned work and
to break up the rhyme scheme. Recent scholarship suggests that Eliot’s wife, Vivien, also had a significant role in the
poem’s final form.
A long work divided into five sections, The Waste Land takes on the degraded mess that Eliot considered modern culture to
constitute, particularly after the first World War had ravaged Europe.
Lesson 04
Toni Morrison and Philip Roth

Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison (born Chloe Anthony Wofford) is an American author, editor, and professor who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in
Literature for being an author “who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential
aspect of American reality”.
Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed African American characters. In 2001 she
was named one of “The 30 Most Powerful Women in America” by Ladies’ Home Journal.

Home, by Toni Morrison

There are topics already discussed before such as racism, slavery, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust. Toni Morrison, however,
presents her novel, Home, we realize as Samuel Beckett put it, “All has not been said and never will be”.
Home is gorgeous and intense, brutal yet heartwarming. Deceptively slight, it is like a slingshot that wields the impact of a
missile.
A Mercy (2008) by Toni Morrison, set on a farm in 17th century New York, focused on the roots of slavery and racism. With
Home, Morrison jumps forward some 275 years, to the mid-20th century where blacks in the South were still treated, as
several characters note, “like dogs. Change that. They treat dogs better”.
Her hero — and he is a hero — is 24-year-old Frank Money, recently returned from the horrors of the Korean War. He's
haunted by the deaths of his two "homeboys" and a moral lapse that has shaken him to his core.
He has no intention of returning to Lotus, Ga., the hometown he has always loathed, until he receives a letter about his
younger sister, Cee, which reads: “Come fast. She’ll be dead if you tarry”.
Home tells the story of Frank, who goes back home to rescue his beloved sister and save himself in the process.
Along the way, he is helped by Good Samaritans who provides train fare, food and clothes, but he is also frisked by cops,
jumped by gangsters and provoked into pummeling a pimp.

A Mercy, by Toni Morrison

A Mercy, published in 2008, joins Toni Morrison’s celebrated body of work exploring the African American experiences of
slavery and freedom. But in A Mercy, those issues are more multifaceted than in her previous novels.
Morrison goes back to the beginning of slavery in America, in the late seventeenth century, a period during which America
was far more diverse and complex than is generally imagined today.
Characters from various nations such as Portuguese, Dutch, English, Native American, African, and mixed-race characters
are included, all vying for a place in this new world.
Neither religious freedom nor religious tolerance is a given, and while the Southern colonies are clearly strongholds of
slavery, the North is by no means an innocent bystander.
Measles and smallpox are common diseases. Nevertheless, there is an Eden-like quality in the beauty and richness of this
new world, along with many decencies that transcend the evil elements.
According to High, there’s a main narrator in the novel whose name is Florens. She is a slave born in America of an African
mother, originally owned by Portuguese plantation owners.
Through an act of mercy, she becomes part of the household of the Vaarks, a farming and trading couple. Florens, one
Native American slave, one foundling of mixed race, and two male indentured servants are part of the household.
All characters are given a voice in the story: the voices combine to form a narrative that allows the reader to see the history
of the characters, as well as their present circumstances, and that allows the plot to move forward as a kind of mosaic.  The
action in the story is framed by the journey of Florens, a journey that is both literal and figurative.
Many themes emerge in A Mercy because of the complexity and diversity of the setting and the characters. Concepts of
freedom and slavery are explored by Morrison in every man (and woman), not just within the context of the African
American experience.
She examines the power of literacy in a world in which literacy is by no means a right, connecting it to freedom and
personal autonomy. The author presents biblical themes with America as the Garden of Eden and America as the Promised
Land, both perhaps being precursors of the modern “American Dream”.
The religious intolerance of the Old World is repeated in the New World, allowing an exploration of the myth that America
is the land of religious freedom.
The variability of love is a theme demonstrated through the relationships in the novel — relationships between mother and
child, between husband and wife, between two males, and between lovers.
Morrison also expands the reader’s perspective on what makes a home and what makes a family, showing that these are
constructs we create out of need and love, not only out of blood or marriage.
And finally, acts of kindness and humanity — large and small — run through the story, showing that it is not so much God’s
mercy that rescues us as much as it is our mercy to one another.

Philip Roth
Born on March 19, 1933, in Newark, New Jersey, Philip Roth is considered one of the leading authors of the 20th century.
He is best known for his provocative explorations of Jewish and American identity, often focusing on sexual and familiar
love and mortality. He is considered by many critics to be a literary troublemaker, graphically exploring uncomfortable
cultural and familiar issues. Roth has produced more than 30 books during his career. His most recent titles
include Everyman (2006) and Nemesis (2010). He announced that he was retiring from writing in 2012, but it is difficult to
believe that this great man of letters will stay away from the printed word forever.

Sabbath’s Theater, by Philip Roth

Sabbath’s Theater tells the story of aging puppet master Mickey Sabbath, who embarks in search of a suitable ending for
his ignominious life’s story.
Sabbath, at age sixty-four, finds himself dispossessed of his job, his home and his wife through a series of poor choices
driven by his aggressive libido and thirst for revenge. Sabbath sees life from the perspective of an author writing a black
comedy. He takes nothing seriously.
He chooses each action and word for its shock value, which Sabbath finds immensely entertaining. He sees life as a big
show and himself as the puppet master pulling the strings. The purpose of his act is to shock and entertain, but he
considers the misery of others entertaining. His purpose is to put on a show and he doesn't consider the pain he causes.
The turning point that propels Sabbath to write the conclusion of his own life comes when his beloved mistress of thirteen
years, Drenka Balich, dies from cancer at age fifty-two.

Video Lesson
Postmodernism
Postmodern literature is literature characterized by reliance on narrative techniques such as fragmentation, paradox, and
the unreliable narrator; and often is (though not exclusively) defined as a style or a trend which emerged in the post–World
War II era. Postmodern works are seen as a response against Enlightenment thinking and Modernist approaches to
literature.
Postmodernism arts, as a whole, tend to resist definition or classification as a "movement".
The convergence of postmodern literature with various modes of critical theory, particularly reader-response and
deconstructionist approaches, and the subversions of the implicit contract between author, text and reader by which its
works are often characterized, have led to pre-modern fictions such as Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605,1615) and Laurence
Sterne's eighteenth-century satire Tristram Shandy being retrospectively considered by some as early examples of
postmodern literature.
While there is little consensus on the precise characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature, it is
commonly defined in relation to a precursor. For example, a postmodern literary work tends not to conclude with the
neatly tied-up ending as is often found in modernist literature (Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner), but often parodies it. Postmodern
authors tend to celebrate chance over craft, and further employ metafiction to undermine the writer's authority. Another
characteristic of postmodern literature is the questioning of distinctions between high and low culture through the use of
pastiche, the combination of subjects and genres not previously deemed fit for literature.
The last half of the 20th century left a number of writers with a profound sense of paranoia. They also gave them an
awareness of the possibility of utter disaster and apocalypse on the horizon. The notion of locating precise meanings and
reasons behind any event became seen as impossible.
Postmodern literary writers have also been greatly influenced by various movements and ideas taken from postmodern
philosophy. Postmodern philosophy tends to conceptualize the world as being impossible to strictly define or understand.
Postmodern philosophy argues that knowledge and facts are always relative to particular situations and that it's both futile
and impossible to attempt to locate any precise meaning to any idea, concept or event.
Postmodern philosophy argues that all belief systems and ideologies are developed for the express purpose of controlling
others and maintaining particular political and social systems. The Postmodern philosophical perspective is pretty cynical
and takes nothing that is presented at face value or as being legitimate.
Postmodern literary writer's imagination is a belief that the world has already fallen apart and that literature, instead,
should serve to reveal the world's absurdities, countless paradoxes and ironies.
Postmodern literature is not specific to writers from any particular region or culture. There are thousands of writers and
literary works from all over the world.

Characteristics of Postmodernism
 Pastiche: The taking of various ideas from previous writings and literary styles and pasting them together to make
new styles; mixing of styles.
 Intertextuality: The acknowledgment of previous literary works within another literary work.
 Metafiction: The act of writing about writing or making readers aware of the fictionality of the very fiction their
reading.
 Temporal Distortion: The use of non-linear timelines and narrative techniques in a story.
 Minimalism: The use of characters and events which are decidedly common and non-exceptional characters.
 Maximalism: Disorganized, lengthy, highly detailed and writing.
 Magical Realism: The introduction of impossible or unrealistic events into a narrative that is otherwise realistic.
 Faction: The mixing of actual historical events with fictional events without clearly defining what is factual and
what is fictional.
  Reader Involvement: Often through direct address to the reader and the open acknowledgment of the fictional
nature of the events being described.
 Discontinuity: of tone, point of view, register, and logical sequence.
 Self-consciousness about language and literary technique: especially concerning the use of metaphor and symbol,
and the use of self-referential tropes.

Even though the writers most often associated with postmodernism may deal with serious themes, their work often has
absurd, playful, or comic aspects, and sometimes makes special use of parody and pastiche and of references to other texts
and artifacts.

Toni Morrison
American author, editor and professor. Winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize. Her novels are characterized by visionary force and
poetic import.
Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed African American characters; among the best
known are her novels The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988.

Morrison’s Style
 easily distinguishable due to her unique use of language.
 use of unusual—yet effective—comparisons that give further description to the details she presents; utilizes
similes in her writing to help the reader connect the content with alternate images and experiences.
 frequent use of significant references to history; historical roots also add more depth to the stories and make
them seem more realistic.
 includes a wide variety of different types of sentences, which makes her writing that much more fluid.

Home, by Toni Morrison

Whatever home might be for Frank, it is not a place where war is absent. War memories, psychological injury, and loss have
become a part of him, so that his wartime and peacetime selves have become one.
His army jacket and dog tags are signs of an inner melding. A central theme in the novel is the kind of space home can be
for a broken veteran like Frank.
Home is better seen as an exploration of the limits of understanding. Home is the place where we look for understanding
but can never find it. Home in this novel is not a land. It is tied to concrete physical spaces and to memories of their past
meanings. It is a place where individuals remain disconnected, able to see only the exterior of their most intimate human
contacts. Even at home individuals don’t fully know each other.
Brother and sister provide support for each other, but they can never truly empathize because, as Frank admonishes: “You
can’t imagine it because you weren’t there.”
Home is a cautionary tale for an era when soldiers return from places the rest of us can never fully understand. The
experience of war itself is far away and largely inaccessible.
Frank’s nightmares and rages would now have a name: post-traumatic stress disorder. But even if broken soldiers received
better care and resources, they would still confront the same emptiness — the profound limits of empathy.

A Mercy, by Toni Morrison

It is set on a farm in 17th century New York, and focused on the roots of slavery and racism.

Philip Roth
Philip Roth was born on March 19, 1933, in Newark, New Jersey. Roth graduated from Princeton University in 1954. In
1959, he won the National Book Award for Goodbye, Columbus.
Over the years, he has earned many accolades for his work, including a second National Book Award for 1995's  Sabbath's
Theatre and a Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. His later works include Everyman (2006) and Nemesis (2010).
Much of Roth's fiction revolves around semi-autobiographical themes, while self-consciously and playfully addressing the
perils of establishing connections between the author Philip Roth and his fictional lives and voices. His fiction has also
incorporated social commentary and political satire.
Roth’s works are characterized by an acute ear for dialogue, a concern with Jewish middle-class life, and the painful
entanglements of sexual and familial love.

Sabbath's Theatre, by Philip Roth

Roth won the National Book Award again for Sabbath's Theatre in 1995. The story revolves around Mickey Sabbath, a
former puppeteer, who starts to unravel after the death of one of his lovers.
Sabbath's Theater is a comic creation of epic proportions, and Mickey Sabbath is its gargantuan hero. Once a scandalously
inventive puppeteer, Sabbath at sixty-four is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. After the death of his
long-time mistress, Sabbath embarks on a turbulent journey into his past, which takes him to the brink of madness and
extinction.
There is plenty of nastiness in this book, and certain readers will find it repellent, not funny at all.
American Pastoral, by Philip Roth
Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for American Pastoral (1997). This novel, part of a trilogy that also includes I Married
a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain(2000), brings back Nathan Zuckerman to help tell the story of Jewish
businessman Seymour "Swede" Levov.

Lesson 05
Zadie Smith and John Updike

Zadie Smith
In this lesson we are going to analyze two novels by the British author Zadie Smith.
 The first one will be White Teeth, which is a 2000 novel. It focuses on the later lives of two wartime friends — the
Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and the Englishman Archie Jones, and their families in London.
 The second one is On Beauty, in which Howard Belsey is an Englishman abroad, an academic teaching in
Wellington, a college town in New England. Married young, thirty years later he is struggling to revive his love for
his African American wife Kiki. Meanwhile, his three teenage children— Jerome, Zora and Levi — are each seeking
the passions, ideals and commitments that will guide them through their own lives.

Hysterical Realism
Hysterical realism, also defined as recherché postmodernism, is seen by James Wood, an English critic, as a literary genre.
The term hysterical realism was introduced by Wood in an essay on Zadie Smith's White Teeth, which appeared in the July
24, 2000 issue of The New Republic.
This kind of realism shows a great contrast between elaborately absurd prose, plotting, or characterization and careful,
detailed investigations of real specific social phenomena.
Wood defines the use of the term to describe the contemporary conception of the "big, ambitious novel" that pursues
"vitality at all costs" and consequently "knows a thousand things but does not know a single human being" (Wood, 2000).
Authors like Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon can be considered the forefathers of hysterical realism continuing in writers
like David Foster Wallace.

White Teeth, by Zadie Smith

England is known for its class structure. The Iqbals and the Joneses are working-class families. Some of these characters feel
comfortable with that, and others seem to want more. When Irie, Millat and Magid Chalfen come into contact with a
middle-class family, we see more clearly some of the differences that define families of different social statuses or classes.
But we also see that families are just families. The Chalfens, the Iqbals, and the Joneses all struggle with intergenerational
and cultural conflicts. And, at the conclusion of the novel, they all end up in the same place. Literally.

Themes:
 Friendship - It often feels as if there is no such thing as a new friend in White Teeth. Friendships come with history,
lots of history. Let’s see the following example taken from White Teeth: “Samad had looked at him with great
sympathy, for he felt very tenderly for Archie. Their wartime friendship had been severed by thirty years and a
separation of continents […] In a fit of nostalgia, and because he was the only man Samad knew on this little island,
Samad had sought Archie out, moved into the same London borough”.
 Identity is the theme present all over the novel. In White teeth issues of identity are explored through characters'
ethnicities, the way they speak, their socioeconomic class, and more. We can say that identity is everywhere in this
book.
"You don't stand for anything, Jones," continued Samad. "Not for a faith, not for a politics. Not even for your
country. How your lot ever conquered my lot is a bloody mystery. You're a cipher, no?"
"A what?"
"And an idiot. What are you going to tell your children when they ask who you are, what you are? Will you know?
Will you ever know?"
"What are you that's so bloody fantastic?"
"I'm a Muslim and a man and a son and a believer. I will survive the last days."

On Beauty, by Zadie Smith

Themes:
 Language - With On Beauty, Smith takes a more traditional storytelling route; one where the language is calmer
and sedate—a slight letdown, in a way, considering what she’s proven herself capable of achieving.
 Plot and character development - The characters in On Beauty mingle in and out of each other’s lives in exuberant
and surprising ways (including in a number of incongruous romantic entanglements). The various characters and
subplots clash ecstatically together towards the end in a drunken brawl at a fraternity party in which secrets held
from one another are revealed and illuminate the larger themes explored in the novel.
  Expected and unexpected topic related to academia - Its removal from the real world, its scathing politics, its
hypocrisy, the role of affirmative action, down to the self-hatred of female students (Still starving themselves, still
reading women’s magazines that explicitly hate women, still cutting themselves with little knives in places they
think can’t be seen…)
 Emotional depth and acuteness - One such perfect moment is when Kiki cleans her family’s storeroom: “Generally
she kept her head down, but on the occasions she raised it she was treated to the most intimate of panoramic
views: the scattered possessions of the three people she had created.”

The Terrorist, by John Updike

According to The Independent, Saturday 06 sep. 2014:
John Updike has written 52 books. I have read most of them, and every Updike is a beacon in my reading year. Updike's
themes, with a few exceptions, are place, human yearning (which covers art, sex, and religion), and America, in both its
physical and mythical guises.
His latest, The Terrorist, treats with all of these:
• but America's place in the world,
• America's consumerism,
• America's cut-price spirituality,
• America's lost innocence
• and America's obesity, are specifically his pre-occupations here.

The novel’s title is literal. But the book’s aftertaste is the profound sense that we all terrorize each other in strange,
quotidian ways. We do so with our cynicism, infidelity, and bitterness, with our bullying, the betrayal of our ideals, with our
weakness and disgusting habits, our greed and licentiousness. We do so, in short, by living.
In Ahmad’s sad and warped sensitivity, his quiet, tidy confidence, Updike confronts us with judgment day. Ahmad and his
disgust with whom we are seeps into our consciences like moisture into wall cracks. Who doesn’t feel, now and then, that
contemporary society somehow deserves punishment for its sins and failures?
For most of us, though, maturity and sanity bring the realization that such punishment needn’t come in the form of a
truckload of explosive fertilizer.
Punishment, ubiquitous and subtle and merciless, comes in the degradations of life itself -- aging, loneliness, illness,
mourning, regret. And faith feeds on the joys wrapped baroquely and frailly around those degradations.
In this timely tale, that faith is as murky as a young man’s unpromising tomorrow, as transient as an ambivalent mistress’s
embrace, and as warm and close as the vein in your neck.

Video Lesson
Romanticism x Realism
Between Romanticism and Realism there is a radical aesthetic and ideological change. While Romanticism is emotional,
Realism tend to show the reality. Broadly defined as "the faithful representation of reality" or "verisimilitude," realism is a
literary technique practiced by many schools of writing. It also denotes a particular kind of subject matter.
A reaction against romanticism, an interest in scientific method, the systematizing of the study of documentary history, and
the influence of rational philosophy all affected the rise of realism.

Characteristics of Realism
• Selective presentation of reality with an emphasis on verisimilitude;
• Character is more important than action;
• Characters appear in their real complexity of temperament;
• Class is important – novel served interests of an insurgent middle class;
• Realistic novels avoid the sensational and has plausible events;
• Diction is natural vernacular, not heightened or poetic;
• Tone may be comic, satiric, or matter-of-fact;
• Objectivity in presentation.

Hysterical Realism
It is a writing style where the author attempts to talk about a real social phenomenon with funny and strange characters,
an odd plot and overelaborate prose. It is a form of social commentary meant to both amuse and comment on society. It is
a complex method of writing that requires humor in the language used while poking fun at modern society.
It is typified by a strong contrast between elaborately absurd prose, plotting, or characterization and careful detailed
investigations of real specific social phenomena. It is a literary genre characterized by exceptional length, frenetic action,
offbeat characters, and long digressions on topics secondary to the story.

Characteristics
• manic characters;
• chronic length;
• parallel and constant digressionon topics secondary to the plot;
 • frenzied action;
• characters trapped in a endless web of stories and sub-stories;
• information and details are connected to each other;
• overworked elements of realism;
• everyday events treated in extravagant manner.

Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith was born Sadie Smith on October 25, 1975 in London. Zadie Smith was born Sadie to a Jamaican mother and an
English father and grew up in a working class part of North West London. As a child, Smith wrote poetry, sang, and tap-
danced. She changed her name to Zadie at the age of fourteen, a year before her parents were divorced.
Smith aspired to a career in journalism and studied English Literature at Cambridge. While in college she published several
short stories, an initial success that led her to secure an agent for the novel she was writing.
She completed that first novel, White Teeth, while still at Cambridge and published it after graduation in 2000. It tackles
issues of race and the experience of immigrants in working class and middle class England. It became an instant bestseller
and won numerous literary prizes including the 2000 Whitbread Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award.

Zadie Smith Writing Process

Smith says she spends 80 percent of her efforts on the first 50 or 60 pages of a book — and the rest comes "pretty quickly."
She says she does that to get the tone — the perspective — the way she wants it.

John Updike
John Updike was born on March 18, 1932, in Reading, Pennsylvania. His famous  Rabbit series—including Rabbit,
Run (1960); Rabbit Redux (1971);Rabbit Is Rich (1981, Pulitzer Prize); Rabbit at Rest (1990, Pulitzer Prize); and Rabbit
Remembered (2001)—follows a very ordinary American man through the decades of the late 20th century. The most recent
installment of the series, Rabbit Remembered, centers on characters from the earlier books in the wake of Rabbit's death.
Updike died on January 27, 2009, in Danvers, Massachusetts.
John Updike is known for the idea that seemingly ordinary aspects of American life (like grocery shopping) are actually
quite fascinating. Updike wanted readers to see the beauty and magic of life, so he tried to describe everyday things using
the most clear but beautiful language possible.
Updike was well recognized for his careful craftsmanship, his unique prose style, and his prolificacy. Updike populated his
fiction with characters who "frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family
obligations, and marital infidelity.
His fiction is distinguished by its attention to the concerns, passions, and suffering of average Americans; its emphasis
on Christian theology; and its preoccupation with sexuality and sensual detail.
Updike's highly distinctive prose style features a rich, unusual, sometimes arcane vocabulary as conveyed through the eyes
of "a wry, intelligent authorial voice" that extravagantly describes the physical world, while remaining squarely in
the realist tradition. He described his style as an attempt "to give the mundane its beautiful due.

Principal themes
The principal themes in Updike's work are religion, sex, and America as well as death. Often he would combine them,
frequently in his favored terrain of "the American small town, Protestant middle class", of which he once said, "I like
middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules."

The Terrorist
It tells of eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy and his devotion to Allah and the words of the Holy Qur’an, as
expounded to him by a local mosque’s imam. The son of an Irish-American mother and an Egyptian father who disappeared
when he was three, Ahmad turned to Islam at the age of eleven. He feels his faith threatened by the materialistic,
hedonistic society he sees around him in the slumping factory town of New Prospect, in northern New Jersey.
Neither the counselor at Central High School, Jack Levy, nor Ahmad’s seductive black classmate, Joryleen Grant, succeeds in
diverting the boy from what his religion calls the Straight Path. When he finds employment in a furniture store owned by a
family of recently immigrated Lebanese, the threads of a plot gather around him with reverberations that rouse the
Department of Homeland Security.

Themes:
 The Power of Desire
 The Mystery of Other Minds
 Apearances
 Power
 Gender
 Society and class
Lesson 06
The Beat Generation - Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs

What was the beat generation?

The beat generation is a literary group also known as — The Beats which were relevant from the mid — 1950s until the
early 1960s. Its most well-known members were:
 the novelists:
o John Clellon Holmes (1926-88)
o Jack Kerouac (1922-69);
 and the poets:
o Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919),
o Philip Whalen (1923),
o Gary Snyder (1930),
o Gregory Corso (1930-2001).

William Burroughs (1914-97) was also loosely associated with the group, which was mainly placed in San Francisco and in
Greenwich Village, New York City. Much Beat poetry was published by Ferlinghetti's "City Lights" imprint, and his "City
Lights" bookstore in San Francisco was an important meeting-place for the group. It was suggested by Gregory Stephenson
that the Beat movement had two distinct phases:
 the first one was "underground," from 1944 to 1956,
 the second, the public, 1956-62.

The term "Beat generation" was introduced by Holmes in a 1952 essay on his novel Go (1952), later on Kerouac explained
that "Beat" meant being socially marginalized and exhausted ("beaten down") and blessed ("beatific").

How can we define the beats?

The term lost any significance of meaning, assuming it ever had a specific one, and broke down to a physical type — a kid
with beard, rumpled clothes, sandals, bongo drum, jazz records and a copy of Howl. Hints of sexual immoralities and use of
drugs, added a perverted glamour. The "beats" — whether in Venice, California or Greenwich Village, New York — were
lumped together in the same mattress on steel spring bed.
With more and more name calling came less and less clarity until the word assumed mythic proportions and the Beat
Generation had arrived. This might be called typical for America which would rather catalogue people than attempt to
understand them. The beats are those who identify themselves with the ideas of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory
Corso and Peter Orlovsky.
The others are whatever they might call themselves — "underground", "Black Mountain", "abomunist", or simply poets and
writers. There are also the numerous amorphous cliques that tend to cluster around a particular "little" magazine —
Exodus, Big Table, Yugen, Chelsea, Birth, etc. — or a “little” press — City Lights, Jargon, Totem, etc.

Who were the Bohemians?

All are Bohemians but all have been labeled as "beat". Certainly it is a different Bohemianism than the cool hipsterism of
seven years back, different too from the McCarthy time conformists of ten years ago when almost the only Bohemianism
around was still practiced by the "old-timers" of the Twenties and Thirties who had never given it up. Possibly the present
Bohemians should revel in the popular "beat" label instead of resenting it.

Who took part in the new young literary world of New York´s Greenwich Village?
Before World War II, the Village — then America´s only Bohemia — was a vaguely defined geographic area centering
around Washington Square, extending north to Fourteenth Street, went to the Hudson River and south to Houston Street.
The subsequent housing shortage pushed the young writers in search of inexpensive flats to Chelsea, the East Side,
Brooklyn Heights and even further outlying areas of the city. But the village is still their haven and center and over ninety
per cent of Fred McDarrah’s photographs were taken there. The writers, too, who appear here, are all "Villagers" or, at
least, visitors to this home of Bohemia which has clearly established branches throughout the country especially on the
West Coast where the "beat" movement initially started and reached its most outstanding proportions.
This Bohemia of social, political and artistic outcasts is deeply rooted in America. Over a hundred years ago, Herman
Melville in Pierre saluted its presence and perfectly described its qualities: “They are mostly artists of various sorts: painters
or sculptors, or indigent students, or teachers of languages, or poets, or fugitive French politicians, or German
philosophers.
Their mental tendencies, however heterodox at times, are still very fine and spiritual on the whole; since the vacuity of
their exchequers leads them to reject the coarse materialism of Hobbes, and incline to the airy exaltations of the
Berkleyean philosophy.

What about the beat's political beliefs?

Arguments have been maid that the "beats" are neo-fascist in spirit because there is apparent in some of the writings an
anti-humanist element, a mystical withdrawal to the inner life, a glorification of individual sensibilities, a denunciation of
social responsibilities, use of drugs and the applauding of sexual immorality. It is never possible to avoid this political
argument.
We have seen in our own time Ezra Pound reading Fascist speeches from Rome and his disciple, John Kasper, leading racist
mobs in our southern states: Celine on the side of anti-semitism and the Nazis; Hamsum welcoming Hitler's armies; Hesse's
early books- Steppenwolf and Demian — used cult-like by young SS officers.
But the presence of others must not be forgotten:
 Sartre and Camus in the French underground,
 Kenneth Patchen's ardent pacifism,
 Hemingway's For whom the bell tolls,
 Garcia Lorca murdered in Spain,
 Auden and Spender — all speaking for the humanistic, democratic spirit.

You can't lump all writers together — not even the Bohemians. And if you mean just the "beats", do you mean Life
magazine "beat", Ginsberg "beat", Kerouac "beat", or Norman Mailer "beat"? Each should be examined separately to make
conclusions — whether aesthetic, political or moral.
The reader has the choice of agreeing or disagreeing. This is the common ground of all social life and in the field of human
expression — of art — there is just as much responsibility for the observer as for the artist. Each has his own and it serves
no purpose to state that neither has any, as though that were possible.
Of explicit political attitudes, a deep suspicion and distrust of all state operations and participation dominates a rejection of
both armed camps — communist and capitalist. Its configuration is the mushroom shape of the nuclear bomb and the
holes dug in the salt mines to circumvent the abolition of national suicide. It spews anti-politics if politics must mean the
acceptance of "practical" man hugging shibboleths of moralities that would countenance non-moral deceits, lies, cheating,
distrust, violence, self-aggrandizement and national political life aimed at bigger rockets to the moon.
If a label is desired, perhaps that of Thoreau is most suited — the Thoreau who envisioned, to alter slightly, "a world at last
which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it
inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all
the duties of neighbors and fellow men. A world which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as it ripened would
prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious world…"

What is Jack Kerouac's Duluoz Legend about?

Jack Kerouac was considered the James Dean of the literary world. As the rash and ruthless bad boy he was loved by
adventurous women all over America. We can say that by being extremely handsome he became the poster-boy for the
sensitive and enlightened Beat generation.
Like his peers, Kerouac spent his life trying to find comfort in sex, drugs, and literature. His life, his romances, and his highs
were unnatural, fast, and furious, and the tortured soul found behind the pretty face could never be calmed.
We have three ways to read Jack Kerouac chronologically:
 Biographical order
 Compositional order
 Order of publication

By the time On the road was released in 1957, Kerouac was in the uncomfortable and rare position of having no fewer than
half a dozen manuscripts he wanted to publish.
The books were released out of autobiographical order due to Viking Press's desire for another road book (which they later
received in The Dharma bums), Kerouac's own dual frustration at attracting a cult following instead of literary respect, and
his inability to widely market his more experimental fictions such as Visions of Cody and Dr. Sax.
Two kinds of novels fall into two camps: the Lowell books, which chronicle his childhood and adolescence through his days
at Horace Man Prep and Columbia, and his Road books, which relate his adventures on the road, his relationship with Neal
Cassady and the members of the Beat Generation, his sudden fame, and his ultimate descent into alcoholism.
This Duluoz (the fictional substitute for "Kerouac") Legend was Kerouac's attempt to make as in the traditions of Balzac,
Proust, and Thomas Wolfe, a great scheme of his life.
While this approach has confounded and overly excited many critics and biographers, leading them to deal with Kerouac's
life at the expense of his fiction, James T. Jones offers a compelling mythic context to the Duluoz Legend that not only
provides the prose with a relevant psychoanalytic structure appropriate for autobiographical fiction but also illuminates
Kerouac's craft as a writer (a neglected and mistreated subject due to the confused belief that Kerouac's self-professed
"spontaneous composition" eliminated the possibility for revision altogether).

Naked Lunch, by William Burroughs

It's very difficult to describe Naked lunch in terms of plot because it is a non-linear narrative.
The book is structured as a series of loosely connected vignettes. Burroughs stated that the chapters are intended to be
read in any order. The reader follows the narration of junkie William Lee, who takes on various aliases, from the U.S. to
Mexico, eventually to Tangier and the dreamlike Interzone.
The vignettes (which Burroughs called "routines") are drawn from Burroughs' own experiences in these places and his
addiction to drugs (heroin, morphine, and while in Tangier, majoun [a strong hashish confection] as well as a German
opioid, brand name Eukodol, of which he wrote frequently).

Video Lesson
Beat Generation
It was not a big group, but their ideas were quite controversial and let their marks until nowadays.
It was a generation that started at the end of the 40s and got strong in the 50s. They provoked society in a way it could be
felt until the 70s.
Society was deeply wounded by the thought of this generation, which was unhappy with the way things had been
happening in society.
The beat generation was a movement that went beyond literature and arts – it changed the life style of the adepts and the
way people perceived life. However, many of the things the beats proposed were not really possible in society.

Historical Context
The beats appeared in a moment right after the war, when people were trying to put things together again. America had
become a strong nation in many aspects.
When the 50s began, something seemed to be a little wrong with the American way of living. American way of life used to
be very simple, even for the richest part of the population. However, racism was a real problem and it started to be showed
off. Black people didn’t have the same rights as white people and started making demands for a country which was growing
and developing.
Black movements started to organize themselves and fight for their right. It promoted a conflict and things started to
change.
On the other hand, prosperity was a real thing in America and it brought optimism to America. Americans saw an
opportunity to return to their old way of living – calm lives in the suburbs with man as providers in the families – even with
the cold war going on and people living in fear.
The construction of interstate highways and schools, the distribution of veterans’ benefits and, most of all, the increase in
military spending on goods like airplanes and new technologies like computers contributed to the decade’s economic
growth. Rates of unemployment and inflation were low, and wages were high. Middle-class people had more money to
spend than ever–and, because the variety and availability of consumer goods expanded along with the economy, they also
had more things to buy. There was a great wave of consumerism in the USA.
People began to buy land on the outskirts of cities and use mass production techniques to build modest, inexpensive tract
houses there. It was often cheaper to buy one of these suburban houses than it was to rent an apartment in the city. These
houses were perfect for young families. However, they were often not so perfect for the women who lived in them. In fact,
the booms of the 1950s had The idea that a woman’s most important job was to bear and rear children was hardly a new
one, but it began to generate a great deal of dissatisfaction among women. This dissatisfaction, in turn, contributed to the
rebirth of the feminist movement in the 1960s.

The Beat Generation

At the same time America was developing, women were not satisfied, cold war was going on and a growing group pf
Americans began fighting against inequality and racial discrimination.
This is the context in which The Beat Generation appeared. It was a new cultural and literary movement staked its claim on
the nation’s consciousness.
It was a generation seen as gone wild. They thought they should not live under any kind of authority. They denied religion
and encouraged the use of drugs in order to make your mind go free.
They were against consumerism and saw capitalism as something destructive to the human spirit.
They usually crossed the line of pornography in their works and therefore merited censorship. They were not traditional
and very aggressive in what they believed.
They were very influential.
Criticism of the Beat Generation’s aesthetics and behavior came from many corners of society. The academic community
derided the Beats as anti-intellectual and unrefined. Mainstream America was horrified by their supposed sexual deviancy
and illicit drug use. Established poets and novelists looked down upon the freewheeling abandon of Beat literature.
Politicians identified elements of Beat ideology as Communist and a threat to the nation’s security.

Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac was an American writer best known for the novel On the Road, which became an American classic, pioneering
the Beat Generation in the 1950s.
Kerouac, a writer from the movement who introduced the term beat generation, ended up leaving the movement and
living a decaying life after all. It was thought the movement became meaningless – sex just for sex, alcohol just for fun, etc.
He is considered a literary iconoclast. Kerouac is recognized for his method of spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work
covers topics such as Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel. He became an
underground celebrity and, with other beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement.
While he is best known for his novels, Kerouac is also noted for his poetry written during the Beat movement. Many of
Kerouac's poems follow the style of his free-flowing, uninhibited prose, also incorporating elements of jazz and Buddhism.

Douloz Legends
The book describes the adventures of Kerouac's alter ego, Jack Duluoz, covering the period of his life between 1935 and
1946. The book includes reminiscences of the author's high school experiences, his education at Columbia University, and
his subsequent naval service during World War II. It culminates with the beginnings of the beat movement.  Vanity of
Duluoz is a key volume in Jack Kerouac's lifework, the series of autobiographical novels. With tender humor and
intoxicating wordplay he brought, Kerouac takes his alter ego from the football fields of small-town New England to the
playing fields and classrooms of Horace Mann and Columbia, out to sea on a merchant freighter plying the sub-infested
waters of the North Atlantic during World War II, and back to New York, where his friends are the writers who would one
day become known as the Beat generation and where he published his first novel.

William Burroughs
Beat Generation writer known for his startling, nontraditional accounts of drug culture, most famously in the book Naked
Lunch.
An addict for years, he crafted books like Junky and Naked Lunch, which were harrowing, often grotesque looks at drug
culture. He is cited as a major influence on countercultural figures in the world of music as well and worked on several
recording projects.

Lesson 07
Postmodern Literature
Postmodern literature is literature characterized by reliance on narrative techniques such as fragmentation, paradox, and
the unreliable narrator; and often is (though not exclusively) defined as a style or a trend which emerged in the post–World
War II era. Postmodern works are seen as a response against Enlightenment thinking and Modernist approaches to
literature.
It can be said that American postmodern fiction dominated American literature in the 1960’s, but it has come through
various modifications and transformations since that. It cannot be understood either as a coherent movement, or as a
systematically developing tendency.

Thomas Pynchon
Born in 1937 in Glen Cove, New York, Thomas Pynchon studied science and English at Cornell University, publishing his first
novel, V., in 1963. Subsequent works include The crying of lot 49, Gravity's rainbow and Mason & Dixon, each of which is
marked by a layered, complex narrative. Known almost as much for being reclusive as he is for his novels, Pynchon won the
1974 National Book Award for Gravity’s rainbow and is slated to publish Bleeding edge in September 2013.
Pynchon is one of the most famous “recluses” who frequently runs away from the generally standard media engagements
expected of a writer of his status. (Of course that does not include his two appearances on The Simpsons, wearing a paper
bag over his head, of course.)
As a result, it’s easy to see the man as myth, as a hilarious cad of letters, the man who asked comedian Irwin Corey to
accept his National Book Award Fiction Citation. His life and behavior seems to be a postmodern work full of irony and
humor.
He is noted for his dense and complex works of fiction. He is regarded by many readers and critics as one of the finest
contemporary authors. Both his fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, styles and
themes, including (but not limited to) the fields of history, science and mathematics.
Reclusive as JD Salinger, little is known about him. Reportedly, his last public appearances occurred in episodes of The
Simpsons.
Pychon works covers a infinitude of subjects and does so in a variety of styles: science, ideology, perception, paranoia,
racism, music and math are treated at the same time and from different perspectives. And hysteria it is a keyword. James
Wood frame the work of Pynchon in something called “hysterical realism”: a subgenre of postmodernism that, ultimately
simplifying means plots and complicated written.
One of the highlights of this work is the idea that there is always something acting in secret, that there are underground
agents in determining the observable part of reality.

Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett was born near Dublin, Ireland, on April 13, 1906 into a Protestant, middle class home. His father was a
quantity surveyor and his mother worked as a nurse. At the age of 14 he was sent to the same school that Oscar Wilde
attended. Beckett is known to have commented, "I had little talent for happiness."
He wrote a trilogy of novels in the 1950s as well as famous plays like Waiting for Godot. In 1969 he was awarded the Nobel
Prize for Literature. His later works included poetry and short story collections and novellas. He died on December 22, 1989
in Paris, France.
His work has extended the possibilities of drama and fiction in unprecedented ways, bringing to the theatre and the novel
an acute awareness of the absurdity of human existence.
Having begun literary life as a modernist and promoter of the reputations of Proust and Joyce, in the years before and after
the Second World War he found his own voice (“began to write what I feel”) and continued to develop this voice
unstintingly and without compromise until the year of his death.
His work has been described by himself and others as an art of impoverishment, an art of failure. Far from meaning that his
stories, novels and plays are nihilistic, pessimistic and depressing, features he inherited from liberal humanist constructions
of human self-identity.
Beckett's work seeks a different location for the human psyche than that of the realist fiction and drama writer.
His work appears to have survived and transcended all attempts to categorize it or assimilate it into traditions such as
Existentialism, Modernism, or the Absurdist movements with which Beckett was provisionally associated in the sixties and
seventies.

Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros was born on December 20, 1954, in Chicago, Illinois.
Sandra Cisneros is the author of several books including The house on Mango Street, Caramelo, Loose woman, and, most
recently, Have you seen Marie? She is the founder of two organizations that serve writers, the Macondo Foundation (now
administered by the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center) and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation. Sandra is also the
founder of the Latino MacArthur Fellows (Los MacArturos). She has been honored with numerous awards including the
MacArthur Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and a Texas Medal of the Arts.
Her novel The House on Mango Street has sold more than two million copies.
Cisneros often incorporates Spanish into her English writing, substituting Spanish words for English ones where she feels
that Spanish better conveys the meaning or improves the rhythm of the passage.
Cisneros's fiction comes in various forms—as novels, poems, and short stories—by which she challenges both social
conventions, with her "celebratory breaking of sexual taboos and trespassing across the restrictions.
Cisneros tackles complex theoretical and social issues through the vehicle of apparently simple characters and situations.
Her writing is rich not only for its symbolism and imagery, but also for its social commentary and power to "evoke highly
personal responses".

Postmodern Style
The hallmarks of postmodern authors’ style were the use of irony and humor in their writing. Although postmodern
authors treat very serious subjects such as World War II, the Cold War, conspiracy theories — from a position of distance
and disconnect, they choose to depict their histories ironically and humorously.
White (2012) says that "Postmodernism sees human experience as unstable, internally contradictory, ambiguous,
inconclusive, indeterminate, unfinished, fragmented, discontinuous, jagged, with no one specific reality possible".
Many postmodern authors combined, or “pasted” elements of previous genres and styles of literature. To create a new
narrative voice, or to comment on the writing of their contemporaries, many postmodern authors combined, or “pasted”
elements of previous genres and styles of literature.

Thomas Pynchon and postmodern style

Thomas Pynchon, one of the most important postmodern authors, uses, for example, pop culture references, elements
from detective fiction, songs, science fiction, and war fiction, and well-known, obscure, and fictional history.

What should first-time reader’s attitude be towards Pynchon´s books?

According to Joslin (2012), those who are first-time readers of Pynchon´s works should avoid Pynchon’s most famous novel:
Gravity’s rainbow.
We suspect this is where many bristle against his work, throw down the fat tome and declare this Pynchon fellow to be a
literary huckster and a writer who has no interest in writing accessible literature with a proper story. Which, we suppose,
he is. But in a good way. One must get used to him: a first-time reader has to walk before they can run.
Pynchon’s prose takes gradual acclimation. It’s very easy to finish a scene and be completely unaware of what just
happened (obviously if you had been paying attention, you’d know the protagonist was swimming down a toilet, chasing
his harp, to avoid Malcolm X).
Pynchon’s novels are high-caliber shaggy dog stories, full of digressions and possibly pointless details converging to a climax
that resolves little, if anything. Gravity’s Rainbow, for example, has a brief interlude in which we follow the history of Byron
the Bulb. An immortal lightbulb. And it’s wonderful. But there’s time for Gravity’s rainbow later. There are less threatening
entry points to Pynchon’s mad world.

Common Themes
Along with its emphasis on sociopolitical themes such as and imperialism, its awareness and appropriation of many
elements of traditional high culture and literary form, Pynchon's work explores philosophical, theological, and sociological
ideas exhaustively, though in quirky and approachable ways.
His writings demonstrate a strong affinity with the practitioners and artifacts of low culture, including comic books and
cartoons, pulp fiction, popular films, television programs, cookery, urban myths, conspiracy theories, and folk art.
The Crying Lot 49, by Pynchon
Oedipa Maas starts working on the inventory of her late ex-boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity, only to discover the conspiracy that
involves a parallel system of mail to the official (and obviously secret) which is in operation since the late Middle Ages and
leaving (purposely or not) clues of its existence in plays and postage stamps .

Samuel Beckett and postmodernism

It is said that Beckett and Borges divide the distinction of introducing in literature what has come to be called
postmodernism.
Finney (1994) says that “Beckett's fictions starts out anew, inventing its rules as it goes along. Its subject is itself, the
narrating voice creating a world out of language. Before, between and after the jabber of words that constitute the fiction
is silence. How to express silence through sound? Beckett is preoccupied with this dilemma from the beginning of his
career. Unlike pigment and musical notes, words signify beyond any writer's control. "Is there any reason", Beckett asks a
friend in 1937, "why that terrible arbitrary materiality of the word's surface should not be permitted to dissolve...?"

How does Beckett describe a “literature of the unword?”

Since the beginning of a long writing life, Beckett promoted a war on words that conducted him to initiate innovations in
form and language. He went on experimenting to the end, never satisfied with the increasingly minimal, pared down
fictions that were the traits of the second half of his writing life. He was never satisfied. Words which were regarded as
enemies, continued to signify beyond every defeat he inflicted on them.
As Finney (1994) remarks “his fictions functions as progressive record of his fight to dominate language so that the silence
of the Real might make its presence felt”. As examples of silence in his earliest fiction we can mention Assumption (a short
story, 1929), Dream of fair to middling women (a novel written in 1932, published 1983), More pricks than kicks (a novel, or
ten connected short stories, 1934), and A case in a thousand (a short story, 1934). In Assumption the male protagonist is
locked in a self-imposed silence.

Minimalism in Beckett’s Works

The absurdity of human existence has been treated in Samuel Beckett's works as possibilities of drama and fiction in
unprecedented ways, showing in theatre plays and books our desperate search for meaning, our individual isolation, and
the gulf between our desires and the language in which they find expression. His work falls into two main periods, before
and after Waiting for Godot (written around 1950).
 Before: The pre-Godot period, when Beckett was finding his way as a writer and virtually unknown, yields much
more variety but less even quality of creative output.
 After: The latter period brought Beckett international and time-consuming eminence in theatre, radio and
television, and he concentrated more and more on the search for dramatic minimalism, writing — in an ever
shorter, more distilled style — plays (dramaticules) and prose (micronarratives), often only amounting to a few
pages, or less, of text.

Themes in Waiting for Godot

 Humor and the Absurd
 Waiting, Boredom, and Nihilism
 Modernism and Postmodernism
 Time
 Humanity, Companionship, suffering, and Dignity

The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisnero

Sandra Cisnero's novella The house on Mango Street was originally written in 1984 and is the story of a Latina girl named
Esperanza Cordero who grows up on the mean streets of an inner-city neighborhood. The novel enjoyed immediate critical
acclaim, winning the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award in 1985.

Themes:
 Identity
 Dreams, hopes and plans
 Society and class
 Innocence
 Gender
 Women and Femininity
 Foreignness
 Home
 Family
 Friends 
Lesson 08
Nabokov, Auster and Lessing
One of the great novelists of the 20th cent., Nabokov was an extraordinarily imaginative writer, often experimenting with
the form of the novel. Although his works are frequently obscure and puzzling (filled with grotesque incidents, word games,
and literary allusions) they are always erudite, witty, and intriguing.
Paul Auster is an internationally acclaimed author, who is well-known for his distinct themes such as that contain elements
of absurdism, identity crisis and existentialism.
Doris Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in Persia (now Iran). Both of her parents were British. Lessing has described her
childhood as an uneven mix of some pleasure and much pain.  In this class, you will see more about these three great
writers.

Who was Vladimir Nabokov?

Vladimir Nabokov (1899—1977), a Russian-born American, is one of the contemporary famous writers in America. As a
prolific writer, Nabokov is hugely known as one of the most relevant of literary stylists of the twentieth century.
There are eight novels that are English ones, in most of which it is reflected the illusory nature of reality and the Nabokov´s
relationship to his craft, proving the formulation of the illusion.
Lolita was Nabokov´s masterpiece and the book made him become a celebrity. It was first published in 1955 in Paris and
two heated controversies in the British and French media at that time were brought about: whether the novel was a work
of pornography or not, and if it should be banned or not.
The first American edition was finally published in 1958 and quickly moved to the top of the best-seller lists. The author
wants to show us something vivid, and something about people's real lives through characters' images given in the novel,
through Lolita's experience, which is like a nightmare, and through Humbert's life, which is hunted by an illusion of pursuing
a nymphet, and uses all his real life to discern from illusion to reality.

How can we link postmodernism with Lolita?

Modernism started to develop into postmodernism in 1950s in USA. Lolita, published in 1955 by Vladimir Nabokov, is one
of the most important works and controversial fictions of the 20th-century.
The fiction brought Nabokov international reputation, but also to generation after generation of readers leave untold topic.
There were some aspects of his fiction that made not only Lolita confusing and complicated but also the first fiction of
postmodernism in the history of American literature.
The aspects are:
 The complicacy of subject matter.
 Symbolic configuration between the leading character.
 Suspicion and denial of traditional values.
 The search for missing the main body and carefully depicted details.

For those characteristics we can analyze Nabokov’s representative work Lolita from the perspective of the postmodern
literary criticism theory. Lolita is analyzed for its background culture, genre, form and artistic techniques, etc. in the
postmodern context.
Thus it is the author’s intention to illustrate its major postmodern narrative features. Besides that the artistic charms in
Lolita are revealed and they were considered as the American postmodernism herald.

How is language dealt with in Lolita?

In Sparknotes (2014), Nabokov revered words and believed that the proper language could elevate any material to the level
of art. Lolita´s use of language is described as: effectively triumphs over shocking content and gives it shades of beauty that
perhaps it does not deserve. Lolita is filled with sordid subjects, including rape, murder, pedophilia, and incest. However,
Humbert Humbert, in telling his story, uses puns, literary allusions, and repeating linguistic patterns to render this dark tale
in an enchanting form. In this way, Humbert seduces his readers as fully and slyly as he seduces Lolita herself. Words are his
power, and he uses them to distract, confuse, and charm. He is a pedophile and a murderer, but he builds up elaborate
defenses and explanations for his actions, and his language shields him from judgment.
With Lolita, Nabokov’s ultimate achievement may be that he forces readers to be complicit in Humbert’s crimes. In order to
uncover the actual story of pedophilia, rape, and murder within the text, readers have to immerse themselves in Humbert’s
words and their shadowy meanings — and thus they must enter Humbert’s mind.
By engaging so closely with Humbert’s linguistic trickery, readers cannot hold him at a far enough distance to see him for
the man he truly is.

What's the role of Psychiatry?

Easy psychological analysis is defied by Humber´s passion and throughout Lolita, Humbert mocks psychiatry’s tendency
toward simplistic, logical explanations. In the foreword to Lolita, John Ray, Jr., Ph.D, claims that Humbert’s tale will be of
huge interest to psychiatry, but throughout his memories Humbert does his best to discredit the entire field of study,
heaping the most scorn on Freudian psychology.
For example, he lies to the psychiatrists at the sanitarium. He reports mockingly that Pratt, the headmistress of Lolita’s
school, diagnoses Lolita as sexually immature, wholly unaware that she actually has an overly active sex life with her
stepfather.
Nabokov demands that readers view Humbert as a unique and deeply flawed human being by undermining the authority
and logic of the psychiatric field, but not an insane one. Humbert further thwarts efforts of scientific categorization by
constantly describing his feelings for Lolita as an enchantment or spell, closer to magic than to science. He tries to prove
that his love is not a mental disease but an enormous, strange, and uncontrollable emotion that resists easy classification.
Nabokov himself was deeply critical of psychiatry, and Lolita is, in a way, an attack on the field.

Paul Auster
Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3, 1947) is an American author known for works blending
absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as:
 The New York Trilogy (1987)
 Moon Palace (1989)
 The Music of Chance (1990)
 The book of Illusions (2002)
 The Brooklyn Follies (2005)

What´s Paul Auster´s The New York trilogy about?

Dawson (2014) points out that Paul Auster's The New York trilogy is made up of three short novels and examines the
changing identity of the principal characters in a novel, while also investigating "the imbalance between the physical author
of a book, the individual who puts his name onto the cover, and the authentic author who he is not certain is the same
person".
He goes on saying that City of glass, in the first part, uses the conventions of the crime thriller in a metaphysical apologue
about man in relation to subconscious control and solitude.
The detective story is also used in Ghosts, the middle section, and shows a man forced effectively to 'tail' himself.
The concluding part, The locked room, is an autobiography by the unnamed friend of a disappeared literary giant. Though
the stories and styles are very contrasting, they are in essence all the same tale, with The locked room finally resolving the
odyssey.

How can Doris Lessing be described as a postmodern writer?

When Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007, it seemed that, at last, the highest literary honor was being
placed on a woman who has surveyed and judged mankind in the latter half of the 20th century like no other writer.
Turner (2014) says that “Doris Lessing perceives the operations of sex, power and society by way of a mystical vision that
makes her the heir to D.H. Lawrence. Her observations are not always comfortable ones, and this may be one reason why
she has troubled the literary and political world so much — she is a fierce writer, unafraid to speak unpalatable truths”.
We cannot easily categorize Doris Lessing´s because her work is united by her being a moralist, an investigator of states of
consciousness and forms of fiction, and a portrayer of how individuals function within society. It is said that no one other
than Lessing is capable of writing about African landscapes, outer space, Sufism, nuclear holocaust, Spanish rural poverty, a
Hampstead political family, and cats, all within the same career.

Video Lesson
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Lolita
For a book known for being very risqué, Lolita has no four-letter words or graphic sex; that's because of Humbert's style,
which combines the lyrical and clinical, the poetic and the academic, evoking Edgar Allan Poe and then height-charts, road
maps, post cards, "evidence" and exhibits.
Our narrator, Humbert, riddles the narrative with wordplay and wry observations of American culture, while his black
humor provides an effective counterpoint to the pathos of the tragic plot.
The style is also highly visual; Humbert often compels the reader to see what he describes.

Lolita Themes
 Sex
 Love
 Youth
 Innocence
 Visions of America
 Morality and ethics
 Justice and judgment
 Language and communication

Paul Benjamin Auster

The New York Trilogy
Following his acclaimed debut work, a memoir entitled The Invention of Solitude, Auster gained renown for a series of three
loosely connected detective stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy. These books are not conventional
detective stories organized around a mystery and a series of clues. Rather, he uses the detective form to
address existential issues and questions of identity, space, language, and literature, creating his own
distinctively postmodern form in the process.
Auster's writing style raises the mystery to a new level, with constant plays on words.
Auster’s relentless use of psychological doubles unifies The New York Trilogy and underscores his concern with
contemporary humanity’s obsession with self and uncertainty about the validity and value of that self.

Other works
The search for identity and personal meaning has permeated Auster's later publications, many of which concentrate heavily
on the role of coincidence and random events (The Music of Chance) or increasingly, the relationships between people and
their peers and environment (The Book of Illusions, Moon Palace). Auster's heroes often find themselves obliged to work as
part of someone else's inscrutable and larger-than-life schemes.

Themes
Two central influences in Paul Auster's writing are Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis and the American transcendentalism of
the early to middle nineteenth century, exemplified by Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The world can only be constructed through language, but it always leaves something uncovered, something that cannot be
told or be thought of, it may only be sensed. This is one of the central themes of Paul Auster's writing.
Auster's protagonists often are writers who establish meaning in their lives through writing and they try to find their place
within the natural order, to be able to live within "civilization" again.
Paul Auster's reappearing subjects are:
 coincidence
 frequent portrayal of an ascetic life
 a sense of imminent disaster
 an obsessive writer as central character or narrator
 loss of the ability to understand
 loss of language
 loss of money - having a lot, but losing it little by little without earning some new money any more
 depiction of daily and ordinary life
 failure 
 absence of a father
 writing and storytelling, metafiction
 intertextuality
 American history and space

Doris May Lessing

Lessing’s books were mainly fictional and can be sub-categorized in three diverse themes:
 The Communist theme which lasted from 1944 to 1956;
 The Psychological Theme started from 1956 to 1969;
 Sufism, to which she was introduced to by ‘Idries Shah’, who was a good friend and teacher.

Lesson 09
Atwood, McEwan and Eggars
Margaret Eleanor Atwood, (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and
environmental activist. She is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, has been
shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award several
times, winning twice.
Ian Russell McEwan, (born 21 June 1948) is an English novelist and screenwriter. In 2008, The Times featured him on their
list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Dave Eggers (born March 12, 1970) is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He is known for the best-selling memoir A
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and for his subsequent work as a novelist and screenwriter.

Who is Margaret Atwood?

Margaret Atwood is considered a versatile and prolific writer. She began her literary career in 1961 with the publication of
her first poetry collection, Double Persephone, and has grown to include sixteen poetry collections, twelve novels, eight
short fiction collections, six children's books, and five major non-fiction works.
She has also edited six literary anthologies including, Survival: a thematic guide to Canadian Literature, 1972, her most
relevant anthology, which has been credited with renewing interest in Canadian Literature. Besides this generic diversity,
Atwood's work also offers thematic diversity:
  Canadian national identity,
 relations between Canada and the United States,
 relations between Canada and Europe,
 the Canadian wilderness,
 environmental issues,
 biotechnology,
 human rights issues,
 and feminist issues, a prominent theme throughout her career.

Among so many themes, Atwood's representations of gender explore the social myths defining femininity, representations
of women's bodies in art, the social and economic exploitation of women, as well as women's relations with each other and
with men.

How does Atwood characterize her novels?

Callaway (2008) says that Atwood characterizes her novels in the following way: "the first trio [The Edible woman,
Surfacing, and Lady Oracle] has to do with women and men, last trio [The Handmaid's tale, Cat's Eye, and Robber Bride]
with women and women, and then [one] in between [Life before man] ha[s] to do with both: [...] pointing towards Cat's eye
and Robber Bride and one pointing towards Handmaid's tale and Bodily Harm" (Waltzing Again 219).
Atwood's first five novels, in particular, demonstrate the range and complexity of her representations of sexual power
politics, and provide a solid foundation for understanding the evolution of her feminist sympathies and how they inform
The Handmaid's tale.

What are The Handmaid´s tale´s themes?

 Women’s bodies as political instruments - Because of their subjugation, women are treated as subhuman and that
happens despite all of Gilead’s pro-women rhetoric. They are reduced to their fertility, treated as nothing more
than a set of ovaries and a womb.
 Language as a tool of power - An official vocabulary is created by Gilead that ignores and warps reality in order to
serve the needs of the new society’s elite. Considering that it was illegal for women to have jobs, Gilead created a
system of titles. Men are defined by their military rank while women are only defined by their gender roles as
Wives, Handmaids, or Marthas. A trial to strip them of permanent individual names strips them of their
individuality, or tries to. Feminists and deformed babies are treated as subhuman, denoted by the terms
“unwomen” and “unbabies”. Blacks and Jews are defined by biblical terms (“children of ham” and “sons of Jacob,”
respectively) that set them apart from the rest of society, making their persecution easier. There are prescribed
greetings for personal encounters, and to fail to offer the correct greetings is to fall under suspicion of disloyalty.
Specially created terms define the rituals of Gilead, such as “prayvaganzas,” “salvagings,” and “particicutions.”
 The causes of complancency - A slight amount of power or freedom, in a totalitarian state, Atwood suggests, make
people bear oppression willingly. Offred remembers her mother saying that it is “truly amazing, what people can
get used to, as long as there are a few compensations”. This is shown after Offred begins her relationship with
Nick.
 Religious terms used for political purposes - Gilead is a theocracy — a government in which there is no separation
between state and religion — and its official vocabulary incorporates religious terminology and biblical references:
o domestic servants are called “Marthas” in reference to a domestic character in the New Testament;
o the local police are “Guardians of the Faith”;
o soldiers are “Angels”;
o and the Commanders are officially “Commanders of the Faithful”.
Politics and religion sleep in the same bed in Gilead, where the slogan “God is a National Resource” predominates.
 Similarities between reactionary and feminist ideologies - Although The Handmaid’s tale offers a specifically
feminist critique of the reactionary attitudes toward women that hold sway in Gilead, Atwood occasionally draws
similarities between the architects of Gilead and radical feminists such as Offred’s mother. Gilead also uses the
feminist rhetoric of female solidarity and “sisterhood” to its own advantage. These points of similarity imply the
existence of a dark side of feminist rhetoric. Despite Atwood’s gentle criticism of the feminist left, her real target is
the religious right.

Who is Ian McEwan?

Ian Russell McEwan was born in Aldershot, Hampshire. He is an English novelist, the son of David McEwan and Rose Lilian
Violet (nee Moore). His father was a working class Scotsman and had the rank of a major in the army. As a result, McEwan
spent much of his childhood in East Asia (including Singapore), Germany and North Africa (including Libya), where his father
was posted. His family returned to England when he was twelve.
He attended Woolverstone Hall School; the University of Sussex, receiving his degree in English Literature in 1970; and the
University of East Anglia, where he was one of the first graduates of Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson's pioneering
creative writing course.
What´s the summary of Atonement, by Dave Eggers?
GradeSaver (1999) presents here a summary of Atonement which is a book written in three major parts, with a final
denouement from the author.
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius was Dave Eggers´ first book. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. After that, he's
written two more novels and launched an independent publishing house, which publishes books, a quarterly literary journal
(McSweeney's), a DVD-based review of short films (Wholpin), a monthly magazine (The Believer) and the Voice of Witness
project.
He has established himself as a philanthropist and teacher-at-large. In 1998 he launched 826 Valencia, a San Francisco-
based writing and tutoring lab for young people, which has since opened six more chapters across the United States. He has
extended his advocacy of students by supporting their educators, instituting a monthly grant for exceptional Bay Area
teachers. His TED Prize wish is for more people to follow him into getting involved in your local school — and talk about it
— through the website Once Upon a School.

What about Eggers latest book?

John Williams (2014) states that the new book’s title is a two-sentence mouthful: “Your fathers, where are they? and the
prophets, do they live forever? The novel features a man named Thomas who takes a NASA astronaut to an abandoned
military base, where he interrogates him about their mysterious connection.

Lesson 10
Techno Culture and Hyperreality
In postmodernity people are inundated with information, technology has become a central focus in many lives, and our
understanding of the real is mediated by simulations of the real. Many works of fiction have dealt with this aspect of
postmodernity with characteristic irony and pastiche. For example, Don DeLillo's White Noise presents characters who are
bombarded with a "white noise" of television, product brand names, and clichés. Steampunk, a subgenre of science fiction
popularized in novels and comics by such writers as Alan Moore and James Blaylock, demonstrates postmodern pastiche,
temporal distortion, and a focus on techno culture with its mix of futuristic technology and Victorian culture.

Introduction
Fedric (1991) says that “the last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the
future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or
social class; the “crisis” of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.); taken together, all of these perhaps
constitute what is increasingly called postmodernism.
The case for its existence depends on the hypothesis of some radical break or coupure, generally traced back to the end of
the 1950s or the early 1960s.

What´s White Noise by DonDeLillo about?

Jack Gladney teaches Hitler studies at a liberal arts college in Middle America where his colleagues include New York
expatriates. These people want to immerse themselves in "American magic and dread". Jack and his fourth wife, Babette,
bound by their love, fear of death, and four ultramodern offspring, navigate the usual rocky passages of family life to the
background babble of brand-name consumerism. Then a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives, an "airborne
toxic event" unleashed by an industrial accident.
The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the "white noise" engulfing the Gladney family — radio
transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmerings — pulsing with life, yet heralding the danger
of death.

How does Baudrillard describe the hyperreal?

Baudrillard´s ideas are very important to describe the postmodernism. He has been named as "the high priest of
postmodernism". Baudrillard's main ideas include two that are often employed in discussing postmodernism in the arts:
"simulation" and "the hyperreal".
Baudrillard often writes in an exaggerated or hyperbolic style (following his philosophical forefather Friedrich Nietzsche), so
that it is hard to know whether he is serious or not.
Simulation - A "simulation" is a copy or imitation that substitutes for reality. The TV speech of a political candidate,
something staged entirely to be seen on TV, is a great example. A cynical person might say that the wedding now exists (for
many people) in order for videos and photos to be made — having a "beautiful wedding" means that it looks good in the
photos and videos!
Hyperreal - The hyperreal is "more real than real": something fake and artificial turns to be more definitive of the real than
reality itself. Examples include high fashion (which is more beautiful than beauty), the news ("sound bites" determine
outcomes of political contests), and Disneyland.

How does William Gibson present reality?

Living in Vancouver, Canada, William Gibson is an American science fiction author. He was born near Myrtle Beach, South
Carolina, USA, in 1948.
Gibson is married with Deborah Gibson, and they have 2 children. In 1976, he wrote his first published story Fragments of a
hologram rose, which mixes end-of-an-affair melancholy with an early take on virtual reality. Since then he has been writing
short stories but it wasn't quite working, so he gave up and spent 1977 buying punk Neuromancer, his first novel appeared
in 1984.
Neuromancer very soon gained a cult status by being one of the first novels in a new science fiction genre called cyberpunk.
Gibson presented the word cyberspace. He used it for the first time in his story Burning Chrome in 1982.
The cyberpunk literature of the eighties had a very pessimistic view of the future because it predicted the rise of
multinational capitalistic corporations, and showed the negative effects the forthcoming new technologies may have on
everyday human life. Although it has been said that cyberpunk as a literary genre is already dead, William Gibson presented
some ideas in his novels which are now appearing in many other contexts — both artistic, sociological and technical.
The way Gibson sees reality is very well defined by Targowski:
"Gibson's view of a very probable downside future was a satirical criticism of current trends. Somehow, it touched a nerve
and triggered a cascade of intelligent inquiry and practical experimentation. There's no end of discussion — which ranges
from literary to practical to psychological — about the implications of our new found powers. The fact is that we are
building another reality." (Henry W. Targowski)

How is cyberpunk literature defined?

Born in 1980, Cyberpunk is a literary movement that looks for to completely integrate the realms of pop culture and high
tech, both mainstream and underground, and break down the separation between the organic and the artificial.
We can define Cyberpunk as a member of the genre of fiction known as Hard (or Hard Core) Science Fiction. It is called Hard
Science Fiction because it heavily relies on technology or biology to tell a story. The works of cyberpunk science fiction
writers can be said to be the origin of the concept of "cyberspace". This concept was first introduced to the world by writer
William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer, probably the most famous cyberpunk book ever.

What´s The league of extraordinary gentlemen about?

It is a comic book series, which began in 1999, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Kevin O'Neill. The series spans two
six-issue limited series and a graphic novel from the America's Best Comics imprint of Wildstorm/DC, and a third miniseries
and a graphic novel published by Top Shelf and Knockabout Comics.
According to Moore, the concept behind the series was initially a Justice League of Victorian England but quickly grew into
an opportunity to merge several works of fiction into one world. Elements of Volume I were used in a loosely adapted
feature film of the same name, released in 2003 and starring Sean Connery.

Who is James Paul Blaylock?

James Paul Blaylock is appointed an American fantasy author. He is recognized for his distinctive style. He writes in a
humorous way because his characters instead of walking, clump along, or when someone complains (in a flying machine)
that flight is not possible, the other characters agree and show him why he's right.
Born in Long Beach, California, he studied English at California State University, Fullerton, and received an M.A. in 1974. He
lives in Orange, California, teaching creative writing at Chapman University. Many of his books are set in Orange County,
California, and can more specifically be termed "fabulism" — that is, fantastic things happen in our present world, rather
than in traditional fantasy, where the setting is often some other world. We can also define his works as magic realism.
Tim Powers and K.W. Jeter and Blaylock were mentored by Philip K. Dick. Along with Powers he invented the poet William
Ashbless. Blaylock and Powers have often collaborated with each other on writing stories, including The better boy, on
pirates, and The William Ashbless Memorial Cookbook.
Blaylock is also currently director of the Creative Writing Conservatory at the Orange County High School of the Arts, where
Powers is writer in residence.