Week 5.1: Henry James, Daisy Miller

 Reading:
James, Daisy Miller, 389-99

Study Questions:
1. What does Winterbourne mean when he says, "You were right in that remark that you made last summer. I was booked to make a mistake. I have lived too long in foreign parts"? Why does he say it? What is his mistake?


2. What are we to make of Daisy Miller's death?

Week 4.1: Henry James, Daisy Miller

Reading:
Henry James (324-7), Daisy Miller: A Study, 342-61
James, "The Art of Fiction," 584-6

Study Questions:
1. Discuss how Daisy Miller achieves much  its dramatic tension through point of view. What seems to be the central conflict of the text?

2. The Norton Anthology refers to James's international theme. Often times this takes the form of opposing American innocence to European corruption. How might we see this at work in Daisy Miller?

Week 3.2: Feminist Fictions

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the rise of what we today call first wave feminism. Although the term feminism is much abused by those who think it is synonymous with hating men or a belief that women are superior, nothing could be further from the truth. Although there are many types of feminism and many different types of feminists, put plainly, feminism simply advocates for the social and political equality of women. It is, as one commentator has put, the radical idea that women are people too. The efforts of first wave feminists focused on gaining legal and political rights such as the right to sign a contract and the right to vote. The stories that we will read for today, particularly Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" were rediscovered and promoted in the 1970s by second wave feminists. While first wave feminists focused on legal rights, second wave feminists in the 1960s and 1970s focused on issues relating to the family, the workplace, and reproductive rights. After reading the stories today, I think it will be evident why second wave feminists saw themselves in these late 19th- and early 20th-century fictions.

Reading:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (509-11), "The Yellow Wall-paper," 511-24
Edith Wharton (524-6), "The Other Two," 526-39

Study Questions: 
1. What work do the words "creep," "creeped," and "creeping" do for Gilman in "The Yellow Wallpaper?" What creeps? What does it mean to creep? (b) Why are the paragraphs so short throughout the story? (c) In answering these questions, how are you using the ubiquity topos?

2. "The Other Two" requires you to make several inferences about Mrs. Waythorn's character that Mr. Waythorn doesn't understand. What do we know as readers that Mr. Waythorn doesn't?

Week 3.1: Immigrant Fictions

In 1883, the Jewish-American poet Emma Lazarus wrote the poem "The New Colossus" in honor of the Statue of Liberty, then currently under construction. Starting in 1886, the Statue would begin to great recently arrived immigrants as they arrived to Ellis Island. The poem is as follows:

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”—Emma Lazarus, 1883

The poem displays all the ambiguity that America has displayed to its new arrivals. On the one hand, we have the image of Lady Liberty's torch burning a "world-wide welcome." She is the "mother of exiles" who greats immigrants as they come to shore. However, Lazarus's attitude toward the new immigrants themselves is not wholly welcoming. They are the "huddled masses," the "wretched refuse" of the Old World, and are quite literally "homeless." These sentiments were contradictory, but they were held by the native-born and by those who had immigrated earlier or were the children of immigrants.

On the U. S. government's official web page about immigration, Hasia Diner writes:

Gradually over the course of the decades after the Civil War, as the sources of immigration shifted so too did the technology of ocean travel. Whereas previous immigrants had made their way to the United States via sail power, innovations in steam transportation made it possible for larger ships to bring larger loads of immigrants to the United States. The immigrants of this era tended to come from southern and eastern Europe, regions undergoing at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries the same economic transitions that western and northern Europe had earlier experienced.

As among the immigrants of the earlier period, young people predominated among the newcomers. This wave of migration, which constituted the third episode in the history of U.S. immigration, could better be referred to as a flood of immigrants, as nearly 25 million Europeans made the voyage. Italians, Greeks, Hungarians, Poles, and others speaking Slavic languages constituted the bulk of this migration. Included among them were 2.5 to 3 million Jews.

Each group evinced a distinctive migration pattern in terms of the gender balance within the migratory pool, the permanence of their migration, their literacy rates, the balance between adults and children, and the like. But they shared one overarching characteristic: They flocked to urban destinations and made up the bulk of the U.S. industrial labor pool, making possible the emergence of such industries as steel, coal, automobile, textile, and garment production, and enabling the United States to leap into the front ranks of the world’s economic giants.

Their urban destinations, their numbers, and perhaps a fairly basic human antipathy towards foreigners led to the emergence of a second wave of organized xenophobia. By the 1890s, many Americans, particularly from the ranks of the well-off, white, native-born, considered immigration to pose a serious danger to the nation’s health and security. In 1893 a group of them formed the Immigration Restriction League, and it, along with other similarly inclined organizations, began to press Congress for severe curtailment of foreign immigration.

At the same time, American also experienced its first wave of Asian immigration from China. Chinese immigrants, mostly men, arrived in the American West to work on the railroads and other labor-intensive projects. White Americans looked down on these immigrants and lobbied Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which effectively banned all immigration from China. The result was that it produced a small and segregated Chinese community largely on the West Coast.

In the 1920s, Congress heavily restricted immigration from the Eastern hemisphere. This produced a quota system from immigrants from both Europe and Asia. It effectively limited immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, but did allow for significant immigration from Western Europe. The National Origins Act however did not restrict immigration from the Western hemisphere and so immigration from the Caribbean and Latin America moved quite freely. In 1965, the Hart-Cellar Act, inspired by civil rights legislation, reversed the overtly racist and discriminatory immigration polices of the United States. The law replaced the quota system of The National Origins Act and replaced it with a system that weighed family relations and job skills. It dramatically opened up immigration from Asia and Africa and as such these populations have increased exponentially in the United States.

Immigration remains a "hot-button" issue in the United States and nativist thought runs deep in our politics. For this reason it is important to examine the early immigrant literature of the United States.

Reading:
Abraham Cahan (473-5), "A Sweat-Shop Romance," 475-83 (course packet)
Emma Lazarus, all poems, 429-32
Sui Sin Far (549-50), "Mrs. Spring Fragrance," 550-8

Study Questions:
1. How does scarcity in the realm of economics and romance structure the conflicts of Cahan's story? How do these issues resolve themselves?

2. How would you characterize the tone of Mrs. Spring Fragrance's letter to her husband? Does she say what she means? How do you know? Most of Sui Sin Far's audience is white. What role does the exotic nature of Jade's prose play in addressing this audience?

Week 2.1: Charles Chesnutt & Mark Twain

Reading:
Charles W. Chesnutt (479-81), "The Wife of His Youth," 488-96 
Mark Twain (101-4), Selections from Life on the Mississippi, 491-8, 500-2 PDF

Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, "On Closer Examination" PDF
Extra Credit: Print both course packets and place them in a binder

1.  After completing the story in full, direct your attention to the last full paragraph on page 491. Carefully note how Chesnutt uses languages in his passage. What are some of the most important choices in diction that Chesnutt makes in this section? What words jump out to you? What seems especially figurative? Why?

2.  On page 490 (shortly after the second section begins), Chesnutt's narrator presents us the poetry that Mr. Ryder is reading. What is significant about Tennyson's "A Dream of Fair Women" in the context of the larger story? In answering this question, focus particularly on the linguistic features on the text. It's not just what is said, but how it is said.

3. Graff and Birkenstein write that literary critics identify the conflicts apparent in a text. What is the conflict that motivates Chesnutt's story? How does it resolve itself? Does Chesnutt take a side in this conflict?

Week 2.2: Ambrose Bierce, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"

Point of view signifies the way the story gets told. It answers the question of who tells the story, whose story is this. The question of the point of view has been at the center of prose fiction since the emergence of the modern novel in the 18^th century. For the 19^th-century American novelist Henry James, point of view was one of the most prominent and persistent problems within fiction.

First-persons point of view can taken on many forms. In almost all occurrences, however a first person point of view suggests that the story is being told by a character from within the world of the story. First person narrators can be fortuitous spectator to events that he or she relates (Marlow in Heart of Darkness), or a participant, but only a minor one (Ishmael in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Nick in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby), or the central character to the story such as the title character of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.

First-person narrators can either speak directly to an imagined audience, have their words recorded in a letter or a diary, or can be speaking into an imaginary space occupied by nobody at all.

First person narrator speaking to nobody in particular: “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.’” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

First person narrator speaking directly to another character: “May I, Monsieur, offer my services without running the risk of intruding?” — Albert Camus, The Fall

First person narrator, epistolary: “Noon. London: my flat. Ugh. The last thing on earth I feel physically, emotionally or mentally equipped to do is drive to Una and Geoffrey Alconbury's New Year's Day Turkey Curry Buffet in Grafton Underwood. Geoffrey and Una Alconbury are my parents' best friends and, as Uncle Geoffrey never tires of reminding me, have known me since I was running round the lawn with no clothes on. My mother rang up at 8:30 in the morning last August Bank Holiday and forced me to promise to go. She approached it via a cunningly circuitous route.” — Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary

Although rare, the first-person novel can also be in the plural form, that is using the pronoun “we.” Joshua Ferris’s novel, And Then We Came to The End does just that to tell the story of an office that is experiencing downsizing:

“We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen. Most of us liked most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything.”

Second-person points of view are only slightly less rare than first-person plural narrators. In the second-person point of view the story is told through an address to a character often referred to as the second-person pronoun “you.” This “you” is usually the central character and the reader assumes this persona as he or she reads. Perhaps the most famous example of the second-person point of view comes from Jay McInerney’s 1984 novel Bright Lights, Big City:

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, though the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub taking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge.

Third-person points of view, are however, the most common in literature. The third-person— which relies on the personal pronouns he, she, it, and they—comes in two varieties: the omniscient and the limited. The third-person omniscient narrator has a God’s eye view of the novel’s action. This narrator has privileged access to the characters’ thoughts, feelings, and motives, and is free to move around the world of the novel through both space and time.  This narrator can be either intrusive or objective. In other words, they can make comments or moral judgments on the events of the novel or they can present matters neutrally or scientifically without comment.

The limited point of view, favored since the mid-19^th century, tells the story from the third person, but stays inside the confides of what is perceived, through, remembered, and felt by a single character or from very few characters. We see things, as it were, not from their point of view, but from over their shoulder. We are close to these characters, but they are not addressing us, the readers. We are voyeurs rather than confidants.

Reading:
Ambrose Bierce (326-7), "An Occurrence at Owl Creed Bridge," 327-33
George and Judy Cheatham, “Point of View in Bierce’s ‘Owl Creek Bridge,’” 219-24 PDF (in course packet)

Study Questions:
1.  Identify the various points of view in "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." Does this shift in point of view change how we experience or sympathize with Peyton Farquhar?    

2. Identify the thesis of Cheatham's article. Do you agree with is argument? Why or why not? Note that Cheatham's essay was not written to satisfy the demands of a high school English teacher and is not the standard five-paragraph essay of your youth. Thus, his thesis does not have to come at the end of the first paragraph. 

Week 1.2: William Dean Howells, "Editha"

Reading:
Introduction: American Literature 1865-1914, 1-17
William Dean Howells (314-6), "Editha," 316-23

Study Questions:

DIRECTIONS: Throughout our term, I will assign you study questions. These questions are due at the beginning of class and must be typed with a proper header. You must be prepared to hand these in at the beginning of class. In other words, answers handwritten during class will not be accepted. Unless I state otherwise, your answers should be about a paragraph long. When dealing with primary texts, you should quote directly from the text using MLA standards. Our discussions in class will stem from your answers to these questions. See the "paraburger" model on the "How to Write a Successful Paper" link before crafting your answers.

1. As I stated in our first class, realism developed in part as a reaction to the romanticism of an earlier generation of writers. How does Howells portray Editha as a romantic figure and thus mistaken? What words or phrases signal to us that she is romantic?

2. What connections does Howells draw between literary romanticism and yellow journalism, and how does he offer his own version of literary realism as an alternative to both?

Realism

Definition:

The term "realism" when used by literary critics denotes two different meanings:

1) In its first meaning "realism" designates a mode, in various eras and literary forms, of representing human life and experience in literature (Abrams 269). In this way, realism designates a work of literature (usually fiction) that hopes to represent the world as we experience it through our senses. As such, realistic literature uses thick descriptions of persons, places, and things, to recreate them in the mind's eye of the reader. This is known as "formal realism."

2) In its second meaning it designates a literary movement that occurred throughout Europe and the United States in the 19th century. Within the American context, the realist period spans from the close of the Civil War (1865) to the beginning of World War I (1914). It is this sense of realism that we will primarily be concerned with. 

In The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957), Richard Chase identifies the following characteristics about American realist fiction: 

• Renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail. Selective presentation of reality with an emphasis on verisimilitude, even at the expense of a well-made plot
• Character is more important than action and plot; complex ethical choices are often the subject.
• Characters appear in their real complexity of temperament and motive; they are in explicable relation to nature, to each other, to their social class, to their own past.
• Class is important; the novel has traditionally served the interests and aspirations of an insurgent middle class. (See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel)
• Events will usually be plausible. Realistic novels avoid the sensational, dramatic elements of naturalistic novels and romances.
• Diction is natural vernacular, not heightened or poetic; tone may be comic, satiric, or matter-of-fact.
• Objectivity in presentation becomes increasingly important: overt authorial comments or intrusions diminish as the century progresses.

History:

In the United States, realism responded to a previous generation of writers that were characterized by their romanticism or transcendental ideals. Writers as diverse as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allen Poe, and Walt Whitman wrote essays, novels, and poems that sought to locate some greater metaphysical significance beyond the world of the everyday. For Hawthorne the letter "A" was not a simple abbreviation, for Melville a white whale was not merely an aquatic mammal suffering from albinism, and for Whitman an untidy blade of grass did not signal that he needed to mow the lawn. While all of these items would be described using the techniques of "formal realism," they took on a greater significance than was observable to the naked eye.

In stark contrast, American realists turned their attention from the transcendental to everyday events. This is not to say that realism focused its attention on the banal, merely that it distanced itself from the fantastic. American realism addressed a broad spectrum of topics and worked in variety of different modes: regional differences within the United States (known as regionalism or local color), the moral dilemmas of everyday life, the influence of the burgeoning woman's movement, the rapid industrialization of the Eastern seaboard and parts of the Midwest, the vast influx of immigrants to the United States, the precarious nature of African American rights, and America's growing empire overseas.

Major Figures:

Although a diverse movement, realism has traditionally been typified by three authors: William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Mark Twain. Within this categorization, each writer served the role as acting as a short hand for various features of the movement. 

William Dean Howells (1837-1920), also known as the "Dean of American Letters," is perhaps most responsible for promoting the realism within the United States. As editor of  Atlantic Monthly and later Harper's, Howells was able to not only codify what realism meant (“Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material") and provided a publishing avenue for like-minded author. Howellsian Realism stressed the realism of social relations. Observing the interactions between different members of society (separated by class, education, ethnicity, and politics) served as the central purpose of Howell's fiction, a feat he achieved in such masterful novels as The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and The Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). Because of his dislike of crudeness, Howells became a particular target of Naturalists such as Stephen Crane and Frank Norris who criticized him for upholding the genteel tradition. While he is still widely read as an exemplar of American realism, his critical reputation has never entirely recovered.

In contrast to Howells, Henry James (1843-1916) remains a critical darling of the academy. Henry James, the self-styled "Master," also differs in his development of realism. James's great theme is that of the American abroad, portrayed in novels such as The American (1877), Daisy Miller (1879), and Portrait of a Lady (1881). In these novels, innocent American protagonists encounter a European world much more sophisticated, decadent, and corrupt than they are yet ready to understand. While James does pay attention to social relations, Jamesian realism instead focuses on the psychology of his characters. Where Howells pays attention to external interactions, James instead devotes his attention to the shifting internal states of those figures who occupy his pages. In his later career, James's fiction grew more experimental, his prose more prosaic (in part because he dictated his novels to a stenographer), and he served to bridge the space between realism and modernism.

Compared to the refined prose of Henry James, the works of Samuel Clemens (the real name of Mark Twain) will always seem rough and uncultured. However, this is just as well as Mark Twain (1835-1910) serves as the representative of realism's penchant for humor and local color. In novels such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Puddn'head Wilson (1894) and in books of travel writing such as Roughing It (1872) and Life on the Mississippi (1883), Twain depicted sections of the South and the West that many Americans would never visit in their lifetimes. Regionalism and local color served an important role in American cultural life during this period. It helped to reunite a fractured country after the Civil War and helped to unite a country that was still rapidly expanding. Although Twain's body of work is not limited to local color or even realism (he wrote romances as well), as a purveyor of regionalism he helped provide his readers with a more varied look of the United States. 

Opening Up the Canon:
While the invocation of James-Howells-Twain provides a helpful heuristic to aid our understanding of American realism, it does not convey the ethnic, racial, or gender diversity that marked the realist movement. Since the 1970s critics have rediscovered realist authors who were neglected after they ceased publication. Feminist authors such as Kate Chopin (The Awakening) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman ("The Yellow Wallpaper") have been rediscovered and studied extensively. Minority writers such as the first Asian-American author Sui Sin Far (Mrs. Spring Fragrance), the Native American author Zitkala-Sa ("The Trial Path"), and the Jewish-American author Abraham Cahan (The Rise of David Levinksy) have all received renewed attention in recent years. African-American authors such as Charles Chesnutt (The Marrow of Tradition) and Alice Dunbar-Nelson (Violets and Other Tales) have also increased in prominence. Taken collectively these authors offer us an expanded view of not only the realist movement, but also of the United States that their novels and short stories depict.