3. Catcher in the Rye

4. Black Humour

1. definition: to deal with tragic things in comic ways to make it more powerful and more tragic.

It refers to the use of morbid and absurd for darkly comic purpose. It carries the tone of anger, bitterness in the grotesque situation of suffering, anxiety, and death. It makes the reader laugh at the blackness of modern life. The writers usually do not laugh at the characters.

2. Features

1. Comic way to express tragic situations
2. Creation of anti-hero
3. Illogical narrative structure

3. Joseph Heller

1. Life
2. Catch-22

It is not only a war novel, but also a novel about people’s life in peaceful time. This novel attacked the dehumanization of all contemporary institutions and corruptions of individuals who gain power in institutions. Armed-forces are the most outrageous example of the two evils.

Language: circular conversation, wrenched cliché

Jewish Literature

1. Definition

Jewish literature refers to published creative writings by American Jews about their American experiences. This kind of writings is shown in Jewish perspective.

2. Historical Background
3. Emergence: after WWII
4. Jewish Point of View

1. Jews believe that God has sent perpetual sufferings to his chosen people to strengthen and purify them, and they are the “chosen people”.
2. Humour is a prominent aspect of Jewish point of view. It is often a twisted kind of comedy to keep them from despair. Jews are able to laugh at themselves, so some of their best humour is self-mocking.
3. Jews lay emphasis upon the power of intellects. The power to understand their own experience to judge their own life rationally to think well is considered a high virtue.
4. Self-teaching is at the heart of almost all Jewish novels. The Jewish heroes often try to seek a rational interpretation of the world through their own experience in it.

5. Saul Bellow

1. life
2. works

1. Dangling Man
2. The Adventures of Augie March
3. Henderson the Rain King
4. Herzog
5. Mr. Sammler’s Planet
6. Humboldt’s Gift
7. The Dean’s December

3. point of view

1. Saul Bellow’s strength lies in his faith in man and man’s ability to offer a “spirited resistance to the forces of our time”. As he sees it, modern man has lived through frustration and defeat, managed to grapple with destructive historical pressures, and striven for “certain durable human goods” – truth, freedom, and wisdom.
2. He is highly critical of modern life in which the old value system is no longer functioning. His major characters are all concerned to find a way that would keep American civilization from going under. They body forth Bellow’s credo that art has “something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos”, and that “a novelist begins with disorder and disharmony and goes toward order by an unknown process of the imagination”.

4. characteristics of his heroes

Most of Saul Bellow’s heroes are marginal men, alienated or absurd characters caught between their own inadequacies and those imposed upon them by their friends and society. Most of them are Jewish intellectuals or writers who try to discover the queerness of existence and overcome it. Struggling with the impersonality of the physical world, agonized by their own awareness of morality, his protagonists laugh at their own deficiency with irony because it relieves despair. The hunger for community, yet they hold back because that world have to betray the sanctity of their private self in order to achieve it.

5. style: realism + modernism

Chapter 7 American Drama

1. Brief Introduction

1. 17^th century
   • Ye Bare and Ye Cubb (1665) by William Darby
2. 18^th century
   • American subjects began to be treated seriously. The first tragedy is The Contrast (1787) by Royal Tyler. It is considered “typical American play” about American soldiers.
3. 19^th century
   • poetical plays, esp in the first half of a group of playwrights
   • after civil war: realism, melodrama, emotional incidents (domestic melodrama), with simple plots
4. 20^th century

separation from the old tradition

• 1920s: “Little Theatre Movement” began after 1912, Washington Square Players, Provincetown Players (New York City, Greenage Village). They are freed from the conventional theatre and can be as experimental as they like.
• 1930s: Eugene O’Neil, Clifford Odets
• Post-war: second climax of American drama, Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman
• 60s: Theatre of the Absurd, Edward Albee

2. Eugene O’Neil

1. life
2. works

1. Bound East for Cardiff
2. Beyond the Horizon
3. The Emperor Jones
4. The Hairy Ape
5. Desire under the Elms
6. The Iceman Cometh
7. Long Day’s Journey into Night

3. point of view

His purpose is to get the root of human desires and frustrations. He showed most characters in his plays as seeking meaning and purpose in their lives, some through love, some through religion, some through revenge, all met disappointment. The characters seem to share O’Neil’s perplexities of human nature. As a result of his tragic and nihilistic view of life, his works, in general, indicated chaos and hopelessness.

4. The Hairy Ape

Yank

5. style

1. O’Neil was a tireless experimentalist in dramatic art. He paid little attention to the division of scenes. He introduced the realistic or even the naturalistic into the American theatre.
2. He borrowed freely from the best traditions of European drama, especially the stream of consciousness.
3. He made use of setting and stage property to help in his dramatic representation.
4. He wrote long introduction and directions for all the scenes, explaining the mood and atmosphere.
5. He sometimes wrote the actors’ lines in dialect.

6. His position

He was the first playwright to explore serious themes in theatre. With him, American drama developed into a form of literature. And in him, American drama came of age (mature). He came only after Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw in the world of drama.

3. Tennessee Williams

1. life
2. point of view and themes

He writes about violence, sex, homosexuality (taboos in drama). Some of his plays rooted in southern social scene. The characters are often unhappy wanderers; lonely, vulnerable women indulged in memory of the past or illusion of the future. He was attracted to bizarre characters and their predicament. He looked deeply into the psychology of the outcasts of society. He saw life a game which cannot be won. Almost all his characters are defeated.

3. his plays

1. The Glass Menagerie
2. A Streetcar Named Desire
3. Summer and Smoke
4. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

4. style

1. combination of coarseness and poetry
2. vivid southern speech
3. He helped to break taboos, long imposed on the American literature.

4. Arthur Miller

1. life
2. theme: dilemma of modern man in relation to family and work
3. his plays

1. The Man Who Had All the Luck
2. All My Sons
3. Death of a Salesman
4. The Crucible
5. A View for the Bridge

5. Theatre of the Absurd

1. introduction: existentialist philosophy, mainly in Europe
2. four founders: Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov
3. What is “absurd”?

Humorous and meaningless

4. features

1. The basic assumption: human life lacks coherence and is chaotic. Life operates without any rules.
2. The world is meaningless, so the play appears meaningless.
3. It examines the problems of life and death, of isolation and communication.
4. It satirizes people who are unaware of the ultimate reality (death).
5. In absurd drama, situation is more important than characters and events. The dramatist wants to show people what their situation in their life is. Therefore, he constructs a play which presents a picture of the universal situation. One result of these is that the characters are often comic and humorous.

5. Edward Albee

2. Life
3. Works

1. Zoo Story
2. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Chapter 8 Black American Literature

1. Overview

Negro – coloured (legally free) – black (after civil rights movement)

1. oral tradition

1. songs and ballads
2. spirituals: sorrow of the singers’ earlier condition and longing for freedom
3. blues: after civil war, derived from work songs – loneliness, separation, losses, wonderings, love, desperation, sense of doom
4. jazz: after WWI, developed from blues, died out in the Great Depression

2. written literature (from 1760s)

1. poetry: religious, enduring, patient to the white
2. slave narrative: autobiographical experience of the person
3. 1920s: Harlem Renaissance – New York, black – black dialect and black folklore – “the new negro” – representatives: Langston Hughes (“black poet laureate”), Huston, Claude McKay
4. 1940s: Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison
5. 50s~60s: a lot of black writers emerged in the civil rights movement: James Baldwin, Brooks, Jones
6. 70s~80s: publishing of “Root” (Alex Haley), Walker – “The Colour Purple”, Morrison (the second woman writer and the only black who won Nobel Prize)

2. Richard Wright

1. life
2. works

1. Uncle Tom’s Children: Four Novellas
2. Native Son
3. Black Boy
4. The Outsider (the first novel of existentialism in America, published in France)

3. themes and subjects

His common theme is to condemn racism, urge reform, criticize evils of society. His books focus on racial conflict and physical violence. They review the devastating effect of institutionalized hatred (hatred brought by social system) and humiliation on black males’ psyche. They affirmed dignity and humility of society’s outcasts.

4. writing techniques – realism, naturalism

He tries to show that people cannot escape from society. Therefore, society must be changed. He is a father figure, especially to the writers of violence.

3. Ralph Ellison

1. life
2. works: Invisible Man

significance: It has a universality of theme (problems of all modern people), not only regional dilemma of existence.

3. attitude: complexity of art – the best art makes good politics, not vice versa.

4. James Baldwin

1. life
2. works

1. Go Tell It on the Mountain
2. Notes of a Native Son
3. Nobody Knows My Name
4. The Fire Next Time

3. point of view

Baldwin calls for the blacks to resort to means including force so as to bring about the nation’s self-realization. He saw love and understanding as difficult but necessary way to overcome racial conflict.

4. themes: race, homosexuality

5. Alice Walker

1. life
2. works

1. Once (a collection of poems)
2. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (“womanism” instead of feminism)
3. The Colour Purple (epistolary)

6. Toni Morrison

1. life
2. works

1. The Bluest Eye
2. Sula
3. Song of Solomon (the best black novel after Native Son and Invisible Man)
4. Tar Baby
5. Beloved
6. Jazz
7. Love (trilogy)

3. themes: love, guilt, history, individual, gender, race, religion
4. purpose: to empower the black people to act for themselves, to recognize for their own world, own history, own reality
5. style – many kinds of factors: naturalism, realism, fantasy, reality, magical realism