Southern Rennaisance

Video Watching Assignment #4: Watch a 28-minute video on the Southern Renaissance and take notes. When you are done, post your notes here.

Video Authors:
William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston

Who's Interviewed:
Dorothy Allison, award-winning author; Don Doyle, professor of history (Vanderbilt University); Carla Kaplan, professor of literature, American studies, and gender studies, (University of Southern California); Ramon Saldivar, professor of American literature (Stanford University); Alice Walker, award-winning author and poet; Rafia Zafar, director of African and Afro-American studies (Washington University, St. Louis)

Points Covered:
• After World War I, writers emerged in the segregated South to tell new stories. Continuing a tradition while challenging the past, writers such as William Faulkner and Zora Neale Hurston ushered in a renaissance of southern literature.

• Faulkner built upon the work of a group of writers known as the Southern Agrarians that emerged in the late 1920s. The Southern Agrarians defended the South's rural way of life while the world was changing around them.

• Faulkner captured the complicated, often tangled layers of southern history in countless novels and short stories. Intricately weaving the importance of time and place into everything he wrote, Faulkner was also a modernist who rebelled against linear storytelling. As I Lay Dying, with its nearly ludicrous plot and modernist style, is a good example of this stylistic innovation, while Absalom, Absalom!--a soul-searching indictment of the South--shows how some poor nineteenth-century whites tried to elevate themselves through racism, as a reaction against their own oppression.

• While Faulkner explored myths about white southerners, Zora Neale Hurston turned to African American folk traditions to present a positive view of black southern life. Hurston was a flamboyant storyteller, an anthropologist, and a respected writer.

• In her essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" Hurston observes that race is created, not given. As a folklorist and author, she captured a vision of the South that was different from what was usually recorded. Their Eyes Were Watching God is a woman's coming-of-age story and a critique of African American folk society.

• Hurston's final work was the autobiographical Dust Tracks on a Road, from which her publishers removed all anti-white references prior to publication. In the 1950s she slipped into obscurity; she died in poverty in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave. Hurston's writing was "rediscovered" by Alice Walker in 1973. She's now seen as the most important African American woman who wrote before World War II.

• Writers like Faulkner and Hurston joined their voices with those of other writers from the South to revise southern myths. At the same time, they broke through regional barriers to speak to the American experience and to the universal human condition.

Preview
• Preview the video: In the decades following World War I, the United States experienced massive social and cultural changes in response to economic, industrial, and technological upheavals. This was especially true in the South, which had never fully recovered--economically or socially--from the Civil War and the effects of Reconstruction. Within this environment, writers like William Faulkner and Zora Neale Hurston emerged to write about the South, both its mythical past and its often harsh contemporary realities--including deeply entrenched racism and the hardships of lives lived under crushing poverty. Joined by the likes of Flannery O'Connor and Tennessee Williams, these writers participated in a reinvigoration of southern literature which has come to be known as the "Southern Renaissance."

• What to think about while watching: What are the main social and cultural factors that influence these writers? How do these writers depict the South? Does "the South" seem to be the same place for both Faulkner and Hurston, or do they each see it differently? What assumptions or beliefs do these writers challenge? How and why do these writers convey the importance of time and place in their writing? What are the formal innovations these writers use to convey their characters' experiences? What does the history of the critical reception of these authors tell us about American literature and the literary canon?

Photo of Zora Hurston: A widely published portrait of Hurston taken by Carl Van Vechten, a white novelist, photographer and supporter of Harlem Renaissance writers and artists. Many of her Harlem Renaissance contemporaries were critical of Hurston for her relationships with wealthy white patrons and "friends of the Negro arts." See also: New Negro. Southern Renaissance. Hat. African American Literature. African American Women Writers.

Photo of William Faulkner: Southern writer William Faulkner's experimental narrative style and his creative innovations have left an indelible mark on American fiction. Faulkner was too short to serve in the US Air Force, so her joined the Canadian Royal Flying Corps (RFC) during World War I. He graduated the day Armistice was signed. Although Faulkner rarely made public appearances or speeches, his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech is one of the most widely anthologized. In it, he said: "Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again." See also: Regionalism. Mississippi.

Search for Identity

Video Watching Assignment #3: Watch 20 minutes of the video Search for Identity and take notes. When you are done, post your notes here.

Video Authors:
Maxine Hong Kingston and Sandra Cisneros

Who's Interviewed:
Mary Pat Brady, professor of English (Cornell University); Patricia Chu, associate professor of English (George Washington University); Sandra Cisneros, award-winning author and poet

Points Covered:
• Explains how women writers in the 1970s through the 1990s blurred genres (fiction and nonfiction, novels and short stories) to tell their stories.

• Connects feminist and identity movements in the 1970s and 1980s to parallel developments in literature, and explains that as women gained more political and social power, their writing also garnered more respect.

• Shows how these later writers recovered largely forgotten women writers from the past (e.g., Zora Neale Hurston) to establish a women's literary tradition.

• Addresses the challenges for ethnically diverse writers of describing their communities truthfully and questioning dominant beliefs while still identifying with these communities.

• Shows how these writers used their communities' storytelling techniques, primarily the oral tradition, in their own fiction.

• Analyzes how these writers tried to separate myths about womanhood from lived realities.

• Shows how Kingston and Cisneros drew inspiration from their own lives to write fiction that would bring attention to the needs of their communities. Also expresses their desires to "give something back" to their communities, or to return one day to help those who could not leave.

• Defines postmodern narrative and feminism.

Preview
• Preview the video: Inspired by the civil rights movement, the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s challenged established conceptions of what it meant to be American. Partly because such works as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique sold many more copies than publishers had anticipated, literary critics and readers began to take the work of women writers more seriously in the 1960s and 1970s. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior inspired other women writers grappling with issues of feminine, American, and ethnic identity. Like Kingston, Sandra Cisneros portrayed in her work characters the reading public had never before encountered. These representations challenged mainstream society's definitions of women and of American identity. Like other "postmodern" writers of the period, Kingston and Cisneros experimented with form and blurred genres. A mixture of fiction and autobiography characterizes their best-known works.

• What to think about while watching: What is identity? What does it mean to have a dynamic rather than a rigid identity? What does it mean to say that identity is a process? How might this idea conflict with preexisting ideas about identity? What is postmodern narrative? What writing styles did these authors use and why? What does it mean to "translate" one culture's stories into the language of another culture? How did female writers challenge the meaning of being American? What does it mean to be a woman in America? How can books help women readers to realize the options available to them? How did minority women writers complicate mainstream views of their communities while also questioning these communities' dominant beliefs? What risks did these writers take in telling their stories?

Photo: Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643) was a 17th-century midwife who taught the Antinomian heresy that God could be reached directly and without the assistance of a minister. She was put on trial and excommunicated from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She later gave birth to a stillborn, misshapen child--further proof, some said, of her affiliation with the Devil. She has come to represent freedom of speech and is sometimes labeled America's first feminist.

Spirit of Nationalism

Video Watching Assignment #2: Watch a 28-minute video on the Spirit of Nationalism and take notes. When you are done, post your notes here.

Spirit of Nationalism
The Enlightenment brought new ideals and a new notion of selfhood to the American colonies. This program begins with an examination of the importance of the trope of the self-made man in Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, and then turns to the development of this concept in the writings of Romanticist Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Video Authors: Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson

Who's Interviewed:
Michael J. Colacurcio, professor of American literary and intellectual history to 1900 (University of California, Los Angeles); Bruce Michelson, professor of English (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign); Carla Mulford, associate professor of English (Pennsylvania State University); Dana Nelson, professor of American literature (University of Kentucky); John Carlos Rowe, professor of English and comparative literature (University of California, Irvine); Rafia Zafar, director of African and Afro-American studies (Washington University, St. Louis)

Points Covered:
• In the wake of the political revolution that separated them from the Old World, Americans became determined to liberate themselves culturally as well. A new belief in the power and importance of the individual shaped what became a uniquely American philosophy and literary style.

• Benjamin Franklin helped shape the foundational myth of America and the "American dream." Relying on his own cleverness and hard work to rise from his station as a poor indentured apprentice and become a successful businessman, writer, philosopher, and politician, Franklin served as a model of the "self-made man." His witty, endearing representation of himself and his life in his Autobiography set a new standard for the autobiographical genre in America. In Franklin's time, prejudice and oppression limited the definition of who counted as an American, but Franklin's work inspired men and women of subsequent generations to strive to expand those boundaries.

• Forty years later, Ralph Waldo Emerson built on Franklin's practical ideals of self-improvement and virtue and made them more personal and spiritual. Emerson encouraged Americans to look inward and find power and inspiration within themselves. He turned to nature as a spiritual resource that could energize the nation politically and elevate it morally. His Transcendental ideas about the unity of nature, the individual soul, and God profoundly influenced his peers as well as subsequent generations of American writers and thinkers. His ideas about self-reliance, in particular, inspired such writers as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Anzia Yezierska. In a difficult historical period, Emerson was a prophet of hope and unbounded optimism. His ceaseless efforts on behalf of the individual generated important ideas about social reforms that would make America a more inclusive and equal society.

• Both Franklin and Emerson championed the rights and potential of the individual and called for independent thought. Through their own works, they gave new power to the genres of the autobiography and the moral essay. By writing about their experiences and offering their own lives as examples, they encouraged other Americans to examine themselves and trust in their own principles and beliefs.

Preview
• Preview the video: In the wake of the Revolution that severed America's colonial ties to Great Britain, the new nation struggled to liberate itself culturally from the Old World values and aesthetics that structured life and art in Europe. Many Americans turned to the Enlightenment ideals of self-determination and individualism as the basis for the new culture they were in the process of forming. Benjamin Franklin, often called the "first American," helped shape the national ideal of the "self-made man" in his Autobiography, a book that traced his rise to prominence through hard work and virtue. Forty years later, Ralph Waldo Emerson also celebrated individualism, but in a more Romantic and spiritual context. Issuing a clarion call to Americans to break free of European traditions, Emerson encouraged individuals to use their intuition and intellect to cultivate spiritual power within themselves. He looked to nature both as a source of inspiration for the individual and as an expression of the correspondence among humans, God, and the material world. Although their understanding of individualism and their vision of national culture were profoundly different, both Franklin and Emerson committed themselves to championing independent thought and individual development.
http://www.learner.org/amerpass/unit04/usingvideo.html

Photo: Ralph Waldo Emerson pioneered Romantic Individualism in the United States. Central to Emerson's system of belief was the idea that mankind is endowed with an intuitive capacity that, if utilised, would lead to transcendent knowledge.

Resistance and Renewal in American Indian Literature

Assignment: Watch a 28-minute video on Resistance and Renewal in American Indian Literature. Be patient with the video. Watch five minutes at a time and take notes. When you are done, post your notes for each five-minute interval here. Your notes should explain what is being covered (ideas, topics, images) in each five-minute section. (You can get a copy of the video from Al Banan)

Before starting: Google one of the contemporary Native American authors mentioned below under "Points covered in the video" (example, Luci Tapahanso), read about the author and read a piece of her writing (example, "They are Silent and Quick").
What to think about while watching:
What are some of the characteristics of Navajo and Pueblo oral traditions? In what sense do these writers draw on native oral traditions and beliefs? How do they speak to the experience of being American Indian? What does their written literature hope to do or achieve?
Points covered in the video:
• American Indian oral traditions link people to the culture, myths, and land. Traditionally, the oral storyteller is a human individual who relates the mythological to others. Contemporary American Indian written literature draws on oral traditions even as it translates them into European forms. These stories are necessary for the culture to survive in the era after European contact. A kind of "cultural contact," this written literature deals with the interaction of Native and European cultures and identities. This video focuses on three Native American writers from the Southwest: Luci Tapahonso (Navajo), Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo), and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo).

• Luci Tapahonso's poems "They Are Silent and Quick" and "A Breeze Swept Through" draw on and are a product of Navajo language, tradition, and landscape.

• Simon J. Ortiz's writing reflects a renewed transmission of Acoma Pueblo cultural memory, as in "My Mother and Sister." It also conveys the often fractured and besieged state of being a Native American today, as in his poem "8:50 AM Ft. Lyons VAH." These poems reflect the bicultural world of contemporary Native Americans.

• Like "8:50 AM Ft. Lyons VAH," Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony deals with the post-World War II experience of Native Americans. The novel attempts to reintegrate the shattered experience of its protagonist, Tayo, with the old stories and worldviews. The Laguna ceremonies must be adapted to cope with the current world, or else the old ways will die. In Storyteller, Silko demonstrates the ways in which language does not merely reflect the world, but can directly affect it.

• Native American literature is particular to tribal people in its invocation of the concrete power of language to heal and guide, but it is also like all American literature in probing what it means to be American.

Photo: George A. Addison, KIOWA GIRLS (1890) courtesy of Denver Public Library/ Western History Department.

This late 19th century photograph shows two young Kiowa women. Their dress is an example of bicultural production; they are wearing moccasins and European-style dresses, and have fringed blankets adorned with tribal designs around their waists. Writer N. Scott Momaday is of Kiowa ancestry, and spent most of his childhood growing up on reservations in New Mexico and Arizona. He was exposed to the rituals and traditions of tribal life, as well as the great social change caused by the influence of postwar material cultural, unemployment and alcoholism. His many works include HOUSE MADE OF DAWN, THE WAY TO RAINY MOUNTAIN, and THE NAMES: A MEMOIR.

Anne Bradstreet: Upon the Burning of our House

Assignment: Write an essay in which you describe the major concern in the poem and how it seems to dominate the poem. Include passages from the poem to support your thesis.

Origin Myth or Legend

Assignment: Find an origin myth or legend (about the origin of life on earth or the origin of earth itself) from any culture and retell it here in your own words. Make sure to cite the source.

Independent Summer Reading Assignment

Required summer reading: The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck.

John Steinbeck (1902 -1968) is an American writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962 for Grapes of Wrath, a novel he wrote in 1939. The novel tells the story of the Joads, who are forced to leave their farm in Oklahoma because of the dust bowl, and their struggle to survive during the Great Depression. It celebrates their spirit and strength.

"Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed….the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit - for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love.” From Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.