ENG 335 Final – Flashcards

Show life as it is lived; Not a romantic ideal
– The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896) Harold Frederic
– The Awakening (1899) Kate Chopin
-House Behind the Cedars (1900) Charles Chesnutt

Reaction against Realism; Emphasis on subjective and personal; Uncertainty and subjectivity into works of art (Picasso)
– Cane (1923) Jean Toomer
– Yonnondio (1930’s/1974) Tillie Olsen
– The Maltese Falcon (1930) Dashiell Hammett

– A Rage in Harlem (1957) Chester Himes
– Desperate Characters (1970) Paula Fox
– In the Lake of the Woods (1994) Tim O’ Brien
– Fun Home (2006) Alison Bechdel

Stories we tell ourselves about ourselves
– Fun Home (masculinity, family, whiteness, race–grand narrative)
– Work culturally and subconsciously
– Come from outside of the text

The break down of logic and order
– Traditional Narrative — breakdown
– Counter to social realism of social protest novels
– Using absurdity to get at something more essential about race in America

(Content)

Harold Frederic

1896

*Theron Ware – A Methodist minister who begins to question his faith when he is faced with people who live and work outside of his faith.
*Alice Ware – Theron’s wife. They met and were married very quickly and later fell into debt. While Theron forgave himself about the debt, Alice was still upset about it.
*Abram Beekman – A man from Tyre who gave the Wares a loan so they could “start over”.
*Loren Pierce – Octavius trustee who “does not know how to smile”. He is very anti-Irish Catholic.
*Erastus Winch – Octavius trustee. Very smart yet tight with money.
*Levi Gorringe – Octavius trustee. A nonreligious no non-sense lawyer who probably has a drinking problem. He became good friends with Alice and later becomes a member of the Methodist parish.
*Mr. MacEvoy – Worker at a wagon shop who is injured and issued his last rites by Father Forbes.
*Father Vincent Forbes – An Irish Catholic priest in Octavius.
*Celia Madden – Daughter of the wagon-shop owner and organist at the Catholic Church, although she is not Catholic and believes in the Greek philosophy.
*Dr. Ledsmar – An elderly nonreligious scientist and expert of Assyriology.
*Jeremiah Madden – Octavius’ richest citizen with many children, including Celia.
*Candace Soulsby – A debt-raiser who uses outlandish activities to raise money for churches.
*Brother Soulsby – Sister Soulsby’s husband.
*Erastus Winch – Pledged money to the Methodist church but was unable to pay. His case was voted on by the trustees.

The novel centers on the life of a Methodist pastor named Theron Ware who has recently moved to a fictional small town in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, which Frederic modeled after Utica, New York. A promising young pastor recently married, Theron has a number of experiences that cause him to begin to question the Methodist religion, his role as a minister and even the very existence of God. His moral decline (or illumination) is heightened through his dealings with Father Forbes, the town’s Catholic priest; Dr. Ledsmar, a local atheist, philosopher, and man of science; and Celia Madden, a local Irish Catholic girl, a species of aesthete, with whom Theron becomes hopelessly infatuated. In the end, these three “advanced” characters find Theron a bore, and tell him so. He goes on a binge, and is saved by Brother and Sister Soulsby, common-sensical fund-raisers for Methodist congregations. Their feet are on the ground, and they pack Theron and his wife off to the new state of Washington, where, who knows?, he might end up in politics.

Realism

Realism: Financial realities, Religion and the church, politics, inner-workings, class, race, ethnicity
How is America deciding who is American?
– Who do we define ourselves against?
The book is rejecting Theron Ware–the fault lies within him
– Be cautious when something new comes up, otherwise you could end up totally lost — a warning to those who are naive
Antimodernism — Fear of modern life, Taking traditional American life and cutting it off at its root, Antimodern novel, damnation vs. illumination

Dramatic Irony
• A relationship of contrast between a character’s limited understanding of his or her situation in some particular moment of the unfolding action and what the audience, at the same instant, understands the character’s situation actually to be.
o We are granted knowledge that a character does not have
• The result of a discrepancy in perspective, dramatic irony is “moment-bound.” There is on the one hand how things appear from a point of view that emerges within the action at a given moment, and which is constrained by the limitations of an individual’s history up to that moment. There is on the other hand a point of view that takes in the whole of an interpersonal history, part of which is unknown to that individual at the particular moment in question. For dramatic irony to emerge, some consciousness (in fiction, this will be the audience’s) must be simultaneously aware of both perspectives.
Narrative Persona in Damnation
• “Theron’s tongue dallies for an instant with the temptation to comment up these old-wife fables, which were so dear to the rural religious heart when he and I were boys. But it seemed wise to only no again, and let his mentor go on” (26-27)
• They had come now upon the main street of the village, with its flagstone sidewalk overhung by a lofty canopy of elm-boughs. Here, for the space of block, was concentrated such fashionable elegance of mansions and ornamental lawns as Octavius had to offer; and it was presented with the irregularity so characteristic of our restless civilization.” (44)
Theron’s Characterization
• “Theron, indeed, might be said never to have laughed before…” (17-18)
o “People had prized him for his innocent candor and guileless mind”
• “As for Theron, the period was one of incredible fructification and output. He scarcely recognized for his own the mind which now was reaching out on all sides with the arms of an octopus” (19)
• “For the instant his mind was aflame with this vivid impression—that he was among sinister enemies, at the mercy of criminals.” (68)
• “Theron lay awake, it seemed to him, for hours, listening tranquilly, and letting his mind wander at will through the pleasant antechambers of sleep, where are more unreal fantasies than Dreamland itself affords.” (98)

End of the Civil War, a nation that was torn apart was trying to find its identity again.

(Content)

Kate Chopin

1899

*Edna Pontellier – Edna is a respectable Presbyterian from Kentucky, living in Creole society in Louisiana. Throughout the course of the novel, she rebels against the expectations of society and finds she has an independent identity, aside from her role as a wife and mother.
*Léonce Pontellier – Leonce is Edna’s husband, a successful businessman who appears to be unaware of his wife’s unhappiness.
*Mademoiselle Reisz – Mademoiselle Reisz’s character symbolizes what Edna could have been if she had grown old and independent from her family. Despite viewing Reisz as disagreeable, Edna sees her as an inspiration to her own ‘awakening’.
*Madame Adèle Ratignolle – Adele becomes a friend of Edna’s and represents the perfect nineteenth-century woman, totally devoted to her husband and children.
*Alcée Arobin -Arobin is known for seducing married women and pursues a short-lived affair with Edna, satisfying her whilst Robert is away.
*Robert Lebrun – Robert has a history of charming women he cannot have, but finds something different with Edna and falls in love with her. Robert’s flirting with Edna begins her ‘awakening’ and she sees in him what has been missing in her marriage to Leonce.

Set in New Orleans and the Southern Louisiana coast at the end of the nineteenth century, the plot centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle to reconcile her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century South. It is one of the earliest American novels that focuses on women’s issues without condescension. It is also widely seen as a landmark work of early feminism, causing varied reactions among readers at the time and generating much criticism.

Realism

• Cognitive Dissonance
o Central mechanism by which we experience new differences in the world
o Internal tension which comes from holding two conflicting thoughts in the mind at the same time
o Gap between beliefs (self-image) and actions
• Most Common: We believe something about ourselves and then do something against that belief
i.e.: I believe I am good/I see myself in a certain way, but do something bad
o Gap between social expectations and internal beliefs
• Internal identity (self-construction) vs. external identity (gender, race, class norms)
Be the author of your own identity
External Identity: Defined by race, culture, class
Who you imagine yourself to be vs. what society expects you to be
Cultural/Social Tensions Surrounding Women
• Work and Education
o Upper class white women were attending college in record numbers and entering progressions previously barred to them
o Lower-class white women worked long hours for low wages and organized to combat conditions in textile mills and sweatshops
• Chopin was probably thinking about these things as she worked on this novel

Grand Isle and Nature/Pigeon House
• Edna is stuck between these two worlds
o Cultural Activism and the submissive wife
• Ways for her to take control and assert independence
o Desire for control and independence
• Grand Isle: Husband is gone
• Both places allow her to escape reality
o Escaping society – wants something that removes her from society
• Gives her space, literally and figuratively
Space to be herself
Escapes male gaze – women seen as property
• As only a wife and a mother
• Impulse to remove herself from society – “to rise in a spiritual scale, decline in the social scale”
o To be up in one, you have to be down in the other
• Pastoralism
o Nostalgia
• Simple emotions – we want to retreat away because life is too complex
• A mythical, mystic place
Edna and Desire
• Robert
• “Oh! Talk of me if you like,” cried Edna, clasping her hands beneath her head; ” but let me think of something else while you do.”
o Chapter 27
• “If desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the established order of a society: not that desire is a social, on the contrary. But it is explosive; there is no desiring-machine capable of being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors. Despite what some revolutionaries think about this, desire is revolutionary in its essence…and no society can tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy being compromised.”
o Deleuze and Guattari Anti-Oedipus (1972)
• Mother woman
o Awakening is happening on multiple levels
o In acting on her desires, she is calling into question how society works and what people are going to say about it
o Edna’s desire is dangerous

• Traditional Expectations/Napoleonic Code
o Women were legal property of their husbands
o All of a wife’s “accumulations” after marriage were legal property of husband
o Husband was legal guardian of children and until 1888 and were granted custody in case of divorce
o Wife was “bound to live with her husband, and follow him wherever he [chose] to reside.”
o Wives could not sign legal contracts (except for wills) without consent of husband, and could not: institute a lawsuit, appear in court, hold public office
• WIFE: more than just getting married

Death as the ultimate freedom

(Content)

Charles W. Chesnutt

1900

*Rowena (Rena) Walden – a young woman who is “strikingly handsome, with a stately beauty seldom encountered… she walked with an elastic step that revealed a light heart and the vigor of perfect health.”[5] She is the younger sister of John Warwick and daughter of Molly Walden. Although she is of mixed blood, and thus considered to be a colored woman (or mulatto), her skin is light enough that she may pass as a white woman. Rena becomes engaged to George Tryon, but after he discovers her family history, their relationship ends and she moves with Jeff Wain to become a schoolteacher for colored children.
*George Tryon – young man of 23, who is described as “a tall, fair young man, with gray eyes, and a frank, open face.”[6] He is a close friend of John Warwick, and falls in love with Rena when he first meets her at the Clarence tournament. His mother wants him to marry Blanche Leary, but he has his heart set on marrying Rena. When he finds out that she is not white, he leaves her, but continues to love her despite her race.
*John Warwick – Rena’s 28 year old brother who moved away from home when he was younger in order to become a successful lawyer in South Carolina. John is a protective brother who wants Rena to have a new life and be afforded all the opportunities she deserves. Like Rena, his skin allows him to pass as a white man, but he must stay away from Patesville to conceal his identity. He was married, but his wife died and left him with a young son named Albert.
*Molly Walden – John and Rena’s mother who is also of mixed race and comes from a family of prosperous, free African Americans. After John leaves home, she is left alone with Rena in the house behind the cedars. Her illiteracy plays a hand in causing the main conflict of the story since she is unable to read Judge Straight’s letter warning her to keep Rena at home.
*Frank Fowler – a black workman for the Walden family who grew up with Rena and is in love with her. He is strongly devoted to the Waldens and would do anything for Rena. When Molly Walden is left alone, he helps take care of her and reads/writes her letters.
*Jeff Wain – mulatto man who owns the schoolhouse Rena teaches in, and the man Molly wants Rena to marry. Although on first impression he is polite and gracious, he becomes a character of suspicion. “Upon a close or hostile inspection there would have been some features of his ostensibly good-natured face—the shifty eye, the full and slightly drooping lower lip—which might have given a student of physiognomy food for reflection,”[7] and Rena becomes afraid to be left alone with him. He claims to be a widower, but Mrs. Tryon explains that his wife is not dead, but left him because she was physically abused.
*Judge Archibald Straight – John Warwick’s mentor who promised John’s father that he would help provide for his children. He advised John to move away so that he could pass as white and become lawyer, and tried to prevent Rena and George from meeting in Patesville.

The story occurs in the southern American states of North and South Carolina a few years following the American Civil War. Rena Walden, a young woman of mixed white and black ancestry, leaves home to join her brother, who has migrated to a new city, where he lives as a white man. Following her brother’s lead, Rena begins living as a white woman. The secret of her identity leads to conflict when she falls in love with a white aristocrat who learns the truth of her heredity. The ensuing drama emphasizes themes of interracial relations and depicted the intricacies of racial identity in the American south.

Realism

• Two different types of African American literature
o Passing Narrative:
• African American passing for white—male or female
o Tragic Mulatto:
• A woman who can pass as a white woman, who is seemingly beautiful
• Issues of integration and the color line – Abolition
The Color Line
• “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” – W.E.B. Dubois
• Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
o Segregation does not constitute unlawful discrimination
o Upheld Louisiana law requiring separate black/white railcars
o Upheld state-imposed segregation
o Codified “separate but equal”
o Strengthened Jim Crow until the 1950’s
• Courts can create laws
• Inferiority is self-conferred
• Courts can’t change custom and tradition
Lost Cause Ideology
• Secession, not slavery, caused the Civil War – distancing themselves from the slavery issue
• African Americans: “faithful slaves,” loyal to their masters and the Confederate cause and unprepared for the responsibilities of freedom. – The plantation myth
• The Confederacy was defeated militarily only because of the Union’s overwhelming advantages in men and resources.
• Confederate soldiers were heroic and saintly.
• The most heroic and saintly of all Confederates, perhaps of all Americans, was Robert E. Lee
• Southern Women: Loyal to the Confederate cause and sanctified by the sacrifice of their loved ones

• Matrilineal—race is determined by mother; One drop rule
o One drop of “black blood” was enough to identify you as black
• The Dr. found it a shame that she was black, but said that he thought she was probably up North, passing for white, and married to a Yankee

Miscegenation and American Society
• Antebellum America: Many whites feared political equality would lead to widespread interracial sex and marriage.
o Insulting the purity of the white race
• The first anti-miscegenation laws were passed during the colonial era in Virginia and Maryland
• By 1948 all states had enacted such laws except: Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Vermont
Performing whiteness
• Message of passing—constructed identity
• Fear of passing

• Fixated on trying to define race
• The Mirror Scene—Society is telling him one thing, he looks in the mirror and sees another thing
o Trying to understand the truth of himself
o They thought themselves one way—the were treated another way by their peers and society
o Sense of unknowability – break from a sense of self

• Jacques Lacan: French Psychoanalyst and psychiatrist
• Critical stage in the development of the ego (what he referred to as the “I”) when an infant recognizes him/herself in a mirror and integrated self-image begins to happen
• The child finds reflected back a gratifyingly unified image of itself
• Begins the process of constructing a center of self
• Establishes the ego as relational, fundamentally dependent upon external objects, on an other.

• Race as being like a veil
• Race functioning as a lense thorough which we see people
o He sees one thing, they are seeing another
• Atavism: Belief of lurking under the service of African Americans – invert to this animalistic state
o Physical characteristics literally change that moment and the way he feels

Charles Chesnutt
• The future American
• Argued:
o Science has rejected old notions about racial superiority
o Racial purity is a myth
o “Any dream of a pure white race…may as well be abandoned as impossible if even desirable.”
o Future America will be a “mingling” or “amalgamation” of races
o African Americans must be elevated in order for this to happen
• Elevated in education
John vs. Rena
• Rena’s death is a subtle revision of the tragic mulatto
Realism
• Gendered – the women die, Theron gets to run away
• Desire can disrupt a natural way of doing things
o Desiring paths in life that go against traditional roles, which lead to death
• Psychological aspects of two worlds colliding

American Literary Modernism
• Influences:
o Early 1900s: Widespread experimentation in literature, music, art and architecture
o The Armory Show (1913)
o Picasso: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and Head of a Woman (1909)
• Anti-representational art: A crisis of representation
Does not show what is really happening – emphasis on the artist and their perspective
Not representing what real life looks like
• Cezanne and Post-Impressionism
o Revised realism/impressionism to include uncertainty in our perceptions
o Appearances change given conditions/viewer
o Painted not reality but the effect of perceiving it
o Large Bathers (1899-1906)
o Working toward a perspective that emphasizes the individual
o The effect of perceiving reality
• Ernest Hemingway
o Nick Adams “wanted to write about the country so it would be there like Cezanne had done it in painting. You had to do it from inside yourself.:
Cubism
• Expands Cezanne’s views on variability and stability
• Reality simplified to geometric shapes/planes
• Multiple and simultaneous viewpoints
• Interlocking movements
• Picasso: Girl with a Mandolin (1910)
• Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase (1912)
Perspectivism
• It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to the rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm.
• Philosophical position that one’s access to the world is possible only through one’s own perspective and interpretation.
• Rejects both the idea of a perspective-free or an interpretation-free objective reality.
First Great Migration (1910-1940)
• i.5 million African Americans moved to the nation’s Northern urban centers such as Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Detroit
o 1910-1920: Chicago: 148% growth; New York: 66% growth; Philadelphia: 500% growth; Detroit: 611% growth

(Content)

Jean Toomer

1923

First Section:
Karintha- A vignette about a young black woman desired by older men who wish “to ripen a growing thing too soon.”
Reapers (poem)
November Cotton Flower (poem)
Becky-Vignette of an ostracized white woman with two black sons who lives in a small stone house with the railway.
Face (poem)
Cotton Song (poem)
Carma-Vignette about a strong woman whose husband becomes involved in shady business.
Song of the Son (poem)
Georgia Dusk
Fern-A Northern black man attempts to woo a southern black woman, with strange results.
Nullo (poem)
Evening Song (poem)
Esther-A young woman who works in a drug store ages and pines for the wandering preacher Barlo, eventually seeking him out.
Conversion (poem)
Portrait of Georgia (poem)
Blood Burning Moon-Black man Tom Burwell and white man Bob Stone each pursue the young Louisa, resulting in a violent encounter and a tragic climax.
Second Section:
Seventh Street-Brief vignette about a street which is “a bastard of Prohibition and the War.
Rhobert-Brief vignette about a solitary man.
Avey-A young college student pursues a lazy girl named Avey, but cannot figure out why.
Beehive (poem)
Storm Ending (poem)
Theater-A dancer named Dorris seeks the approval and adoration of a patron named John.
Her Lips are Copper Wire (poem)
Calling Jesus-A brief vignette.
Box Seat-Dan Moore lusts after a reluctant Muriel, and follows her to a dwarf fight, where he starts a scene.
Prayer (poem)
Harvest Song (poem)
Bona and Paul-A story of indifferent love.
Third Section:
Kabnis-Essentially a short play about a Northern black schoolteacher’s experiences in the south, returning to his roots.

First Section:
Karintha- A vignette about a young black woman desired by older men who wish “to ripen a growing thing too soon.”
Reapers (poem)
November Cotton Flower (poem)
Becky-Vignette of an ostracized white woman with two black sons who lives in a small stone house with the railway.
Face (poem)
Cotton Song (poem)
Carma-Vignette about a strong woman whose husband becomes involved in shady business.
Song of the Son (poem)
Georgia Dusk
Fern-A Northern black man attempts to woo a southern black woman, with strange results.
Nullo (poem)
Evening Song (poem)
Esther-A young woman who works in a drug store ages and pines for the wandering preacher Barlo, eventually seeking him out.
Conversion (poem)
Portrait of Georgia (poem)
Blood Burning Moon-Black man Tom Burwell and white man Bob Stone each pursue the young Louisa, resulting in a violent encounter and a tragic climax.
Second Section:
Seventh Street-Brief vignette about a street which is “a bastard of Prohibition and the War.
Rhobert-Brief vignette about a solitary man.
Avey-A young college student pursues a lazy girl named Avey, but cannot figure out why.
Beehive (poem)
Storm Ending (poem)
Theater-A dancer named Dorris seeks the approval and adoration of a patron named John.
Her Lips are Copper Wire (poem)
Calling Jesus-A brief vignette.
Box Seat-Dan Moore lusts after a reluctant Muriel, and follows her to a dwarf fight, where he starts a scene.
Prayer (poem)
Harvest Song (poem)
Bona and Paul-A story of indifferent love.
Third Section:
Kabnis-Essentially a short play about a Northern black schoolteacher’s experiences in the south, returning to his roots.

Modernism

Rejects the idea of one single character–we’re getting different characters throughout the entire novel

• South
o Young, Beautiful Women
• Most of the titles happen to be women’s names
• They were preyed upon—their bodies were taken away from them
• No since of ownership or agency—not only with your body, but with your family as well
o First part of the book: Located in the south, stories about women and their physical selves (multiple women, multiple ages, multiple perspectives)
o Nature—Sugar Cane
o Distinctive differences in class – the way they dress
o Songs (Song of the Sun, Cotton Song, Spirituals)
o Geography and Marginalization
o Violence
o Religion
o Naturalized with their surroundings
o Miscegenation – ironies of passing

• Relationship between form and content
o Toomer: Hybrid form vs. Cedars
• What is experimental about it?
o Narrative perspective
• Primary perspective
Mazie – fragmented, sense perceptions, juvenile, stream of consciousness
o Stream of Consciousness:
• Coined by psychologists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to describe the personal awareness of one’s mental process
• Continuous flow of sensations, impressions, images, memories and thoughts experienced by each person.
• Captures thought in its nascent stage, prior to any logical connection – thought/sensory impressions not experienced as words.
• Represents character’s subjectivity, or sense of self
• To what ends does she employ experimentation?
• Poor Family
o Violence
o Piece of working class fiction

(Content)

Tillie Olsen

1930s/1974

*Mazie Holbrook: Jim and Anna’s eldest daughter. Although she is just six and a half years old at the beginning of the novel, she assumes many responsibilities in the house. She helps her mother start the fire, cook and care for her little brothers and sister. Her character changes as events progress in the novel, and as she becomes aware of her social position. Her own way of escaping the harsh reality is portrayed in her daydreaming and imaginary trances. She believes that stars are “lamps in houses up there, or flowers growin in the night” (46). According to most critics, had the novel been completed, Mazie would have been the revolutionary character in the narrative when she grows.
*Anna Holbrook: Mazie’s mother. She believes that education is the only way for her children to achieve upward mobility in society; she tells Mazie, “An edjication [education] is what you kids are going to get. It means your hands stay white and you read books and work in an office” (4). The violence she experiences from her husband is in part reflected in the violent attitude she displays towards her children as she shouts at and beats them constantly. In some parts of the novel, she is an active housewife, always busy with canning food or doing laundry. However, when she gets sick due to a miscarriage, she is usually sleeping and the house and kids are left unattended to.
*Jim Holbrook: He is the patriarch of the Holbrook family. In his attempt to make ends meet, he moves from one job to another, first, a coal miner, next, a farmer, and finally a meat packer. He heads to the bar and gets drunk, as most other workers do, to escape from reality. The financial stress on the family is reflected on Jim’s violent attitude towards his wife and kids: “He had nothing but heavy blows to the children and he struck Anna too often to remember” (9). However, in some parts of the novel, he shows care to his sick wife and plays with his children.
*Will and Ben Holbrook: Mazie’s younger brothers. Will is attached to Mazie in the beginning of the novel. However, as he grows a little older, he wants to be independent and to have his own friends, secret adventures and gadgets. Ben is weak in body and suffers from lung disease especially when the family moves to the smelly, unclean area next to the packing houses.
*Jimmie and Bess Holbrook: The youngest son and daughter in the family. Although her role is very limited in the novel, Bess closes the unfinished novel with an optimistic tone when she grabs a jar lid and bangs it enthusiastically against the floor.

The novel details the lives of the Holbrook family, depicting their struggle to survive during the 1920s. Yonnondio explores the life of the working-class family, as well as themes of motherhood, socioeconomic order, and the pre-depression era. The novel was published as an unfinished work.

Modernism

o Look past likability of characters
o Lack of education – Industrial labor and the lack of education
o Objectivity
o To work in these types of conditions is to live in a type of eternal present
o The myth of Sisyphus – figure who is condemned for life to forever push a rock up a hill, and it comes back down

Yonnondio—the importance of smell
Why we don’t want a happy ending:
• Master narratives
• Metanarratives
o American Dream : Hard work, Education – equalizer
The Frankfurt School
• German-American theorists who analyzed and critiqued changes in Western capitalism after WWII.
• Max Horkheimer and T.V. Adorno focused on the “culture industry.”
o “Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (1944)
• American “popular culture” was highly ideological and promoted the interests of American capitalism
• Mass culture produces:
o Desires, dreams, hopes, fears and longings
o Unending desire for consumer products
o Cultrual consumers who consume its products and conform to the dictates and the behaviors of the exiting society.
• “Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanized work
• The mind of the working class
o The Eternal Present – that your mind almost gets emptied out
Mass Culture
• Entertainment
• Standards of Beauty

(Content)

Dashiell Hammett

1930

*Sam Spade
Archer “maybe you saw her first, Sam, but I spoke first.”
“you’ll play hell with her you will.”
Spade grinned wolfishly, showing the edges of his teeth far backing his jaw.
We feel like this is a hint that Spade and Ms. Wonderly will get together in the future.
He was a player because three women want him and he’s using them all: Effie Perine, Brigid O’shaunassy, Iva Archer

Is Spade mad at Mr. Gutman?
– we don’t really know if he is actually really mad at him or if he is just putting on a show.

We feel that Sam is very patient or reliant because he waits for Ms. Oshaunassy to tell Sam the truth about her lies that she has told him about her story.

*Brigid O’ Shaughnessy
– Description: tall and pliantly slender, without angularity anywhere. Long legs, her hands and feet narrow. Dark red hair.
– Is always lying.
– An example can be: her name, sister, and her story keeps changing.
– She tries to get what she wants by flirting but other than flirting she cannot really do anything
– Hence, she is afraid of Cairo because she cannot flirt with him to get her way.
– Cairo makes fun of her because she could not something from a man because he wasinterested in Cairo and not her.
– She likes money.
– Refuses to tell the truth even though she is called out on it.
– Admits that she is even lying.
– Only looks out for herself
Summary:
Brigid started off the bat just lying and her lies have continued and taken over, she is willing to do anything to get what she wants. She wont tell the truth even though she is confronted about it. She just looks out for herself, but is helpless so she needs others help. She is willing to step on others to be first. She isn’t trust able. She didn’t care that Thursby is dead, and was killed. She left him because she knew he wasn’t going to pay her, she
wont even tell the people who are on her wide the truth.

*Joel Cairo
Small boned, dark man, medium height, his hair is black, smooth and very glossy. His features were Levantine he walks with short mencing bobbing steps and is a little bit queer. Fashion is important to him but he is not very manly. He paid spade 5,000 dollars to find the black bird. He tries to search spades office for the black bird and gets beaten up by spade.

*Effie Perine
She is a lanky sunburned girl
She is Sam Spade’s secretary
Effie knows that Iva wants to marry Sam
Spade told Effie to break the news to Iva about miles death
Spade and Effie have a close relationship
Effie trust Miss Wonderly and doesn’t want Spade to hurt her in any way
Spade trusts Effie because she is trustworthy
She is able to help spade when he needs it and she gets the jobs done

*Miles Archer
– Sam Spades partner.

– Miss Wonderly asks if Spade or Miles Archer could look after it personally. Miles Archer said he would look after it himself.
– Miles Archer sounds a little bit clueless because he didn’t know that Sam Spade was having an affair with Miles’ wife.

*Wilmer Cook

– Young boy that is following Spade around ever since he was at Cairo’s hotel.
– Do not find out his name until Ch 13
– Wilmer then follows spade around for the next chapter.
– Wilmer confronts Cario and tells him that his boss “G” will be dealing with Spade “at some point”
– Wilmer trips Spade and then kicks him in the head

The main character, Sam Spade, appears only in this novel and in three lesser known short stories, yet is widely cited as the crystallizing figure in the development of the hard-boiled private detective genre – Raymond Chandler’s character Philip Marlowe, for instance, was strongly influenced by Hammett’s Spade. Spade was a departure from Hammett’s nameless detective, The Continental Op. Sam Spade combined several features of previous detectives, most notably his cold detachment, keen eye for detail, and unflinching determination to achieve his own justice.

Modernism

• Hard-boiled Style
o Vernacular Modernism
• Vernacular: Everyday usage, with connotations of dialect, circulation, and translatability
• Blurring of boundary between “high” art vs. “low” art and of autonomous art vs. popular and mass culture
o Departs from modernist tradition
• Economy of form
o Get to the heart of the matter
o Finding its way into writing both high brow and low brow
• Hammet’s prose
o Flat
o Unemotional
o Objective
o Ironic distance between style and subject
o A lot of attention to actions – a way to shut off the mind
• What does a focus on actions say about the mind?
• Setting
o Responding to the world as it is, rather than what it is not
• Take the reader and put them into the muck that is going on
o The City/Urbanization
• Role of the modern city as a milieu
City as wasteland
Progress as double-edged sword
Emerging Horizontal Society – Urbanization and mass society
• “[The hardboiled author’s] urban landscape was a dream world, an exaggerated image of the metropolis as a battlefield of crime lords and corrupt officials.”
o Sean McCann “The Hardboiled Novel”

Style and Setting
• Vernacular modernism (Style)
• Urban Milieu (Setting)
• Noir (Setting)
• Nothing is as it seems
• Bureaucratization
Character
• Thoughts on Detectives/Detective Novels
o “the detective can be understood as an organ of perception, a membrane which, irritated, serves to indicate its sensuality.”
• Hard-boiled Detectives
o Character: The Detective – Roots in the frontier hero
• Marginalized professional: Detective as Everyman
Self Chosen: Rejects mainstream concepts of success and respectability.
• Toughness/Physical Action
Accustomed to a world of physical violence, corruption and treachery
• World Weary/Experienced
Not naïve. Understands violence is endemic to society
• Moral code transcends existing social order
Knight Errant; Frontier Hero
o End goal of the detective novel is to achieve justice
• Justice based on a self-defined code
o Flitcraft story: The way Spade thinks and views the world
• What does it reveal about Spade?
No absolutes
Human nature – humans don’t change
• Epiphany
o Modernist Epiphany:
• A moment of unveiling -of realization or insight – recovered from the fragmentary chaos of modern, often urban, life.
• Strains to identify the mundane or particular with something revelatory.

• White man – threats to white masculinity?
Suffrage
Women working
Femme Fatale

• Threats to the patriarchy (white male)
o Joel Cairo – ethnic and sexual other
o Women working
o Suffrage
o Femme Fatales
• Imagined Fraternity
o Defines masculinity as a set of beliefs and practices
• Solution to my story is subordinate to accomplishment of justice – self-defined by detective
o Truth

(Content)

Chester Himes

1957

Jackson
Goldy
Imabelle
Big Kathy
Easy Money
Slim
Jodie
Teena
Hank
Gus Parsons
Coffin Ed
Claude X
Mrs. Canfield
Louis
Smitty
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
Clerk

A beautiful black gangster’s moll flees to Harlem with a trunkload of gold after a shootout, unaware that the rest of the gang, and a few other unsavoury characters, are on her trail. A pudgy momma’s boy becomes the object of her affections and the unlikely hero of the tale.

Postwar/Postmodernism

• Relation to Modernism
o Rejects
• Boundaries between high and low forms of art
• Rigid genre distinctions: pastiche, parody, bricolage (a work constructed from a wide variety of sources), irony, and playfulness.
o Favors
• Reflexivity and self-consciousness
• Fragmentation and discontinuity in narrative structures
• Ambiguity and simultaneity
• Modernism:
o Fragmentation of human subjectivity and history is tragic, something to be lamented and mourned as a loss.
o Modernist art
• Provide unity, coherence, and meaning which has been lost in most of modern life; art will do what other human institutions fail to do.
o Modernity is fundamentally about order: about rationality and rationalization, creating order out of chaos

• Transition from WWII Era
o 1945: WWII ends, American soldiers return home
o American economy strengthens due to the damage done to European industry during the war
o America had endured two world wars and a devastating economic depression.
• The American people were making more and wanting more
o The Age of Prosperity & The Suburbs
• The Baby Boom
o After WWII economy was doing well, so the fear of where you were going to get your next meal disappeared.
o People were hopeful about the future and started having families.
• The number of children ages 5-14 increased by more than 10 million between 1950-1960
• White Flight/Suburbia
o After WWII, the city experienced a shortage of housing
o Housing was either not suitable for family living or too expensive
o The number of immigrants, African Americans, and poor white people living in the city grew during WWII, and middle class whites felt they needed a space of their own.
• Car Culture
o Having families created a need for a space separate from the hustle and bustle of the city
o Suburban life: outside of the city within driving distance/rail lines
o Motor vehicle registration jumped from 31 million vehicles in 1945 to 49 million in 1950
o Federal Housing Act of 1949
o Decentralized businesses and workforce
o Shopping malls, coffee shops, etc. become “other” places, distinct from homes or workplaces.
• Suburbs as a narrative, not just as a place or a home
o Containment culture
o Merging of domestic narrative (the home front) and a global narrative (cold war)

• Everyone is dying to get money, but it won’t raise their status or do anything major for them
o Money becomes an empty symbol – it leads to nothing
• Role of Religion: Nothing is safe from fraud or the con
o It becomes very empty—it’s all façade
o It’s something to give them comfort
o Used to justify

• No change – stasis
• Hard to get out → segregation
o Sense of being trapped where they are
• Internal logic of Harlem
o The logic comes from without—place that is being squeezed to death by the color line

• Largely influenced by the existentialist and nihilist movements in philosophy and the Dada and surrealist movement
• The Absurd:
o The modern sense of human purposelessness in a universe without meaning or value.
o Theatre of the absurd (1950s): works that evoke the absurd by abandoning logical form, character, and dialogue together with realistic illusion.
o Harlem is a product of racism
o Cartoonish vision of reality in which they live

(Content)

Paula Fox

1970

Sophie Bentwood
Otto Bentwood
Charlie
Francis Early

Sophie and Otto Bentwood are a middle-aged, middle class, childless Brooklyn Heights couple trapped in a loveless marriage. He is an attorney, she a translator of books. Their existence is affected not only by their disintegrating relationship but by the threats of urban crime and vandalism that surround them everywhere they turn, leaving them feeling paranoid, scared, and desperately helpless. The film details their fragile emotional and psychological states as they interact with each other and their friends.

Postwar/Postmodernism

Success, American Dream, Containment — A Rage in Harlem was much on the outside of this, while Desperate Characters is on the inside

• To a greater extent than any of us may care to admit, we are little more than custodians of our stuff, curators of a traveling exhibition called “ourselves.”
• Not just buying a house, buying an important part of our identity
• Thing Theory Asks:
o What do things mean? And how do things mean?
o How do things make people?
• Objects mediate social relationships; inanimate objects have a form of subjectivity and agency of their own
• Strong connection to the past
• Want to separate themselves from others based on what they know and what they have
o Taste & knowledge
• Interior vs. Exterior
• Containment
o Puts a premium on order and providing a type of structure to one’s life
• Us vs. Them
o “Why do they drop everything on the pavement?” (pg. 13)
o Us = Bentwoods
o They = Everyone that used to live in Brooklyn, the lower class, black people, different people from them
• Isolationism

we’re often aware of the writer’s strong executive hand, molding and shaping, commanding our attention to niceties of design.
• Moves according to a rhythm of its own, setting in motion a single line of action, less complex than the full-scale novel but decidedly more so than the short story, with its brief flaring incident.
• Moves rapidly toward a moment of testing, in which its characters achieve something like a full lucidity.
• Draws attention to the artist – you know you are in the hands of the author

sets up fear of the other—fear of the unknown
• If you can just avoid everything around you, and exclude yourself from bad things you don’t have to worry about it. You don’t have to feel obligated to help
• Rejecting suburban culture.
• Fear of what’s outside—continuously looking out of the window
o Letting the cat inside of the house ended up causing harm on the inside
o Fear of bringing the outside in – impact their life
o Obsessed with keeping the inside separate from the outside

• Frederic Jameson from Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
o Nostalgia as a mode is “a terrible indictment of consumer capitalism itself—or , at the very least, an alarming and pathological symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history.”
• Creative Destruction: Capitalism exists by destroying what has come before it
o New ways of doing things, that cannot survive with old ways of doing things – the death of Blockbuster
o Capitalism is constantly moving forward – become nostalgic for older times
o A stick which to beat the present
o Nostalgia for a world in which change didn’t happen
The Bentwood’s are feeling less and less control of their life…by bringing the cat inside—it deeply affected them.

• Creating an identity through consumption
• Questions the rage and desire for order that was starting to merge at this time

(Content)

Tim O’Brien

1994

*John Wade – A 41-year-old man at the height of his political career. The lieutenant governor of Minnesota, John was running for the U.S. Senate when details of unseemly war actions in Vietnam were uncovered; he went down to overwhelming defeat in the primary.
*Kathy Wade – John’s wife, has been intimately involved with him since their college days. She has stood by him despite her loathing for politics. Kathy is aware that John represses memories of his past, which arise in his dreams and subconscious. Kathy is secretly glad that he will be out of politics and more involved with her again.
Secondary characters
*An unnamed Narrator, who admits his own unreliability on several occasions. He appears to be unconnected to the Wades but obsessed with their case. He has interviewed surviving characters and built a narrative on his own speculation. He served in Vietnam during the war.
*Ruth Rasmussen, a close neighbor. When Kathy goes missing, Ruth supports John and helps him through the search effort.
*Claude Rasmussen, the husband of Ruth, acts as a friend to John. During the investigation, they become closer.
*Eleanor Wade, John’s mother; she comments on his isolation as a child, as well as the transformation of his personality because of his father’s abuse.
*Paul Wade, John’s father, who committed suicide. Although alcoholic and often abusive, he was still idolized by John.
*Patricia S. Hood, Kathy’s sister, who never trusted John. Patricia assists in the search efforts. on the search efforts when she hears the news of her missing sister, and becomes annoyed and suspicious at John’s reluctance to get involved with the search.
*Arthur Lux, the sheriff of Lake of the Woods County. He heads the investigation.
*Vinny Pearson, runs the Texaco station while serving as the police.
*Myra Shaw, Vinny’s cousin, reports witnessing some events with John and Kathy.
*Anthony (Tony) Carbo served as John’s campaign manager through his political career.
*Sandra Karra, owns Karra’s Studio of Magic. She speculated that John had a crush on her.
*The many men of Charlie Company
*PFC Weatherby, a soldier in John’s Charlie Company.
*Richard Thinbill begged for John to release the Vietnam events to the authorities.

Related to issues of the Vietnam War theme, In the Lake of the Woods follows the struggle of John Wade to deal with a recently failed campaign for the United States Senate. After moving to Lake of the Woods, Minnesota, John discovers one morning that his wife Kathy is missing. Through the use of flashbacks of John’s childhood, college years, and Vietnam experiences, as well as testimony and evidence from affected characters, the novel provides several hypotheses for the disappearance of Kathy Wade, leaving the decision up to the reader.

Postwar/Postmodernism

o The Role of Storytelling
• Who we are is a product of storytelling and narrative
• Shaping our relationship with the world and ourselves
• In the Lake of the Woods: Narrative Techniques
o DIEGESIS:
• A narrative’s created world
• The world experienced by the characters in situations and events of the narrative
• Telling, recounting, as opposed to showing, enacting.
o ANALEPSIS (flashback) AND PROLEPSIS (flash-forward)
• Reorder the story/narrative: by “flashing back” to an earlier point in the story (analepsis) or “flashing forward” to a moment later in the chronological sequence of events (prolepsis).
o Competing scenarios:
• Confession
• Tension
• Suspense
• Resists Chronology
Clarity
o Novel that frustrates the things that we usually expect to come from a novel
• Enter uncertainty
• Unity
• Coherence
• Stability
• Metafiction
o “Writing that self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.”
• Patricia Waugh
o “Contemporary metafictional writing is both a response and a contribution to an even more thoroughgoing sense that reality and history are provisional: no longer a world of external [truths] but a series of constructions, artifices, impermanent structures.”
• Waugh
Metanarratives – stories
• Self-Reflexive Arts
o Art which exposes its own artificiality (and that of its target),
• E.g. artistic medium (stage, language, camera), creative process; artistic frames, story, by…
Denying the author’s power;
Bringing its context into the text;
Making narrative intrusion, speaking to the audience/reader;
Refusing to tell the whole story or revealing its untruthfulness
• Artificiality of reality – Politician
o Truth
o Reality
o Stories
• Constructed nature
• Removes the artifice of most novels

• Generic Instability: Employs myriad forms
• Rejects authority of narrator: No single perspective/truth
• Emphasizes role of the reader: We put together the pieces
• Truth and Storytelling, and knowability
o Recursive

• Paradigm. The writers uses a theoretical or critical framework in order to fit a kind of template over the details of a literary text to endow them with order and to elucidate a structure.
o Theory/critical perspective explicitly named and summarized in sufficient detail and with sufficient complexity
o Agency in use of paradigm is located in critic/student and not the literary text’s author
o Argument shows how application of a paradigm provides an overarching structure
Magic is all about control – and playing around with people’s expectation

Vietnam and Trauma
• National – War and soldiers; Why we fight; What are we fighting for
• Individual
Trauma
• A recalibration of feeling so violent and radical that it resists and compels memory, generating stories that cannot, yet must, be told
• Creates something that you don’t want to remember, yet you’re forced to remember over and over again
• A story you don’t want to tell, yet you feel that you need to tell it
• Freud: An event the full horror of which is not and cannot be assimilated or experienced fully at the time but only belatedly
• Creates a kind of historical and experiential abyss, a yawning and possibly unbridgeable gap between before and after.
John’s Motivations
• Political → Earlier narrative about soldiers – bravery, courage, men that would go fight for us, men that we could trust, honor
• Tim O’Brian – Coward for going to War
o Anti-War
o Against going
o Mainstream Kid – wanted what everyone else wanted (Cherry-coke)
Media
• Guerilla Warfare
• We lost
• Lack of clear objectives
My Lai Massacre – Symbol of the psychic trauma of soldiers, everything that was wrong with the Vietnam War
• Thuan Yen
• Pinkville
• Thinbill – reference to the flies

o Deny that they have any knowledge of bad things that happened
o People at the top are never responsible for what the people at the bottom did
o William Calley – only person responsible for the killing of thousands of people
• Puts a face on it
• Don’t want to think multiple people
• Not the United States – just this one guy who went rogue

(Content)

Alison Bechdel

2006

Alison and her family.
Specifically her mother and father.

It chronicles the author’s childhood and youth in rural Pennsylvania, USA, focusing on her complex relationship with her father. The book addresses themes of sexual orientation, gender roles, suicide, dysfunctional family life, and the role of literature in understanding oneself and one’s family. Writing and illustrating Fun Home took seven years, in part because of Bechdel’s laborious artistic process, which includes photographing herself in poses for each human figure.

Postwar/Postmodernism

Memoir – added element of reality
• Graphic novel
Visual Culture and Postmodernism
• Visual forms of media, communication, and information predominate over the verbal and textual.
• Visual culture merges popular and “low” cultural forms; media and communications, with the study of “high” cultural forms or fine art, design, and architecture.
o Graphic novel is the merging of these two worlds
o Comics seen as disposable art form

• Allison in the present narrative
o Retrospective
• Icarus Story – bringing other texts into her text to help make sense
o Intertextuality – brings other stories in to help frame her own story
• Allison as a child – representative dialogue
• Father’s dialogue – recreated from Allison
• Multiple narratives that all work together
• Visual Iconography
• Removed stereotypical gender norms from panels – combination of image and text allow readers to better understand Allison
o Going beyond illustrating what is happening

• Simple iconic images
• Objective vs. Subjective
o Story truth vs. Happening truth
• The idea of truth – how do we know what we know; how do we represent the truth?

• Subjective experience of life – filtered through the self
• Truth and memory – become more real by embracing it
Recursively
• Father’s death organizes the entire novel – everything kind of comes back to it
• Recursive Chronology
o Story-within-a-story
o Returns, repeatedly, to the same point or to the same moment.
o Resists linearity—cause-and-effect chronology
• Two stories going on – Allison’s story—father’s death
Trauma
• Compelling and defining – but you don’t want it to be
o The actual moment is too hard to deal with, so she tells the story around it—but she doesn’t actually draw it or talk about it
• BUT she keeps talking about it
o Reliving the trauma over and over – always mentioning it
• The story that keeps playing in her head
o Unwillingness to let go
• Keeping it present and alive
Daily Life vs. Traumatic Event
• Never goes away—it’s always there
• It can spring up at any moment
Artifice as Theme
• Not really knowing her father
• Trying to connect with him over sexuality – as soon as they begin to connect, he dies
• Maps throughout the book—trying to find/locate something
o Searching—trying to explain/locate herself
• Struggling to do that throughout the book
• Pretending to be something that you are not
Master Narratives and Gender & Sexuality
• Her father is trying to project the average heterosexual marriage
o The queer identity
• How does she arrive at an identity?
o Actively seeking out an identity

(Similarities)

The Awakening
The House Behind the Cedars
A Rage in Harlem
Desperate Characters

The Damnation of Theron Ware
In the Lake of the Woods
Fun Home

Cane
Yonnondio
The Maltese Falcon

point of view · Most of the stories are told from the first person, but on several occasions, O’Brien uses the third person as either a distancing tactic or a chance to let one of his platoon-mates, such as Mitchell Sanders or Rat Kiley, tell his story.

tone · The Things They Carried is an introspective memory story and a self-conscious examination of the methods and reasons behind storytelling. The narrator is unreliable; he speaks of the necessity of blurring truth and fiction in a true war story.

tense · Past tense, shifting between the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and the narrator’s immediate past, twenty years after the war

setting (time) · Late 1960s and late 1980s

setting (place) · Primarily Vietnam, but also U.S. locations including Iowa and Massachusetts

protagonist · Tim O’Brien

major conflict · The men of the Alpha Company, especially Tim O’Brien, grapple with the effects—both immediate and long-term—of the Vietnam War.

rising action · In the summer of 1968, Tim O’Brien receives a draft notice. Despite a desire to follow his convictions and flee to Canada, he feels he would be embarrassed to refuse to fulfill his patriotic duty and so concedes to fight in Vietnam.

climax · During their tour of duty, the men of the Alpha Company must cope with the loss of their own men and the guilt that comes from killing and watching others die.

falling action · After he returns from war, O’Brien grapples with his memories by telling stories about Vietnam.

themes · Physical and emotional burdens; fear of shame as motivaton; the subjection of truth to storytelling

motifs · Storytelling; ambiguous morality; loneliness and isolation

symbols · The dead young Vietnamese soldier; Kathleen; Linda

foreshadowing · O’Brien mentions the deaths of men such as Ted Lavender, Curt Lemon, and Kiowa before he gives detailed accounts of how and when they died in later stories.

Testifying to its author’s “fascination with death” (324), this scholarly and abundantly illustrated work focuses on the history of the American idea of the Good Death as this concept took shape during the Civil War. Frederic Law Olmstead used the phrase “republic of suffering” to describe the many wounded and dying soldiers being treated at Union hospital ships on the Virginia Peninsula. Faust argues that the task of dealing with more than half a million dead during the War motivated Americans in the North and South to discover cultural and physical measures of interpreting and coping with the suffering and loss that occurred in thousands of families.

The scale of this War was unprecedented due to rifles and railroads; however, Gilpin Faust reminds us that twice as many soldiers died of disease as died of wounds suffered in the conflict. The illnesses were epidemics of measles, mumps and smallpox, then diarrhea and dysentery, typhoid and malaria. Medical care was inadequate; consequently, soldiers and their families turned to spiritual consolation. The Good Death was identified as sacrificing your life for the cause; many believed in the Christian idea of resurrection and the afterlife. Killing became work, as African American soldiers fought for “God, race and country” (53), where Southerners fought to preserve the status quo, including slavery.

Because of the War, public cemeteries and ceremonies, and government’s identifying and counting the dead are now taken for granted. Because of the Civil War, bodies of the dead military are today brought back from foreign lands and honored with decent burial: “We still seek to use our deaths to create meaning where we are not sure any exists” (271).

• Man made power vs. Religious (different forms of power)
• Representing two different worlds
In Henry Adam’s “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” he starts to speculate about Christianity’s strength during the medieval times and how it can be related to the twentieth century energy, using the dynamos, that produced electricity. He says when he relates religion and energy,” As he grew accustomed to the gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross.” By doing this he is explaining he believes the relation between the machines and their parts are just like the Christians being part of the Cathedral and their faith. Therefore, after his relation is given between faith and science, decides he is going to combine the two in his studies, and everything that is considered irrational, he would say it takes faith to believe. He goes on to say how there could never be an American Virgin, since we relate that to sin. As he gets older, continues to search for reasons why the Virgin is still lost in our culture, and he explains it has always been there. He says the Virgin is a force that shaped our Western Civilization, but we had to find her.

Why Narrative?
• “Nothing seems more natural and universal to human beings than telling stories.” (66)
• “Narrative cannot by any means be taken for granted.” (68)
• What psychological or social function do stories serve? Just why do we need stories, lost of them, all the time?” (67)
• Archetype: Repeated element that you see over and over again
o Psychological:
• Order Finding: “Man learns by imitation…” (69)
Fictions “reveal” the nature of the world and “represent accurately” the order of the world.
• Order Giving: “Imitations are rhythmic..”
• “In fictions we order or reorder…”
The world is messy and disordered and fiction functions by giving shape/structure to the world.
o Cultural/Social
• Makers and Policers of Culture: “Fictions…[are] makers of…culture…” (69)
• Questioners of Culture: “Narratives are a relatively safe or innocuous place in which the reigning assumptions of a given culture can be criticized.” (69)
• Cultural Archetypes: Images, figures, character types, settings, and story patterns that are universally shared by people across cultures, or within specific cultures.

Tompkins and American Literature in the age of Realism
• Cultural Work of Fiction:
o Find order in the world
o Construct and police culture
• “these…texts…provid[ed] men and women with a means of ordering the world they inhabited.” (537)
• “When literary texts are conceived as agents of cultural formation rather than as objects of interpretation and appraisal…” (540)
• Why Realism?
o Not fantastical
o Not abstract
o Not romantic
• Why the novel?

• It should…
o “perform a national service…” (155)
o Provide a “picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence” (156).
o “[P]aint…the American soul within the framework of a novel” (156).
o Display “a tableau of American society” (156)
o Tell “a single tale which paints American life…” (158-159)

David E. Shi’s FACING FACTS: REALISM IN AMERICAN THOUGHT AND CULTURE, 1850-1920 is a fascinating study of how realism affected American art, literature, culture, and intellectual life in a period extending roughly from the Civil War until World War I. Expertly blending historical analysis with artistic and literary criticism, Shi provides an important new understanding of how historical events influenced “style” during a critical period of American life.

FACING FACTS contains much that is valuable for the specialist and general reader alike. Lavishly annotated (with footnotes accounting for 67 of its 394 pages), the book provides thorough documentation and suggestions for further study. Yet Shi also writes in an accessible style, supplying so much background information that even those unfamiliar with the topic will find the book an excellent introduction to what is a complicated and rich subject.

The encyclopedic nature of FACING FACTS is at once the book’s most important contribution and its greatest weakness. Shi continually interweaves biographical sketches, historical narratives, and critical analyses to set the stage for each of the individuals and works he describes. All too often, however, a chapter will leave the reader wanting more, at times much more. Darwin is discussed in little more than a page, Matthew Brady in three pages, Frank Norris in eight. A package tour through history, FACING FACTS can result in breathlessness. Shi would have been better advised to make fewer stops along the way, allowing his readers more time to absorb all the wonderful things he is showing them.

Despite this limitation, however, FACING FACTS is important for its discussion of the intellectual roots of the so-called “Gilded Age.” The social factors that guided American realism—the Civil War, the invention of photography, the rise of Darwinism, the Industrial Revolution, World War I—raised serious philosophical doubts about the merits of idealism and classicism as they were embraced by the early republic. FACING FACTS demonstrates that many threads in the American fabric came together to create a style that has left an indelible mark upon modern taste.

Lauded as one of the most influential events in the history of American art, the Armory Show has a mythic legacy that rivals the raucous opening of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet, The Rite of Spring in Paris. In the wake of previous large independent art exhibitions in France, Germany, Italy, and England, from February 17th to March 15th, 1913, New York’s 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th streets was home to approximately 1250 paintings, sculptures, and decorative works by over 300 European and American artists. While the purchase of Cézanne’s Hill of the Poor by the Metropolitan Museum of Art signaled an integration of modernism into official art channels, the shock and outrage proported from Duchamp’s Nude Descending the Staircase and Matisse’s Luxury connected the Armory Show, officially known as The International Exhibition of Modern Art, with an historic avant-garde whose duty was to question the boundaries of art as an institution.
Reconsidering the narratives constructed by Armory Show critics, using the exhibition itself as a lens through which to evaluate their claims, is a two-fold process. The first step is to provide access to the material remnants of the Armory Show, the paintings and sculptures themselves. Though by no means complete, the tour of the Armory Show aims to present a skeleton map of the exhibition as it looked in 1913, with the 69th Regiment Armory divided into 18 individual galleries. Also included is commentary on each area of the exhibition, providing some understanding of how audiences came to see the works at the Armory. The second aspect of the project is an investigation of several widespread contentions held by Armory Show critics. The impact of these assertions on analyses of early 20th-century cultural production in America will be explored as well. These essays are an attempt to detail some of the Show’s impact while offering alternatives to critical accounts of the past.