Please keep in mind that these notes provide only a brief overview of class lecture and discussion.  You should refer to your syllabus to make sure that you've been keeping up with the reading; these notes are in no way to be considered a replacement for attending class.  You should supplement the information in these notes with your classnotes, discussion groups, and discussion questions.  You should also make sure that you can find specific textual references that support and/or illustrate the points listed below.  If you have questions, please email me: Dwilliams@iona.edu or dlw7@nyu.edu

Narrative/short stories: Edgar Allen Poe, Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Zora Neale Hurston, Rudolf Fisher, James Thurber, Woody Allen, and Flannery O'Connor

Terms:
Definition of narrative as a genre
Narrative Conventions:

• Setting
• Language and dialogue
• Type of narrator
• Tone

Stephen King & Edgar Allen Poe: "Strawberry Spring," "The Tell-tale Heart," "The Cask of Amontillado"

• setting
• effect of the unreliable narrator
• transformation of the real into the surreal
• creation of suspense--placement of "clues"

• transformation of the real into the surreal
• ambiguity of events: psychological horror
• individual image of Satan
• use of dialogue
• implicit threat of violence: emotional/spiritual rather than physical

Aspects of the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro Renaissance:

• Pride in African heritage
• Creation of and celebration of black American heroes
• Racial propaganda - wanting to create a positive image for African Americans; wanting to "educate" both whites and blacks about African and African American history and culture
• Realistic representations of African American life and culture
• Drawing on the resources of the black folk art tradition: use of spirituals, the blues, jazz, vernacular language (dialect)

• use of dialect and slang
• use of setting
• use of irony
• use of religious language and symbolism
• ambiguous endings
• need for both central characters to escape aspects of their lives - searching for freedom

"Good Country People" (Flannery O'Connor, 1955)

• setting
• irony of title
• Joy-Hulga's hubris
• moment of epiphany
• similarities between Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman--social conventions
• Bible salesman's duplicity
• connections between Mrs. Freeman and the Bible salesman
• the role of "misfits"
• use of violence (psychic, emotional, physical)

• setting
• the realism of the story: family trip, quarreling, etc
• the grandmother's sense of herself and her perceptions of the world
• The Misfit's perceptions of the world
• moment of epiphany
• crisis of faith
• use of violence (psychic, emotional, physical)

which world-view--the grandmother's or The Misfit's--prevails?

Elements of tragedy, in the classical tradition:

• Emphasis on a heroic figure who is larger than life, but flawed
• Hero fails in his course of action but retains dignity, nevertheless
• We recognize our own potential for failure--and greatness--in the hero
• Actions of the play create a catharsis: release of emotions, generally a combination of pity and fear
• Ending of the play is unhappy but leaves the audience with a sense of affirmation
• At the conclusion of the play, a corrupt society is healed but at great cost

• Role of society
• Is society changed, by the conclusion of the play?
• Dynamics of Hally and Sam's relationship

 

• Importance of seeing Leaves of Grass as an ongoing project (first edition 1855, last edition 1891)
• Poem's celebration of copias: multitudes, cataloging all of the United States
• Poet as a "kosmos"
• Whitman's "barbaric yawp"
• Connections between the poet and the people he describes
• Celebration of the physical world and the physical body
• Significance of the various images of grass
• Importance of allowing for contradictions
• Whitman's transcendentalism
• Whitman's use of language and imagery

• Structure of a sonnet
• Italian and Shakespearean sonnets
• Use of figurative language
• Connections between structure and theme

• Connections between novel's structure and ideas; reasons for blending fact and fiction
• Crisscrossing family stories: New Rochelle family, Tateh and daughter, Sarah, Coalhouse, and their child
• Movement from the isolationism of New Rochelle to the multi-racial, multi-ethnic family at the novel's end
• Different versions of the "American Dream": Tateh, Evelyn Nesbit, Younger Brother, Coalhouse, Henry Ford...
• Importance of transformation: the stories from Ovid that the grandfather tells the young boy as a key to the changes that occur in almost all the central characters
• Image of the United States as a society of "ragamuffins"
• Critique of capitalism and the complacency of the wealthy
• Changing role of women and the consequences of those changes
• Coalhouse as a revolutionary who does not see himself as such

last updated April 17, 2002