Post-Modernism

Postmodernism (1945 →) is an attempt to rethink the cultural landscape with theories taken from linguistics, psychiatry, continental philosophy, and left-wing politics.

To many readers, Postmodernist poetry is not poetry at all. Postmodernism is hard to define and there is little agreement on the exact characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature.

Tends to be an art of:
Fragmentary (consisting of small parts that are disconnected or incomplete)
Solipsist (the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist. )
Provisional
Paradoxes
Pastiche
Employs Metafiction
Questionable Narrators
Opposed to the 'great themes of art' and saying anything definite.
Styles are simple
Anything goes.

Themes:
Iconoclastic (a person who attacks cherished beliefs or institutions.)
Groundless
Formless
Populist (seeking to represent the interests of ordinary people using politics)

Poets:
Julia Williams
Michael Boughn
Gary Barwin
Kate Hall

Post-Modernism
by James Galvin

A pinup of Rita Hayworth was taped
To the bomb that fell on Hiroshima.
The Avant-garde makes me weep with boredom.
Horses are wishes, especially dark ones.

That's why twitches and fences.
That's why switches and spurs.
That's why the idiom of betrayal.
They forgive us.

Their windswayed manes and tails,
Their eyes,
Affront the winterscrubbed prairie
With gentleness.

They live in both worlds and forgive us.
I'll give you a hint: the wind in fits and starts.
Like schoolchildren when the teacher walks in,
The aspens jostle for their places

And fall still.
A delirium of ridges breaks in a blue streak:
A confusion of means
Saved from annihilation

By catastrophe.
A horse gallops up to the gate and stops.
The rider dismounts.
Do I know him?

Helpful Site for Poetry Periods

Representative Poetry Online:

You can find a collection of 4,700 poems in the English and French language by over 700 poets spanning over 1400 years. 
Go HERE.

Neo-Classical or Augustan

The last quarter of the 17th century and the first half of the 18th century of English literature has been called the Augustan Age, the Neoclassical Age, and the Age of Reason. 

Augustan Age literature was noticeably influenced not only by the preceding era of Latin literature, but by Syracusa, and Alexandrian, and Greek writers.

Characteristics/Forms: 

Mock epics

Didactic poetry

Love elegies

Historic

Epic

Heroic couplets
Commonly uses satire and irony, iambic pentameter, and paradoxes

Often has a plain/ordinary plot

Alludes to ancient Roman/Greek epic poetry

Themes:

Human frailty

Standards of man's potential

Order in the universe

Mocking of human behavior

Authors:
-John Dryden
-Alexander Pope
-Jonathan Swift

Poem:
SONG

By Robert Dodsley

1     Man's a poor deluded bubble,

2    Wand'ring in a mist of lies,

3     Seeing false, or seeing double,

4    Who wou'd trust to such weak eyes?

5     Yet presuming on his senses,

6    On he goes most wond'rous wise:

7     Doubts of truth, believes pretences;

8    Lost in error, lives and dies.

Metaphysical Poetry 'Poetry of Strong Lines'

   Metaphysical poetry (A term used to group together certain 17th-century poets) is concerned with the whole experience of man, but the intelligence, learning and seriousness of the poets means that the poetry is about the profound areas of experience especially - about love, romantic and sensual; about man's relationship with God - the eternal perspective, and, to a less extent, about pleasure, learning and art.

    Metaphysical poems are lyric poems. They are brief but intense meditations, characterized by striking use of wit, irony and wordplay. Beneath the formal structure (of rhyme, metre and stanza) is the underlying (and often hardly less formal) structure of the poem's argument. Note that there may be two (or more) kinds of argument in a poem.

Poets: 

John Donne 

George Herbert 

Henry Vaughn 

Edward Herbert 

Thomas Carew

Richard Crashew 

Andrew Marvell

Richard Lovelace

Sir John Suckling

Metaphysical poets adopted a style that is energetic, uneven, and rigorous. (Johnson decried its roughness and violation of decorum, the deliberate mixture of different styles.) It has also been labelled the 'poetry of strong lines'. Used far-fetched or unusual similes and metaphors. 


Terms Associated with Metaphysical Poetry:


Psychological Analysis: emotion, love and religion.
Imagery: that is novel, unpoetic, and sometimes shocking, drawn from the commonplace or the remote, including the extended metaphor of the metaphysical conceit.
Simple Diction: echoes the pauses and breaks of everyday speech.
Form: frequently an argument with the poet's lover, God, or oneself.
Meter: often uneven, not 'sweet' or smooth. This roughness goes naturally with the metaphysical poets' attitude and purpose: a belief in the perplexity of life, a spirit of revolt and the putting of an argument in speech rather than song.
Metaphysical Conceit: far fetched and ingenious extended comparison used by metaphysical poets to explore all areas of knowledge. Uses unusual analogies for the poet's ideas in the startlingly obscure or the shockingly commonplace - not the usual stuff of poetic metaphor.


The Best Metaphysical Poetry: is intellectual, analytical, psychological and bold.

Poems: 
 
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/to-his-coy-mistress/ 
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/flea.php 

Great Gatsby Review

Major Themes:

Death of the American Dream:

This can be explained by how Gatsby came to get his fortune. Through his dealings with organized crime he didn't adhere to the American Dream guidelines. Nick also suggests this with the manner in which he talks about all the rich characters in the story. The immoral people have all the money. Of course looking over all this like the eyes of God are those of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg on the billboard.

Repeating the past:

Gatsby's whole being since going off to war is devoted to getting back together with Daisy and have things be the way they were before he left. That's why Gatsby got a house like the one Daisy used to live in right across the bay from where she lives. He expresses this desire by reaching towards the green light on her porch early in the book. The last paragraph, So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past reinforces this theme.

Immorality that was besieging the 1920's: 

Fitzgerald was in his twenty's when he wrote this novel and since he went to Princeton he was considered a spokesman for his generation. He wrote about the third theme which is the immorality that was besieging the 1920's. Organized crime ran rampant, people were partying all the time, and affairs were common play. The last of which Fitzgerald portrays well in this novel.

The Eyes of T. J. Eckleburg:

George Wilson compares them to the eyes of God looking over the valley of Ashes. The unmoving eyes on the billboard look down on the Valley of Ashes and see all the immorality and garbage of the times. By the end of the novel you will realize that this symbolizes that God is dead.

Society and Class
Love
Wealth
Dissatisfaction
Isolation
Marriage
Gender
Education
Lies and Deceit
Compassion and Forgiveness
Religion

Questions that would be good to Answer:

1.    Does that definition of success in America transcend the divides of social class, race, sex, gender, and citizenship?

2.    Is the novel a satiric or realistic representation of life in the 1920s?

3.    Questions about the American Dream

4.    How the novel reflects the authors life

5.    How colors affect the meaning/flow of the novel

6.    Relate to the reaction of WWI?

7.    Money leads to happiness?

8.    Questions about how time passes

9.    Questions about how rumors affect people

10.    The use of weather to reflect the mood of the story

11.    Absence of God

Literary Devices:

Symbols:

Owl-Eyed man

Gatsby’s unopened books

The Eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg

The Valley of Ashes Below

Green Light

Colors

Wolfshiem’s cufflinks made of human teeth (connection to the underworld)

Motifs:

Time

Geography (West/East Egg)

Weather

Important Scenes:

•    Nick moves to West Egg

•    Nick meets up with Daisy and Tom

•    Nick gets invited to Gatsby’s party

•    Nick meets Gatsby

•    Tom shows Nick his other woman

•    Jordan, Gatsby and Nick arrange to have Gatsby and Daisy meet at Nick’s house

•    Gatsby and Daisy tell Tom about there affair and Daisy tells Tom she doesn’t love him

•    Daisy accidentally hit and killed Tom’s in the street

•    Wilson kills Gatsby and then kills himself

•    Nick meets Gatsby’s father

•    Funeral – no one comes to Gatsby's funeral despite his popular parties

•    Nick decides to return back west

Characters:

•    Jay Gatsby

•    Nick Carraway

•    Daisy Buchanan

•    Jordan Baker

•    George Wilson

•    Myrtle Wilson

•    Meyer Wolfsheim

•    Owl Eyes

•    Klipspringer

Structure:

The novel is really a story within a story, for Nick Carraway, the frame narrator of Gatsby’s plot, is really a protagonist himself. Additionally, there is another subplot revolving around the triangle of Myrtle, Wilson, and Tom. Much of the story is also told as flashbacks, so the chronological order of the plot is constantly interrupted. Fitzgerald, however, masterfully intertwines all the plots and all the flashbacks into a unified whole.

Summary:

Our narrator, Nick Carraway, begins the book by giving us some advice of his father’s about not criticizing others. Through Nick’s eyes, we meet his second cousin, Daisy Buchanan, her large and aggressive husband, Tom Buchanan, and Jordan Baker, who quickly becomes a romantic interest for our narrator (probably because she’s the only girl around who isn’t his cousin). While the Buchanans live on the fashionable East Egg (we’re talking Long Island, NY in the 1920’s, by the way), Nick lives on the less-elite but not-too-shabby West Egg, which sits across the bay from its twin town. We are soon fascinated by a certain Mr. Jay Gatsby, a wealthy and mysterious man who owns a huge mansion next door to Nick and spends a good chunk of his evenings standing on his lawn and looking at an equally mysterious green light across the bay.

Tom takes Nick to the city to show off his mistress, a woman named Myrtle Wilson who is, of course, married. (Fidelity is a rare bird in this novel.) Myrtle’s husband, George, is a passive, working class man who owns an auto garage and is oblivious to his wife’s extramarital activities. Nick is none too impressed by Tom.

Back on West Egg, this Gatsby fellow has been throwing absolutely killer parties, where everyone and his mother can come and get wasted and try to figure out how Gatsby got so rich. Nick meets and warily befriends the mystery man at one of his huge Saturday night affairs. He also begins spending time with Jordan, who turns out to be loveable in all her cynical practicality.

Moving along, Gatsby introduces Nick to his "business partner," Meyer Wolfsheim. Everyone (that is, Nick and readers everywhere) can tell there’s something fishy about Gatsby’s work, his supposed Oxford education, and his questionable place among society’s elite. Next, Gatsby reveals to Nick (via Jordan, in the middle school phone-tag kind of way) that he and Daisy had a love thing before he went away to the war and she married Tom (after a serious episode of cold feet that involved whisky and a bath tub). Gatsby wants Daisy back. The plan is for Nick to invite her over to tea and have her casually bump into Gatsby.

Nick executes the plan; Gatsby and Daisy are reunited and start an affair. Everything continues swimmingly until Tom meets Gatsby, doesn’t like him, and begins investigating into his affairs. Nick, meanwhile, has revealed Gatsby’s true past to us: he grew up in a poor, uneducated family, and would in all likelihood have stayed that way had he not met the wealthy and elderly Dan Cody, who took him in as a companion and taught him what he needed to know. Yet it wasn’t Dan that left Gatsby his oodles of money – that part of his life is still suspicious.

The big scene goes down in the city, when Tom has it out with Gatsby over who gets to be with Daisy; in short, Gatsby is outed for being a bootlegger and Daisy is unable to leave her husband for her lover. As the party drives home to Long Island, Tom’s mistress, Myrtle, is struck and killed by Gatsby’s car (in which Gatsby and Daisy are riding). Gatsby tells Nick that Daisy was driving, but that he’s going to take the blame for it. Tom, meanwhile, feeds Gatsby to the wolves by telling George where to find the man that killed his wife, Myrtle. George Wilson shoots and kills Gatsby before taking his own life.

Daisy and Tom take off, leaving their mess behind. Nick, who by now is fed up with ALL of these people, breaks things off with Jordan in a rather brusque way. He is the only one left to take care of Gatsby’s affairs and arrange for his funeral, which, save one peculiar former guest, none of Gatsby’s party-goers attend. Nick does meet Gatsby’s father, who fills in the picture we have of Gatsby’s youth. Standing on Gatsby’s lawn and looking at the green light (which, not accidentally, turned out to be the light in front of Daisy’s house across the bay), Nick concludes that our nostalgia, our desire to replicate the past, forces us constantly back into it.

Scarlet Letter - read your journal entries!

Themes:

Revenge: Nathaniel Hawthorne presents revenge as an unnatural act that twists a person’s soul into something evil. In the religious worldview vengeance belongs to God alone.

Women and Femininity: several strong women in an era when women were expected to be subordinate to their male counterparts. Hester Prynne is willing to take on her own shame while protecting the man she loves from his share of the public condemnation. She keeps his secret faithfully, for seven long years. Even when she might have been able to demand his help, she does not seek it. Alternatively, the two men in Hester's life, her husband and her lover, are cowards and hypocrites, unwilling to reveal their true identities. Women, although the "weaker sex" in this heavily religious society, prove to be incredibly strong in this novel.

Nature vs. Human Law/ Justice vs. Judgement: the inhabitants of the Massachusetts Bay Colony have a finely tuned sense of justice based on a partnership of religion and law. When a citizen breaks the colony’s law, he is also breaking God’s law. While it is only through confession to the public that a sinner, Arthur Dimmesdale, finds peace, this conflation of God’s law with man’s law also creates an intolerant, authoritarian society that does not allow for human mistakes.

Nature of Evil/ Supernatural: things like eyes that glow red, meteors in the shape of an “A,” witches that go riding their broomsticks. These events as being part of a fable or (dark) fairy tale tell us something important about the characters and the secrets they keep.

Sin vs. Forgiveness or Punishment vs. Forgiveness: In Christianity, grace and forgiveness are frequently contrasted with the law. The Puritan faith suggests that conformity to a strict set of rules is the most important religious practice you can perform. The more good you do and the fewer sins you commit, the more likely you are to go to heaven.
    The narrator presents the society as essentially legalist, with its inhabitants adhering to strict moral codes and societal values. Hester’s punishment is a form of legalism. She has sinned and must be isolated from the rest of the group to keep her from contaminating them. The narrator gives the belief that their society should be ruled by grace.

Guilt & Blame: The relationships of these characters are defined by either the guilt they feel or by the blame they place. Hester Prynne commits adultery and is ostracized for the blame placed upon her. Her lover is transformed physically and emotionally by the guilt he feels, and her husband is driven mad by his quest to inspire guilt in Hester’s lover.

Exile: Hester Prynne lives in isolation for years for having a child out of wedlock. Her isolation leads her to see her society in a new light and allows her to think outside of the box. Ironically, it seems characters who are the most appreciated by and involved in this society seem to be the most conflicted and alone.

Public Guilt vs. Private Guilt/Hypocrisy: Private guilt is a sin that leads to great personal injury. Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, a religious figure, comes to embody hypocrisy, resulting in so much guilt that he becomes ill. His guilty conscience produces the mysterious appearance of the scarlet letter on his skin over his heart and ultimately causes his death. 
    The narrator warns us not to let our reputations become more important than our lives, and it poses an interesting question about the danger of valuing appearances.

Civilization vs. Wilderness or Town vs. Woods: Nature is almost like a character in their society. It is often personified as listening, commenting on, and interacting with other characters. The society itself is like an island surrounded by nature. The town is bordered on one side by a huge expanse of woods, home to Native Americans (the Wampanoag tribes). On the other side lies the big blue Atlantic Ocean. From the beginning of this story, our narrator tells us that nature is “kind” and generous, contrasting heavily with the cold and strict ways of Puritan society.

Good vs. Evil/Sin: In the Puritan society religious sin is associated with breaking the law.

Fate vs. Free Will/ Individual vs. Society: a religious society that believes in fate and in the idea that each person’s life follows a specific and set path. Puritans believed that God was a guide who controlled every aspect of life and a nation’s livelihood. They believed God worked toward bringing about good, and they looked for messages and signs from him through the celestial occurrences (like meteors). Characters in this novel constantly struggle between letting fate run its course and choosing a path for themselves. Those who are ostracized by society seem more able to forge a life of their own.

Questions that would be good to Answer:

1.    The function of physical setting in a book.
2.    The relationship between the book’s events and the locations in which these events take place.
3.    Do things happen in the forest that could not happen in the town? What about time of day?
4.    Does night bring with it a set of rules that differs from those of the daytime?
5.    Questions about the different treatments of men and women.
6.    Questions about revenge.
7.    The function of the past in the novel. The narrator tells a two-hundred-year-old story that is taken from a hundred-year-old manuscript.
8.    The role of a child. Why are children presented as more perceptive and more honest than adults? How do children differ from adults in their potential for expressing these perceptions?

Literary Devices:

Symbols:  

The Scarlet Letter
The Meteor
Pearl

Motifs:
Civilization Versus the Wilderness
Night Versus Day
Evocative Names (“Prynne” rhymes with “sin”, “Dimmesdale” suggests “dimness”)

Important Scenes:

The scaffold scenes: dramatic structure devices. Hawthorne's three scaffold scenes symbolizes Dimmesdale's gradual advancement towards an utter public repentance.
     In the first scaffold scene, he acts as Hester's deceitful accuser. Hester stands alone on the scaffold with Pearl, a child born out of wedlock, in her arms. Meanwhile, a crowd of townspeople has gathered to watch her humiliation and to hear the sermon. Dimmesdale is present throughout  the scene as a mere spectator but in reality he is her accomplice in the crime of transgression. Moreover it is in this scene where Haster's husband Chillingworth  comes to know about his wife's transgression.
     In the second scaffold scene all the major characters are brought together. this scene focuses upon Dimmesdale's guilt and remorse, which have led him to the edge of insanity. The scene takes place in the middle of the night, seven years after Hester's punishment, Dimmesdale holds a vigil on the scaffold where he finally accepts his sin not to the town but to himself. In his torture he suddenly cries out a shriek of agony that is heard by Hester and Pearl on their journey home from the dying bed of Governor Winthrop. After hearing this shriek both Hester and Pearl  join Dimmesdale on the scaffold. Pearl then asks Dimmesdale if he will be joining her and Hester there at noontime on the next day. Dimmesdale responds that this meeting will be on the great judgement day rather than here in the daylight. Hawthorne describes this situation as such: "And there stood the minister, with his hand on his heart; and Hester Prynne, with the embroidered letter glimmering on her bosom; and little Pearl, herself a symbol, and the connecting link between the two of them" The cry od Dimmesdale was also heard by two other people and they were Mr. Wilson and Chilligwoth. Mr. Wilson thought that Dimmesdale was sad over the death of Governor Winthrop, Chilligworth was spotted by Pearl when a large meteor flashed in the sky.
     The final scaffold scene occurs after the procession of Election Day. Dimmesdale give his sermon and confesses his sin to the public. suddenly he sinks down and dies. In this powerful scene Dimmesdale regains his soul, Pearl gains humanity, Chillingworth loses his victim and Hester loses her dream.
 

Characters:

•    Hester Prynne
•    Roger Chillingworth
•    Arthur Dimmesdale
•    Pearl

Structure: 

Its structure is tight, with all of the events interrelated and integrated into a logical sequence. The imagery is bright, and the writing is consistent in its evocation of the dark reality of Puritan Boston.

Summary:

    Hester is briefly released from prison so that she can be paraded through town, displaying her scarlet "A" while standing on top of the town scaffold (a public stage). She carries her baby daughter, Pearl, in her arms. Pearl was born in prison. Hester steadfastly refuses to reveal the name of Pearl’s father, so that he might be saved from punishment.
    Hester Prynne’s long lost husband arrives in the midst of this parade through town. He visits her in prison before her release and asks her not to tell anyone that he’s in town. His plan is to disguise himself so that he can ferret out and seek revenge on her lover.
    Hester’s husband tells the townspeople that he’s a physician, and he adopts a fake name: Roger Chillingworth. Hester keeps his secret. Chillingworth soon realizes that the minister, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, is the likely father of Hester’s baby, and he haunts the minister’s mind and soul, day and night, for the next seven years.
    The minister is too afraid to confess his sin publicly, but his guilt eats away at him; Chillingworth’s constant examination really makes him antsy. Seven years pass and, finally, Hester realizes the evil her husband has done to the man she loves.
    Dimmesdale confesses his sin to the townspeople on the scaffold that had, seven years earlier, been the scene of Hester’s public shaming. His dying act is to throw open his shirt so that the scarlet A that he has carved onto his chest is revealed to his parishioners. Dimmesdale finds peace through confession.
    When Chillingworth dies about a year after his rival, Dimmesdale, he leaves all his money and property to Pearl. Hester and Pearl finally escape the community where they have been outcasts for so many years and return to the England.
     Many years later, Hester returns to the New England community that had been the site of her shame, resuming the scarlet letter of her own will.
     When she dies, she is buried near the minister, and they share a gravestone. The gravestone contains an image, described as follows: "On a field, sable, the letter A, gules." In other words, marked on the headstone is a scarlet letter A drawn over a black background.