NORTH AMERICAN LITERATURE;
SOCIAL REALISM AND BEAT GENERATION
2023-24
MODERN AMERICAN LITERATURE: AN APPRECIATION
20th century and 21st century in the USA
Main characteristics:
1. Romanticism → Nihilism 7. 1920s: Jazz Age
2. No experience of God 8. 1930s → Depression Years
3. Man kills god → subjectivity (stock crash) → Social Protest
ego 9. 1950s: Post World War II
4. Man as creator → Science / disillusionment
Technology 10. 1950s-1960s → Isolation/
5. Modernism replaces Individualism, capitalism
romanticism 11. 1970s → Postmodernism
6. 1910s-1920s: World War I society
12. 1980s → Digital culture
Literature:
➢ 1920s: Many writers participated in the war, disillusioned with life. From
idealism to cynical materialism.
➢ 1930s. A new way of writing. Economic difficulty for everyone. Pessimism,
alienation, nationalism, political views. Literature→ a social protest.
Psychological literature. Rejection of capitalism, interest in the human mind
➢ Late 1940s early 1950s: More disillusionment because of manipulations of
politicians. Against materialism.
➢ 1960s: New reality. The Civil Rights Act was passed, recognizing minorities.
➢ 1980s-today: Techniques are modified, new trends. New artistic expression,
more difficult to discern what art is. Not a single subject but multiple
REALISM
➢ Science, patriotism
➢ Emerged in the 19th century in France and Russia
➢ Realistic movement
○ past and present as discontinuous
○ no relevance of the past
➢ Aim of realist literature
○ visible, palpable
○ writers cannot borrow from others
○ writer as reporter
➢ America: agrarian regionalism
○ instinct
○ doubts about religion
○ link between environment and behavior
,Realism: Reality as it was, things as they really were. Didn’t fixate on the past.
Ordinary people and ordinary lives
Naturalism: How characters are controlled by their environment. Heredity
Stephen Crane was in both of these movements. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets:
naturalist. It shows Maggie’s environment and how her heredity determined her life.
Used graphic language heard on the streets.
Red Badge of Courage: realist. Boy who has been filled with ideals about war, as he
prepares to go to the battlefield. Psychological realism, inside a character’s mind
Realism in America
● individualist, no community view. Multiple realisms as a result
● After the Civil War, the states were joined together. From agrarian past to
Industrialism, from villages to cities. This resulted in a nationalistic view.
Agrarian Regionalism: By the late 19th century Americans were disillusioned with
the war, there was a divide between “the old times”, related to agrarian life, and the
new age of Industrialization.
● Technology shifted society. No farmers. Triangle of God, Self and Nature
● Yearning for a simpler, agrarian past. Faulkner: main representatives of this.
Combines the nostalgia for the past with new techniques
Characteristics of Agrarian Regionalism:
- disillusionment, how man has been separated from nature
- instincts rather than rationale (in America man is made by instinct)
- doubts about the presence of God
- connection between environment and behavior
- contrast between ideas and facts
- more interested in the self, they investigated human relationships
- focus on the industrialized cities
Realism in Europe:
1. Past and present are discontinuous, past was rejected. Realism denies the
continuum of time. Everything they do is new. Focused on real tangible
things. Imitate nature
2. Artists didn’t borrow anything from past artists, due to heredity. A rebellion in
the political system. Opposed romanticism. True objectivity does not exist for
them, reality is relative. They transmitted what they saw, writer as a reporter.
Interested in the psychology of characters, their minds and behaviors.
3. Separated between reality and fiction. Authors informed, not spoke on their
thoughts. Demanded the separation of the author from the text, and focused
on psychological analysis.
, WILLIAM FAULKNER (1897-1962)
Life:
❖ Lived in New Albany (Mississippi) most of his life. Privileged family. Great
grandfather: hero in the Civil War. The Sartoris’ represent his family in his
works. To Faulkner, he was a symbol that represented the Southern
Aristocracy, destroyed by the Civil War. His father worked in a university,
descended economic status. Aristocratic but no longer wealthy.
❖ Interested in representing the psychology of human behavior. Doesn’t
convince the reader of his ideology, he just presents the characters.
❖ Faulkner tried to get involved in the War, but was not admitted because he
was too short. Another trauma. He trained in the Canadian Air Force, but by
the time he had finished the War was over. Traumatized again, he started
lying and saying that he had been wounded in the War.
❖ Started writing to remedy his family’s economic situation. He went to New
York, but he didn’t become successful
❖ He went to Europe, and started writing fiction. He gained some success with
The Sound and the Fury. He wrote Sanctuary which was a real success. .
Sanctuary was written only to gain money, which was rare.
❖ Soldier’s (1926) , Sartoris (1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929)
❖ Screenwriter in Hollywood, Nobel in Literature (1944)
Literary details:
❖ He was an Agrarian Regionalist
➢ Novels set in rural landscapes
➢ Moral and psychological issues. Analyzed his characters, especially
between high and low social classes
❖ Subjects
➢ decline of the south
➢ economic stability
➢ struggle to resist materialistic progress coming from the North
➢ moral disintegration
❖ Protagonists: two classes. He prepares a new awakening for the South. He
presents America as possessing a great future. His novels are pessimistic,
but there is space for change
➢ Sartoris, Thompsons and Bundrens (Old South)
➢ Snopes (Invading the South )
❖ Invented the Yoknapatawpha County
❖ Radical way of using stream of consciousness, which describes the thought
process of a character. It puts the reader inside the mind of the characters.
➢ experimented with language and the characters mind
➢ played with time, using flashbacks (analepsis) and flashforwards
➢ diverse points of view (As I Lay Dying: prime example of this, each
chapter narrated with a different character, a single event from
different perspectives)
