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American Literature Final
Final
29
Literature
Undergraduate 3
05/01/2006

Additional Literature Flashcards

 


 

Cards

Term
Daisy Miller - By: Henry James
Definition
THINGS ABOUT...

- It's a melodrama (excessive,emotional.
sentimental, family, heroes/villians)
- It's about people we should care about
- She's an American girl w/ money, you
can't give her class, we see
everything through the narrator
(Winterbourne)
- It's okay for men to be flirts not
women
- Gender politics: women are brought
to a certian confinement in this story
- She seems floral. Ex. white dress
and she dies in the winter
Term
The Open Boat- By: Stephen Crane
Definition
THINGS ABOUT...

- it's an exhausting story, such a small
story but if felt so long
- gorgeous story/writer
- story is repetitive
- Billy, the oiler dies
- this story is a process of thought
- Trauma: inability to cry, you see
that in this story
- A Tale intended to be after the fact.
being the experience of four men
from the sunk steamer "Commodore"
- Use of metaphors (the boat's feminine)
- The 4 men are powerless
- God can't control nature
Term
Design- By: Robert Frost
Definition
THINGS ABOUT...

- It's a way of looking at the world
through the eyes of humans.
- It's about the design of nature.
- Starts with a white spider sitting on
a white flower holding up a white moth
It's about contrast b/w positive
connotations like the color white and
the horror od the scene.
- The poem is about death but it also
suggest purity and innocense.
- Frost feels that there is no order
in the word and that Design can onl
exist if it were something so small
like the spider, flower, and moth.
Term
Portrait of a Lady- By: William Carlos Williams
Definition
THINGS ABOUT...

- Describing the beauty of this woman
- It's af the lady is whispering in the
background of this poem
- A lot of movement in this poem
- His annoyed response to her questions
show that he really may be more
interested in being a poet instead
of a lover
- Sexual metaphors
- He has two choose between his two
loves, poetry or the lady
Term
Portrait d'une Femme- By: Ezra Pound
Definition
THINGS ABOUT...

- The woman in this poem is perfection
- The woman in this poem is so beautiful
that all other objects around her seem
plain and awkward
- She could be a prostitute
- Nothing is good enough for her
- This amazing woman falls for a
ordinary guy
- A woman who has everything, can want
the simplist of things... love
Term
To Brooklyn Bridge- By: Hart Crane
Definition
THINGS ABOUT...

- It bristles with movement
- The way something as fundamentally
stationary as a bridge becomes a
moving object
- The seagull flies over the east river
like a ghost so we can't see him
- Cycle of a day dusk til' dawn
- The sun on wall street
- The appearance of the bridge is so
important
- There's a delicate balance between the
divine and the industrial -the
poem is filled with mundane, metallic
images- but the poem somehow lifts
them all into a different plane, so
we see the bridge and the derricks not
for what they are but rather as Gods
mighty and merciless.
Term
The Lynching- By: Claude McKay
Definition
THINGS ABOUT...

- The Lynching” opens with the ascension
of the victim’s “Spirit” to his “
father in “high heaven."
- The poem continues to affirm their
guilt and to deny them any means of
forgiveness
- This effectively refuses lynchers any access to the divine-human relationship highlighted in the opening lines.
- The Lynching refuses racists any access to God
- The speaker only needs to answer this divine commission, and the savage fiends of the first half of the poem will have to run from his divine light. Understandably, this is a more optimistic ending than that of a poem about lynching
- The rest of the poem is dominated by the unrepentant on-lookers who ensure the lineage of white fiends
-These generations of lynchers would seem to have defeated both the African and the religious forces brought against them in “To the White Fiends.” The divine light that God set aggressively upon the earth in “To the White Fiends” has given the lynch victim over “to Fate’s wild whim.” And God is reduced to a father welcoming his returning son far of
Term
How it Feels to be Colored Me- By: Zora Neale Hurston
Definition
THINGS ABOUT...

- emerges as a catalogue of the stereotypes and the misguided ideas of white artists and intellectuals
- Hurston represents these stereotypes as different forms of herself.
- Understanding that she was at "the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or weep," Hurston undertakes these many different roles in order to report on the culture out of which New Negro modernism emerged.
- personal story-in this essay is the
story Hurston tells of her own
childhood
- Hurston's statement about slavery being the price for civilization mirrors the ideas of white artists and intellectuals, who looked to blacks for originality.
Term
I, Too- By: Langston Hughes
Definition
THINGS ABOUT...

- It's about the Harlem Renaissance
- About hoping for a future in racial
equality
- White's society of ignorance
- By identifying the beauty of his African American culture, Hughes creates reason for white acceptance and asks for racial impartiality.
- An attitude for change
- We are all one in the same, we all
want to be seen
Term
Silhouette- By: Langston Hughes
Definition
THINGS ABOUT...

- the poem stands as a ... "Affirmation of Black Self.
- contrasts the genderracial myth of gentle lady and a black man
Term
The Snows of Kilmanjaro- By: Ernest Hemingway
Definition
THINGS ABOUT...

- You see Hemingway in Harry's Character
- Harry's a writer
- Repitition
- Harry treats her like shit, he doesn't
love her
- She's more of a man than Harry is
- Hysteria- women getting crazy with
emotions
- Violent trauma
- Reflects several of Hemingway's personal concerns during the 1930s regarding his existence as a writer and his life in general.
- As writer Harry Street lays gravely wounded from an African hunting accident he feverishly reflects on what he perceives as his failures at love and writing. Through his delirium he recalls his one true love Cynthia Green who he lost by his obsession for roaming the world in search of stories for his novels. Though she is dead Cynthia continues to haunt Street's thoughts. In spite of one successful novel after another, Street feels he has compromised his talent to ensure the success of his books, making him a failure in his eyes. His neglected wife Helen (Susan Hayward) tends to his wounds, listens to his ranting, endures his talk of lost loves, and tries to restore in him the will to fight his illness until help arrives. Her devotion to him makes him finally realize that he is not a failure. With his realization of a chance for love and happiness with Helen, he regains his will to live.
Term
Howl- By: Allen Ginsberg
Definition
THINGS ABOUT...

- A positive attitude towards drugs
- post modernism-real fatigue in
technology
- Personal
- The poem itself is a confession of the poet's faith, done into some 112 paragraph-like lines, in the ravings of a lunatic friend (to whom it is dedicated), and in the irregularities in the lives of those of his friends who populate this disturbed pantheon
- Hipster 60-70's into drugs, divinity,
jazz, love, death, suicide, poetry
- Fortright with sexual desire
- Geographical connection b/w Soloman
and Ginsberg
- 1st section- lack of safety
- 2nd section- trying to find a solution
to the problem- turns into a love
story
- 3rd section- love connection
- Violent sexual strain
- Solomon's mom telling him he's not
safe, he's in agony, he's supposed
to hear this
- moloch- an old god
- ends with liberation solution of love
Term
The Day Lady Died- By: Frank O'hara
Definition
THINGS ABOUT...

- This poem is very vivid, there's really
only one clear image in the entire poem
- The climax is the discovery of "Lady's" death and the indelible memory of one soft song that lives on, but the poem is essentially about a-day-in-the-life of Frank O'Hara and his city. Death is one of many random things that could punctuate and focus the seemingly unconnected activities of an otherwise typical day, making everything from a shoeshine to a bottle of Strega purchased in a liquor store glow with its own brilliant significance.
- When he hear's the song on they
keyboard it brings him back to a
past memory
- The tone at the opening of the poem is giddy and excited
- written in present tense making it
immediate to the readers
- this poem is like jazz
- Even when he sees the "NEW YORK POST with her face on it," he refuses to break into discourse on the brevity of human life, "thinking," instead, in visual and sensory images.
Term
Sonny's Blues- By: James Baldwin
Definition
THINGS ABOUT...

- A captivating tale of relationship of two troubling brothers in Harlem, "Sonny's Blues" is told from a perspective of Sonny's brother, whose name is never mentioned.
- Baldwin's choice of Sonny's brother as a narrator is what makes "Sonny's Blues" significant in terms of illustrating the relationship and emotional complications of Sonny and his brother
- As Sonny's brother, he gets to be physically and mentally as close to Sonny as anyone else can
- Sonny's brother stands as a major character and also as a first person narrator, meaning that he is a participant in the action. Baldwin achieves the sense of vividness by placing the narrator right in the middle of the action
- Dialogue is effectively used from Sonny's brother's point of view to convey how misunderstanding of two brothers gets built up
- Sonny's brother's struggle finally comes to an end when he first hear Sonny play at the nightclub. He first takes a glimpse of "Sonny's world" or "kingdom," and finally sees an aspect of Sonny which he has never known
Term
Jazz
Definition
Improvisation
Syncopation- Rythm
- missed beats, weak beats
- call and response
- horns, pianos, percussion, voice
- Jazz is the American music
- merges from the early 20th century
rag beats
Term
Louis Armstrong
Definition
sings and plays the trumpet
-"stardust" composed in 1927-1929
- love song- he makes his own words change
Term
Herston
Definition
We read her story in class
- she's talking about when and when not she feels her color
- what is jazz to her? A return back to her roots. Very instinctive
Term
Bop Music
Definition
- Started in the early 1940's
- Location: Milton's Playhouse in Harlem
- The first official bop records were made in 1944 by Coleman Hawkins
- John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie
- Charles Christopher Parker jr. "Bird"
- Thelonious Sphere Monk
Term
The Beat Generation
Definition
Key figures: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs
-the term "beat" was coined by Kerouac in 1948
- On the road published in 1957 rumored to have been written 3 weeks on one continuous piece of paper
- the ny school also worked with the beat generation
Term
The Lost Generation
Definition
- Phrase started by Gertrude Stein after WWI
-This refers to American writers who left the US and settled in Europe
- People: Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, TS Eliot
Term
The Lost Generation
Definition
- Phrase started by Gertrude Stein after WWI
-This refers to American writers who left the US and settled in Europe
- People: Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, TS Eliot
Term
I Get a Kick out of You
Definition
Ethel Murman
-1934
- also by cole porter
- word association
- rhyme scheme
Term
I Get a Kick out of You
Definition
Ethel Murman
-1934
- also by cole porter
- word association
- rhyme scheme
Term
Modernism
Definition
- a general term describing the broad range of experimental and avantgarde trends in the literature and other art in the 20th century
-fiction and poetry
- Breakdown: modernism is mostly defined as the period encompassing WWI and WWII
- Important authors: Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, D.H. Lawrence
- Worldly Influenced by:
Both wars,chaotic, hopeless future
Term
Modernism
Definition
- a general term describing the broad range of experimental and avantgarde trends in the literature and other art in the 20th century
-fiction and poetry
- Breakdown: modernism is mostly defined as the period encompassing WWI and WWII
- Important authors: Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, D.H. Lawrence
- Worldly Influenced by:
Both wars,chaotic, hopeless future
Term
Cubism
Definition
- a release from stereotyped forms and trite subjects
- focused on exploring relationships between images, perspectives and materials.
- The first phase of cubism was Analytical Cubism 1902-1912 by Braque and Picasso
Term
Modernism 2
Definition
-unconventional
- rebellious
- originality, new
- 1914-1945
- Fragmentation
- Order
- Man made objects
- Sincerity
Term
Post Modernism
Definition
-Post WWII
-Suspicion of man-made objects
- loss of unity, order
- excess
- irony
- un-clear
- imitation
- To make fun of
- Pastiche: to make fun of
Term
Post Modernism
Definition
-Post WWII
-Suspicion of man-made objects
- loss of unity, order
- excess
- irony
- un-clear
- imitation
- To make fun of
- Pastiche: to make fun of
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