ENG 201: Southern Literature

ENG 201: Southern Literature Lesson 7: Realistic Narrative Dates: October 6 and 10, 2003 Objectives By the end of this lesson, you should be able to do the following: Describe the life and literary contributions of Samuel Clemens. Interpret themes and other literary features of “A True Story” and excerpts from Life on the Mississippi. Define or identify relevant terms, names, dates, and quotations. Assignment Read “Samuel Clemens” (254-257), “A True Story” (257-260), and excerpts from Life on the Mississippi (260-270). Activities Think Fast: Respond to the questions I assign you in classes. These questions generally will cover objective information, such as names, dates, and terms. Presentation: Realistic Narrative (Professor Canada) Cooperative Learning: Discuss one of the “Questions for Discussion” with the other members of your group. Discussion: During this time, we will discuss the insights and questions that have emerged during our “Think Fast” exercise, my presentation, and cooperative learning. Conferences: During these one-on-one conferences, I will review some of your writing, orally quiz you on lesson objectives, and field your questions. Think Again: Write your own response to one of the “Questions for Discussion.” Identifications Make sure you know the meaning and significance of each of the following: Samuel Clemens hyperbole memoir Mississippi River Missouri realism Resource All American: Mark Twain features a detailed chronology of Twain’s life, study questions, and more. Updated October 1, 2003 © Mark Canada, 2003 mark.canada@uncp.edu

Introduction In this lesson, we hop aboard a steamboat and join the young Samuel Clemens on a journey on the Mississippi River. Notes Background The South has had an enduring romance with romance. From Captain John Smith’s tales of adventures in the Virginia wilderness and Edgar Allan Poe’s surreal fiction to Margaret Mitchell’s romance novel Gone with the Wind to the modern Gothic stories of Anne Rice, Southern writers and readers have long enjoyed the brand of literature that allows them to leave their ordinary lives and escape into exotic settings peopled with larger-than-life characters embarking on exciting adventures. Something changed, however, after the Civil War. Perhaps the war, which decimated the South’s economy and took hundreds of thousands of lives in the South and the North, gave both parts of the country a reality check. Dreams may be fine, some writers may have thought, but the reality of war and its consequences called for an honest literature that would tell things as they were. Whatever the reason, much of the literature produced by Southern writers—and indeed writers in other parts of the country and the world—veered away from romance and toward something that came to be known as “realism”—that is, the effort in literature and the other arts to focus not on the world of imagination, but on the real world, particularly its economic and social problems, and to represent this world in an honest way. As part of this effort, realistic writers frequently made use of dialect and details. One of the Southern writers who rebelled against romance was Samuel Clemens (1835-1910). Born and raised in Missouri, a border state with both Union and Confederate supporters during the Civil War, Clemens nevertheless knew the South perhaps as well as any person living in the heart of it. As a boy, he had firsthand knowledge of slavery, which was legal in Missouri before the war, and he even fought for the Confederate cause, an event he chronicled humorously in a short story called “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed.” In his early twenties, he trained as a steamboat pilot and thus grew intimate with the Southern portion of the Mississippi River, as well as the people he met in the area. The world of steamboat piloting, in fact, provided him with a pseudonym he would use in his later career as a writer: “Mark Twain,” in the language of steamboats, means water is two fathoms deep. Although he eventually moved out West and later settled in Connecticut after his marriage, Twain frequently revisited Missouri and the South in his nonfiction and fiction. In a memoir, or nonfiction account of one’s life, called Life on the Mississippi, he chronicled his adventures as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River. Furthermore, he was a great admirer of Old Southwestern humor, and works such as his short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” resemble Old Southwestern humorists’ stories in their use of dialect and hyperbole, or gross exaggeration. Finally, Southern locales, characters, and themes, appear in his two most famous novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A master stylist, Clemens wrote some of the most lyrical prose in American literature. He also was perhaps the nation’s greatest satirist and made extremely creative use of point of view—that is, the perspective from which a narrator tells a story. Questions for Discussion 1. Style: Identify several elements of Clemens’s style. Consider his diction and syntax, as well as his use of hyperbole or other literary devices. 2. Southern Qualities: What is “Southern” about “A True Story” and Life on the Mississippi? 3. Realism: Identify some realistic features in “A True Story” and Life on the Mississippi. How does Clemens use these features to capture the real world he is depicting? Are there any shades or romance in his writing? If so, identify and explain them. 4. Selection: Choose an event or a description that Clemens included in Life on the Mississippi and explain how it helps him to achieve his ends in writing the narrative. 5. Point of View: Analyze the point of view that Clemens uses in Life on the Mississippi. What is complex about this point of view? Conclusion In our next lesson, we will visit some of Twain’s contemporaries and examine the ways that they, like Twain, captured the real people, places, and issues of the South after the Civil War.