ENG 201: Southern Literature |
ObjectivesBy the end of this lesson, you should be able to do the following:
AssignmentRead Look Homeward, Angel. 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: Novel (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.” IdentificationsMake sure you know the meaning and significance of each of the following:
Updated November 25, 2003
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IntroductionIn this lesson, we will use our powers of literary
analysis to interpret one of the most famous films ever made, Gone with
the Wind. NotesBackground
Unlike poetry and drama, which go back thousands of years to works such as the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2000 B.C.) and the Greek play Oresteia (458 B.C.), the novel is a somewhat recent literary creation. Lengthy fictional narratives written in prose had appeared sporadically before 1700; examples include the stories in Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1351-1353), the English romancer Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (c. 1469), and Don Quixote (1605, 1615), by Miguel de Cervantes of Spain. These early precursors aside, some scholars date the birth of the modern novel to the eighteenth century, specifically the publication of the English printer Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740-1742), a long story recounting the trials of an English girl in a battle against a man trying to seduce her. As Richard Freeman explains in The Novel, Richardson’s book came at an opportune time in English history, as the presence of a literate middle-class, the appearance of London’s first circulating library, printing innovations, and other factors helped prepare the soil for the new genre to grow (12). Over the next century, English readers saw the publication of many other long fictional narratives, including Richardson’s own Clarissa (1748), Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749), Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748) and Humphry Clinker (1771), Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760-1767), and Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813). In general, these books were longer than Boccaccio’s narratives and more unified than Don Quixote. Furthermore, rather than recount the far-fetched adventures of knights and other idealized heroes and heroines, as Malory’s book does, this new breed of narrative tended to recreate the worlds and everyday lives of ordinary people. Thus we have the strict definition of a modern novel: a lengthy fictional narrative, written in prose, presenting a realistic picture of believable characters and events. Many of the same terms that the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle applied to drama can also be applied to a study of the novel. For example, novels generally feature a protagonist—that is, a main character whose actions we follow throughout the story. This protagonist is usually involved in some kind of conflict with an antagonist, a person or force working against the protagonist. The plot, or arrangement of events in the narrative, often begins with an exposition in which the author introduces the major characters and setting and ultimately culminates in a climax, or turning point. Many novels also feature extensive dialogue in which we see characters interacting through conversations. Because novels often deal with realistic characters involved in familiar conflicts, they can serve as excellent studies of human psychology, particularly if we pay attention to character motivation—that is, the reasons why characters act as they do. Great novels also explore important ideas, or themes, such as pride, love, meaning, and identity. One of the best-loved writers of his generation, Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) built his reputation largely on his first novel, the highly autobiographical Look Homeward, Angel (1929). Before his premature death in 1938, Wolfe published only one more novel, Of Time and the River (1935), but he wrote a voluminous amount of fiction and nonfiction, much of which was edited and published posthumously in the books The Web and the Rock (1939), You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), and The Hills Beyond (1941). A major figure of the Southern Renascence, the North Carolina-born Wolfe addressed many of the same themes treated by his contemporary William Faulkner, as well as the many other great Southern writers who preceded and followed him: time, family, maturation, race, class, and human psychology. Like Faulkner and others, furthermore, he composed highly stylized, even poetic prose that surely has helped to secure his reputation as one of the great Southern novelists. Like Eugene Gant, his protagonist in Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe was born in 1900. The son of W.O. Wolfe, who carved gravestones for a living, and Julia Wolfe, who would eventually run a boarding house called My Old Kentucky Home, he grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, where he attended Orange Street Public School and later North State Fitting School. The marriage between his mother and his alcoholic father was a stormy one, and the two began living in separate residences in 1908. When Wolfe was 16, he left home to attend the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where he performed in a Playmakers production of his own play, The Return of Buck Gavin, and edited the Tar Heel student newspaper. After graduating from UNC in 1920, he entered graduate school at Harvard, eventually earning a master of arts degree in English there in 1922. A playwright at that stage of his career as a writer, Wolfe saw his play Welcome to Our City produced in 1923. Over the next six years, he spent time teaching English at New York University, traveled to Europe, and met Aline Bernstein, with whom he began an affair. A turning point came when the great editor Maxwell Perkins of Scribner’s took an interest in one of Wolfe’s manuscripts and helped him to transform it into a published novel. That novel, Look Homeward, Angel, put Wolfe on the literary map. The year after its publication in 1929, Wolfe received a Guggenheim Fellowship, stopped teaching, and returned to Europe. During this same year, he ended his relationship with Bernstein. In 1931, he moved to Brooklyn. His second novel, Of Time and the River, came in 1935. By this time, Wolfe was famous. After traveling to Europe yet again, he made trips to California, New Orleans, Raleigh, and—for the first time since the publication of Look Homeward, Angel—his hometown of Asheville. In 1938, after spending some time writing in New York, Wolfe began a trip to the West to visit some national parks. He became sick, however, and went to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where he died of tuberculosis of the brain on September 15, 1938. Over the next three years, his books The Web and the Rock, You Can’t Go Home Again, and The Hills Beyond all appeared posthumously, having been prepared from manuscripts he left. Like much of the great literature published in the South, Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel is anchored in a region—in his case, his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina. Wolfe generally changed the names of his characters and settings and thus hid the factual bases for his novel behind a disguise that is at times comically thin: Chapel Hill became Pulpit Hill, for example, and Raleigh becomes Sidney—the name of another Elizabethan poet. Of course, the people of Asheville were not fooled, and Look Homeward, Angel—often critical in its treatment of the city—aroused a negative reaction to the author. Literary scholar Leslie Field explains that Asheville residents “reacted violently” to both the novel and Wolfe himself, leaving him “frazzled psychologically,” though his reception when returned home in 1937 was more positive (175). Many of the other characteristics of this novel, furthermore, give it a Southern flavor. Here, for example, are the fascination with time and the individual, the careful attention to the sensual world, the poetic style, and the depiction of an outrageous character in the histrionic W.O. Gant. Works CitedField, Leslie. “Thomas Wolfe.” American Novelists, 1910-1945. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale, 1981. ConclusionNext week, your presentations will begin. |