Nombre EROULLA Apellidos DEMETRIOU DEMETRIOU D.N.I.
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UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente MEMORIA FINAL DE PROYECTOS DE INNOVACIÓN DOCENTE CONVOCATORIA CURSO 2010/2012 DATOS DEL/DE LA SOLICITANTE Nombre EROULLA Apellidos DEMETRIOU DEMETRIOU D.N.I. 75116031-D Centro FACULTAD DE HUMANIDADES Y Teléfono 83551 E-mail [email protected] CC. DE LA EDUCACIÓN Departamento Categoría FILOLOGÍA INGLESA PROFESORA TITULAR DE UNIVERSIDAD DATOS DEL PROYECTO Título ELABORACIÓN DE MATERIALES DIDÁCTICOS PARA LA ENSEÑANZA DE LA LENGUA INGLESA A TRAVÉS DE LA LITERATURA DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA Y DE OTROS PAÍSES DE LA COMMONWEALTH Línea de actuación PROYECTO DE INNOVACIÓN – PROYECTO PARA ASIGNATURAS Departamento/s implicados Asignatura/s implicada/s Titulación/es implicada/s FILOLOGÍA INGLESA - TEXTOS LITERARIOS EN LENGUA INGLESA - ESTILÍSTICA DEL INGLÉS - APRENDIZAJE Y ENSEÑANZA DE LA LENGUA EXTRANJERA I ESTUDIO SELECTIVO DE LA LITERATURA DE LOS EEUU FILOLOGÍA INGLESA, FILOLOGÍA INGLESA + TURISMO, MÁSTER DE PROFESORADO DE ENSEÑANZA SECUNDARIA OBLIGATORIA, BACHILLERATO, FORMACIÓN PROFESIONAL Y ENSEÑANZA DE IDIOMAS UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente Curso/s implicado/s 3º y 4º DE FILOLOGÍA INGLESA Y DE FILOLOGÍA INGLESA + TURISMO, Y MÁSTER DE PROFESORADO EN SECUNDARIA ENSEÑANZA OBLIGATORIA, BACHILLERATO, FORMACIÓN PROFESIONAL Y ENSEÑANZA DE IDIOMAS Nº de alumnos afectados 30-50 ALUMNOS MEMORIA DEL PROYECTO Justificación La justificación de esta memoria es dar cuenta de las actividades realizadas desde que se nos concedió este proyecto de innovación docente en 2010. Objetivos conseguidos UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente - Hemos establecido un banco de actividades útiles y realistas para el aprendizaje y refuerzo de estrategias orales y escritas a través de la literatura escrita en lengua inglesa en los Estados Unidos de América y en otros países anglófonos de la Commonwealth de diversos periodos y nacionalidades. - Hemos analizado las estrategias y dificultades encontradas por el alumnado de lengua inglesa al enfrentarse al estudio de la literatura norteamericana y de otros países de la Commonwealth. - Hemos profundizado en el conocimiento de la literatura norteamericana y de la Commonwealth en lengua inglesa por parte del alumnado de Filología Inglesa, Filología Inglesa + Turismo y de posgrado, sobre todo en las siguientes asignaturas: - TEXTOS LITERARIOS EN LENGUA INGLESA (Fil. Inglesa); ESTILÍSTICA DEL INGLÉS (Fil. Inglesa y Fil. Inglesa + Turismo); APRENDIZAJE Y ENSEÑANZA DE LA LENGUA EXTRANJERA I (Máster de Profesorado de Enseñanza Secundaria Obligatoria, Bachillerato, Formación Profesional y Enseñanza de Idiomas); ESTUDIO SELECTIVO DE LA LITERATURA DE LOS EEUU (Fil. Inglesa y Fil. Inglesa + Turismo) - - Hemos intentado fomentar el interés de los estudiantes por la literatura norteamericana y de la Commonwealth en lengua inglesa como forma de disfrute y de enriquecimiento personal, cultural, y ético y como puente de acercamiento a otras culturas. - Hemos intentado buscar formas de adaptación de las asignaturas de lengua y literatura inglesas (inclusive la literatura norteamericana) a los nuevos tiempos y necesidades sociales y culturales desde una perspectiva novedosa y enriquecedora. - Contenidos desarrollados Actividades de aprendizaje de lengua inglesa a través de la poesía norteamericana y de otros países de la Commonwealth. - Actividades de aprendizaje de lengua inglesa a través de la narrativa norteamericana y de otros países de la Commonwealth Descripción global de la experiencia UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente Debido a que la adquisición de libros especializados en literatura norteamericana, canadiense, sudafricana, australiana y neozelandesa ha sido difícil, muchos de ellos ya descatalogados, y habiendo sido muy reducida la lista de libros finalmente adquiridos, no hemos visto obligados a reducir la investigación a los recursos a los que de facto hemos tenido acceso. Aun así, hemos dedicado la mayor parte de nuestro presupuesto a adquirir material bibliográfico necesario para elaborar materiales docentes y a sufragar los gatos de publicación del CD-Rom A HANDFUL OF LITERARY RESOURCES AND ACTIVITIES FOR UNIVERSITY STUDENTS OF AMERICAN AND COMMONWEALTH LITERATURES. Aun así, la experiencia ha sido positiva y fructífera tanto para nosotros como para, esperemos, el alumnado de las respectivas asignaturas a las que se refieren directamente los logros alcanzados durante nuestra investigación. Metodología empleada (sesiones de trabajo, actividades, recursos didácticos, cronograma, etc) UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente - Hemos realizado un análisis crítico de las obras especializadas sobre la enseñanza del inglés a través de la literatura de los EEUU y otros países de la Commonwealth, así como de los métodos existentes que traten la enseñanza del inglés desde esta perspectiva. (Marzo-2011 / junio-2011: Lectura y análisis crítico de dichas obras. Puesta en común entre los miembros del grupo de impresiones). - Hemos adquirido un número de libros especializados con el fin de realizar un contraste entre ellos y así conocer el estado de la cuestión en asuntos relacionados con la enseñanza del inglés como segunda lengua/lengua extranjera a través de la literatura norteamericana y de otros países de la Commonwealth, con especial interés en los últimos avances en la didáctica de la lengua. (Diciembre-2010 / febrero-2011: Localización de fuentes secundarias especializadas así como de obras ya publicadas para el aprendizaje del inglés a través de la literatura. Familiarización con tendencias y aspectos fundamentales.). VER ANEXO I: LISTADO DE LIBROS ADQUIRIDOS. - Hemos confeccionado un banco de actividades para los distintos niveles y necesidades del alumnado universitario interesado en cursar asignaturas de inglés en distintas carreras de letras. Confección de actividades de poesía y narrativa de distintos niveles (Noviembre 2011 – abril 2012). - Actualizaremos en breve las asignaturas impartidas previsiblemente, durante el curso próximo que tengan relación con la enseñanza de la lengua inglesa y de la literatura en dicha lengua, con especial incidencia en aquellas que permite el uso de textos norteamericanos y de otros países de la Commonwealth. Esto tendrá lugar a partir de septiembre de 2012. - A partir de octubre/noviembre 2012: Aplicación de los resultados de nuestra investigación en nuestras clases. Resultados obtenidos (los materiales o documentos que se hayan producido en la experiencia deben presentarse en forma de anexo) UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente - Realización de las correspondientes y preceptivas memorias descriptivas en las que se describa el trabajo realizado y los logros obtenidos por los miembros del presente proyecto de innovación docente. - Exposición en congresos especializados organizados por terceros las conclusiones y logros obtenidos. - Publicación del material confeccionado a partir de nuestra investigación en un CD-ROM para uso del alumnado y del profesorado interesado. Su publicación ha sido ya aprobada por Consejo del Departamento de Filología Inglesa con fecha 18 de julio de 2012. Su título es A HANDFUL OF LITERARY RESOURCES AND ACTIVITIES FOR UNIVERSITY STUDENTS OF AMERICAN AND COMMONWEALTH LITERATURES. Sus autores son Eroulla Demetriou, José Ruiz Mas y Pilar Sánchez Calle. Esta obra sería continuación de la ya publicada en 2010 en CD-Rom, titulada HANDFUL OF LITERARY RESOURCES AND ACTIVITIES FOR UNIVERSITY STUDENTS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE (Jaén: Universidad de Jaén), de los mismos autores. VER ANEXO II: CONTENIDOS DE LA PUBLICACIÓN EN CD-ROM. Proyección e Impacto (transferencia de los resultados y mejoras en el aprendizaje demostrables) UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente - Publicación del material confeccionado a partir de nuestra investigación en un CD-ROM para uso del alumnado y del profesorado interesado. Su publicación ha sido ya aprobada por el Departamento de Filología Inglesa. Su título es A HANDFUL OF LITERARY RESOURCES AND ACTIVITIES FOR UNIVERSITY STUDENTS OF AMERICAN AND COMMONWEALTH LITERATURES. Sus autores son Eroulla Demetriou, José Ruiz Mas y Pilar Sánchez Calle. - Índice de contenidos: INTRODUCTION 1. NOVEL, SHORT STORY AND POETRY IN THE USA: HERMAN MELVILLE, EDGAR ALLAN POE AND WALT WHITMAN. 2. DIDACTIC UNIT: EDGAR ALLAN POE. 3. HUMOUR IN AMERICA: MARK TWAIN. 4. HENRY JAMES AND COSMOPOLITISM. 5. THE LOST GENERATION. 6. DIDACTIC UNIT: PEARL S. BUCK. 7. A BRIEF LITERARY PANORAMA OF THE USA FROM 1945 TO THE PRESENT DAY. 8. THE LITERATURES OF THE COMMONWEALTH. 9. BIBLIOGRAPHY Evaluación del proceso y Autoevaluación (instrumentos y recursos empleados) - Hemos reflexionado con detenimiento sobre el grado de cumplimiento individuales y como grupo. - Hemos venido aplicando (y seguiremos haciéndolo) un amplio número de actividades en las respectivas asignaturas para observación del grado de satisfacción del alumnado. Otras consideraciones UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente Creemos que nuestra investigación y los logros obtenidos a partir de ella pueden ser de utilidad, no solo para el alumnado de las asignaturas mencionadas, sino también para el alumnado de los primeros cursos del Grado de Estudios Ingleses, de Magisterio Lengua Extranjera (Grado de Educación Primaria, mención Lengua Extranjera) o para cualquier persona interesada en la literatura norteamericana y de los países de la Commonwealth. Gastos generados en el segundo año Fungibles ------ Inventariables Adquisición de libros especializados: 445’86 euros Pendientes de recibir libros por valor de aprox. 40 euros. Viajes/Actividades Otros ------- Costes de la publicación del CD-Rom: 100 euros. Total gastado: 545’86 euros Justificación Total pendiente de pago: (aprox.) 40 euros Total inicialmente concedido: 1500 euros. Total a devolver: 914’14 euros. DATOS DE LOS MIEMBROS DEL GRUPO Nombre EROULLA Apellidos DEMETRIOU DEMETRIOU D.N.I. 75116031-D Centro FACULTAD DE HUMANIDADES Y Teléfono 83551 E-mail [email protected] CC DE LA EDUCACIÓN Departamento FILOLOGÍA INGLESA Asignatura impartida ESTILÍSTICA DEL INGLÉS; APRENDIZAJE ENSEÑANZA DE LA LENGUA EXTRANJERA I Y UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente Curso 3º Y 4º DE FILOLOGÍA INGLESA Y DE LA DOBLE TITULACIÓN DE FILOLOGÍA INGLESA PROFESORADO EN Y TURISMO ENSEÑANZA Y MÁSTER DE SECUNDARIA, BACHILLERATO, FORMACIÓN PROFESIONAL Y ENSEÑANZA DE IDIOMAS (2011-12) RESPECTIVAMENTE Categoría PROFESORA TITULAR DE Firma UNIVERSIDAD DATOS DE LOS MIEMBROS DEL GRUPO Nombre PILAR Apellidos SÁNCHEZ CALLE D.N.I. 24217269-V Centro FACULTAD DE HUMANIDADES Y Teléfono 81827 E-mail [email protected] CIENCIAS DE LA EDUCACIÓN Departamento FILOLOGÍA INGLESA Asignatura impartida TEXTOS LITERARIOS EN LENGUA INGLESA (FILOLOGÍA INGLESA); ESTUDIO SELECTIVO DE LA LITERATURA DE LOS EEUU (FILOLOGÍA INGLESA Y FILOLOGÍA INGLESA + TURISMO) Curso 4º DE FILOLOGÍA INGLESA Y 3º/4º DE FILOLOGÍA INGLESA + TURISMO RESPECTIVAMENTE Categoría PROFESORA TITULAR DE Firma UNIVERSIDAD DATOS DE LOS MIEMBROS DEL GRUPO Nombre JOSÉ Apellidos RUIZ MAS D.N.I. 26460121-R Centro FACULTAD E-mail DE FILOSOFÍA [email protected] Y Teléfono 646826237 LETRAS Departamento FILOLOGÍAS INGLESA Y ALEMANA, UNIVERSIDAD DE GRANADA UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente Asignatura impartida APRENDIZAJE Y ENSEÑANZA DE LA LENGUA EXTRANJERA (MÁSTER DE PROFESORADO EN ENSEÑANZA SECUNDARIA, 2010-11) Curso MÁSTER DE PROFESORADO EN ENSEÑANZA SECUNDARIA, BACHILLERATO, FORMACIÓN PROFESIONAL Y ENSEÑANZA DE IDIOMAS, UJA Categoría PROFESOR Firma CONTRATADO DOCTOR VºBº de Coordinador/a Fdo.: Eroulla Demetriou Demetriou Jaén, a 31 de julio de 2012 VICERRECTOR DE ORDENACIÓN ACADÉMICA, INNOVACIÓN DOCENTE Y FORMACIÓN DEL PROFESORADO DE LA UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente Anexo I UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente ANEXO I: LISTADO DE LOS LIBROS ADQUIRIDOS TITULO STFACTURADOTUS The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature / edited by Coral Ann Howells and Eva-Marie Kröller FACTURADO The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature / edited by Coral Ann Howells and Eva-Marie Kröller CANCELADO The Development of Australian Literature (1898) / by Turner, Henry Gyles A history of Australian literature: pure and applied / H.M. Green PENDIENTE (aprox.26€) CANCELADO The literature of Australia / edited by Geoffrey Dutton CANCELADO Australian literature / edited by Elizabeth Webby Writing South Africa: literature, apartheid, and democracy 1970-1995 / edited by Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly A Land apart: a contemporary South African reader / edited by André Brink and J.M. Coetzee Pagado el 20/05/2011 Fecha Factura 16/05/2011 Cantidad Pagada 103.32 FACTURADO 18/05/2011 12/05/2011 23.62 FACTURADO 20/05/2011 16/05/2011 28.69 White writing: on the culture of letters in South Africa / J. M. Coetzee PENDIENTE (aprox. 14€) CANCELADO From puritanism to postmodernism: a history of American literature FACTURADO 13/07/2011 06/07/2011 12.20 Survival: a thematic guide to Canadian literature / Margaret Atwood FACTURADO 14/09/2011 05/09/2011 10.93 American literature to 1900 / Teresa Gibert FACTURADO 18/05/2011 16/05/2011 39.00 A study guide for American literature to 1900 / María Teresa Gibert Maceda FACTURADO 18/05/2011 16/05/2011 28.00 The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life/ Harold Bloom FACTURADO 06/06/2012 01/06/2012 20.00 A Visit from the Goon Squad/ Jennifer Egan FACTURADO 18/06/2012 12/06/2012 25.00 Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic/ Terry Eagleton FACTURADO 06/06/2012 01/06/2012 25.00 UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital/ Catherine Hakim FACTURADO 06/06/2012 01/06/2012 24.00 A Journey Through American Literature/ Kevin J. Hayes FACTURADO 14/06/2012 08/06/2012 15.00 Jane Smiley, Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo: Narratives of Everyday Justice/ Jason S. Polley FACTURADO 20/06/2012 14/06/2012 60.10 Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism/ Stephen J. Burn FACTURADO 20/06/2012 15/06/2012 31.00 TOTAL GASTADO 445.86 TOTAL PENDIENTE APROXIMADO 40.00 UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente Anexo II UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente ANEXO II: CONTENIDOS DE LA PUBLICACIÓN EN CD-ROM. A HANDFUL OF LITERARY RESOURCES AND ACTIVITIES FOR UNIVERSITY STUDENTS OF AMERICAN AND COMMONWEALTH LITERATURES Eroulla Demetriou∗ José Ruiz Mas∗∗ Pilar Sánchez Calle∗ CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1. NOVEL, SHORT STORY AND POETRY IN THE USA: HERMAN MELVILLE, EDGAR ALLAN POE AND WALT WHITMAN. 2. DIDACTIC UNIT: EDGAR ALLAN POE. 3. HUMOUR IN AMERICA: MARK TWAIN. 4. HENRY JAMES AND COSMOPOLITISM. 5. THE LOST GENERATION. 6. DIDACTIC UNIT: PEARL S. BUCK. 7. A BRIEF LITERARY PANORAMA OF THE USA FROM 1945 TO THE PRESENT DAY. 8. THE LITERATURES OF THE COMMONWEALTH. 9. BIBLIOGRAPHY. *Universidad de Jaén **Universidad de Granada UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente INTRODUCTION The contents included in this CD offer an introduction to American Literature from the 19th century up to the present day. We have also added the chapter “The Literatures of the Commonwealth” which briefly mentions some features of other literatures written in English in Canada, India, South Africa and Australia. Each unit centres on the main authors of the period, pointing out their literary contributions and their most relevant works. The reader will also find two didactic units devoted to Edgar Allan Poe and Pearl S. Buck with diverse activities dealing with vocabulary, grammar, comprehension questions and writing practice among others. These didactic units may serve as a model for teachers of American literature who are interested in creating their own teaching material adapted for their students. The target audience for this CD is first-year students of Grado en Estudios Ingleses, students of Magisterio Lengua Extranjera and of Grado en Educación Primaria (mención Lengua Extranjera) as well as anyone interested in American literature. UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente 1. THE NOVEL, SHORT STORY AND POETRY IN THE USA: HERMAN MELVILLE, EDGAR ALLAN POE AND WALT WHITMAN 1.1 INTRODUCTION The literary panorama of American literature during the 19th century is best represented by Herman Melville, a novelist and fiction writer, Walt Whitman, a pure poet, and Edgar Allan Poe, both a poet and a fiction writer. The three writers have made a permanent impact on American, European and universal literature in general. Their works are still widely read and highly valued nowadays. 1.2. HERMAN MELVILLE (1819-1891) Herman Melville, one of American literature's greatest figures, was born in New York City into an established merchant family. His father become bankrupt and then insane and died when Melville was twelve. At the age of fifteen he left school and began working to support his family, first as a bank clerk, then as a teacher and then as a farm labourer. At the age of nineteen he sailed on a merchant ship to Liverpool. This was followed by several other sea voyages as a sailor. One of these was a whaling trip during which he jumped ship and lived briefly among a cannibal tribe called the Typee cannibals. Although he had no early intentions to become a writer, he was encouraged to write about some of his more exotic experiences and the result was Typee (1846), loosely based on his encounter with the natives in the Polynesian. It was half a travel book, half an adventure tale. It was a big success in spite of not being artistically perfect, but it showed a great ability to create suspense and define character. UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente Then came Omoo (1847), Mardi (1849), Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850). These early works earned Melville a good deal of acclaim. They also stirred controversy because of his sympathy with pagan societies, sometimes to the point of contempt for western attitudes and practices. Omoo, set in Tahiti, is considered by some to be Melville's best adventure story. He satirises the missionaries who believed that they were saving the natives, while, in fact, their "enlightened" ideas were threatening the native social fabric. In Mardi Melville uses the sea voyage as a symbol of the quest of life's meaning. Mardi is an imaginary South Seas archipelago presenting many analogous life experiences. Redburn is based on Melville's first voyage to Liverpool, and White-Jacket anticipates the more mature Billy Budd. It is based on his outrage of the flogging and brutality he witnessed on a warship on a return journey from Hawaii. During this time Melville began to read widely, he met a wide range of writers and philosophers and in 1850 he and his wife moved to Pittsfield in Massachusetts, where they became neighbours and close friends with Nathaniel Hawthorne. Inspired by Hawthorne and his reading, Melville entered into his most ambitious phase. In 1851 he published Moby Dick. Moby Dick is considered to be by many the greatest work of American fiction. Paradoxically, the novel was not well received and from relative popularity Melville began to fade into obscurity. This novel was published under the name of The Whale in England, its plot being a very simple one. A young seaman called Ishmael, the narrator, joins the crew of the whaler "Pequod", whose captain is Captain Achab. He has made friends with Queequeg, a native harpooner from a Pacific island, a literary depiction of a noble savage. "Call me Ishmael" are the novel's first words, where the narrator introduces himself. After setting out to sea Achab announces that the purpose of the voyage is to search for and kill Moby Dick, the legendary white whale who on a previous voyage had sheared off his leg. The novel recounts the hunt for Moby Dick and ends when the great whale destroys the ship and all the crew, except for Ishmael, who survives to tell the UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente world the story. The novel, in spite of its apparent simplicity, contains religious and political allegories, parables and commentaries as well as vivid descriptions of the whaling trade and whale captures. Melville's next book was Pierre (1852), a psychological and moral study of the protagonist, Pierre, based on his own childhood. For the first time Melville keeps one of this works removed from the ocean setting of most of his other fiction. Pierre conveys grand images of pessimism, destruction, suicide and incest and was hardly read at all in the 19th century. At odds with his public and deprived of his friend Hawthorne, who had moved to Concord, Melville turned increasingly to shorter fiction. He published a collection of short stories called The Piazza Tales (1856), which included two of his most famous short stories: "Bartleby the Scrivener" and "Benito Cereno". "Bartleby the Scrivener" resembles a Kafka atmosphere and the literature of the absurd. "Benito Cereno" is about a slave ship which seems to be in the control of its captain, Benito Cereno, but which is really controlled by the slaves, led by Babo. They have revolted and massacred the crew and are holding the captain prisoner. The narrator, Captain Delano, is telling the story through his consciousness. He finds himself initiated into an awareness of evil and the unreliability of appearances. In his innocent self-confidence and trust in his own perceptions, Delano is incapable of drawing logical conclusions from what he sees. Thus he dismisses Captain Cereno's alternating moods of indifference or hysteria as derangement. One lesson he eventually learns, however, has particular significance today: no race will willingly serve another without resentment and eventually it will rebel. At the age of forty Melville turned almost exclusively to poetry. Long after his death his reputation began to revive and his unfinished tale Billy Budd was published posthumously in 1924. The protagonist of Billy Budd is the "Handsome Sailor" of sailor folklore. He is recruited on a man-of-war ship during the war between England and France in 1797. He is a favourite of the crew but becomes UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente the target of the envious and cruel master-at-arms, Claggart. Claggart concocts a plan of mutiny and accuses Billy Budd before the ship's commander, Captain Vere of being involved in it. Unable to answer the accusation due to a chronic stammer, Budd strikes Claggart out of fury and kills him. Although Vere realises the falseness of the charges he fears a reaction from the crew if Budd is not punished for assaulting a superior. Therefore Budd is tried and found guilty of a capital crime and is consequently hanged. He dies just after crying out "God bless Captain Vere!" Vere is later killed by the French, his last murmured words being Billy's name. The story raises questions about the relationship between man's law and God's law, between mercy and justice, between the individual and the larger social good. Captain Vere has been likened to the Old Testament God and Billy shows similarities to the figure of Christ. On his death Billy is transfigured into myth. Mutinous talk on the ship is changed into legends and songs about the handsome sailor, who was a good patriot and was wrongly accused. 1.3. EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849) Poe is the least understood of America's major writers. Acclaimed by French critics such as Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Valery, in America he has often been dismissed as an immature, neurotic and pedantic genius, devoid of permanent literary merit. He was born in Boston to itinerant actors with serious drinking problems. When his parents died, leaving Poe at three, he was fostered and brought up by a wealthy Richmond merchant, John Allan. Poe's relationship with his strict foster father was always very tense. Poe entered the University of Virginia but after a year he dropped out due to gambling debts that John Allan refused to pay. He then enlisted in the army under an assumed name ("Edgar A. Perry") and some years later he managed to enter West Point, but absented himself from drills and classes and was therefore expelled. Poe tried to make a UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente living by contributing in the local magazines and newspapers with articles, essays, reviews and stories, eventually becoming an editor (of The Southern Literary Messenger, Graham's Magazine and The Broadway Journal), which gained him some literary reputation and money, but he wasted it on drinking. In Baltimore Poe lived his only happy years of adulthood with his aunt Mrs Maria Poe Clemm and secretly married his thirteen-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm, who died a few years later from TB, in 1847. Her death was the beginning of Poe's moral and physical decline. He took to drinking heavily again and was found unconscious in a street in Baltimore. Three days later he died in hospital. 1.3.1. POE'S POETRY Poe himself paid for his first book of poems to be published, called Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), but he did so anonymously ("by a Bostonian"). Later he shortened Tamerlane, revised other poems and added new ones to make up his second volume, Al Aaraaf, Tamburlane and Minor Poems (1829), which included such famous poems as "Al Aaraaf" (an Arabic word meaning "limbo", thought to be the ideal and spiritual haven of poets, where beauty appears platonically unspoilt), and "Sonnet to Science", a lament for the loss of beauty on Earth for the benefit of science and technology. The publication of his third book, Poems (1831), was paid for by his cadet friends and included such famous poems as "To Helen" (a yearning for women's idealized beauty), "Leonore" (a lament for the death of a beautiful woman) and "Israfel" (about an angel, Israfel, considered to be the best singer in a perfect world of unspoiled beauty). In fact, Poe's first published volumes were all of poetry and this is the genre to which he devoted many of his last years of life. There is no consensus on Poe's success and literary merit as a poet. Nevertheless, his influence on the French symbolist poets is clear, and it is through these that he influenced successful American poets such as T. S. Eliot. UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente Poe's best-known and most representative poem is "The Raven", included in his book of poems The Raven and Other Poems (1845). The underlying theme of the poem (as in many of his poems) is the death of a beautiful woman called Leonore. To Poe there was nothing as poetic as the death of a beautiful woman. At midnight the "I" of the poem is reading books in his bedroom in a melancholy mood as he is full of sorrow for his lost Leonore. He hears a tapping at the chamber door, he opens and sees nothing. He then opens a window and a raven comes in and rests on a bust of Pallas and says nothing. The only answer the poet obtains is "nevermore!" In a short poem like "Annabel Lee" Poe describes the death of a beautiful young girl of a distant land, whom the narrator loved, who was killed by cold winds and underwater demons. The poet lies down by the side of her grave by the sea. The reminiscences to Virginia Clemm, Poe's prematurely dead young wife, are very clear. 1.3.2. POE'S CRITICAL REVIEWS AND LITERARY CRITICISM In his essays "The Philosophy of Composition" and "The Poetic Principle" Poe explains in full detail the making of a poem. He gives many technical details and talks about the "effect" that he wants to produce in the reader, but he fails to specify what "effect" this is. This attitude is typical of Poe in both his tales and poetry. He gives us an abundance of detail and signs, but no sure clue to their meaning. For example, "The Raven" may be read as clearly hilarious or as a melancholic and lugubrious poem. It will not declare itself either way. Our attention should therefore focus on the language. Poe was the only serious literary critic of his generation and America's first real man of letters. He was thought eccentric for spending his whole time writing literature, but when he started to write literary criticism this was indeed unheard of. He was the first to recognise Hawthorne's genius in his review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales and the first to determine the reasons of Dickens' success and UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente literary importance. It was however his misfortune to have a very ignorant audience and very little American literature to work on. 1.3.3. POE'S SHORT STORIES Although Poe wished to be thought of primarily as a poet, his short stories brought him far greater fame. He first published a short detective novel called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), but later concentrated on writing short tales. These tales were published in two books called Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1839) and Tales (1845) as well as in different magazines and journals for which he contributed as a freelance writer or was editor. His tales are usually divided into a) tales of horror, b) tales of ratiocination and c) tales of love. It has been suggested that Poe's tales are gothic, but gothic horror means that the real world contains terrors that would strike us with horror. But Poe's tales do not have any relation to reality; their effects are of the imagination only. His tales are merely constructions of the detailed kind of what goes on in his imagination. His tales occur in innumerable cellars, darkened rooms and fantastically decorated chambers. These are places of the mind, located nowhere in particular, but recognised by every reader. Poe's tales make very poor films, precisely because those places lose their imaginative charge as soon as they are assembled for the eye instead of the reader's imagination. Another source of inspiration for Poe was chess and technology; proof of this is his essay on a chess machine device invented by someone called Maelzel ("Maelzel's chess player"). He bordered professionalism in cryptography and used to boast about being able to decipher any secret message encrypted in any code. His detective stories and his tales of ratiocination are therefore works of Poe's powerful formal and logical reasoning and capacity of deduction. In "Eureka" he wrote a prose statement of a theory of the universe. His most famous tales of horror are "The Black Cat", "The Fall of the House of Usher", "Hop-Frog", "The Masque of the Red Death", "The Cask of the UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente Amontillado" and "Murders in the Rue Morgue". As for his tales of ratiocination we should mention "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Gold Bug". His most famous love tale is "Ligeia". "The Black Cat" is narrated by the murderer who assures the reader that he is not mad. He kills his wife and walls her up in the cellar of their house. But he has also walled in the cat, which is still alive. The cat reveals the corpse by crying out just as the police are investigating the scene. The murderer does not feel remorse after the deed. Poe is more interested in the psychology of the criminal than his sense of guilt. "The Fall of the House of Usher" is considered by many critics to be his best short story. It deals with the last two members of the Usher family, Roderick and his sister Madelanie. The narrator visits his old friend Roderick in the gothic castle that is the ancestral home of the family. His sister Madelanie dies and is buried in the vault of the castle. But she is buried alive and emerges from the tomb to grasp hold of Roderick, who dies of terror in her arms. The narrator feels horror too as he witnesses the collapse of the entire house. “The Masque of the Red Death" was written bearing in mind a cholera epidemic that hit Baltimore in 1832. Well-off families used to rush to the country to escape plagues. Prince Prospero takes refuge with his court in a castle surrounded by tall walls. He offers his guests a fancy dress dance but they all stop in fright to listen to the twelfth chime of the clock in the ballroom. A Red Death figure comes into the room. It is not wearing a disguise: it is the very presence of Death. "The Gold Bug", the masterpiece of his "ratiocination tales" is a kind of detective story without a criminal. The hero, accompanied by the narrator and a black servant, decodes a secret code that leads him to the discovery of a treasure buried by Captain Kidd and they become rich. In fact Poe was the creator of the detective story. He created a renowned type of intellectual detective in the character of Auguste Dupin, a French detective with powerful deducing skills who UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente appeared in three of stories: "The Murders of the Rue Morgue", "The Mystery of Marie Roget" and "The Purloined Letter". "Ligeia" was Poe's favourite tale and his most famous love story. The protagonist is deeply in love with his wife Ligeia, who dies. He finally remarries the fortune hunter Lady Rowena but she dies too. At the end her corpse rises while it changes into Ligeia in his imagination. This tale or reincarnation may be seen as a hallucination on the part of the narrator, who is thinking of Ligeia as Lady Rowena dies. 1.4. WALT WHITMAN (1819-1893) Walt Whitman was born in Long Island. In 1823 his family moved to Brooklyn. In 1830 he left school to become a printer's apprentice and then an itinerant teacher. He returned to Long Island in 1838 as a schoolteacher and printer and worked in various newspapers. He then began to write poetry and short stories. In 1848 he travelled south and experienced the vastness of the American landscape and the variety of its people, a fact that made a deep impression on him. He returned to New York and turned his attention increasingly to poetry. In 1855 Whitman published his first edition of Leaves of Grass, which contained 12 poems, including an early version of "Song of Myself", his most representative poem and the one which constitutes the seeds of Leaves of Grass. It describes the process of universal life. The self grows and assimilates other forms of life. Leaves of Grass is a metaphor for the beauty and spiritual inheritance of the natural world. Although Whitman himself published an anonymous review praising his book, the book received little attention. It was, however, praised by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Whitman decided to print its second edition in 1856 (with 20 poems). Nine different editions of Leaves of Grass were printed during the poet's lifetime. In each new edition new poems were UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente included, up to the number of 293! He worked briefly as a clerk in the Department of the Interior but when the Secretary found out that he was the author of Leaves of Grass he was expelled. Soon he began to suffer his recurrent paralytic strokes. Another major factor in his life and works is his recognition and acceptance of his homosexuality. Whitman's verse, with its frequent use of colloquial language, Indian, Spanish and French words (languages spoken in America) as well as everyday events, represents a turning point in the history of American poetry. He created a poetic form made out of a specifically American experience. Whitman tries to create a literature that was entirely American, away from the polite and formal European influences. Some of his finest poems grew out of his personal experience of the horrors of the Civil War (during which he served as a volunteer nurse in army hospitals and as a correspondent for The New York Times). In his poetry he attempted to reconcile the destruction of the war with his visionary idea of America. Drum Taps (1865) and its companion volume Sequel (1867) were included in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass. Sequel was written in the aftermath of Abraham Lincoln's assassination and includes an elegy for the dead president. This elegy includes the famous poems "When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and "O Captain! My Captain!" In "A Song of Myself" the poet celebrates the self. The "I" who signs the poem is omnipresent and immortal and is Whitman's hero. He talks of a cycle of life where everything is being constantly renewed and absorbed back into an essential mass. But all is conserved and is therefore immortal. Despite the different nature of objects, animals and men, they are all composed of the same substance and are therefore equal. The "Soul" is not only for mankind but for any substances and therefore universal. In the poem Whitman touches on different moments of one's life, from the baby in the cradle to a suicide, isolated moments UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente of individual life. At the end of the poem the poet is a mere man travelling on foot asking for company, thus completing the idea of a "journey of life" that is never ending. In the short poem "America" Whitman thinks of America as the centre of equal daughters and equal sons who are "strong, ample, fair, enduring, and capable" and who identify themselves with "freedom, law and love". He asserts his faith in the destiny of the American nation. It demonstrates his love and the masses, his devotion to democracy and his belief that by using a democratic process, America is fulfilling a spiritual need of her people. UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente 2. DIDACTIC UNIT: EDGAR ALLAN POE Poe is one of the least understood of America's major writers. Acclaimed by French critics such as Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Valery, in America he has often been dismissed as an immature, neurotic and pedantic genius, devoid of permanent literary merit. In fact, Poe's first published volumes were all of poetry and this is the genre to which he devoted much of this last years of life. There is no consensus on Poe's success and literary merit as a poet. Nevertheless, his influence on the French symbolist poets is clear, and it is through these that he influenced successful American poets such T. S. Eliot. He was born in Boston to itinerant actors with serious drinking problems. When his parents died, leaving Edgar at three, he was fostered and brought up by a wealthy Richmond merchant, John Allan. Poe's relationship with his strict foster father was always very tense. Poe entered the University of Virginia but after a year he dropped out due to gambling debts that John Allan refused to pay. He then enlisted in the army under an assumed name ("Edgar A. Perry") and some years later he managed to enter West Point, but absented himself from drills and classes and was therefore expelled. Poe tried to make a living by contributing in the local magazines and newspapers with articles, essays, reviews and stories, eventually becoming an editor (of The Southern Literary Messenger, Graham's Magazine and The Broadway Journal), which gained him some literary reputation and money, but he wasted it on drinking. In Baltimore Poe lived his only happy years of adulthood with his aunt Mrs Maria Poe Clemm and secretly married his thirteen-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm, who died a few years later from TB, in 1847. Her death was the beginning of Poe's moral and physical decline. He took to drinking heavily again and was found unconscious in a street in Baltimore. Three days later he died in hospital. UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente 1. IN THE PREVIOUS TEXT THERE ARE A NUMBER OF PROPER NAMES AND FACTS. WITHOUT LOOKING BACK, TRY TO RELATE THE NAMES WITH POE’S LIFE FACTS. Baudelaire City where Poe was born Boston Assumed name that Poe used when he enrolled in the Army John Allan French critic that admired Poe’s work Edgar A. Perry Poe’s cousin and wife Virginia Clemm City where Poe died Baltimore Name of Poe’s foster father 2. ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS WITHOUT LOOKING BACK AT THE TEXT. a) What opinion did American critics have of Poe before he was acclaimed by French criticism? b) Who were Poe’s parents and what was their personal tragedy? c) What was Poe’s life like while he was living in John Allan’s house? d) What were Poe’s main addictions? e) Who was Poe’s first wife and what happened to her? f) What literary genre did Poe devote his first published books to? UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente 3. READ THE FOLLOWING TEXT ABOUT POE’S POETRY AND SPOT THE TWO BIG MISTAKES. Poe himself paid for his first book of poems to be published, called Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), but did so anonymously ("by a Bostonian"). Later on he shortened Tamerlane, revised other poems and added new ones to make up his second volume, Al Aaraaf, Tamburlane and Minor Poems (1829), which included such famous poems as "Al Aaraaf" (an Arabic word meaning "limbo", thought to be the ideal and spiritual haven of poets, where beauty appears platonically unspoilt), and "Sonnet to Science", a lament for the loss of beauty on Earth for the benefit of science and technology. The publication of his third book, Poems (1831), was paid by his cadet friends and included such famous poems as "To Helen" (a yearning for women's idealized beauty), "Leonore" (a lament for the death of a beautiful woman) and "Israfel" (about an angel, Israfel, considered to be the best singer in a perfect world of unspoiled beauty). His drama included Hamlet, Othello and King Lear. Poe's best-known and most representative poem is "The Raven", included in his book of poems The Raven and Other Poems (1845). The underlying theme of the poem (as in many of his poems) is the death of a beautiful woman called Leonore. To Poe there was nothing as poetic as the death of a beautiful woman. At midnight the "I" of the poem is reading books in his bedroom in a melancholy mood as he is full of sorrow for his lost Leonore. He hears a tapping at the chamber door, he opens and sees nothing. He then opens a window and a raven comes in and rests on a bust of Pallas and says nothing. The only answer the poet obtains is "nevermore!" In a short poem like "Annabel Lee" Poe describes the death of a beautiful young girl of a distant land, whom the narrator loved, who was killed by cold winds and underwater demons. The poet lies down by the side of her grave by the sea. The reminiscences to Virginia Clemm, Poe's prematurely dead young wife, are UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente very clear. He travelled in Spain by coach and wrote numerous poems about the country. 4. THE FOLLOWING STATEMENTS ABOUT POE’S POETRY ARE FALSE. MAKE THE NECESSARY AMENDMENTS TO MAKE THEM TRUE. a) Tamerlane and Other Poems was the first book that he published under his real name. b) Al Aaraaf, Tamburlane and Minor Poems was his first published book, though under the pseudonym of “A Bostonian”. c) "Al Aaraaf", an Arabic word meaning "hell", was thought to be the place where incapable poets go when they die. d) The publication of his third book, Poems (1831), was paid for by his foster father. e) "Leonore" is a poem where the author yearns for women’s idealized beauty. f) In “Annabel Lee" Poe describes the birth of a beautiful young girl in a distant land whom the narrator will eventually fall in love with. 5. YOU ARE GOING TO READ THE FIRST OR LAST STANZAS OF SOME OF POE’S MOST FAMOUS POEMS. GIVE THEM EACH A TITLE. a) SCIENCE! meet daughter of old Time thou art UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes! Why prey’st thou thus upon the poet’s heart, Vulture! Whose wings are dull realities! b) Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicéan barks of yore, That gently, o’er a perfumed sea, The weary, way-worn wanderet bore To his own native shore. c) In Heaven a spirit doth dwell “Whose heart-strings are a lute;” None sing so wildly well As the angel Israfel, And the giddy stars (so legends tell) Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell Of his voice, all mute. d) And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming, And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted – nevermore! UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente 6. NOW THAT YOU HAVE IDENTIFIED THE NAMES OF THE ABOVE POEMS, CAN YOU SPOT THE MISTAKES OF THE FOLLOWING STATEMENTS? a) In "Sonnet to Science", an exaltation to Science, Poe is of the opinion that Science should come before beauty. b) The poem "To Helen" is a lament for the death of a beautiful woman. c) "Israfel" is about an angel of the same name known for his inability to sing no matter how hard he tries. d) In “The Raven” the author tells of his conversation with a friendly bird who visits him in the middle of the night. 7. IN ORDER TO SPOT THE MISTAKES OF THE PREVIOUS STATEMENTS YOU MUST HAVE READ THE EXCERPTS OF THE POEMS. WHAT WORDS AND/OR EXPRESSIONS GAVE YOU THE CLUE TO IDENTIFY THE MISTAKES OF THE STATEMENTS? a) “Sonnet to Science”: b) “To Helen”: c) “Israfel”: d) “The Raven”: UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente 8. ALTHOUGH POE WISHED TO BE THOUGHT PRIMARILY AS A POET, HIS SHORT STORIES BROUGHT HIM FAR GREATER FAME. HIS TALES ARE USUALLY DIVIDED INTO TALES OF HORROR, TALES OF RATIOCINATION, DETECTIVE FICTION AND TALES OF LOVE. HERE IS A LIST OF SOME OF HIS FAMOUS STORIES. PLACE THEM ACCORDING TO THIS CLASSIFICATION: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym – The Black Cat – Ligeia – The Golden Bug – The Murders in the Rue Morgue – The Fall of the House of Usher – The Pit and the Pendulum – The Masque of the Red Death – Hop Frog – The Cask of the Amontillado a) Tales of horror: b) Tales of ratiocination: c) Detective fiction: d) Tales of love: 9. IDENTIFY THE NAMES OF THE FOLLOWING SHORT STORIES BY READING THEIR SUMMARISED PLOTS. FILL IN THE BLANKS WHEN NECESSARY WITH THE TITLES OF THE STORIES. a) __________ is narrated by the murderer who assures the reader that he is not mad. He kills his wife and walls her up in the cellar of their house. But he has also walled in the cat, which is still alive. The cat reveals the corpse by crying out just as the police are investigating the scene. The murderer does not feel remorse after the deed. Poe is more interested in the psychology of the criminal than his sense of guilt. UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente b) __________ is considered by many critics to be his best short story. It deals with the last two members of the Usher family, Roderick and his sister Madelanie. The narrator visits his old friend Roderick in the gothic castle that is the ancestral home of the family. His sister Madelanie dies and is buried in the vault of the castle. But she is buried alive and emerges from the tomb to grasp hold of Roderick, who dies of terror in her arms. The narrator feels horror too as he witnesses the collapse of the entire house. c) __________ was written bearing in mind a cholera epidemic that hit Baltimore in 1832. Well-off families used to rush to the country to escape plagues. Prince Prospero takes refuge with his court in a castle surrounded by tall walls. He offers his guests a fancy dress dance but they all stop in fright to listen to the twelfth chime of the clock in the ballroom. A Red Death figure comes into the room. It is not wearing a disguise: it is the very presence of Death. d) __________, the masterpiece of his "ratiocination tales" is a kind of detective story without a criminal. The hero, accompanied by the narrator and a black servant, decodes a secret code that leads him to the discovery of a treasure buried by Captain Kidd and they become rich. In fact Poe was the creator of the detective story. He created a renowned type of intellectual detective in the character of Auguste Dupin, a French detective with powerful deducing skills who appeared in three of stories: "The Murders of the Rue Morgue", "The Mystery of Marie Roget" and "The Purloined Letter". e) __________ was Poe's favourite tale and his most famous love story. The protagonist is deeply in love with his wife __________, who dies. He finally remarries the fortune hunter Lady Rowena but she dies too. At the end her corpse rises as the narrator while it changes into __________ in his imagination. This tale UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente or reincarnation may be seen as a hallucination on the part of the narrator, who is thinking of __________ as Lady Rowena dies. 10. CAN YOU IDENTIFY THE DIFFERENT ENDINGS OF THE DIFFERENT STORIES? CHOOSE THE APPROPRIATE ONE FROM THE FOLLOWING LIST: - The Black Cat - Ligeia - The Fall of the House of Usher - The Cask of the Amontillado a) I stirred not – but gazed upon her who was before me. There was a mad disorder in my thoughts – a tumult unappeasable. Could it, indeed, be the living Rowena who confronted me? Why, why should I doubt it? The bandage lay heavily about the mouth – but then it was the mouth of the breathing lady of Tremaine. And the cheeks –there were the roses as in her noon of health –yes, these were indeed the fair cheeks of the living lady of Tremaine. And the chin, with its dimples, as in health, was it not hers? –but– had she then grown taller since her malady? What inexpressible madness seized me with that thought? One bound, and I had reached her feet! Shrinking from my touch, she let fall from her head, unloosed, the ghastly cerements which had confined it, and there streamed forth, into the rushing atmosphere of the chamber, huge masses of long and dishevelled hair. It was blacker than the raven wings of the midnight! And now the eyes opened of the figure which stood before me. “Here then at least, “I shrieked aloud, “can I never –can I never be mistaken–these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes of the lady –of the lady Ligeia!” UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente b) But to these words I hearkened in vain for a reply. I grew impatient. I called aloud– “Fortunato!” No answer. I called again– “Fortunato” No answer still. I thrust a torch through the remaining aperture and let it fall within. There came forth in return only a jingling of the bells. My heart grew sick; it was the dampness of the catacombs that made it so. I hastened to make an end of my labour. I forced the last stone into its position; I plastered it up. Against the new masonry I re-erected the old rampart of bones. For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them. In pace requiescat! c) The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon, which now shone vividly through that once barely-discernible fissure, of which I have before spoken, as extending from the roof of the building, in a zig-zag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened– there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind– the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight –my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder –there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters – and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the “House of Usher.” d) Of my own thoughts it is folly to speak. Swooning, I staggered to the opposite wall. For one instant the party upon the stairs remained motionless, through extremity of terror and of awe. In the next, a dozen stout arms were toiling at the wall. It fell bodily. The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente spectators. Upon its head, with read extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up within the tomb! UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente Solutions to didactic unit on Poe 1. Boston City where Poe was born Edgar A. Perry Assumed name that Poe used when he enrolled in the Army Baudelaire French critic that admired Poe’s work Virginia Clemm Poe’s cousin and wife Baltimore City where Poe died John Allan Name of Poe’s foster father 2. a) American critics thought he was immature, neurotic and pedantic, devoid of permanent literary merit. b) His partents were itinerant actors who had serious drinking problems. They died when Edgar was three years old. c). Life with his foster father John Allen was very strict and tense. d). Poe’s main addictions were gambling and alcohol. e) Poe’s first wife was his thirteen year old cousin, Virginia Clemm, who died only a few years later of TB in 1847. f) Poe devoted his first published books to poetry. 3. “His drama included Hamlet, Othello and King Lear“ and “He travelled in Spain by coach and wrote numerous poems about the country”. 4. a) Tamerlane and Other Poems was published under the pseudonym of “a Bostonian” UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente b) Al Aaraaf, Tamburlane and Minor Poems was his second published book, though under the pseudonym of “A Bostonian”. c) "Al Aaraaf", an Arabic word meaning "limbo", was thought to be the ideal and spiritual haven of poets, where beauty appears platonically unspoilt. d) The publication of his third book, Poems (1831), was paid for by his cadet friends. e) "Leonore" is a poem where the author laments the death of a beautiful woman. f) In “Annabel Lee" Poe describes the death of a beautiful young girl of a distant land, whom the narrator loved, who was killed by cold winds and underwater demons. 5. Free solutions. 6. a) In "Sonnet to Science", a criticism of Science, Poe is of the opinion that Science should come after beauty. b) The poem "To Helen" is a about a yearning for a women’s idealised beauty. c) "Israfel" is about an angel of the same name considered to be the best singer in a perfect world of unspoiled beauty. UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente d) In “The Raven” the author expresses his sorrow for the death of a beautiful woman called Leonore and the raven who visits him in the middle of the night says nothing but the word “nevermore”. 7. a). “Sonnet to Science”: “who alterest” “peering eyes”, “prey’st”, “Vulture!”, “dull realities”. b) “To Helen”: “thy beauty is” c) “Israfel”: “None sing so wildly well” and “attend the spell/ Of his voice” d) “The Raven”: “And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming,” 8. a) The Black Cat, The Fall of the House of Usher, Hop-Frog, The Masque of the Red Death, The Cask of the Amontillado; b) The Pit and the Pendulum, The Golden Bug; c) The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; The Murders in the Rue Morgue; d) Ligeia. 9. a) The Black Cat b) The Fall of the House of Usher c) The Masque of the Red Death d) The Gold Bug e) Ligeia UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente 10. a) Ligeia; b) The Cask of the Amontillado; c) The Fall of the House of Usher; d) The Black Cat] UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente 3. HUMOUR IN AMERICA: MARK TWAIN 3.1. INTRODUCTION: HUMOUR IN AMERICA In the 19th century American humour in literature was fashionable both in Britain and America. The English had an appetite for authentic literary Americanism and humour was found to be one of its main characteristics. American humour was soon known as "Western" or "Frontier humour", although it was not confined to the West. In fact, many of the most famous humorists of the time were from the East or had been brought up there (Artemus Ward, Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, John Hay, etc). The origin of American humour must be sought in Frontier life. Frontier life was dull and lonely. A great deal of exaggeration and hyperbole were needed to make life bearable in such empty places like the small villages in the middle of nowhere. The element of fraud became a conspicuous element in American humour: the folk-heroes of frontier mythology (such as Davy Crockett, Buffalo Bill or Wild Bill Hickok, to name but a few) were in truth very normal people or even comic figures, but literature made them look like real heroes. Honorary titles such as Judge, Major, Colonel or General were widely used in myth-making and the names of small western villages were made to appear as if they were enormous metropolises. Burlesque names and pseudonyms were widely employed for anyone who wanted to make a name for themselves (one of whom, for instance, was Mark Twain). The press was also particularly generous with nicknames for aspiring politicians. One of the genres that developed from typically Western humour was the so called "tall tale". This type of tale normally consisted of the narration of overtly exaggerated events that meant to entertain the reader. It was normally based on comic ballads and popular stories. The exaggeration element became a key one UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente in Western humour. It is not a coincidence that there were twenty-four American editions of Baron Munchuausen by 1835. Another popular genre was the satirical sketch in any of the numerous newspapers and periodical journals that were born on the Frontier. But a great deal of Western humour was oral. Ward and Twain were very successful humorous lecturers. Their monologues were usually in dialect and, if transcribed in black and white, often deliberately misspelt. The speaker would pose as a plain uneducated man and would intentionally quote classical writers wrongly in search of comic effect. But the repetitive puns, the similarity of all tall tales and the irritating abundance of misspellings made the genre a tiring one to read after some time. In fact, Mark Twain excepted, not much of American humour has lasting literary merit. Very little is remembered nowadays of successful humorists of the time such as Artemus Hart, Bret Harte, Josh Billings, etc. But humour was now familiar to America, and when Mark Twain started to write, the way was already prepared for his success. 3.2. MARK TWAIN 3.2.1. MARK TWAIN'S LIFE Mark Twain (1835-1910) was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in the village of Florida, Missouri, and moved with his family to the Mississippi River town of Hannibal, to which he has always been associated, when he was a child of 4. Due to the premature death of Clemens' father, a lawyer from Virginia, his family was left in rather precarious circumstances. Therefore, at the age of 12 Clemens left school and started to work as an apprentice printer. At 13, when his brother Orion, 10 years his senior, established The Hannibal Journal, he became a compositor for that paper and soon a contributor with humorous sketches which he signed with the pen-name "Rambler". At 18 he left Hannibal to become a real rambler. He worked as a printer hired by the day in several American cities such UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente as St Louis, New York, Philadelphia, Keokuk (Iowa) and Cincinnati. He went on writing humorous accounts about his travels ("ramblings") in the Keokuk Daily Post under the pseudonym of "Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass". Clemens then met a steamboat pilot (Horace Bixby) on his way down the Mississippi going towards New Orleans who agreed to take him on as an apprentice river-boat pilot. While a pilot, Clemens met all sorts of people. In 1859, when he was 24, he became a fully licensed pilot, thus fulfilling one of the dreams of his youth. However, two years later the American Civil War broke up and the river was cut across, bringing an end to traffic between the north and south. Clemens then served briefly in the Confederate Army but his division deserted and he spent the remainder of the war in Nevada either unsuccessfully looking for silver and gold with his brother Orion, or being a timber speculator and a journalist in San Francisco. His peculiar war experiences are chronicled in "The History of a Campaign that Failed". In 1863, when Clemens was 27 and working for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise and Californian, his famous "nom de plum" "Mark Twain" was used for the first time to sign a humorous travel account. This pen-name was a river man’s term that meant "two fathoms deep" (=twelve feet deep) and it was used to indicate when the water was just barely safe for navigation. In 1865 he made his pseudonym famous with the tall tale that gives name to his first book of short stories, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, published in 1867. The sketch was based on an old California folk-tale. It can be summarised as follows: Jim Smiley owns a champion jumping frog, Dan'l Webster. A stranger claims that any frog could beat him and sends Smiley off to catch another one to have a contest. Dan'l is defeated but only because, as Smiley discovers after the race, the stranger has managed to fill his gullet with quail shot to weigh him down. Twain signed up with the Sacramento Union to cover in a series of amusing letters for which he used a fictional character, "Mr Brown", to present his often unorthodox ideas. This was an acceptable policy provided that he clearly UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente repeated what other people said and did. And this is what Twain did. Twain became a celebrity almost overnight. His sparkling personality and his witty quotable phrases caught on fast and he soon began making lecture tours. His summer and autumn trip to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867 produced his first major work, a humorous travel book called The Innocents Abroad, or, The New Pilgrim's Progress (1869). It took shape from letters he wrote to the San Francisco Alta California and the New York Tribune. The humour of the book usually comes from the impressions given of the journey by an American who goes to Europe and Palestine for the first time. Twain returned to America and settled in the East. In 1870 he married Olivia Langdon, the physically fragile daughter of a wealthy New York coal magnate. The couple had three daughters. He often travelled to Europe and England, where he was received with even more enthusiasm than in the USA. The Clemens lived in Connecticut for 20 years, this being the most prolific period of Twain's life. It is called Twain's "Optimistic Period". 3.2.2. TWAIN'S LITERARY WORK During this happy span of life Twain wrote Roughing It (1872), The Gilded Age (1873), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), A Tramp Abroad (1880), The Prince and the Pauper (1882) and Life on the Mississippi (1883). Roughing It is a humorous autobiographical narrative of his early travels to the Far West, including visits to a Mormon community in Utah, to San Francisco and to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), with special emphasis on the wild Californian gold frontier. His humour comes from the contrast of the narrator (that is, himself), a presumably civilized man, and the chaotic and primitive ways he comes across in the West of the 1860's. But as the story progresses, the narrator begins to come to terms with and even adopt the Western ways. The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today is a satirical novel that Twain wrote in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner. One year later it was dramatised by UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente Twain himself and G. S. Densmore. The novel, set in Missouri, New York and Washington DC, exposes American business politics in the post Civil War era. Indeed, it presents various unscrupulous individuals and their dubious financial enterprises in the atmosphere of the greed, exploitation and economic speculation during the period of the post-war reconstruction. This era was later named after the title of the book. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer had an early version written in 1870 called "A Boy's Manuscript". The novel is about an intelligent and imaginative boy who is nevertheless careless and mischievous. He lives in the respectable home of his Aunt Polly and his obnoxious cousin in the Mississippi River town of St Petersburg, Missouri. His preferred world, however, is the outdoor and parentless life of his friend Huck Finn. They run away with a third boy after witnessing a murder and are believed dead. They return to witness their own funerals and are discovered among much uproar. At the trial of the murder Tom becomes a hero by accusing drunkard Muff Potter. Later Huck and Tom discover a dead boy as well as his buried treasure. They return to town as heroic as ever and the riches are divided between them. Twain was using the rich material of his Hannibal and Mississippi childhood and youth that constantly ran in his vivid memory and imagination. The Prince and the Pauper: a Tale for Young People of All Ages is a novel set in the last years of Henry VIII's reign in England. Prince Edward and a pauper boy, Tom Canty, are like two peas in a pod. They exchange clothes and roles and nobody notices the difference. Tom is treated as a prince and is even about to be crowned king after Henry VIII's death whereas Edward is abused by Tom's father and wanders in rags. He becomes friends with an unfortunate knight, Miles Hendon, who feels pity for his airs and graces and his loud claims of being of royal blood. Edward manages to make it to Westminster Abbey just before the coronation and proves his true identity by revealing where the Great Seal is UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente hidden. He then becomes king Edward VI and makes sure he always keeps in mind the injustice and cruelty that he witnessed whilst being a pauper. Life on the Mississippi combines elements from several genres: history and geography books, memoirs and travel books. It starts with a summary of the history of the river from its discovery by the Spanish conquistadores (Hernando de Soto) in the 16th century up to Twain's time. Twain adds a non-fictional passage with Huck Finn in Chapter 3 originally meant to have been included in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as if it were a purely historical episode. In the rest of the book Twain describes his childhood, youth and life as a steamboat pilot. Several years later he added a second part in which he idealised life in the South before the Civil War and the changes that the railway brought about to the country. In 1884 a heavy investment in a badly managed publishing firm (Charles L. Webster's publishing house) and in financial speculation, especially in type-setting machinery, drove Clemens into bankruptcy. Nevertheless, he managed to publish his best work, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), which has a moral dimension that is lacking in Tom Sawyer. It took him eight years to write it (187683), with several stops and starts. Although now it is considered by many as the greatest American novel and certainly the most important one in 19th century America, at the time, it was believed to be vulgar and unfit for young readers. Many even called it racist and it was banned in many libraries. The truth is that the novel is far from racist. Twain never uses the derogative term "nigger" for Jim, the young black protagonist of the novel. But even Twain himself felt unwilling to go on writing "another boys' book" and seriously considered burning it or leaving it aside. However, the book has far exceeded its predecessor in critical acclaim (if not always in popularity). The novel is narrated in first person by its hero, Huckleberry Finn (Huck for short), an uneducated boy of 13 or 14 who runs away from the "sivilizing" pressures of respectable widow Douglas and her sister Miss Watson, but above UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente all from his heavy-drinking father. Huck is kidnapped by his father and imprisoned in an isolated cabin with the intention of catching the treasure that Huck and Tom had found in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Huck frees himself by making it appear as if he has been murdered and then flees to Jackson Island. While hiding out there he meets Jim, Miss Watson's good-hearted slave who has run away after overhearing that he was to be sold. When Huck discovers that his own "death" has been blamed on Jim and that a search party may be on its way to Jackson Island the two runaways resolve to travel down the Mississippi on a raft. They are joined by a couple of confidence tricksters who call themselves the King and the Duke. These con-men exploit the young boys and make a lot of money along the river journey. Tom Sawyer appears in the book to save Jim from captivity. When the fugitives go back to St Petersburg, they learn that Miss Watson and Huck's father are dead and that Jim has been granted his freedom. At the end of the novel Huck decides to "light out" for the territories rather than face life with Tom's Aunt Sally, who, he tells the reader, was planning to "sivilise" him. The novelist recreates recording a vanished way of life in the pre-Civil War Mississippi valley of his own boyhood and adolescence with obvious nostalgia, innocence and humour. Twain followed his literary career with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), The American Claimant (1892) and The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894). His intention with these three works was to entertain the reader, but a deep feeling of pessimism is already quite evident in them. He also wrote a couple of sequels to Tom Sawyer (Tom Sawyer Abroad, 1894; and Tom Sawyer, Detective, 1896) where he sought to recapture the innocent fun of his early works, but he was never quite able to write with his former casual ease and wit. UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente 3.2.3. TWAIN'S LAST YEARS AND LITERARY PRODUCTION Clemens gradually overcame his debts by going on a worldwide lecture tour. In London in 1895 he received news of the death (due to meningitis) of his oldest daughter, Susy, and his second one, Jean, was diagnosed an epileptic. He became increasingly alienated from the good-humoured wit on which his popularity was based. His works became more and more pessimistic and serious. When he published Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1895), he even refused to sign it "Mark Twain" to avoid readers thinking it to be another comic narrative. His next works, Following the Equator (1897), The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900), the philosophical treatise What is a Man? (1906) and The Mysterious Stranger (published posthumously in 1916), show evident pessimism and scepticism. Clemens' health was starting to fail him. He was stricken with grief when his wife died in Italy in 1904, where she had gone for convalescence due to a long illness, and when his second daughter Jean passed away in 1909. However, his profession carried him through and he continued to lecture widely in the USA and abroad. His opinions on world affairs (like the Belgian atrocities in the Congo and the American behaviour in the Philippines) were often controversial, but he was always considered a revered public institution. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by Oxford University in 1907, for which he was always very proud. Many of his works, the most famous of which is his Autobiography (1924), were published posthumously. Clemens died a bitter man in Redding (Connecticut) in 1910, when he was 75 years old, his birth and his death coinciding with the appearance of Hailey's Comet on the date that he always said he would die. UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente 4. HENRY JAMES AND COSMOPOLITISM 4.1. INTRODUCTION Henry James' career was one of the longest and most productive -and most influential- in American letters. He was a master of prose fiction from the beginning and gave it his own personal touch and style. He wrote for 51 years. His literary production consists of 20 novels, 112 tales, 12 plays, several volumes of travel and criticism and a great deal of literary journalism. He became an artisan and master of the "international" or "cosmopolitan novel". His main theme was the innocence of the New World, the corruption and wisdom of the Old World and the clash between the two. He had a prophetic sense of America's coming-of-age and the moral problems that the USA would encounter as a world power in the 20th century. 4.2. HENRY JAMES'S LIFE Henry James was born in New York City on April 15, 1843, to a wealthy Irish immigrant called Sir Henry James, a prominent theologian and philosopher of the day. Due to Henry James' father's strong views on education, he made an effort to give his children a cosmopolitan upbringing. Henry and his older brother William (who became a notable psychologist and an influential philosopher in the future) were taken abroad as infants and crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic, and were schooled in Manhattan and in Geneva, Paris and London while they were in their teens. They acquired languages and an awareness of Europe that few Americans of their time had. At 19 Henry James enrolled at the Harvard Law School but withdrew after a year. He devoted his time to reading writers such as Balzac and Hawthorne and began to write short stories and reviews for journals UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente after being encouraged to do so by William Dean Howells. By his mid-twenties he was already regarded as one of the most skilful writers of short stories in America. Critics complained of his tendency to write about the life of the mind, rather than of action. His stories contained echoes of George Sand, H. Balzac, P. Merimée and N. Hawthorne. He had a thorough apprenticeship for almost a decade before he attempted a full-length novel: he did not stop writing stories, reviews and articles. Henry James travelled throughout his lifetime and never married. He was friendly and an active observer of the literary world and a dynamic participant in society, but he tended to be "distant" in his relations with people and careful to avoid "involvement". Leon Edel, James's biographer, divides the writer's literary career into three phases: the first culminates with The Portrait of a Lady (1881). His main topic of interest is the so called "international theme". It takes the shape of the tragic and comic ordeals suffered by Americans in Europe and by Europeans in America. In the second phase he experimented with the strong social and political trends of the 1870s and 1880s, with drama, with the relationship of artists to society and with the troubled psychology of oppressed children and haunted or obsessed men and women. In his third phase, also called his "major phase", James returned to the cosmopolitan or international subjects, though in a more elaborate manner. 4.2.1. FIRST PHASE OF JAMES' LITERARY CAREER Between 1870 and 1872 James lived in Boston and published his first significant American-European tale, "A Passionate Pilgrim", recording in it a deep yearning for historic England. He also published an early novel of Boston life, Watch and Ward (1871 in serial form and 1878 in volume form). It was then when his long expatriation in Europe began. James published Roderick Hudson (1876), the story of an American sculptor's struggle in Rome between his art and his passions and how these affect his art. It is James' version of "a portrait of the artist UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente as a young man". Simultaneously with his novel he brought out Transatlantic Sketches (1875), his first collection of travel writings. This travel book was followed by The American (1877) and The Europeans (1878), two novels centred on the differences between the two continents which he had written whilst in Paris. The American is about a wealthy American bachelor who goes to Paris to look for a wife. He falls in love with a widow of an aristocratic French family who try to prevent his marrying her by being strongly against the match. He later finds he could bribe her family with information that he has found out about them, but then chooses not to do so, as he does not want to force the marriage. His loved one finally becomes a Carmelite nun. In 1876 James settled in London, which he made his home for the next twenty years. There he wrote the major fiction of his middle years. In 1878 he received international renown with his story of an American flirt in Rome, a novella called Daisy Miller (1879). He became popular in England with some of the leading Victorians: Lord Houghton, Gladstone, Tennison and Browning, among others. James published his stories simultaneously in English and American periodicals. His reputation was founded on his versatile studies of the "American girl". His witty tales seemed to prove that there were different kinds of them. In 1881 he published one of his most popular and accessible novels, Washington Square. It relates the story of Catherine Sloper, a plain, socially awkward heiress who falls in love with the handsome and charming Morris Townsend, a fortune-hunter. Her father, Doctor Sloper, tries to prevent the marriage by threatening to disinherit her. The novel is a battle of wills between father and daughter that takes place in the exquisite drawing-rooms of New York society in the 1850's. James ended this first phase of his literary career with his masterpiece The Portrait of a Lady (1882). This is the story of a young American lady in England who becomes rich through inheritance and marries someone who is only after her money. James offers an appraisal of the American character and embodies the UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente American national myth, that is, an ideal of freedom and equality hedged with historical blindness and pride. 4.2.2. SECOND PHASE OF JAMES' LITERARY CAREER James turned to new topics during his second phase. In the 1880's he wrote two naturalistic novels dealing with social reformers: The Bostonians (1886) and The Princess Casamassima (1886). In the former, a novel of Boston life, James analysed the struggle between conservative masculinity embodied in a Southerner living in the North and an embittered man-hating suffragette. In short, it is a satirical study of the movement for female emancipation in New England. It is the most rounded American social novel of its time in its study of cranks, faddists and "do-gooders". In the latter, a novel set in London in the 1880s, he portrays a range of characters from all social classes. The protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, an orphan who saw his mother only once, when she was dying in prison, whilst learning the trade of a book-binder, meets a proletarian revolutionary and becomes part of his secret society. He meets Princess Casamassima, now separated from her Italian husband. She finds the revolutionary movement an outlet for her energies. Later, when the protagonist realises that he no longer supports the revolutionary society, he is summoned to carry out the assassination of a duke. Trapped and in despair he kills himself. These stories of revolutionaries, reformers and radicals, so very different from his typical "American-European" characters, were not fully appreciated in his time. James decided to regain his popularity and finances by turning dramatist. It was then when James began to toy with writing drama. He wrote seven plays between 1890 and 1895 but he was so unsuccessful that the audience even booed at the end of a performance of one of his own plays (Guy Domville, 1895). He then sought a complete change and began to write quite unique stories such as The Turn of the Screw (1898), a ghost story in which he teases the reader by withholding information, making available to him/her only what the characters see. UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente He now wrote shorter works in which he experimented with three dominant subjects: misunderstood or troubled writers and artists, ghosts and apparitions, and doomed or threatened children and adolescents. 4.2.3. FINAL PHASE OF JAMES' LITERARY CAREER This has been called his major phase due to three grandiose novels that he wrote at the beginning of the century. In these novels he tried to remove himself from being an omniscient and controlling narrator and did his best to become invisible from the reader's awareness. The more the author withdrew, the more the reader was forced to join in the creative process. These novels are "philosophical" studies not only of Western society's modes of survival; they embody a type of social ethics which suggests that man in the West must cultivate the moulds and traditions -however defective they may be- that have shaped him out of chaos, and cherish the artefacts and forms by which he lives. His syntax, The Wings of the Dove has the following plot: Kate Croy, the daughter of a social adventurer, is secretly engaged to a journalist called Merton Densher. During Merton's stay in America Kate becomes a good friend of Milly Theale, a millionaire. Milly confides to Kate that she will die soon from a mysterious death. Merton returns from America and Kate encourages him to marry Milly with the purpose of later marrying Merton as a rich widower. Lord Mark, a fortune-hunter reveals Kate's secret purpose to Milly. Milly dies and soon after Merton receives a letter in which he is informed that he has been made rich and that he can now marry Kate. Merton offers to marry Kate on the condition that she has to refuse his newly-acquired wealth. Kate declines and the novel closes as they separate for ever. The Ambassadors was James's most perfect novel according to him. Lembert Strether, an American widower, is sent to Paris by Mrs Newsome, a wealthy widow, to bring her son Chad back home to take over the family business. If he succeeds in his enterprise, he will be able to marry Mrs Newson. On the way UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente to Paris Lembert meets an American expatriate, Maria Gostrey, who introduces him to sophisticated life in Europe. In Paris Lembert finds that Chad is not willing to go back to America, no doubt influenced by Madame de Vionnet, a refined French lady. Lembert feels gradually more and more reluctant to go back himself. Other "ambassadors" are sent by Mrs Newsome to recover her son Chad. Lembert now supports Chad's decision to remain in France. He has also discovered that Chad is intimately involved with Madame de Vionnet. After some time of reflection, Lembert returns to America. James remained in London until the late 1890s, when he moved to Lamb House in Rye (Sussex). His Englishness was so strong that he became a naturalized citizen in 1915, just after the outbreak of the First World War. Henry James was later awarded the Order of Merit and died in 1916. UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente 5. “THE LOST GENERATION” 5.1. MAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF “THE LOST GENERATION” The experimental and versatile American writer and feminist Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) said once to Ernest Hemingway, "You are all a lost generation". She was referring to a group of American writers who had begun to write in the 1920's. Hemingway used Stein's remark as an epigraph in The Sun Also Rises (1926), a novel that depicts the disillusions of the young expatriates living a dissipated life of alcohol and promiscuity in post-war Paris. The "Lost Generation" included those young American expatriates in France or Spain born around 1900 who started their literary careers in the aftermath of World War I, namely Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, Hart Crane, etc. The term soon caught on and became an appropriate one for this group of writers. They all had the following circumstances in common: - Their inherited values were no longer valid in the post-war and therefore they tried hard to distance themselves from them. Although each one of them discovered and set new ones, they usually failed to adhere to them. For example, Hemingway used courage as a code of conduct both as a man and as a writer, but he ended up committing suicide because he could not fully comply with it; Fitzgerald tried to make his life into a permanent party, and ended up an alcoholic; Dos Passos employed experimental techniques to portray the ever changing trends of modern urban life in the period from a Socialist point of view, but resulted in disillusion in the labour movement and an alignment with conservatism. - They felt unattached to any region or tradition, yet none of them gave up their American citizenship. Nevertheless, in their early books they tried to UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente recapture their long lost childhood and home in an overtly nostalgic manner. - They left America to live in exile, for they believed their country to be too provincial, too materialistic and completely devoid of a cultural and literary tradition. They criticised President Harding's policy of "back to normalcy" after the war. - They all made Paris the centre of their literary activities in the 1920's. In the 1930's the "Lost Generation" writers followed individual directions, therefore losing the distinctive stamp of the post-war period. The last novels considered to belong to the era were Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night (1934) and Dos Passos' The Big Money (1936), the last part of his famous "U.S.A." trilogy (1930-36). 5.2. FRANCIS SCOTT FITZGERALD Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September, 24, 1896, in St Paul, Minnesota. Although his background was precariously middle class, Fitzgerald was sent to a private school for the rich and to Princeton University in 1913, but he left without a degree in 1917 to join the army. While posted in Alabama he met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre, an aspiring writer too. After leaving the army he worked for an advertising agency in New York and managed to sell his first short story, "Babes in the Wood" to The Smart Set. After that he went back to writing his first novel, the one which he had begun while in the army, This Side of Paradise (1920), originally titled "The Romantic Egotist". This novel made him rich and famous. He could now marry his fiancée. This Side of Paradise depicts the disillusionment and moral degradation of post-World War I in America with many autobiographical elements: like Fitzgerald himself, the protagonist, Amory Blaine, goes to Princeton, becomes a member of a literary circle, joins the army, is sent to France, works in an UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente advertising agency, has several love affairs, and at the age of 24, also Fitzgerald's age then, admits to having been too selfish (a romantic egotist) and decides to give a major turn to his life in search of happiness. Fitzgerald became the social critic and glamorous chronicler of the flaming youth of the jazz age (the 1920's) after the publication of two volumes of short stories, Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922). The latter includes his famous "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz". He was fascinated by the aristocracy and by rich people and by the magic properties of wealth and the immunities it could purchase. His second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), was not so successful. It is about a young married man, Anthony Patch, and his wife Gloria, who dilapidate the fortune that Patch's father has reluctantly bequeathed them. They end up becoming alcoholics in an obvious physical and spiritual decline. Fitzgerald and his wife joined the group of American expatriates living in France in 1924, as it was cheaper to lead their idle lifestyle in Europe than in America. There he became good friends with Hemingway and Stein. It was then when he wrote his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby (1925), and some of his finest short stories, collected in All the Sad Young Men (1926). The Great Gatsby shows youth, idleness and richness at variance. The narrator, Nick Carraway, moves to East Egg to spend the summer with his cousin Daisy, married to Tom Buchanan. Jay Gatsby, a rich young man of a dubious past, gives lavish parties in his massive mansion with the hope of attracting funloving Daisy to them. Gatsby had had a romance with her years before, but she had married the rich and ostentatious Tom Buchanan as Gatsby was then poor. Gatsby had made a fortune only to be able to have access to Daisy and be able to deserve her. Gatsby does his best to become friends with Nick, Daisy's cousin, and asks Nick to help him organise a meeting with her. Daisy and Gatsby renew their love for each other. Tom Buchanan has a mistress, the ambitious and frustrated Myrtle Wilson, who is married to a poor wretched mechanic. Myrtle is UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente accidentally killed by Daisy when she is driving Gatsby's car. Mildred's husband shoots Gatsby while he is swimming in his pool, not realising that the Buchanans, and not Gatsby, are the ones to blame for his misfortunes. Nick Carraway, so critical towards Gatsby at the beginning, admits his superior quality at the end. In spite of Gatsby's popular parties, no one but Nick Carraway attend his funeral. During the 1930's the Fitzgeralds constantly travelled from Europe to America and back. Zelda also constantly suffered from mental illness and spent her remaining years in a sanatorium (until she died, in 1948). Fitzgerald struggled to write his last novel, Tender is the Night (1934), after many false starts and corrections. It is not devoid of auto-biographical elements. Dick Diver, a young American psychiatrist in Zurich, becomes interested in the case of a schizophrenic woman, Nicole Warren, and marries her. But their doctor-patient relationship continues into their marriage and stops him from loving her and from pursuing his intellectual career. With their two children they lead a life of leisure in the French Riviera. Diver then becomes infatuated with a young American actress and Nicole falls for a French mercenary. They divorce. By now Diver, who drinks heavily, has his medical career on the verge of ruin. His failure reaches its climax when he returns to America to a small-town medical practice. Fitzgerald's fourth volume of short stories, Taps at Reveille, was published in 1935. In 1937 he dedicated his writing skills to film scripts for Metro-GoldwynMayer in Hollywood without much success. In fact, he was fired due to his alcoholism. He started a relationship with the columnist Sheilah Graham. He also wrote some confessional essays about his broken health and literary decadence, some of which were first published in Esquire magazine ("The Crack-Up", "Pasting It Together" and "Handle with Care") and then posthumously collected together with some other letters and personal notes in The Crack-Up (1945). Although alcoholism had already gripped him completely in 1939, he began another novel, The Last Tycoon, and wrote some more short stories to be collected and published such as The Pat Hobby Stories as late as 1962. Fitzgerald died from a UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente heart attack on 21 December 1940 in Hollywood, leaving The Last Tycoon unfinished. However, though unfinished, it made its way to publication in 1941. 5.3. JOHN STEINBECK John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California in 1902. He attended Stanford University but did not take a degree. Before he achieved literary success he spent considerable time working as a labourer but also as a druggist, caretaker, fruit-picker and surveyor. His first hand observation and experience make his working men characters all the more authentic and real. His first novel, Cup of Gold (1929), is about Morgan the pirate. Steinbeck achieved popularity with Tortilla Flat (1935), a story about Mexican-American "paisanos" in Monterey in a mood of gentle humour. His most famous novels are Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Steinbeck's works are faithful mirrors of the Depression decade (1929-39) in his native California. Of Mice and Men appeared in three versions: as a novel, as a play and as a film. The play won a drama award. It is about two migrant labourers who yearn for some sort of home to settle down in. Its theme is similar to that of his later novels: the essential worth of a man close to the soil contrasted with the commercial dehumanization that confronts him. The peak of his career came with his best known novel, The Grapes of Wrath, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940. It summed up the bitterness of the Depression days and aroused widespread sympathy for the plight of the migratory farm workers. It is about an Oklahoma family, the Joads, who seek a new life in California, hoping to take advantage of what they imagine to be a land of plenty. The grandparents die on the way. Then they have to bear the hard life of fruit pickers. During a strike a minister and a good friend of the family, Jim Casy, dies and Tom Joad kills the aggressor. The family flee and try to hide Tom, but are exhausted by struggle and starvation. Tom has to leave them and the rest of the UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente family struggles on together, although we are not told how. At the controversial end of the novel the eldest daughter Rose of Sharon, who has just given birth to a stillborn baby, nurses an anonymous starving stranger with her own milk from her breast. The novel was made into a notable film in 1940. Out of Steinbeck's indignation at injustice and his admiration for the poor came other well-known works such as The Pearl (1947) and East of Eden (1952). The Pearl depicts the war existing between Mexican natives and white men. The fisherman Kino and his wife Juana desperately need to find a pearl to pay for a doctor to see to their son, Coyotito, who has been stung by a scorpion. Kino finds an extraordinary black pearl which would surely pay for the medical expenses and guarantee their son's schooling for the future. But the pearl only brings them enemies and problems. Everyone tries to cheat them when they try to sell it or to steal it from them. In the end they decide to throw it back into the sea. Steinbeck wrote the script himself for the film version of the novel. Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. At the time of the award his critical reputation was high in Western Europe but had declined in the US partly because the quality of his work deteriorated after World War II. He died in 1968. 5.4. ERNEST HEMINGWAY American novelist and short story writer Ernest Miller Hemingway was born into a middle-class family of a doctor and a music teacher in Illinois on 21 July 1899, the second of six children. The Hemingways spent much of Ernest’s early life in Oak Park, in the Great Lakes region, where he became interested in sports, fishing and hunting. After graduating from high school, in 1917, he worked as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star and then volunteered for service in WWI, but was turned down due to his poor eyesight. He volunteered instead to be an ambulance driver UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente for the American Red Cross and was eventually assigned to the Italian war front in April 1918. At first he took the experience as some kind of game or adventure. On 8 July he was wounded at Fossalta di Piave by an Austrian projectile but managed to drag a wounded soldier through machinegun fire back to the command post, and then collapsed. He was twice decorated for his services by the Italian government. In a Milan hospital, being 19 years old, he fell in love with a 26-year-old American nurse, Agnes von Kurowksy, and proposed marriage to her, but she refused. He returned to America in 1919 and received a hero's welcome at his birthplace. Hemingway married Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives (1921), and worked as a reporter for the Toronto Star on the Greco-Turkish war in 1922. The Hemingways lived in Paris partly off his income as a journalist and partly off her inheritance. His first son was born in 1923. While in Paris he was greatly influenced by a number of expatriate American writers then living there: Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, and above all, Gertrude Stein. Hemingway’s first two published works were mainly collections of short stories: Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923) and In Our Time (1925), both published in Paris. These works, together with Men Without Women (1927) and Winner Take Nothing (1933), are proof of Hemingway's great craft and gift for short story writing. His next novel, The Torrents of Spring (1926), was the first of his works to enjoy some success. It satirised Sherwood Anderson's style. However, the first novel to make him famous was The Sun Also Rises (1926), titled Fiesta in England, based on his stay in Pamplona in 1925 with some friends. It is a story about rootless expatriate Americans and Britons in Europe after WWI in search of exotic sensations and a pleasure-seeking way of life to replace the stable society destroyed by the war. Paris is depicted as a moral wasteland of drunkenness and promiscuity. Next they travel to Pamplona, where they go through a purification process by means of the bullfight. The narrator-hero, Jake Barnes, an American journalist made impotent by a war wound, falls in love UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente with the promiscuous Brett Ashley, who returns his love but becomes engaged to Mike, her bankrupt Scottish fiancé, as she knows that their love can never be consummated. The circle of friends (Jake, Brett, Mike, Bill, Cohn) travels to Pamplona in Spain and are all enthralled by the bullfighting and bullfighter alike. The narrator is angered when Brett runs off with the matador Pedro Romero, whom she eventually leaves too, but the novel ends on a sustained note of bitterness. Cohn is left aside from the circle as he does not share the code of behaviour of the group. To Hemingway, manliness (that is, enjoyment of food, wine, sex, trout-fishing, skiing, shooting and so on) and dignity in failure is more important than actual victory, and Cohn lacks it. The novel was made into a successful film with Ava Gardner and Tyrone Power as protagonists. Hemingway divorced Hadley and married a Roman Catholic, Pauline Pfeiffer, his second wife. Hemingway declared that he himself had been baptised by an Italian priest while he was wounded. Hemingway remained a Catholic all his life. Then he wrote A Farewell to Arms (1929) half in Paris and half in America, where they returned for his wife to have their child. Both wife and baby nearly died at birth: the experience is included in the novel. Before revising the manuscript for publication Hemingway found out that his father, depressed due to illness, had committed suicide. This had a grave effect on the writer: he would also commit suicide years later. Hemingway got the title of the novel from the title of a poem by 16th century George Peele. The novel was initially published as a serial in Scribner's Magazine in 1929. It is about Frederic Henry, a young American lieutenant who volunteers in the Italian ambulance corps in the First World War. Up near the front he meets and falls in love with an English nurse, Catherine Barkley, after being wounded in the knee by a shell while eating macaroni and taken to hospital. By taking part in a general retreat in Caporetto, he comes near to being shot by the Italian "battle police" accused of desertion. He then decides to desert. Frederic and Catherine finally escape to Switzerland, but the nurse dies UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente from a haemorrhage at childbirth. The baby survives and the novel finishes with the protagonist's bitter description of the feeling of unhappiness and isolation that the child has brought about. Hemingway despised the happy ending given to the Hollywood production of the film, starring Gary Cooper as Frederick and Helen Hayes as Catherine. In the novel Catherine dies, but not in the film. During the following years Hemingway lived in Florida and made frequent trips to Europe and Africa. He was particularly interested in Spain and in the art of bullfighting, about which he wrote Death in the Afternoon (1932). Here is described and explained the technical and the emotional appeal of the bull-fight. There are chapters on individual bullfighters, the techniques of the "corrida" and pages about the bulls themselves. Woven into the book there are several short stories and a chapter on the art of writing fiction. Hemingway also published a volume of stories under the title of Winner Take Nothing (1933), which again shows his pessimistic view of life. From his experiences in Africa he wrote The Green Hills of Africa, about his big-game experiences there, a hobby he had taken up as a young boy in his native Illinois. When the Spanish Civil War broke out Hemingway went to Spain as a war correspondent, taking sides for the Republican army. He even wrote a play, the pro-Republican The Fifth Column (1938), about life in sieged Madrid. But as a correspondent he did not succeed. His war reports were far too novelesque. Hemingway did not hide having added a bit of fiction to them. At that time Hemingway divorced his second wife and married his third, the journalist Martha Gelhorn. From his experiences in the war came his successful novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). The title of the book is taken from a quotation by John Donne meaning that any loss of freedom anywhere means a reduction of it everywhere. High in the pine forests of the Spanish mountains, a guerrilla band operating behind the lines of Franco's army prepares to blow up a bridge. Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer, has been sent from the Spanish Republic to handle UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente the dynamiting. He meets Maria, a young Spanish woman escaped from Franco's territory, and falls in love with her. Hemingway himself chose Ingrid Bergman and Gary Cooper as protagonists for Sam Wood's film version of 1943. At the end of WWII, 1945, Hemingway became a war correspondent again. He went to Cuba and he married his fourth wife, Mary Welch. His following works did not contain his usual quality: The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936), To Have and Have Not (1937) and Across the River and into the Trees (1950). He did not really write anything up to standard again until 1952, with The Old Man and the Sea, one of his most acclaimed works, for which he was given the Pulitzer Prize. The Old Man and the Sea is about greatness in spite of failure: an old Cuban called Santiago manages to catch a massive sword-fish with great effort. As he pulls the fish ashore a school of sharks devour it. In spite of his failure, he transpires dignity. Two years later, in 1954, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His poor health in the 1950's, the physical consequences of his two plane accidents in Africa and the decline in his literary career led to mental depression. In June 1961 he committed suicide. A slim posthumous volume appeared in 1964, A Moveable Feast, a memoir of his days in Paris in the 1920's. The reason why he killed himself may have been linked to the fact that he always believed himself to be a man of action, a man who, many say, was unbearable due to his constant boasting of his masculinity and courage. He thought himself to be the best at everything: he thought he was the best writer of the time, the best hunter, the best fighter, the best drinker, the best lover (indeed, he even once boasted having slept with over 1000 women, including Mata Hari). Yet, towards his sixties he found he could not keep pace with his life and art any more. Despite the Nobel Prize, his later novels, with the exception of The Old Man and the Sea, were not really up to scratch and he was aware of this. Not only that; his ways with women were also declining. He finally took his own father's way out. UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente 5.5. WILLIAM FAULKNER'S FICTION 5.5.1. FAULKNER'S LIFE William Falkner was the oldest of four brothers born to Murry C. and Maud Butler Falkner on September 25, 1897 in New Albany, northern Mississippi. His surname was originally Falkner, but he had it changed to "Faulkner" after a spelling mistake of an editor. Five years later the Falkners moved to Oxford, where they ran a farm and a stable and where the writer and his family spent most of their lives. Young Faulkner always felt very proud of his Southern origin, his greatgrandfather Colonel William C. Falkner, of the Confederate army, a Civil War hero and a novelist himself, author of the best selling romantic novel The White Rose of Memphis, and his black servant, Caroline Barr ("Mammy Callie"), from who he learnt many stories that dated back to the days of slavery, many of which he used in his novels. His vivid imagination would did the rest. Faulkner was never a good student and soon dropped out from high school. He fell in love with Estelle Oldham, but could not afford to marry her, therefore he started to work as a bank clerk. It was then when he became fond of reading English classical and modern literature (Dickens, Wilde, T. S. Eliot, Joyce, etc) and the works of the French Symbolists (Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé) thanks to the influence of Phillip Stone, a well-read neighbour who worked in his family's office. When his beloved Estelle married somebody else Faulkner joined the Royal Air Force Canada in 1918, just before the Great War ended, so he did not have time to take part in any military action. After the war he enrolled at the University of Mississippi, apparently more interested in joining a fraternity in order to publish his poems in their literary magazine than in studying a degree. He left his university studies without finishing them and worked in odd jobs, the post of postmaster of the university station being his most permanent one. UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente 5.5.2. FAULKNER'S APPRENTICE WORKS Phillip Stone himself paid part of the expenses for the publication of Faulkner's first book, a book of pastoral poems called The Marble Faun (1924). In 1925 Faulkner joined a literary circle in New Orleans, though he kept a low profile in it. He then wrote his first novel, Soldier's Pay (1926). It is the story of a physically and psychologically wounded aviator who returns to his native Georgia to change the lives of his relatives and friends. It was highly appraised by Sherwood Anderson, who recommended it to his publisher. In the meantime Faulkner sailed to Italy and travelled to Paris on foot, until he received news from the publisher accepting to publish it. He then went back to America. Faulkner went on earning his living by odd jobs (house painter, carpenter, golfer, sailor and even smuggler). This did not prevent him from writing. Faulkner was an isolated man from a social and literary point of view. He was producing lots of poems and above all short stories, which were all being passed on to his friend Stone to read. They would then be sent for publication in literary magazines, but with little success. He managed to publish his second novel, Mosquitoes (1927), a satirical picture of the New Orleans literary circle, but had his third novel, Flags in the Dust, rejected. He changed its title to Sartoris, made some modifications to its manuscript and was finally accepted by another publisher (1929). It was the first novel to be set in the fictional Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha. 5.5.3. FAULKNER'S MATURE WORKS Faulkner wrote and published The Sound and the Fury in 1929. It describes the decay of an aristocratic family, the Compson, and indirectly, the fall of social order from four different points of view. The Compson family is introduced through the mind of the idiot Benjy. Its innovative narrative technique (the use of multiple points of view) and the depth of the psychology of the characters make it the first of his masterpieces. Its experimental nature and its non-chronological UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente structure were the possible reasons for its limited popular success. This is the second novel to fully deal with the imaginary world that he created in his works, the Yoknapatawpha county (with its fictional county seat at Jefferson), set in the state of Mississippi. The social atmosphere of the South depicted in Faulkner's later novels and first presented in Sartoris and The Sound and the Fury is that of an aristocratic society whose traditional values and economic wealth relies on the slaves and plantation tradition. In Faulkner's novels Southern society is doomed to self-destruction. Faulkner married Estelle Oldham after the failure of her first marriage in 1929. He then started to write Sanctuary, which was at first rejected by the publisher on the grounds that it would take them all to jail if it were published. Indeed, Faulkner himself believed that it was the most horrible tale he could imagine. In the meantime, and while working as a fireman, he wrote As I Lay Dying (1930). It is about a poor white family, the Bundrens, and their journey through fire and flood to bury their mother in Jefferson, in the county of Yoknapatawpha. The novel is composed of 59 monologues by a variety of characters who gradually reveal their complex ties. The good reviews that Faulkner was getting for The Sound and the Fury brought attention to his short stories: his famous "A Rose for Emily" (1930) was the first of many to be published in a national magazine. From then on his literary production became impressive. Between 1930 and 1942 he published two collections of short stories, his second and last book of poems (A Green Bough, 1933), nine novels and dozens of film scripts for Hollywood, the most famous of which are Hemingway's version of To Have and Have Not (1945) and Chandler's The Big Sleep (1946). In 1931 Faulkner finally managed to publish Sanctuary, his most popular success, though some of its original horror had been deleted. His next novels were Light in August (1932); Pylon (1935); Absalom, Absalom! (1936); The Unvanquished (1938); The Wild Palms (1939); The Hamlet (1940), Go Down, UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente Moses (1942), and the short story "The Bear". All these novels have in common three novelties as far as American fiction is concerned: the events depicted in the narrations are determined by a sense of place, a sense of history and a sense of community. In fact, Faulkner serves as the spokesman of the voice of the community. However, in each novel he adopts a completely different approach or method to solve the problem with which he himself has begun the novel. These methods were usually a consequence of the influence that the Modernists or the Symbolists had on him. This is for example the case of the interior monologue or stream of conscience, which he borrowed from Joyce. But Faulkner developed it in his own personal way. These interior monologues were for example often those of idiots or insane characters. By 1945 Faulkner had virtually been forgotten in America (though not in France, thanks to the superb quality of the translations of his works). In order to make a living Faulkner felt forced to accept writing film scripts in Hollywood. The most interesting of his mature fictional production is Absalom, Absalom!, which concerns the frustrated attempts of Thomas Sutpen to found a Southern dynasty in 19th century Mississippi. The story is told by Quentin Compson, a character taken from The Sound and the Fury. Compson is obsessed by the South's failure in the interracial relationships of its inhabitants, a fact that gives rise to the misfortunes of the Sutpen family. 5.5.4. FAULKNER'S LATE WRITING Faulkner's revival came in 1946 with the publication of The Portable Faulkner, which presented the Yoknapatawpha saga as a whole. Publishers and the public took a deeper interest in his work. In 1948 he published a relatively successful novel, Intruder in the Dark, about a white boy who saves a proud Negro, Lucas Beauchamp, from being lynched. In 1949 Faulkner was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The National Book Award was given to him for Collected Stories (1950). UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente Soon after, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (1949). He travelled extensively abroad representing his country in spite of his shyness and showed open sympathy for the cause of the blacks, a fact that provoked some scandal in a segregational country like the USA. This did not prevent Faulkner from declaring his pride in the South and its lifestyle. In 1951 Faulkner published his only drama, a play of three acts called Requiem for a Nun, staged in some European venues with little success. Each act is accompanied by a narrative prologue that gives the play the effect of a novel. In 1954 he published his longest novel, A Fable. It is a pessimistic and ambiguous book about the reincarnation of Christ in a French corporal in the First World War. It won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1955. In his last fiction, The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959), Faulkner continues with the Yoknapatawpha story, but in a kinder and less demoniac tone. The Reivers (1962), his very last novel, is a comical recreation of youth published only one month before his death in an Oxford hospital on July, 6, 1962. UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente 6. DIDACTIC UNIT: PEARL S. BUCK 1 1. PRE-ACTIVITY: ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS ORALLY. a) What do you know about David Bowie? b) What does he look like? c) Where is he from? d) Why do think he is relevant in a unit on China? 2) PRE-ACTIVITY: BRAIN-STORMING: THE VIDEO CLIP OF THE SONG “CHINA GIRL” IS FULL OF CLICHÉS ON CHINA. CAN YOU ANTICIPATE WHICH ONES? TELL YOUR TEACHER AND YOUR CLASSMATES. WRITE YOUR OPINIONS ON THE BLACKBOARD AND SEE WHERE YOU COINCIDE WITH THE VIDEO CLIP. 3) LISTEN TO THE SONG, SPOT THE MISTAKES AND CHANGE THEM FOR THE RIGHT WORD(S). China Girl David Bowie - Oh oh oh ohoo little china girl Oh oh oh ohoo little china girl 1 Our special thanks to Ms Rui Ma for her kindness to allow us to use some activities from her research, for having shared some interesting ideas with us and for her availability to answer any doubts on China and her culture. UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente I could escape this feeling, with my China Girl I feel a wreck without my little China Girl I hear her heart beating, loud as thunder Saw the waves (STARS) crashing I'm OK with my little China Girl (I`M A MESS WITHOUT) Wake up in the morning. Where's my, little China Girl? I hear our heart's beating, loud as thunder I saw the stars crashing down I'm feelin' tragic like I'm Marilyn Monroe (MARLON BRANDO) When I look at my China Girl I could pretend that nothing really meant too much When I look at my China Girl I stumble into town just like a sacred mouse (COW) Visions of swastikas in my head Plans for everyone It's in the pupils of my eyes (WHITE) My little China Girl You shouldn't mess with me I'll ruin everything you are I'll give you videos (TELEVISION) I'll give you eyes of blue I'll give you a man who wants to rule the planet (EARTH) And when I get excited My little China Girl says Oh baby just you shut your face (MOUTH) She says... shh She says... shh She says She says UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente And when I get excited My little China Girl says Oh baby just you shut your mouth And when I get excited My little China Girl says Oh baby just you shut your mouth She says... shh She says Oh oh oh ohoo little china girl Oh oh oh ohoo little china girl Oh oh oh ohoo little china girl Oh oh oh ohoo little china girl Oh oh oh ohoo little china girl [Lyrics from http://www.metrolyrics.com/china-girl-lyrics-david-bowie.html]. Consulted on 29 June, 2010.] 4. READ THE LYRICS OF THE SONG AND LOOK FOR THE FOLLOWING TERMS IN THE TEXT: a) A synonym of SPOIL (verb): ruin b) An antonym of CLOSE (verb): shut c) A synonym of MASTER (verb): rule d) An antonym of LOW (adjective): loud 5. WATCH THE VIDEO CLIP OF DAVID BOWIE’S “CHINA GIRL” TWICE. IDENTIFY THE CHINESE CLICHÉS THAT YOU SEE AND TELL THE CLASS ABOUT YOUR FINDINGS. - UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente - 6. POST-ACTIVITY: WHICH OF THE CLICHÉS MENTIONED BY THE STUDENTS IN ACTIVITY 4 COINCIDE WITH THE CLICHÉS THAT APPEAR IN THE VIDEO CLIP? - 7. PRE-ACTIVITY: BEFORE WATCHING THE FILM “THE LAST EMPEROR” IN ENGLISH, WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES, ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS ORALLY. a) What kind of film do you expect to watch? A comedy, a tragedy, an action film, a thriller, a biography, a historical film? b) What do you know about the life of an emperor? c) Brainstorming activity: What do you know about China’s dynasties? Tell your teacher to write your ideas on the blackboard as you tell him/her and comment on them. d) What do you know about Mao Zedong’s revolution? 8. DURING ACTIVITY: WATCH THE FILM AT HOME (YOUR TEACHER WILL PROVIDE YOU WITH A CD COPY) OR WATCH SOME EXCERPTS CHOSEN UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente BY THE TEACHER. DO NOT FORGET TO TAKE NOTES ON ASPECTS THAT ATTRACT YOUR ATTENTION. 9. POST-ACTIVITY: AFTER WATCHING THE FILM, ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS ORALLY. a) Where does the story take place? b) What was the emperor’s name? c) How old was the last Chinese emperor when he inherited the throne? d) How many wives did the emperor have? e) What effect did Mao Zedong’s revolution have on the emperor’s life? f) What was the ex-emperor’s last job? g) Food for thought: The Chinese say that if you wish to be happy for one day, you should get drunk; if you wish to be happy for one year, you should get married, and if you wish to be happy all your life you should be a gardener. Do you think the protagonist was happy at the end of the film? Reason your answer. 10. PRE-ACTIVITY: YOU MAY NEED TO LEARN NEW WORDS IN ORDER TO WRITE A SUMMARY OF THE FILM. MAKE A LIST OF TERMS AND EXPRESSIONS THAT YOU THINK YOU MAY NEED AND LOOK THEM UP IN A DICTIONARY OR ANY OTHER REFERENCE BOOK (INCLUDING DICTIONARIES IN THE INTERNET). UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente 11. WRITE A SUMMARY OF THE FILM IN 150 WORDS APPROXIMATELY. HAND IT TO YOUR TEACHER FOR HIM/HER TO MARK IT. IF YOU CAN, STICK TO THE FOLLOWING GUIDELINES: - Include the title and the production year of the film. - Do not retell the complete plot. - Make your summary as appealing to the reader as possible. - Write the summary thinking of your likely readers (that is, people who have not seen the film). - Do not forget to add your opinion of it at the end. 12. POST-ACTIVITY: COMPARE YOUR CORRECTED SUMMARY WITH THAT OF A CLASSMATE’S. HAVE YOU WRITTEN A SUMMARY WITH THE SAME MAIN IDEAS? HAVE YOU MADE SIMILAR MISTAKES? STUDY BOTH SUMMARIES AND DEBATE ON THEM. 13. PRE-ACTIVITY: ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS ORALLY. a) Do you know the name of a Nobel Prize for Literature? b) Do you know the name of an English-speaking Nobel Prize for Literature? c) Do you know the name of a woman Nobel Prize for Literature? d) Do you know the name of an English-speaking woman Nobel Prize for Literature? UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente 14. READ THE FOLLOWING TEXT ON PEARL S. BUCK AND ANSWER THE FOLLOWING WRITTEN COMPREHENSION QUESTIONS (intensive reading). PEARL S. BUCK (Also known by her Chinese name “Sai Zhenzhu”) (Chinese: 賽珍珠; pinyin: Sài Zhēnzhū) Beloved by millions of readers, The Good Earth has been one of the most popular novels of this century since its publication in 1931. The book won the Pulitzer Prize and the William Dean Howells medal for fiction. For over 30 years, Pearl Buck's novel played a major role in shaping Western attitudes towards China. Born in Hillsboro, West Virginia, in 1892 to an ill-matched pair of Southern Presbyterian missionaries, Pearl Sydenstricker was taken to China at the age of three months and lived there for forty years. A rarity among white American writers, she spent her childhood as a minority person, an experience that had much to do with her lifelong passion for interracial understanding. Raised in Chinkiang, a small port city in Kiangsu province (China), by the time she was four she spoke and wrote Chinese as well as English. Upon her mother's insistence, Pearl was educated at Randolph-Macon Women's College in Lynchburg, Virginia. In 1917 she married Lossing Buck, a Cornell Graduate working in China, and spent the next several years in Nanhsuchou, a barren rural village, home to several thousand impoverished farmers. She became UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente intimately familiar with the daily lives of China's poorest inhabitants, and a decade later the village would provide the primary setting for her first stories of China, including The Good Earth. She would publish over seventy books during her long, productive career, including many bestsellers, most of them about China, her culture and her people, but The Good Earth would prove to be her most enduring. In 1935, Pearl divorced Lossing Buck in order to marry her publisher and editor, Richard Walsh. They moved to Green Hills Farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. In 1938 she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature; it would be fifty-five years before another, Toni Morrison, would win. In essays, lectures, and novels, she was an active supporter of the Chinese in their war against the Japanese invasion. She and Walsh raised millions of dollars that were sent to China for medical relief. Along with her tireless efforts on behalf of the Chinese, Pearl was also active in the campaigns for African-American civil rights, the equal rights amendment, and a nuclear test ban. After World War II, she found herself under attack by Senator Joseph McCarthy and other right-wing politicians for her liberal views, and became a target of F.B.I. surveillance which began in 1938 and continued to the end of her life. In 1949, Pearl founded “Welcome House” in order to find homes for thousands of mixed-race children who had been fathered by American Servicemen in Asia. In the last twenty years of her life, she established the “Pearl S. Buck Foundation” to provide foster care for Asian-American Children who could not be adopted by American families. Eventually she moved to the small New England town of Danby, Vermont where she died in 1973 at the age of eighty. Pearl lived half her lifetime in the East, half in the West. She began in poverty and ended her life as a UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente millionaire, along the way winning the most coveted literary prize in the world. She played a leading role in major twentieth-century struggles for human rights and established herself as one of the most powerful women of the century. In all of this, she left a legacy far larger than her classic novel, The Good Earth, and her other writings. She is buried as she had instructed, at Green Hills Farm, beneath a large ash tree. Her tombstone, which she designed, does not record her name in English; instead the Chinese characters representing the name Pearl Sydenstricker are inscribed. By Peter Conn [From http://www.michaelbutler.com/cyberbil/pearl2/pbbio.html. Consulted on 28 June 2010] 15. ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS WITH INFORMATION TAKEN FROM THE PREVIOUS TEXT. a) How many times did Pearl S. Buck get married? b) Where did Pearl S. Buck base the setting of her first novels? c) Why was she criticized by Senator McCarthy? d) What did “Welcome House” do for mixed-race children? 16. READ THE FOLLOWING STATEMENTS AND DECIDE IF THEY ARE TRUE OF FALSE ACCORDING TO THE INFORMATION GIVEN IN THE PREVIOUS TEXT. JUSTIFY YOUR ANSWERS. UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente a) For many years The Good Earth has contributed to spreading an image of China internationally. [TRUE. Lines 7-10: “For over 30 years, Pearl Buck’s novel played a major role in shaping Western attitudes towards China.”] b) Pearl S. Buck was 55 years old when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. [FALSE. Lines 55-59: “In 1938 she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature; it would be fifty-five years before another, Toni Morrison, would win.”] c) The authoress started as a poor woman but became rich at the end of her life. [TRUE. Lines 98-102: “She began in poverty and ended her life as a millionaire …”] d) On the tomb where Pearl S, Buck is buried you can read her name in English and Chinese. [FALSE. Lines 117-122: “Her tombstone, which she designed, does not record her name in English; instead the Chinese characters representing her name Pearl Sydenstricker are inscribed”.] 17. TRANSLATE THE FOLLOWING TITLES OF PEARL S. BUCK’S NOVELS INTO SPANISH. YOU CAN WRITE THE TRANSLATIONS OR TELL YOUR CLASSMATES ORALLY. COMPARE YOUR TRANSLATIONS WITH THOSE OF YOUR CLASSMATES. FIND OUT IF THEY HAVE BEEN TRANSLATED INTO SPANISH AND COMPARE YOUR TITLES WITH THOSE GIVEN IN THE PUBLISHED SPANISH VERSIONS. East Wind:West Wind (1930) The House of Earth (1935) o The Good Earth (1931) o Sons (1933) o A House Divided (1935) The Mother (1933) UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente This Proud Heart (1938) The Patriot (1939) Other Gods (1940) China Sky (1941) Dragon Seed (1942) The Promise (1943) China Flight (1943) The Townsman (1945) -- as John Sedges Portrait of a Marriage (1945) Pavilion of Women (1946) The Angry Wife (1947) -- as John Sedges Peony (1948) The Big Wave (1948) A Long Love (1949) -- as John Sedges Kinfolk (1950) God's Men (1951) The Hidden Flower (1952) Come, My Beloved (1953) Voices in the House (1953) -- as John Sedges Imperial Woman (1956) UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente Letter from Peking (1957) Command the Morning (1959) Satan Never Sleeps (1962) Death in the Castle (1965) The Time Is Noon (1966) Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (1967) The New Year (1968) The Three Daughters of Madame Liang (1969) Mandala (1970) The Goddess Abides (1972) All Under Heaven (1973) The Rainbow (1974) 18. BEFORE READING PEARL BUCK’S THE GOOD EARTH IT MIGHT BE A GOOD IDEA TO READ THIS BRIEF PRESENTATION. The novel The Good Earth (1931) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1932. It became a best-seller in the US and was surely a reason for her winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. It is the first book in a trilogy that includes Songs (1932) and A House Divided (1935). It is about the life of a family in a Chinese village before the 1949 Revolution. The novel helped prepare the American citizenship of that decade to see China as an ally in UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente WWII against Japan. It was made into a successful film in 1937. It would certainly be a good idea to watch the film after reading the novel. 19. NOW THAT YOU HAVE READ PEARL BUCK’S THE GOOD EARTH, READ THE FOLLOWING PLOT SUMMARY OF THE BOOK, THERE ARE SELECTED MISTAKES IN BOLD TYPE. CORRECT THEM BY OFFERING THE RIGHT WORDS OR EXPRESSIONS. The story begins on Ling Fong’s wedding day and follows the rise and fall of his fortunes. The House of Hwang, a family of wealthy landowners, lives in the nearby town, and Wang Lung's wife is a slave there. As the House of Hwang slowly declines due to the consumption of cannabis and the spending and borrowing of too much money, Wang Lung, through his own hard work and the skill of his wife, O-Lan, slowly earns enough to buy land from the Hwang family. Chee Tang delivers two sons and two girls, the first becomes mentally retarded as a result of starvation during the famine. Wang Lung feels sorry for her and calls her "Poor Fool". O-Lan kills her second baby as soon as she is born and the little corpse is left out to be eaten by a wolf by Wang Lung. During the famine and drought, the family must emigrate to the Southern City in search of work. Wang Lung's evil grandfather offers to buy his possessions and land, but for much less than their real value. The family sells everything except the land and the house. Wang Lung then faces the long journey south on foot, contemplating how the family will survive, when he discovers that the “Wind Boat”, as the locals call the newly-built train, takes people south for a fee. While in the city, O-Lan and the children turn to juggling while Wang Lung pulls a rickshaw. Wang Lung's father begs but does not earn any money and spends the time looking at the city. They find themselves like strangers among their inhabitants of the city who look different and speak in a fast accent. They do not go hungry any more, due to the charitable meals of rice gruel that they receive for only one dollar, but still live in UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente poverty. Wang Lung dreams about going back to his homeland. When soldiers approach the city he can only work at night hauling merchandise because he is afraid of being called to the army. When a food riot erupts, a mob breaks into the house of a slim and kind poor man who offers Wang Lung all of his money in exchange for his life. When he returns home, Wang Lung buys an elephant and farm tools, and even hires servants to help him work in his beloved land. In time, more children are born. Using money O-Lan looted from the house in the southern city, Wang Lung is able to buy the House of Hwang's land. He is eventually able to send his sons to be educated and learn to the trade of a barber. As Wang Lung becomes richer, he buys a concubine named Lotus. O-Lan dies just after her first son's wedding. Wang Lung and his family move into town and rent the old House of Hwang. Wang Lung, now an old man, wants peace and a quiet life, but there are always arguments among his sons and their wives. Wang Lung's third son runs away to become a magician. At the end of the novel, Wang Lung learns that his sons are planning to sell the land and he tries to convince them not to. They tell him not to worry, as they will not sell the lands, but their real intention is to do it all the same. 20. WRITE AS MUCH AS YOU CAN REMEMBER FROM THE FOLLOWING CHARACTERS FROM THE BOOK. CHOOSE A MINUMUM OF FIVE OF THEM. a) Wang Lung— b) O-Lan— c) Wang Lung's father - UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente d) The Poor Fool— e) Second Baby Girl— f) Nung En (Eldest Son)— g) Nung Wen (Middle Son)— h) Eldest Son's Wife— i) Middle Son's Wife— j) Youngest Son— k) Youngest Daughter— l) Wang Lung's Uncle— m) Uncle's Wife— UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente n) Uncle's Son— o) Ching— p) Lotus— q) Cuckoo— r) Pear Blossom— 21. COMPETITION: PREPARE 4 DIFFICULT QUESTIONS (AND THEIR ANSWERS) ABOUT THE BOOK, AND ASK YOUR PARTNER THEM. 22. READ THE FOLLOWING TEXT AND ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS. Suddenly, it seemed to Wang Lung that he was a very old man. He did not want to do anything except sit in the sun or talk to the little slave called Pear Blossom. Pear Blossom comforted him and he felt that she was like a daughter to him. Wang Lung was very kind to her and, because of his kindness, she was kind to the poor fool. This pleased Wang Lung. Many times he had wondered what would happen to the poor fool when he died. Who would look after her? UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente His son’s wives did not care about her and his sons were too busy with other things. Wang Lung had even bought a little bundle of white poison from a medicine shop. He thought he would give her this just before he died. But, ever since he had bought it, he had been very anxious at the thought of giving it to her. It worried him even more than the thought of his own death. (Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth) a) Why did b) Why had Wang Lung bought a little recipient of white poison? c) Why was Wang Lung worried about Pear Blossom? 23. WRITE QUESTIONS TO THE FOLLOWING ANSWERS: a) _______________________________? He only wanted to sit in the sun or talk to the little slave called Pear Blossom. b) _______________________________? He bought a little bundle of white poison. c) _______________________________? It worried him even more than his own death. UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente 24. WRITE AN ESSAY OF ABOUT 150 WORDS ON ONE OF THE FOLLOWING TOPICS: a) Any aspect of China that you find interesting. b) Did you like Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth? Why (not)? UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente Solutions to Didactic unit on Pearl S. Buck 1) Students’ free answers. Answers: a) He was a famous singer during the 1970s, 80s and early 90s; b) His looks were very eccentric. His eye pupils were famous for being of two different colours; c) He is British; d) He sang a very famous song in the 1980s called “China Girl”. Its video was banned by the BBC because it showed some mild nudity, but the result was that it increased the sales of the record. 2) Students’ free oral answers. 3) China Girl David Bowie - Oh oh oh ohoo little china girl Oh oh oh ohoo little china girl I could escape this feeling, with my China Girl I feel a wreck without my little China Girl I hear her heart beating, loud as thunder Saw the waves (STARS) crashing I'm OK with my little China Girl (I`M A MESS WITHOUT) Wake up in the morning. Where's my, little China Girl? I hear our heart's beating, loud as thunder I saw the stars crashing down I'm feelin' tragic like I'm Marilyn Monroe (MARLON BRANDO) UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente When I look at my China Girl I could pretend that nothing really meant too much When I look at my China Girl I stumble into town just like a sacred mouse (COW) Visions of swastikas in my head Plans for everyone It's in the pupils of my eyes (WHITE) My little China Girl You shouldn't mess with me I'll ruin everything you are I'll give you videos (TELEVISION) I'll give you eyes of blue I'll give you a man who wants to rule the planet (EARTH) And when I get excited My little China Girl says Oh baby just you shut your face (MOUTH) She says... shh She says... shh She says She says And when I get excited My little China Girl says Oh baby just you shut your mouth And when I get excited My little China Girl says Oh baby just you shut your mouth She says... shh She says Oh oh oh ohoo little china girl Oh oh oh ohoo little china girl UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente Oh oh oh ohoo little china girl Oh oh oh ohoo little china girl Oh oh oh ohoo little china girl 4) a) A synonym of SPOIL (verb): ruin b) An antonym of CLOSE (verb): shut c) A synonym of MASTER (verb): rule d) An antonym of LOW (adjective): loud 5) Possible answers: protagonists eating with chopsticks at a Chinese restaurant; male protagonist joking with the Chinese girl about her almond eyes; Chinese girl working at a restaurant, posing at the entrance of a restaurant; Chinese girl holding a bowl of rice, Chinese girl dressed up in the traditional Chinese manner, Chinese girl with long nails, Chinese girl dressed in revolutionary clothes carrying a red flag, etc. 6) Possible answers: protagonists eating with chopsticks at a Chinese restaurant; male protagonist joking with the Chinese girl about her almond eyes; Chinese girl working at a restaurant, posing at the entrance of a restaurant; Chinese girl holding a bowl of rice, Chinese girl dressed up in the traditional Chinese manner, Chinese girl with long nails, Chinese girl dressed in revolutionary clothes carrying a red flag, etc. 7) a) It is a mixture of a biography and a historical film with some tragical elements. UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente b) Student’s free answers. c) Student’s free answers. d) Student’s free answers. 8) Students own notes 9) a) The story takes place in China and in occupied Manchukuo. b) [His name was Puyi.] c) [He was four years old.] d) He had two official wives. e) The emperor was dethroned, judged and converted into a normal citizen, like everybody else. f) He was a gardener. g) Student’s free answers. 10) Student’s personal list of words and expressions. UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente 11) Student’s personal summary of the film. 12) Students’ oral analyses of their work and debate on their mistakes. 13) Students’ possible answers: a) Presumably students will say the names of the Spanish Nobel Prize winners: José Echegaray (Literature), Santiago Ramón y Cajal (Medicine), Juan Ramón Jiménez (Literature), Severo Ochoa (Medicine), Vicente Aleixandre (Literature), Camilo José Cela (Literature), Mario Vargas Llosa (Peruvian nationalized Spanish); b) Students’ free answers; c) Students’ free answers, although someone might say Marie Curie; d) Students’ free answers. Regrettably, they are not expected to mention Pearl S. Buck. 14) Students read the text. 15) a) Twice. b) She based it on the rural village of Nanhsouchou. c) She had liberal views on political issues. d) It provided houses for them. 16) a) For many years The Good Earth has contributed to spreading an image of China internationally. [TRUE. Lines 7-10: “For over 30 years, Pearl Buck’s novel played a major role in shaping Western attitudes towards China.”] UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente b) Pearl S. Buck was 55 years old when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. [FALSE. Lines 55-59: “In 1938 she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature; it would be fifty-five years before another, Toni Morrison, would win.”] c) The authoress started as a poor woman but became rich at the end of her life. [TRUE. Lines 98-102: “She began in poverty and ended her life as a millionaire …”] d) On the tomb where Pearl S, Buck is buried you can read her name in English and Chinese. [FALSE. Lines 117-122: “Her tombstone, which she designed, does not record her name in English; instead the Chinese characters representing her name Pearl Sydenstricker are inscribed”.] 17) Students’ translations. 18) Students read. 19) The story begins on Ling Fong’s [WANG LUNG’S] wedding day and follows the rise and fall of his fortunes. The House of Hwang, a family of wealthy landowners, lives in the nearby town, and Wang Lung's wife is a slave there. As the House of Hwang slowly declines due to the consumption of cannabis [OPIUM] and the spending and borrowing of too much money, Wang Lung, through his own hard work and the skill of his wife, O-Lan, slowly earns enough to buy land from the Hwang family. Chee Tang [O-LAN] delivers two sons and two girls, the first becomes mentally retarded as a result of starvation during the famine. Wang Lung feels sorry for her and calls her "Poor Fool". O-Lan kills her second baby as soon as she is born and the little corpse is left out to be UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente eaten by a wolf [DOG] by Wang Lung. During the famine and drought, the family must emigrate to the Southern City in search of work. Wang Lung's evil grandfather [UNCLE] offers to buy his possessions and land, but for much less than their real value. The family sells everything except the land and the house. Wang Lung then faces the long journey south on foot, contemplating how the family will survive, when he discovers that the “Wind Boat” [“FIRE WAGON”], as the locals call the newly-built train, takes people south for a fee. While in the city, O-Lan and the children turn to juggling [BEGGING] while Wang Lung pulls a rickshaw. Wang Lung's father begs but does not earn any money and spends the time looking at the city. They find themselves like strangers among their inhabitants of the city who look different and speak in a fast accent. They do not go hungry any more, due to the charitable meals of rice gruel that they receive for only one dollar [CENT], but still live in poverty. Wang Lung dreams about going back to his homeland. When soldiers approach the city he can only work at night hauling merchandise because he is afraid of being called to the army. When a food riot erupts, a mob breaks into the house of a slim and kind poor man [FAT AND FEARFUL RICH MAN] man who offers Wang Lung all of his money in exchange for his life. When he returns home, Wang Lung buys an elephant [OX] and farm tools, and even hires servants to help him work in his beloved land. In time, more children are born. Using money [JEWELS] O-Lan looted from the house in the southern city, Wang Lung is able to buy the House of Hwang's land. He is eventually able to send his sons to be educated and learn to the trade of a barber [MERCHANT]. As Wang Lung becomes richer, he buys a concubine named Lotus. O-Lan dies just after her first son's wedding. Wang Lung and his family move into town and rent the old House of Hwang. Wang Lung, now an old man, wants peace and a quiet life, but there are always arguments among his sons and their wives. Wang Lung's third son runs away to become a magician [SOLDIER]. At the end of the novel, Wang Lung learns that his sons are UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente planning to sell the land and he tries to convince them not to. They tell him not to worry, as they will not sell the lands, but their real intention is to do it all the same. 20) a) Wang Lung: He was a poor, hard-working farmer, born and raised in a small village of Anhwei. He follows morals and Chinese traditions: filial piety and duty to family. He believes the land is the source of happiness and wealth. He later becomes a very successful man and possesses a large plot of land which he buys from the House of Hwang. b) O-Lan: Wang Lung’s first wife. She used to be a slave in the house of Hwang. She doesn’t speak much. She is not particularly clever but she is valuable to Wang Lung. She is hardworking and is prepared for any sacrifice. c) Wang Lung's father : He would like his grandchildren to respect and keep him company when he is old. He gradually becomes more and more dependent and behaves like a child. d) The Poor Fool: First daughter and third child of O-Lan and Wang Lung. She becomes mentally with age. Her mental illness was provoked by starvation in her childhood. Wang Lung loves her very much. e) Second Baby Girl: She was suffocated just after she had been born by O-Lan because the whole family was going hungry and they could not feed her. f) Nung En (Eldest Son): He becomes a scholar and resembles the sons of Hwang. g) Nung Wen (Middle Son): He becomes a merchant: practical and cunning. He dislikes his elder brother for allowing his wife to be avaricious and eager for riches. UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente h) Eldest Son's Wife: The daughter of a grain merchant and a city woman who hates the middle son's wife. She is brought to the house before O-Lan dies and is accepted by her. i) Middle Son's Wife: A happy country woman. She hates the first son's wife. Her first child is a girl. j) Youngest Son: Although Wang Lung had originally planned that he would be in charge of the farm while his other brothers were educated, he became selfish and decided to leave the house and join the army. k) Youngest Daughter: She was the twin sister of the youngest son. She was betrothed to a merchant's son earlier due to harassment from her cousin. l) Wang Lung's Uncle: Lazy and cunning man who becomes a member of a band of thieves. He also becomes addicted to opium. m) Uncle's Wife: A friend of Lotus and also addicted to opium. n) Uncle's Son: Wild, lazy and a troublemaker. He leaves to become a soldier. o) Ching: He is Wang Lung's faithful friend and neighbour. He dies and is buried near the entrance to the family graveyard. Wang Lung wishes to be buried by his side. p) Lotus: A former prostitute and now a fat concubine. q) Cuckoo: Although she used to be a slave in the house of Hwang, she has become the madam of the "tea house". She becomes a servant to Lotus. O-Lan hates her because she used to be cruel to her in the Hwang House. UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente r) Pear Blossom: A slave, but she becomes Wang Lung's lover at the end of the novel. 21) Student’s free questions and answers. 22) a) Because he did not want to do anything except sit in the sun or talk to the little slave called Pear Blossom. b) Because he thought he would give it to Pear Blossom just before he died. c) Because his son’s wives did not care about Pear Blossom and his sons were too busy with other things. He was worried therefore about who would look after her when he died. 23) a) _Why did Wang Lung think that he was already a very old man? b) What did he buy for when he died? c) Why was he anxious at the thought of giving Pear Blossom the poison? 24) Students’ free essays. UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente 7. A BRIEF LITERARY PANORAMA OF THE USA FROM 1945 TO THE PRESENT DAY 7.1. INTRODUCTION TO THE PERIOD It is plain to see that the USA has become a completely consumerist society. This means that in all walks of life, not only literature, things are made on the basis that they should sell well, and if they do not, they are avoided. In literature things that have sold well are voices of protest, of man's cruelty to other men, of female protest against their still unequal position in life, and of ethnic protest too. If we think that the majority of the American cultured population is female and that females are more likely to study arts, then it is easy to conclude that the majority of readers in America are women. If we add to this the fact that the US is made up of different ethnic communities, the "melting pot" images come dramatically to life. 7.2. NOVEL 7.2.1. JEROME DAVID SALINGER (1919-2010) For some years the voice of the post-war generation seemed to be that of J.D. Salinger, the author of The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Salinger speaks for the young urban American of middle class parentage. In his world no one is starving or concerned with what might be called public issues. The people he most admires are above all "sincere". His ideal people are children, the next best are adolescents, but few of his adults emerge intact from the corruption of growing up. The verdict is that he produces a modern version of Huckleberry Finn in The Catcher in the Rye, and then fizzled out as a writer. UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente 7.2.2. SAUL BELLOW (1915-2005) Saul Bellow is perhaps the best-known American writer nowadays. His first and best novel, Dangling Man (1944), is the chronicle of a young man who is waiting to be called up for military service. He has left his civilian job and month after month goes by before the army summons him. He is in limbo, a city drifter, a frequenter of afternoon movies, whose liberty becomes increasingly burdensome. Bellow has a reputation as an interpreter of the struggle of urban dwellers to define their roles and responsibilities in the modern world. His most famous novel is Herzog (1964). It is basically the portrait of Moses Herzog, a great sufferer, joker, moaner and charmer. Although his life disintegrates around him -he has failed as a writer and teacher, as a father, and has lost all the affection of his wife to his best friend- Herzog sees himself as a survivor. He writes unsent letters to friends and enemies, colleagues and famous people, revealing his bitter and clever perceptions of the world and the secrets of his heart. Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, and died in 2005. Like Norman Mailer, Bellow was Jewish, as are a high proportion of America's best novelists, artists and critics. 7.2.3. NORMAN MAILER (1923-2007) Mailer excels at what has been called "the new journalism", a form which he helped to create. He takes actual events and submits them to imaginative transformation. In this mode he registered the transformation of American sensibility in An American Dream (1965) and Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967). He is also sexually blatant in his novels, something that has become a literary trend. 7.2.4. VLADIMIR NABOKOV (1889-1977) This Russian nationalised American novelist and a prestigious expert on butterflies is best known for his polemic novel Lolita (1955), about the obsessive UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente passion that an adult named Humbert feels for a twelve-year-old girl, who he calls "a nymphet". The protagonist gives a first-person narrative of his confession from jail of his step-daughter, Lolita, whose boyfriend he murders. 7.2.5. KURT VONNEGUT (1922-2007) In Slaughterhouse Five (1969) Kurt Vonnegut shows his outrage at the bombing of Dresden by the Allies, which he experienced himself while a prisoner of the Germans, and the gratuitous destructiveness that he believes is characteristic of humankind. Our inhumanity and the capacity for destruction provided by twentieth century technology and his interest in anthropology are themes present in all his novels: Deadeye Dick (1982) on nuclear power, Galapagos (1987) and Hocus Pocus (1990) on genetic manipulation, etc. He is also a pioneer in using science fiction in his novels, like in Cat's Cradle (1963). 7.2.6. TRUMAN CAPOTE (1924-1984) Truman Capote is most famous for In Cold Blood (1965) and Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958). The former is about the investigation of the apparently motiveless murder of a Kansas City family by two youths. The latter is basically a comedy of life in New York City. 7.2.7. WOMEN NOVELISTS With the increasing rise and success of the women's liberation movement, American women are perhaps the leaders in modern-day fiction. It is not only a strictly political "feminist" literature but also one that is essentially female, describing hardships and liberties that have been won and a new society of equality. Not only this, we also have female writers from different ethnic backgrounds that show real changes in the American female "melting pot". UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente 7.2.7.1. MARGE PIERCY (1936-) Marge Piercy is one of the earliest women writers of this century. Most of her work reflects the consciousness of women's assigned place in a maledominated society and the form that relationships take as a result. One of her best and most famous novels is Vida (1979). She has also been involved in other issues apart from the women's movement, such as civil rights, the New Left and the anti-nuclear movement. 7.2.7.2. ALICE WALKER (1944-) Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982) was extremely popular, not less so because it was made into a film directed by Steven Spielberg. It shows an inner vision of the Black community and how its struggles are survived by Celia and Nettie, two sisters. Celia is made pregnant by the man she believes to be her father and is made to marry someone older who she despises. The novel is made up of Celie's despairing letters to God and to her sister Nettie who has gone to Africa as a missionary, and of Nettie's letters to Celie. The film as well as the novel itself is a real tear-jerker. 7.2.7.3. TONI MORRISON (1932-) Toni Morrison is another American black woman writer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. The black plight, a poor woman's segregation not only in society for being black but also for being a woman is shown in all her works. The Bluest Eye (1970) shows how a black girl nearly goes insane thinking of the blue eyes of a white girl's doll. It also talks of the girl's incestuous relationship with her father and her subsequent pregnancy. 7.2.7.4. ERICA JONG (1942-) Erica Jong represents no ethic minority (even though she is a Jewess herself). She represents the liberated female American woman who has broken out and is scared of nothing and no one. Her outrageous Fear of Flying (1974) UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente was a pioneer in its brashness, blatentness, eroticism and lack of inhibition. We have a woman who talks continually and openly about sex and her fantasies about a zipless dalliance on a train. Recently she has published Fear of Fifty, an autobiographical work. 7.3. DRAMA As far as drama is concerned, since 1945 there have been two outstanding American playwrights: Tennessee Williams (1911-83) and Arthur Miller (19152005). Williams was born in Mississippi in 1911 and after working in a factory and as a waiter, he managed to finish his university education. He is best known for The Glass Menagerie (1944), which is set in the slums of St Louis, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). The first two plays show Williams' sympathy for the lost and self-punishing individual. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is about the intricacies of southern families and southern culture. His plays have been made into successful films, so adding to the author's popularity but they have often caused much controversy, particularly in Britain and Ireland, where they were banned. Arthur Miller, apart from being famous for marrying Marilyn Monroe, is renowned for his modern tragedy Death of a Salesman (1949), a play that gives a portrait of the unsuccessful Jewish salesman Willy Loman. The Crucible (1953) relates the issues of the 1692 Salem Witch trials to those of the era of McCarthism in America. 7.4. POETRY Perhaps the three most outstanding poets of 20th century America were James Russell Lowell, William De Witt Snodgrass and Sylvia Plath. Lowell wrote magnificent apocalyptic poems about the stormbound New England coast. He UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente also wrote verse translations of the French poet Racine. Snodgrass's poetry is characterised by its autobiographical subject matter, his use of traditional verse forms and his sensitive, often delicate tone. Plath studied with Lowell and her work has clear affinities with confessional poetry. Her experiences as a daughter, wife (to the British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes) and her suicide attempts are all present in her poems: there is an undercurrent of terror in her poetry. American Nobel Prize Winners: 1930: Sinclair Lewis 1936: Eugene O'Neill 1938: Pearl S. Buck 1948: T. S. Eliot 1949: William Faulkner 1954: Ernest Hemingway 1962: John Steinbeck 1976: Saul Bellow 1978: Isaac Bashevis Singer (wrote in Yiddish) 1987: Joseph Brodsky (wrote in Russian and English) 1993: Toni Morrison UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente 8. THE LITERATURES OF THE COMMONWEALTH 9.1. LITERATURE IN AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND. The Australians and New Zealanders have created a literature of their own from a combination of British, American and native sources. It has been described as going "from colonial to Commonwealth, from Commonwealth to cosmopolitan". First it was crudely imitative of English writing. Now it has its own identity. The interest of these writers is the history and traditions of their respective countries, as seen, for example, in the novels of Nellie Scanlan, Brian Penton or Miles Franklin. Traditionally Australian literature has been considered as little else than a little sister to British and American literatures, a literary sibling who has only recently come of age and therefore hardly deserved to be closely read and even considered as an independent relative. Indeed, up to 1898, when Henry Gyles Turner and Alexander Sutherland published The Development of Australian Literature, a first serious attempt to systematise the literature from down under, Australian literature was still virtually unthought-of in the books of any literary critic. And this has almost been the case up to only a few decades ago. Australian literature had not managed to attract much attention either until some meritorious handbooks saw the light in the second half of the 20th century, namely A History of Australian Literature Pure and Applied (1961), by H. M. Green; The Literature of Australia (1964 and 1976), by Geoffrey Dutton; The Oxford History of Australian Literature (1981), edited by Leonie Kramer; The Penguin New Literary History of Australia (1988), by Laurie Hergenhan et al.; and The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature (2000), by Elizabeth Webby, to name but a few of the best known. Scholars’ increasing interest in postcolonial studies during the last decades has encouraged the publication of UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente new works on Australian literature and other English-speaking national literatures. So far, most analyses of Australian literature –quite numerous of latehave been carried out by Australian scholars and university lecturers, who are only naturally concerned about studying and dissecting their own literary production and constructing a canon. It was only fairly recently, in 1963, that a first professorship of Australian literature was created at Sydney University and only a handful of Australian scholars have made it possible since then to maintain an interest for pro-Australian literary studies. But apart from local literary critics, Australian literature had not managed to attract much interest internationally until 1973, when Patrick White was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first Australian writer to do so. The main Anglophone literatures (British, American and to some extent Canadian) have already established a canon; Australian literature is on the way to doing so; and this book is evidence of this. Australian writers and literary critics are in the middle of a strenuous process of “glocalization” of Australian literature within a massively unstoppable and unavoidably globalised world. In other words, they are searching for a specific literary identity within a globalised concept of the literary phenomenon, an identity that differentiates them from the heavy cultural and political influence of the ex-metropolis. 9.2. ENGLISH CANADIAN LITERATURE Not all English-Canadian writers are Canadian by birth and some who are Canadian by birth do not write of Canada at all. The most famous Canadian fiction writer in the mid twentieth century was Morley Callaghan. In his The Loved and the Lost Callaghan touches what is perhaps the most significant theme in modern Canadian literature: the existence of two cultures of English and French Canada. UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente The Canadian problem has been described as a kind of Canadian apartheid that has produced as much literature as the South African species. 9.3. ANGLO-INDIAN LITERATURE. By Anglo-Indian literature (also known as Indo-Anglian or Indo-British literature) we refer to the literature written by Indians or Pakistanis in English after the independence of both India and Pakistan. These writers usually are able to write in Hindu or Urdu too, but do so in English to reach a wider range of readers. Before these countries were part of the British Empire the term "Anglo-Indian literature" usually referred to the literature written by those British residents officials, missionaries, soldiers- in the Indian continent who dealt with local issues in their writings but from a western point of view, for, after all, they were still British and felt British, not Indian. 9.4. SOUTH AFRICAN LITERATURE IN ENGLISH. Writers such as Roy Campbell, a self-exiled South African poet and translator who wrote poetry on the Spanish Civil War, is well-known in literary circles for his excellent translations of St John of the Cross and García Lorca into English. But more recent South African literature is particularly strong in the field of realistic fiction, usually with political implications. This is particularly perceivable in Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) and Nadine Gordimer's novels. There has also been lots of literature written about the living symbol of the social and racial injustice of apartheid in South Africa, Nelson Mandela. UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente 9.5. DORIS LESSING (1919- ) Doris Lessing was born in Iran to British parents and grew up on a farm in Rhodesia. After two failed marriages she left Africa for England, where she tried, successfully, to publish The Grass is Singing (1950), a powerful novel about a white woman's obsession for her black servant, demonstrating the writer's interest in the private action of the mind which was to distinguish many of her later novels, what she would later call "the space within". Her second novel, Martha Quest (1952), became the first part of a five novel sequence collectively entitled The Children of Violence. In her novels Lessing usually presents societies rigidly governed by convention and prejudice (including man's dictatorship over women) and presents the protagonists' struggle (usually women) to challenge these conventions by dominating their own mental power. She is a fervent political feminist and has also been deeply involved in experimenting with literary forms and therefore uses the formal aspects of notebooks, memoirs, archives and all types of documents in her novels. Experimental fiction is a recurrent interest in Lessing's work, as can be seen in The Golden Notebook (1962) and The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), or Canopus in Argos: Archives, consisting of five parts (1979-83), among others. In later novels Lessing returned to realistic narrative (as opposed to experimentalism) with two works originally published with the penname of "Jane Somers": The Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983) and If the Old Could (1984), where she deals with the privations of old age. In her very last novels she has written about terrorism: The Good Terrorist (1985) and Prisons We Choose to Live Inside (1987). 9.6. NADINE GORDIMER (1923 -). Nadine Gordimer is a South African novelist born in Trasvaal. In her novels and in her short stories she has concentrated on attacking apartheid and racial UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente misunderstanding from the point of view of a privileged white member of the South African society. Although her novels depict the economic, social and legal divisions and tensions existing in South Africa between the white and the black communities, she does not write from an overtly political point of view. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN Vicerrectorado de Ordenación Académica, Innovación Docente y Profesorado Secretariado de Innovación Docente 9. BIBLIOGRAPHY BANK, Stanley, ed. (1969): American Romanticism. A Shape for Fiction. New York: Capricorn Books. BERCOVITCH, Sacvan, ed. (1974): The American Puritan Imagination. Essays in Revaluation. New York: Cambridge University Press. 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