Schools ~ a.k.a.

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Schools a.k.a. "-isms" of American Literature
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Context of each period including

• Overview of period
• Significant authors
• Historical timeline
• Characteristics of writing
• Political highlights
• Philosophy views
• Social influences

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Puritanism Discovery to 1800

• Profoundly religious school of thought
• God as the be-all and end-all of human thought
• Believes Bible as the infallible Word of God
• All people are born in sin and need the atoning
  blood of Christ if they are to be saved
• All human activityincluding literature should
  foster this end.

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Puritanism Significant Authors

• Jonathan Edwards
• Native American oral traditions
• Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz
• Mary Rowlandson
• Olaudah Equiano
• Phillis Wheatley
• Halimah Abdullah

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Puritanism Timeline

• 1493 Askia Muhammadstatesman, scholar, and
  strategistascends the throne of the Songhai
  Empire of West Africa.
• 1517 Martin Luther posts list of criticisms on
  the door of cathedral in Germany to protest
  policies of the Roman Catholic Church -begins
  break with Catholicism
• 1635 Roger Williams is banished from the
  Massachusetts Bay Colony after criticizing the
  colonys Puritan doctrine the next year he
  established a colony in Providence, Rhode Island
  known for its religious freedom and the
  separation of church and state.

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Puritanism Characteristics of Puritan Writing

• Bible provided model for Puritan writing
• Viewed each individual life as a journey to
  salvation
• Looked for direct connections between biblical
  events and events in own lives.
• Diaries and histories most common forms of
  literary expression in Puritan society in them
  writers described the workings of God
• Favored plain style of writing
• Admired clarity of expression and avoided
  complicated figures of speech.

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Puritanism Political Highlights

• Mohawk leader Dekanawida establishes the Iroquois
  Confederacy around 1500, uniting Native American
  peoples who used to be rivals
• Mayflower Pilgrims adopt the Mayflower Compact
  and land at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620.

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Puritanism Philosophical Views

• Native American worldviews, passed down through
  oral tradition, stress not progress but the
  cyclical nature of existence.
• Puritans regard life as a journey toward
  salvation and look for signs of self-improvement
  and for the workings of God in their daily lives.

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Puritanism Social Influences

• Slavery is legal and common in all New England
  colonies in 1620
• Hysteria and paranoia build as more than one
  hundred people are accused of witchcraft in
  Salem, Massachusetts.

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Rationalism

• Fundamentally scientific and empirical in its
  orientation
• Philosophy of the seventeenth- and
  eighteenth-century movement called the
  Enlightenment
• Experience is its highest authority, rather than
  Divine Revelation
• Placing ultimate trust in the power of human
  reason to solve all social, practical, and
  political problems.

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Rationalism Significant Authors

• Benjamin Franklin
• Patrick Henry
• Thomas Paine
• Thomas Jefferson
• Abigail Adams
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton
• Anne Bradstreet

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Rationalism Timeline

• 1748 French philosopher and jurist Montesquieu
  proposes the system of checks and balances that
  has come to characterize the United States
  government.
• 1771 Ben Franklins autobiography is the first
  American rags-to-riches story.
• 1775-1781 Revolutionary War
• 1787-1788 The Federalist Papers Collection of
  eighty-five essays published between October 1787
  and August 1788.

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Rationalism The Rationalist Worldview

• People arrive at truth by using reason rather
  than by relying on the authority of the past, on
  religion, or on nonrational mental processes,
  such as intuition.
• God created the universe but does not interfere
  in its workings.
• World operates according to Gods rules, and
  through the use of reason, people can discover
  those rules.
• People are basically good and perfectible.
• Since God wants people to be happy, they worship
  God best by helping other people (social service
  of todays politics)
• Human history is marked by progress toward a more
  perfect existence.

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Rationalism Political Highlights

• Mounting tension between the colonists and the
  British Empire results in the Revolutionary War
  (1775-1783)
• The Second Continental Congress adopts the
  Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

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Rationalism Philosophical Views

• Native American worldviews, passed down through
  oral tradition, stress not progress but the
  cyclical nature of existence.
• The rationalists regard reason and logic as
  God-given gifts and try to find order in the
  universe.

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Rationalism Social Influences

• An epidemic of smallpox strikes Boston in 1721,
  affecting nearly half the citys population.

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American Romanticism 1800-1860

• A reaction against both rationalism and
  Puritanism, romanticism seeks to plumb the depths
  of the human spirit by means of intuition and the
  imagination.

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Romanticism Significant Authors

• Fireside Poets/Schoolroom Poets
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• John Greenleaf Whittier
• Oliver Wendell Holms
• James Russell Lowell
• William Cullen Bryant

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American Romanticism timeline

• 1798 English Romantic period begins in Britain
  with Wordsworths publication of Lyrical
  Ballads, which emphasizes the role of emotion in
  poetry and urges poets to draw inspiration from
  the everyday life and speech of ordinary people.
• 1814 Francis Scott Key wrote The Star-Spangled
  Banner as a poem the song officially became the
  national anthem by an act of Congress in 1931.
• 1828 Noah Webster published dictionaries, a
  grammar book, and a speller that sold sixty
  million copies and distinguished American
  spelling from British spelling.
• 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville was sent to the
  United States by the French government to study
  the penitentiary system, but he ultimately wrote
  the earliest and most enduringingly influential
  analysis of American democracy.
• 1845 Margaret Fuller argued in Woman in the
  Nineteenth Century for equal opportunity for
  women and for the abolition of stereotyped gender
  roles.
• 1845-1849 Irish potato famine was caused by a
  blight that killed most of the potato crop the
  staple food for most of Irelands population
  between 1847 and 1854 more than 1.6 million Irish
  immigrants had entered the United States.
• 1850-1859 The slavery issue was key during this
  decade, a time of fierce sectional quarrels
  between the North and the South, and between
  abolitionists and pro-slavery forces of various
  regions.

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American Romanticism Characteristics

• Values feeling and intuition over reason
• Places faith in inner experience and the power of
  the imagination
• Shuns the artificiality of civilization and seeks
  unspoiled nature
• Prefers youthful innocence to educated
  sophistication
• Champions individual freedom and the worth of the
  individual
• Reflects on natures beauty as a path to
  spiritual and moral development
• Looks backward to the wisdom of the past and
  distrusts progress
• Finds beauty and truth in exotic locales, the
  supernatural realm, and the inner world of the
  imagination
• Sees poetry as the highest expression of the
  imagination
• Finds inspiration in myth, legend, and folklore.

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American Romanticism Characteristics of the Hero

• Is young or possesses youthful qualities
• Is innocent and pure of purpose
• Has a sense of honor based not on societys rules
  but on some higher principle
• Has a knowledge of people and life based on deep,
  intuitive understanding, not on formal learning.
• Loves nature and avoids town life
• Quests for some higher truth in the natural world

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Gothic (Dark) Romanticism

• Gothic romanticism is concerned primarily with
  the darker aspects of the psychemadness,
  obsession, the fragmentation of the self.
• It tends to be both anti-political and
  anti-religious, in the conventional sense of
  those terms.
• Explores the conflict between good and evil, the
  effects of guilt and sin, and the destructive
  underside of appearances

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Gothic Romanticism Significant Authors

• Edgar Allen Poe
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Herman Melville
• Washington Irving

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Transcendentalism

• A parallel to Gothic romanticism,
  transcendentalism is the sunny, optimistic side
  of the romantic tendency.
• To the transcendentalist, the psyche of the soul
  is part and particle of God ultimate spiritual
  fulfillment is to be found by following the
  inmost promptings of the individual soul.
• The transcendentalist finds as much to admire in
  the Eastern religions Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism
  of the cultivation of the spirit as in
  traditional Christianity.

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Transcendental Significant Authors

• Henry David Thoreau
• Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Transcendental View of the World

• Everything in the world, including human beings
  is a reflection of the Divine Soul.
• The physical facts of the natural world are a
  doorway to the spiritual or ideal world.
• People can use their intuition to behold Gods
  spirit revealed in nature or in their own souls.
• Self-reliance and individualism must outweigh
  external authority and blind conformity to custom
  and tradition.
• Spontaneous feelings and intuition are superior
  to deliberate intellectualism and rationality.

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Romanticism Social Influences

• The lyceum movement furthers American education,
  self-improvement, and cultural development.
• Reform movements begin for womens rights, child
  labor, temperance, and the abolition of slavery
  involving many Americans in social activism.
• Utopian planners attempt to turn idealized
  visions of human potential into practical
  realities.

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Realism 1860 - 1914

• A literary reaction against what it saw as the
  excess and delusions of the romantics, realism
  seeks to view humans not as gods or demons, not
  as damned sinners or reasoning machines, but as
  ordinary-sized humans.
• Realistic literature tends to focus on homely
  situations, the "facts of life" accessible to the
  reporter, the historian, the student of society.

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Realism Significant Authors

• Mark Twain
• Stephen Jay Gould
• Kate Chopin
• Edwin Arlington Robinson
• Chief Joseph
• William Dean Howells

• Emily Dickinson
• Walt Whitman
• Frederick Douglass
• Harriet A. Jacobs
• Ambrose Bierce
• Abraham Lincoln

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Realism timeline

• 1850 Sojourner Truth, a freed slave, traveled
  across the country, speaking in support of
  feminism, religion, and abolition.
• 1850 Harriet Jacobs, abused by her owners
  father, escaped to the North but was pursued
  there after the passage of the Fugitive Slave
  Act. Her narrative describes her life in bondage
  and as a fugitive.
• 1876 The Battle of the Little Bighorn, led by
  General George A. Custer, marked the last major
  victory for the Lakota in the intense fight
  between Native Americans and white settlers for
  land in the West.
• 1881 Booker T. Washingtons approach to
  improving life for African American after the war
  sparked considerable controversy since he
  believed that blacks interests were best served
  through vocational education rather than academic
  instruction or participation in politics.
• 1896 Paul Laurence Dunbar became known for his
  poetry while working as an elevator operator,
  establishing himself as a leading African
  American writer.

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Realism Characteristics

• Rejection of the idealized, larger than-life
  hero of Romantic literature
• Detailed depiction of ordinary characters and
  realistic events
• Emphasis on characters from cities and lower
  classes.
• Avoidance of the exotic, sensational, and overly
  dramatic
• Use of everyday speech patterns to reveal class
  distinctions
• Focus on the ethical struggles and social issues
  of real-life situations

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Realism Political Highlights

• Civil War (1861 1865) results in the loss of
  more than 600,000 men and a reunited but bitter
  republic.
• Slavery, a leading cause of the Civil War, is
  abolished in 1865.
• Abraham Lincoln is assassinated in Fords
  Theatre, Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865.

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Realism Philosophical Views

• Romanticism is overtaken by more realistic
  attitudes toward art and life.
• Advances in sociology and psychology lead to
  growing interest in analyzing everyday life and
  the behavior of society as a whole.

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Realism Social Influences

• Reformers and muckraking journalists expose
  abuses in industries such as mining and
  meatpacking.
• Large numbers of immigrants from Europe settle in
  American cities.
• In 1908, Henry Ford introduces the Model T, an
  invention that will drastically change the
  landscape and reshape the American way of life.

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Naturalism

• Naturalism takes the down-scaling tendency of
  realism a step farther, and to picture humans as
  small, helpless beings in the grip of forces far
  beyond their controlforces of biology sex,
  hunger, disease, and death and society economics,
  politics, war.
• To the pessimistic naturalists, the freedom of
  the human will is a delusion, and life is
  inherently a losing proposition.

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Naturalism Significant Authors

• Stephen Crane
• Jack London
• Frank Norris
• Theodore Dreiser
• Henry James

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Naturalism Elements

• Attempt to analyze human behavior objectively, as
  a scientist would.
• Belief that human behavior is determined by
  heredity and environment
• Sense that human begins cannot control their own
  destinies
• Sense of life as a losing battle against an
  uncaring universe
• Combined realism with Darwinism

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Modernism 1914 - 1939

• A complex of movements emerging in the late
  nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
  modernism has roots in
• the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche famous for
  saying "God is dead
• the sociology of Karl Marx human history is the
  record of conflict among economic classes
• the psychology of Sigmund Freud the psyche
  explained in terms of primal energies, basically
  sexual in nature.
• The vast, senseless carnage of World War I
  prompted modernists to a wide variety of literary
  experimentation, attempting to define a viable
  position for the self in social and philosophical
  predicaments of many kinds.

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Modernist Significant Authors

• Mid-century Voices
• John Steinbeck
• Eudora Welty
• Katherine Anne Porter
• James Thurber
• Robert Frost
• Harlem Renaissance
• Countee Cullen
• Langston Hughes
• Lucille Clifton
• Zora Neale Hurston

• Make It New
• Ezra Pound
• T. S. Eliot
• Marianne Moore
• William Carlos Williams
• e. e. cummings
• Modern American Fiction
• William Faulkner
• Ernest Hemingway
• F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Modernism Timeline

• 1914 Panama Canal opened, connecting Atlantic
  and Pacific oceans and shortening the voyage
  between east and west coasts by about 8,000
  nautical miles.
• 1920 Prohibition and the Eighteenth Amendment
  resulted in a rise in criminal alcohol production
  and sale and restrictions on individual freedoms.
• 1927 Charles Lindbergs flight from New York to
  Paris too 33 ½ hours and made him an
  international hero overnight.
• 1933 Eleanor Roosevelt took on responsibilities
  unprecedented for a presidents wife, traveling
  widely, giving speeches, holding press
  conferences, and she often represented her
  husband on occasions when he was unable to appear.

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Modernism Elements

• Emphasis on bold experimentation in style and
  form, reflecting the fragmentation of society
• Rejection of traditional themes, subjects, and
  forms
• Sense of disillusionment and loss of faith in the
  American dream (America as a New Eden, a belief
  in progress, triumph of the individual)
• Rejection of sentimentality and artificiality
• Rejection of the ideal of a hero as infallible in
  favor of a hero who is flawed and disillusioned
  but shows grace under pressure
• Interest in the inner workings of the human mind,
  sometimes expressed through new narrative
  techniques, such as stream of consciousness
• Revolt against the spiritual debasement of the
  modern world.

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Modernism Political Highlights

• In 1917, the United States enters World War I on
  the side of the Allied nations.
• Women win the right to vote when the Nineteenth
  Amendment is passed in 1920.
• The stock market crash of 1929 ushers in the
  Great Depression.

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Modernism Philosophical Views

• Marxism, which embraced socialism as the desired
  social structure, takes hold in Russia and finds
  some support in the United States.
• The science of psychoanalysis encourages
  exploration of the human subconscious and the
  meaning of dreams.

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Modernism Social Influences

• Speak-easies and jazz clubs spring up during
  Prohibition. The underground social scene
  becomes popular.
• During the 1920s, many young women flout
  tradition and become more independent in thought,
  dress, and attitude.

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Postmodernism/Contemporary1939 to Present

• Postmodern writers allow for multiple meanings
  and multiple worlds in their works, often
  structuring their works in a variety of
  nontraditional forms.
• They do not abide by conventional rules for
  shaping writing.

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Postmodernism Timeline

• 1959 Lorraine Hansberrys play A Raisin in the
  Sun opens
• 1963 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I Have a
  Dream speech reached an audience of more than
  200,000 gathered in Washington, D. C., in a
  passionate demonstration for civil rights and
  racial justice.
• 1979 1981 Iranian Hostage Crisis began when
  militants, backed by Islamic fundamentalists,
  ousted the shah of Iran from power and seized the
  U. S. embassy in Tehran, taking a large group of
  U. S. citizens hostage, and refusing to release
  them until the former shah of Iran was returned
  from the U. S. for trial.
• 1991 Dissolution of the Soviet Union
• 2001 World Trade Center is destroyed, plunging
  the U.S. into conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan,
  and Iraq.

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Postmodernism Significant Authors

• Toni Morrison
• Donald Barthelme
• Amy Tan
• Philip Roth
• Elie Wiesel
• John Hersey
• Margaret Bourke-White
• Julia Alvarez
• Theodore Roethke
• Richard Wilbur
• Billy Collins

• Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Richard Wright
• Maxine Hong Kingston
• N. Scott Momaday
• Alice Walker
• James Baldwin
• Sandra Cisneros
• Sylvia Plath
• Anne Sexton
• Gwendolyn Brooks
• Judith Ortiz Cofer

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Postmodernism Characteristics

• Allows for multiple meanings and multiple worlds
• Structures works in nontraditional forms
• Comments on itself
• Can be intensely personal
• Features cultural diversity
• Blends fiction and nonfiction
• Uses the past fearlessly

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Postmodernism Political Influences

• World War II ends in 1945
• The Soviet Union becomes a nuclear power in 1949,
  touching off a dangerous arms race with the
  United States
• Mikhail Gorbachev presides over the dissolution
  of the Soviet Union in 1991, ending the cold war.

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Postmodernism Philosophical Influences

• In the 1950s, America creates a culture marked by
  conformity and vigorous anti-Communism.
• In the 1980s, postmodernism takes root in
  philosophy, linguistics, and literature
• Proponents of multiculturalism challenge
  traditional views of what writers should write
  and what students should read.

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Postmodernism Social Influences

• The counterculture movement of the late 1960s
  reject conformity in politics and art in favor of
  dissent and experimentation.
• The communications revolution of the 1990s
  promises new levels of prosperity as well as new
  types of communication.