CHARLOTTE GILMAN (1860-1935)

two siblings who died in infancy. Gilman's mother told “no more children” Father left the family. “Mother no longer a woman.” Gilman w/mom and other kids forced to “house hop” among relatives

Voracious reader, artist, living designing greetings cards.

Married 1884, daughter, post partum depression.

Treatment: by Dr. in 1886: 'live as domestic a life as possible' and 'never touch a pen, brush or pencil as long as you live' – makes depression much worse.

Writes in secret (husband would lock her up, tear up journals, pens, etc)

Separated in 1888 – has to fight to get her share

campaign for the cause of women's suffrage (right to vote) and vs economic oppression

Yellow Wallpaper in 1892

Highly biographical: Gilman was institutionalized to rest

divorced in 1894: writes short stories

Gilman's WOMEN AND ECONOMICS (1898), in which she attacked the old division of social roles with men in control women as housewives. Best Seller as turn of century feminist book

Also wants right to die rather than women forced to asylum.

Married 1^st cousin in 1902. Touring lecturer on women’s writes. Starts feminist magazine The Forerunner magazine.

1932 breast cancer, committed suicide 1935 by taking an overdose of chloroform

Rediscovered (canonized) by feminist scholars for Yellow Wallpaper and HERLAND, published by Women's Press in 1979. In the story a group of scientist discover a peaceful lost civilization, populated entirely by women

Sample of canonization by group: in this case feminists – this story was lost and considered nothing more than a ghost story at best, feminists lifted it from one hit wonder to “literature” based on the themes they found in the story.

Over-reading by a group with a purpose?: reading word “queer” in the line ______________ as meaning Gilman was a repressed lesbian and that the creeping woman she sees in the wallpaper is her repressed sexuality.

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

Mississippi born

Nobel Prize in 1949, 2 pulitzer prizes, famous for writing about changing American South

Famous set of stories in same fictional place: Yoknapatawpha cycle of stories

Yoknapatawpha in Chicsaw indian means “water passes slowly through flatlands”

Supposedly based on Lafayette County in Mississippi

n admired his Grandfather, “the Old Colonel,” a civil war hero & local “man’s man” who wrote heroic stories and died in a duel

Oldest but shortest/smallest of 4 brothers. Became quarterback, but father favors bigger sons

Rejected for WWI for size so joined Canadian Air Force.

Completed training too late – war was over.

Returned home and said had been shot down over France.

Went to college, dropped out, admirer of early Brit Lit (1890’s) and more recent French Lit.

Traveled New Orleans, encouraged to write.

Became Post Office Postmaster for small town in Mississippi. Wrote and sold 1^st novel.

The Sound and the Fury (1929), is a radical departure from conventional novel form. It uses a stream-of-consciousness method, time jumps, and different narrators in each of its sections including a mentally retarded man, Benjy, who tells his story without understanding past or present.

The title, taken from Macbeth

pessimism of the novel, which records the decay and degeneracy of the Compson family and, by implication, of the aristocratic South.

Early Lit novels sold poorly so did a commercial novel (Sanctuary, 1931), with sensational, crowd pleasing elements of rape, abduction, and “turning out” of a good Mississippi girl by Popeye the Gangster.

Hollywood now wanted him to write screenplays.

--Alcoholic, drug-addicted wife, had affairs in Hollywood

--His screenplay for Ernest Hemingway's novel To Have and Have Not (1944) and “The Big Sleep” (1946) – both with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall

HEMMINGWAY ATTACKS: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”

n Rivalry for lit attention as America’s best writer with Hemmingway (even wrote him as a character in The Wild Palms screenplay, 1939, as “McCord”)

ATTITUDE TOWARD LIT: “All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection [in writing]. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible”

Many Americans frustrated stop reading his work – all experiment and exploitation. Though Faulkner’s reputation remained high in Europe, especially in France, where Jean-Paul Sartre allegedly said, “For the young people in France, Faulkner is a god,”

André Malraux wrote an appreciative preface to Sanctuary (French edition): “Faulkner is the bastard son of our own Maupaussant and the Mind penetrating Eye of God”

In 1946, however, with the appearance of the Viking Portable Faulkner, arranged and edited by the distinguished literary critic, Malcolm Cowley, there emerged for the larger reading public a clearer picture of Faulkner’s literary methods, purposes, and importance

Character of the Southern Writer in Barton Fink based on Faulkner.

FAULKNER SAID: “Live in Hollywood, seduced by Money, a quality writer dies”

"Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder."

He took a public stand on the race question in the South during the stirrings of the early Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s, calling for the end of segregation and for the opening up of opportunities to black people

Faulkner thrown from a horse in 1962, hurt. Dies a few weeks later.

FAULKNER & COEN BROTHERS: The Coen Brothers, who wrote and directed Barton Fink, seem to like to inject Faulkner references in their films. In Raising Arizona, the escaped convicts (played by John Goodman and XXX) are the Snopes brothers, and in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Penny’s fiancee, Vernon T. Waldrip, is the name of a character referred to in The Wild Palms [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem]. And some viewers have even noted a Faulkner reference in the Coen Brothers’ bowling movie, The Big Lebowski: as in the short story “Barn Burning,” a key plot point centers on the issue of a soiled rug.

PARODIED: When Miss Grimly Gruesome sighed (“Oh Lobe. There’s a bad smell in here again. Lobe? Lobe!”) we had been standing on her lawn for forty-four years, still waiting to collect the library fines she owed and probably wouldn’t pay tomorrow, or even tomorrow and tomorrow, while she kept her squarish round frame in an enroached and ex-spired old Gothic two-story-split, a nosesore among eyesores, hearing her complain to her manservant.... “A Rose for Hemingway” by Peter Stoicheff, the winning entry from the 1995 Faux Faulkner contest.

2004 winner: “At last it is Curly who picks up the plank, rough hewn and smelling of sweet gum, and — feeling the weight and heft and fiber of it — swings it innocently (bending to retrieve the tool, the ball-peen hammer dropped casually on Larry’s toe) and feeling the awful force of the blow as it (the plank) catches Moe upside his head...”

Topics and Themes:

--The South

---Racism

--Family

--the sometimes ‘curse’ of heritage

-- The South’s dirty “Underbelly”: incest, prostitutes, rape, racists, murderers, fanatics, defrocked & phony ministers, interracial sex

-- Class Division

-- Nostalgia for old “cultured” South and its traditions (hunting, not racism)

-- South wracked by grief and defeat, clinging to old values while struggling to embrace the harsh rationality of modern capitalist America

--missions and duty of family (“I lay here Dying” – need to take mother to hometown grave despite near impossibilities)

STYLE: Split, dependent on intended audience
--Visual, storytelling dominant (why Hollywood wanted his screenplays)

-- Experimental: A)As I lay Dying: episodic plot, w/59 narratives from 15 characters

B) Language experiments: 1 page long sentence, scrambled timeline, stream of

consciousness

often forces the reader to piece together events from a seemingly random and fragmentary series of impressions experienced by a variety of narrators

meticulous attention to diction and cadence

Symbol filled: Names like Joe Christmas and Lucius Priest and New England liberal Joanna Burden, disgraced minister Gail Hightower

clause upon clause and scarcer use of punctuation in an effort to capture the complexity of thought

n women many times portrayed as floozies, golddiggers, heart breakers

-- HOLLYWOOD: Screenplays (storytelling) sold well

VS

Experimental novels (“lit”) with more critical acclaim

Hemingway, Ernest. (1899 - 1961) born in Illinois
Father, a doctor who loved outdoors/hunting/fishing. Shot himself 1928
Mother, voice lessons/painted, over bearing, wanted twin girls: would dress as infant in girls clothing and call him “Ernestine”
 
Car accidents, plane accidents, injuries, illness, depression

Marries, fall in love on adventures, affairs, divorces
 
Sports & High School Newspaper
 
Wrote for “Kansas City Star”. Learned journalist style:
short sentences in clear English and to make sure the writing was positive
 
 
bored with paper, wanted excitement of WW I. 
joined the Missouri National Guard early in 1918, but
as the Guard seemed unlikely to see action soon, he
enlisted in the American Red Cross by May 1918. 

on duty in Italy with an ambulance unit. Asked for canteen duty.
 
Canteen duty: feed troops and deliver mail on the frontlines
 
seriously wounded by artillery shell. Spent the rest of
1918 in a Milan hospital, where he met a nurse (model for the
heroine of A Farewell to Arms.) 
 
back home work for paper. Low income.
 
Went to Spain. Fell in love with bullfighting.
 
Moved with wife to Paris. LOST GENERATION. Expatriate community. Wants to be serious writers (among other famous writers such Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford as mentors)
 
THE LOST GENERATION: the young who had been disillusioned by fighting in multinational wars and being pawns to the generals who plunged the world into war. Hundreds died in trying out tactics or defending/attacking for a few square feet of land with little chance of survival against the mass death of poision gas, machine guns, tanks, etc. The culture of the honor of the duel, of bravery, of warrior to warrior combat where skill chose the winner, had fallen to bombs, machine and poison gas death that killed many and randomly, regardless of warrior skill. With Hemmingway he knew that the honorable man couldn’t exist in modern war and times so had to invent own code. Got famous hanging around with famous Americans expatriated to France, was early trying to take journalistic methods to lit. He was a fanatic about bull fighting because It was man vs nature where the man’s single skill was life or death.
In the 1920s, Hemingway bet his colleagues $10 that he could write a complete story in just six words. They paid up. His story: "For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn."
 
 
introduced to Key West islands. Big Game fishing and writing
 
first novel “The Sun Also Rises” in 1926, publisher recommended by F. Scott Fitzgerald
THE NOVELS/STORIES
 
He wrote novels and short stories about outdoorsmen, expatriates, soldiers and other men of action
 
"A man can be destroyed but not defeated."
 
(Men) meet the pain and difficulty of their existence with stoic courage
 
He worked hard at living the manly attributes he gave to his fictional heroes - a hard drinker, big-game hunter, fearless soldier, amateur boxer, and bullfight aficionado
 
Hemingway once wrote, "I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the world--or as much of it as I have seen. Boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out thin.
 
James Joyce once remarked: "He [Hemingway] has reduced the veil between literature and life, which is what every writer strives to do. Have you read 'A Clean Well-Lighted Place'?...It is masterly. Indeed, it is one of the best short stories ever written..."
 
life now has begun to hold no meaning. [Discussing A Clean Well Lit Place: As the old waiter says to himself, "It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too."]
 
The Sun Also Rises defined the expatriate existence of the “Lost Generation” 
— US and British citizens living in Paris following the Great War
 
In 1929 he published “A Farewell to Arms” big hit
1932 – Death in Afternoon – he was ‘lead:’ “fearless great man and adventurerer”
 
The “Papa” Hemingway image was born
The Hemmingway Hero: living and functioning bravely under pressure: John Wayne. Stripped down writing: the iceberg principle (7/8ths of it is hidden below the surface). Everything was dialogue, plain short sentences, no fancy language, no attempt to entertain, no attempt to have art or style in the writing, use of lan guage tricks and writer tricks.
 
the central example of the author's "iceberg principle" of omission, "Hills Like White Elephants," in which a couple "discusses" an abortion and their failed marriage without ever bringing up the subjects.
 
Critiqued, ridiculed as Great economic depression spread across America, but still liked by audience
 
A Clean Well Lighted Place: 1933
 
1933 - Africa for a big game hunting safari – source for next writing
 
1938 went to Spain together to witness the Spanish Civil war
Travel to China etc, with new journalist wife. Resents her journalistic career while he is called the fiction writer.
 
In England, writing about WW II.
court martialled for violating the Geneva Convention, which states journalists can not be part of the fighting forces
 
Story sold to Hollywood – Have and Have Not – no creative control, Faulkner does screen play (1944).
Ernest Hemingway had bet Howard Hawks that Hawks couldn't film this novel. Hawks did it by deleting most of the story, including the class references that would justify the title, and shifting to an earlier point in the lives of the lead characters
 
Hemingway's well-documented homophobia and his frequent attacks on openly gay individuals, such as Jean Cocteau,
 
Accused as overcompensating for latent homosexuality.
 
1953 Old Man and the Sea. Resparks his career/critical fame.
Nobel Prize 1954.
After Fidel Castro took over Cuba, Ernest Hemingway publicly supported the revolution
Moved to Idaho after Cuba Anti-Americanism. Lives on a Farm. Depression.
Electro shocks as part of his therapy. As a result he lost his memory. Can’t write.
 
nostalgic journey to Africa planned by the author and his wife in 1954 ended in their plane crash over the Belgian Congo.
 
Shotgun to head in 1961. 
 
INFLUENCED:
hard boiled" crime fiction (which flourished from the 1920s to the 1950s) often owed a strong debt to Hemingway. Hemingway's terse prose style.
Others saying they were heavily influenced by Hemingway:
Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Douglas Coupland and many Generation X writers
Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (magical [dirty] realism)
 
Margaux Hemingway (granddaughter) died by suicide
On July 2, 1996, on the anniversary of her grandfather's suicide
 

Updike, John (1932 - )

known for his novels RABBIT, RUN (1960), RABBIT REDUX (1971), RABBIT IS RICH (1981), and RABBIT AT REST (1990). They follow the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom

-Lit critic and reviewer, all-American non-“nuts” non-alcoholic etc overall happy “normal” writer

- Theme of hope, pain and disappointment of people entering thirties in America, as teen dreams have been compromised away against responsibility and demands of adulthood, while still living overall normal happy lives

writer's duty: 'to give the mundane its beautiful due'

JOHN UPDIKE on his way of writing: You try to make them entertaining, verbally entertaining for one thing. I try to write with some precision and surprisingness about details that your readers have presumably observed themselves. And with any short story you try to write first sentences that will in some way pique the readers' interest, and then a lot of middle, and then you try to write a last sentence that will in some way close the case, close the issue, resolve it all, and leave him or her with a satisfied feeling of having seen a complete picture.”

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec03/updike_12-29.html

grew up in PA

Updike's childhood was shadowed by psoriasis and stammering

At 13, Grew up on a 80 acred farm, read mystery novels heavily

Harvard, on scholarship, edited the Harvard Lampoon

Father was a HS math teacher, mother was a writer

Sells first short story at 22 to the New Yorker Magazine

Started working at the New Yorker in 1955

First novel (600 pgs) written at 25, decides not to publish. Another Novel at 26, Poorhouse Fair… Harper Publishing will publish if he changes ending, moves the book to Knopf Publishers

Guggenheim Fellowship used to write Rabbit, Run

Makes changes to Rabbit, Run to avoid 1960 risk of obscenity lawsuits

Rabbit series: patterns in title: R R words, all end in single words

Series starts with athletic good looking protagonist (Rabbit, Run), Harry Angstrom; then middle class dealing with infidelity of wife (Rabbit, Redux); finally old, chest pains, losing hope in AIDS 80’s U.S. (Rabbit at Rest).

Rabbit series gets many awards including two separate Pulitzer prizes in lit (including Rabbit at Rest in 1990 – last of Rabbit series)

STYLE: ordinary life, with previously unseen importance, and hidden sense of unfulfilled dreams and guilt they don’t do more for world/people; in essays light satire;

Publicly Christian

Many short stories keep winning awards and included in compilations. Over life time his stories win many dozens of highest short story awards.

1962: Publishes A&P (1960) in New Yorker Magazine

Tries teaching creative writing at Harvard and Boston U – both times dislikes teaching

“The Times”: writes stories and novel (Couples – on book bestseller list for full year) made into a movie about middle class “secret” of infidelity and affairs. Big American concern in 1968; Updike for his novel on the cover of Time Magazine themed around “adulterous society”

Lit crit standards: classic to modern: imptce: 1)truth to the subject matter; 2)humanistic values; 3)clear good descriptions

1970: Rabbit, Run made into Movie with James Caan

Tours world as lecturer/book tours

1974 Divorced

1978: speaks before congress against government support for the arts

1984: Witches of Eastwick (Novel)

Terrorist, Updike's 22nd novel, was about an 18-year-old Islamic extremist, whose critique of American culture is literally deadly

Q’s:

Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” has been interpreted as

A) a ghost/ possession story (Victorian Horror)

B) a tale designed to show how oppressed women who refused to conform had no recourse other than turning inwards into madness, as the only escape from their “permitted” identities (Gender issues)

C) a story designed to expose the ills of the medical profession in Victorian times (social ills)

D) a story about a woman who is a repressed lesbian and goes insane when she can’t come to terms with her (deviant-by-Victorian-standards) sexuality