Details Title: American Literature Final Description: Final Total Flash Cards: 29 Created: 05/01/2006 12:25:19		New Users: To study from this flashcard set, or to create your own your own study flash cards, REGISTER HERE. Existing Users: CLICK HERE. Additional Literature Flashcards
Cards in this set: Term Daisy Miller - By: Henry James Definition THINGS ABOUT... - It's a melodrama (excessive,emotional. sentimental, family, heroes/villians) - It's about people we should care about - She's an American girl w/ money, you can't give her class, we see everything through the narrator (Winterbourne) - It's okay for men to be flirts not women - Gender politics: women are brought to a certian confinement in this story - She seems floral. Ex. white dress and she dies in the winter Term The Open Boat- By: Stephen Crane Definition THINGS ABOUT... - it's an exhausting story, such a small story but if felt so long - gorgeous story/writer - story is repetitive - Billy, the oiler dies - this story is a process of thought - Trauma: inability to cry, you see that in this story - A Tale intended to be after the fact. being the experience of four men from the sunk steamer "Commodore" - Use of metaphors (the boat's feminine) - The 4 men are powerless - God can't control nature Term Design- By: Robert Frost Definition THINGS ABOUT... - It's a way of looking at the world through the eyes of humans. - It's about the design of nature. - Starts with a white spider sitting on a white flower holding up a white moth It's about contrast b/w positive connotations like the color white and the horror od the scene. - The poem is about death but it also suggest purity and innocense. - Frost feels that there is no order in the word and that Design can onl exist if it were something so small like the spider, flower, and moth. Term Portrait of a Lady- By: William Carlos Williams Definition THINGS ABOUT... - Describing the beauty of this woman - It's af the lady is whispering in the background of this poem - A lot of movement in this poem - His annoyed response to her questions show that he really may be more interested in being a poet instead of a lover - Sexual metaphors - He has two choose between his two loves, poetry or the lady Term Portrait d'une Femme- By: Ezra Pound Definition THINGS ABOUT... - The woman in this poem is perfection - The woman in this poem is so beautiful that all other objects around her seem plain and awkward - She could be a prostitute - Nothing is good enough for her - This amazing woman falls for a ordinary guy - A woman who has everything, can want the simplist of things... love Term To Brooklyn Bridge- By: Hart Crane Definition THINGS ABOUT... - It bristles with movement - The way something as fundamentally stationary as a bridge becomes a moving object - The seagull flies over the east river like a ghost so we can't see him - Cycle of a day dusk til' dawn - The sun on wall street - The appearance of the bridge is so important - There's a delicate balance between the divine and the industrial -the poem is filled with mundane, metallic images- but the poem somehow lifts them all into a different plane, so we see the bridge and the derricks not for what they are but rather as Gods mighty and merciless. Term The Lynching- By: Claude McKay Definition THINGS ABOUT... - The Lynching” opens with the ascension of the victim’s “Spirit” to his “ father in “high heaven." - The poem continues to affirm their guilt and to deny them any means of forgiveness - This effectively refuses lynchers any access to the divine-human relationship highlighted in the opening lines. - The Lynching refuses racists any access to God - The speaker only needs to answer this divine commission, and the savage fiends of the first half of the poem will have to run from his divine light. Understandably, this is a more optimistic ending than that of a poem about lynching - The rest of the poem is dominated by the unrepentant on-lookers who ensure the lineage of white fiends -These generations of lynchers would seem to have defeated both the African and the religious forces brought against them in “To the White Fiends.” The divine light that God set aggressively upon the earth in “To the White Fiends” has given the lynch victim over “to Fate’s wild whim.” And God is reduced to a father welcoming his returning son far of Term How it Feels to be Colored Me- By: Zora Neale Hurston Definition THINGS ABOUT... - emerges as a catalogue of the stereotypes and the misguided ideas of white artists and intellectuals - Hurston represents these stereotypes as different forms of herself. - Understanding that she was at "the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or weep," Hurston undertakes these many different roles in order to report on the culture out of which New Negro modernism emerged. - personal story-in this essay is the story Hurston tells of her own childhood - Hurston's statement about slavery being the price for civilization mirrors the ideas of white artists and intellectuals, who looked to blacks for originality. Term I, Too- By: Langston Hughes Definition THINGS ABOUT... - It's about the Harlem Renaissance - About hoping for a future in racial equality - White's society of ignorance - By identifying the beauty of his African American culture, Hughes creates reason for white acceptance and asks for racial impartiality. - An attitude for change - We are all one in the same, we all want to be seen Term Silhouette- By: Langston Hughes Definition THINGS ABOUT... - the poem stands as a ... "Affirmation of Black Self. - contrasts the genderracial myth of gentle lady and a black man Term The Snows of Kilmanjaro- By: Ernest Hemingway Definition THINGS ABOUT... - You see Hemingway in Harry's Character - Harry's a writer - Repitition - Harry treats her like shit, he doesn't love her - She's more of a man than Harry is - Hysteria- women getting crazy with emotions - Violent trauma - Reflects several of Hemingway's personal concerns during the 1930s regarding his existence as a writer and his life in general. - As writer Harry Street lays gravely wounded from an African hunting accident he feverishly reflects on what he perceives as his failures at love and writing. Through his delirium he recalls his one true love Cynthia Green who he lost by his obsession for roaming the world in search of stories for his novels. Though she is dead Cynthia continues to haunt Street's thoughts. In spite of one successful novel after another, Street feels he has compromised his talent to ensure the success of his books, making him a failure in his eyes. His neglected wife Helen (Susan Hayward) tends to his wounds, listens to his ranting, endures his talk of lost loves, and tries to restore in him the will to fight his illness until help arrives. Her devotion to him makes him finally realize that he is not a failure. With his realization of a chance for love and happiness with Helen, he regains his will to live. Term Howl- By: Allen Ginsberg Definition THINGS ABOUT... - A positive attitude towards drugs - post modernism-real fatigue in technology - Personal - The poem itself is a confession of the poet's faith, done into some 112 paragraph-like lines, in the ravings of a lunatic friend (to whom it is dedicated), and in the irregularities in the lives of those of his friends who populate this disturbed pantheon - Hipster 60-70's into drugs, divinity, jazz, love, death, suicide, poetry - Fortright with sexual desire - Geographical connection b/w Soloman and Ginsberg - 1st section- lack of safety - 2nd section- trying to find a solution to the problem- turns into a love story - 3rd section- love connection - Violent sexual strain - Solomon's mom telling him he's not safe, he's in agony, he's supposed to hear this - moloch- an old god - ends with liberation solution of love Term The Day Lady Died- By: Frank O'hara Definition THINGS ABOUT... - This poem is very vivid, there's really only one clear image in the entire poem - The climax is the discovery of "Lady's" death and the indelible memory of one soft song that lives on, but the poem is essentially about a-day-in-the-life of Frank O'Hara and his city. Death is one of many random things that could punctuate and focus the seemingly unconnected activities of an otherwise typical day, making everything from a shoeshine to a bottle of Strega purchased in a liquor store glow with its own brilliant significance. - When he hear's the song on they keyboard it brings him back to a past memory - The tone at the opening of the poem is giddy and excited - written in present tense making it immediate to the readers - this poem is like jazz - Even when he sees the "NEW YORK POST with her face on it," he refuses to break into discourse on the brevity of human life, "thinking," instead, in visual and sensory images. Term Sonny's Blues- By: James Baldwin Definition THINGS ABOUT... - A captivating tale of relationship of two troubling brothers in Harlem, "Sonny's Blues" is told from a perspective of Sonny's brother, whose name is never mentioned. - Baldwin's choice of Sonny's brother as a narrator is what makes "Sonny's Blues" significant in terms of illustrating the relationship and emotional complications of Sonny and his brother - As Sonny's brother, he gets to be physically and mentally as close to Sonny as anyone else can - Sonny's brother stands as a major character and also as a first person narrator, meaning that he is a participant in the action. Baldwin achieves the sense of vividness by placing the narrator right in the middle of the action - Dialogue is effectively used from Sonny's brother's point of view to convey how misunderstanding of two brothers gets built up - Sonny's brother's struggle finally comes to an end when he first hear Sonny play at the nightclub. He first takes a glimpse of "Sonny's world" or "kingdom," and finally sees an aspect of Sonny which he has never known Term Jazz Definition Improvisation Syncopation- Rythm - missed beats, weak beats - call and response - horns, pianos, percussion, voice - Jazz is the American music - merges from the early 20th century rag beats Term Louis Armstrong Definition sings and plays the trumpet -"stardust" composed in 1927-1929 - love song- he makes his own words change Term Herston Definition We read her story in class - she's talking about when and when not she feels her color - what is jazz to her? A return back to her roots. Very instinctive Term Bop Music Definition - Started in the early 1940's - Location: Milton's Playhouse in Harlem - The first official bop records were made in 1944 by Coleman Hawkins - John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie - Charles Christopher Parker jr. "Bird" - Thelonious Sphere Monk Term The Beat Generation Definition Key figures: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs -the term "beat" was coined by Kerouac in 1948 - On the road published in 1957 rumored to have been written 3 weeks on one continuous piece of paper - the ny school also worked with the beat generation Term The Lost Generation Definition - Phrase started by Gertrude Stein after WWI -This refers to American writers who left the US and settled in Europe - People: Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, TS Eliot Term The Lost Generation Definition - Phrase started by Gertrude Stein after WWI -This refers to American writers who left the US and settled in Europe - People: Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, TS Eliot Term I Get a Kick out of You Definition Ethel Murman -1934 - also by cole porter - word association - rhyme scheme Term I Get a Kick out of You Definition Ethel Murman -1934 - also by cole porter - word association - rhyme scheme Term Modernism Definition - a general term describing the broad range of experimental and avantgarde trends in the literature and other art in the 20th century -fiction and poetry - Breakdown: modernism is mostly defined as the period encompassing WWI and WWII - Important authors: Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, D.H. Lawrence - Worldly Influenced by: Both wars,chaotic, hopeless future Term Modernism Definition - a general term describing the broad range of experimental and avantgarde trends in the literature and other art in the 20th century -fiction and poetry - Breakdown: modernism is mostly defined as the period encompassing WWI and WWII - Important authors: Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, D.H. Lawrence - Worldly Influenced by: Both wars,chaotic, hopeless future Term Cubism Definition - a release from stereotyped forms and trite subjects - focused on exploring relationships between images, perspectives and materials. - The first phase of cubism was Analytical Cubism 1902-1912 by Braque and Picasso Term Modernism 2 Definition -unconventional - rebellious - originality, new - 1914-1945 - Fragmentation - Order - Man made objects - Sincerity Term Post Modernism Definition -Post WWII -Suspicion of man-made objects - loss of unity, order - excess - irony - un-clear - imitation - To make fun of - Pastiche: to make fun of Term Post Modernism Definition -Post WWII -Suspicion of man-made objects - loss of unity, order - excess - irony - un-clear - imitation - To make fun of - Pastiche: to make fun of