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What We Talk about When We Talk About Ourselves: How American Literature…

- - - - Hills like White Elephants
        
        Published 1927
        
        Hemingway's terse, minimalist style creates a sense of alienation from the interior lives of the characters he depicts. This is not only the opposite of how most fiction attempts to convey the interiority of characters, but is in fact meant to mirror a sense of self-alienation that the characters, and people in modern society in general, feel. In this story specifically, part of that self-alienation is the result of a man trying to persuade a young woman away from her own feelings on the subject of getting an abortion. Both of the characters' motives are unclear to us; perhaps in the same way they are unclear to the characters themselves.
        
        Ernest Hemingway
      - Barn Burning
        
        Published 1939
        
        Opposite Hemingway's brevity, Faulkner's longwinded, molasses-slow narrative style paints characters who are in touch, at least in some way, with their own vague and hazy interiority, but who are distinctly out of touch with the way in which that very interiority, and indeed the lives they live, are shaped by the histories of violence and oppression in their society. In this story, the dirt-poor Snopes family moves from home to home as their patriarch, Abner Sartoris, cannot keep a job on account of his temper flaring violently and causing him to destroy the property of the people he works for. He does not learn from his past mistakes and has stuck not only himself but his wife and children also in a cycle of unexamined anger and violence exacerbated by their destitution and lack of social standing.
        
        William Faulkner
        
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE_bxElDhrk
      - The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
        
        Published 1915
        
        Eliot's poem, in detailing the impotence of a single man struggling to interact successfully with those around him and to push forward with his life, mirrors the impotence of the human subject to contend with the fractious, violent cacophony of modern life. The poem's fragmentary, at times vague style attempts to mirror this confusion, littered with references to classical literature that lead nowhere and a sense of time at once minute and cosmically expansive.
        
        T.S. Eliot
    - - Up from Slavery
        
        Published 1901
        
        Recognizing the same core issue as du Bois (the problems of being black in a white-dominated world), Washington takes the opposite tack and proposes that the black community must de-other itself by assimilating into the dominant white culture.
        
        Booker T. Washington
      - The Souls of Black Folks
        
        Published 1903
        
        Du Bois argues that to be black in a nation run by whites is to live a split existence, to experience a split self ("double consciousness"). The modern black community, he argues, must both retrace its roots and forge new cultural, artistic, and social identities lest it remain bounded by a dominant culture which is not its own.
        
        W.E.B. du Bois
      - Both of these approaches are attempts to deal with having been positioned by the dominant culture as the "other" within their own society. However, while Washington's solution would involve a legitimizing of that dominative white culture, du Bois is more radical in proposing the need for a individuated black cultural response.
  - - - How it Feels to be Colored Me
        
        Published 1928
        
        Hurston's essay discusses the possibilities brought about by her blackness, and thereby her marginality within white American culture, as a positive instead of a negative. She viewed it as opening up a landscape of possibility even as (or perhaps because of how) it closed off access to the mainstream of society.
        
        Zora Neale Hurston
      - Daisy Miller: A Study
        
        Published 1878
        
        James positions Daisy, a brash young American woman, as a disruptive force within the calcified social hierarchy of wealthy Europeans and American expat. Part of James' thesis here seems to be that, for all its flaws, "American Culture" is at least more vibrant and socially alive than the stagnant, "dignified" culture of the old world.
        
        Henry James
    - - "Self-Reliance"
        
        Published 1841
        
        Emerson's essay is a grand statement against conforming to a society that, as it approached modernity, had become increasingly developed and all-encompassing. He holds up the need for individuals to make themselves entirely self-sufficient, without need of or connection to any larger governing bodies (either institutional or de facto), in order for the best in humanity to survive.
        
        Ralph Waldo Emerson
      - Walden
        
        Published 1854
        
        Thoreau asserts the necessity of both radical individualism and a return to nature in the discovery of true, uncorrupted identity. Only in this way, he says, is it even conceivably possible to escape the strictures of a repressive, industrializing society rapidly progressing towards atomized consumer culture.
        
        Henry David Thoreau
        
        I think it's interesting to note that Thoreau's insistence on establishing a direct link with the land on and in which one lives is similar to assertions made by Indigenous writers prior to and after him. In their cases, however, that connection with the land is tied directly to history and ancestry, whereas Thoreau's stated efforts were to establish an immediate, personal, individual link with the land, irrespective of (and perhaps even opposed to) biological and cultural heritage.
      - "Common Sense"
        
        Published 1776
        
        Paine's pamphlet paints the colonial struggle for independence as part and parcel with the universal struggle for the sovereignty of peoples living under the thumb of archaic and oppressive monarchies. In doing so, Paine helped ground the stated guiding principles of the American Revolution within the philosophical framework of Enlightenment ideas, paving the way for Americans after him to conceive of the country as as much a philosophic project as a sociopolitical entity.
        
        Thomas Paine
- - - - Published 1828
      - In setting up a print forum for discussion and news delivery in the language of the Cherokee people, Boudinot aided in the continuing attempts by the embattled Indigenous populations of the Americas to not only reclaim sovereignty, but to redevelop a sense of community and society that was not part of mainstream white culture, while still not necessarily opposing it.
      - Elias Boudinot
    - - Published 1981
      - This story examines the contemporary lives and struggle for sovereignty of the Laguna Pueblo people it depicts. The story urges a pulling away from attempts to assimilate into or be accepted by the colonizing White Anglo culture that has decimated the Indigenous populations, calling instead for a return to a way of life more closely tied to the land, with which Indigenous peoples share a connection that the colonizers either cannot or will not.
      - Leslie Marmon Silko
  - - - Published 1890
      - Dickinson's poem, in seeing death as the anchoring experience of life (not physicality, as in Whitman), interrogates the space between individual experience and larger social/historical experiences in a deeply intimate and personal way, attempting to judge the value of either from the standpoint ruthlessly dedicated to acknowledging the temporary nature of life and human experience.
      - Emily Dickinson
    - - First published in 1855
      - In privileging sensuous physicality and ecstatic contact with nature as anchoring experiences within the turbulence of rapidly industrializing society, Whitman posits the self or individual as both the locus of life experience, and, in his nationalistic love of country, the principle underlying the founding doctrines of America. In this way, his poetry extends both the individualist and transcendentalist fields of thought popular during his lifetime and attempts to reconcile them with the experience of modern American life.
      - Walt Whitman
      - [revised editions published many more times up until Whitman's death in 1891]
  - - - Written between 1630 and 1651
      - Bradford's journal accounts for the initial years of the Pilgrim's living in the Americas, describing the colony built there as relatively autonomous and sustaining meaningful, though not particularly deep, contact with the Native tribes who inhabited the surrounding areas.
      - William Bradford
    - - Published 1552
      - De las Casas' account of the degradation of the Americas at the hands of inept and outright cruel colonists displays, among other things, that there were Europeans at the time of colonization who were at least conscious of how harmful the actions of Europeans in the "New World" (a phrase de las Casas himself used) were.
      - Bartolome de las Casas
  - - - Published 1925
      - Locke's essay speaks to the actuality (not only the necessity) of a rising tide of black diasporic consciousness, a movement in the arts and culture coming together around and defining new notions of blackness both in America and globally. This is a seminal text of the Harlem Renaissance in that it attempts to communicate in essay form the direction of that artistic movement, and indeed to define what that movement was all about.
      - Alain Locke
    - - Published 1921
      - Highes' poem foregrounds the long history of the African diaspora as physically manifested in the black body, thereby indicating that the artistic products of the emergent "Harlem Renaissance" come out of a long tradition of black art with its roots at the very base of civilization.
      - Langston Hughes
    - - by James Baldwin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LmrqtD1E7c
      - Published in 1957
      - Baldwin's story points to music as a binding factor in contemporary blackness, capable of communicating emotions both too intensely positive and negative to be conveyed with words, thereby bringing together the vast and multivariate black experience, if only briefly.
  - - - Published 2016
      - In portraying a resistance to multinational corporate domination (the modern iteration of the colonial impulses on which America was built) which incorporates the radical heterogeneity of contemporary American society while privileging and foregrounding the indigenous tribes whose historical right to the land has been ritually ignored by those powers, Erdrich's piece on the Standing Rock resistance raises the question of whether or not there is a possibility, in our increasingly postcolonial moment, for mass actions to come together which attempt not only to stave off further violent domination in the American tradition, but to begin healing the vast schisms erupted by that violence in the first place.
      - Louise Erdrich
    - - Published 2017
      - Machado's story depicts both human death at a cataclysmic scale and a positive embrace of human (especially female) sexuality as reversals of the Amemrican legacy of domination and destruction, suggesting that perhaps apocalypse is the only thing that's going to turn this nation's destructive tendencies around on a large scale, but that there is still something to be said for attempting to operate positively and make connections on a more individual scale.
      - Carmen Maria Machado (Sweet earrings!)
      - (The earrings say "cunt." I don't know if that's visible at this photo resolution.)
- - - - Published 1855
      - Melville's novella plunges the reader into a world of vagueness and suspicion as a white captain boards a marooned slave ship people primarily by the African slaves it was carrying, and with very few white people alive on its decks. The tension Melville builds throughout this story, coupled with the uncertainty on the reader's part as to how much of the narrator's suspicions are to be taken seriously and how much attributed to prejudice or paranoia, mirrors the fragility of the white-dominated social hierarchy of the author's time revealed by both the Civil War, and by any generalized instance of racial strife that seemed to pose a conceptual threat to white supremacy (slave uprisings, the Haitian Revolution, etc.).
      - Herman Melville
    - - Published 1864
      - Baraka's surreal play documents the persisting insolubility of racial tensions in the United States, specifically focusing on the way in which black bodies are fetishized, demonized, or otherwise dehumanized by white American culture, leaving black people, regardless of socioeconomic class, in a nightmarish position of damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't. Part of Baraka's interest here is the way in which black creativity and arts are a sublimation of the more logical response to the years of oppression suffered by the African diaspora -- the murder of their oppressors.
      - Amiri Baraka https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ziRjhAgTO8
  - - - Mary Rowlandson
      - Published 1682
      - In telling the story of her "Captivity and Restoration," Mary Rowlandson's memoir helped establish the notion of an "American Frontier," ie a place on the borderlands of (white) "civilization." Beyond these borders are the Native American tribes of the type who captured her and killed her relatives. This conceptual cartography aided in mapping a picture of white society in the new world, and placing Native tribes firmly outside of it.
    - - Christopher Columbus [Interestingly, there are no portraits of Christopher Columbus painted during his lifetime -- all of the famous ones are posthumous. Among others, historian James W. Loewen, in "Lies My Teacher Told Me," states that he does not believe there is any historical value to the existing portraits of Columbus for this reason.]
      - Columbus' letters manage to portray a "New World" in the Americas that is both peopled already, and available for the taking. In writing of the kindness of the native peoples he met on his voyages, Columbus implies that the "bounty" of the new world is open for the habitation and colonization of Europeans.
    - - Thomas Jefferson
      - Jefferson's musings on the state of slave society in the US recognized that the chattel slavery system as it existed at the time was not only morally repugnant, but could not realistically remain in place as society progressed. However, based on his belief in the inherent inferiority of black people to whites, Jefferson suggests the transplanting of the slave population to Africa, essentially abrogating responsibility for the lives of people who were born into American society because of a system whose gruesome machinations made possible the existence of that society in the first place.
      - Published (in English) 1787
      - [Previously published in French 1785]
  - - - The Haitian Declaration of Independence, in extending the principals enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence to the colonized people of Haiti greatly complicates not only the founding rhetoric of America, but even the physical/political borders of "America" as a concept. It does this by logically extending the aims of the "American Project" to the enslaved people of Haiti, throwing into stark relief both the history of colonization and enslavement that made America possible in the first place.
      - Signed 1804
    - - Published 1833
      - In detailing the injustices wrought upon the Native Peoples, specifically the Sauk tribe, by the white settlers in America, Black Hawk's autobiography paints a revealing portrait of the human lives ignored in the concept of "Manifest Destiny." His description of the lies and shady dealings perpetrated by the settlers rebut any notion of their "ownership" of the land that they swindled from the people who had been living on and tilling that land for the good of their community.
      - Black Hawk
- - - - Delivered 1851
      - Truth's speech complicates the decidedly white notion of "femininity" prevalent at the time by asserting her own femininity as contiguous with, not at odds with, her blackness, her hard-wearing life experiences, and her sharp wit in denouncing assertions to the contrary. It's a pretty badass speech, even if we're not sure how accurate the versions we have today are to the actual speech she delivered (off the cuff) at the Women's Convention in 1851. In this way, she knits together the abolitionist and women's suffrage movements of her time by necessarily tying the success of both to their recognition of black and non-white womanhood.
      - Sojourner Truth
    - - Published 1892
      - Gilman's story asserts the necessity of ending American patriarchal culture's dismissal of women's interior lives by viscerally portraying how this treatment causes the story's protagonist to slide into violent madness, the only way she can regain personal agency after having been repressed by the imperious men in her life.
      - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
  - - - Edgar Allan Poe
      - Published 1839
      - [mediocre film adaptation starring Vincent Price, co-starring Vincent Price's voice. (Possibly vice versa.) 1960] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqgLS6TMPnk
      - In Poe's story, the calcified "culture" through which Usher moves is portrayed as not only stagnant, but decaying and infectious, legitimately dangerous. Poe is urging, both artistically and culturally, that the US must escape its fractious and past, or that (more likely) that past will tear the country apart.
    - - By James Fenimore Cooper
      - In Fenimore Cooper's novel, which takes place in 1757, the decimation of the Indigenous populations of the Americas by European settlers is portrayed as a dismal event, but a necessary one for the greater good that is the later American republic to be born. This "perspective" is made possible by the space of nearly a century between the events about which Cooper is writing, and the writing of his novel.
      - Published 1826
  - - - Published 1845
      - Douglass's autobiographic story of his life under slavery were part of a broad abolitionist attempt to make the horrors of chattel slavery undeniable and immediate to the comfortable, educated classes of America at the time. Douglass' story specifically posits his escape as an act of heroism, arguing for an end to slavery on the basis of its repression of vibrant human individuals like himself.
      - Frederick Douglass
    - - Published 1861
      - Jacob's harrowing recounting of sexual abuse at the hands of her slavemaster force both the gendered and sexualized facets of oppression under slavery to the fore, an act which necessitates an expansion in our understanding of both the many manifestations of racist domination and an acknowledgement of the ways in which different people are abused and/or oppressed differently under the same systems.
      - Harriet Jacobs
    - - Published 1833
      - Apess's address to a white audience on the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples under colonial rule implicates that very audience in the oppression, which Apess takes pains to describe as not only contrary to the stated founding principles of America, but to the very foundations of Christianity.
      - William Apess