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Literature in English: The Mid-19th through the Mid-20th Century - Coggle…

- - - - Harlem [2] lacks Hughes's usual optimism and instead focuses on the nature of that which has been denied to a person, tying this disappointment to rotting food, injury -- "Does it dry it dry up/like a raisin in the sun?/Or fester like a sore--/And then run?" The poem ends, however, with the line "Or does it explode?" suggesting that in the wake of destruction, something new can be born.
      - Waiting for Godot follows to characters who seek purpose, seek hope, and are denied these things repeatedly. Because of the complications of memory and time, it feels as though once the play ends, these characters are doomed to repeat the same mistake once more, waiting for a messenger by a tree day by day, never truly remembering, never truly being remembered.
      - Eurydice takes up the voice of a character left behind, reflecting on the abandonment of her beloved. This poem allows a typically silent character to relieve the anger she feels at having been left behind, reflecting, also, the despair felt by the change in civilization after the destruction of war.
    - - Tradition and the Individual Talent argues that the artist should remove themself from their work -- the final piece should stand for itself. Eliot views poetry as an escape from personality, emphasizing an artist's role in tradition, and stating that tradition must be learned, not simply inherited. This sentiment can also be read as something that seeks to erase the personal -- without the idea of inherited tradition, the emotional attachment within the piece may not feel the same.
        
        Sea Rose likewise complicates the idea that personality should be removed from poetry, as H.D.'s female perspective makes "Sea Rose" a poem that twists what is typically assumed to be gentle and feminine. H.D.'s other poetry continues this complication, providing a distinctly female voice to figures of mythology, and creating a new perspective that had been entirely absent from the interpretations of these classical texts.
        
        Spring and All challenges Eliot's assertions, placing the poem in a specifically individual, American context. The imagery drawn within the poem comes from Williams's drive to work at the hospital; without the involvement of that context, the poem would take on an entirely different meaning. Williams also sought to establish a modern American tradition of poetry, and this is reflective of that; this poem is situated in time and place, and the poet's experience bleeds through beautifully.
      - The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain draws attention to the ways in which whiteness is upheld as the ideal; Hughes argues that separating out the Black identity within the artist is equal to some form of erasure. This notion, however, is complicated by the consideration of boundaries; if limited in such a way, is Black art constrained? Should the focus be on universality, or is this the rejection of the individual?
        
        Their Eyes Were Watching God clearly features the construct of race, but it could be argued that it does not center it. Janie's identity as a Black women is something that she lives within; her race is addressed within the narrative and affects her lived experience, but the centrality of the narrative revolves around Janie as a person learning, loving, and growing over the course of her life. This reflects Zora Neale Hurston's own ideas about the intermittent nature of racial awareness, stating: “I have no race. I am me...The cosmic Zora emerges.”
  - - - The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock begins with an untranslated line from Dante's Inferno, immediately drawing a line of accessibility within the poem. The speaker makes other references to classical works -- Michelangelo and Hamlet being the most obvious -- but the immediate inclusion of Latin within the poem reflects Eliot's opinion that one should earn a sense of tradition, not be given it without effort. The changes in time and tense, alongside the sheer length of the poem, similarly create an amount of friction for the reader -- this is a piece that must be dissected to be understood.
      - Oread is a poem that requires additional mythological knowledge in order to fully understand its meaning. An oread is a mountain nymph, so the poem's combination of oceanic and forest imagery take on a new meaning, emphasizing the nature of the erotic with the merging of two environments. While this poem is not inaccessible, it does require the reader to possess a certain amount of information pertaining to Greek mythology that the average person may not have.
    - - Nude Young Dancer not only describes a sex worker, but makes direct reference to the environment in which she works, working against the idea of poetry as a medium which only represents certain circumstances and certain types of people. There is also a sense of combination between the natural and the constructed here; the subject of this poem exists within Hughes's time and space, but he makes repeated references to "jungle trees" and "great forests", furthering the sense of the troubling of boundaries.
      - The Weary Blues includes the language of jazz, with alliteration, syncopation, and rhythmic patterning all mimicking musical construction. It also incorporates a Blues song within itself, again challenging the boundaries between high and low art by incorporating popular culture within itself.
      - The Man of the Crowd reflects a range of different people who gather on the streets of London. The narrator observes the office workers earlier in the day, and when the bourgeois sentiment begins to fade with the evening, he describes the less savory figures. While this story does describe a broad range of people, it seems to come from a place of judgmental curiosity rather than pure observation; there is a difference in tone, after all, between the descriptions of "modest young girls" and "the loathsome and utterly lost leper in rags".
- - - - Easter, 1916 describes, in poetic form, Irish resistance to English settlement. These instances of rebellion, such as the Easter, 1916 armed rebellion against the English, preserves a moment in time; while Yeats may not have been entirely supportive of the cause, his creation of a work that describes the incident prevents it from being erased from memory as a whole. Preservation is enough.
      - Let America Be America Again does not let economic injustice, even across racial lines, be forgotten. The collective voice created through the mobilization of "I" allows the poet to bring together a broad expanse of people from a multitude of histories. Hughes makes it a point to emphasize the past within the people he speaks for: "For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,/And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,/And torn from Black Africa's strand I came/To build a 'homeland of the free.'"
      - Things Fall Apart, because of its preservation of oral storytelling and Ibo tradition, represents a sort of collective memory, as the novel begins with a collection of tales that shape the lives and perceptions of the characters that the novel follows. It also serves to reverse the colonist idea that Africa existed as a cultural void before European interference; in writing this novel, Achebe not only portrays Ibo culture, but fights against the idea that African peoples did not have strong, nuanced cultural ideals and traditions.
      - The Sound and the Fury exemplifies the confines of both collective and individual memory, with the characters continuing to reflect the slowly dying Southern values that built the Compson fortune. Each of the male narrators seem to be haunted, as well, by the memory of their sister, Caddy, whose attitude was antithetical to the values of feminine purity that these men continue to uphold. In this way, the collective and the individual are intertwined; Caddy's continued presence in the minds of her brothers is lined with the ideas that drove her away in the first place.
    - - The Turn of the Screw is a novel about an experience written down by a governess, told and mailed to her acquaintance, and read aloud by that acquaintance to a narrator transcribing the tale for an audience. Given the elaborate and supernatural nature of the novel's plot, and the tendency of the governess to read into the actions of the people around her, the novel intentionally raises questions of reliability and remembrance -- how much of this is being framed so as to remove guilt from the governess herself?
      - Mrs. Dalloway allows its characters to lapse into memory, recalling what they were like in their youth, what form their relationships took. Through the use of free indirect discourse, we are able to see multiple characters' perspectives and memories of each other, allowing the audience to see the ways in which the characters misjudge or misunderstand each other, weaving a full tapestry of the human experience of being unknown. The memories of these people continue to influence present interactions, thus prolonging this.
      - Waiting for Godot similarly combines experiences of individual and collective memory, which is interesting given that none of the characters in the play remember who they are, although they may have rare moments of clarity. This lack of history is a greater commentary on the loss of personhood felt after a war, as well as the loss of a culture, as so many things have been shifted and damaged in the violence.
      - Their Eyes Were Watching God is structured within the frame narrative of Janie telling her story to Phoeby -- as such, it seems as though the entire tale is memory. However, there is no challenging of the accuracy of this experience, as the novel serves to trace Janie coming into her form. Janie's missteps are never included judgmentally, but they are included -- she chose the wrong man, the wrong life for herself, but that does not make her incapable of growth or happiness.
  - - - The Lake Isle of Innisfree is structured relatively consistently, yet its final line falls short: "While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,/I hear it deep in the heart's core." This seems to reflect the level to which the speaker's ideal world of Innisfree can never become a reality; even in verse, and even as it provides comfort, the edenic image is still not enough.
      - Sea Rose challenges the classically romantic and soft images of a rose by immediately imagining it as some harsh thing, strong and off-putting as opposed to inviting and gentle. This perspective highlights the degree to which previously-established ideas were addressed by modernist writers -- the world had changed, and their perspectives changed alongside it.
      - Sailing to Byzantium follows a speaker who wishes to become a work of art, contrasting the difficulties of time and aging with the everlasting power of artistic form. In doing so, however, the speaker removes their humanity: "Consume my heart away; sick with desire/And fastened to a dying animal/It knows not what it is; and gather me/Into the artifice of eternity." This also complicates the idea of the coexistence of the art and the artist -- at some point, the artist will die, but their work will live on, conveying feeling in others, though it has no feeling itself.
    - - The Sound and the Fury features a character who, although she is not given a perspective, continues to dominate the memories of her brothers. Caddy's freedom of spirit relative to the rest of her family contrasts her with the Southern aristocratic values of the Compson's, and her continued influence over her family, even in her absence, highlights the cracks in the systems that Jason and Mrs. Compson continue to idolize even at the novel's close.
      - Things Fall Apart is, partially, a lament of all that was lost to European colonization. There is a chilling nature to reading small references to Christian settlers -- the novel's ending marks the beginning of a spiral into violence and erasure. The haunting nature of this piece comes from the inevitable loss that the reader can feel hanging over the novel; it is unavoidable, and follows the audience all the same.
      - Eurydice, if considered a poem of haunting, is told from the perspective of an unsettled ghost. While Eurydice is typically not granted perspective at all -- the myth tends to center Orpheus's grief, not Eurydice's loss -- her mourning of what she has lost is especially impactful, as she laments the living with the voice of the dead.
- - - - Conversation
        
        Mrs. Dalloway Through the conversations present in Mrs. Dalloway, the reader can see the ways in which characters both fail and respond kindly to one another; it is, after all, a novel obsessed with the failures of communication. By allowing the reader a glimpse inside the minds of the conversational participants, it places on full display the gaps between thought and speech, between longing and connection.
        
        Bartleby, the Scrivener The narrator of this short story spends the entirety of his tale detailing the ways in which he fails to communicate with his employee, who only responds to his requests with one sentence. The nature of the investigative present in this story combines with the failure of conversation to create a narrative that highlights the anxieties that follow a great change in the structuring of society. Furthermore, the less the narrator discovers about Bartleby, the more it is clear that he does not truly know himself, defined entirely by the capitalist confines of work.
        
        Their Eyes Were Watching God In the Floridian landscape that Hurston has captured here, conversation is the central tenant of belonging in Black communities. Hurston frames these conversations among townspeople with a great deal of nuance -- this level of communal storytelling provides a certain amount of power, but that influence is not always used kindly, as the novel opens with gossip about its main character. Janie's inclusion or exclusion from conversational circles impacts her feeling of belonging to the community she lives in.
        
        Things Fall Apart Okonkwo is a character whose tragedy is built partially on his failure to communicate -- afraid to replicate the behaviors of his father and be perceived as weak, Okonkwo instead imparts his values and expectations onto his family with harsh words, commands, and threats. As a result, his family unit begins to fracture, with Okonkwo's son Nwoye leaving his community to join the church of the colonizers.
      - Investigation
        
        The Man of the Crowd Set in industrial London, the observations of the unnamed narrator reveal the changes in social connection that followed the economic and social shifts of the mid-nineteenth century. The narrator's obsession with a character who cannot be defined challenges neat ideas of class structure, and reflects a level of anxiety surrounding the inadequacy of the kinds of social understanding common before this time.
        
        The Turn of the Screw James's narrator becomes an investigator of the paranormal happenings she believes to be occurring at Bly Manor, her place of employment. In her continued observation of the phenomena and her interpretation of the events, her anxieties surrounding social class and manner are clear. While this investigative spirit allows the audience to experience the ways in which the narrator incorporates social norms into her ways of thinking about others, the presence of these worries also reflects a fear of these traits within herself, leaving the mystery of knowledge wide open.
        
        Weary Blues Langston Hughes's poem similarly reflects a level of social observation across racial lines as well as class ones. The nature of the poem is such that the speaker has no clear identity; if read against the grain, the poem could be a description of a white outsider observing a Black performer. Due to the often-tongue-in-cheek nature of Blues lyrics, combined with the poem's somewhat serious ending, an argument could be made that there is a level of misunderstanding present that could reflect the viewpoint of a person watching the performance from the outside.
    - - The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is a first-person narrative poem playing on the style of the lyric poem, which emphasizes personal emotions or feelings. The only real strength of feeling present, however, within this narrator, is his sense of hesitance and a degree of misunderstanding: "This is not what I meant, at all." This failure of language reflects the narrator's lack of trust in himself, and thus a sense that the narrator is unknown to himself.
      - Mrs. Dalloway Clarissa's narrative foil, Septimus, reflects on his past midway through the novel, remembering his love for Shakespeare before he enlisted. After the trauma that he endures during the war, this connection with literature no longer produces the same feeling; he has become disillusioned with that which had, before, brought him so much joy. Septimus's experience melding together two halves of a person -- one, irreversibly changed -- reflects, ironically, the success of language, although Septimus now insists on its inherent failure.
      - Their Eyes Were Watching God details Janie's journey from adolescence to adulthood, following her as she grows in strength and in confidence. Through Hurston's use of free indirect discourse, Janie tells her own story on her own terms, reflecting on the multitude of challenges she faced throughout her lifetime. While Janie's perspective may not always be clear to the people around her, it is always transparent to the audience, allowing her the space to make and learn from her mistakes, building her personhood alongside her resilience.
  - - - The Turn of the Screw centers a narrator who is obviously literate -- not only does she "read" into the situations she encounters, she, as someone who can write, is the only figure of authority who can communicate with the world outside Bly. Despite this, however, the character who retains the most absolute knowledge seems to be Mrs. Grose, who is illiterate. The contrast between the paranoid overreading of the governess as opposed to the stability of Mrs. Grose's judgment challenges the nobility of reading.
    - - The Turn of the Screw is a story told thirdhand -- a narrator recounts a tale read by a person reading a letter written to them. Each narrator becomes another level of a reader, deepening the sort of metacognitive tone that the novel encourages. As the narrator continues to read into situations and instances obsessively, the reader does as well, conscious of the textuality of the work that they are encountering.
      - Their Eyes Were Watching God frames the majority of its story through a conversation that Janie is having with her friend, Phoeby. We are given the context of recollection, of assemblage from memory, from the beginning, but the use of free indirect discourse complicates this. Janie's thoughts are not the only thoughts present, just as she has not spent her life alone -- the actions and perceptions of the people around her have influenced the life she has lived, and thus impacts the way the story is told.
  - - - Claustrophobic Narration
        
        Man of the Crowd, although beginning in a very broad sense by describing a number of figures in a large space, eventually narrows its scope until it focuses all of its attention on the details surrounding one ever-shifting, ever-moving figure. The pacing changes as the narrator moves with the elusive "Man of the Crowd;" while the narrator was relatively aware of time before, the story ends with the narrator having followed the object of his curiosity throughout the night. This level of disorientation, alongside a close attention to detail, creates a tense atmosphere that reflects the state of mind of the narrator.
        
        Turn of the Screw features a narrator who is constantly interpreting the situations she finds herself in, adding context to the conversations that she has without logically leading the audience to her jumps in reasoning. This formal decision is frustrating and confusing -- the reader, like the narrator, is having to develop context and invent logic for the winding prose that James presents.
        
        The Sound and the Fury, while featuring four narrators, manages produce three chapters that trap the reader inside of the heads of narrators obsessed with the looping nature of time and their own relationships. The narrative becomes bordered by these ideas of family and society that the characters seem trapped by. Although the differences between Benjy's, Quentin's, and Jason's sections are stark, they nevertheless reflect the rutting, cyclical nature of the systems that the Compson family benefited from. The only section not entirely focused on the looping thoughts of a single character is Dilsey's, reflecting, possibly, the change that is to come in a society whose structure seems to be failing itself.
      - Expansive Narration
        
        The Dead, while spending its time with one narrator, opens with the thoughts of the domestic worker helping to organize the party that the narrator attends. Through the use of free indirect discourse, the narrative voice bounces from character to character until Gabriel arrives, leaving the impression that location is significant to one's perception of oneself -- the story cannot begin until Gabriel is present at a specific place.
        
        Mrs. Dalloway takes an almost "democratic" approach to narration, with the voice of the story moving throughout the people of London, sharing their thoughts, even if just for a second. Early in the novel, a car passes by, and the narrative spends time reflecting on each of the people who see that car, and which royal figure they think is most likely to be driven by it -- how a mass of people interpret the world they inhabit is important to Woolf.
        
        The Negro Speaks of Rivers features the inclusion of a "lyric I", encompassing the feelings and experiences of a broad expanse of people in one poem, and through one pronoun. This creation of a shared history was especially important for Black Americans during the Harlem Renaissance, as part of their goal was to create, on their own terms, the shape of their own identity.
        
        Let America Be America Again features a stanza where the speaker becomes a breadth of American figures: "I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,/I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars./I am the red man driven from the land,/I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--". With this, Hughes argues that there is not only one facet of the American people that is truly American; the voice of freedom benefits the masses.
        
        Their Eyes Were Watching God begins from an almost mythic perspective in its breadth, then narrows its scope, following the thoughts of the townspeople who watch Janie walk by, to Janie herself. Although not as entirely inclusive as Mrs. Dalloway, Their Eyes Were Watching God features the perspectives of several other characters apart from Janie through the use of free indirect speech. This creates the impression of the individual being shaped by the collective.
        
        Things Fall Apart follows a more oral tradition, and at the novel's beginning, when the characters and their society are prosperous, the narration is given to multiple people, and their perspectives are given equal weight. After Okonkwo threatens Ekwefi, she voices the weight of this to another person at the wrestling match: "I cannot yet find a mouth with which to tell the story." Okonkwo's actions are not represented in a vaccum, yet as the story progresses, the scope of narration becomes much more limited, following fewer and fewer characters until the narrative voice is picked up by the white District Commissioner who has colonized Okonkwo's homeland.
    - - The Turn of the Screw, made entirely of James's long, flowing sentences, draws the reader's attention immediately to the form that it occupies. Only a novel could allow the narrative to expand in such a way so as to leave room for mystery within the individual reader; they are forced, as investigators of the narrative, to consider, in a granular sense, the language and mode as another part of the mystery.
      - In a Station of the Metro is incredibly short, but manages to capture the feeling of an image entirely. The format of the poem on the page -- two lines, each with three spaced clusters of words -- draws the reader's attention to the medium that the text occupies, not simply its content.
      - Waiting for Godot features a speech from Lucky near its midpoint, which is stylized so specifically that, if reading the text without watching a performance, it takes the audience entirely out of the form of the play, drawing attention to the absurdity of the situation at hand by forcing the reader to contrast a near nonsensical philosophical rambling with the near nonsensical roundings and loops of Estragon and Vladimir's conversation.
    - - A Few Don'ts from an Imagiste encourages creating and preserving an instant without the use of excessive or unnecessary language. All words must serve a purpose in the presentation of the poem.
        
        In a Station of the Metro features two lines with three clusters of words each, mimicking the appearance of metro cars, or the sight of people clustered together in a crowd.
        
        Oread includes, truly, one image of the sea splashing against the shore, but complicates the piece with a command and sensuality. Each word intentionally ties the internal with the external, the emotional with the image.
      - Preservation of the Langauge
        
        The Dead forces its narrator to confront the ever-present link between the literary and the political. Gabriel's lack of connection to the language of his culture serves to create both internal and external tension -- he ponders the continuation of tradition, but draws up short when confronted with the ways in which he himself has failed to keep tradition alive.
        
        Things Fall Apart preserves an orality not commonly found in English literature; it reads more similarly to The Odyssey in parts, with its epic, and in some parts, mythical, scope. Achebe's careful recreation of traditional orality helps to preserve a culture largely erased -- as society continues to degrade, so too does the form that once represented it.
        
        Their Eyes Were Watching God makes an effort to capture the patterns of speech and phonetic differences if its characters, expanding upon Hurston's work as a folklorist by preserving the idiosyncrasies of speech within a space often neglected by literature.