CHARACTERISTICS

WRITERS

HISTORICAL EVENTS

Southern writers:

- grotesque

- fascination with extreme and perverse incongruities of character and scene

- cultivation of verbal effect

- problem of the situation of the Blacks in the South

- sense of history

- no engagement with the public and social happenings  

The Beat Generation:

- inspiration from Whitman, Buddha, eastern religion, drugs

- spontaneity, opposition to constricting forms – poetic or political

- rhetorical shock

- language of drug subculture, Black music, jazz milieu

- references to mythical religion

- comic touches

POST-MODERNISM

v   exploration of fantasies and extremities of experience

v     v  use of myth, fantasy, fairy tale

v      self-conscious style

v      the mirror effect – story within the story

v      parodies of other literary styles, formal and linguistic experimentation

v      irony, grotesque

v      “black humor” – employing elements of cruelty and shock to make readers see the ugly, the awful in a new way

v      novel an independent art form creating its own universe, its own rules

v      stresses artificiality of its worlds

v      literature a game between an author and a reader ß participation

v      exaggeration, repetition, unexpected view point, dislocation

v      disruption of cause-and-effect narration, structure episodic (feeling of artificiality)

v      characters two-dimensional, flat, grotesque, alien

v      use of popular culture

v      first person narration – can be an animal

v      celebration of chaos, acceptance of entropy (world moving towards inert uniformity and disintegration, a measure of the lack of order in a system, that includes the idea that the lack of order increases over a period in time)

v      doubt if literature can reflect any reality, even disintegrating one

v      less confidence in art and hence the artist

v      “naïve” childlike narration

v      myth, religion, history presented as arbitrary constructs of the human mind

v      moral relativity

v      interest in the problems of literary creation

  PROSE

  Southern writers:

Eudora Welty   (1909 - 2001)

Flannery O’Connor (1925– 1964)

Carson McCullers (1917 – 1967)

Truman Capote  (1924 – 1984)

Walker Percy   (1916 - 1990)

William Styron   (b. 1925)

New York  writers:

Saul Bellow   (1915 - 2005)

Philip Roth   (b. 1933)

Bernard Malamud  (1914 - 1986)

J.D. Salinger   (b. 1919)

Middle America writers:

John Updike   (b. 1932)

Norman Mailer   (b. 1923)

Joseph Heller  (b. 1923)

The Beat Generation:

Jack Kerouac   (1922 – 1969)

Afro-American Writers:

Richard Wright   (1908 –1960)

Ralph Ellison   (1914 - 1994)

James Baldwin   (1924 - 1987)

Alice Walker   (b. 1944)

Post-Modernism:

Vladimir Nabokov  (1899– 1977)

Thomas Pynchon   (b. 1937)

John Barth   (b. 1930)

Donald Barthelme  (1931 - 1989)

William Burroughs   (1914 - 97)

William Gaddis   (1922 - 1998)

Robert Coover   (b. 1932)

Joseph Heller   (b. 1923)

Kurt Vonnegut   (1922-2007)

Joyce Carol Oates  (b. 1938)

Asian American Writers

Maxine H. Kingston (b. 1940)

Amy Tan (b. 1952)

Jade Snow Wong (b. 1922)

Frank Chin (b. 1940)

John Okada ( 1923 - 1971)

  POETRY

The Beat Generation:

Allen Ginsberg (1926 – 1997)

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919)

Confessional Poets:

Robert Lowell   (1917 – 1977)

Sylvia Plath   (1932 – 1963)

John Berryman  (1914 – 1972)

Theodore Roethke (1908 – 1963)

Anne Sexton   (1928 – 1974)

Black Mountain Poets:

Charles Olson   (1910 – 1970)

Robert Creeley   (b. 1926)

Robert Duncan   (1919 - 1988)

Denise Levertov   (1923 - 1997)

New York Poets:

Frank O’Hara   (1926 – 1966)

John Ashbery   (b. 1927)

Kenneth Koch   (b. 1925)

James Schuyler   (1923 - 1991)

Afro-American Poets:

Langston Hughes(1902–1967)

Countee Cullen (1903 – 1946)

LeRoy Jones [Amiri Baraka]  (b. 1934)

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917 - 2000)

DRAMA

Arthur Miller   (1915-2005)

Tennessee Williams (1911-83)

Edward Albee  (b. 1928)

Sam Shepard   (b. 1943)

David Mamet   (b. 1947)  

August Wilson (b. 1945)

David Hwang  (b. 1957)

1945, 6 Aug –  Hiroshima bomb

1950-53 –  Korean War

1950-54 –   McCarthy’s era

1954 –    end of school segregation

1960s –    Civil Rights movement

1960 – J. F. Kennedy President

1962 –  Cuban missile crisis

1963, Nov 22 – JFK  assassination

1964-75 – Vietnam War

1965 –  Malcolm X assassination

1968 – Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinated

1969 – first man on the Moon

1972-74 – Watergate Scandal

1974 – Richard Nixon’s resignation

Wright, Native Son  (1940)

Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (1948)

Miller, Death of a Salesman   (1949)

Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye  (1951)

McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café        (1951)

Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof    (1955)

Ginsberg,  Howl    (1956)

O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey Into Night  (1956)

Kerouac,  On the Road   (1957)

Updike,  Rabbit, Run   (1960)

Heller,  Catch-22   (1961)

Nabokov,  Pale Fire   (1962)

Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962)

Bellow,  Herzog   (1964)

Pynchon,  The Crying of Lot 49   (1966)

Barthelme,  Snow White   (1967)

Barth,  Lost in the Funhouse   (1968)

Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five   (1969)