Final Flashcards
(54 cards)
I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
TS Eliot
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
Wallace Stevens
“It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said. “It’s not
really an operation at all.”
The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.
“ I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It’s just to let
the air in.”
The girl did not say anything.
Ernest Hemingway
Sorrow is my own yard where the new grass flames as it has flamed often before, but not with the cold fire that closes round me this year. Thirty-five years I lived with my husband.
William Carlos Williams
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
Gwendolyn Brooks
“I heard that you lost a lot in the crash.”
“I did,” and he added grimly, “but I lost everything I wanted in the boom.”
“Selling short.”
“Something like that.”
F Scott Fitzgerald
For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.
Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.
William Faulkner
“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
“Some fun!” Bobby Lee said.
“Shut up, Bobby Lee” The Misfit said. “It’s no real pleasure in life.”
Flannery O’Connor
In the dark, the girl came by and I asked her to take drinks to the bandstand. There was a long pause, while they talked up there in the indigo light and after awhile I saw the girl put a Scotch and milk on top of the piano for Sonny. He didn’t seem to notice it, but just before they started playing again, he sipped from it and looked toward me, and nodded. Then he put it back on top of the piano. For me, then, as they began to play again, it glowed and shook above my brother’s head like the very cup of trembling.
James Baldwin
My mother danced all night and Roberta’s was sick. That’s why we were taken to St. Bonny’s. People want to put their arms around you when you tell them you were in a shelter, but it really wasn’t bad.
Toni Morrison
If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two—— The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now.
Sylvia Plath
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn…
John Berryman
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz…
Allen Ginsberg
He seemed to see, with a cartographer’s eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county. He had made a discovery, a contribution to modern geography; he would name the stream Lucinda after his wife. He was not a practical joker nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure. The day was beautiful and it seemed to him that a long swim might enlarge and celebrate its beauty.
John Cheever
I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing eye dogs. A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to.
Raymond Carver
It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?”
Kurt Vonnegut
modernism
- most of what we read falls under modernism
- good example is TS Eliot
- between WWI and WWII (1914-1945)
- distrust of meta-narrative
- fragmented
- stream of consciousness
- experimental, leader was Ezra Pound
- extreme in politics and ideology
- take elements of these stories and traditions and mix them up
- influence of new ideas from Freud, Jung, Einstein
- rejection of Victorian world
- pessimism
- nature is depicted as a wasteland
- most intense in Europe bc America was not impacted as much
- ALLUSION - references to other works
- “make it new”
- unreliable narrators
- free verse
- LOOK AT MODERNISM SHEET
“Lost Generation”
-people too young to have been in WWI
-name from Gertrude Stein’s mechanic
-poets, artists, etc in Europe
also referred to people who died in the war - a whole generation was lost
-Fitzgerald & Hemingway
-between WWI and WWII, esp 1920s
“Beat Generation”
- after WWII, late 40s and 50s
- New York and San Francisco
- Manhattan, esp around Columbia Univ
- eventually shifted to California (countercultural capital)
- areas in Mexico City and Tangier (Morroco)
- hippies came from this
- “Howl” by Ginsberg is main poem
- On the Road by Kerouac is main book
Southern Gothic
- how South is usually depicted
- falling down mansions, rape, murder, family secrets, etc
- “A Rose for Emily” by Faulkner, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor
Confessional Poetry
- not cerebral, unfeeling, classical reference-filled poems
- sharing their feelings, the truth - not about making up characters
- write about themselves, often about depression
- Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, (John Ashbery), Robert Lowell
- RL taught poetry class in Boston, AS & SP met in his class
unreliable narrator
What is it?
-often a character in the story
-can’t rely on them to be telling the whole truth
-may not know, may be lying, may be mentally compromised
-not omniscient
-often, but not always, 1st person
-unreliable and biased
-other end of spectrum from omniscient (om -> lim 3rd person -> unreliable)
What is an example? Explain why.
-Yellow Wallpaper, Slaughterhouse Five, The Swimmer
*Recitatif by TM - Twyla is telling her story, everything you get is only from her side, so you have to piece it together by yourself
*“Emergency,” “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” by DJ - narrator is high, cannot trust him
postmodernism
- bombing of Hiroshima - 9/11 attacks
- irony, playfulness, black humor
- pastiche
- intertextuality
- metafiction
- temporal distortion
- maximalism
- participation
- LOOK AT POSTMODERNISM SHEET
