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Housekeeping: 

• Discussion Questions for Friday 10.16.15.docx  

 

Took a picture of the moon and it gave a triplicate image (and you can see the details of the moon in the reflections)!!

 

Agenda

WEDNESDAY American Gothic Reading Poe Go to Netflix : "Mysteries at the Museum: An Inspirational Murder" S2:E9 (start 14:30) FRIDAY Group Work: Biographical Reading The Gothic as an Aspect of American Romanticism Transcendentalism vs. American Gothic Discussion Question One: Compare "The Tell-Tale Heart" to Klimt's painting "Death and Life" and to the British Gothic painting "The Nightmare" both in message and style. Which image seems to resemble Poe's message? Which seems to resemble his style? WHY? Use quotes from the text to support your answer. Defining American Gothic:  American Dream - American Nightmare Discussion question two: How does the American Gothic movement of Poe (and Hawthorne) illuminate the nightmare that lurks behind (or parallel with) the American Dream? How do they obscure it? Use quotes from the text (or the BIOGRAPHY) to support your answer. New World, Old Fears: Giving the Medieval Nightmare a New Context Discussion Question Three: How do the settings of "The Raven" and "The Tell-Tale Heart" reflect an "American" Gothic (or do they)? Where is "The Raven" set? Where is "The Tell-Tale Heart" set? How does this relate to the construction of "The Gothic" in these poems? Use quotes from the text to support your answer. Genre Bending  Group Work:   More Fun with Poe and the America Gothic:

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WEDNESDAY

American Gothic

 

 

 

"American Gothic" (1930) Grant Wood

 

This familiar image was exhibited publicly for the first time at the Art Institute of Chicago, winning a three-hundred-dollar prize and instant fame for Grant Wood. The impetus for the painting came while Wood was visiting the small town of Eldon in his native Iowa. There he spotted a little wood farmhouse, with a single oversized window, made in a style called Carpenter Gothic. “I imagined American Gothic people with their faces stretched out long to go with this American Gothic house,” he said. He used his sister and his dentist as models for a farmer and his daughter, dressing them as if they were “tintypes from my old family album.” The highly detailed, polished style and the rigid frontality of the two figures were inspired by Flemish Renaissance art, which Wood studied during his travels to Europe between 1920 and 1926. After returning to settle in Iowa, he became increasingly appreciative of midwestern traditions and culture, which he celebrated in works such as this. American Gothic, often understood as a satirical comment on the midwestern character, quickly became one of America’s most famous paintings and is now firmly entrenched in the nation’s popular culture. Yet Wood intended it to be a positive statement about rural American values, an image of reassurance at a time of great dislocation and disillusionment. The man and woman, in their solid and well-crafted world, with all their strengths and weaknesses, represent survivors.

— Entry, Essential Guide, 2013, p. 56.

 

How does this image, painted almost a century after Poe's work, capture the mood of the literary movement Poe began? 

 

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Reading Poe

 

Many of you have (rightly) commented on the lack of apparent emotion in early America writing. Later American writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe seem to respond to this lack in their fiction. 

 

Since we had a test on Monday, today we're just going to soak up the text. We'll watch a quick clip about the real-life inspiration for Poe's story and then we'll read "The Tell Tale Heart" and "The Raven" out loud together. I want everyone to prepare answers for these discussion questions for Friday (otherwise we'll start having weekly reading quizzes).

 

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Go to Netflix : "Mysteries at the Museum: An Inspirational Murder" S2:E9 (start 14:30)

 

• "A Murder in Salem" The Smithsonian

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FRIDAY

 

Group Work: Biographical Reading

 

On Wednesday we learned about the historical event that inspired Poe's short story "The Tell Tale Heart." What is your reaction to that? What does this narrative capture about (Poe's perspective on) American life? 

 

Hint: think about what happens, what counts as evidence, and where it is set.

 

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The Gothic as an Aspect of American Romanticism

 

In 1820, one of the British critics, Sidney Smith wrote: "Literature the Americans have none."  Words uttered by Smith were really insulting and hurt American's national pride. American Romanticism arises against this backdrop. Last week we read Ralph Waldo Emerson's self-conscious discussion of the American Scholar (which is implicitly tied to the idea of American Literature. 

 

Transcendentalism vs. American Gothic

 

Emerson's Transcendentalism took an optimistic view of nature and American potential. It is not hard to believe that Emerson's Transcendentalism was very popular and highly influential. To his followers and friends belonged Margaret Fuller and David Thoreau. Still Ralph Waldo Emerson had opponents. Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville did not accept his optimistic vision of the world and did not believe in happy future of mankind.

Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville created a darker dimension of American Romanticism: American Gothic (also called Dark Romanticism). Gothic and romantic writing are closely related chronologically and share some themes and characteristics, for example the character tormented with pangs of conscience. Most importantly, Gothic as well as Romanticism are considered as definitive shift from neoclassical ideals of logic and reason, toward romantic belief in emotion and imagination. Both are preoccupied with the individual, the human mind and thus with interior mental process.  

 

Henry Fuseli. "The Nightmare" (1781)

British Gothic.

 

Gustav Klimt "Death and Life"  

 

Discussion Question One: Compare "The Tell-Tale Heart" to Klimt's painting "Death and Life" and to the British Gothic painting "The Nightmare" both in message and style. Which image seems to resemble Poe's message? Which seems to resemble his style? WHY? Use quotes from the text to support your answer.

 

Defining American Gothic: 

American Gothic constitutes the darker side of Romanticism. Its nature was accurately captive by Leslie Fiedler in Love, Death and the American Novel:  "American fiction became 'bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction, non-realistic, sadist and melodramatic- a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation.'" 

 

American Dream - American Nightmare

American Gothic arose in the world of optimism, in the country filled with vision of freedom and endless happiness. As Eric Savoy rightly noticed, this paradox has its explanation in the history of the United States. It shows the other side of the coin, the nightmare which hides under the "American dream". In the world of American Gothic the ghosts of the past never sleep and constantly haunt the present. 

 

Margaret Bourke-White "The World's Highest Standard of Living" (1937). 

 

First published in Life Magazine’s February 1937 issue, World’s Highest Standard of Living became instantly recognizable to many Americans during the Great Depression for its starkly ironic juxtaposition of an idealized America alongside the grimmer aspects of everyday reality. Often thought to be an unemployment line, the photo was actually taken in Louisville after the flooding of the Ohio River, which killed almost 400 people and displaced about a million more across four states.

 

 

Discussion question two: How does the American Gothic movement of Poe (and Hawthorne) illuminate the nightmare that lurks behind (or parallel with) the American Dream? How do they obscure it?

Use quotes from the text (or the BIOGRAPHY) to support your answer.

  

 

New World, Old Fears: Giving the Medieval Nightmare a New Context

American Gothic writers did not have spooky old castles, monasteries and legends like their celebrated (or simply recognized) European counterparts, but they did have: the frontier, Puritan legacy, slavery and political utopianism. Puritan's heritage was the consciousness of good and evil coexistence, the sense of guilt and fear from the Day of Judgment. Outwardly optimistic character of utopianism, in turn entailed less optimistic consequences, like: undisciplined rule of majority, rule of the mob or the danger of collapse. 

Of course American Gothic could not be indifferent to British models, which were the "perpetrators" of gothic fiction great popularity.  It adapted all main conflicts, settings, motifs and narrative situations, like: the feeling of fear and anxiety, the gloomy atmosphere, unexplainable, supernatural events or motif of haunted place. However, Gothic in American writers depiction gained  its own special character, for example they replaced haunted castles, which naturally did not exist in the American landscape, with haunted, old houses. There was also more significant difference. While gothic fiction was focusing on  the aspect of fear and terror, American gothic was placing emphasis on mystery and skepticism toward man's nature. 

 

Romantic writing expresses the faith in some higher order and existence of  higher answers. Gothic writing instead of giving such answers, leaves the reader with contradictions and paradoxes, forces him to face the moral and emotional ambiguity. 

 

Discussion Question Three: How do the settings of "The Raven" and "The Tell-Tale Heart" reflect an "American" Gothic (or do they)? Where is "The Raven" set? Where is "The Tell-Tale Heart" set? How does this relate to the construction of "The Gothic" in these poems? Use quotes from the text to support your answer.

 

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Genre Bending 

 

Edgar Allen Poe was a popular writer who supported himself as an author. He is best known for his short stories and poems, both short works of fiction that could be published in magazines (where American writers made the most money). Comparing his two writing styles, we can think about the importance of genre. 

 

Group Work:  

1. Identify important literary devices in "The Raven" (rhythm, rhyme...). Do you see any of these in Poe's short story?  
2. How would the effect of "The Raven" change if it were written as a short story, not a poem?
1. Use quotes to support your answer. 

 

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More Fun with Poe and the America Gothic:

If you find that exploring the dark side of the American Dream is your thing, here are resources for more fun with Poe (you may want to consider exploring this for the final paper).

 

• The Poe Museum - Richmond, VA. 
• "What Is American Gothic Fiction" - essay (good scholarly, secondary source for the final paper)