Post world-war II/ the Beat generation

In this new era where history had demonstrated that it could, as it were, surpass fiction itself, many writers subscribed to forms of extreme realism, confining themselves to an unsettling journalistic record of American life (Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote).Novels dealing with the war, such as Kurt Vonnegut’s, or Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, would soon show the absurdity of history, which becomes in these texts a stage of lunacy and pain. And novels dealing with the condition of post-World War II America, such as Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, read like a fall from innocence.

T he Beat Generation, a remarkable social phenomenon which rose to prominence in the 1950s in America. Along with a reference to jazz, «beat», a term coined by Jack Kerouac, also refers to the «beaten» condition of the outsider.

New journalism”: Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer - Journalism that is characterized by the reporter's subjective interpretations and often features fictional dramatized elements to emphasize personal involvement.

Poetry: Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady

Fiction: J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut

POSTMODERNISM

An historical period stretching from the 1960s to the present. It shows a crisis of identity of human being (ethnic, sexual, social and cultural) and its struggle for legitimization in a hypocritical society. With a more employment, educational and public opportunities to find a place in the society, new authors representing minority ethnic (in addition to quite well-established Jewish and Black-American authors, especially Native- American, Asian-American and Hispanic-American authors), gender (female), sexual (gay, lesbian) started to gain a prominent position in American literature. American literature, depicted a growing awareness of the negative effects of industrialization and commercialization of public life leading to the ecological crisis and consumerism (the Beatnick authors such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Snyder, Gregory Corso and others).

Postmodern literature is closely connected with the development of advanced, information and communication technologies and media such as television, film, video, DVD, computers, internet, cell phones and others that have not only sped up communication among people in the world, have contributed to the globalization of the capital, consumerism, and popular culture, but have also significantly influenced and manipulated the people’s vision of the world.

33.Послевоенная литература: К.Воннегут.

Post World War II literature sort of continues the themes (or “a theme”) of disillusionment that began in the "Lost Generation" Post WWI writers. American literature becomes increasingly more regional post 1920s – the center of American literature shifts from the East to the Midwest and the South. By mid-century, American literature was becoming increasingly more urban. World War II had enormous impact on American writing, as did many of the other events of mid and late twentieth-century America (explosion of the Atomic bomb in 1945, the emergence of television as a cultural force, the invention and growing dominance of computers, the McCarthyism of the 50s, the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s, the Korean and Vietnam wars, the feminist movement of the 60s and 70s). The literature that emerges from the experience of World War II is distinctly different from that of WWI – and yet it also seems to be aligned with the themes of dissillusionment that began with the "Lost Generation" (if WWII is considered the "Greatest Generation"); however, it shows a nation that was united and confident in its powers to endure and to lead – transitioned to a new enlightened period of the experience gained; or so it seems.

The period in time from the end of World War II up until, roughly, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw to the publication of some of the most popular works in American history. The last few of the more realistic Modernists along with the wildly Romantic Beatniks largely dominated the period, while the direct respondents to America's involvement in World War II contributed in their notable influence.

Though born in Canada, Chicago-raised Saul Bellow would become the most influential novelist in America in the decades following World War II. In works like The Adventures of Augie March and Henderson the Rain King, Bellow painted vivid portraits of the American city and the distinctive characters peopling it. Bellow went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976.

From J.D. Salinger 's Nine Stories and The Catcher in the Rye to Sylvia Plath 's The Bell Jar, America's madness was placed to the forefront of the nation's literary expression. Émigré Authors such as Vladimir Nabokov, with Lolita, forged on with the theme, and, at almost the same time, the Beatniks took a concerted step away from their Lost Generation predecessors.

The poetry and fiction of the "Beat Generation," largely born of a circle of intellects formed in New York City around Columbia University and established more officially some time later in San Francisco, came of age. The term, Beat, referred, all at the same time, to the countercultural rhythm of the Jazz scene, to a sense of rebellion regarding the conservative stress of post-war society, and to an interest in new forms of spiritual experience through drugs, alcohol, philosophy, and religion, and specifically through Zen Buddhism. Allen Ginsberg set the tone of the movement in his poem Howl a Whitmanesque work that began: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...." At the same time, his good friend Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) celebrated the Beats' rollicking, spontaneous, and vagrant life-style in, among many other works, his masterful and most popular novel On the Road.

Regarding the war novel specifically, there was a literary explosion in America during the post-World War II era. Some of the most well known of the works produced included Norman Mailer 's The Naked and the Dead (1948), Joseph Heller 's Catch-22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). MacBird, written by Barbara Garson, was another well-received work exposing the absurdity of war.

In contrast, John Updike showcased what could be called the more idyllic side of American life, approaching it from a quiet, but subversive writing style. His 1960 book Rabbit, Run broke new ground on its release by its characterization and detail of the American middle class. It is also credited as one of the first novels to ever use the present tense in its narration.

Ralph Ellison 's 1953 novel Invisible Man was instantly recognized as among the most powerful and sensational works of the immediate post-war years. The story of a black man in the urban north, the novel laid bare the often repressed racial tension still prevailing in the nation while also succeeding as an existential character study. Flannery O'Connor also explored and developed the theme of 'the South' in American literature that was dear to Mark Twain and other leading authors of American literary history (Everything That Rises Must Converge 1965).

Sci-fiction

Metafiction

Kurt Vonnegut (1922 – 2007)

Following the war, Vonnegut began publishing fiction about the dangers of technology, but since his work contained elements of fantasy, he was quickly labeled a science fiction writer, and his works were not taken seriously. Vonnegut’s first published novel, Player Piano, depicts a fictional city called Ilium in which the people have surrendered all control of their lives to a computer named, ironically enough, EPICAC, after a substance that induces vomiting. The Sirens of Titan (1959) takes place on several different planets, including a thoroughly militarized Mars, where the inhabitants are controlled electronically. Although obvious sci-fi venues, the super-real settings of Vonneguts fictional worlds serve primarily as a metaphor for modern society, which Vonnegut views as absurd to the point of being surreal, as well as a world peopled by the hapless human beings who struggle against both their environments and themselves.

NOTE:

In December 1944, Vonnegut was captured by the Germans at the Battle of the Bulge. He was imprisoned in a slaughterhouse in Dresden, Germany, and forced to work in a factory that manufactured food supplements for pregnant women. Allied bombers attacked the city on the night of February 13, 1945, setting off a firestorm that burned up the oxygen and killed nearly all of the city’s residents within hours. Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners survived because they slept in a meat locker three stories belowground. When they went outside the following morning, they found themselves among few people left alive in a city that had burned to the ground.

While writing these early books, Vonnegut kept trying to work on a novel about the bombing of Dresden. Finally, in 1967, he published Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) about a man named Billy Pilgrim who experiences the bombing of Dresden and loses his mind, thinking that he has been transported to a planet where time no longer exists. Slaughterhouse-Five was published at the height of the War in Vietnam, and antiwar protestors saw the author as a hero and a powerful spokesperson.

The Sirens of Titan (1959)

Mother Night (1961)

Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade (1969)

Bluebeard (1987)

34.Экзистенциализм и тема молодежи в романах Дж. Сэлинджера «Над пропастью во ржи» и в романе Х. Ли «Убить пересмешника».

Surrealism expresses the unconscious through vivid dreamlike imagery, and much poetry by women and ethnic minorities. Though superficially distinct, surrealists, feminists, and minorities appear to share a sense of alienation from white, male, mainstream literature. In 1960s surrealism and existentialism become domesticated in America under the stress of the Vietnam conflict.

Existentialism emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will.

J.D. Salinger (1919-) 


A harbinger of things to come in the 1960s, J.D. Salinger has portrayed attempts to drop out of society. Born in New York City, he achieved huge literary success with the publication of his novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), centered on a sensitive 16-year-old, Holden Caulfield, who flees his elite boarding school for the outside world of adulthood, only to become disillusioned by its materialism and phoniness. 
When asked what he would like to be, Caulfield answers "the catcher in the rye," misquoting a poem by Robert Burns. In his vision, he is a modern version of a white knight, the sole preserver of innocence. He imagines a big field of rye so tall that a group of young children cannot see where they are running as they play their games. He is the only big person there. "I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff." The fall over the cliff is equated with the loss of childhood and (especially sexual) innocence -- a persistent theme of the era. Other works by this reclusive, spare writer include Nine Stories (1953), Franny and Zooey (1961), and Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters (1963), a collection of stories from The New Yorker. Since the appearance of one story in 1965, Salinger -- who lives in New Hampshire -- has been absent from the American literary scene.

35.Литература битников: Дж.Керруак, Т.Вульф. Новый журнализм: Х.Томпсон.

the Beat Movement­­­the impact of WWII, the cold war, the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the assassination of Kennedy and of Martin Luther King; the idea of life as a big joke or an absurdity; the more disintegrating and fragmentary world; more estranged and despondent people; Allen Ginsberg, the “Howl”, the manifesto of the Beat Movement.

Beat Poets

The "Beat" poets emerged in the 1950s. Most of the important Beats (beatniks) migrated to San Francisco from the East Coast, gaining their initial national recognition in California. Major Beat writers have included Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. Beat poetry was the most anti-establishment form of literature in the United States, but beneath its shocking words lies a love of country. The poetry is a cry of pain and rage at what the poets see as the loss of America's innocence and the tragic waste of its human and material resources.

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) 


The son of an impoverished French-Canadian family, Jack Kerouac also questioned the values of middle-class life. He met members of the "Beat" literary underground as an undergraduate at Columbia University in New York City. His fiction was much influenced by the loosely autobiographical work of southern novelist Thomas Wolfe. 
Kerouac's best-known novel, On the Road (1957), describes "beatniks" wandering through America seeking an idealistic dream of communal life and beauty. The Dharma Bums (1958) also focuses on peripatetic counterculture intellectuals and their infatuation with Zen Buddhism. Kerouac also penned a book of poetry, Mexico City Blues (1959), and volumes about his life with such beatniks as experimental novelist William Burroughs and poet Allen Ginsberg.

Большое влияние на американскую литературу 50 -70-х гг. годов оказала философия экзистенциализма. Проблема отчуждения человека легла в основу идеологии и эстетики поколения так называемых «битников». В 50-х гг. в Сан-Франциско образовалась группа молодой интеллигенции, которая назвала себя «разбитым поколением» - битниками. Битники восприняли близко к сердцу такие явления, как послевоенная депрессия, «холодная война», угроза атомной катастрофы. Битники фиксировали состояние отчужденности человеческой личности от современного им общества, и это, естественно, выливалось в форму протеста. Представители этого молодежного движения давали почувствовать, что их современники-американцы живут на развалинах цивилизации. Бунт против истеблишмента стал для них своеобразной формой межличностного общения, и это роднило их идеологию с экзистенциализмом Камю и Сартра. Знаковой фигурой среди писателей-битников стал Джек Керуак. Манифестом писателей-битников стал его роман «На дороге» (1950).

New journalism”: Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer - Journalism that is characterized by the reporter's subjective interpretations and often features fictional dramatized elements to emphasize personal involvement.

36.Творчество Дж.Апдайка

John Updike (1932-) 


John Updike is regarded as a writer of manners with his suburban settings, domestic themes, reflections of ennui and wistfulness, and, particularly, his fictional locales on the eastern seaboard, in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Updike is best known for his four Rabbit books, depictions of the life of a man -- Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom -- through the ebbs and flows of his existence across four decades of American social and political history. Rabbit, Run (1960) is a mirror of the 1950s, with Angstrom an aimless, disaffected young husband. Rabbit Redux (1971) -- spotlighting the counterculture of the 1960s -- finds Angstrom still without a clear goal or purpose or viable escape route from mundaneness. In Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Harry has become prosperous through an inheritance against the landscape of the wealthy self-centeredness of the 1970s, as the Vietnam era wanes. The final volume, Rabbit at Rest (1990), glimpses Angstrom's reconciliation with life, and inadvertent death, against the backdrop of the 1980s. 
Among Updike's other novels are The Centaur (1963), Couples (1968), and Bech: A Book (1970). He possesses the most brilliant style of any writer today, and his short stories offer scintillating examples of its range and inventiveness. Collections include The Same Door (1959), The Music School (1966), Museums and Women (1972), Too Far To Go (1979), and Problems (1979). He has also written several volumes of poetry and essays. 


37.Творчество Дж.Барта

POSTMODERNISM

John Barth (1930-) is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist (post–World War II era) quality of his work.

The Floating Opera (1956)

The End of the Road (1958)

The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)

Lost in the Funhouse (1968)

1) According to Barth language is material. Because somehow we don’t want to be reminded that a story is in material container. But Barth invites a reader to do this.

2) Narrative has a form. It can be constructed, built. It’s like a craft project.

So the stories are a craft that get built of a material of language.

3) Form is both endless and closed. It is both repetitious and endlessly filled with possibility, because when you read this you get to know that a beginning is repeated over and over again. It gives you that feeling of possibility. But it’s also boring. It doesn’t tell us anything. John Barth runs a certain kind of risk into his story collection, it’s the rusk of difficulty.

Some stories are conscientiously boringly metafictional. The sound like all those stories we have about somebody writing a story about themselves, about themselves writing a story and etc. And it’s all about that endless regress.

4) Language is also unpredictable.

So the language can be separated from people.

38.Творчество Дж.Гарднера

John Gardner (1933 – 1982) was an American novelist, essayist, literary critic and university professor. He is perhaps most noted for his novel Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf myth from the monster's point of view.

A prolific and popular novelist, Gardner used a realistic approach but employed innovative techniques -- such as flashbacks, stories within stories, retellings of myths, and contrasting stories -- to bring out the truth of a human situation. His strengths are characterization (particularly his sympathetic portraits of ordinary people) and colorful style. Major works include The Resurrection (1966), The Sunlight Dialogues (1972), Nickel Mountain (1973), October Light (1976), and Mickelson's Ghosts (1982).

39.Массовая литература рубежа 20-21в. Творчество Б.И.Эллиса, Ч.Паланика

Popular culture is concept that came into existence as a result of turbulent changes brought into society by the industrial revolution. A cheap form of entertainment aimed at mass audience, which, instead of reviving the bygone cultural traditions, quietly started forming standardized opinions of its consumers.

Blank generation (=a new beat generation = lost generation???)

Consumerism

Bret Easton Ellis (1964-)

Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1991) features a very characteristic figure in US popular culture-- the serial killer--and, formally, it mixes popular genres and the language of different media. Mass culture is inextricably linked to the concept of seriality since talk shows, daily news, advertisements, pop music and magazines, among other mass culture products, are consumed in a serial and repetitive way. They rely on a structure known to the audience, which results in feelings both of reassurance and anticipation. In American Psycho mass culture references constantly appear and serve as a linking structure to the sixty short chapters into which the book is divided. As part of this seriality we find the consumerist patterns followed by the main character, a serial killer called Patrick Bateman, who consumes in all possible ways: buying, eating and destroying. The three forms of consumption are produced in series, the text thus building a close link between the seriality of the serial killer and the seriality of mass culture, a link that may account for the interest aroused by the figure of the serial killer in Western societies, and especially in US society.

Bret Easton Ellis's most controversial and representative work is American Psycho (1991), a novel which clearly illustrates this influence of mass culture in blank fiction literature. American Psycho's subject- matter is taken from popular literature. Its main character is a rich white heterosexual yuppie called Patrick Bateman. Although Bateman seems to be a successful man perfectly integrated in society, he is actually a sexist, racist, and xenophobic serial killer. Bateman himself narrates all the events portrayed in the novel, deploying the same flat tone to describe both his daily routine and his horrific killings. In a narration overcharged with details we learn of his favourite television talk shows, magazines, films, cosmetic products and preferred ways of torturing people.

Charles «Chuck» Palahniuk (1962-)

Flight Club (1995)

Survivor (1999)

Invisible Monsters (2000)

Choke (2001)

Palahniuk‘s books are commonly read also by people who do not usually read books. Attracting such a wide body of readers, he has become a controversial figure as various kinds of readers constantly argue about true nature of his writing – ―for some, his work represents mere shock literature, deviant and aggressive with adolescent sensibility. For others, Palahniuk‘s fiction speaks great truths about the nature of their lives.

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