30/01/2024

12:10 Tuesdays 8:20 Thursdays

Tutor hours: Thursdays 10:00 – 13:00
Topics for the Exam

JUSTICE REVOLT SEXUALITY POWER MENTAL HEALTH

MIGRATION FEMINISM RACE BEAUTY POVERTY AND CLASS
TRAUMA FREEDOM FAMILY IDENTITY DREAM
ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS FUTURITY GENDER CONFINEMENT
COMING-OF-AGE
Units
1- Indigenous Origins – Colonial Pandemics – Environmental Crisis
2- American Revolution – From Puritanism to Social Protest
3- Confinements – Domesticity – Gendered Spaces
4- Identity: Growing up in America – Young Adult Literature – Postmodern Youth/Anxiety
– Dystopia and Artificial Intelligence RACE – GENDER – SEXUALITY
5- American Dreams – Mobilities and migrations – Crisis and Precariousness – Imagining a
Hopeful Future
GROWING UP IN AMERICA
Readings
1-Mark Twain “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (1884)
2-J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
3-Ray Bradbury “The Veldt” (1950)
4-James Baldwin “The Letter” The Fire Next Time (1962)
5-Toni Morrison The Bluest Eye (1970)
6-Sandra Cisneros The House on Mango Street (1983)
7-George Saunders “Pastoralia” (2000)
8- Lydia Davis “Our Strangers” (2023)
01/02/2024

UNIT 4 GROWING UP IN AMERICA

4.1 The Origins of Young/Adult Literature and the Origins of the Adolescence
Characters.
Key word: Coming of age – process of becoming (Huckleberry,Solar Storms, Machimanito
(Fleur))
Young- adult voice – resisting transition – Huckleberry Finn.
Main characteristic adolescence: rebelliousness.
Features Huckleberry Finn (1884): Set Missouri 1840s
-Use of a very fresh language in Mark Twain’s stories (main references of this period), he used
vernacular language, which makes Huckleberry Finn very fresh and engaging. It was a huge
influence for narrative fiction because of this stylistic innovation . A language very
transgressive and innovative which also makes the book being censured for such bad
influence.
-A very charming and innocent way of writing.
-Ideologically charged.
“The Catcher in the Rye” (1951)
-Huge differences in class. - the protagonist of The catcher in the Rye”
-Identity crises (anxiety, who am I, etc.).
Historical context: After WWII. 1950s

4.1 THE ORIGINS OF YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE

Mark Twain (1835 – 1910) progressive scholarist. He was anti imperialism,
anticolonialism and anti slavery.
Satirical, very political – he was a journalist.
Young/adult fiction.
1º Novel = The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) - The first young adult novel.
2º Novel = Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
DEVELOPING SOCIAL AWARENESS – SLAVERY exploited.
Coming-on-age novel: social rebellion. Adolescence issues. Huckleberry Finn is going to set
a very specific trend in American Literature that has to do with the concept of American
historian culture. The concept of dissent and revolution, social justice.
Finn – big moral crisis, he reconsiders the world, social issues. This is about this social world
where people are exploited, not about the adult world.
Realistic novel with the racist language of the time.
Imbalance relationship - Huck and Jim.

SOCIAL JUSTICE AND DISSENT

Hamilton – one of the revolutionary fathers who was of mixed descent (half Caribbean).

RACIAL JUSTICE IN US LITERATURE

The problem of race in America. Race justified some matters like the slavery, hierarchy, social
categories, etc. at that time. Those were cruel times for some people in the US.
NAACP (The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and the music of
the epoch (blues and jazz) influenced the literature.
Langston Hughes – “I, too” (poem) – African American voices “I am the darker brother… I
am, too America”.
Harlem from Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) – Matin Luther King “I have a dream…” -
1963 The American Dream.
New change in 20th century with the AfricanAmerican voices.

SOCIAL JUSTICE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF RACE IN THE 19TH CENTURY

Race as a Social Construction. Discursive formation which delimits social relations on the
basis of alleged physical differences. “Race” is a strategy for relegating a segment of the
population to a permanent inferior status”. A pervasive invention of human difference with no
significant basis in biology. The construction of race as a justification of colonization, social
hierarchy, slavery, taking lands to exploit.
Group of authors abolishing racism (Mark Twain 1830s, Philip Dick 1960s). Allegations against
slavery, discrimination, margination.
White ethnostate
According to Francis and Cassandra Jackson “Race and Literary poetics essay” even before
the National human genome project, which calculated that 99.9% of the 3.1 billion nucleotides
are the same in all human beings.
SCIENTIFIC RACISM
In the 19th century, this discursive formation of race took vivid shape through the ongoing
discourses of scientific racism, derived from Darwin publication “The Evolution of Species”.
Many white scientists started applying Darwin's ideas regarding the survival of the fittest to the
constructivism of race and the depiction of the races as inferior. They claimed to know that the
white race was superior based on genetics (Craniometry).
Scientific theories written by scientists.
They started a CLASSIFICATION OF THE RACE. Anglo Teutonic,Irish
This is going to be the trigger to the manipulation by the nazis campaign in the 20th
century.
“RACIAL DEGENERATION” and EUGENICS
Eugenics influenced society, anti-miscegenation laws were imposed.

ANTI-MISCEGENATION LAWS, EUGENICS POSTER AT A PUBLIC FAIR AND

MARRIAGE COUNSELING IN THE 1920S
Mark Twain writes for people who follow these stereotypical and racist ideas.
The Anglo-Saxon was considered the perfect race.
Eugenics describe the policies that ruled each one another based on contemporary
“science”, which was racist.

RACIAL JUSTICE IN THE 21ST CENTURY VS. THE “WHITE ETHNOSTATE”

Ethnostate: A state regulated by the white race.
Donald Trump tried to bring back the ethnostate.

06/02/2024
ETHNICITIES - CULTURAL, RELIGIOUS AND LINGUISTIC FEATURES
Based on cultural, linguistic, and religious differences. It is also a construction.
“White ethnicities” underwent discrimination by americans. For instance Irish, Jewish, Italian-
american.Immigrants have to work in order to survive. In the second generation of
immigrants some authors emerged in literature, the third generation is full of them.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

Criticism of social injustice. The abolition of slavery and the civil war. Her novel became a
best-seller. It is the most famous book about plantation life but it is not realistic because she
based all her information on slaves' narratives. She never lived in the South and she has never
been on a plantation.

Abraham Lincoln met her and considered this book the greatest speech for the Republic, even
greater than the speeches made for it. Her aim was to persuade the reader emotionally to stop
slavery and racism.

Beecher set a series of character types that have become clichés that were not necessarily
good for social change. For instance, with Uncle Tom that is content with his life and does not
have sufficient agency to change his situation as if they need a white man to help them (the
white savior), the role of the mulata who was not accepted by the Whites nor the Blacks, so
she always had a very tragic end; along with the role of the mammy.

Harlem Reinassance - The New Negro

1920s - 1930s
“Passing” Short novella. Nella Larsen
“Their Eyes Were Watching God” Nora Neale Hurston
“Cane” Jean Toomer.
Langston Hugues’ poems
Debunking Racial Stereotypes
They tried to make it work for the publicity placements such as propaganda (always
racist).
Plenty of stereotypes: Black people always know how to dance. Ex. The Littlest
Rebel (1930s) starring Shirley Temple Bojangles.

Amanda Gorman “The Hill We Clim” (2021)

Ideas are very clearly expressed and simple. She was chosen to do the speech in
Joe Biden’s campaign.

MARK TWAIN (Samuel Langhorne Clemens 1835 - 1910)

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - 1885
Close relationship between a white boy and a black man.
He belonged to the realist tradition, but he wrote fiction; but his fiction’s aim was to
tell things as they are with no sentimentalism; there were sentiments, but not over
facts.
He was going to separate himself from the realist tradition because of his characters.
Imitate and reproduce characters' speeches of the MidWest (Missouri, where he grew
up). Most American writers are regionalist writers, imitating a particular group of a
particular region.
It is set in the 1840s, when he was a kid, before the civil war and the abolition of
slavery.
Elements of realism in the story, speech types identification and the American
vernacular (the way people talk in the streets).
Draw for a new tradition, the “Picaresque”.
Alcoholism as a problem - Finn’s Father.

JIM CROW LAWS - 1880s

at the turn of the century
Mark twain is very concerned of segregation, politicking more the novel

CHARACTERS: HUCKLEBERRY FINN

Modelled after Tom Blankenship.
08/02/2024
REALISM AND REGIONALISM FEATURES

Realistic features
❖ Detailed description of characters, psychology, personality , physical aspects.
❖ Natural setting and elements.
❖ Domestic environment.
❖ Linguistic
❖ Dialect (class related) attached with the ideology.
❖ Truthfulness
❖ Psychological analysis (realistic writers)

M. Bahition - Heteroglossia - not only speak in different ways, they represent different
conditions. Society has a big spectrum of community.

Regionalistic features
❖ Cultural landscapes
❖ Focus on the present
❖ Regional speeches
❖ SOCIAL ISSUES, reform society for minor communities. Huckleberry Finn.
❖ Female issues exploration (oppression)
❖ Sentimentality - the main strategy to change the reader's mind.
❖ Nostalgia and Idealization of non-industrialize spaces.
Social Issues
Slavery
Urbanization
Patriarchal dominance
Domestic issues - alcoholism, infant death
MARK TWAIN - ADVENTURES of HUCKLEBERRY FINN - 1885

Real name: Samuel Langhorne Clemens 1835 - 1910

Genre: Realist (regionalist) fiction, elements of picaresque and social satire.
Pure regionalist writer, realist style
He introduce new elements: picaresque and humor
He is going to criticize very uncomfortable issues in a humoristic style that not all readers
will identify.
IS A SATIRE
Setting - Hannibal (Missouri) and Midwest culture - passing The Mississippi river
Petersburg town
Pre-war times when Twain was a child, before slavery abolition.
A pinch of nostalgia and idealization. With the view of an infant (Finn)
It becomes a road narrative (the river). The river becomes a character. Huck has the power
over Jim because he could denunciate him at any time. This is going to be seen in Jim’s
behavior.

DIALECTS IN HUCKLEBERRY FINN

Midwestern dialects
❖ standard Pike Country dialect of Missouri - Petersburg town
❖ Several modified variations from this standard
❖ Southwestern dialect from Arkansas
❖ Missouri Black vernacular.

Hemingway considered Huckleberry Finn as the point of all modern American literature.

STRUCTURE (collection of genres)

● PART 1: St. Petersburg - adventure novel (Chapter 1,2)
● Gang of robbers, Widow Douglas, Pap
● PART 2: THE JOURNEY (Chapter 8,9)
- The Mississippi River, the raft, JIM, family feuds, sailors, scoundrels and confidence
men (picaresque chapters)
● PART 3: ARKANSAS - river (Chapter 10,15)
- The farm, burlesque/satire chapters, Jim.
- The river gives the structure (linear structure). The Mississippi River and the Raft itself
becomes a charachter.
- The river chapters come almost like a utopian force, a healing force (Solar storms).
- Movement as a self encounter with your inner self. The main character is unable to
come back to civilization. seeking freedom on his own terms.
13/02/2024
TONE AND NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE
Huck “a voice that self-creates
Jim and Huck become companions, establishing a father son relationship. Jim became a very
powerful nurture voice. How they give each other love, affection and support.
INTRODUCTION SOCIETY 1950s
MAIN THEMES
❖ Growing up in a challenging world
❖ Freedom and Enslavement
❖ social constraints
❖ Social Justice
❖ The Racial debate and the 19th century racism
❖ Moral and Ethical responsibility
❖ life as a journey
❖ friendship
❖ civilization (democratic ideals vs. human corruption)
❖ The Mississippi river (and the natural world).
❖ Picaresque.
The Mississippi River as a historical and symbolic space.
Language(s) used: American vernaculars and diversity of speech and the various ideologies
they represent.
Hucks vulnerability and poetic language, even innocence through language. p 21 Chapter 9.

RACISM AND CENSORSHIP

Critics
“is the most grotesque example racist trash ever written”
“This book is not good for our children” “is humiliating and insulting to black students. It
contributes to their feelings of low self-esteem and the white students disrespect for black
people.”

The greatest discussion is if this work should be removed from American education or not.
Jim
The character of Jim at the end turned into a cliché and it is an uneven representation.
He is a proactive and a smart character, he was able to escape.
Jim is pointing out the issue about the bible people being racist.
Huck learnt to respect Jim at some point in the novel.
Popular folklore tradition gives dignity to the Black community in literature.
Whatever it is not religion was considered superstition.
Huck Finn’s crisis of consciousness
The dialect is set up there.
15/02/2024
4.2 POSTMODERN YOUTHS, ANXIETY AND MENTAL HEALTH
“The Catcher in the Eye”
After the end of WWII, in the 50s. It is more like an evolution of modernism.
Ethnic authors began to emerge during postmodernism.
Many authors came from the front, they saw dehumanisation.
Late 60s and 70s started Postmodernism.
Historical context: post WWII - Cold War anxiety
Existentialism
Enlightenment thinkers - emancipatory changes, the beginning of the democratic ideas.
New revolutionary movements to improve society and dignify people’s lives. American and
French writers developing postmodern ideas as a theoretical discourse. A wide range of
postmodernism ideas came from French theorists.
66 - 67 Movement against the Vietnam war.
POST WAR YEARS: THE COLD WAR
NATO/OTAN
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (1949)
American feared communism and disloyalty.
Second Red Scare (1950-1957)
HUAC - House Un-American Activities Committee - 1950s
WITCHES HUNT: McCarthy’s hearings end in 1954.
-Marvel’s films are a reference for explaining the USA's history. Russia is always the bad
guy.
The Prosperous 50s
Fear and paranoia but America at its most prosper ever. America is the richest country in the
World.
❖ 1947 - 1971 - incomes more than doubled
❖ Productivity increased (cars, oil, electronics…)
❖ Labour Market - more office jobs and services.
❖ corporations merged into big conglomerates - late capitalism
❖ Spread of Franchises
❖ Consumerism and Advertisements
THE 1950s: Expansion of the Middle Class
Incomes rose - material wealth - consumerism
Suburban Culture
❖ FAMILY VALUES
❖ Baby Boom
❖ Teenage Life
❖ University Students
❖ Conformism
❖ The American Way of Life
Mid 1950s - Social Changes: Second Wave Feminism & Civil Rights Movement
POSTMODERN CULTURE
Represents these social transformations through new themes and styles. Popular and high
literary genres started connecting. Intertextuality. The postmodern condition is created by the
french Jean-François Lyotard (1979)

Main Features

➢ Pessimism, Spiritual/Moral Decay - Irony (Jameson, Lyotard)

➢ Scepticism about Grand Narratives (Enlightenment) - (Lyotard)
➢ Focus on identity, the subject (ontological issues) - (Jameson, Foucalt) - new subjects.
➢ Style: non-linear, inconclusive, fragmented (already in modernism)
➢ The society of spectacle (Debord), written in the sixties. Emergence of television.

The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relationship between people that is
mediated by images. A new world where images and subjects start. The images create means
and desires. The more we recognize our own needs on the images proposed by the dominant
system, the less we understand our own existence and our own desires.

SURFACE -SIMULATION - HYPERREALITY - Provoking ALIENATION, confusion

➢ Real vs Surface - Depthlessness - Simulations (Baudrillard). He believes that we live
in a depthless superficial world. Hyper real/ superficial world, an imitation.
➢ Language as a Construction - Simulations of Reality (Derrida). The most important
device to distinguish between artificial and reality.
➢ Lack of originality (Irony, Parody, Pastiche) (Linda Hutcheon)
➢ The metafiction
➢ Intertextuality

New genres
❖ Irony: Ironic narrative as a way to criticise society.
❖ Parody
❖ Pastiche
❖ Hedonism: recycling aesthetics, matching in something new to develop a
commentary (some exaggerated).
22/02/2024
Postmodernism: Identity, Small narratives and fragmentation. Why and how?
Emerging subjective perspective, silence by others that now have visibility. - New voices.
Identity: desire of participation in the public sphere, to matter. Gender, race, class…
Disbelieve in grand narratives (Los grandes relatos que explican el mundo), mostly religious
narratives (Catcher in the Rye, Holden did not like the word Grand).
Science is God. However in postmodernism they claim the use of science as a weapon to kill
people (atomic bomb).
Subjective truth - their own view of the world.
Fragmentation: rupture with the theology explanation and process. Emphasise subjectivity of
new voices, small narratives giving their own explanation of things. No more pedagogical-
theological process.
Postmodern humour: dark. Mediated by a certain level of disillusion, anxiety…

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

Fragmentation - Identity - Self-alienation from the System - Trauma - Mental Health -
Irony - Sexuality - Coming of Age.
Critic grand narratives and education system.
Pencey principle (school) - Prepare young men for the game of life. Learn to play the game of
life.
J.D Salinger - His first novel, becoming a bestseller. He was born in 1919, he was sent to fight
in WWII. He died four years ago (covid).
The main character was criticised as immoral, toxic.
The anxiety of post WWII, criticism of conformist society and expectations of economic
growth and form and family teenage rebellion, about the fifties.
Language - key element in Postmodernism but also remember to Huckleberry Finn language,
fresh, straightforward but a little contradictory.
Father, a lawyer who doesn’t have time for Holden.
Mother, mental illness because Allie sudden death (Holden’s Brother), trauma.
D.B - other brother. writer that self-himself.
Coming of age - transformation from innocence to maturity (adulthood). Finn, Angel
Trauma: Holden and the Mother.
Criticism of his own conformism.
Post WWI and the prosperous 1950s

➔ Eisenhower: economic boom, successful materialism, consumerism

➔ Suburban culture, expansion of the middle class, conformism.
➔ Teenagers and youth cultures, baby boom, rebellion, alienation
The Beat Generation: counterculture, anti-establishment.
Weekend - diapositiva issues to consider.

27/02/2024
Coming of age - American narratives.
Bildungsroman - British Literature (Charles Dickens).
THE CATCHER IN THE RYE (1951)
➢ Coming of age novel - features
➢ Teenage rebellion (without an “obvious” cause)
➢ Anti-hero quest/journey - non-conformity
Individual vs. society
➢ Nervous breakdown - trauma and mental health

Self-alienated from society.

Gender and sexuality - Holden performing masculinity (values, practices, vocabulary)
pressure on Holden regarding his sexuality.
Rebellion against dominant values: Bartleby, The Scarlet Letter.
Hoden is sixteen but he is telling the story at seventeen (he is in a sanatorium now maybe).
Colloquial endings “and all”, avoiding things (gaps)

Issues to consider - Chapter 1

➔ Main characters, structure, and themes.
➔ Narrative voice, point of view, tone, type of language.
➔ Running symbols and motifs
➔ Space and space construction in the novel.
➔ Journey through NY City and encounters.
➔ Historical context
➔ Postmodern elements
➔ Trauma and mental health
➔ Gender and sexuality

Holden Caulfield
❖ Innocence, Adolescence, Identity.
❖ Sexuality, Social Pressure
❖ Mental Health, Trauma, Depression, Alienation
❖ Lies and Deceit, Knowledge and Education
❖ Language and Communication.

Symbols and Motifs

★ The museum and its glass cages, “Everything is frozen in time”.
★ The ducks in Central Park. Flying south for the winter to survive. Jealous of their wings,
he wishes he could fly (freedom) and go somewhere else.
★ The Red hunting hat (protection?)
★ Allie’s glove.
★ The carousel. Symbol of innocence and childhood. Circle (Holden’s mind). At the end
of the carousel he finally goes home and searches for help, getting better in the asylum.
Phoebe saved his life.
★ The catcher in the rye (title). Song from a Scottish poem.
The catcher figure - saving, rescuing as a guardian.
Phoebe is eleven, the same age that had Allie when he died.

SPACES: Temporary places.

● Pencey Preparatory Academy (Pennsylvania)
● Night club, bars, taxis, Edmont Hotel.
● Museum of Natural History.
● Central Park - the lagoon, the Carousel.
● Home, Phoebe’s bedroom.

Central Park and nature-bound American anti/heroes - Site of possibility, freedom and
comfort.
He connects Central Park with his childhood.
American Museum of Natural History - nothing changed.
Main issues
➔ Knowledge and Education. He is challenging the education system. However, he loves
reading books. Structure education versus a more intuitive approach to learn.
➔ Lies and deceit
➔ Love and Death
➔ Identity and Sexuality (the pervert scene, indirectly alluded to, because it is too painful
to mention it - Angel and Finn)
➔ Mental health
➔ Playing the “game of life”
➔ Understanding the END: is there transformation and healing in Caulfield?
➔ Check style: present/past tenses, repetitions, colloquial expressions… Do we find
differences?
29/02/2024
At first he seems the typical angry young man, later he seems to have mental health issues.
Mental Health Issues
- Symptoms: Bipolarity, depression, death wish, dissociation
- Evidence
End Chapter 14 suicide thought (jumping throw the window)
Holden is afraid to ask for help from his parents, he is not brave enough to knock at their door.
Self-alienate at the end, feeling lonely.
Aggressive language, drinking, not sleeping or eating, smoking all the time.
Peter pan syndrome, he doesn't want to grow up. He is also afraid of death because of the death
he has been forced to see (Allie). He doesn't want to face the reality of a changing world.
05/03/2024
Feedback videos colgados - participación
RAY BRADBURY “THE VELDT”
Main features: Science fiction and utopian writing.
Speculative genre: imagine future possibilities.
Examples: Frankestein, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, The Time Machine, The Island of
Dr. Moreau.
Altering human nature development, flying, immortality, time travelling, interstellar
journeys.
Main theme: Postmodern anxiety
Simulations and hyperreality

Science Fiction in the United States/DYSTOPIAS

Postwar anxiety and alienation. The space race between Russia and the USA.
WWII ends with atomic bomb, nuclear power.
Future possibilities.
Dys (dus)-topia (topos) - bad place
Criticism: Power, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, social divisions, elite controlling the
mass, obedient subjects(submissiveness), dehumanisation…
The process of becoming a dehumanised society - Conclusion, lack of hope, disillusion.
Always a group of hope: Rebellion, resistance.
Negative view of social development.
Challenging what we can do, challenging our ethics and morals.
Warning stories of what would happen without our values and morals.
Ostranenie - defamiliarization: literary strategy to enter in a world and throw us out to it to
analyse from an outside perspective.

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012)

“THE VELDT” or THE WORLD THE CHILDREN MADE
The Saturday Evening Post (1950)
The Illustrated Man (1951)
Questions to consider:
➢ Main themes and structure
➢ Characters, narrative point of view, and style
➢ Coming of age elements - parent - children conflict (the nursery was a tool to help in
these relationships) resulting in a completely spoiled kids.
➢ Power, control, and resistance
➢ The role of AI in communication and social relations
➢ Imagining the Future.
Social alienation.
Five human characters and the nursery room.
Middle class family: George, Lydia, Peter and Wendy. Plus the psychologist.
Table that cooks.
Kids: desires, anxiety, control.

07/03/2024
Representation of AI in literature and film.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of IA as represented in the arts?
Hypereal
12/03/2024
4.3 “THE BLUEST EYE” - FACTORS OF RACE, GENDER, CLASS, AND
SEXUALITY IN AFRICAN AMERICAN TRIBES.

➔ 18th Century: Phillis Wheatley - First african american poet, an african slave
who learnt to read and write. White people liked her work. The african american
were so dehumanised that the white people did not believe she could write that.
She was an African slave who learnt how to read and how to write, so she started
to write poems.
➔ 19th Century: Slave Narratives. Black people were intelligent human beings,
this was demonstrated through their literature. They fought oppression, they did
not have a voice.
➔ Late 19th century: Clotel or the President’s
Daughter by William Wells Brown

THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE - The New Negro (1920s - 1940s)

W.E.B Du Bois, The Souls of black Folk (1903): one of the most important books in
African American history. This book introduced the double consciousness to
American literature.
Double consciousness - one feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two
thoughts… Black Americans deserve to be both, to be black and to be american. We
need to reconcile ideas.

Black literature in the 1940s - 1950s

Protest Novel/Social Realism Modernist experimentation Spirituality
RICHARD WRIGHT RALPH ELLISON JAMES BALDWIN
Native Son (1940) Invisible Man (1952) Go Tell to the Mountain 1953
Self-acceptance.
Whiteness is also a construction in america.
James Baldwin
-He did not want to become a preacher like his father.
-He reflected their anger and desperation in his works.
-He once wrote a love story about homosexuality.
-Face a lot of strings, but now with his family.
-He did not feel like he belonged there anymore (USA).
“A letter to my Nephew” by James Baldwin
-He recommends his nephew to be aware of the consequences of being a Black person
at that time in the USA. He increments his self-acceptance.
Key ideas in the letter: Family and identity: continuity, connections and similarities.
-Generational differences: GRandfather//Nephew.
-Life in the ghetto.

AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN’S LITERARY RENAISSANCE

1960s - 1970s onward

● Black Arts, Black Power Movement, Second Wave Feminism

● Civil Rights Act - 1964.
● Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde. They were friends
and wrote together.

TONI MORRISION, MAYA ANGELOU, ALICE WALKER AND AUDRE

LORDI.
Toni Morrison - won the nobel prize of literature, one of the most recognised african
american human voices. The Bluest Eye.
-She became an editor for the publishing house “Random House”.
-Her first novel was The Bluest Eyes because she thought that nobody was writing about
some topics.
-There were no White people in The Bluest Eyes. This resulted as a great criticism
towards the novel.
-One of the main topics would be intra-familiar problems.
-Relevant themes and issues: Identity construction, subjectivity, and “double
consciousness”.

14/03/2024
2ND FEMINIST WAVE
Womanism - Alice Walker’s concept (Concept exam)
- Woman centre, black intellectual woman connect gender issues with race.

THE BLUEST EYE (1970)

The idea of sisterhood: how women of different colours support and understand each
other. (Claudia supports Pecola)
Pecola es un vacío en el centro de la novela. Most vulnerable, threat and saddest
character of the novel.
TONI MORRISON
Real name - Chloe Anthony Wofford (1931 - 2019)
Born in Lorain, Ohio. She comes from a very humble background.
Selected works: Song of Solomon, Beloved, The Bluest Eye (1970) - first novel and
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992).
Literary Awards.
BELOVED (1987 - pulitzer Prize in 1988)
On historical haunting and REMEMORY.
Historical haunting - how race is this hunting force that affects everybody black and
white americans. Coming from plantation slavery and colonisation.
American gothic - the moral horrors of their legacy.
E.g. La Capra trauma studies - Holocaust traumas. - Rememory

THE BLUEST EYE (1970)

Situation of black people in the forties. Two families, product of relocation. A story in
which the author tries to humanise every character because black people have been
dehumanised in writing. Gives complexity to every single character including the
perpetrator of sexual abuse (the father).

Beauty: sth that you do, not sth that you are. Very different experiences between black
community.

❖ Story, plot events and structure

❖ Symbols (eyes, flowers, seeds, the cat, the house, dolls, the quilt)
❖ Key issues: self-acceptance, self-loathing, perception, racism, trauma, beauty.
❖ Cultural and literary intertexts
❖ Structure, narrative perspective(s), tone and style
❖ Characters

EPILOGUE at the beginning

Why this story?
This “terrible story about things one would rather know anything about”
(Afterword 209)
Main Topic: the silence as its centre, the void that is Pecola’s “unbeing”.
(Afterword 211)
Perception and Racial Self-loathing - The racialized gaze and our complicity with it.

Structure - very postmodern structure

A forward, she prepares us and warns us about the story. Why the story.
Very didactic.
First word of the novel - “quite” connected with other words “secrets”. Spoiler -
Pecola is pregnant by her abusive father.

Symbol : planting seeds (baby), helping pecola’s baby be born. The magical seeds.
Critical examination - understand the story from a macro level.
The novel is organised following the seasons. - como Solar storms.
Doble structure.
Claudia’ voices - desordenados, cuts, not well written like a diary. Claudias subjective
perpestive. Claudia is the voice of the resistance. Historia de superación. SS
Omniscient Narrator
Dick and jane - cartillas de lectura (familia perfecta) para niños. La autora nor pone un
extracto de la familia perfecta y luego empieza a distorsionarlo. No es el mundo en el
que black people vive.

26/03/2024
THE BLUEST EYE (1970)

1950-1960 - African-american lives.

A tragic story of intra-racial discrimination, anti-american-novel, with race,gender and
class mixed. The Bluest Eye is concerned with racial self-loathing, the loss of identity
and shame.

Published 1970, the setting of the story is 1940-1, the beginning of WWII for the United
States, it is also ideologically grounded in the 1960s then “Black is Beautiful” entered
into the popular, if more, militant, discourse. The context of segregation and racism is
so terrible that there is no possible way to escape from it. Since the origins of the US
nation Black people have undergone the process of dehumanisation.

A novel about failure and death (anti-american), the american nightmare, how the
African american suffered, where black cannot be saved. All characters are related to
their circumstances. This is a naturalistic novel, where there is no success, it’s the anti-
american, for all characters are doomed to failure.
Whiteness kills and destroys. Make us understand the perversity of white americans.
Responds to this white ideology.

1970s-1980s - the second African American renaissance. Civil rights movements

mostly black women. African American Women writers were exploring the lives of
Black girls and women, creating their own agenda since the white feminism didn’t
include them. Women who had previously been only shadows now come forward to fill
in these empty presences.

Toni Morrison: This was the age of “Black is beautiful” let us not forget why that
became a necessary statement. Pecola - the most helpless creature of the World, black
girl and naive. Pecola is the ultimate U.S. victim.
How did this happen?

The Bluest eye works here like the omnipresent, omnipotent one-eyed presence which
is watching us all time. The protagonist of the book is obsessed with having blue eyes,
for she feels everything will change if she has them. The eye, simultaneously, stands
for the standards of beauty and happiness that the protagonist feels she misses and
condemns her.

Morrison offers a new view of Black marginalisation. Morrison is concerned with Black
sexism and explores it within the black world, for there’s no need to go into the white
world to show how this African American girl is wrecked.

Pecola - coal (carbón)

The Breedlove: growing in a family that does not breed love but HATE, self-hate.
Structure: four sections = Autumn - Winter - Spring - Summer.
The way Morrison conveys this information seems to suggest a journey from darkness
to light, from negativity to optimism.

This is a world that is seedless, no flower comes up from the seeds planted. The seeds
do not carry life but death. The process of life is reversed.
Marigolds -
Earth - U.S. - unyielding.
Pecola - the living proof of the black American dehumanisation.
Modern’s pecola
Michael Jackson - the modern Pecola. He was self-hating.
Oprah was raped by her uncle.
Morrison goes to the very origins of American primers, the books used to teach children
to read and write in the prologue.
They are connected to religion. The first Protestant primers linked the teachings of the
Bible with the mechanism of literacy.
Dick and Jane series: Primers - the epitome of the American White perfect family.
School is key in the process of indoctrination and of turning the child into a citizen.
1965 - Now We Read 1st ethnic primer. Black and white kids.

The narrative she’s going to present follows the patterns of a slave narrative. In slave
narratives there are white people or voices legitimising the narrative. Pecola’s text is
framed by the white text or discourse of American primers, in a way limiting narrative.
She’s establishing symbolic violence, the burden of whiteness by using this all-white
world. The idealisation of the American family, taken to be exemplary, with the dick
and Jane primer.
The symbolic whiteness presented in the family and the house will lead these african
American characters to destruction and there’s no escape other than social death.

THE IMPORTANCE OF DOLLS p 20,21,22,23.

Pecola is alienated from her own community and roots, and from the sense of Blackness
and self-esteem because of the all-white standards of beauty. One way to turn boys and
girls into conceptions of masculinity and femininity is through toys.

“The Doll Test” . 1940s effects of segregation. Making black people choose between
a white doll and a black doll, choosing the white one.
The indoctrination and prejudices led to self-hatred. Children are drinking these
prejudices from the moment they’re born.

Black girls are indoctrinated into a type of motherhood that resembles the mammy
stereotype. This chapter gives clues about how Pecola comes to the point of self-hatred,
because of all the images that surround her, thinking that she’s ugly. Unlike, Claudia,
she doesn’t have support from her family nor environtment.

Shirley Temple - prototype of U.S, white american girls (marisol). Bojangles is the
Black companion to Shirley. This goes back to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

THE POLITICS OF HAIR

From the very beginning in the process of black people’s dehumanisation, not only
religion or education, but their physical traits were also involved. Black people didn’t
have hair, they had wool nappy, woolly kinky hair. One of the ways to denigrate is
through their.
The way to eliminate attention to one’s hair, not ot be put in a dehumanising
discourse, is to show as little as possible.
Pecola eats white sweets and drinks milk to remove her blackness.

REVISION OF EUCHARISTIC RITUAL:

Pecola etas the sweets to become Mary Jane, to become white.
In the Eucharistic ritual Christ’s body is eaten to achieve a new life, to cleanse the sins
and start a new and to eventually become Christ in the afterlife.
Morrison reinterprets the Bible and questions the religious creed that has always
excluded African Americans. Pecola eats thew body of Mary Jane to become Mary Jane
in the same way that she drinks from Shirley temple’s mug to become shirley Temple.
09/04/2024
The house is the epitome of American values. The house: the external symbol of this
family is misery and victimisation. The first cluster of the primer appears here. The
house is not even a house, but an “abandoned store”.
“Nestle together”. This is used for animals, as in they didn't live in a house, but in a
nest.
“Festering together” - fester means pudrirse, infectarse. Morrison gives the sense of
death in a naturalistic way, where characters are doomed to death because they are
festered. Nothing changes, nobody looks at them or cares about them. It conveys the
sense of isolation of human being, living in separated cells. P 33-34

P36 “There were no memories” , no history behind, there’s nothing there. Morrison is
dissecting American primers while dissecting the demise of the Black characters.

P42-43. “No less did Cholly…So he gave that up, too”.

The marginalisation, instead of bringing about protests, kills them spirituality. Instead
of protecting their anger on the outside world, they’re going to project it onto the people
nearest to them. They have been forced by the symbolic violence around them to retreat
towards the people surrounding them as scapegoat to their own anger.

“Emasculations” p 42

Cholly’s emasculated figure. In U.S. history African American men have been
emasculated, deprived of masculinity not only sexually by through violence too.
Morrison is going to criticise the exclusion, invisibility, marginalisation of Black people
in American Primers.
Gerarldine, as Mrs Breedlove, represents the perversity of a type of African American
motherhood that puts whiteness before their offspring. Gerarldine hates her black world
and her African American community. She desires to become white and to acquire
white standards of beauty and living.
She tries to uproot herself, to relinquish her Blackness and to indoctrinate her son into
white standard.

P127 “She became what is known…Here she found beauty, order, cleanliness, and
praise”

11/04/2024
Una señora que solo ha hablado de vox, de la lengua valenciana y de obras que no van
para la asignatura. Nada interesante pero ha dicho que la semana que viene vuelve Ana.
16/04/2024
UNIT 5: MOBILITIES AND HOMELANDS
Migration and Latinx Literatures
Sandra Cisneros
Transnationalism, Globalization.

Migration is related to mobility and identity (split identity). The homeland you remember is
no longer the same, your reality is distorting.

23/04/2024

Postmemory - the generation after - 2nd generation Marianne Hirst. Kids dealing with the
trauma of the previous generation. Intergenerational trauma. They rememory through
photographs and story, and the silences or gaps.
2nd and 3 generation pre construction of the community through imagination.

SANDRA CISNEROS (1954…) - The House of Mango Street (1984)

She grew up in Chicago. Later, she moved to Mexico.
She is very autobiographical.
Question on Tuesday: if she loves her people why does she leave?
It is avery experimental novel, is a postmodern novel (fragmentation)

Issues to consider in the novel:

Genre and form
Common themes with other novels – Differences
- Childhood (innocence, point of view, relationship with world of adults)
- Migration – Cultural conflicts
- Gender differences and expectations – patriarchal society
- Family and Friends
- Home, house, space of artistic creation
- Community as a positive force that shapes us and that we contribute to.
Neighbourhood (the barrio)
- Language – bilingualism.
- Foreigness and Hospitality
- Hope and Resistance
Genre and form
Structure: interconnected vignettes like “beads on a necklace”
STITCHING – reconstructing experience, female creativity
Narrative point of view:
Stylistic features
- How does Esperanza trigger connection & empathy?
- CHAPTER 1: The house
Gender - The Bluest Eye, The Catcher in the Rye, The Great gatsby.
Bucar primeros fragmentos, identity markers related to gender expectations. How is she
questioning, in what moments.
Señalar todos los simbolismos (hair, the river,...) que apoyen el tema.
Gender sexuality (Solar storms)
Self-perception
The role as career - responsibility
30/04/2024
Growing Up Ethnic - Chicano/a/x literature
American Civil Rights
Chicano cultural nationalism 1960-1970
Chicano Literature in the 1970s
Creation of a chicano self-consciousness across national borders. Testimonial, coming of age
narrative, narratives of precarious lives as a farm workers.
Male subjectives - traditional family as symbol of resistance.
“I am the masses of my people and/ I refuse to be absorbed. I am Joaquin.”
Chicana authors 1980s (Second Wave Feminism) and onwards
Female self-consciousness against racism and injustice but also patriarchy.
Sexual liberation, empowerment, gender construction, intersectional relations.
THE HOUSE OF MANGO STREET (1984)
46 Short stories of vignettes
➔ Genre & form
➔ Structure: interconnected vignettes like “beads on a necklace”
STITCHING - reconstructing memory & experience, female creativity
➔ Common themes with other novels
➔ Narrative point of view:
Stylistic features
How does Esperanza trigger connection & empathy? Childish and innocence voice,
ANALYSIS CHAPTER 1: The house - multiple meanings of house as key concept. Departure,
living the domestic space, this is a very American attitude even though is so many ways she is
so mexican. The American Dream (social mobility) - Gatsby.
Borderlands - within the city of Chicago, ghetto.
Analyse society (maturity). She was trying to recreate the voice of her younger self but she
has grown up now and it is also reflected in the narrative. The idea of producing a childish
voice is to generate empathy.
She has a comfortable tone. Optimism and Hope.
Key concept: individual, try to search for independence but she also has a moral obligation
with her family.
Gender construction: “Hairs”, “Sisters”; Gender roles: “Boys and Girls” “Hips”

Going west for growing up, leave in order to mature.

Setting: Chicago’s West side in the 1960s

12:00 miercoles andrea herrera 403
Marriage - freedom.
Neighbourhood.
Symbols of freedom and resistance in the novel.
Entrapment and oppression - symbols that lead with the idea of operness, freedom, resistance.
Writing yourself - “write and you will be free”, aunt who supports her creativity.
House - window (symbol of freedom)
02/05/2024
➔ On Beauty and Self-Perception
➔ Hospitality and Care (solar storms)
➔ Spanglish
➔ Female solidarity and independence.

Language
Language as a way of stick to the homeland - Mamacita
Esperanza - she doesn’t speak Spanish much, she has learnt the language from her family, she
cannot use it properly. Relationship with Spanish?, she uses it to engage with her family more.
(when sm died)
your mama’s frijoles as an insult. Take the Spanish language as a weapon to attack the
immigrant ones. Chanclas

Walter Mignodo: BILINGUALISM (ability to speak more than one language) vs

BILIGUAGINg (a way of life between languages to create in the public sphere a new subject:
consciousness).
“Third space” (Homi Bhabha) - the place of a new identity origin.

Hospitality
Strangers that you treat as if were neighbours
Matchimanito - Nanapush to the priest
Pecola - Frieda offer a home, the sister take Pecola as their sister.
Inhospitality - The scarlet letter.
Trust
Home
The Catcher in the Rye - Holden trying go home and Phoebe let him in, he going to the teacher
house.
Solar Storms - Grandma adopts Angel again, Adam’s rib
Ethics of Care
Community
Care ethics: refers to a approaches to moral life and community that are grounded in virtues,
practices nd knowledges associated with appropriate caring and regulating self.
Female solidarity and Independence
Mental force of Esperanza that her mum gives her that Pecola doesn’t have.
A house of my own - chapter, search of independence. Not a man house, a house of my own
UNIT 6 - THE 21st CENTURY: CRISIS AND PRECOCIOUSNESS
IMAGINING A HOPEFUL FUTURE?

➔ Social issues - social categories

➔ Technology (IA)
➔ Environment (Climate Change) - literature genre: Dystopia, Cli-fi (climate change
fiction)
➔ Crisis, humanitarian, economic, environmental, global, financial, mental health crisis.
➔ Precariousness: working in poor conditions. Strong workforce.
➔ Relative Truth
➔ Globalisation: everything is interconnected thanks to the internet.
➔ Interdependence.
CRISIS
18th century Thomas Paine: Journal - The American Crisis, questioning authority,
questioning identity. Americanness roots through the concept of crisis. To choose between
being American or british.

Modernity - a series of interrelated crisis that have not ended.

Brooklyn, New York 2001 (11-S): America first new state of Awareness.
End of the 20th century
- Cold War had ended
- Economic prosperity
- New Threats
2001 - new president George W. Bush
9/11 attacks on World Trade Center
WAR on TERROR
Invasion of Iraq
Arab Scare
Postmodern irony use to interrogate dominant forces - Poem & George Saulders

THE OBAMA ERA

Barack Obama (2008-)
“Yes We Can”
- Change
- Health Care Reform
- World Crisis
- financial crisis
- bank bailouts
- huge deficits
2012 Election: immigration reform, social issues, gay marriage.

Donald Trump (2016-??) - Mike Pence

Controversial election:
● Ties with Russia
● Reality show campaign/twitter
● Megalomania
● Conflict of interests

GEORGE SAUNDERS
POSTMODERNISM - THE POSTHUMAN ERA
Satire and Irony
Social Critcism

PASTORALIA (2000)
Issues to consider:
- Characters
- Narrative structure
- Space
- The American Dream
- Identity, the self, gender family.
- Language and communication.
- The Spectacle
- Labour rights. Capitalism
- Style