Essay 2 is due this week. Write a 500-750 word essay on one of the following topic. Aim for a 5-paragraph essay structure (introduction with thesis, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion).
Compare and contrast J. Alfred Prufrock and Nick. How are these men alike, different, and representative of the “Modern” man?
Your essay should be formatted in MLA style, including double spacing throughout. All sources should be properly cited both in the text and on a works cited page. As with most academic writing, this essay should be written in third person. Please avoid both first person (I, we, our, etc.) and second person (you, your).
In the upper left-hand corner of the paper, place your name, the professor’s name, the course name, and the due date for the assignment on consecutive lines. Double space your information from your name onward, and don’t forget a title. All papers should be in Times New Roman font with 12-point type with one-inch margins all the way around your paper. All paragraph indentations should be indented five spaces (use the tab key) from the left margin. All work is to be left justified. When quoting lines in literature, please research the proper way to cite short stories, plays, or poems.
You should use the online APUS library to look for scholarly sources. Be careful that you don’t create a “cut and paste” paper of information from your various sources. Your ideas are to be new and freshly constructed. Also, take great care not to plagiarize.
Whatever topic you choose you will need a debatable thesis. A thesis is not a fact, a quote, or a question. It is your position on the topic. The reader already knows the story; you are to offer him a new perspective based on your observations.
Since the reader is familiar with the story, summary is unnecessary. Rather than tell him what happened, tell him what specific portions of the story support your thesis. The handout on “Literary Analysis” is a must for this aspect of the paper.
Modernism
A reaction on the part of a number of writers and artists to the horrors of World War I ( 1914-1918), “Modernism” is the name given to a number of themes, attributes, and attitudes, each of which reflected a growing pessimism, a sense of disorientation, and a drift into a numbing meaninglessness. Dominant in the 1920’s, Ernest Hemingway referred to the decade and its decadence as the “Lost Generation.” Well, actually a poet named Gertrude Stein did, but Hemingway picked up the expression and became the dominant voice of this group. Many of the most well-known writers, painters, and poets of the time served in WWI in some capacity, either as soldiers or, in Hemingway’s case, as ambulance drivers or some other auxiliary role.
The war was 4 years and exposed Europe ( in particular) to devastation that it had not known before. Battles such as Verdun, the Somme, and Passchendaele, stretched on for eternities and led millions to their deaths in mud-filled shell holes and water filled trenches. The brutality and meaningless of the event in the minds of the soldiers lead to a de-romanticizing of war and an instant mistrust and rejection of old, traditional ideas.
Modernists felt that they needed to reinvent the ways they expressed themselves. The painting form Cubism emerged around this time, as Picasso and his peers were painting in Paris alongside Hemingway and Fitzgerald, writing in cafes and creating an artists’ colony of sorts. The language and style of the writing changed significantly at this point, as did the attitudes expressed in this writing.
The war was not the only influence on the Modern psyche. Industrialization, urbanization, and immigration were transforming the country and the way we lived. De-personalized cities and company-owned factories replaced towns and villages with family owned operations. In Modern works, there is often a crisis as the central character, usually a man, struggles with his place in this rapidly transforming world.
The “Great Depression,” the economic crisis that followed the collapse of the stock market in 1929 only fueled the despair of millions of Americans and their counterparts across Europe.
As a movement, “modernism” fomented a range of expression: almost vitriolic satire, the “Theater of the Absurd,” the “Dada” school of art, and the “surrealists.” T. S. Eliot, Alduous Huxley, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Franz Kafka populate their works with common people caught up in a world of irrational forces and futile labor. In the arts, the movement prompted a focus on form and experimentation, such as Joyce’s use of “stream of consciousness,” and the popularity of “Art Deco.” Only the Allied victory against Germany and the Axis powers in World War II relieved the nihilism. The atmosphere of the movement survived, however, in the “Beat Generation” of the 1950’s and with the protests against “the Establishment” and the Vietnam War in the 1960’s and ’70’s.
In form, modernist literature blurs the lines between genres and tends to an inward narrative source, incorporating literary techniques like “stream of consciousness” that reflect the derivative nature of the new literary contexts. Literary theory of the period rewards spontaneity, creativity and experimentation tending toward the avant garde.
Ernest Hemingway, already mentioned, drew upon experiences from his youth in the woods of northern Michigan where he and his father spent many times backpacking and fishing. Nick Adams is Hemingway’s own persona in the stories that follow his adventures in the natural world. “Big Two-Hearted River, Parts 1 and 2” reflect Hemingway’s succinct style that strips away authorial interpretation in deference to a reportorial realism, leaving the reader free to relate more directly to setting and action.
At least three times in “Big Two-Hearted River,” Nick takes stock of his actions and decisions. His catalog of choices, his rationale for them, and the meaning he assigns to them define the basis for the “Hemingway code” of ethical action.
The simplicity of the prose and the highly symbolic nature of the items and actions in this story make it ripe for our next Way of Reading, the New Critical school.
Ways of Reading: New Criticism
Sometimes called “close reading,” applying the New Critical school of thought requires you to forget about your personal ‘Reader Response’ and think instead about the art ( the movie, the play, the painting, the poem, the novel) as a treasure chest with all its wonders already inside it. New Critics look only at the text and don’t worry about anything else. The writer’s unconscious intentions or the reader’s personal response is irrelevant to the meaning. You only care about how the word choices and the concrete elements of the text contribute to the meaning. Meaning is fixed.
If you are a New Critic and you are ‘close reading’ a movie, you would be critiquing its setting, costumes, lighting, music, cinematography, the presence of symbols, the structure of the film, etc. and how those things contribute to the overall message or the overall success of the film.
If you are looking at a painting or photograph, you would be looking at color, scale, placement of objects in the frame, etc.
If you are reading a poem, you would examine rhyme scheme, meter, form, symbol, capitalization, enjambment, etc.
If you are reading a short story, you would focus on the internal structure of the piece, the presence of irony, symbol, point of view, literary tools, character analysis, the reliability of the narrator, setting, etc. Textual evidence is key to support your interpretation of these tools and devices.
Here is a refresher on some of those tools and devices:
Symbolism and metaphor are two closely linked elements. While a metaphor makes a comparison that provides new insight to one of the objects being compared, a symbol is an object that specifically represents something else while remaining unchanged. A symbol is not something that simply has a deeper meaning.
Imagery can best be summed up as the picture the author is painting. An author’s vivid descriptions and even specific language assist in creating a mental image.
Tone is imperative in understanding a work. Is the author entirely serious? Does the author’s choice of language tell a different story than his or her actual words? This can be one of the most subtle to pinpoint. For instance, in week one, we discussed Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody.” Tone is key. She has a lighthearted tone that tells the reader she is not truly diminishing her own self worth.
A theme is pervasive; it is more than one simple incident within a work. While multiple themes may exist within a work, it is important to look at how they work together. America is a land of broad landscapes and even broader perspectives. The circle of life, disillusionment, coming of age, love, corruption, and death are all common themes in literature. These are all well represented in American literature as well, but we see some themes becoming more prominent.
Ernest Hemingway: Author Bio AKA Nick Adams
Ernest Hemingway: Big Two-Hearted River: Part I and Part
http://www.poetryfoundation.
http://www.poetryfoundation.
http://www.poetryfoundation.
T. S. Eliot: Author Bio
T. S. Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
