3.

week - Frost: The Road Not Taken

Frost: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
W. C. Williams: The Red Wheelbarrow
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
W. Stevens: The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain
A. Ginsberg: Howl
4. week - R. Lowell: Epilogue
A. Sexton: Lullaby
5. week - Plath: Daddy
Plath: Lady Lazarus (és ehhez kérem elolvasni és órára hozni Ted Hughes: Bride and
Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days című versét).
6. week – Modernism, Postmodernism in American Fiction
7. week – Henry James: Daisy Miller, The Turn of the Screw
8. week – The Great Gatsby
9. week – Hemingway: Short happy life of Francis Macomber
10. week – Faulkner
15 May – Zh

Afro-American Literary History

- American Fiction
- Literary traditions
- cultural and historical aspects
- genre
- language
- African-American Blues tradition
- literary output of slaves, autobiography
- autobiographic texts of slaves
- Harlem Renaissance – movement, started in Harlem New York, 1918-1930, outburst,
revolution of Af-Am intelligentsia -> social science, history; creating a basis of Af-Am
culture, existence; the whites wrote about the Af-Ams, New Negro Movement the initial
name for this term – to redefine the Af-Am culture from an Af-Am perspective;
developing strong Af-Am middle class, urban Af-Am middle class.
o Characteristics: trying to create an image of the New Negro; they should view
itself with pride – racial pride; artworks – didactic purpose of uplifting the race,
 spreading this sense of pride; cooperated cultural elements and styles -
experimental, new, mixing the wide variety of cultural elements and styles;
Blues and Jazz is created – not primarily connected to Harlem; music – Blues
poetry is born – Langston Hughes;
o Themes: influence of slavery on 20th century black communities, emergence and
building into high literature of black folk traditions; black identity; institutional
racism - Segregation – to separate a very strict division, after the Civil War,
black and white community should not mixt in every way -> 1960s Civil Rights
Movements – Martin Luther King; urban living – north (half of the US); using
art to prove that blacks are humans – they are valuable; art and science was used
to start demanding equal rights – journals, articles, novels – Jean Toomer, Zora
Neal Hurston, etc.;
o Rosa Parks – they didn’t take the bus,
o representations of the black community within canonical…; period of self-
determination for the Black community
o Josephine Baker – famous dancer
o Bill Bojangles Robinson – famous musician
o equal rank with white artists
o the bases of The Color Purple
- William Motley: Knock on Any Door
- William Demby: Beetle Creek
- James Baldwin: Giovanni’s Room (1956); Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953); Another
Country (1962); Just Above My Head (1979)
(McCarthy’s Commission)
- Ralph Ellison: The Invisible Man (1952)
- Toni Morrison: Jazz

Alice Walker
- 1944 –
- focus on black and female identity
- the importance of text, sexuality in people’s life
- writing the letters – self-determination
- 1970: The Third Life of Grange Copeland
- 1976: Merridian
 - 1982: The Color Purple
- 1989: The Temple of My Familiar – collection of poems and essays
- 1984 – Collection of Essays: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose

The Color Purple

- she cannot put herself into words
- a novel of becoming a SHE
Explain the title
- the color of the Holy, the Saint, the absolute
- symbolic color of English suffragettes
Genre
- epistolary tradition – Sentimental novel (Laurence Stern: A Sentimental Journey)
- (novel written in form of diary)
- historical slave narrative
- Harriett Jacobs: Events in the Life of a Slavegirl
- historical fiction’
Sentimental novel
- 18th century
- rationalism and empiricism – John Locke – sentimentalism (experiencing sensually;
does not exclude reason – to reason you have to add sensations and sentiments as well)
- English form of writing
- topic: love, family, home, family values
- focus on reason and desires and how they can be (kibekiteni a kettot)

- her desire for freedom and for love (TCP)

- the diversity of female desires
- TCP – postmodern version of the sentimental novel
Historical narratives, slave narratives
- the story of liberation
- becomes capable of creating an identity
- gaining identity/subjectivity is the goal - Bildungsroman
- a novel about gender – rather than race
- plot driven towards liberation
Hw – Why letters? Why Alice Walker choose a story – liberation in form of letters?
Walker uses the novel’s epistolary (letter-writing) form to emphasize the power of
communication. Celie writes letters to God, and Nettie writes letters to Celie. Both sisters gain
strength from their letter writing, but they are saved only when they receive responses to their
letters. Therefore, although writing letters enables self-e-xpression and confession, it requires a
willing audience. When Celie never responds to Nettie’s letters, Nettie feels lost because Celie
is her only audience. Nettie grows disillusioned with her missionary work because the
imperialists will not listen to her and because the Olinka villagers are stubborn. Only after Nettie
returns home to Celie, an audience guaranteed to listen, does she feel fulfilled and freed.
(Sparknotes)

Through the device of letter writing, Walker brings her audience into intimate communication
with Celie, the principal storyteller in the novel. Celie’s letters for a time are her only sustaining
lifeline, as they confirm her existence. Celie’s words are evidence of a life lived.

In The Color Purple, Alice Walker explores the nature of God and religion. Celie shares a
traditional Christian view of God with the rest of her community. The church is an essential
part of this society, although there is a clear hierarchy within the congregation. The Bible is a
guide for correct behavior, and the local preacher uses it to help shape the moral values of the
community as a whole. The early letters demonstrate the key role that religion plays in
determining Celie’s behavior, even to the point where she refuses to criticize her father for
raping her because the Bible says she should honor her father. God, to whom Celie addresses
her letters, is both a confidant and a source of protection. She pictures God as he appears in
many Christian images, an Old Testament patriarch with long hair and flowing robes. However,
after the revelation that Mr.—— withheld her letters for all those years, God suddenly seems a
representative of the two groups that abused and betrayed her all her life, men and white people.

Shug Avery, a self-confessed sinner who is denounced by the churchgoing community, defends
God. God is not “him” to her, but rather “it.” She espouses a pantheistic view of the world in
which all nature is God, and God appears in all nature. God is a joyful and loving being. The
novel’s title reflects this as Shug tells Celie that she thinks God may become angry when people
walk past a field and fail to appreciate the color purple. In her view, God appears in church only
when the people themselves bring him in. Her religion stresses love, compassion, and pleasure.
This contrast between the conventional Christianity of established churches and more
nontraditional views is also reflected in Nettie’s letters from Africa. Although the Olinka
worship nature and pay homage to the rootleaf plant, the crop that sustains their lifestyle, they
listen to stories about the white Christian God. However, the destruction of the rootleaf and
their village by the white colonialists causes the Olinka to question all religion because no God
has been powerful enough to save them. Samuel and Nettie, too, find failures in conventional
religion. They eventually wish to establish a new church in their community, one that honors
the spirit of God rather than the image.
(Enotes)