The genre of story in american and uzbek literature and ways of teaching

CHAPTER II. NEW ASPECTS OF TEACHING METHODS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
2.1. Story genre and teaching methods in American literature
The American literature developed very rapidly. The first widely read American author was Benjamin Franklin. Basically, the development of American literature is a path from romanticism to realism. Washington Irving (The Legend of Sleepy Hollow) was the first American to gain an international literary reputation. Mark Twain still captivates readers with his unique—and uniquely American—humor and insight. Realism is any effort to portray life as it truly is. Realism in literature was part of a wider movement in the arts to focus on ordinary people and events. In the spirit of general "realism," Realist authors opted for depictions of everyday and banal activities and experiences. instead of a romanticized or similarly stylized presentation. "Realism sets itself at work to consider characters and events which are apparently the most ordinary and uninteresting, in order to extract from these their full value and true meaning. In America realism was an early 20th century idea in art, music and literature that showed through these different types of work. Characteristic American novels of the period depict the damage of economic forces. Pulling away from fantasy and focusing on the now, American Realism presented a new gateway and a breakthrough — introducing modernism, and what it means to be in the present. For Berthoff, realism is committed to “capturing the special immediate air of American reality. For Benardete, realism is “the record of life, the real, the true”. Donald Pizer (1984) has modified a commonly accepted definition of realism based on three criteria— verisimilitude, representativeness, and objectivity. Alfred Habegger (1982) has suggested that realism was more specifically opposed to women's fiction. Hamlin Garland was his counterpart in the countryside. His collections of stories published and known as prairie realism. Josephine Donovan (1983) has argued that women's local color literature can be firmly situated within the anti-romantic tradition of women's realism. Howells equated romanticism with the Old World aristocracy and therefore considered realism to be the appropriate aesthetic for the emerging institution of American literature.
American literature has a relatively short but colorful history. The first widely read American author was Benjamin Franklin, whose witty aphorisms and sound advice written in the yearly journal “Poor Richard’s Almanack” helped shape ideas of what it means to be an American. Washington Irving (The Legend of Sleepy Hollow) was the first American to gain an international literary reputation. James Fenimore Cooper’s verbal landscapes in his “Leather stocking Tales” captured the nation’s vast beauty. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson broke from poetic tradition and brought a sense of individuality to the nation’s literature. Mark Twain still captivates readers with his unique—and uniquely American—humor and insight. The modernists of the 1920s and 1930s produced such talents as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Today, writers like Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy continue to make American literature relevant and exciting.
When we understand the American literary tradition as something that is shaped in large part by an extended interpretive community of editors, teachers, and readers, you can think of yourselves and your students as part of that interpretive community. For some of you, that could well represent a pretty radical reorientation of teacher and students to the American literary tradition. If you think of that tradition as something that is fixed, eternal, and bestowed upon us by God, your relation to the text that you read and teach could become overly reverential. As Emerson argued in his 1837 "American Scholar" address, that is not necessarily a good thing. To paraphrase Emerson: when your reading is characterized only by reverence for the canonical figure or text, you stop thinking. You simply worship, and your goal as a reader narrows to merely reproducing institutionally-sanctioned responses (i.e., the supposedly correct way of reading Emerson, Melville, Dickinson, or whomever). In his "American Scholar" address, Emerson says that once you start reading this way, you in effect find yourself orbiting around the work, and, to quote Emerson, "the book becomes noxious. The guide is a tyrant." As a result, Emerson says, "instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm."
Now, I wouldn't want to encourage an extreme version of Emersonian solipsism, in which all literary works become appropriated by the self, but I like his call to engage and not worship texts. For me, the essential thing about not worshipping is that we can think about books as written by actual people at particular historical moments for actual readers. And consequently, we can think about the books or essays or poems or short stories in the American literary tradition as trying to do something in their own time. In "The American Scholar" essay, which has been canonical almost from the time that Emerson first delivered the address to Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1837, and then published it for a wider readership, Emerson was specifically trying to revitalize an institution—Harvard College—that he thought had become overly insistent on passive forms of learning, and he was trying to revitalize an American literary culture that he thought had become similarly passive and trying merely to imitate European literary models. Let's do to Emerson what he asked his auditors and readers to do with great writers: engage him, ask questions about his ideas, resist falling into the sleepy trap of simply worshipping him as a great and canonical writer. And to bring this talk back to one of the main reasons we're all here, I'd suggest that we can do this by taking seriously the Texas state curricular standards, which ask teachers to focus on such things as rhetorical analysis
The curricular standards emphasize the importance of attending to writing across genres and especially to nonfictional prose, and thus it's worth noting that over the past few decades the canon has expanded to include a lot of such writing. To focus on just the 1820–1865 selections in the Norton [Anthology of American Literature]: we have Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Lincoln, Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, Margaret Fuller, Caroline Kirkland, and others, and these authors are addressing such issues as slavery, race, nationhood, the frontier, social reform, democracy, nonconformity, and women's rights. I can assure you that they were thinking rhetorically about how to make an impact on readers, and the way that they try to do that is very much worth studying and talking about. In my presentation tomorrow, I'm going to focus on Douglass and Emerson as figures who influence writers of their own time and beyond. But they were also writers who shared in a vision of the importance of democracy to American life and letters and sought to convey their thoughts to ordinary readers. Their writings help us to see that at least one persistent strand in the American literary tradition is a commitment to the promises of democracy. I can't think of a topic that is more worthy of being addressed in your classrooms.