Topics for final exam

14 Beat Generation 15 American WWII novelists

The Beats were a criticism of American complacency under the Ike-Nixon regime, an expression of new forms of prose, and poetry and an exploration of consciousness, which joined the dissent of existing Bohemias [...] to produce a distinct style of literature and living, based on disaffiliation, poverty, anarchic individualism and communal living. A relaxation of 'square' (puritan, middle-class, respectable) attitudes towards sex, drugs, religion and art became the opposing uniformity of 'beat' -Eric Monstram: The Penguin Companion to Literature The “Beat Generation” is viewed as an influential cultural revolution or a literary movement that emerged in the late 1940’s in the aftermath of World War II. The Beat movement was made up of a broad geographical range, from New York City to San Francisco. At first the majority of the “beats” lived in Greenwich Village, New York. They usually hung out together in coffeehouses, jazz bars, and in Washington Square Park, sharing ideas, creating works of art -especially poetry, listening to music and having wild parties. The poetry and novels they wrote were always about their own life experiences and hence biographical. The autobiographical fiction novels of Jack Kerouac and his fellow Beat writers show that without a specific philosophy, the Beat Generation sought to redefine the American Dream and reject middle class values through the pursuit of kicks and escape from convention.

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   American WWII novelists
   

PART II. Practical Questions: Author, literary period, genre, setting place and time, title, point of view, main themes, symbols, main characters, conflict, plot

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   Rip Van Winkle // Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
   

In the Dutch settlement of Tarry Town in New York State there is a secluded grove known as Sleepy Hollow. Rumours say that Sleepy Hollow is haunted. The most famous ghost of those sighted is a figure known as the Headless Horseman, which is thought by some to be the ghost of a Hessian soldier whose head had been shot from his body by a cannonball during a battle of the American Revolution. The story is set just after the end of the American War of Independence, in the late eighteenth century. In Tarry Town there lives a tall, lean schoolmaster named Ichabod Crane. Crane takes a shine to a young woman, Katrina Van Tassel, not least because her father is a wealthy man. Crane is something of an outsider in the community, with very little money of his own and no family. He sees marriage to a wealthy woman as his route out of relative poverty. However, another man, Abraham Von Brunt (known as ‘Brom Bones’), also has designs on Katrina. Brom Bones is a hero to the people of Sleepy Hollow, ‘full of mettle and mischief’. One night, Crane attends a harvest party at the Van Tassels’ farm and listens to ghostly legends told by Brom Bones and others. Crane fails to win Katrina’s hand in marriage, and rides home, his superstitious imagination working overtime following the ghostly accounts he had heard at the party. Ichabod encounters what appears to be the ghostly headless horseman, which is really (almost certainly) Brom Bones in disguise, playing a prank on Crane. Bones had brought a pumpkin with him and hurls it at Crane, who believes it to be the ghost’s severed head. Ichabod Crane disappears from Sleepy Hollow, and Katrina and Brom Bones arrange to be married. Nobody knows what happened to Crane, but the old Dutch wives of the town believe he was taken away by spirits. ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’: analysis ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ is a story shot through with peculiarly American detail, making it the New World’s answer to the European tales of the Brothers Grimm. Indeed, Irving was influenced by German folk tales for both this and ‘Rip Van Winkle’, and he actually wrote the story while living in Birmingham, England. But what does the story mean? Should we view it as an out-and-out ‘Gothic’ tale, or as a more realist tale which merely draws upon Gothic elements? Part of the problem is that we cannot be entirely sure that the ghost of the headless horseman whom Crane encounters towards the end of the narrative really is just Brom Bones in disguise, determined to give his love rival a fright and clear the way for him to woo Katrina for himself. We are led to believe this, but Irving’s narrative does not confirm it at any point.

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