Introducción a la Literatura Inglesa: Contemporary American Literature

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jueves, 28 de abril de 2022

Anne Sexton

From Hart and Leininger's Oxford Companion to American Literature:

Sexton, Anne (1928-74) , poet who lived in her native Massachusetts and traced her ancestry to Mayflower Pilgrims, but whose writing is concerned not with heritage or religion but very frankly with her firsthand experience. Her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), was the outcome of a nervous breakdown. The poems in All My Pretty Ones (1962) are equally revealing. The same characteristics are evident also in the lyrics of Live or Die (1966, Pulitzer Prize) and Love Poems (1969). Her dark, bitter views of life are evident in Transformations (1971), retellings of the Grimms' fairy tales; The Book of Folly (1972), poems and prose parables; and The Death Notebooks (1974), which were followed by the poems in The Awful Rowing toward God (1975), published after her suicide. 45 Mercy Street (1976), Words for Dr. Y (1978), and The Complete Poems (1981) are posthumous collections of poems. A Self-Portrait in Letters appeared in 1977. In 1985 was published No Evil Star, a collection of essays, interviews, and other prose.

From The Norton Anthology of American Literature:

Anne Sexton's first book of poems, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), was published at a time when the label confessional came to be attached to poems more frankly autobiographical than had been usual in American verse. For Sexton the term confessional is particularly apt. Although she had abandoned the Roman Catholicism into which she was born, her poems enact something analogous to preparing for and receiving religious absolution.

Sexton's own confessions were to be made in terms more startling than the traditional Catholic images of her childhood. The purpose of her poems was not to analyze or explain behavior but to make it palpable in all its ferocity of feeling. Poetry "should be a shock to the senses. It should also hurt." This is apparent both in the themes she chooses and the particular way in which she chooses to exhibit her subjects. Sexton writers about sex, illegitimacy, guilt, madness, and suicide. Her first book portrays her own mental breakdown, her time in a mental hospital, her efforts at reconciliation with her young daughter and husband when she returns. Her second book, All My Pretty Ones (1962) takes its title from Macbeth and refers to the death of both her parents within three months of one another. Later books act out a continuing debate about suicide: Live or Die (1966), The Death Notebooks (1974), and The Awful Rowing toward God (1975—posthumous), titles that prefigure the time when she took her life (1974).

Sexton spoke of images as "the heart of poetry. Images come from the unconscious. Imagination and the unconscious are one and the same." Powerful images substantiate the strangeness of her own feelings and attempt to redefine experiences so as to gain understanding, absolution, or revenge. These poems poised between, as her titles suggest, life and death or "bedlam and part way back" are efforts at establishing a middle ground of self-assertion, substituting surreal images for the reductive versions of life visible to the exterior eye.

Anne Sexton was born in 1928 in Newton, Massachusetts, and attended Garland Junior College. She came to poetry fairly late—when she was twenty-eight, after seeing the critic I. A. Richards lecturing about the sonnet on television. In the late 1950s she attended poetry workshops in the Boston area, including Robert Lowell's poetry seminars at Boston University. One of her fellow students was Sylvia Plath, whose suicide she commemorated in a poem and whose fate she later followed. Sexton claimed that she was less influenced by Lowell's Life Studies than by W. D. Snodgrass's autobiographical Heart's Needle (1959), but certainly Lowell's support and the association with Plath left their mark on her and made it possible for her to publish. Although her career was relatively brief, she received several major literary prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize for Live or Die and an American Academy of Arts and Letters traveling fellowship. Her suicide came after a series of mental breakdowns.

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Anne Sexton at The Poetry Foundation

John Barth (1930)

From Hart and Leininger, Oxford Companion to American Literature:

BARTH, John [Simmons] (1930-). Maryland-born novelist, educated at Johns Hopkins, whose fiction set on the Eastern Shore of his native state includes The Floating Opera (1956), the experiences of a man recalled on the day in 1937 when he debates suicide, and The End of the Road (1958), another existential and nihilist view of experience set in a travestied conventional love triangle. Although placed in the same setting, his third novel, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) is more fantastic and funnier in its lusty parody of an 18th-century picaresque tale re-creating the life and times of Ebenezer Cooke. This was followed by Giles Goat-Boy (1966), another lengthy, complex, and comic novel full of ingenious parody in its satirical allegory of the modern world conceived in terms of a university campus. Lost in the Funhouse (1968) consists of 14 pieces of fiction related in part by their concern with what happens when a writer writes (he makes himself a persona) and a reader reads. Chimera (1972) is also a volume of short fiction, retelling in elaborate style tales of Scheherazade, Perseus, and Bellerophon dealing with social and psychological problems of modern life, also introducing the author Barth along the way. The last-named work won a National Book Award. Barth returned to the long novel in Letters (1979), an unusual development of epistolary fiction, in which seven more or less parallel narratives are reveales through correspondence written by seven characters from his earlier fiction, including the author himself as just another imaginary figure, the intricate story comprising an inquiry into the patterns into which the characters have been previously set and the degree of freedom they may possess. Sabbatical: A Romance (1982) tells of the adventures and ideas occasioned by a long cruise of a college professor and her husband, an aspiring novelist. The Friday Book (1984) collects essays and other nonfiction. The Tidewater Tales (1987) is a lengthy novel about a novelist who claims he cannot write a projected novel as he and his wife sail full of friction along Chesapeake Bay. The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991) probes the connection between memory and reality in a postmodern style of narration.

The Sot-Weed Factor, novel by John Barth, published in 1960 and in a revised version in 1966.

In a lusty picaresque tale that satirizes conventional historical fiction, the novel creates a fictive biography of the real Ebenezer Cook, endowing him with a twin sister, Anna. After failing in his studies at Cambridge, though abetted by a tutor, Henry Bullingame, Ebenezer is ordered by his father to manage the family tobacco plantation in Maryland. There he spends most of his time writing poetry and protecting his virginity, both of which are under constant assault. Finally he achieves fame as a writer while simultaneously losing his poetic inspiration and his virginity.

Giles Goat-boy, or, The Revised New Syllabus, novel by John Barth, published in 1966.

In the metaphoric world called the University, control is held by a computer, WESAC, which is able to run itself and to tyrannize people, for it has the ability to subject them to a radiating and disintegrating force, that is, to EAT them, an acronym for its power of "Electroencephalic Amplification and Transaction." WESAC is so out of hand that one of its developers, Max Spielman, believes it can only be controlled through reprogramming by a Grand tutor, a prophet, who will bring a "New Syllabus," that is, a new philosophy. For this role and this purpose he selects George Giles, whom he had raised among goats as a goat, though he was actually a human found as an infant in the tapelift of WESAC. In his undertaking George has to contend with a troublemaker, Maurice Stoker, who alone fully understands the operation of WESAC, and with a minor poet, Harold Bray, who contends that he is a Grand Tutor. George enters the computer to destroy it, and learns to confound WESAC by answering its questions through paradoxes that paralyze the machine. When George emerges, authorities eager to put WESAC back into operation seize him and send him back to the animal site of his boyhood, for he is now the University's scapegoat.

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Later works (Wikipedia: John Barth):

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991)

Once upon a Time: A Floating Opera (memoirish novel) (1994)

On with the Story (stories) (1996)

Coming Soon!!!: A Narrative (2001)

The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories (2004)

Where Three Roads Meet (three linked novellas) (2005)

The Development: Nine Stories (2008)

Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons (2011)

Nonfiction

The Friday Book (1984)

Further Fridays (1995)

Final Fridays (2012)

Postmodernity in Prose

Philip Roth (1933-2018)

from American Literature: A History, by Hans Bertens and Theo d'Haen

(from "After the war: 1945-80 - Jewish American novelists") (...)

Still, although Malamud's characters are not invariably Jewish, in his presentation of Jewish milieus in The Assistant and in his early stories he is the most Jewish of all Jewish American writers of the fifties and sixties. Here, mainstream America is a vague presence in the background, just like Poland and its inhabitants only feature in the distance in the ghettos and streets of I.B. Singer's stories (Gimpel the Fool, 1957; The Spinoza of Market Street, 1961) or novels (The Family Moskat, 1950; The Magician of Lublin, 1960). Far more usual in Jewish American fiction is a continuous interaction with mainstream American culture and an unending negotiation of territorial boundaries. Such interaction even takes place when mainstream America is nowhere in sight, as in the title story of Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus (1959), a wistful story about class differences within Newark's Jewish community, in which the narrator's lover-for-a-summer has had her nose 'fixed'—'I was pretty. Now I'm prettier"–to conform to mainstream standards of beauty. With this collection of stories, Roth (1933-[2018]) found himself at the center of controversy, especially because of the stories 'Defender of the Faith', in which a calculating Jeish soldier tries to exploit the loyalty he expects from a Jewish superior, and 'Eli, the Fanatic', in which suburban, assimilated Jews try to prevent orthodox co-religionists from establishin a yeshiva in their mostly gentile neighborhood. Roth's fiercest critics, supset by what seemed a cynical view of middle-class American Jewry, accused him of self-hatred, even of anti-Semitism. What Roth captures in 'Eli' is the self-censorship and the dissembling that in the 1950s were part and parcel of assimilation and the deep sense of alienation—experienced here by the lawyer hired by his fellow Jews—that such a forced way of living may bring with it. This is in fact one of the overriding themes in Jewish-American writing of the first decades after the war. In order to be accepted by mainstream America, Jewish Americans abandon much of what may characterize them as Jews—sometimes, as in 'Goodbye, Columbus', even the shape of their nose—and move out of typically Jewish neighborhoods. But that estranges them from their background while their new environment never fully accepts them, leading to a sort of alienation that differs from that felt by young mainstream Americans but is felt even more profoundly.

After two rather traditional novels featuring a more mainstream cast and dealing with the familiar themes of relationships and personal problems and ambitions (Letting Go, 1962, and When She Was Good, 1967), Roth returned to more specifically Jewish themes with Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a virtuoso rant on a psychiatrist's couch in which the novel's protagonist, Alexander Portnoy, exhaustively lists all his frustrations at having been brought up Jewish, and in between details his insatiable lusting after blonde, all-American girls. Lust would from then on return regularly in Roth's novels, as in The Professor of Desire (1977) or the fairly recent Sabbath's Theater (1995), and has contributed disproportionally to his public image, but in those novels, too, Roth is concerned with Jewishness, even if he sees himself first of all as an American writer. In the last four decades, Roth has brilliantly chronicled Jewish life in the Newark of his younger years and has through an alter ego, the Roth-like writer Nathan Zuckerman who features in for instance Zuckerman Bound (1985) and The Counterlife (1987), offered incisive meditations on what it means to be a Jewish American writer. Early in his career Roth worried that 'the actuality is continually outdoing our talents', that the technical skills of American writers were no longer a match for the outrageous images and events that the culture casually produced. Fortunately, those fears were unfounded.

(From "The End and Return of History: 1980-2010 - Philip Roth")

Philip Roth has remained extremely prolific also after 1980, even to the point of becoming perhaps the iconic American author of the entire period. To begin with, Roth wrote a third novel in the David Kepesh series with The Dying Animal. Then, he has continued the series of novels featuring Nathan Zuckerman, the first instalment of which, The Ghost Writer, appeared in 1979, and the seventh, presumably also the last given its title of Exit Ghost, in 2007, with as other titles Zukerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), The Prague Orgy (1985), The Counterlife (1986), American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000). Zuckerman has often been interrpeted as an alter ego for Roth himself, but as of 1990 there also started appearing a new series featuring a protagonist called 'Roth', comprising Deception: A Novel (1990), Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993) and The Plot Against America (2004). There is also a free-standing novel, Sabbath's Theatre (1995), and finally a series of short novels, Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008), The Humbling (2009) and Nemesis (2010). We will here briefly treat three exemplary instances from this overwhelming oeuvre.

American Pastoral, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, starts from the premise of the good life in the country as the culmination of the American Dream and a counterweight to the chaos, oppression and misery of the Old World. This is also what the protagonist of the story, whose life Zuckerman records, seems to have been bound for all his life, until everything fell apart. The novel is set in Newark, and the turning point is the 1960s, when Newark's earlier prosperity has melted away under the onslaught of beginning globalization, the city's older population of first and second generation immigrants, many of them Jewish, like the protagonist, have moved away or been minoritized by the large numbers of African Americans that have moved in. Instead of a harmonious community Newark now is the scene of race riots and labor conflicts. On the level of the U.S. as a whole the havoc wrought in Newark repeats itself in the radical youth and political movements rocking the country. Roth returns a hard verdict on what has gone wrong with America during his own lifetime.

A similar feeling speaks from The Plot Against America, winnner of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2005. Roth finds his initial inspiration in a plea Charles Lindbergh, the first man to cross the Atlantic by airplane in 1927 and a national hero, made in 1941 to prevent the U.S. from entering World War II, for which he blamed the Jews, the British, and President Roosevelt. Lindbergh was in good standing with the Nazi regime and especially with Goering, the commander of the German air force. Roth takes the poetic liberty of situating Lindbergh's speech not in 1941 but in 1940, in the run-up to that year's Presidential elections, and casting Lindbergh as the Republican challenger of Roosevelt. When Lindbergh wins the election, life in the U.S. turns bitter for American Jews, and hence also for little Philip Roth. Things look even more somber when Lindbergh disappears on a solo flight with his famous Spirit of St. Louis airplane and Vice-President Wheeler, an extreme rightwing politician, assumes office. In the end, everything returns to normal, Rososevelt triumphs in a special election, Pearl Harbor signals the entry of the U.S. into World War II, and history resumes its familiar course. The Plot Against America asks some hard questions about the nature of American democracy and American politics more generally. For most commentators it was hardly a coincidence that Roth published a novel focusing on these questions, and with such characters, in the run-up to the 2004 elections, with an incumbent who in the wake of 9/11 had institued an authoritarian regime such as the U.S. had hardly ever seen before, and with a Vice-President of known conservative sympathies.

If American Pastoral and The Plot Against America address wider social and political issues, Everyman sticks to the personal level. In all of Roth's later work the consciousness of approaching death is overwhelmingly present, and particularly so in the foru short novels he published towards the end of his career (Roth in 2013 announced that he thought he had written enough and would write no more). In the futher unspecified 'he' protagonist Roth gives us a reincarnation of the medieval 'everyman' from the eponymous morality play. but whereas the medieval Everyman finds that with death all material worries and constraints dissolve and only spiritual virtues remain, because after death comes resurrection, noting of the sort happens in Roth's version. Everyman as the chronicle of a death announced, a merciless march from the cradle to the grave marked by disease, illness, the relentless deterioration of the body, deaths and funerals. Like the medieval play it holds up the mirror of our own fallibility and ephemerality, but without the consolation of faith.