8. Literatura norteamericana 1960-

La sección B ya está completa en el sentido de que tenéis en la red todos los materiales necesarios para el estudio. Ánimo con ellos.  

En clase presencial seguimos con la unidad 5 de la sección A, Literatura norteamericana del siglo XIX, la última unidad que veremos presencialmente:

 

 

 ____________________

Y despedimos el curso con una Sección B (NIVEL AVANZADO, y fuera de programa) sobre  algunos autores norteamericanos recientes:

-  Literatura norteamericana contemporánea.

- Prose After Postmodernism

______________________

 

 

 

 

____________________

SECCIÓN B, tema 8 (Literatura norteamericana 1960-)

 

 

Philip Roth (1933-2018)

Jewish-American postmodernist novelist; l. Connecticut 1972-; Gold Medal of the Arts 1986, White House, 1998; Gold Medal for Narrative of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2001; Booker International 2011, Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras 2012; National Book Award, PEN/Faulkner Award, National Book Critics Circle Award; complete works published by the Library of America.

 

Roth, Philip. Portnoy's Complaint. Novel.  1967, 1968, 1969.

_____. The Breast. Novel. 1972. (Kepesh books).

_____. My Life as a Man. 1974.

_____. Reading Myself and Others. Essays.  1975.

_____. The Professor of Desire. 1977. (Kepesh books).

_____. The Ghost Writer. Novel.  1979. (Zuckerman series) (Holocaust).

_____. The Anatomy Lesson. Novel. 1983. (Zuckerman series).

_____. The Counterlife. Novel. 1986.. (Zuckerman series).

_____. The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography. 1988. (Roth books).

_____. Deception. 1990. (Roth books). (Adultery).

_____. Sabbath's Theater. Novel. 1995. (1995 National Book Award)

_____. American Pastoral. Novel. 1997. (Zuckerman series).  (1998 Pulitzer Prize).

_____. I Married a Communist. Novel. 1998. (Zuckerman series).

_____. The Human Stain. Novel.  2000.* (Zuckerman series).

_____. The Dying Animal. Novel. 2001.

_____. The Plot against America. Novel. 2004. (Alternative history novel on Charles Lindbergh and Nazism).

_____. Everyman. 2006.

_____. Nemesis. Novel. 2010.

Del manual de Bertens y D'haen, unas notas sobre Philip Roth, novelista judío norteamericano, perpetuo candidato al Nobel que, recientemente fallecido, se quedó sin él. 

https://litinglesa.blogspot.com/2022/04/philip-roth-1933-2018.html

Y aquí una entrevista con Philip Roth:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/books/review/my-life-as-a-writer.html



De Roth tenemos como lectura en las fotocopias el primer capítulo de su novela The Human Stain (1, Everyone Knows, 1-75). También hay una buena película sobre esta novela.

__________________________________


NIVEL AVANZADO: Philip Roth Unleashed.

and

3 Yale lectures on The Human Stain.

 

___________________________________

Vamos terminando la sección B incluida en el programa (literatura del siglo XX) con unas palabras sobre literatura norteamericana desde 1960-, mencionando a:

John Barth, novelista experimental y postmoderno,

https://litinglesa.blogspot.com/2022/04/john-barth-1930.html

 (más notas sobre JOHN BARTH aquí)

y a

Anne Sexton,

 

poeta existencialista y suicida.  (Obituario de Anne Sexton en el New York Times).

De todos estos autores tenéis alguna lectura en el bloque de fotocopias. De Barth, el relato metaficcional "Life-Story"; de Sexton, los poemas "The Abortion" y "Cripples and Other Stories".  

- SOME NOTES ON ANNE SEXTON.

 

________________________

NIVEL AVANZADO: LA POESÍA INTIMISTA Y CONFESIONAL

 

________________________

 

De Joyce Carol Oates, tenemos entre las lecturas el relato "Secret Observations on the Goat-Girl".

-     Wikipedia on JCO.

 

 

 

De Toni Morrison, novelista del realismo mágico y último premio Nobel de la literatura norteamericana incluido en el programa, podéis leer en las fotocopias un capítulo de su novela Beloved (cap. 3, 239-75).

Más notas sobre Toni Morrison. 

 El contexto para leer el texto de Beloved (Wikipedia)

 

 

_______________ 

 

 

NIVEL AVANZADO:

- FLANNERY O'CONNOR, CARSON McCULLERS & JOYCE CAROL OATES

- Una entrevista con Joyce Carol Oates:

Lopate, Leonard. "The Deaths that Changed Joyce Carol Oates' Life." Interview with Joyce Carol Oates. Audio. (The Leonard Lopate Show). WNYC 13 Oct. 2015.*

         https://www.wnyc.org/story/joyce-carol-oates-lost-landscape/

- Recordad que tenemos otros novelistas premios Nobel en lengua inglesa, varios todavía en activo. Y en poesía norteamericana también tenemos dos Premios Nobel recientes:

En 2016, el cantautor Bob Dylan. Aquí algunas de sus canciones en un concierto de mediados de los años setenta:

 

 

Y en 2020, la poetisa Louise Glück. Aquí pueden leerse u oírse algunos de sus poemas.

Aquí lee Glück algunos poemas de su libro Faithful and Virtuous Night:

 

 

 

Sección B, unidad 7: Literatura inglesa 1960-2000

Morrison, Toni

 

By Adam Begley.  From the Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors (2000).

 

MORRISON, Toni (1931-[2019])

 

FICTION: The Bluest Eye (1970), *Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1998) [Love (2003), A Mercy (2008), Home (2012), God Help the Child (2015)]

NONFICTION: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) 

Sula—I'm talking about the character here, not the novel—would have winced at the sentimental streak running through Beloved, Toni Morrison's best-known book. Sula is bad news, a skeptical fatalist, an idle, amoral artist, an accident so sure to happen it doesn't bother waiting. But she's my favorite; and she lights up Morrison's second novel like a torch. She's a good part of the reason why I insist that Sula, the skinny, 174-page novel, is Morrison's masterpiece.

Beloved—I'm talking about the novel here, not the character, who's really just a ringer from The Exorcist—is something of an icon, a bit like Morrison herself, the unassailable Nobel laureate, supremely confident in herself as a woman, a black woman, and a black woman writer. Beloved is a "contemporary classic," a big book with a colossal subject: slavery. Who wants to knock it? Not m, because in fact it's beautiful, rich, fierce, harrowing. A damn fine book. But also sentimental. Why should uplift and overripe prose poems clog a novel about a runaway slave willing to slaughter her own children, including her newborn baby, rather than be dragged back to captivity, children in tow?

In Beloved, Morrison strains to remind us of goodness and love, as though she feels she has to counter the world's gross tonnage of evil. So we have a white girl busy saving Sethe's life (Sethe the runaway slave, half-dead, hugely pregnant); the white girl chatters all the while about how "Sleeping with the sun in your face is the best old feeling." And we have two of Morrison's specialties, food and sex, served up luscious enough to make us forget all that looming horror. Here, for example, the erotic version of corn-on-the-cob: "How loose the silk. How quick the jailed-up flavor ran free . . . [N]o accounting for how that simple joy could shake you."

I can already hear a grad-school clever argument about how Morrison binds food and sex and the monstrosity of slavery in one tangled life-like whole, but that doesn't change a thing. The music swells, Sula winces.

Morrison began with a bone-dry book, The Bluest Eye, about a little black girl raped by her father and driven mad by her yearning for blue eyes, epitome of the white world's ideal of beauty. A sad and bitter story, choked by too many voices, it contains passages as lovely as anything Morrison has written—but it's a minor work in a minor key.

Then comes Sula, the story of two little girls, best friends, who grow up very different in "the Bottom," the black neighbourhood of a small Ohio city. Sula and Nell are bouncing with life, vividly real but also emblematic. Sula becomes the radical individualist, Nell the pillar of the community, steady, maternal, dutiful. Morrison weaves her tale with just three strands, a place and two families, but she seems magnificently omniscient, as though she had access to the pooled insight of every sociologist, every psychologist, every anthropologist; as though she had solved the riddle of what holds society together, what holds the solitary self together—and what blows it all apart. Though packed with comic scenes and and brilliantly inventive, Sula ends on a note of rich, full-throated sadness. There's plenty of laughter in the Bottom, but only visiting white folk manage to "hear the laughter and not notice the adult pain that rested somewhere under the eyelids, somewhere under [the] head rags and soft felt hats . . . . [T]he laughter was part of the pain."

Song of Solomon—another marvel, a rambling tale, almost picaresque, freer and more daring than Sula, though less precise, less perfect—follow a callo young man's slow steps to redemption. If Sula is about self and community, Song of Solomon is about self and family. Hints of the fantastic in the first two novels—folklore, and the maybe-magic of myth—blossom here. The ordinary takes wing: Our hero flies.

The weakest of Morrison's novels is Tar Baby, a dubious jumble set in the Caribbean, featuring a white candy magnate, his black servants, their beautiful niece, and an ugly cruelty inflicted years ago. Morrison's first extended excursion into the heads of white folk. Only for the loyal fan.

Beloved wiped the slate clean and beckoned, with the same gesture, the august attentions of the Swedish Academy. After which, of course, a disappointment: Jazz, a curiously dispassionate, plotless love story set in Harlem in the 1920s. A teenage girl, an older man, and his jealous wife generate some bizarre domestic violence. In the background, the threat of race riots.

Another kind of violence powers Paradise: the defensive violence of black people intent on protecting their community. Ruby, Oklahoma, is an all-black settlement founded in 1950, a patriarchy, fortress of rightenousness, a prosperous, peaceable community. Persecuted by whites, shunned by lighter-skinned blacks, the people of Ruby have shut out the white world. A few miles from Ruby is the Convent, nun-less since 1970, a shelter of sorts for women, most of them battered and abused, some black, some white. There is no structure to life at the Convent, no rules, no authority. It is an anti-community, a kind of anarchist's paradise. In 1976, the misguided men of Ruby, who think of the Convent as a witches' coven, stage a deadly raid.

The narrative is choppy and needlessly confused, but Morrison's messabge comes through loud and clear. No haven can be heavenly, no home can smack of paradise, if it begins with exclusion or thrives by triage—some in, some out, some damned, some saved. Morrison is agitating for the abolition of us versus them.

As a storyteller Morrison combines a poet's grace, a radical's fervor, and a great preacher's moral majesty. She writes for and about the African-American community ("If I tried to write a universal novel," she once claimed, "it would be water"). And yet she reaches us all.

 

See Also: Nobody who "writes like" Morrison is anywhere as good as she is. If you're after other African-American writers, try James Baldwin or John Edgar Wideman (avoid Alice Walker). If you're after nuanced treatment of racial isues, try Nadine Gordimer. If you just want a novel as good as Sula, try The Great Gatsby or Billy Budd.

 

—Adam Begley