Literatura Norteamericana II: Moderna y Contemporánea – 1ª semana – FEEDBACK

The following comments summarize what we expect students to know about the topics
proposed. As usual, we recommend students to read exam instructions and questions
carefully: this can make a huge difference!

PART ONE: Choose one of the following questions (up to 300 words): This part is for
you to show your general knowledge of some terms and concepts of the course. We
expect you to define/explain/describe them and then be able to provide suitable
examples to illustrate your definitions and explanations. In other words, you must
defend how the literary texts you choose exemplify what you have previously explained.

1) Explain the maxim “Make it New” in relation to the formal features of Modernist poetry, and
exemplify with two of the poems of the first part of the course.

The expression “Make It New” comprises the creative efforts at the turn of the century to
find new formal and thematic ways to express a complex, fragmentary and difficult-to-
apprehend existence. We expect you to mention the intellectual and social context that
fostered new understandings of the self and the world, and to relate those to formal
experiments carried out by Modernist poets. Your answers should expand on the
breakaway from classical poetic models and the focus on form and language over subject
matter. There are several poems in this first part of the course that can help you illustrate
your comments on objectification, the international style, concentration, vernacular
language, new rhythmical proposals, etc. You should bear in mind that Modernism did not
invent images, juxtaposition or free verse: they only used it for new purposes.

2) Describe the figure of the “New Woman” and exemplify in relation to two of the set texts of
the course.

We expect you to describe the figure emerging at the turn of the 19th century as a result of
the suffragette movement and other protofeminist endeavors. What was known as the New
Woman referred to white middle-class women who reached higher education and
participated in socio-economical and intellectual activities that had previously been limited
to men, and who pursued equal rights for both sexes. We also expect you to expand on the
deconstruction of previous gender patterns regarding public presence (clothes, behavior),
sexuality, roles in marriage, economic independence, representations of the body and so
forth. As literary examples you could discuss some female characters from the set texts of
this part of the course. These encompass several interpretations of the term, from
deconstruction of old models to the flapper, but you should make sure your examples
illustrate the definition you gave –e.g. Hurston’s Delia can hardly exemplify a smoking,
driving, party-going and sexually-liberated woman.

PART TWO: Comment upon both excerpts (up to 200 words for each one). This part
makes you focus on the specific literary excerpt provided. You are expected to show
your capacity to analyze it with the help of the questions given, not to answer the
questions independently of the excerpt. Please remember that a text commentary is a
literary analysis of the text given and not a retelling of the plot or the biography of the
author.
1) Identify the author and title of the work where the following excerpt belongs. What type of
narrative voice and narrative perspective are used in the excerpt, and what purposes do
they serve? Briefly debate the reasons for labeling the story as a Southern Renaissance
work.

Two hours later the boy was chopping wood behind the house within which his mother and
aunt and the two sisters (the mother and aunt, not the two girls, he knew that; even at this
distance and muffled by walls the flat loud voices of the two girls emanated an incorrigible
idle inertia) were setting up the stove to prepare a meal, when he heard the hooves and saw
the linen-clad man on a fine sorrel mare, whom he recognized even before he saw the
rolled rug in front of the Negro youth following on a fat bay carriage horse ―a suffused,
angry face vanishing, still at full gallop, beyond the corner of the house where his father and
brother were sitting in the two tilted chairs; and a moment later, almost before he could have
put the axe down, he heard the hooves again and watched the sorrel mare go back out of
the yard, already galloping again.

This excerpt has been taken from William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” (please notice the
inverted commas) and shows the moment when Sarty (“the boy”) sees the arrival of De Spain
with the rug Abner has previously stained. As we can see in the excerpt, the narrator is third
person singular and heterodiegetic (“the boy was”) focalizing on Sarty (“he knew,” “he heard,”
“he recognized”). In other words, the narrator is partially omniscient because s/he can access
the boy’s thoughts and perception. This type of narrator allows us to follow Sarty’s evolution
into maturity and complements the thoughts and feelings of a child who is almost speechless
throughout the story due to his father’s abuse. This focalization explains expressions like “idle
inertia” and “suffused face” in the excerpt, which are rare in a ten-year-old boy’s vocabulary.
In this particular excerpt we can see how Sarty witnesses a turning point in the plot. We can
label “Barn Burning” a Southern Renaissance work because it depicts the customs, language
and social and economic conditions of the agrarian South after the Civil War. Race and class
issues of the sharecropping system are addressed in the story, of which the excerpt provides
some evidence: the poor white tenants like Sarty’s family, the rich white landowner (“the linen-
clad man” on a “fine sorrel mare”) and the black servants (“the Negro youth”).

2) Identify the author and title of the lines that follow. To what extent do these lines conform
to the period’s alleged metric freedom? How does the poem show the prevalence of the
poetic object over the subject?

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

These lines form the poem “In a Station of the Metro” (in inverted commas, again) by Ezra
Pound. As the reputed Imagist he was, Pound was fond of the characteristic metric freedom
of Modernism (that is, he preferred to abandon the classic iambic pentameter). In this case
he was inspired by the haiku –a traditional formula in Japan but obviously new to American
poets at the beginning of the 20th century. The two lines show disparate number of syllables
with irregularly-placed stresses, which reinforces the freedom advocated by Modernists. Only
assonant rhyme (“crowd- bough”) and alliteration (“black bough”) defies this formal newness.
Please bear in mind that lines, phrases and sentences are different things! In the poem, the
poetic subject fuses with the object so that the latter prevails. Our attention is not drawn to
the viewer of the scene and the feelings it arouses, but to the instant captured in a Paris
metro station (the apparition of the crowd) and conveyed by a suitable metaphor (“Petals on
a wet black bough”). The linguistic choices of the poet (no grammatical subject and no verbs)
reinforce the objectivity of the poetic product.