Final Essay Exam for English 2328 There is no grace period for the.docx

Final Essay Exam for English 2328
There is no grace period for the final essay.
please turn your final in to me in the assignment area in an
attached file.
Be sure to read all of the instructions (the entire file). PLEASE
LET ME KNOW IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS.
General Instructions:
For your final essay, you will be looking at general
topics/themes—ideas that connect the stories and poems in
Volume E:
American Literature since 1945
.
All reading selections must come from the textbook. Here is a
link to the table of contents (in case you don't have the book):
http://media.wwnorton.com/cms/contents/NAAL8_VE_TOC.pdf
Before writing your essay, please read either the introduction to
Volume E or the briefer online introductions (copied below). As
you will see, one of the introductions is to the 7th edition; the
other is from the 8th. You should read both of these and use
various statements as support for your essay. You will find the
part called "Literary Developments" and the timeline very
useful.
In your essay (750-1000 words or more), you will trace one of
these general ideas through at least
four
pieces of literature
by different writers
(poets, playwrights, fiction writers--
no essays, speeches, or non-fiction prose
) from this time period.
In other words, you will be discussing t

he work of four writers;
you may include more than one work by each of the four
writers.
The paper should be in essay form with an introduction, body
paragraphs, and a conclusion rather than a collection of reading
responses. Please do not use sub-headings.
You
must
use quotations from the reading selections as support for your
general ideas.
You should not use the same works that you used in your
reading responses for Volume E or the novel or short story that
you wrote about in your research paper.
Please do not choose long reading selections for this paper.
If you have questions or need suggestions, please let me know.
The final should show me that you have read selections from
various parts of Volume E.
Here are some possible ways to group the reading selections
(choose
one
):
Reading selections that show the increasing diversity in
America literature during this time period
Reading selections that show how writers viewed significant
social issues (especially in the area of civil rights, including
women's rights and gay rights)
Reading selections that reveal something about relationships
between parents and children (especially adults looking back on
their relationships with their parents)
Reading selections that reveal something about relationships
between men and women
Reading selections that reveal the effects of historical events on

individuals (including events that occurred before this time
period) (Note: If you are using the 7th edition, you may use
one
poem or story from the September 11 section, but not all. I
want you to find poems or stories that relate to a variety of
historical events.)
If you consult sources for the paper, you must cite the source,
even if you paraphrase the author's words rather than quoting
directly from the source. If you don't cite these sources, you are
plagiarizing. The final is a test of your ability to use critical
thinking skills as you discuss the stories and poems, so you
should use sources sparingly.
You will find the following overviews and timelines helpful in
writing your paper.
Overview of Volume E (7th edition)
The following information comes directly from the website for
the 7th edition:
After World War II, the United States emerged as the strongest
world power and assumed the role of speaking on behalf of
liberal democratic ideals. Having fought until Germany and
Japan had unconditionally surrendered, the triumphant Allies
attended to their war-ravaged economic infrastructures, but only
the United States had the wherewithal to build on its success in
the conflict. The overseas empires of Britain and France began
to dissolve, often violently. And the Soviet Union, weakened by
the German assault of 1941, eventually could not sustain the
investment necessary to vie militarily with the Americans. The

Cold War (1946–89) between the United States and the USSR
involved an ideological struggle between capitalist and
communist states worldwide, which erupted into proxy fights in
Korea and Vietnam, but eventually confirmed American military
preeminence. At home, these political struggles resulted in three
major aesthetic reactions. First, the period immediately
following World War II was characterized by cultural
conformity and nationalist ambition, as artists responded to the
Cold War by closing ranks and writing on behalf of an assumed
collective identity. Second, in the 1960s and 1970s, the
unfulfilled promise of the Kennedy administration along with
the turmoil of the Vietnam War prompted cultural introspection,
as more and more artists rejected conformity and searched for
ways to represent previously excluded minority voices. Third,
from the 1980s to the present, artists consolidated the progress
made in the previous years, until diversity and inclusivity
became aesthetic ideals as well as political goals.
In the aftermath of the economic and cultural reorganizations of
World War II, American society became fascinated by cultural
homogeneity and political unity. The war effort had shifted
industrial production to military ends and recruited women to
replace factory workers fighting overseas. When those workers
came home, many women found returning to domesticity only
temporarily acceptable. Similarly, African Americans who had
been drafted into a fully integrated army found their return to
second-class citizenship difficult to accept. But for the majority
of the 1950s, most Americans dedicated themselves to stability
at home in order to bolster the American cause abroad. During
the Cold War, American competition with the Soviet Union took
the form of political “containment” of the Russians, Chinese,
and their satellite states through international organizations like
the United Nations (for the Korean War) and the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (in the case of the Eastern European

Warsaw Pact). Once the USSR developed nuclear weapons, both
sides formulated policies that favored deterring their
adversaries economically rather than deploying the weapons. In
light of the struggle between capitalist and socialist economies,
Americans treated materialism (which valued wealth as a good
in itself) as patriotic. The G.I. Bill, which granted college
educations to returning soldiers, ensured a highly skilled
workforce, and the developing network of American-owned
international corporations resulted in prosperity and the creation
of a managerial class. Interstate highways connected suburbs
with urban hubs to allow businessmen to shuttle between work
and home, but this increased mobility underscored the
homogeneity of these interchangeable zones of commerce.
The literature of the 1950s reflects the cultural preoccupations
of stability and conformity as it responded to the aesthetic
project of modernism. Many artists sought to depict what they
took to be common or essential to all Americans regardless of
gender, class, ethnicity, or regional identity. Such striving for
representativeness derived in part from the grand ambitions of
modernist novelists like Ernest Hemingway, whose lingering
macho challenge to write the “Great American Novel” pushed
writers to universalize or generalize so that their works could
speak to any reader. Other novelists were inspired by William
Faulkner to use regional specificity to make major statements
about race, history, and national identity. By the end of the
decade, fiction writers began to suspect that novelistic
conventions were inadequate to the task of representing
essential Americana, much less contemporary reality. The
“Death of the Novel” controversy, as it was called, pointed to
the dependence of novels on stable assumptions about character,
plot development, and symbolism. During the 1960s, novelists
like Philip Roth were increasingly skeptical of such
assumptions. Poetry followed a course similar to that of prose in

these years. Starting with finely wrought, intricate, personal
lyric meditations, which were stylistic holdovers from
modernist influences, poets in the Fifties began to experiment
with formal openness and thematic inclusiveness of non-
mainstream perspectives. Two books that symbolized poetry’s
break with modernist form are Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956),
with its wandering, oral rhythms and energetic rejections of
conformity, and Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959), featuring
a less difficult, more direct style and an autobiographical
intensity. Ginsberg’s and Lowell’s works helped prepare for the
“confessional” poetry of the 1960s, which stressed the
distinctiveness rather than the representativeness of the lyric
voice.
The inevitable collision of conformity and individuality was
foreshadowed in the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960.
Kennedy’s “New Frontier” challenged the prosperous and
complacent to provide for the underprivileged and socially
marginalized through the desegregation of the South and
government programs like the Peace Corps. Many of Kennedy’s
civil and voting rights proposals were realized by Lyndon
Johnson in the late 1960s as part of his “Great Society.” The
assassination of Kennedy in 1963 began a dozen years of
cultural revolution in which intellectual unrest over the Vietnam
War resulted in urban and campus violence, but also gave rise
to movements for the betterment of women, blacks, and Native
Americans. The feminist movement, which encouraged women
to promote their collective legal, political, and cultural
interests, made strides in equality for women not seen since
suffrage; similarly, the civil rights movement made advances in
awareness and combating racial discrimination, unfinished
business since Reconstruction one hundred years earlier. But the
good will earned by the Great Society was largely squandered
by escalation in Vietnam under Johnson and Nixon and the

government’s often deceitful handling of information about
Southeast Asia. Cynicism and activism in universities resulted
in riots on campuses and deaths at Kent State and Jackson State
in 1970; unrest did not cease until Nixon resigned in 1974 under
threat of impeachment for abuse of power during the Watergate
scandal and American troops withdrew from Vietnam in 1975.
The political divisions, disruptions, and uncertainties of the
1960s were mirrored in the literature of the decade, in which
writers came to terms with changing attitudes toward social
involvement, government and corporate power, individual and
minority rights, drug use, and technological advances like
television and consumer air travel that lent themselves to a
global perspective but disrupted normal ways of thinking about
time and space. The Death of the Novel debates in fiction and
the increasingly provisional, momentary nature of poetry
emphasized the fragility of language. In literary theory, the
school of deconstruction, starting in about 1966, examined the
fundamentally unstable quality of all utterances and how any
statement depends on often unspoken and arbitrarily constructed
assumptions. Still, some writers like the novelists John Updike
and Ann Beattie and poets like Elizabeth Bishop and Stanley
Kunitz remained committed to realistic description and
traditional connections between text and represented world.
Others, like those in the “Minimalist” school of prose fiction,
labored to create a rigorously believable and philosophically
acceptable aesthetic. While some mainly white voices responded
to the 1960s by accounting for their aesthetic privilege, others
took the decade as an opportunity to add their voices to
American ideas of distinctive identity. Large platforms like
literary feminism and the Black Arts Movement allowed
individual authors to render particular experiences without
having to feel they spoke for their race, ethnicity, or gender:
Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud were American writers

participating in this trend, and Adrienne Rich and Ursula Le
Guin are good examples of powerful women writers. In the case
of Native American literature, for which historical and cultural
contexts did not exist to combat lingering stereotypes, the 1960s
saw a parallel movement of critical writings to supplement
creative works by Native authors.
After the Vietnam War, Americans voted on their cynicism
about government intervention and nostalgia for traditional
values by electing Ronald Reagan president in 1980. Reagan
presided over the demise of the Soviet Union thanks to a
massive buildup in American military spending that the
Russians could not match. His economic policies hearkened
back to the personal quest for wealth of the 1950s rather than
the social activism of the early 1960s. Under Reagan and
Clinton, industries downsized and were made more efficient for
competition in a globalized marketplace. Instead of a monolithic
communist threat, the United States faced a succession of
smaller challenges in Grenada, Panama, Somalia, and Iraq that
it could dispatch handily. The new shape of American influence
materialized with the terrorist attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon; instead of large states, Americans now
face radical fundamentalist cells, and U.S. culture has only
begun to respond to this antagonist.
As the Cold War ended, writers worked to broaden the cultural
achievements of the 1960s, widening the scope of American
experience and casting diversity and plurality as aesthetic
ideals. African American women like Toni Morrison, Lucille
Clifton, and Rita Dove wrote in national, racial, and ethnic
terms; likewise, Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich succeeded
in writing in the often ignored or suppressed tradition of Native

American literature. Immigrant writers like Maxine Hong
Kingston and Jhumpa Lahiri augmented national dialogues of
assimilation and ethnic identity for Mexican, Chinese, Japanese,
and Indian Americans. Perhaps the most telling emblem of this
contemporary acceptance of new perspectives into conceptions
of American experience is the Internet. Online, new hypertext
realities need only be imagined to exist virtually, all users may
join online communities, and writing exists in open-ended and
interactive relationships with its readers.
The following comes from the website for the 8th edition.
Overview of Volume E, 8th edition
Since 1945
Overview
The United States and World Power
After the Allies defeated Germany and Japan in World War II,
The United States emerged as the only world power with a
strong economy.
The nation’s participation in World War II had reorganized the
American economy in ways that changed the lifestyles and
expectations of its citizens. Women and African Americans, in
particular, broadened their expectations of economic and social
opportunities after their participation in the war effort.
The United States exploded two atomic bombs in Japan in
August 1945—the first and only atomic bombs that have ever
been deployed. The effect was so horrific and catastrophic that
the United States shifted to a policy of amassing military
strength for deterrence rather than combat. This strategy was
known as “cold war.”
America’s cold war was directed at containing the political,
economic, military, and ideological influence of Communism
around the globe. The Soviet Union and, eventually, China
emerged as the main cold war adversaries of the United States.

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, social critics perceived a
stable conformity to American life, as well as a dedication to an
increasingly materialistic standard of living enabled by the
strong economy and by the abundance of job opportunities.
American life became increasingly mobile as the population
began a westward shift and more and more people relied on
automobiles. The interstate highway system was begun in 1955.
Conflicts within and resistance to this way of life purportedly
based on stability and conformity emerged in the 1960s, or “the
Sixties,” as this period is known. This tumultuous period of
American history, beginning with the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy in 1963, was characterized by its
countercultural revolt against the status quo.
The Sixties ushered in a combative period in civil rights,
climaxing with the most sustained and effective attempts to
remedy the evils of racial discrimination since Reconstruction.
Women began to organize in the Sixties to pursue their legal,
ethical, and cultural interests, a position now defined as
“feminism.”
Active dissension within the culture emerged in response to
military involvement in Vietnam.
The nation was shocked in 1974 by the Watergate scandal: a
revelation of President Richard Nixon’s abuses of governmental
privileges that led to his resignation.
By the end of the 1970s some characteristics that had seemed
countercultural in the Sixties had been accepted in mainstream
American culture, including informalities of dress, relaxation of
social codes, and an increased respect for individual rights.
The 1980s witnessed a call for a return to traditional values,
interpreted as a return not to community and self-sacrifice but
to the pursuit of wealth. During Ronald Reagan’s presidency
income disparities grew while taxes fell, and Americans began
to focus on personal acquisition. The economy boomed but
shifted away from manufacturing and into service and financial
speculation.
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 after American economic

might had depleted its ability to compete.
The attack on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon
by terrorists on September 11, 2001 shifted the nation’s
political agenda to a seemingly open-ended conflict with
revolutionary Islamic forces.
Literary Developments
The ideal of homogeneity and conformity so prominent in the
1950s and early 1960s led many writers to aspire to the creation
of a single work—short story, novel, poem, or play—that could
represent the experiences of an entire people, and that could
attempt to represent a common national essence that lay beneath
distinctions of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, or region.
Novelists hoped to write the so-called “great American novel”
that would characterize the larger aspects of the national
experience. Playwrights, too, aspired to write plays that would
be nationally representative, embracing otherwise mundane
characters as universal types that could speak to monumental
national issues.
In the 1950s and 1960s, poets acquired a new visibility in
American life through writers’ conferences and workshops,
recordings, and published and broadcast interviews and
readings. Despite this increase in poetry’s visibility, its
relatively marginal position in the nation’s culture, when
compared to that of prose fiction, may have allowed it more
diversity from the ideal of homogeneity.
In the 1950s, the poetic standard was a short lyric meditation on
an object, landscape, or observed encounter that clarified or
epitomized a feeling. The period also supported poets who gave
voice to previously marginalized social groups and poets who
experimented with new rhythms.
The notion that any single piece of literature could represent an
entire people or nation fell out of favor in the Sixties, as the
nation itself fractured over such issues as the uses of industrial
and military power; the institutions of marriage and the family;
the rights of racial minorities, women, and homosexuals; the use
of drugs; and alternative states of consciousness.

Some writers felt that social reality had become too unstable to
serve as a reliable anchor for their narratives, and some critics
believed that fiction, and particularly the novel, was “dead,”
having exhausted its formal possibilities.
Poetry was transformed by the appearance of two poems in the
late 1950s: Allan Ginsberg’s
Howl
(1956), with its antiestablishment message, open, experimental
form, and strong oral emphasis, and Robert Lowell’s
Life Studies
(1959) with its directness and autobiographical intensity.
Technological advances such as the advent of television and air
travel challenged boundaries of time and space and brought a
global awareness that made the concept of all-encompassing
expressions of the world through literature seem impossible.
“Confessional” poetry and literature in the 1960s—pieces that
involved autobiographical revelations about difficult, personal
subject matter such as sex, divorce, alcoholism, and insanity—
began to focus on the distinctness of individual experience, not
its representativeness.
“Deconstruction,” a literary theory first developed by French
linguists and philosophers, questioned assumptions about the
stability of language, the ability of words to represent reality,
and the extent to which “facts” might be constructed by
intellectual operations.
The idea of literature as a form of self-expression was
complicated by deconstructionists’ skepticism about the very
idea of a coherent or essential “self.”
The political dissent of the 1960s opened up spaces for a range
of voices in literature representing, in new and varied ways, the
experiences and views of African Americans, Southerners, Jews,
feminists, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Latina/Latino
Americans, and others. This development produced a rich
legacy in American literature.
The contemporary literary period values heterogeneity in its
forms and pluralism in its cultural influences.

Contemporary literature is also increasingly preoccupied with
questions about what constitutes “artificiality” and what
constitutes “authenticity.”
A burgeoning genre known as “creative nonfiction” reflects
contemporary literature’s impatience with the opposition
between fact and fiction. Combining aspects of the essay,
memoir, reportage, criticism, and autobiography, creative
nonfiction uses the techniques of fiction to make a claim to the
real.
The Internet has produced a contemporary literary culture that
is keenly aware that reality is hybrid, with constant input from
multiple sources. Contemporary literature reflects this insight
with its proclivity for combining, editing, altering, and
rearranging existing materials.
Texts and Contexts
American Literature Since 1945
Texts
Contexts
1941
Eudora Welty, "
Petrified Man
"
1944
Stanley Kunitz, "
Father and Son
"
1945
Randall Jarrell, "
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
"
1945
U.S. drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Japan

surrenders, ending World War II • Cold War begins
1947
Tennesse Williams,
A Streetcar Named Desire
1947
Jackie Robinson becomes the first black Major League
ballplayer
1948
Theodore Roethke,
The Lost Son
1949
Arthur Miller,
Death of a Salesman
1950
Richard Wilbur, "
A World without Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness
" • Charles Olson, "
Projective Verse
"
1950
Senator Joseph McCarthy begins attacks on communism
1950-53
Korean War
1952
Ralph Ellison,
Invisible Man
1953
Saul Bellow,
The Adventures of Augie March
• Charles Olson, "
Maximus, to Himself
"

1953
House Concurrent Resolution 108 dictates government's
intention to "terminate" its treaty relations with the Native
American tribes
1954
Brown v. Board of Education
declares segregated schools unconstitutional • Beat Generation
poets begin to gather at San Francisco's City Lights Bookshop
1955
Flannery O'Connor, "
Good Country People
"
1955-68
John Berryman composes
The Dream Songs
(pub. 1964, 1968, 1977)
1956
Allen Ginsberg,
Howl
1956
Martin Luther King Jr. leads bus boycott in Montgomery,
Alabama
1958
Bernard Malamud, "
The Magic Barrel
"
1959
Philip Roth, "
Defender of the Faith
" • Robert Creeley, "
Kore
" • Robert Lowell,

Life Studies
• Frank O'Hara, "
Per- sonism
"
1959
Fidel Castro becomes communist leader of Cuba
1960
Thomas Pynchon, "
Entropy
" • Gwendolyn Brooks, "
We Real Cool
" • Robert Duncan, "
Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow
"
1960
Woolworth lunch counter sit-in in Greensboro, N.C., marks
beginning of Civil Rights Movement
1961
Denise Levertov, "
The Jacob's Ladder
"
1962
Jack Kerouac,
Big Sur
• Robert Hayden, "
Middle Passage
"
1962
United States and Soviet Union close to war over Russian
missiles based in Cuba; missiles withdrawn
1963
James Wright, "
A messing
" • Martin Luther King Jr., "
I Have a Dream

"
1963
King delivers "I Have a Dream" speech • black church in
Birmingham, Alabama, bombed, killing four girls • Pres ident
John F. Kennedy assassinated
1964
John Cheever, "
The Swimmer
" • Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) "
An Agony. As Now.
" • Frank O'Hara, "
A Step Away from Them
"
1965
James Baldwin, "
Going to Meet the Man
" • A. R. Ammons, "
Corson's Inlet
"
1965
Riots break out in Watts section of Los Angeles • Malcolm X
assassinated • hippie culture flourishes in San Francisco
1965-73
Vietnam War
1966
James Merrill, "
The Broken Home
" • Sylvia Plath,
Ariel
1966
National Organization for Women (NOW) founded • Hayden
and Brooks crit- icized at Black Writers' Conference, Fisk
University, for composing "academic" poetry
1967
A. R. Ammons, "

A Poem Is a Walk
" • W. S. Merwin, "
For a Coming Extinction
"
1968
Donald Barthelme, "
The Balloon
" • Edward Abbey, "
Havasu
"
1968
King assassinated • Senator Robert F. Kennedy assassinated •
photo of Earthrise by Apollo 8
1969
N. Scott Momaday,
The Way to Rainy Mountain
• Kurt Vonnegut,
Slaughterhouse-Five
• Galway Kinnell. "
The Porcupine
" • Robert Penn Warren,
Audubon
1969
U.S. astronauts land on the moon • Stonewall riots in New
York City initiate gay liberation movement • Woodstock
Festival held near Bethel, New York
1970
Ishmael Reed, "
Neo-HooDoo Manifesto
"
1970
National Guard kills four students during antiwar
demonstration at Kent State University, Ohio
1971
Audre Lorde, "

Black Mother Woman
"
1972
Rudolfo A. Anaya,
Bless Me, Ultima
• Anne Sexton,
The Death of the Fathers
• Letter from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell objecting to
use of personal letters in manuscript of
The Dolphin
1972
Watergate Scandal • military draft ends
1973
Alice Walker, "
Everyday Use
" • Adrienne Rich,
Diving into the Wreck
1973
Roe v. Wade
legalizes abortion • American Indian Movement members
occupy Wounded Knee, South Dakota
1974
Grace Paley, "
A Conversation with My Father
" • Annie Dillard,
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
1975
John Updike, "
Separating
" • John Ashbery, "
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
" • Michael S. Harper, "
Nightmare Begins Responsibility

"
1974
President Richard Nixon resigns in wake of Watergate,
avoiding impeachment
1976
Elizabeth Bishop,
Geography III
• Maxine Hong Kingston, "
No Name Woman
" • Barry Lopez, "
The Raven
"
1977
Audre Lorde, "
Poetry Is Not a Luxury
"
1978
Ann Beattie, "
Weekend
" • Jamaica Kinkaid, "0"
1979
Philip Levine, "
Starlight
" • Mary Oliver, "
The Black Snake
" • Robert Hass "
Meditation at Lagunitas
"
1976
U.S. bicentennial
1980
Toni Cade Bambara, "
Medley

" • Sam Shepard,
True West
1981
Leslie Marmon Silko, "
Lullaby
" • Lorna Dee Cervantes, "
The Body as Braille
" • James Dickey, "
Falling
" • Simon J. Ortiz, "
From Sand Creek
"
1982
Raymond Carver, "
Cathedral
" • David Mamet,
Glengarry Glen Ross
1982
Equal Rights Amendment defeated • antinuclear movement
protests manufacture of nuclear weapons • AIDS officially
identified in the United States
1983
Toni Morrison, "
Recitatif
" • Joy Harjo, "
Call It Fear
"
1984
Louise Erdrich, "
Dear John Wayne
"
1985

Ursula K. Le Guin, "
She Unnames Them
" • Stanley Kunitz, "
The Wellfleet Whale
"
1986
Louise Erdrich, "
Fleur
" • Art Spiegelman,
Maus I
• Rita Dove,
Thomas and Beulah
• Li-Young Lee, "
Eating Together
"
1987
Gloria Anzaldua,
Borderlands/La Frontera
• Sharon Olds, "
I Go Back to May 1937
"
1988
Yusef Komunyakaa, "
Facing It
"
1989
Amy Tan,
The Joy Luck Club
1989
Soviet Union collapses; Cold War ends • oil tanker
Exxon Valdez
runs aground in Alaska
1990

Robert Pinsky, "
The Want Bone
"
1990
Congress passes Native American Graves Protection and
Repatriation Act
1991
Sandra Cisneros,
Woman Hollering Creek
1991
United States enters Persian Gulf War • World Wide Web
introduced
1993
Gary Snyder, "
Ripples on the Surface
" • A.R. Ammons,
Garbage
• Sherman Alexie, "
This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona
"
1994
Cathy Song, "
Lost Sister
" • Stephen Dixon, "
Flying
"
1995
Federal building in Oklahoma City bombed in a terrorist attack
1995
Jorie Graham,
The Dream of the Unified Field
1996
W. S. Merwin, "

Lament for the Makers
" • Sherman Alexie, "
The Exaggeration of Despair
" • J unot Dfaz, "
Drown
"
1997
Julia Alvarez,
jYo!
• Fanny Howe, "
[Nobody wants crossed out girls around]
"
1997
Pathfinder
robot explores Mars
1998
Billy Collins, "
I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version
of 'Three Blind Mice'
"
1999
Jhumpa Lahiri, "
Sexy
" • Charles Simic, "
Arriving Celebrities
"
2000
Charles Wright, "
North American Bea
r" • Lucille Clifton, "
Moonchild
"

2001
Charles Simic, "
Late September
"
2001
Execution of Timothy McVeigh, convicted of 1995 Oklahoma
City bombing • September 11 terrorist attacks on Pentagon and
World Trade Center
2002
Dorothy Allison, "
Stubborn Girls and Mean Stories
" • Alberto Rfos, "
Refugio's Hair
"
2003
United States and Great Britain invade Iraq
2004
Louise Glück, "
October
"
2005
Kay Ryan, "
Home to Roost
" • Joan Didion,
The Year of Magical Thinking
2006
Thomas McGuane, "
Gallatin Canyon
" • Richard Powers,
The Echo Maker
• John Crawford, "
The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell

"
2007
Edwidge Danticat,
Brother, I'm Dying
2007
Advent of worst economic recession since the Great
Depression.
2009
Inauguration of Barack Obama as U.S. President
2010
Massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico
2011
Death of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, architect of 9/11
attacks
This site and the materials contained herein ©2012
W.W. Norton and Company, Inc.
unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved.
Making Connections
After World War II, America turned outward politically but
inward culturally; new ideals of conformity and homogeneity
developed that are best seen in works that argue against that
conformity, like Arthur Miller’s
Death of a Salesman
; Saul Bellow’s
Adventures of Augie March
; Allen Ginsberg’s
Howl
; and Philip Roth’s “Defender of the Faith.” Other works of
nonconformity and rebellion against convention throughout
American literature include William Bradford’s
Of Plymouth Plantation
(in which the Pilgrims record their reasons for sailing from
England); Jonathan Edwards’s “Personal Narrative;” Henry
David Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government;” Herman
Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener;” Henry James’s “Daisy

Miller;” Mark Twain’s
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
; Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Miniver Cheevy;” and William
Faulkner’s “Barn Burning.”
One interesting feature of postwar literature is the theme of
cross–cultural mixtures and hybrid perspectives that result from
globalized contemporary life. Works like Jhumpa Lahiri’s
“Sexy;” Rita Dove’s “Parsley;” Gloria Anzaldúa’s “How to
Tame a Wild Tongue;” and Li–Young Lee’s “Persimmons” all
have to do with translations of customs or language from
another culture into American English. The vexed issue of
translation has been part of the American tradition from its
inception: see Cabeza de Vaca’s and Thomas Harriot’s
descriptions of Native “orature;” and Roger Williams’s
A Key into the Language of America
.
A major shift in American literature after World War II was the
inclusion of new immigrant voices in the spectrum of national
perspectives. Examples of works that maintain ties to a previous
culture while establishing links to America include Sandra
Cisneros’s “Woman Hollering Creek;” Cathy Song’s “The White
Porch” and “Lost Sister;” Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name
Woman;” and Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Sexy.” But the process of
naturalization and the salvaging of ethnic identity were not
always accepted by the majority of Americans. The best place to
start examining the nation’s growing pains is the
“Americanization” cluster in the 1865–1914 section of the
anthology, especially in
Twenty Years at Hull-House
by Jane Addamsand Jose Martí’s “Our America.” Other works
that deal with the inclusion or exclusion of minority groups
include William Bradford’s “Dealings with the Natives” and
“The First Thanksgiving” from
Of Plymouth Plantation;
Philip Freneau’s “An Indian Burying Ground;” Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Jewish Cemetery at Newport;” Emma

Lazarus’s “In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport” and “The New
Colossus;” and Carlos Bulosan’s “Be American.”
The publication in the late 1950s of poetry in the “confessional”
mode helped authors break some conventions of formality and
universality in the lyric voice in favor of an autobiographical
intensity. Examples of confessional poets include Allen
Ginsberg; Robert Lowell; Sylvia Plath; and Anne Sexton.
Earlier works that allowed for more individual expression
include John Woolman’s
Journal
; Thomas Jefferson’s
Autobiography
; Benjamin Franklin’s
Autobiography
; the slave narratives of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass;
Walt Whitman’s
Song of Myself
; and the slightly fictionalized autobiographical accounts in
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and
Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

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