This summary provides an overview of key events and developments in American literature since World War II: - World War II reshaped American culture and established the U.S. as a global superpower in the postwar era. However, the war resulted in tremendous loss of life worldwide. - The postwar decades saw major social movements like the Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King Jr., as well as movements for women's and gay rights that demanded greater equality and recognition. - The Vietnam War deeply divided America and sparked widespread protests on college campuses against U.S. involvement overseas. - Authors like Ronald Sukenick, William Gass, and Hunter S. Thompson helped pioneer postmodern literature through experimental

1. We will discuss this
when your father
gets home!
Wow! Will
he last
longer in
that outfit?
Farther versus Further

2. Farther versus Further
 Farther is an adjective and adverb that means to or at
a more distant point: ―We drove 50 miles today;
tomorrow, we will travel 100 miles farther.‖
 Further is an adjective and adverb that means to or at
a greater extent or degree: ―We won't be able to
suggest a solution until we are further along in our
evaluation of the problem.‖ It can also mean in
addition or moreover: ―They stated further that they
would not change the policy.‖
Read more: Easily Confused or Misused Words | Infoplease.com
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3. ―the rhythmic, inevitably
narrative, movement
from an overclothed
blindness to a naked
vision‖
- Dylan Thomas

4.  American Literature since 1945
 Postmodern Manifestos
 Sukenick
 Gass
 Thompson
 Olson

5. American Literature
1945 to the Present
An Introduction
December 1, 1941, Washington,
D.C. President Roosevelt
addresses the people of the
United States in his ―fireside
chat,‖ in which he told them ―we
are going to win the war and the
peace that follows.‖
Roosevelt’s words were
prophetic: The United States
emerged from World War II as a
global superpower. ―This new
power, experienced both at home
and abroad, became a major force
in reshaping American culture for
the balance of the twentieth
century‖ (NAAL 3).

6. World War II and Its Aftermath
The war cost the lives of 50-70
million people world wide; almost
quarter of million died in the
bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. Historians and
politicians continue to debate
whether the use of nuclear
weapons was necessary to end the
war, but what remains undisputed
is that the possibility of nuclear
warfare radically changed the
nature of global politics for the
rest of the twentieth century.

7. World War II and Its Aftermath

8. World War II
and Its
Aftermath

9. World War II and Its
Aftermath
J. Howard Miller’s We Can
Do It poster from 1942.

10. The Civil Rights Movement
 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led an estimated 10,000 civil rights marchers
out on the last leg of their Selma-to-Montgomery march. May 28, 1961,
Montgomery, Alabama.
 The Civil Rights Movement was one of the defining features of the
postwar cultural revolution as thousands of African Americans took to
the streets to demand their equal rights in society.

11. Voices of the Cultural Revolution
A group of women rally at the
Statue of Liberty in support of
the recent passage of the Equal
Rights Amendment by the
United States House of
Representatives. August 10,
1970. The bill did not survive
in the U.S. Senate.
Women as well as racial
minorities seized upon the
changing climate of the post-
war years to demand greater
equality.

12. Voices of the Cultural Revolution
―Active dissension within the culture
emerged in response to military
involvement in Vietnam, where in
1961 President Kennedy had sent
small numbers of advisers to help the
Republic of South Vietnam resist
pressures from Communist North
Vietnam. Presidents Lyndon Johnson
and Richard Nixon expanded and
continued the U.S. presence; and an
increasingly strident opposition—
fueled by protests on American
college campuses and among the
country’s liberal intellectuals—
turned into a much larger cultural
revolution‖ (NAAL 6).

13. Voices of the Cultural Revolution
Gay and lesbian activists
prepare for a Gay and
Lesbian Pride parade in
downtown Des Moines,
Iowa. June 25, 1983, Des
Moines, Iowa.
The riots at the Stonewall Inn in New
York City mark the beginning of the
modern Gay Rights movement.
Stonewall was a gay-friendly bar in the
progressive Greenwich Village
neighborhood of Manhattan that was
frequently subjected to police raids. On
June 28, 1969, bar patrons actively
resisted arrest and a series of riots
broke out among the gay and lesbian
residents of Greenwich Village. One
year later, the first Gay and Lesbian
Pride parades took place in Los
Angeles, New York, and Chicago. Such
parades have been a staple of the Gay
Rights movement for the last forty
years.

15. Hunter S
Thompson
(1937-2005)
William H
Gass
(1924- )
Ronald
Sukenick
(1932 – 2004)

16.  ―For Sukenick [. . .] fiction was above all an activity, a self-
conscious act of creating a literary work with no illusions abut
the nature of its making‖ (NAAL 401).
 ―Fiction is the most fluid and changing of literary forms, the one
that most immediately reflects the changes in our collective
consciousness, and in fact that is one of its great virtues. As soon
as fiction gets frozen into one particular model, it loses that
responsiveness to our immediate experience that is its hallmark.
[…] It seems to me that this is one of the major factors
contributing to the recent decline in the popularity of fiction:
people no longer believe in the novel as a medium that gets at
the truth of their lives‖ (402).
Ronald Sukenick

17. QHQ: Sukenick
1. Q: How does Ronald Sukenick’s advice on writing a novel
differ from Willa Cather’s advice about the same?
2. Q: Why is it more important that fiction be experiential,
rather than experimental?
3. Q: What does Ronald Sukenick mean when stating, ―no one
takes novels seriously‖?
4. Q: When technology take over even more, will reading be
over?

18. William H. Gass
Gass– what is the flaw in fiction writing?
―.. the moment our writer concentrates on sound, the moment
he formalizes his sentences, the moment he puts in a figure of
speech or turns a phrase, shifts a tense or alters tone, the
moment he carries description, or any account, beyond need,
he begins to turn his readers interests away from the world
which lies among his words like a beautiful woman among her
slaves, and directs him toward the slaves themselves.‖

19. QHQ: Gass
1. Q: What meaning was Gass trying to convey in ―The Medium of
Fiction‖?
2. Q: Why is word choice important to Gass and how can the
meaning influence the text?
3. Q: What does William Gass intend when including the quotation,
―..he did not have enough imagination to become a first-rate
mathematician‖ in regards to his literary manifesto?
4. Q: How are the ways that modernists and postmodernists look at
literature different?
5. Q: What qualities, in specific, distinguish postmodern literature
from modern literature? How do we see these in Gass’s manifesto?

20. ―On the upstairs balconies, the customers are
being hustled by every conceivable kind of
bizarre shuck. All kinds of funhouse-type booths.
Shoot the pasties off the nipples of a ten-foot bull-
dyke and win a cotton-candy goat. Stand in front
of this fantastic machine, my friend, and for just
99¢ your likeness will appear, two hundred feet
tall, on a screen above downtown Las Vegas.
Ninety-nine cents more for a voice message. ―Say
whatever you want, fella. They’ll hear you, don’t
worry about that. Remember you’ll be two
hundred feet tall.‖ (408).
Hunter S. Thompson
―Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to
cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your
leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of
thing‖
―But nobody can handle that other trip—‖ (408).

21. QHQ: Thompson
1. Q: Thompson’s writing seems to be very fictional and new
compared to other stories that we have read.
2. Q. Was Hunter S. Thompson disturbed?
3. Q: What does acid have to do with the post modernist manifestos?
4. Q. In terms of literary criticism, is there a school of
drug/psychedelic criticism?
5. Q. Has our reality become something akin to what Thompson
describes in his manifesto?
6. Q: How does one’s perception of reality form one’s opinion of it?

22. HOMEWORK
 Read ―Postmodern
Manifestos‖ 400-17
 Read Mary Klages
―Postmodernism.‖ There
is a link to this article on
the website home page.
 Post #28 QHQ on one of
the following:
 Olson
 O’Hara
 Bishop
 Ammons
 Lorde