Hemingway. Fitzgerald. Faulkner. These and other giants of literature are immediately recognizable to anyone who loves to read fiction and even to many who don't. Now, thanks to these 32 lectures, you can develop fresh insight into some of the greatest American authors of the 20th century. Professor Weinstein sheds light not only on the sheer magnificence of these writers' literary achievements but also explores their uniquely American character as well. Despite their remarkable variety, each author represents an outlook and a body of work that could only have emerged in the United States. As such, the aim of these lectures is to analyze and appreciate some of the major works of American fiction, using as a focal point the idea of freedom of speech. The works you'll investigate here include Winesburg, Ohio (among the most poignant descriptions of life at the beginning of the century); Light in August (which depicts the ravages of racism in the American South); Their Eyes Were Watching God (the first – and perhaps the best – account of growing up black and female in America); Slaughterhouse-Five (a poignant and wacky take of mass destruction and aliens); Sula (an experimental novel that makes rubble out of the conventions of black and white culture); and White Noise (which depicts our encounter with the technological madhouse in which we live). These American fictions, seen together, tell a composite story about coping, about fashioning both a story and a life. Much is dark in these stories, but the honesty and integrity of these writers makes us realize that reading is as much a lifeline as it is entertainment or education.
20th-Century American Fiction
Develop fresh insight into these and eight other great American authors of the 20th century.
01: American Fiction and the Individualist Creed
What are the origins of our belief in freedom and individualism? Do other societies share these beliefs? Can we trace the notion of an "atomic self" from 19th-century figures such as Emerson and Whitman to writers of the 20th century? American fiction makes visible to us these central questions about our national life.
02: The American Self—Ghost in Disguise
Many 19th-century authors—Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, and James—present heroes that are surprisingly empty, spectral, unreal, even to themselves. This view of the Self as hollow is to be found in several major American novels of the 20th century. Writing and language play a role in facing this dilemma.
03: What Produces "Nobody"
In addition to the Existential critique of Self as empty or false, there is an equally powerful social explanation at hand: "Nobody" is produced by the discourses of race, gender, and other powerful forces. Being a Self with an agenda was hardly available to slaves or other minorities including women.
04: Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio"—Writing as the Talking Cure
"Winesburg," once a central text in the canon, is now neglected; why? Anderson is seen as the psychoanalyst of small-town America, and his narrator, George Willard, performs an invaluable purgative role in bringing the repressed villagers to speech. This is a therapeutic function as well as a writerly strategy.
05: "Winesburg"—A New American Prose-Poetry
Anderson's tales of Winesburg's grotesques have a reach and a philosophic dimension that we have ignored. These stammering tales of confession and expression are semiotic wonders—we can no longer distinguish easily between background and foreground, between details and essentials.
06: Hemingway—Journalist, Writer, Legend
Hemingway's brand of macho is politically incorrect today, but his work remains a permanent feature of the American landscape, and his terse, tight-lipped style has influenced generations of journalists and writers. "In Our Time" introduces war and violence to American readers in unheard-of ways.
07: Hemingway as Trauma Artist
The double nature of trauma—physical injury and emotional wound—is ideally suited to Hemingway's narrative manner. In his short stories, he shows us the kinds of damage inflicted by war and violence, and he explores the question: How can we possibly find words to convey these experiences with integrity?
08: Hemingway's Cunning Art
The notion of Hemingway as a simple, straightforward, limpid writer is both true and false. The challenge of reading him is to perceive what he called the "fourth and fifth dimensions"; of prose, and in his best stories we glimpse something of this larger realm. We see a more ambitious writer than we had thought.
09: F. Scott Fitzgerald—"Tender Is the Night"—Fitzgerald's Second Act
Fitzgerald, the Golden Boy writer of the 1920s, spends years and years completing "Tender Is the Night," a record of lost innocence and impending crackup. The decay theme is coded in terms of sexual aberration and excess.
10: Fitzgerald's Psychiatric Tale
Dick Diver, promising young psychiatrist, marries his beautiful, rich, sick patient, Nicole Warren, a transgression of professional wisdom. "Tender" follows the classic psychoanalytic structure: working through defenses and covers to the concealed but poisonous wound.
11: Dick's Dying Fall—An American Story
Fitzgerald paints a large canvas of failure, both cultural and artistic, ranging from the Great War to foiled careers. Violence subtends this story at every point—against this fresco of lost hope Diver's grisly decline is charted. The book stages charm's last stand, charm invested with all the charisma that Fitzgerald himself personified.
12: "Light in August"—Midpoint of the Faulkner Career
Moving from terse narratives of trauma and stream-of-consciousness, Faulkner begins to deal more fully and frontally with racism in "Light in August." The book counterpoints the neurotic, damaged life of Joe Christmas, victim of culture, with the pagan and serene existence of Lena Grove, heroine of Nature.
13: "Light in August"—Determinism vs. Freedom
Joe Christmas, the white man with a little black blood, is one of Faulkner's supremely dysfunctional characters, and his tortured and violent life is juxtaposed against harmonious events of Nature, especially the birth of Lena's infant. This child whose father is not known centers both the novel and its story of the "Passion Play."
14: "Light in August"—Novel as Poem, or, Beyond Holocaust
In "Light in August," Faulkner seeks to create a symbolic realm of gestures and meanings that would somehow posit an alternative to the carnage of his racist, misogynistic plot. This new dispensation aims at no less than the revelation of spirit behind flesh, life beyond death, hope outliving horror.
15: Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God"—Canon Explosion
Hurston's novel, published in 1937 and out of print, became a "cause célèbre" in the mid-1970s, championed especially by black feminist critics. The book charts the tumultuous trajectory of its heroine, Janie Crawford, as she seeks "the horizon" via two dubious marriages.
16: "Their Eyes Were Watching God"—From Romance to Myth
Janie's great love climax comes when she encounters Tea Cake, Hurston's alluring male god: a playful, generous artist of sorts. Janie and Tea Cake's experience in the flood brings this couple into the book's core of feverish vitality and cosmic forces. Hurston's genius consists in telling her story of emancipation and love in terms at once mythic and vernacular.
17: Flannery O'Connor—Realist of Distances
O'Connor's stories challenge the premises of realism; she presents a recognizable everyday scene, peopled with the most ordinary folks, and then proceeds to depict miraculous or otherworldly happenings. Her work raises the stark question: How can one depict the spiritual?
18: O'Connor—Taking the Measure of the Region
Known essentially as a Southern writer, working largely with local Georgia materials, O'Connor probes very deeply into what it means to be from a particular culture, what resources and what blinders that entails. Her most gripping work takes the measure of this scene by inserting it into a framework that includes all history and goes back to the Crucifixion.
19: Williams Burroughs—Bad Boy of American Literature
Burroughs is known essentially as a Beat Generation writer and author of the drug epic, "Naked Lunch," but this characterization fails to take his measure as a visionary about American culture. His assessment of drugs and the human craving for them opens a shocking new image of the Self.
20: "Naked Lunch"—The Body in Culture
Burroughs is a rollicking comic writer, even though his humor is hard for many to stomach. He is also a surrealist author, creating figures of human abuse, exploitation, and ecstasy in ways no other author has attempted. His work places the body in a network of forces that alters our understanding of culture.
21: "Naked Lunch"—Power and Exchange in the Viral World
"Naked Lunch" appears fragmentary and chaotic, but it is structured in the most rigorous fashion imaginable, and fueled by one central plot: The parasite takes over the host. What are the implications of this view? Is there any conceivable ethic to accompany such a perspective?
22: Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five"—Apocalypse Now
Vonnegut has done what seemed impossible: He wrote a radically experimental book that is also a bestseller. Vonnegut, a survivor of the Dresden fire-bombing, carried this story in him for decades before figuring out how it could possibly be told in a way to express its dreadful power.
23: Vonnegut's World—Tralfamadore or Trauma?
The humor and science fiction dimensions of "Slaughterhouse-Five" have made it appealing to generations of readers, but one must ask: What is the relation between the fantastic other-worldly reprieve that Billy Pilgrim finds on Tralfamadore, and the experiences he has had in the war?
24: Robert Coover—Postmodern Fabulator
Coover is among the most experimental, playful, and important of our contemporary writers. His work is attuned to power of all stripes, and he seeks to stretch the contours of storytelling in audacious ways. Realism stops making sense, yet there is an undeniable reality-bite to his fictions.
25: "The Public Burning"—Execution at Times Square
Coover's most significant book, "The Public Burning," considers and reconceives a disturbing chapter in American history: the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as spies at the height of the Cold War. Coover elects to present this grisly story in circus, theater, and jingoist slogans to challenge us to reconsider our own collective past.
26: Robert Coover—Fiction as Fission
The Rosenbergs were executed for stealing atomic secrets. Coover has brilliantly explored the real transgression: not their act but nuclear fission itself: the transmutation of the elements in order to liberate energies on a scale never before imagined. Could this be a formula for fiction?
27: Toni Morrison's "Sula"—From Trauma to Freedom
Toni Morrison, the most celebrated contemporary American writer, fashioned in this early novel a mesmerizing account of a black community, replete with some of the most eccentric and legendary characters in American fiction. A new kind of writing is being born.
28: "Sula"—New Black Woman
Morrison's tale of two girls, Nel and Sula, is a near scientific account of two ways of being: humane, vulnerable, and normative on one hand, radically egocentric and exploratory on the other. It is an experimental fable of astonishing proportions and implications: to make a character who will stop at nothing. What can we make of this?
29: Don DeLillo—Decoder of American Frequencies
DeLillo's projects resemble those of Balzac, Dickens, and Zola: Draw a map of how we lived during the latter part of the 20th century in America. A major new talent in American writing, he presents places we have been but never seen, experiences we have had but never understood.
30: "White Noise"—Representing the Environment
DeLillo's comic masterpiece, "White Noise," makes visible to us our technological world run amok. Above all, he reconfigures the familiar story of the individual vs. the world, but in his rendition we actually see and hear the world. The environment speaks here, and what it says is worthy of note.
31: DeLillo and American Dread
The central fable behind the narrative of "White Noise" is the oldest fable we know: fear of dying. DeLillo makes us understand that this fear animates our lives and our society in countless ways, ranging from Fascism to belief in science and miracle drugs. Death is the white noise that is the background for every existence.
32: Conclusion—Nobody's Home
We take stock of the accounts of American life we've examined, and we consider the role that art plays, personally and socially, in bringing us a heightened sense of our national past and our current endeavors. The central drama here, as throughout the century, is the interplay of Self and World, a dynamic that literature makes visible.
About
Dr. Arnold Weinstein is the Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor at Brown University, where he has been teaching for over 35 years. He earned his undergraduate degree in Romance Languages from Princeton University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. Among his many academic honors, research grants, and fellowships is the Younger Humanist Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Fulbright Senior Lecturer Award as a visiting professor at Stockholm University, Brown University's award as best teacher in the humanities, Professeur InvitÈ in American Literature at the Ecole Normale SupÈrieure in Paris, and a Fellowship for University Professors from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Professor Weinstein is the author of many books, including Fictions of the Self: 1550-1800 (1981); Nobody's Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo (1993); and A Scream Goes Through The House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life (2003). Northern Arts: The Breakthrough of Scandinavian Literature and Art from Ibsen to Bergman (Princeton University Press, 2008), was named one of the 25 Best Books of 2009 by The Atlantic. Professor Weinstein chaired the Advisory Council on Comparative Literature at Princeton University, is the sponsor of Swedish Studies at Brown, and is actively involved in the American Comparative Literature Association.
