ELIT 48C

Class # 23

Is it really “instant”?

Nowadays, it is almost universally assumed that “instant” means “quickly. Obviously, it doesn’t. Google Instant is another good example of this word being abused.

in·stant   /ˈinstənt/AdjectiveHappening or coming

immediately: "instant dismissal.”Noun

A precise moment of time: “Come here this instant!”

Dirty FaceShel SilversteinWhere did you get such a dirty face,My darling dirty-faced child?I got it from crawling along in the dirtAnd biting two buttons off Jeremy’s shirt.I got it from chewing the roots of a roseAnd digging for clams in the yard with my nose.I got it from peeking into a dark caveAnd painting myself like a Navajo brave.I got it from playing with coal in the binAnd signing my name in cement with my chin.I got if from rolling around on the rugAnd giving the horrible dog a big hug.I got it from finding a lost silver mineAnd eating sweet blackberries right off the vine.I got it from ice cream and wrestling and tearsAnd from having more fun than you’ve had in years.

AGEN

DA

Barn BurningStyle Characters and SymbolsAuthor Introduction:

Langston Hughes

Lecture“Barn Burning”Style

Style: SyntaxThe most noticeable feature of Faulkner's style is his sentence structure. His sentences tend to be long, full of interruptions, but work by stringing out seemingly meandering sequences of clauses. The second sentence of ‘‘Barn Burning’’ offers an example: It is 116 words long and contains between twelve and sixteen clauses, depending on how one parses it out; its content is fluid and sundry, moving from Sarty's awareness of the smell of cheese in the general store through the visual impression made by canned goods on the shelves to the boy's sense of blood loyalty with his accused father.

It is the subjectivity of the content—sense impressions, random emotions and convictions—which reveals the purpose of the syntax, which is to convey experience in the form of an intense stream-of-consciousness as recorded by the protagonist.

The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the crowded room, knew he smelled cheese, and more: from where he sat he could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils and the silver curve of fish - this, the cheese which he knew he smelled and the hermetic meat which his intestines believed he smelled coming in intermittent gusts momentary and brief between the other constant one, the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood.

Stre

am o

f co

nsci

ousn

ess

According to J. A. Cuddon’s

Dictionary of Literary Terms,

stream of consciousness is a

narrative device used in literature "to depict the multitudinous thoughts and

feelings which pass through

the mind. Another phrase for

it is “interior monologue.”

Psychologist and philosopher

William James (brother of

Henry James) coined the phrase in 1890. This is a common strategy in modernist works.

Style: Point of ViewFaulkner was a perspectivist: He tells stories from a particular point of view—or sometimes, as in the novels, from many divergent points of view, each with its own insistent emphasis. ‘‘Barn Burning’’ offers a controlled example of perspectivism. Faulkner tells his story primarily from the point of view of young Sarty, a ten-year-old boy. This requires that Faulkner gives us the raw reportage of scene and event that an illiterate ten-year-old would give us, if he could. Thus, Sarty sees the pictures on the labels of the goods in the general store but cannot understand the lettering; adults loom over him, so that he feels dwarfed by them; and he struggles with moral and intellectual categories, as when he can only see Mr. Harris as an "enemy." There are few departures from this strict perspectivism, but they are telling, as when, in the penultimate paragraph of the tale, an omniscient narrator divulges the truth about Ab’s behavior as a soldier during the Civil War. But even this is a calculated feature of Faulkner's style: the breaking-in of the omniscient narrator is another way of fracturing the continuity of the narrative, of reminding readers that there are many perspectives, including a transcendental one in which all facts are known to the author. Sharing Sarty's immediate impressions and judgments forges a strong bond between the boy and the reader.

Style: SettingThe setting of ‘‘Barn Burning’’ is in the post-Civil War South, in which a defeated and in many ways humiliated society is trying to hold its own against the Northern victor. This South has retreated into plantation life and small-town existence, and it maintains in private the social hierarchy that characterized the region in its pre-war phase. Slavery has been abolished, but a vast distance still separates the land-owning Southern aristocracy from the tenant-farmers and bonded workers who do the trench-labor required by the plantation economy. The Snopeses are itinerant sharecroppers, who move from one locale to another, paying for their habitation in this or that shack by remitting part of the crop to the landlord. This is a setting of intense vulnerability and therefore of intense resentment. “Setting" is a word which needs to be qualified in reference to ‘‘Barn Burning’’ because, as Sarty notes, he has lived in at least a dozen ramshackle buildings on at least a dozen plantations in his ten short years. In a way, then, the story's "setting" is the road, or rather the Snopes' constant removal from one place to another due to Ab's quarreling and violence. The wagon, heaped with miserable chattel, is the setting, as is Abner's egomaniacal personality and Sarty's miserable yet rebellious heart.

Grou

p Di

scus

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de SpainSartyAbner SnopesLennie SnopesFireThe soiled rugBlood

Author Introduction Langston Hughes

Few authors of the twentieth century are more significant than Langston Hughes. He is assured his status by his many contributions to literature.

• The length of his career: 1921-1967• The variety of his output: articles, poems, short

stories, dramas, novels, and history texts.• His influence on three generations of African

American writers: from the Harlem Renaissance through the Civil Rights Movement

• His concern for the “ordinary” African American: The subject of his work

• His introduction of the jazz idiom: the quality of black colloquial speech and the rhythms of jazz and the blues.

During his long career Hughes was harshly criticized by blacks and whites. Because he left no single masterwork, such as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) or Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), and because he consciously wrote in the common idiom of the people, academic interest in him grew only slowly. The importance of his influence on several generations of African American authors is, however, indisputable and widely acknowledged.

HOMEWORK

Read: Langston Hughes: “The

Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “I, too,

sing America,” and “The Weary

Blues”Post #23: Choose one to answer

What connections can be made

between race and blues music in

"The Weary Blues"?What do you think it means to have

a soul that is deep as rivers?

How does “I, too, sing America”

make you think about what it means

to be an American? How is

"America" presented in this poem,

and how does it make you feel

about America?