Short Story and Poetry Independent Projects

American Literature
Spragins
March 2020

Short Story and Poetry Independent Projects: American Modernism

Choose an artist or writer from the late 19th or early 20th centuries and write a research paper on how their art relates to “American Modernism”.

Your task is to write an analytical essay in which you generate a thesis statement about a common theme you find in the short stories, poems, or other artifacts by a particular artist from the Modern Era. The purpose of your research is to find information which will help you interpret the poems, stories or other artifacts which you have chosen to analyze. You are not writing a report on the artist's biography or a simple overview of the artist's work. Instead, use your research to help you devise a great thesis statement which explains the artist's purpose in the works you have selected. Be on the look out for ways that your writer's or artists' ideas have been influenced by Darwin, Nietzsche, Marx and Freud. (See The Zeitgeist of Modernism)

The paper should be about five pages in length. You need to use at least three sources. In addition to the internet links suggested below, please check out the Thomson Gale Literature Resources Center, JSTOR, or Bloom's Literary Reference Online which you can link to on the Gilman On-line Database Page.

Final Draft due Thursday, March 13th at 3:30 pm

Here are your choices:

Short Stories, Novels, Poetry and Plays:

Ambrose Bierce: Recommended Texts: An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge; Chickamauga .
Elizabeth Bishop Poetry Foundation, Recommended Poems: "One Art", "The Armadillo"; "The Fish"; "At the Fishhouses"; "The Monument"; "In the Waiting Room"
Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Foundation, Recommended Poems: "We Real Cool", "The Boy Died in My Alley"; "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon" (1960); "The Last Quatrain Of The Ballad Of Emmett Till" (1960); Al Filreis Site: The Harlem Renaissance & Its Legacy
Willa Cather Recommended: "Paul's Case: A Study in Temperament" (1905); "Neighbour Rosicky" (1928) Willa Cather Archive (University of Nebraska)
Charles W. Chesnutt Recommended Stories: "The Passing of Grandison" (1898); "The Goophered Grapevine" (1887) (See also Documents of the South (UNC))
Kate Chopin Recommended: "At the 'Cadian Ball" and "The Storm" (1894); "The Story of an Hour" (1894); "Désirée's Baby" (1892); and The Awakening (1898)
Stephen Crane, Recommended: "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky "(1898), "The Blue Hotel" (1898), "The Open Boat" (1894)
Countee Cullen Poetry Foundation, Recommended Poems: "Incident"; "For A Lady I Know"; "Harlem Wine"; "Yet Do I Marvel"; "Heritage"; "Saturday's Child" from One Way to Heaven (1932) and other Poems from Poetry and Prose of the Harlem Renaissance (Jill Deisman) Al Filreis Site: The Harlem Renaissance & Its Legacy
Eugene O'Neill, The Emperor Jones (1920)
T.S. Eliot Poetry Foundation, (Modern American Poetry) (What the Thunder Said) (Am Lit Archive) Recommended: "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917) (Annotation) (Criticism) (See "To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell) (imagism briefly defined) "The Wasteland" (1922) (annotated) (criticism)
William Faulkner Recommended Stories: “Was”, "The Old People" and "The Bear" from Go Down, Moses (1940); "Barn Burning" (1938), "Dry September" (1931); "A Rose for Emily" (1930)
F. Scott Fitzgerald Recommended: “Babylon Revisited” (1931); “Winter Dreams” (1922); “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” (1920) and other Tales of the Jazz Age
Robert Frost Poetry Foundation , poems from North of Boston (1914) Recommended Poems: "After Apple Picking", "Design", "Mowing", "The Road Not Taken", "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening", "The Wood Pile", "Mending Wall"; "The Road Not Taken" read by Frost (Poets.org)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman Recommended: "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892)
Ernest Hemingway Spragins Intro., Recommended: Short Stories from The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Nick Adams Stories: “Ten Indians,”; “A Day’s Wait”; “Three Shots”; “Indian Camp”; “Night Before Landing”; “Now I Lay Me”; “In Another Country”; “Big Two-Hearted River"; “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber”; “Hills Like White Elephants”; “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”; “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”; “The Killers” (1920’s)
Langston Hughes Poetry Foundation, Poems from Poetry and Prose of the Harlem Renaissance (Jill Deisman) Recommended Poems: "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"; "I, Too"; "America"; "The Weary Blues"; "Jazzonia"; "Negro"; Elevator Boy"; "Red Silk Stockings"; The Jazz Age: Music; Jazz Age Lit/Culture; Jazz Poetry: A Genre Emerges--definition and history of jazz poetry; A Brief Guide to Jazz Poetry; Poetic Form: Blues Poem; Scrapple from the Apple: Jazz Poetry; Hughes Reading his Poems; Langston Hughes on jazz, race and writing (1926) from Al Filreis Site: The Harlem Renaissance & Its Legacy
Zora Neale Hurston Recommended: "Drenched in Light", "Harlem Slanguage", "Sweat", "Black Death"; "Spunk"; "The Gilded Six-Bits" see also Mules and Men (UVA Hypertext) Al Filreis Site: The Harlem Renaissance & Its Legacy
Henry James Recommended: The Turn of the Screw (1898) (Criticism: The Turn of the Screw: A History of Its Critical Interpretations 1898-1979 )
Sarah Orne Jewett Recommended: "A White Heron" and "The Foreigner" (1886)
Claude McKay Poetry Foundation Recommended Poems: "If We Must Die" (1919); "The Tropics of New York"and "The Harlem Dancer" (1922); “White Houses” (1925); Al Filreis Site: The Harlem Renaissance & Its Legacy
Gertrude Stein Poetry Foundation , Al Filreis' Page (UPenn) Recommended Poems: "If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Pablo Picasso" (1924) "Susie Asado" (1932) Or Tender Buttons (1914) see also (Stein reading her "If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Pablo Picasso)")
Wallace Stevens Poetry Foundation , Recommended Poems: "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", "The Snow Man", "Anecdote of the Jar"; "Disillusionment of Ten O'clock"; "The Emperor of Ice Cream" (imagism briefly defined); Al Filreis's Site (UPenn); The "Dominion Wide Mouth" Jar said to be (by Roy Harvey Pearce) the "source" for the "Jar in Tennessee"
Sophie Treadwell, Machinal (1929)
Jean Toomer Recommended: Poems from Poetry and Prose of the Harlem Renaissance (Jill Deisman); "Song of the Sun"; excerpts from Cane (1923) See also Al Filreis Site: The Harlem Renaissance & Its Legacy
Edith Wharton Recommended: Ethan Frome (1911) Short Stories
William Carlos Williams ("No Ideas but in Things"), Poetry Foundation , Recommended Poems: "The Red Wheelbarrow", "This Is Just To Say", "The Great Figure", "Danse Russe", "To Elsie" (read by Williams (poetry.org)); Al Filreis' Page (UPenn)
Anzia Yezierska Recommended: "The Lost Beautifulness" and "How I Found America" from Hungry Hearts (1920) or Breadgivers (1925)

Modern American Art and Architecture:

The Ash Can School, American Naturalism and American Impressionism: Artcyclopedia, The Industrial Revolution (DeYoung Museum); Metropolitan Museum of Art Recommended Paintings: Bellows: Forty-two Kids, Stag at Sharkey's, Excavation at Night; George Bellows

Ash Can School: What Was It?--short introduction.

Ethnic Image in Ashcan School Paintings--images/commentary.

Mary Cassatt Paintings: Mary Cassatt: The Modern Woman; Mary Cassatt--many images; see Boating Party

Mary Cassatt's Lost Mural & Other Exhibits at the 1893 World's Exposition--see my web page.

Chapter One. The "New Woman" Revised--painting and gender.

Grit and Revolution: The Ashcan School.

Hassam Paintings: Childe Hassam--cityscape/commentary; Rainy Late Afternoon, Union Square-painting; Broadway and 42nd Street; Hassam Biography and Images--many images.

Sloan Paintings: South Beach Bathers; Sun and Wind on the Roof; The City from Greenwich Village; McSorley's Bar

Everett Shinn Painting: Dancer in White before Footlights.

George Bellows Paintings: George Bellows' Both Members of this Club; eight images here; Bellow's Love of Winter; links to 2 pages of Bellows' images

The Armory Show Exhibition of Modern Art (1913) (at UVA) and its impact on Joseph Stella, Georgia O'Keefe or Arthur Dove (Artcyclopedia) (Modern Armory Show)
Louis Sullivan's Breakthrough to Modern Architecture: 'Form=Function' Contrast with World's Colombian Exhibition (1893) Great Buildings Online, Archinfom Recommended Buildings: Buffalo Guaranty (1894), Carson-Pirie-Scott Building (1898)
Frank Lloyd Wright's Organic Modernism Digital Archive of American Architecture, Ken Burns Film (PBS), Great Buildings Online, Archinform Recommended Buildings: Robie House (1909), Falling Waters (1936), Guggenheim (1956) .

Modern Music:

Charles Ives (Grove Music): Avant-Garde Transcendentalism: The Charles Ives Society; Recommended Works: 13 Days When Music Changed Forever: January 10, 1931: The Debut of Charles Ives’s Three Places in New England; (See Naxos Music Library online at Gilman); Holiday Symphony 2: Decoration Day, The Fourth of July; The Unanswered Question
The Birth of American Jazz: (Grove Music)

Jazz Age Literature/Culture, Part I and Jazz Age, Part II and Jazz Age Writers. Langston Hughes and other Harlem Renaissance writers, artists, musicians, and notables; F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and other modernist writers; Picasso, Dali, de Lempicka, Kandinsky, and other artists; resources on Prohibition, flappers, racial violence, sports, automobiles, aviators, art deco, movie stars, the Crash of '29, the scandals/trials of the decade, the new technologies; World War I Poetry.

Jazz Poetry: 1920s-30s and Jazz/Blues: 1920s-30s and Jazz Film: 1920s-present.

Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation? 1921 article.

Flapper Jane. 1920s article.

A Flapper's Appeal to Parents. 1920s article.

When the Negro Was in Vogue. Selections from Langston Hughes and Thurman Wallace
Ric Burns, New York: A Documentary Episode 5 Cosmopolis.

Jazz: America's Classical Music (1992) Grover Sales NY, NY Da Capo Press

Chapter 2 "The Nature of Jazz" (pp. 9-47)
Chapter 3 "The Growth of Jazz" (pp. 48-100)

Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns (PBS Webpage)
The Red Hot Jazz Archive: A History of Jazz Before 1920
Jazz Profiles (NPR)

George and Ira Gershwin

Journalism/ Sociology/ Science:

J ane Addams (nobel.org) "The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements" (1892), excerpts from Twenty Years at Hull House (1910)
McClure's Magazine (1893–1929) was an American illustrated monthly periodical credited with having started the tradition of muckraking journalism. Examples of its work include Ida Tarbell's series in 1902 exposing the monopoly abuses of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company, and Ray Stannard Baker's earlier look at the United States Steel Corporation which focused the public eye on the conduct of corporations:What the U.S. Steel Corporation Really Is and How It Works by Ray Stannard Baker,McClure's Magazine, November 1901; The Reign of Lawlessness by Ray Stannard Baker, McClure's Magazine, May 1904
Lincoln Steffens, excerpts from The Shame of the Cities (1904): reports on the workings of corrupt political machines in several major U.S. cities: the first of the muckraking exposes. See "Tweed Days in St. Louis" (1902)
Upton Sinclair, from The Jungle (1906) (excerpt); see "USDA Government Inspected", Chapter Nine of After the Fact
Thomas Alva Edison, American Inventor 1847-1931; The "Brockton Operation"; Thomas Edison on In Our Time at the BBC.; "Edison's Miracle of Light" PBS - American Experience. January 2015; "Edison: Inventing the Century" Booknotes interview with Neil Baldwin on March 19, 1995; "January 4, 1903: Edison Fries an Elephant to Prove His Point" – Wired article about Edison's "macabre form of a series of animal electrocutions using AC."

More Resources:

Social Darwinism and American Laissez-faire Capitalism--Herbert Spenser's "social darwinism" and the rise of the "robber baron."
The Rise of Big Business--were they "robber barons" or "captains of industry"?
The Robber Barons--short introduction to Gould and Fisk. Related link: The Panic of 1873--about Cooke.
The Gilded Age--short introduction to "old rich" and "new rich."
Andrew Carnegie, Richest Man in the World--good biography.
Wealth; or Andrew Carnegie's The Gospel of Wealth--selection.
John D. and Standard Oil--Rockefeller monopoly.
The Gospel of Wealth: Robber Barons and the Rise of Monopoly Capitalism--a different view of the "gospel of wealth."
Why was America's philosophy "right" for economic development?.
The Idle Rich--find out how they lived.
The Rise of McClure's--Chapter II of a book-length study of the most famous muck-racking magazine of the Progressive Era.
People & Events: Ida Tarbell, 1857-1944--America's first great woman journalist and a famous muckraker.
Nellie Bly--another muckraker
1906: Rumble over 'The Jungle'--Sinclair's famous muckraking novel.