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Tema 53:
La novela, el cuento
y la poesía en
Estados Unidos: H.
Melville, E.A. Poe y
W. Whitman.
Topic 53:
La no
ovela, el cuento y la poesía en E
Estados Unidos:: H. Melville, E.A
A. Poe y W. Whitman.
2
Topic 53::
L novela, el cuento y la poesía en Esstados Unidos: H. Melville
La e, E.A. Poe y W. Whitman
n.
Tab
ble of conte
ents
1. Heerman Melv
lville (1819 – 1891) ____________
______________________________
___ 3
1.11. The authoor and his tiimes. _________________
________________________________
____ 3
1.22. Moby Dicck. _____________________________
________________________________
____ 5
1.2.1. The ploot. _________________________________
____________________________________
_____ 6
1.2.2. The maajor characters ______________________
____________________________________
_____ 8
1.2.3. Main thhemes. _____________________________
____________________________________
____ 12
2. Eddgar Allan Poe
P (1809-1849) ______________
______________________________
__ 15
2.11. Poe’s poettry. ____________________________
________________________________
___ 18
2.22. Poe’s Talees. _____________________________
________________________________
___ 19
2.2.1. Comic tales ______________________________ ____________________________________
____ 19
2.2.2. Tales of
o horror.________________________________________________________________
____ 19
2.2.3. Tales of
o Ratiocinatioon. _____________________
____________________________________
____ 20
3. Walt
W Whitmaan (1819-18892) ________________
______________________________
__ 21
3.11. Transcend
dentalism. ___________
_ ___________
________________________________
___ 22
3.22. The authoor. _____________________________
________________________________
___ 23
Bibliiography_____________
____________________
______________________________
__ 24
Poe’’s poems _____________
____________________
______________________________
__ 25
Th
he Raven ___________________________________
________________________________
___ 25
Too Helen ____________________________________
________________________________
___ 27
Brieff summary __________
_ ____________________
______________________________
__ 28
quarterdeck, the captain gathers the crew and discloses the true
purpose of the voyage: the destruction of MOBY-DICK, the enormous
white sperm whale that cost him his leg.
As fond of knowledge as Ahab is of power, ISHMAEL acquires stories
about MOBY-DICK to add to the already enormous amount of information he has
gathered about whales and whaling. Moby-Dick's intelligence, and his apparent
pleasure in harming people make him the most feared of his kind, but what
most terrifies Ishmael is the whale's empty, deathly whiteness.
The Pequod sails round the stormy Cape of Good Hope into the Indian
Ocean. To Ishmael the voyage seems as varied and unpredictable as life itself.
He is appalled by the brutality of whaling, and amused by its humour. He is
frightened at life's dangers, and awed by its beauties. At moments he feels very
close to the crew. AHAB, however, has cut himself off from almost all such
human feelings. Gams (visits with other whaling ships) are a friendly
tradition at sea, but AHAB uses them only to seek information about MOBY-
DICK. That information becomes more and more gloomy, as many captains have
came across Movy Dick and always have lost something.
As the Pequod sails into the Pacific, AHAB's obsession grows. He sees
the entire universe as an enemy that must be battled before it destroys him.
There is heroism in his acts, but there is also madness, and he frightens
Starbuck so much that the first mate slips into the captain's cabin
contemplating, then rejecting, the idea of murder. It's clear to everyone on the
Pequod that each day is bring them closer to Ahab's goal.
They meet the sadly misnamed Delight, which just lost five men to the
whale. That night Ahab sniffs the air, sensing the enemy is near, and in the
morning he's lifted to the tallest mast of the ship to see a round, white hump in
the ocean: Moby-Dick. The chase begins.
On the first day the great whale breaks Ahab's boat in two. On the
second day the whale's tail smash three whaleboats. As the rescued
whalers regroup on the PEQUOD they notice that AHAB's harpooner, FEDALLAH, is
missing. Yet when Starbuck pleads for him to stop the chase, Ahab answers
that he was fated to fight Moby-Dick.
The third day dawns fine and fair. Again three boats are lowered. As
Moby-Dick rises, AHAB sees FEDALLAH's body lashed to the whale. The whale's
churning tail smashes Stubb's and Flask's boats so they must return to the
Pequod, it sends one man in Ahab's boat overboard. Still Ahab moves toward
the whale. But MOBY-DICK turns away. And as the men on the Pequod watch in
horror, the whale swims mightily toward them, crashing its massive head
against the bow. The ship is ripped open, and the sea rushes in. FLASK,
STUBB, and STARBUCK shout helplessly as they are pulled into the water.
Deprived even of a captain's privilege of going down with his ship,
AHAB throws a last harpoon at Moby-Dick. In fulfillment of Fedallah's
prophecy, the line wraps round Ahab's neck and pulls him from his whaleboat
into the sea.
The sinking PEQUOD becomes the centre of a current that pulls
every board, oar, and man into the depths with Ahab. Only Ishmael, the
narrator, survives by clinging to a tomb made for (but never used by) his friend
Queequeg. For two days Ishmael floats, lost, in the ocean, until he is rescued
by the Rachel. And so he survives to tell his tale.
by the consideration that in him literary art lost one of its most brilliant, but
erratic stars" (69). In another work, Griswold further tarnished Poe's reputation
by misquoting his letters and overplaying Poe's drinking problem, which modern
scholars attribute to a low tolerance for alcohol rather than habitual abuse. The
physical and mental struggles of this life emerged in fictional form in Poe's
highly autobiographical writings. Calling Poe "the hero of all his tales," the
critic Roger Asselineau has written: "If Roderick Usher, Egaeus, Metzengerstein,
and even Dupin are all alike, if Ligeia, Morella, and Eleonora look like sisters, it
is because, whether he consciously wanted to or not, he always takes the story
of his own life as a starting point, a rather empty story on the whole since he
had mostly lived in his dreams, imprisoned by his neuroses and obsessed by the
image of his dead mother" (60). To support this assertion, Asselineau cites
Poe's own testimony: "The supposition that the book of the author is a thing
apart from the author's Self is, I think, ill-founded" (Asselineau 52).
While literary scholars have analyzed all of these aspects of Poe's work,
they have studied many more, as well. Of particular interest is Poe's fascination
with psychology. An outspoken admirer of phrenology, a pseudoscience based
on the premise that various functions are controlled by specific regions of the
brain, he tirelessly explored subjects such as self-destruction, madness, and
imagination in works such as "The Imp of the Perverse," "William Wilson,"
and "Ulalume." If the mind was Poe's favorite place, it should come as no
surprise that many of his tales are set there. Stories such as "Ligeia," "Landor's
Cottage," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "MS Found in a Bottle," and The
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym all make more sense when read as journeys
into and around the mind rather than accounts of the physical world.
Specifically, I have argued in Poe in His Right Mind that Poe had an unusually
potent right cerebral hemisphere--which many researchers believe plays an
important part in visual imagery, music, emotions, reverie, and self-destructive
urges--and tapped the resources of this psychological region to create his
extraordinarily powerful works.
Poe's literary criticism, which he produced in great volume as editor of
the Southern Literary Messenger and other publications, also has attracted
attention from scholars. Indeed, Poe is the only major American writer to excel
in poetry, fiction, and criticism. In an era when writers such as Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and John Greenleaf Whittier were
using literature largely to pursue truth or inculcate morals, Poe argued in "The
Poetic Principle" that truth is not the object of literature and condemned what
he called "the heresy of The Didactic." Indeed, a close look at Poe's work
reveals almost no extended attention to contemporary or even universal social
issues, such as community, democracy, slavery, and national identity. Instead,
he praised the "poem per se--the poem which is a poem and nothing more--this
poem written solely for the poem's sake." "Beauty," he wrote in "The
Philosophy of Composition," "is the sole legitimate province of the poem." In his
regard for beauty, "effect," and form, Poe anticipated the critical principles of
many later writers.
The climax of the poem is when the “I” asks the bird if there is life in afterlife,
where he can be together again with Leonore, but the answer of the Raven is
again “nevermore”.
3.1. Transcendentalism.
The Transcendentalist movement was a reaction against 18th C
rationalism and a manifestation of the general humanitarian trend of 19th C
thought. The movement was based on a fundamental belief in the unity
of the world and God. The soul of each individual was thought to be identical
with the world (a microcosm of the world itself). The doctrine of self-reliance
and individualism developed through the belief in the identification of the
individual soul with God.
TRANSCENDENTALISM was intimately connected with CONCORD, a
small New England village 32 kilometers west of Boston. CONCORD was
the first inland settlement of the original Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Surrounded by forest, it was and remains a peaceful town close enough to
Boston's lectures, bookstores, and colleges to be intensely cultivated, but far
enough away to be serene. CONCORD was the site of the first battle of the
American Revolution, and Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem commemorating the
battle, Concord Hymn, has one of the most famous opening stanzas in
American literature.
CONCORD was the first rural artist's colony, and the first place to
offer a spiritual and cultural alternative to American materialism. It
was a place of high-minded conversation and simple living. EMERSON, who
moved to CONCORD in 1834, and THOREAU are most closely associated with the
town, but the locale also attracted the novelist NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, the
feminist writer MARGARET FULLER, the educator BRONSON ALCOTT, and the poet
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. The TRANSCENDENTAL CLUB was loosely organized in
1836.
The Transcendentalists published a quarterly magazine, The Dial, which
lasted four years and was first edited by Margaret Fuller and later by Emerson.
Reform efforts engaged them as well as literature. A number of
Transcendentalists were abolitionists, and some were involved in
experimental utopian communities such as nearby Brook Farm (described
in Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance) and Fruitlands.
Bib
bliograp
phy
Melville
e: www.monkeyynotes.com; ww
ww.classicnotes..com
Poe: http://www.uncpp.edu/home/can
nada/work/allam
m/17841865/lit//poe.htm
CEDE; Editorial MAD
Poe’s poems
The Raven
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore--
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"'Tis some visiter," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door--
Only this and nothing more."
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore?"
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore!"--
Merely this and nothing more.
Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore.
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he,
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door--
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door--
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.
But the Raven, sitting lonely on that placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if its soul in that one word he did outpour
Nothing farther then he uttered; not a feather then he fluttered--
Till I scarcely more than muttered: "Other friends have flown before--
On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before."
Then the bird said "Nevermore."
But the Raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore--
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking "Nevermore."
Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.
"Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee--by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite--respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."
To Helen
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
Brief summary: La novela, el cuento y la poesía en Estados Unidos: H. Melville, E.A. Poe y W. Whitman.
- HERMAN MELVILLE was born into a well-off religious New York family, but his comfortable childhood ended too soon.
- The author:
♦ The Melvilles sank into genteel poverty, dependent on money doled out by richer relatives. These pressures drove Melville to the sea.
♦ As he recounted his adventures for his family, however, they urged him to write the tales down. In this way, he discovered his calling.
♦ Melville's account of his time in the Marquesas, the novel TYPEE, was published in the spring of 1846 The book was a great popular success.
Today, Melville probably would have won a place on best-seller lists and an article in People magazine as the man who lived with the cannibals.
♦ Melville continued to draw on his sea adventures in the novels OMOO (1847), REDBURN (1849), and WHITE-JACKET (1850). Another novel, MARDI,
published in 1849, was an unsuccessful attempt to add fantasy and philosophy to sea stories.
♦ However, MOBY-DICK was a different sea novel. When he began the book, he intended to call it THE WHALE and promised his publishers that it
would be another popular sea adventure.
___ But midway through his writing something changed. Melville had moved Massachusetts and met NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
___ In HAWTHORNE, Melville found a kindred spirit, a man who had fulfilled himself writing the kind of dark, complex books that he wanted.
___ Soon after he met Hawthorne, Melville began furiously to rewrite The Whale.
- MOBY DICK is the story of the voyage of the whaling ship PEQUOD.
♦ The 1 publication of MOBY DICK was in 1851. It was published in 3 volumes & was censored for some of its political & moral content.
st
- EDGAR ALLAN POE is one of the world's most famous and controversial writers:
- Attittudes towards POE have been ambivalent in literary circles. French writers, particularly CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, and his British & American
admirers (including G. B. SHAW) have hailed POE as a superior genius. Somewhat less favorable reactions have come from the American novelist
HENRY JAMES & the Briton ALDOUS HUXLEY.
th th
- POE is widely known for his mastery of the Gothic genre. Made popular in the 18 C & early 19 C by British writers such as HORACE WALPOLE and
MARY SHELLEY, Gothic literature has a number of conventions, including evocations of horror, suggestions of the supernatural, and dark, exotic
locales such as castles and crumbling mansions. Poe's short stories The Fall of the House of Usher and Ligeia are both classic examples of the genre.
- Much of Poe's popularity has grown out of a fascination with his peculiar, tortured life.
♦ Abandoned by his father while he was still an infant, he lost his mother to tuberculosis before he was 3 years old.
♦ Partially because of his own petulance, he frequently fought with his foster father, JOHN ALLAN, who withdrew Poe from the University of Virginia
before he had completed a year there.
♦ In his mid-20s, he married his 13-year-old cousin VIRGINIA CLEMM. In the 1840s, he suffered through Virginia's tuberculosis, who died in 1847.
♦ Always poor, he continually ruined opportunities for success by embarrassing himself and antagonizing important figures.
♦ Several incidents, including a suicide attempt, suggest that Poe suffered from some kind of mental illness.
♦ The physical and mental struggles of this life emerged in fictional form in Poe's highly autobiographical writings.
♦ AL AARAAF (1829) includes several shorter poems apart from the title one. Al Aaraaf is the Moslem term for limbo, a place in the future for
those neither wholly good nor wholly evil. It is the spiritual heaven of the poet, where the ideal platonic beauty is kept directly instead of
being adulterated on earth
♦ POEMS (1931) is the 3 volume published by Poe which contains some of the best lyrics of the writer. To Helen, probably the most famous poem in
rd
this volume, celebrates an idealized woman as the incarnation of the pure, unattainable, romanticized beauty of antiquity. It is the abstract
thirst of the youthful male for the perfect woman
♦ THE RAVEN AND OTHER POEMS (1845) is a collection of verse published in periodicals and revisions of many early pieces. THE RAVEN is the best
known of Poe’s verse. The underlying theme is once more the death of a beautiful woman. The name of the woman is Leonore. At midnight, the “I”
of the poem is reading old books in a melancholy mood. He is full of sorrow for his lost Leonore. He hears a tapping at the chamber door and thinks
to himself that only a visitor is at the door. He opens the door and sees nothing. He then opens a window and comes in a raven that says nothing, but
perches on a bust of Pallas (In the greek mythology, he was the God of wisdom) above the door. He asks many questions to the raven, but all it says
is “nevermore” (=never again). The climax of the poem is when the “I” asks the bird if there is life in afterlife, where he can be together again with
Leonore, but the answer of the Raven is again “nevermore”.
- Although Poe wished to be thought of as a poet, his SHORT STORIES brought him a far greater fame. They’re usually divided in 3 main groups:
♦ Comic tales are a grotesque satire (with a macabre sense of humor) or American society and a painful and terrible portrait of human society.
♦ Tales of terror are usually told by a psychopathological narrator. His stories are concerned no so much about events as with the minds
which perceive them. We can subdivided his horror tales in:
___ Murder Stories: THE CAST OF THE MAONTILLADO is one of Poe’s most realistic horror tale of murder.
___ Stories of love and marriage: Among his tales of love and marriage, his most famous one is LIGERIA.
___ Stories of death: THE FALL OF THE HOUSES OF USHER has been considered his finest story.
♦ Edgar Allan Poe in his tales of ratiocination created the detective story, which is going to be so popular up to the present time. Poe
created in fact the first detective of renown in literature: Augustine Dupin, who appears in three stories.
___ THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE have inspired many imitators, most notably SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, creator of Sherlock Holmes.
- WALT WHITMAN:
- The Romantic movement, which originated in Germany but quickly spread to England, France, and reached America around the year 1820.
♦ A fresh new vision electrified artistic & intellectual circles. Yet there was an important difference: Romanticism in America coincided with the
period of national expansion and the discovery of a distinctive American voice.
♦ The development of the self became a major theme: self-awareness a primary method.
♦ The Romantic spirit seemed particularly suited to American democracy: It stressed individualism, affirmed the value of the common
person, and looked to the inspired imagination for its aesthetic and ethical values.
♦ TRANSCENDENTALIST MOVEMENT was based on a fundamental belief in the unity of the world and God. The soul of each individual was thought
to be identical w/the world. The doctrine of self-reliance & individualism developed through the belief in the identification of the individual soul w/God.
st
___ TRANSCENDENTALISM was connected w/CONCORD, a small N. England village near Boston & the site of the 1 American Revolution battle.
st st
___ CONCORD was the 1 rural artist's colony, and the 1 place to offer a spiritual and cultural alternative to American materialism.
___ It was a place of high-minded conversation & simple living. Many writers lived there, such as NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE …
♦ TRASCENDENTALISTS insisted on individual differences (on the unique viewpoint of the individual.) American Transcendental Romantics
pushed radical individualism to the extreme. American writers often saw themselves as lonely explorers outside society and convention.
___ The American hero (Herman Melville's Captain AHAB or Edgar Allan Poe's ARTHUR GORDON PYM) typically faced risk, or even certain
destruction, in the pursuit of metaphysical self-discovery.
- The author:
♦ WALT WHITMAN was a part-time carpenter & man of the people, whose brilliant, innovative work expressed the country's democratic spirit.
♦ Whitman was largely self-taught, as he left school at the age of 11 to go to work, missing the sort of traditional education that made most
American authors respectful imitators of the English.
♦ More than any other writer, WHITMAN invented the myth of democratic America
♦ His LEAVES OF GRASS (1855), which he rewrote and revised throughout his life, contains SONG OF MYSELF, the most stunningly original poem
ever written by an American.
___ The poem's innovative, unrhymed, free-verse form, open celebration of sexuality, vibrant democratic sensibility, and extreme Romantic assertion
that the poet's self was one with the poem, the universe, and the reader permanently altered the course of American poetry.