AMERICAN REALISM: HUCKLEBERRY FINN and his anti-slavery ideas.

Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name of MARK TWAIN, grew up in the Mississippi River frontier town of Hannibal, Missouri and this influenced him a lot in his way of thinking and his literary production.

ERNEST HEMINGHWAY´S famous statement that all of American Literature comes from one great book, Twain´s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, indicates this author´s towering place in the tradition.

As we move to the middle of the 19th-century American writers begin to forget about Romanticism because their historical background suggested them different things. Industrialization played an important role in this change and we can say that by 1865 we have the beginning of the Realist movement. There was a need for a literature that reflected their own lives at that time. Their real lives because there was a great social shift. That´s why we have writers that showed us real characters who often spoke in a way that reflected their own region, class, gender and age.

The most well known example is HUCK.  Twain's masterpiece, which appeared in 1884, is set in the Mississippi River village of St. Petersburg. It has inspired countless literary interpretations. Clearly, the novel is a story of death, rebirth, and initiation.

In "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," Mark Twain uses satire to mock many different aspects of the modern world. Throughout his trip down the Mississippi, and even prior to leaving St. Petersburg, Huck encounters a variety of people and situations that are designed to scoff at the American people.  The book was writeen shortly afterwards the Civil War, in which slavery was one of the key issues. Twain´s father had slaves throughout his childhood but Mark himself didn´t believe that slavery was right. In the book, Twain mocks slavery and makes a strong statement about the way people treated slaves. He critisizes for example how hypocritical a "good Christian woman" can be when it comes to owning slaves as property ( Miss Watson), etc. In the presentations you have below you can learn some characteristics of AMERICAN REALISM and the writer MARK TWAIN. Read them and take the main ideas to discuss in class. https://www.humbleisd.net/site/handlers/filedownload.ashx?moduleinstanceid=74127&dataid=163307&FileName=American-Regionalism-Realism-and-Naturalism-Revised.ppt

  In class we will be reading several extracts so that you can see some style aspects, and some of the ideas you have learnt in these days. Here you have  an animation with the summary of the book. 





SLAVERY is a key issue in American History. Let´s watch this video to understand why? and understand what led to the Civil War.  After watching it make a summary with the most important ideas. Try to get information about: life in the South, reasons to have slaves, runaway slaves and destinations ( names of poeple that contributed to abolitionism), the underground railroad.

OLIVER TWIST and the Victorian England.

Oliver Twist, subtitled The Parish Boy's Progress, is the second novel by English author Charles Dickens, published  in 1838. The story is about an orphan, Oliver Twist, who endures a miserable existence in a workhouse and then is placed with an undertaker. He escapes and travels to London where he meets the Artful Dodger, leader of a gang of juvenile pickpockets. Naïvely unaware of their unlawful activities, Oliver is led to the lair of their elderly criminal trainer, Fagin.

It is a very good example of a social novel because it calls the public´s attention to different problems people began to be aware of in those times: child labour, recruitment of children as criminals, the difference between the rich and the poor, women´s role in society and so on.



Oliver Twist has been the subject of numerous films and television adaptations. A recent example is the film by Roman Polansky in 2005. Watch the trailer and draw your own conclusions.




Excerpt from Chapter 1. Being born in a workhouse!



 Analyse Victorian Stereotypes about the poor after reading and listening to this extract. What does this extract talk about and what can we learn about the period? Connect it with what we have read in chapter 2.

 What is a workhouse is how is this important for Oliver´s personality and his further development?

Below you have some quotations from the novel. These quotes make reference to some topics presented in class,  read them and try to explain them.

CHAPTER 1. THE WORKHOUSE.
"...and what an excellent example of the power of dress young Oliver Twist was. Wrapped in the blanket which had hitherto formed his only covering, he might have been the child of a nobleman or a beggar; - it would have been hard for the haughtiest stranger to have fixed his station in society. But now he was enveloped in the old robes, that had grown yellow in the same service; he was badged and ticketed, and fell into his place at once - a parish child - the orphan of a workhouse - the humble, half-starved drudge - to be cuffed and buffeted through the world, depised by all, and pitied by none"

CHAPTER 2. THE BOARD.
"... so the established the rule that all poor people should have the alternative of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it. With this view, they contracted with the waterworks to lay on an unlimited supply of water, and with a corn-factor to supply periodically small quantities of oatmeal, and issued three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week and half a roll on Sundays. They made a great many other wise and humane regulations... kindly undertook to divorce poor married people... instead of  compelling a man to support his family, as they had theretofore done, took his family away from him, and made him a bachelor! There is no saying how many appliants for relief, undr these last two heads, might have started up in all classes of society, if it had not been coupled with the workhouse; but the board were long-headed men and had provided for this difficulty. The relief was inseparable from the workhouse and the gruel, and that frightened people"

3. VICTORIAN LONDON AND LIFE IN THE CITIES.
" The houses on either side were high and large, but very old; and tenanted by people of the poorest class.... A great many of the tenements... which had become inseure from age and decay, were prevented from falling into the street by huge beams of wood which were reared against the tottering walls, and firmly planted in the road; but even these crazy dens seemed to have been selected as the nightly haunts of some houseless wretches, for many of the rough boards which supplied the place of door and window, were wrenched from their positions to afford an apertude wide enough for the passage of a human body. The kennel was stagnant and filthy; the very rats that here and there lay putrefying in its rottenness, were hideous with famine"

Do you want to know more about Charles Dickens and the Victorian period?
Let´s do this webquest!!!
http://www.michellehenry.fr/webquests/DICKENS/dickenswq.htm

STOP ALL THE CLOCKS...

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky hte message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My Noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

 Poem written  by W. H. AUDEN.  One of the leading literary figures of the 20th century. He is known for writing poetry that says something truthful about life.  He was a leading voice of a new generation, with a remarkable intellect who could mimick the style of Dickinson, Yeats and others.
He was raised in England and he was influenced by mythology, folklore and an Anglican perspective.  Most of his poetry deals with moral issues, and he was inspired by Marx and Freud in his youth. His poetry has an intense and dramatic tone and established his reputation as a left-wing political poet. He became uncomfortable in this role and later in the 30s he moved to the US and became an American citizen. In 1948 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Anxiety.
 His late poems explored religious and ethical themes in a less dramatic manner.  Apart from poetry, he also wrote essays, and reviews on political, literary, psychological subjects. After his death some of his poems, like this one we are reading now  became widely known through films and the media.


After reading the poem try to answer the following questions:
1. What is the poem about?
2. Could you think of a possible title?
3. Try to label the rhyme scheme
4. In the poem there are several words related to different semantic fields. For example sadness and  sounds. Try to find them.
5. Do you think the poem could be an example of an elegy? why?
6. What are the main poetic devices we can find in the poem? Examples.

The dangers of a single story

"Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories are being used to dispossess and to malign  but stories can also be used to enpower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of people but stories can also repair that broken dignity.When we reject the single story. When we realize that there´s never a single story about any place, we´ll regain a kind of paradise".

Our lives are made of overlapping stories that sometimes are ignored or misunderstood. Sometimes we carry a one-dimensional view of reality and we have a biased vision of the world. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells aus a wonderful speech about the dangers of all this. About the dangers of denying ourselves the vast culture that sorrounds us, the different points of history, literature and so on.


 This is a wonderful speech where she narrates for example how as a child she grew up reading American and British literature and could not connect it  with the elements of her own stories, of the stories she heard around her. In a funny way she explains how the characters of her childhood were blue-eyed and white. Little by little her perception changed and she established contact with African writers and began writing about things she had personal connection with. She identified herself as African, something she was not conscious of  when she was a child.


 Listen to the talk, take notes and focus on the main ideas she presents.




1. Identify some stereotypes about Africa. What´s the problem with stereotypes?
2. What do the following verbs in the speech mean: to patronize, to pity, to assume?
3. What was Adichie´s single story about books when she was a child? and How did it change?
4. What was her university room mate´s single story about Africa?
5. What´s your single story about Africa? 
6. What are the consequences of a single story? How can we reject it, according to the writer?