American Literature

University of Craiova

Faculty of Letters

Specialization: Romanian/ English

Distance Education

American Literature

Course: II^th year/ semester II

Reader: Felicia Burdescu

(Ph. D)

I. Objectives:

- The students will study the most important masters of American literature as a complementizer to the core course of British literature.

- Literary works are introduced chronologically from the colonial period, the post- colonial period up to the 20^th century.

- The most important ideas and concepts from the fictional works will be introduced through the Hermeneutic approach.

II. Themes:

The Beginnings

When the English arrived in the New World, they encountered a continent where more than seven hundred Indian tribes lived; they had a large variety of languages, religions, social costumes and governments. Each tribe had its own folklore and mythology, which were passed on orally to each new generation.

It is important to stress the orally of their culture, and the fact that for them the world held great value, both magical and bearing great responsibility. That is why silence is so expressive in their tradition; silence measures the individual's sensibility to language and his attitude towards the world.

N. Scott Momaday concluded his study on the native voice of the United States that "at the heart of the American Indian oral tradition is a deep and unconditional belief in the efficiency of language. Words are intrinsically powerful. They are magical. By means of words one can bring about physical change in the universe.

In the Indian world a word is spoken not against, but within silence. Silence is a part of the discourse, preparing the audience for something that is to came, or communicating a state of mind that cannot be put into words. The duality word and silence is then fundamental in the understanding of the oral culture of the Native Indians. The Navajo's prayer, for example, is both prayer and poetry. For them this prayer holds the importance as Scriptures for the Christians, and they focus both on the religious thought and the aesthetic perception of the beauty of the world.

When the English colonists arrived in 1607, a beautiful culture was flourishing on the continent, that of the native tribes. Under the leadership of Captain John Smith, the colony of Jamestown throve; though for a while the English and the Indians lived together peacefully and provided each other with needed help and goods, soon these harmonious relationships ended in conflict. Unlike the settlers of Jamestown, the pilgrims that arrived later in 1620 were bound together by their faith: Puritanism. Puritanism wanted to purify the Church of England and was organized around three beliefs: they felt that the Bible was the sole source of God's law; they also felt that people were basically sinful; finally, they felt that God decides in advance who will be "saved" and who will not.

In 1621 pilgrims and Indians celebrate the first Thanksgiving Day, and three years later John Smith records the history of Jamestown colony in The General History of Virginia. Written between 1630 and 1650, William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation provides the reader with two elements that were to become so typical of the New World writing: one was his conviction that America had been chosen as the place for a very special experiment in man's spiritual history, and the other was his increasing fear that evil in man can ruin that experiment. The chronicle mixes the heroic with the melancholic, renders the feelings of the Mayflower pilgrims who established themselves at Plymouth.

This early period in the history of American literature is dominated by the religious writings; sermons played a threefold role: they offered new arguments in ongoing theological debates, they were a part of the political process of the colonies ("Election Day Sermons"), and they played a crucial role in attempts to frighten the congregation back into religious life ("jeremiads"). Apart from these rhetorical discourses, a sense of what life in the 17^th century might have been is giving by diaries and again, chronicles, no matter how biased they may be.

In 1640 appeared the first book printed in the colonies: The Massachusetts Bay Psalm Book, only four years after the founding of Harvard University: the Puritans may not have been great literature lovers, but they certainly appreciated knowledge and education and, therefore, it is important to underline the fact that between 1693 and 1764 a number of prestigious colleges were founded: Yale, Brown, Columbia, Princeton, Pennsylvania, and Dartmouth.

The 17^th century cannot be mentioned in connection with the novel due to the same opposition of the Puritans to lay writings because of ideological reason: the kind of literature might have diverted people's attention from hard work and the Bible. There are at least two poets who deserve more credit than expected for such an early period of American literature: Anne Bradstreet (1612- 1672) and Edward Taylor (1645?- 1729).

In 1650 Anne Bradstreet published her first volume of poetry. Her father and her husband were both governors of the Bay Colony, founded by the second wave of colonists led by John Winthrop on his flagship Arbella.

Awareness of her role as a poet made her critical to her own verses, and after the publication of The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America she began to revise her work, discontented with the awkward rhymed couplets of the somewhat laboured quarternions. In Contemplations, along the thirty- three stanzas, the reader is impressed by the unifying patterns of imagery, including "seasonal metaphors, the diurnal cycle, and mutually reinforcing biblical and classical allusions"- William Scheick.

The poem begins with a contemplation of the Book of Nature, a splendid description of an autumnal landscape. The turning point in the poem is stanza 10 where Bradstreet reverts to Bible history, and to God's artistry in nature, which humbles the mere human efforts to create a thing of beauty. And again stanza 21 bring her musing back to earth, but this time on a horizontal plane, not the vertical one of the trees; the river flowing away seems an emblem of time, collecting the little streams of each man's life into a greater flow. Her initial daring of "looking up" at the vertical trees to catch a glimpse of the sun (God) is now leveled to humbleness by that short projection into the biblical history.

As for Edward Taylor, though he did not publish any poems in his lifetime, he is considered the most accomplished author of his century. The discovery of his manuscripts in the Yale library in 1937 changed all the previous judgments in the Puritan literary scene. Just like Anne Bradford, he made use of emblems in verse. In Meditation 1.8 the poet connects macrocosm and microcosm through a series of parallel emblems: "the picture of the poet looking into a starry sky at night, which becomes the picture of a downed birdlike soul in a cage-like body , which becomes the picture of a starving creature unable to reach the crumb- like stars at the 'bottom' of the barrel-like heavens, which becomes the picture of a potential saint being nourished by a overflow from God's bowels in the inverted crystal (that is, of Christ) meal bowl (and bowel) of the starry heavens. And in Meditation 2.3 Taylor uses his own face as an emblem; it is described in detail as if it were a natural terrain characterized by topography, climate, flora, and fauna"- William Scheick.

From the point of view of literary history, his poems did not influence the development of American literature, but these sermons made a difference for the congregation of the time.

The beginning of the 18^th century is marked by the publication of Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi America, a religious history of New England. The first half of the century begins and ends with personalities that were both disturbing and elusive: Cotton Mather- Puritan bigot and hunter of witches, and Benjamin Franklin- Enlightenment wise man and friend of mankind. The 17^th century ended with the witchcraft trials in Salem (1692) and Mather lived in a such a troubled epoch, being torn between two antonymic directions: the old world of his forefathers, with their inflexible view of the World as written in the Bible and institutionalized in Church, and the new world he witnesses, with the penetration from abroad of the new rationalistic philosophies associated with the Enlightenment, not to mention the royal decree which established that the New England territory belonged to the king, and therefore the Puritans were denied the right to elect their own governors and be independent.

Magnalia Christi America (The Great Achievements of Christ in America, 1702) was a collection of various stories, narratives, and testimonies intended to prove America's special place in God's design. In 1700 he wrote: "It is no Little Blessing of God, that we are part of the English Nation. Our Dependence on and Relation to, that brave Nation, that man deserves not the name of an English man, who despises it" 10110o143k .

On the history scale, Mather was a step forward from the first Puritan settlers, and Benjamin Franklin was another step- from Mather to the American Romantic writers and us. For Mather, "Doing Good meant glorifying God, not only by relieving the distressed but also by universalizing the reformation; and one could not Do Good without having been regenerated, for only those who had grace could know what goodness is. Franklin considered God beyond human aid or praise and aimed at serving him by helping man: Doing Good meant becoming a 'useful citizen'."-Kenneth Silverman

In 1732 Franklin published Poor Richard's Almanack, a yearbook which gave very sound advice to farmers about their every day life. He wrote in Poor Richard, "The noblest question in the world is What Good may I do in it?."

Where Mather pondered upon supernatural explanations Franklin clearly separated the world of matter from that of spirit. He characterized his epoch as "the Age of Experiments", and his Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Made at Philadelphia (1751) had a great impact on the contemporary life.

But what surprises the reader is the turning of his life into an epitome of the most essential of American myths, that of a person advancing "from rags to riches". Franklin wrote his Autobiography for his son, but it was published only almost a hundred years later; his life became an American model to follow. In Franklin's world there was no predestination, and man alone was responsible for what he could do with his own life.

He was representative of the Age of Reason which brought about not only a rational approach to the world, but first of all the belief in progress. "Poetry was being written at all times, and it was becoming both more independent of the British literary style and more sophisticated as the 18^th century was drawing to a close; at the same time, the end of the century witnessed also the arrival of the first American fiction writers"- Zbigniew Lewicki. The American Revolution to come will prove to be a turning point into literature too, and the coming to existence of the United States meant also the entering the age of literature on the cultural level.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston in 1809, the son of itinerant actors. Both his parents died within two years of his birth. A Richmond Merchant, John Allan brought him up, through he was never legally adopted. The relationship between Poe and his foster-parents was tensed, and more strain was added to it when Poe was forced to withdraw from the University of Virginia as a direct consequence of John Allan's refusal to finance his studies.

In 1827 his first book was published, Tamerlane and Other Poems; the logic title poems casts the Mongol conqueror "as a prideful and tormented spirit brooding over his worldly ambition and lost love. The tone recalls Byronic world- weariness; the imagery of dreams and distant stars, mist and night, suggests a theme of infinite regress consequent to a dimming of perception"- G.R. Thompson. These early verses are influenced by Byron, Shelley, and Thomas Moore.

Soon after he joined U.S. Army (1827-1828) and in 1829 he published his second volume Al Araaf Tamerlane and Minor Poems. One of the poems is a sort of introduction to the volume: "Sonnet- to Science" laments the disappearance of ancient poetic myths before the ever increasing power of science. The poet's solution is the re-embody those myths by simply evoking Diana, the Hamadryad, and the Naiad. Al Araaf is a distant star world where "nothing earthly" except the reflected ray of "Beauty's eye" can be seen, and where imagination has found refuge after deserted an earth bereft of poetry. The opening lines are an evocation of that "supernatural beauty", however the end is disheartening since the star is destroyed.

An attempt of reconciliation was made, and Poe entered the Military Academy at West Point, but Allan's tight-fistedness compelled Poe to rebel against that, and he deliberately acted so as to be dishonorably discharged in January 1831, after less than a year there. In the same year he published Poems, Second Edition, an extensive revision of the previous poems, with some new works added to them and featuring sometimes an ambiguous self-irony. What surprises here is "to Helen", an oasis of tranquility for the "weary, way-worn wanderer"; the rest of the volume is dominated by the themes of the earlier two books: from "Al Araaf" he retained the apocalyptic vision, while from "Tamerlane" he kept that implicit unrest. "The City in the Sea" presents an interesting double vision: the image of Sodom and Gomorra under the waters, and their reflections that give the impression of being ready to engulf the sinking cities. "The Sleeper" and "The Valley of Unrest" bring before the eyes bizarre landscapes in which man's world turns slowly into a nightmare. "Israfel" brings forth the blighted vision of the poet searching in vain for that other star world where beauty has taken refuge: he feels that if only he could switch places with the star god, he could be a better artist, one who could make a "bolder note" with his "lyre within the sky". He also thinks that Israfel "might not sing so wildly well-/ A mortal melody".

He achieved respect as a literary critic however, and his opinions were expressed as early as 1831 in his preface to Poems, the "Letter to B-", where he distinguished among the aims of poetry, music and science, concluding that indefiniteness is the most poetic of effects. His critical ideas were further explored and expressed in reviews developed into essays, such as "The Rationale of Verse" (1848) and "The Poetic Principle" (1850).

His career as a writer began with short stories, including "Manuscript found in a Bottle" (1833), The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1837-1838), and Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). The term "arabesque" is what best describes Poe's fiction; it was a term then current "from Germanic romantic literature; it indicates a form of 'romance' embodying a pervasive irony of intent and structure, including self-reflexive self-parody"- G.R. Thompson.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym proposes apparently a journey to the end of the world, but what really counts is the experience of the mind in the quest for origins and ends. The book received many interpretations. The first one was consistent with the way in which Poe himself launched the book- he pretended it was the true account of Pym's voyage as written by Poe. Later on, the hoax was taken further by publishing as a preface to the volume the declaration of Pym's himself, stating that he intended to give the audience the true story of his adventure. What is more, the book ended with an appendix (presumably the "publisher's") that informed the reader about Pym's disappearance, thus it is impossible to find out the final truth about what had happened. The critics saw the journey as an allegory of America and what was happening at the time- the westward migration of people in search of a better future, a parallel to the wandering of the Jewish tribes through the desert seeking the Promised Land.

Other interpretations referred to the Freudian retreat into the womb, a metaphysical disappearance in the void. Or even a view of the duality of life: out of the destruction comes creation, in a cyclic succession characteristic to the universe as the human being sees it.

Coming closer to the end of the twentieth century, a third interpretation was given to the fiction: the journey is an experiment in meta-fiction, an encoding of the artistic process.

In conclusion of Arthur Gordon Pym, Pym and his companion vanish into a chasm towered by "a shrouded human figure" whose skin "was of the perfect whiteness of the snow"- David Galloway. Whiteness loses its ordinary meaning of innocence and basic goodness, and becomes more like a sign of nearing death. Therefore, conventions seem to make way to the ironical view, and whiteness is no exception, Poe challenging thus the "darkness of blackness" which haunted his spirit.

Other important short stories are those published in 1840 under the title Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque. Beginning with 1842 he publishes his best-known writings like The Murders in the Rue Morgue, his first tale of ratiocination. Later on in 1843 he receives an award for The Gold Bug, the story of how the curious William Legrand solves his incredible ease Captain Kidd's cipher and gets hold of that treasure due to his extraordinary intellectual ability to follow the causative mechanism of all events and explain them step by step.

Poe's suggestiveness is a technique. The thrills that may terrify the reader, the feeling of mysterious correspondences are characteristic to the romantic fantastic. The symbolic element gains a first-placed importance in The Fall of the House of Usher. The description of the house is in fact a symbolic description of the mysterious character that inhabits it. A descendent of an old family, Roderick Usher has become intimately linked with the ancestral home until they cannot be told apart. The house is an exact symbol, is a career of a precious function, so that the image of the house has nothing of the vagueness that the Romantics loved so much. Taken into consideration within the general context of the story, the hallucinating beauty of the building is also a witness for the history of the Ushers, great lovers of art, with a passionate talent for labyrinth mysteries, rather than for the orthodox and clear beauty of the musical science. The "minute fungi" that covers the house in a "fine tangled web-work" is not a random detail, it implies an extreme delicacy, similar to the fungi-like minuteness and finesse, and at the same time it implies caducity. The "still perfect adaptation of parts" is combined with the "crumbling condition of the individual stones", translating perfectly Usher's mental status, on the brink of his terrible disaggregation, on the threshold between the most crystal-clear lucidity and insanity"- Matei Calinescu.

The suggestion of "old wood-work" kept isolated from the "breath of the external air" ads more to the moral portrait of its owner, symbolizing the total seclusion, the lack of any contact with the external world, and the artificiality of the character's existence, together with the secret process of internal decomposition that he lives. And finally, the "barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tar" alludes to the split personality that characterizes Usher, from the level of the intellect and the conscience to that of its more obscure fundaments, the unconscious basis.

Rode3rick Usher is one of the first types of characters that have a morbid hypersensitivity in modern literature. Such a literary hero will enjoy a special popularity with the Symbolist and "decadent" prose in the second half of nineteenth century. It is essential to remember this because Poe was for these European movements one of the great models, the idol of a whole generation, beginning with Baudelaire and up to Paul Valery.

The most persistent motif in his prose is the posthumous heroine, and Usher's sister is not an exception. The same is true for "The Oblong Box". Where the maid travels in the place of her dead mistress, or in "Berenice" where the narrator's cousin dominates the domain of Arnheim, suffering apparent deaths that made her belong to two worlds at the same time- the real one and the world beyond it.

Poe never exorcised his posthumous heroine. His famous poem "The Raven" bears witness to that. If so far the dead beautiful woman in Poe's stories was buried alive, closed within a confined space, the echolalia of the poem suggests the sound reverberations in a vault, an incantation that may protect against the bird of omen, the raven. Seen as an emissary of the power of darkness, the raven utters only a word, echoing the poet's hopelessness. Just like in his prose, Poe employs the first person, and the poem becomes a monologue, fragmented here and there by the strange "Nevermore" of the bird. The duality white-black is very important. The black raven is an oppressive symbol. Facing the true darkness, Poe confronted "the dread of loneliness, the terrors of the night, the anguish of being isolated with one's demon- or raven- the prospect at which other men blench"- Harry Levin.

The time of the year and the time of the day are of great importance, preparing the entrance of the raven as messenger o darkness, and of ill omen. The multitude of details reminds the reader of the complex description of Usher's house; therefore the room tells a lot about the owner's soul, indirectly characterizing him. The poem is under the sign of indefiniteness, for no symbol is clearly stated with a precise function, all is blurred image that may be altered every moment.

As Paul Valery wrote about Poe, "the man who attempts to imagine the inner reality of things can do by adapting the ordinary categories of his mind. Always, like a persistent point, there is some unresolved decimal which brings us back to a feeling of incompleteness, a sense of the inexhaustible". The same is true about the Raven as a symbol.

"What a rainbow is for Emerson, or the frozen surface of Walden Pond for Thoreau, or the song of the mocking bird for Whitman, or Faith's pink ribbon for Hawthorne, or the squeezing of whale sperm for Melville, or a shaft of winter sunlight for Emily Dickinson, so are Berenice's perfect teeth, or a diamond in the pocket, or a black cat, or a cask of Amontillado, for Poe. Or, the reader can add, a feather from the Raven's black coat. Poe's symbols have no connection with nature to contaminate the pure subjectivity with which they are to be read.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

Hawthorne was born on the Fourth of July, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts in a family descending from important seventeenth-century New England Puritans. Only four years later his father, a captain in the navy, died on one of his voyages. Raised by his mother with the material support of his maternal relatives, Hawthorne attended Bowdoin College between 1821 and 1825, and enjoyed the company of some classmates like Henry Wadswotrh Longfellow and Franklin Pierce, later to become President of the United States from 1853 to 1857.

As early as 1821, Hawthorne wrote to his mother about his plans to become a writer: "What do you think of my becoming an Author, and relying for support upon my pen. Indeed, I think the eligibility of my handwriting is very author like. How proud you would feel to see my works praised by the reviewers. But Authors are always poor Devils, and therefore Satan may take may take them".

After his graduation, in 1828 he published anonymously a novel, Fanshawe, which he later tried to suppress. His first published collection was Twice-told Tales and this time it bore his name on the cover.

Hawthorne promoted this myth of self-isolation willingly, though historical proof supports the contrary. It is then a dissociation between the sociable speaker and the antisocial person, and out of this contrast comes the narrative strategy of the author.

"Young Goodman Brown" was not included in the 1837 or 1842 editions of Twice-told Tales, but it is his most famous short-story, praised by Melville as being "deep as Dante". Its theme is New England's colonial past, and Hawthorne commented that "the sons and grandchildren of the first settlers were a race of lower and narrower souls than their progenitors had been". Hawthorne interprets the Puritan history.

In 1846 he publishes another volume, Moses from an Old Manse, but the tale did not bring him the desired material independence. The tales illustrate Hawthorne's belief that pictorial art is a form of magic more powerful than poetry; he was dazzled by the highlighted faces and the black backgrounds of Rembrandt's portraiture. His spiritual structure led him to what later Verlaine would say in his Art Poetique: " Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance". This can be noticed fully in The Scarlet Letter where there are basically only three colours: the all-encompassing grey, black and the vivid shade of red, better known as scarlet. There is no light, no definite white in the novel, only the dull grey.

Published in 1850, the novel met a warm reception being the tragic story of a woman's shame and the cruel treatment she suffers at the hands of the Puritan society in which she lives. Hester Prynne as a character proves that morality is not what conventions claim to be, and the symbol she is forced to wear loses its firm contours. Chaucer`s Prioress wore a similar letter "A", but then it signified scared love, under the heading "Amor vincit omnia". Ambiguity undermines the badge, and the end of the novel brings forth a surprising image: "ON A FIELD, SABLE, AND THE LETTER A, GULES". This reminds the reader of a heraldic escutcheon, redeeming Hester and placing her within the chivalrous inheritance of the ladies without blemish, a virtual Madonna carrying in her arms the innocent infant.

The relationship between open shame and inner guilt becomes more and more powerful with the passage of time, and the antithetic characters-Hester with her admirable strength, and Reverend Dimmesdale with his oral cowardice - are brought into an even sharper contrast with the evil forces. This Faustian figure illuminates even more the other two.

Dimmesdale`s guilt will be exposed in the end, when he bares his chest to show the counterpart of Hester`s letter engraved on his flesh. If the novel opens with an enormous "A" projected on the reddish sky, this gesture purges the reverend of the sin, and his death atones for the trespass of the seventh Commandment.

But the darkest figure is Chillingworth; Dimmesdale`s words confirm that "That old man's revenge has been blacker than my sin. Ha has violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart. Thou and I, Hester, never did so." As Harry Levin commented, "while their trespass has been sensual passion, Chillingworth`s is intellectual pride". Even his name betrays his frigid nature, he is malevolence incarnated, possibly even the dark side of Dimmesdale`s conscience, his private demon that torments him.

In this novel, the colour red acquires other connotations than usually, standing not only for love, but also for life. On the other hand, black is death, and Hester is compared in the beginning to a black flower ("It is our fate. Let the black flower blossom as it may!"), while in the end, on the reverend's tomb only black weeds grow at leisure. The fruit of their sinful relationship is the black-eyed Pearl, whose name brings in the whiteness and brilliancy of the pearl - in the Christian tradition it symbolises the absolute purity and sacredness, being used to adorn Virgin Mary`s icons. It is the only shaft of light in the novel, the rest of the writing is very much like the paintingsf Rembrandt.

The technique Hawthorne used underlines the idea that the past is not a problem, and The Scarlet Letter is a transition to the present time, "though that convention of the historical novel which evokes the story from faded relics and fictitious documents". The piece of embroidered cloth that still retains some of the splendour of the stitch-work is very much similar to the cloth of time, on which these possible events have traced a complicated pattern.

Only one year later, in 1851, he published The House of the Seven Gables.

The destiny of the House of the Seven Gables buries the past and lets in the present, just as Phoebe, the country cousin, lets in the fresh air to invigorate the gloomy abode.

If the dust and gloomy atmosphere from the beginning sets out the figures of the two brothers, Clifford Pyncheon and his sister Hepzibah, the reader can recognize at once the identity between the house itself and these two persons.

The building is by definition time arrested, while outside it, life bursts into bloom and movement is the key-word. The dark house seems to be the centre of this circling motion, and its stillness is disturbed only by the arrival of the ruthless cousin, Judge Pyncheon.

The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables constitute, together with The Blithedale Romance, a New England trilogy, the last novel being published in the following year, 1852. The proper name "Blithedale", a modulation of "happy valley" worked by Hawthorne himself, is a modern Arcadia but an uncomfortable one, where winter takes its toll and makes people comment on their visionary aspirations toward "the better life".

HERMAN MELVILLE

FRANCIS SCOTT FITZGERALD

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a romantic and even tragic figure: he was a brilliant writer who achieved success with his first novel (This Side of Paradise, 1920), participated in the glamorous expatriate life in France during the 1920`s, and then experienced a series of personal and professional blows during the 1930`s.

His first novel traced the adolescence of a sensitive intelligent egoist, and at the same time it was considered by the "jazz age" young people as the representative work of their era. However, though he described so tenderly the merry Princeton life in such familiar terms - the author went there as an undergraduate in 1913 - his romanticisation is that of an outsider, somebody who was not himself born into such affluence. The novel's original title was The Romantic Egotist and the transparently autobiographical protagonist is someone who, as the reader hears in the last chapter's Shavian dialogue with a "big man" from the world of corporate power, Henry Adams on modern historical acceleration as well as Shaw himself.

The ambivalence of his attitude toward the rich people is evident in his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned ( 1922 ): the kind of life they lead still has an irresistible glamour, but they are judged by a moralist author, in an attempt at psychological portraiture at full scale.

Only three years later, in 1925, Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, generally regarded as his best novel. The story of Jay Gatsby, who as a poor young man has lost the rich girl he loved to a man of her own class, has subsequently become rich himself, and has come to live in a nearby mansion where he gives extravagant parties with the sole aim of impressing her, is a strangely poignant one. And altough the mysterious and glamorous façade of his life is to collapse, and his dream is to be shattered, he is a romantic figure to the end. Not so the congenitally rich Tom Buchanan, the man whom the girl Daisy has married: his unsought wealth has made him hard, self-centred and purposeless.

Fitzgerald uses Nick Carraway as the narrative consciousness for Jay Gatsby's story, and by doing this he gives the reader the contrasting perspectives that call both Gatsby`s and Nick's motivations into question.

T. S. Eliot called Gatsby "the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James". Inheritor of an intensely American disposition that is simultaneously a blessing and a burden, Gatsby tries to impose his dream on the reality around him, and this is his downfall.

The time theme encompasses the related themes of mutability and loss. Ultimately the novel is about American history, compounding the time theme and the aspiration theme.

After Gatsby`s dream world has been smashed, Nick identifies more closely with him because he sympathizes with the impulses that led him to construct it. His is the only version of Gatsby`s inner world in the moments before his death that the narrative offers. In a way Nick and Gatsby are dual versions of the same experience. The polarities of the ecstatic vision and the nightmare view of life are equally distorting ways of seeing reality. Gatsby will never acquire the necessary corrective vision, and Nick is left a legacy he has to fulfill.

Gatsby`s destiny is a dream within a dream. Jimmy Gatz became Jay Gatsby, buy in the process he did not change himself being trapped within that past summer. The changes referred to the appearances: Gatsby turned himself into an elegantly clad young man, extremely rich and handsome, yet never fully accepted in the high society of New York. The image of Daisy and her luxurious lifestyle made him want to endow the world with beauty and grace. His mistake is that he believed that dreams can offer the promise "that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fair's wing' as Fitzgerald wrote in the novel.

Gatsby`s love story is more than a simple story: it suggests the purity of childhood when fairies and their wonderful deeds seemed possible. It also suggests a mythical past of human innocence.

Gatsby is an isolated figure, too absorbed with himself to see that he was chasing the impossible. That moment of revelation when he kissed Daisy in 1917 has uniquely singled him from the mass of young men and gave birth to that fatal obsession. His vision is totally egocentric. Daisy is the object of his worship, but she is allowed no warm humanity, no autonomous life of her own as a woman. Gatsby is enclosed in a world invented by himself, and blind to any other alterations that might have occurred in Daisy's life, or in the world around him for that matter. The woman with the flower name is continually measured up to his vision of her; the impossibility of his dream is once more marked drastically by the discrepancy between the illusion of her and reality. Death is the only solution to this contradiction; once Gatsby glimpses the truth, he still denies it but he cannot ignore it, and on the other hand he could not live with this new discovery. His idol had to remain perfect, mainly because he cannot accept that he was wrong.

If Gatsby is both dreamer and corrupt, Nick Carraway sees himself as "a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler". As the reader may have noticed, Nick is a possible Jay Gatsby, but wiser and better prepared to face the society of their times.

The novel moves in circles, spiralling toward the core, and in the end Nick moves to the centre of the narrative.

Fitzgerald allows Nick to claim authorship of the novel. He retells even those events that have taken place before Nick's arrival on the stage, and this makes Nick's mind and ethical crisis the focus of the whole narrative. Ultimately, his synthesis of the wasteland and the dream ends the novel.

Fitzgerald`s theme of inevitable disillusion following the dream of youth is evident in some famous stories like "The Rich Boy" or "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz", in the volumes of short stories which he published: Flappers and Philosophers ( 1922 ), Tales of the Jazz Age ( 1926 ), and All the Sad Young Men ( 1926 ).

Fitzgerald spent his last years in Hollywood and saw the terrible effects of the great crash. The protagonist of his last unfinished novel The Last Tycoon ( 1941 ), Monroe Stahr, is driving himself to a premature death, just like his creator.

However, this posthumous and unfinished novel is not a masterpiece, and the flitering of the key impressions through Katherine's sensibility, or the studio episodes sustain this opinion.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Born in Oak Park, a respectable Chicago suburb, Ernest Hemingway was the son of a doctor who was also a keen sportsman. Before becoming a reporter in 1917, he run twice from home, thus announcing a rebel spirit, a non-conformist. In 1918 he was a volunteer ambulance driver on the Italian front; he was badly wounded, but he returned to serve the last few weeks of the war with the Italian infantry. The First World War had a terrible effect on him, visible in the succession of characters he was to create with both physical and psychological effects.

Hemingway had married in 1921 and set off again for Europe the same year, where he worked as a roving reporter and met Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and Ezra Pound. The first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926) was published in England as Fiesta, and it is a touching story of the "lost generation".

The next novel published by Hemingway was A Farewell to Arms (1929), the result of ten years` digestion of his experiences in the First World War. The central character is Frederick Henry, a young American who is in Italy when war breaks out and who enlists with the Italian ambulance unit. He is wounded, and his convalescence coincides with a love affair between him and the British nurse, Catherine Barclay. Henry returns to the front but he witnesses a chaotic retreat, and the insanity for such a world makes him want to rejoin Catherine. He is obsessed by the feeling that everything worth caring for is being destroyed and by the fear that the world will soon catch up with him and Catherine. Although they seek refuge in the Swiss Alps, "the world" has the last word: both Catherine and the child die.

The keynote of this novel is not terror, but doom. This impartiality of death is cruel, for death falls on earth like a steady rain, making place for other men and women to have dreams and hopes, only to break them too in the end. Nature finds its final unity in decay.

But there is also the unity of love. Within the great circle of decay, the two lovers strive to keep intact. But soon this "two of us" becomes "one", because Catherine simply melts away within Henry's personality, but even this does not prevent the tragic ending. The circle tightens, and love too finds its unity in doom.

The two stories, one of love and one of war, are in fact realized after the model story within a story. They are contrasted, though the love story unfolds within the bigger context of the war story.

A second contrast is that between time internal and time external. The book represents a year in the life of Frederick Henry, beginning with the spring of 1917. Thus natural time is encompassing, determining and double-faced. Its contrast pressure is felt in the novel, not just in terms of days, seasons and weather, but also as time over which human beings have no control

The text presents two transformations that occur in Henry: one is due to the experience of war, the terrible events he lived (his wound, the retreat, and the death of a friend, Aymo, and the executions at the bridge). The other transformation is brought about by love. At the beginning of this love story, Henry reveals himself as a self-centred person, incapable of commitment. Step by step he learns to commit himself to Catherine, to care for her. The process is favoured by Catherine's attitude, she is preoccupied with Henry's interests and protects him. They complete each other, and this makes their relationship work.

But the end of the novel brings another turn in Henry's inner development: after Catherine's death, he regresses to a former self, indifferent to the fate of the ants he watched burning when he was a child. His anger rends the fabric of the narrative and re-invokes a time that precedes his experience of war and love.

During the next decade Hemingway did not write anything on the same scale. He published two pieces of non-fiction, the study of bull-fighting entitled Death in the Afternoon (1932) and the hunting travel book Hunting Hills of America ( 1935 ) - books full of practical details of the skills involved as well as of the thoughts and feelings on life and art occasioned by the experience.

In 1937, he published the novel To Have and Have Not, whose first and second parts appeared previously in a magazine in 1934 and 1936.

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) reflects this faith while exploiting an incident in that war.

Hemingway's last major work was The Old Man and the Sea (1952), which won him a Pulitzer Prize and in the 1954 Nobel prize.

He confesses: "I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars". In these simple words the author states the human condition, and the sharks are the agents of destruction that inhabit man's mind. Violence engages both freedom and necessity; true terror must correspond to one within the individual, an emptiness/void that marks people.

WILLIAM FAULKNER

Always protecting his private life, William Faulkner wrote about himself once with a particular brevity that would honour any dictionary of writers` biographies.

His own account about his decision to start writing is somewhat strange and helps create another myth, that of the incidental writer who began to write in the merry 1920`s, in the middle of the Prohibition epoch.

His first novel was Soldier`s Pay (1926) based on the return - soldier theme, and it remains significantly unlocalised, apart from being plunged in the Southern universe. Critics have noted the influence of Eliot and Huxley in spirit and style, but the latter's influence is more evident in Mosquitoes (1927), a novel that unveils the bright talk of the New Orleans art world. With this two novels, Faulkner's apprenticeship ended, and he reoriented himself towards establishing and focusing his writings to one point of an imaginary map so as to give a unique world that mirrors the real one in a more acute and truthful, though a little distorted, way that surprises the essential features of the Southern world. It is a realm that captures the injustice and violence implicit in the past grandeur, threatening a paralyze it into pure nostalgia one arouse in to an alienating anger.

In the same year Faulkner published his first masterpiece The Sound and the Fury. It is a very difficult text, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." The book is followed by As I Lay Dying (1930), a comic- macabre account of a family talking its dead mother to Jefferson to be buried, a journey that allows the writer to explore the relationship with her husband and children.

But the determing factor in the social life of the South was the issue of black and white. This is present in almost everything Faulkner wrote, and in the next two novels he confronted it full-force: Light in August (1932) and Absalom! Absalom! (1936). Faulkner explained that the cryptic title of the first novel refers to Lena, a character in the book, she is "light in August" when she gives birth to her child.

Here the mental landscape of the South is portioned into three separate fields on which operates representatives of three different attitudes towards life. Two of them are plainly obsessions, represented by males characters as main protagonists. It is the obsession with the past, the defeat of the South, which freezes the Reverend Hightower into mental and emotional stagnation and sterility. Then there is the obsession with blood and race, the victims of which are Joe Christmas ( the man under suspicion of Negro Blood ) and, in a reverse sense, Joanna Burden, the white philanthropist, which result in violence and murder. The third attitude contrasts with these two in almost every respect: it is a feminine one, represented by the humble and patient Lena Grove (supported by the gentle Byron Bunch ), who is concerned solely with bringing forth and preserving life.

The novel explores the pairs light and dark, good and evil, mirroring the dichotomy that can resent in a human personality - especially when polarized by a Calvinistic obsession with God and the devil, by real or imaginary racial ambivalence, or by that hopeless contraction that lies at the core of any liberal or Christian southerner. Beyond the schizoid behavior of most of the characters due to the religious and historical conditioning, there is the universality of their predicament, and the need for a sacrificial catharsis.

Joe Christmas` life was an alternation of anguish and violence, torn by incertitude and alienated from the normal course of life. By embracing his racial ambiguity, Joe Christmas moves towards an integration of several fundamental oppositions of the Weatern mind: black and white, female and male, freedom and restraint, mercy and injustice, the unconscious and the conscious.

The other allusion to the Biblical tradition is the triangle Lena Grove, her child and Byron Bunch who substitutes Lucas Burch (alias Brown, the ex-business partner of Joe Christmas, a kind of Judas). By operating this substitution Lena re-creates her cautionary tale of promiscuity and its price into a new version of the holy family and its reward -a rewriting of the ancient story that is also a rewriting of the destiny of the child as Joe Christmas re-enacted it. Lena encloses Joe Christmas` tragic story in a comic one.

Absalom! Absalom! ( 1936 ) is the climax of a phenomenally productive seven-year period, directly concerned with the essence of the Southern agony, as embodied in the history of the house of Sutpen.

The main theme of the novel is that of incest in the Sutpen family relationships; the theme is known from the Compsons tragedy, symbolising the fatal inbreeding of the southern tradition.

Just like the previous novel, Light in August, this one has darkness at its centre: Bon`s blackness, like Joe's, remains a problematic issue that generates tensions inside this universe. Bon`s alleged the northern background of the other narrator, the Canadian Shreve, mirrors blackness.

But perhaps the most celebrated of Faulkner's works is Go Down, Moses ( 1942 ), a book that once again states the dual structure of any of Faulkner's texts, having at its core the profound understanding of white-Negro relations and the technique of multidimensional narrative through which they are illuminated. A story told from two points of view, one of a black narrator ant the other of a white one.

Faulkner's last period of creation concentrated upon the Snopes destiny: The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959). The Snopes family has a tragic stature like the Compsons or the Sartoris family. However, the Snopeses are mean ignoble bourgeois, circling above the ruins of the Old South like vultures.

The South may be doomed, says Faulkner, but heaven preserve it from the ravages of the Snopeses. The South itself is the one that has to solve the problems, and not with external help from the northern rootless bourgeois. This together with the solving of the white-black problem would mean the redemption of the South.

The action is set in Frenchman's Bend, a community in Yorknapatawpha County populated by plain whites, devoid both of aristocrats and blacks. In this first novel of the trilogy, the author combines several stories he had earlier written and brings back certain of the earlier characters, among them Flem Snopes and his sensual wife, Eula Varner, or the salesman Ratliff, a common man of uncommon sense and decay, however a victim of Flem in the end.

In spite of everything that occurs, the community survives as a sustaining, invigotating context. Even in defeat at the hands of Flem, it confirms its fundamental identity. The extraordinary scenes when they all run in pursuit of Flem`s wild ponies which they have just boughy at auction, over the Yoknapatawpha country-side, or their awed, respectful fascination with Henry Armstid, duped by Fleminto an insane quest for imaginary treasure - they show their fierce individualism and their distinct way of life and thinking.

In the final passage of The Mansion Faulkner describes the death of Mink, once the violent sharecropper murdering from ambush, now having spent thirty-eight years in prison, the unlikely agent of the community's exorcism of Flem. After shooting Flem- who, "immobile and even detached", meets his death with the passivity characteristic of these novels - Mink himself succumbs not so much to the weakness of the body as to the strength of the earth, drawing him down to the place where "wouldn't nobody even know or even care who was which any more, brave a any, being inextricable from, anonymous with all of them: the beautiful, the splendid, the proud and the brave, right on up to the very top itself among the shining phantoms and dreams".

The fragment concentrates in it one of the great characteristics of Faulkner's writing: the challenge to hierarchy and decorum, each consciousness has its moment as the centre of the vision, and thus it reaches out and encompasses the world.

JOHN STEINBECK

EUGENE O`NEILL

Maya Koreneva in O`Neill and the Paths of American Drama ties O`Neill`s search for a "different" theatre to the emergence of "new drama" in Europe at the turn of the century. The prevalence of the epic element in drama at the expense of the poetic one jeopardized the very existence of dramatic form, prompting new poetic forms within prosaic structures.

Though the dramatist fearlessly tackled the most painful social issues of the day, his work should not be assessed primarily as social writing. O'Neill's major preoccupation has always been with "impelling, instructable forces" operating under the surface of Life whose workings he endeavored to "at least faintly shadow". It is ontological issues that lie at the core of his plays, probing the human situation in a world where "God is dead".

The key problem of O'Neill's drama can be defined as the total alienation experienced by contemporary man. Seen from this perspective, the collisions of his plays can be regarded as individual cases of the "universal sickness of today" (O'Neill), which can be cured not through social action but by retrieving the lost harmony between Man and Universe. Hence the obsession of O'Neill's "haunted heroes" with the idea of joining in the eternal life cycle on a par with its other elements. Special consideration should be given to recurrent images in O'Neill's plays: the wrathful God, the fog, the "ole devil" of the sea, the idea of belonging.

Critics have focused on two interrelated problems; O'Neill's search for modern tragedy and his literary affiliations. There is a notable distinction between the "universal tragedy" characteristic to his earlier plays and "the tragedy of the individual" dealt with in mature vision.

A conflicting vision on O'Neill is proposed by another critic of the 1990`s, Doris Alexander, whose critical study E. O'Neill's Creative Struggle: The Decisive Decade, 1924 - 1933 reconstructs the personal memories and obsessions that shaped such works as Desire Under the Elms, The Great God Brown, Strange Iterlude, and Mourning Becomes Electra-achievements that built O'Neill's initial successes of the early 1920`s and gained him the Nobel Prize in 1936.

Doris Alexander treats the plays of this period not as isolated productions but as episodes within an even greater if more enigmatic text - his own life.

Thus the individual works appear in the background like moving scenes on a diorama, before which a group of actors in various masks and combinations plays out the impassioned psychic melodrama of the dramatist's interior life. Certainly few modern writers were so haunted by personal ghosts as O'Neill was, yet such an interpretation is far from being accurate, leaving a more than generous space for speculations, as it always happens when the writer is neglected in favour of the man. We could analyze a number of conditions governing his emergence as America's first great playwright under two headings: personal heritage and cultural heritage. The first group defines him as an individual and explain specific qualities of his writing. Here we could include his good fortune to be born the son of a successful actor who considered the theatre an artistic calling, at the time when many Victorian Americans considered it a road to sin; what is more, he has a father who supported him financially for years. O'Neill also spent a trouble youth trying to "find himself", that is, going through periods of drunkenness, work as a common labourer and seaman, and travel among the ranks of the lowest classes in several countries, all experiences which he later drew upon his characters. His own family conflicts were just as colourful, and they provide a hidden key to many of the character conflicts even in his non-autobiographical dramas. Perhaps the last-recognized element but one of the most essential was the theatrical tradition, which O'Neill inherited; observers neglect it because O'Neill and his contemporaries claimed to be totally rebelling against it. This is the heritage of popular spectacular entertainment, melodrama, and even Shakespeare productions on 19^th century American stages.

It would be quite difficult to classify O'Neill's plays adequately, reveal the variety of themes which deal alternatively with his own life, American history and culture, philosophical issues, or world history. Due to various considerations, we will make only a general survey of the major groups within his work. His plays fall into three periods. His earliest plays stayed close to experiences drawn for his early life. He wrote short, naturalistic plays of the sea, creating a group of true-to-themselves, wandered heroes who embodied proletarian reality and spoke accurate, non-rhetorical vernacular language, but still expressed a longing and an awareness of higher cultural crisis that indicates that an artist, not a sociologist, created them. He also drew upon his tuberculosis condition in several plays, most notably in first full-length success, Beyond the Horizon, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1920. But he uses his hero's terminal illness there to depict conflicts between the land man and sea wanderer, the practical business - and the family man and the overreaching artist.

In 1920`s, O'Neill wrote a dozen daring plays which overreached his own artistic capacity but still introduced many of the scenic and poetic effects which he absorbed from European experiments. He also expanded his repertoire of themes, depicting Black characters sympathetically for the first time on the American stage, illustrating conflicts between America country and city, as well as between the businessman mentality and the artistic personality; portraying the newly emancipated

woman; excoriating the machine age; and above all, psychoanalyzing the universal and the American mentality in several plays. These plays also mark his innovations of masks, puppets, spoken interior monologue, and poetic devices.

In the latter 1930`s and early 1940`s, in self-imposed seclusion, O'Neill returned to his family biography to write his best dramatic literature. He also returned to a more strictly realistic form. O'Neill never stopped striving to write "the great American drama", even when he had already accomplished this in his last autobiographical plays. When he read beyond strictly personal themes in The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into Night, we can see the realist's mastery of a whole social environment in O'Neill own time, as informed by the influence of past history, but embodied in dramatic dialogue rather than narrated, and free of cant and costume trappings.

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

One cannot say the same about another playwright, Tennessee Williams (1911 - 1983), who at first glance resembles O'Neill more than his contemporaries, with his Southern rather than mainstream outlook and setting; his interest in the personal realm and psychological themes; and his concern with aberrant, neurotic personalities, who can trace their disturbance to sexual origin. He also drew heavily upon his life in an early play, The Glass Menagerie ( 1945 ), and then became repetitious in his final years. But his most striking characters and best-constructed dramatic situations have a mythic stature that places them among the obsessive life-affirmers and tragic questers of classic American literature, and richly poetic; he builds on the long period sentences and the rhetorical hyperbole of a one-aristocratic people of the South.

His plays are filled with fascinating characters and compelling dialogue. They are illuminated, even gilded, by verbal, visual and sound symbolism that is intended to convey meanings beyond those possible in what Williams has termed "the exhausted theatre of realism". He employs an array of expressionistic literary and theatrical devices: special settings, musical themes, unusual sound and lighting effects - all as a means of leading his audience to see the truths that lurk beneath life's surface.

His characters and their actions are often exaggerated. They are made to resemble the characters and events of ancient myths. Certain character types recur frequently: the outsider, a man or a woman who differs from the mass of making by seeing clearly the frightening terror of life; the physically and emotionally deformed; the neurotic and the insane; real or would-be artists; victims and victimizers; and foreigners-strangers like the Gentleman Caller in The Glass Menagerie - who intrude into and disrupt the lives of others. His characters are commonly overwhelmed by one another and by a growing awareness that the universe is different to their suffering.

In Williams's view, "whether or not we admit it to ourselves, we are all haunted by a truly awful sense of impertinence". To dramatize his dark and narrow vision of life, he wrote of faded men and women, consumed by time and decay. They attempt to escape by moving, by fleeing; they can resist time but never overcome it - for life in Williams's play can only be attenuated, never triumphant.

Yet he shows that for those who come to see clearly the frightening chaos of the world there is a kind of victory, for their vision brings release from guilt and from pointless despair. They can achieve the kind of dignity Williams believed to be possible if one lives "steadfastly, as if he, too, like a character in a play, were immured against the corrupting rush of time".

In The Glass Menagerie Williams presents the theme that was to occupy him for two decades: that of reality versus illusion or fantasy. Mrs. Wingfield and her daughter Laura both live in a fantasy world: the former in an imaginary past of Southern social grandeur, populated by endless admirers, which insulates her from the present impoverished loneliness; the latter in a brittle artificial world she has created for herself with her menagerie of glass animals as an escape from a world that her crippled leg and plain features inhibit her from entering. On the daughter is placed the burden of enacting her mother's fantasies: and the centerpiece of the play is the visit of a "gentleman caller" ( in fact a friend of her brother Tom ) who, out of genuine if mild compassion and the lack of anything better to do, pays court to Laura. He makes her dance and gives her confidence: symbolically they bump against the table with the animals and break the horn of a unicorn, with whose fragility she has identified herself. But with his interest waning ( he is in fact already committed elsewhere ) he cannot follow up his rescue act; the play ends with Laura's further retreat into fantasy, which is set against her brother's success in making his own dream - of running away to sea - come true.

It is a memory play, a series of seven sharply remembered scenes of the son who finally escaped from a nagging mother and from an exquisitely fragile sister whom he could leave but not forget. It represents Williams at his best in brief, highly charged scenes. But neither the incidents nor a well-developed plot holds the play together: the mood and the emotional excitement arising from the characters to do so. Even though Williams expresses contempt for realism, his portrait of Amanda Wingfield, the mother, addicted to bromides and delusions, is incisively delineated and one of his very best.

Social concerns are woven into the texture of his best plays, and support the foreground sexual conflicts; his weaker plays transpire in placeless allegorical locales (Camino Real, 1951), or florid exotic climes which just provide lush imagery (Night of Iguana, 1961), so that the conflict of lovers` wills seems to exist as a timeless entity outside of culture. Since in this sociological age we tend to believe that even our sex lives are culturally conditioned, and since Williams has demonstrated this so convincingly in his best plays, these weaker plays take on the aspect of fantasy - partly of the philosophical variety, partly of the erotic. Camino Real puns on the English and Spanish words real and real ("royal" ): and the play focuses on the point at which for its varied group of characters the camino real ( " royal highway" , i.e. of dreams ) becomes the camino real, the path of truth.

The group includes such historical personages as Byron, Casanova, don Quixote and Sancho Panza, together with the ubiquitous modern American everyman kilroy, a boxer with a faulty heart.

Their arid death-ridden town at the meeting of the roads, a town peopled also with perverts, prostitutes and the riffraff of society, is beyond time and space (it is significantly over the border). The fountains flow again in the piazza, and saving love returns to the camino.

For the integration of social and sexual conflict, Williams` two best plays are A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams portrays the larger-than-life collision between two elemental forces embodied in aristocratic but neurotic Blanche Du Bois and her honestly-appetitive but cruel and narrow-minded brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski. They seem like opposite types, but as they battle they show unconscious attraction for each other. One needs to study the play at length to identify all the connotations of their struggle. Blanche embodies a poetic sensuality but has an obsessive attitude towards sex; she stands for the arts and civilizing forces, but also falls for trashy sentimental decorations and taunts Stanley for his stupidity. Stanley is the elemental sexual being but also a possessive tyrant; he is child-like in his sentiments and needs, but when he turns to humiliate Blanche, he falls back on adult hypocrisies. Eventually he rapes her, and her only refuge is into insanity, but the tragic collision seems inevitable and appropriate for the two of them; as he says, "we've had this date from the beginning".

After the richness and variety of Camino Real, there is a return to a simpler, starker version of the illusion-reality theme; Williams overcame his pessimism about the saving power of sexual union in his marriage comedy Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). The play's general themes of impotence yielding to fertility and accepting one's own identity (even as a deviant or dying man ) are embodied in a concrete and significant setting.

In conclusion, one can say that most of Williams's plays are charged with a highly expressive symbolism and imbued with his recurrent attitudes and motifs: a somewhat sentimental valuation of the lost and lonely; a worship of sexuality as a means of transcending aloneness; a castigation of repression and excessive guilt; an abhorrence of the underdeveloped heart that refuses to reach out to others; a fear of time, the enemy that robs one of physical beauty and artistic vitality; and an insistence on the need for the courage to endure, to always continue onward - as Williams himself did as a writer.

Williams and Miller had contributed their most lasting plays by the beginning of the 1960`s, and with them, theatrical realism, even of a heightened or poetic kind, seemed to have exhausted its resources. It had already been largely rejected on European stages, where a new style, called by the critic Martin Esslin "the theatre of the absurd", emerged after the Second World War. This style ressembled the dream ply and surrealism in part, the more political side of expressionist drama in another part. Esslin identified Beckett, Ionesco, and Pinter as the main writers of this trend. The main theatrical excitement in New York theatres during the early 1960`s was the introduction of these European dramatists.

III. Assignment questions:

- The Amerindians in Pre- Colonial America.

- Comment on the encounter between good and evil in Melville's "Moby Dick".

- Comment on the symbolism of colours in Melville's "Moby Dick".

- Comment on the structure of Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby".

- Comment on the Jazz- Epoch in Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby".

- The concept of "nada"/ "nihilism" in Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms".

- Hemingway's macho hero within a personal style.

- William Faulkner and the quest of a father in "Light in August".

- Race problems and Biblical solutions in W. Faulkner's works.

- Arthur Miller and spiritual vs. pragmatism in the North.

- T. Williams and poetry in the drama of the South.

- W.C. Williams and the poetry of the 50s in the American cities.

Note:

The assignment of the optional course is a written paper on the complex of 2-4 pages and 3 bibliographical items at least.

IV. Selected Bibliography:

*** Robert Frost: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. J.M. Cox, 1963

*** Anthology of American Literature, vol.II, gen. Ed. George McMichael, Macmillan, New York London, 1980

*** American Fiction 1914 to 1945, ed. Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, New York, 1986

*** American Literature to 1900, The Penguin History of Literature, ed. By Marcus Cunliffe, vol.8, London, 1993

*** American Literature, ed. Zbigniew Lewicki, Warsaw, 1993

*** Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott, Columbia U.P. , New York, 1988

*** The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol.9 , ed. Boris Ford, London, 1991

Burdescu, Felicia. American Literature, Tipografia Universitatii din Craiova, 2003

Parvu, Sorin. American Fiction, Iasi, 1988