Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, dealing with life on the Native American reservation post-Vietnam and Beloved by Toni Morrison, dealing with Civil War era slavery. Characters in these stories feel emotion, mental, and physical stress and it affects their behavior in a manner consistent with symptoms of grief[8], depression[5], and post-traumatic stress syndrome [7]. Characters suffer on all levels--their race attacked, their bodies abused, their beliefs challenged, their personal relations and families destroyed, and their minds reel with the horror of what they experience. By the end of both novels, characters have survived and in doing so, overcome some of their problems.
Two American novels illustrate post-traumatic stress well:
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I started my American Literature Course via Oxford Continuing Education. I ordered most of the required texts via Amazon Kindle except Toni Morrison's Beloved which I have on my shelf and can hopefully find. Why American Literature?
Some MFA programs require one course in British Literature and one course in American Literature, so by completing this course I will have examined some of the historical literary movements in American literature in support of my background knowledge. I started off the course early by reading As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I like to preread because when I read the second time in response to the questions I can test the two views change. I perused the information about the various American Literary movements. I think they missed the most contemporary i.e. since the 1960's there's been a strong movement similar to the artwork of Andy Warhol i.e. Commercial as some have titled it. How does my writing fit with realist, modernist, romantic, post-modern etc? I'm not sure that writer's always know. I know that some of my scenery and characterizations come out of the realist movement. I have traces of romanticism scene via POV character. I often play with style and pick the outline of my novels in not necessarily told from beginning to end style. I often work with varying POV. I haven't tried a narrated piece yet in my novels but have in some of my short stories. Also, I'm an American novelist and it helps to know what I am writing fits in with the overall American style of literary art. I walked through the opening material explaining some of the background about America on BBC. Some of it felt like a walk through my life--mainly the discussions about : * Jazz going mainstream (via my husband's family i.e the Flappers, * Great Depression (very different experience of it in the Midwest via some of the accounts by my father and mother and grandmother), * Large Buildings (we've recently seen many from the 50's in Cinncinnati, Pittsburg, Rochester to name a few), * Vietnam era (I was a kid but had Uncles and friends who were in the War and we saw the protest era via fashion and sit downs and television and of course news accounts), *age of Information ( well, Microsoft was up the road and I owned many of those early PCs and witnessed some of the big computers and the clash between mainframe and personal computer as part of my course work in computing). The music provided was often very familiar. More about this course works and the novels and reading as I go. |
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