'American Literature Essay\r'

'When the incline pr separatelyer and author Sidney metal shiter asked in 1820, â€Å"In the intravenous feeding qu cunningers of the globe, who guides an Ameri buttocks book? ” bittie did he suspect that less than both snow years later the answer in lit judgment of convictionte quarters would be â€Å" good ab drop away e very(prenominal) unriv entirelyed(a). ” Indeed, just a few years after Smith posed his inflammatory movement, the Ameri hold writer Samuel Knapp would go approximately to assemble unrivalled of the eldest histories of Ameri rump writings as part of a lecture serial that he was giving.\r\nThe course physicals offered by Ameri fag end Passages march on in the tradition begun by Knapp in 1829. wholeness goal of this argona have is to cargon you limit to be a lit eonry historian: that is, to inst each you to Ameri ass lit as it has evolved every shopping mall magazine and to stimulate you to make conjoinions amongst and amon g textbooks. bid a literary historian, when you make these connections you be pronounceing a story: the story of how Ameri pile usualations came into being.\r\nThis Overview outlines four paths ( there be many differentwises) by which you can inform the story of American writings: one anchor on literary movements and historical change, one ground on the American Passages Overview Questions, one based on context of mappings, and one based on multi paganism. TELLING THE fable OF AMERICAN publications literary Movements and Historical potpourri American Passages is organized somewhat sixteen literary movements or â€Å" kindly units. ” A literary movement c inscribes around a group of authors that share certain rhetorical and thematic concerns.\r\n severally unit intromits ten authors that are represented either in The Norton Anthology of American books or in the Online memorial. Two to four of these authors are discussed in the video, which calls dir ection to important historical and ethnic influences on these authors, de delightfuls a genre that they share, and proposes some break thematic parallels. Tracking literary movements can religious service you see how American writings has changed and evolved over condemnation. In general, great deal think intimately literary movements as reacting against earlier modes of writing and earlier movements. For T E L L I N G T H E S T O R Y O F\r\nA M E R I C A N L I T E R AT U R E 3 sheath, just as modernism ( units 10â€13) is a great deal seen as a response to realism and the Gilded Age (Unit 9), so Romanticism is seen as a response to the prudence (Unit 4). Most of the units management on one era (see the chart below), but they leave a lone(prenominal) often include relevant authors from other eras to stand by draw out the connections and differences. (Note: The movements in parentheses are not limited to authors/ plant from the era in interrogation, but they do proce ed some material from it. ) Century Fifteenth†17th Eighteenth Era reincarnation American Passages Literary Movements.\r\n(1: primal Voices) 2: Exploring Borderlands 3: Utopian squall (3: Utopian promise) 4: purpose of patriotism (7: slavery and liberty) 4: ruling of patriotism 5: man wish Heroes 6: black letter Undercurrents 7: slaveholding and liberty (1: native-born Voices) 6: Gothic Undercurrents 8: regional Realism 9: affectionate Realism (1: Native Voices) 10: Rhythms in song 11: Modernist Portraits 12: unsettled contend 13: Confederate Renaissance 1: Native Voices 2: Exploring Borderlands 12: migratory compete 14: bonny Visible 15: meter of firing off 16: attempt for individuation Enlightenment Nineteenth Romanticist Nineteenth Rea dip\r\n ordinal Modernist Twentieth Postmodernist Each unit contains a durationline of historical neverthelessts along with the dates of key literary texts by the movement’s authors. These timelines are design ed to help you make connections surrounded by and among the movements, eras, and authors covered in each unit. 4 W H AT I S A M E R I C A N L I T E R AT U R E ? Overview Questions The Overview Questions at the offset of each unit are tailored from the basketball team American Passages Overview Questions that exist. They are meant to help you focus your see and reading and participate in discussion afterward. 1. What is an American?\r\nHow does writings get to conceptions of the American feature and American identity? This deuce-part question should trigger discussion nigh issues such as, Who belongs to America? When and how does one become an American? How has the search for identity among American writers changed over time? It can also sanction discussion to a greater extent or less the ways in which immigration, colonization, conquest, youth, race, class, and gender affect theme identity. 2. What is American writings? What are the distinctive voices and styles in Ame rican lit? How do tender and govern psychical issues influence the American canon?\r\nThis multi-part question should vex discussion or so the aesthetics and reception of American literary educate. What is a masterpiece? When is something handed literature, and how is this category culturally and historically dependent? How has the canon of American literature changed and wherefore? How prolong American writers employ language to create art and meaning? What does literature do? This question can also raise the issue of American exceptionalism: Is American literature different from the literature of other nations? 3. How do coif and time shape the authors’ deeds and our discretion of them?\r\nThis question addresses America as a location and the many ways in which place impacts American literature’s form and content. It can provoke discussion about how regionalism, geography, immigration, the frontier, and borders impact American literature, as well as the role of the lingo in indicating place. 4. What characteristics of a literary realise be corroborate made it influential over time? This question can be utilize to spark discussion about the evolving impact of various pieces of American literature and about how American writers used language twain to create art and respond to and call for change.\r\nWhat is the exclusive’s responsibility to uphold the community’s traditions, and when are singles compelled to resist them? What is the relationship among the individual and the community? 5. How are American myths created, challenged, and re-imagined by this literature? This question returns to â€Å"What is an American? ” But it poses the question at a cultural rather than individual level. What are the myths that make up American stopping point? What is the American Dream? What are American myths, dreams, and nightmares? How have these changed over time? T E L L I N G T H E S T O R Y O F A M E R I C A N \r\nL I T E R AT U R E 5 Contexts Another way that connections can be made across and between authors is done the five Contexts in each unit: three lasting Core Contexts and two shorter Extended Contexts. The goal of the Contexts is both to help you read American literature in its cultural punctuate and to teach you close-reading skills. Each Context consists of a brief account about an event, trend, or idea that had crabbed resonance for the writers in the unit as well as Americans of their era; questions that connect the Context to the authors in the unit; and a list of related texts and images in the Online Archive.\r\nExamples of Contexts include discussions of the concept of the divine revelation (3: â€Å"Utopian Visions”), the magisterial (4: â€Å"Spirit of Nationalism”), and baseball (14: â€Å" become Visible”). The Contexts can be used in conjunction with an author or as stand-alone activities. The Slide Show Tool on the Web site is ideal for d oing assignments that draw connections between archive items from a Context and a text you have read. And you can create your own contexts and activities development the Slide Show Tool: these materials can thusly be e-mailed, vie join online, projected, or printed out on bang transparencies.\r\nMulticulturalism In the past twenty years, the field of American literature has undergone a radical transformation. Just as the primary(prenominal)stream public has begun to understand America as more than diverse, so, also, have scholars moved to integrate more texts by women and ethnic minorities into the standard canon of literature taught and studied. These changes can be both exhilarating and disconcerting, as the width of American literature appears to be al intimately limitless.\r\nEach of the videos and units has been carefully balanced to pair canonical and noncanonical voices. You whitethorn find it helpful, however, to trace the development of American literature according to the stand up of different ethnic and minority literatures. The followers chart is designed to highlight which literatures are represented in the videos and the units. As the chart indicates, we have set different multicultural literatures in chat with one another. Literature African American literature television receiver Re debut.\r\n7: Slavery and freedom 8: regional Realism 10: Rhythms in poetry 13: Southern Renaissance 14: go Visible 15: Poetry of Liberation strike convey Representation 4: Spirit of Nationalism 5: virile Heroes 7: Slavery and liberty 8: regional Realism 9: complaisant Realism 10: Rhythms in Poetry 11: Modernist Portraits 13: Southern Renaissance 14: seemly Visible 15: Poetry of Liberation 16: Search for individualism 6 W H AT I S A M E R I C A N L I T E R AT U R E ? Native American literature 1: Native Voices 5: male Heroes 14: Becoming Visible.\r\n1: Native Voices 2: Exploring Borderlands 3: Utopian reassure 4: Spirit of Nationalism 5: Mascu line Heroes 7: Slavery and Freedom 8: Regional Realism 14: Becoming Visible 15: Poetry of Liberation 16: Search for individualism 2: Exploring Borderlands 5: Masculine Heroes 10: Rhythms in Poetry 12: unsettled Struggle 15: Poetry of Liberation 16: Search for personal identity 9: summationy Realism 12: migrator Struggle 16: Search for identicalness 9: Social Realism 11: Modernist Portraits 14: Becoming Visible 15: Poetry of Liberation 16: Search for Identity 1: Native Voices 2:\r\nExploring Borderlands 3: Utopian Promise 4: Spirit of Nationalism 5: Masculine Heroes 6: Gothic Undercurrents 7: Slavery and Freedom 8: Regional Realism 9: Social Realism 10: Rhythms in Poetry 11: Modernist Portraits 12: Migrant Struggle 13: Southern Renaissance 14: Becoming Visible 15: Poetry of Liberation 16: Search for Identity 2: Exploring Borderlands 5: Masculine Heroes 10: Rhythms in Poetry 11: Modernist Portraits 12: Migrant Struggle 13: Southern Renaissance 14: Becoming Visible 15: Poetry of Liberation 16: Search for Identity Latino literature 2:\r\nExploring Borderlands 10: Rhythms in Poetry 12: Migrant Struggle 16: Search for Identity Asian American literature 12: Migrant Struggle 16: Search for Identity Jewish American 9: Social Realism literature 11: Modernist Portraits 14: Becoming Visible 15: Poetry of Liberation 16: Search for Identity Women’s literature 1: Native Voices 2: Exploring Borderlands 3: Utopian Promise 6:\r\nGothic Undercurrents 7: Slavery and Freedom 8: Regional Realism 9: Social Realism 11: Modernist Portraits 12: Migrant Struggle 13: Southern Renaissance 15: Poetry of Liberation 16: Search for Identity intrepid and lesbian literature 2: Exploring Borderlands 5: Masculine Heroes 10: Rhythms in Poetry 11: Modernist Portraits 15: Poetry of Liberation 16: Search for Identity T E L L I N G T H E S T O R Y O F A M E R I C A N L I T E R AT U R E 7 Literature cont’d Working-class literature Video Representation 2: Exploring Borderlands 4: Sp irit of Nationalism 5: Masculine Heroes 7: Slavery and Freedom 9: Social Realism 12: Migrant Struggle 16: Search for Identity\r\nStudy Guide Representation 2: Exploring Borderlands 4: Spirit of Nationalism 5: Masculine Heroes 7: Slavery and Freedom 9: Social Realism 10: Rhythms in Poetry 12: Migrant Struggle 14: Becoming Visible 15: Poetry of Liberation 16:\r\nSearch for Identity LITERATURE IN ITS CULTURAL CONTEXT When you playing area American literature in its cultural context, you enter a multidisciplined and multi-voiced conversation where scholars and tyros in different fields figure the same topic but ask very different questions about it. For example, how baron a literary critic’s understanding of 19thcentury American acculturation compare to that of a historian of the same era?\r\nHow can an art historian’s understanding of popular optical metaphors enrich our readings of literature? The materials presented in this section of the Study Guide aim to help y ou enter that conversation. Below are some winds on how to begin. Deep in the heart of the Vatican Museum is an exquisite marble statue from runner- or second-century Rome. Over seven feet high, the statue depicts a position from Virgil’s Aeneid in which Laocoon and his sons are punished for ideal the Trojans about the Trojan horse.\r\nTheir bodies are entwined with large, devouring serpents, and Laocoon’s face is turned upward in a dizzying portrait of anguish, his muscles rippling and bending beneath the glide’s strong coils.\r\nThe emotion in the statue captured the heart and eye of critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who used the crap as the starting point for his seminal essay on the relationship between literature and art, â€Å"Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. ” For Lessing, one of the most leafy vegetable errors that students of ending can make is to assume that all aspects of close develop in tandem with one another. As Lessing points out, each art has its own strengths.\r\nFor example, literature kit and boodle well with notions of time and story, and thus is more malleable than visual art in terms of inventive freedom, whereas delineation is a visual medium that can reach groovyer beauty, although it is static. For Lessing, the mixing of these two modes (temporal and spatial) carries corking risk along with rewards.\r\nAs you scan literature in conjunction with any of the fine arts, you whitethorn find it helpful to ask whether you agree with Lessing that literature is primarily a temporal art. Consider too the feature 8 W H AT I S A M E R I C A N L I T E R AT U R E ? strengths of the media discussed below. What do they offer that whitethorn not be gettable to writers?\r\nWhat modes do they use that complement our understanding of the literary arts? Fine tricks Albrecht Durer created some of the most disturbing plans known to humans: they are overriding with images of death, the end of the world, and recondite creatures that inhabit hell. Images such as The Last Judgement (below) can be found in the Online Archive.\r\nIn Knight, demolition, and the Devil (1513), a religious Christian knight is taunted by the Devil and Death, who gleefully shakes a quickly depleting hourglass, mocking the soldier with the go through of time. Perhaps the tension and anxiety in Durer’s print resonated with the American poet Randall Jarrell in his struggle with mental illness. In â€Å"The Knight, Death, and the Devil,” Jarrell consecrates with a description of the icon: Cowhorn-crowned, shock betokened, cornshucked-bearded, Death is a scarecrowâ€his death’s-head a pinnacle . . . Jarrell’s description is filled with adjectives in a great deal the same way that the print is crowded with detail. The poetry is an instance of what critics call ekphrasis: the verbal description of a work of visual art, usually of a painting, photograph, or sculp ture but sometimes of an urn, tapestry, or quilt.\r\nEkphrasis attempts to pair the gap between the verbal and the visual arts. ruseists and writers have always influenced one another: sometimes outright as in the case of Durer’s drawing and Jarrell’s poem, and other times indirectly.\r\nThe Study Guide will help you navigate through these webs of influence. For example, Unit 5 will introduce you to the Hudson River [7995] Albrecht Durer, The Last School, the great American grace painters Judgement (1510), courtesy of the of the 19th century. In the Context focusprint collection of Connecticut ing on these artists, you will learn of the interCollege, raw(a) London. connectedness of their visual motifs.\r\nIn Unit 11, William Carlos Williams, whose poems â€Å"The Dance” and â€Å"Landscape with the hail of Icarus” were inspired by two paintings by Breughel, will draw your attention to the use of ekphrasis. Williams’s work is a significant ex ample of how multiple traditions in art can influence a writer: in accessory to his interest in European art, Williams imitated Chinese landscapes and poetic forms. When you encounter works of fine art, such as paintings, photographs, or sculpture, in the Online Archive or the Study Guide, you may find two tools used by art historians helpful: positive outline and iconography. Formal L I T E R AT U R E I N I T S C U LT U R A L C O N T E X T 9 [3694]\r\nThomas Cole, The Falls of Kaaterskill (1826), courtesy of the Warner Collection of the disjunction States Paper Corporation, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. analysis, like close readings of poems, seeks to describe the reputation of the object without reference to the context in which it was created. A semiformal analysis addresses such questions as Where does the primaeval interest in the work lie?\r\nHow is the work composed and with what materials? How is lighting or shading used? What does the scene depict? What allusions (mythologica l, religious, artistic) are found in the work? Once you have described the work of art using formal analysis, you may penury to extend your reading by calling attention to the cultural climate in which the work was produced. This is called an iconographic reading.\r\n present the Context sections of the Study Guide will be serviceable. You may notice, for example, a number of nineteenth-century paintings of ships in the Online Archive. 1 of the Contexts for Unit 6 competes that these ships can be read as symbols for nineteenth-century America, where it was common to refer to the nation as a â€Å"ship of state. ”\r\nThe glowing light or wrecked hulls in the paintings reflect the artists’ alternating optimism and pessimism about where the young country was headed. Below are two possible readings of Thomas Cole’s painting The Falls of Kaaterskill that employ the tools of formal analysis and iconography. W R I T E R A : F O R M A L A N A L Y S I S\r\nIn this pa inting by Hudson River School artist Thomas Cole, the locomote that give the painting its digit grab our attention. The shock of the white falls against the grueling brightness of the rocks ensures that the waterfall will be the focus of the work. up to now amidst this brightness, however, there is darkness and mystery in the painting, where the falls emerge out of a dark quarry and crash down onto broken tree diagram limbs and staggered rocks. The descent is neither peaceful nor pastoral, unlike the presentation of personality in Cole’s other works, such as the Oxbow. The enormity of the falls compared to the lone human figure that perches above them also adds to the instinct of cause the falls embody.\r\nBarely recognizable as human because it is so minute, the figure still pushes anterior as if to embrace the cascade of the water in a painting that explores the tension between the individual and the power of character. W R I T E R B : I C O N O G R A P H Y I agree with Writer A that this painting is all about the power of character, but I would argue that it is about a particular kind of power: one that nineteenthcentury thinkers called the â€Å"sublime. ”\r\nCole’s portrait of the falls is particularly indebted to the aesthetic ideas formulated by Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century. Burke was kindle in categorizing aesthetic responses, and he distinguished the â€Å"sublime” from the â€Å"beautiful.\r\n” While the beautiful is calm and harmonious, the sublime is majestic, wild, and even blare. While viewers are soothed by the beautiful, they are overwhelmed, awestruck, and sometimes terrified by the sublime. Often associated with huge, consuming natural 10 W H AT I S A M E R I C A N L I T E R AT U R E ? phenomena like mountains, waterfalls, or thunderstorms, the â€Å"delightful terror” inspired by sublime visions was supposed to both remind viewers of their own in importation in the face of nature and immortal and inspire them with a sense of transcendence. Here the small figure is the object of our gaze even as he is obliterated by the grandeur of the water.\r\nDuring the nineteenth century, tourists often visited locales such as the Kaaterskill Falls in order to experience the â€Å"delightful terror” that they brought. This experience is also echoed in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay â€Å"Nature,” in which he writes of his desire to become a â€Å" out-and-out(a) eyeball” that will be able to relieve the oversoul that surrounds him. The power that nature holds here is that of the divine: nature is one way we can experience higher(prenominal) realms. How do these readings differ? Which do you find more compelling and why? What uses can you see for formal analysis or iconographic readings? When might you choose one of these strategies over the other?\r\nHistory\r\nAs historian Ray Kierstead has pointed out, bill is not just â€Å"one damn thing after another”: rather, account is a way of telling stories about time or, some might say, making an argument about time. The Greek historian Herodotus is often called the father of explanation in the western world, as he was one of the first historians to notice patterns in world events.\r\nHerodotus motto that the course of empires followed a cyclical pattern of rise and fall: as one empire reaches its rosiness and self-destructs out of hubris (excessive pride), a new empire or new nations will be born to engender its place. Thomas Cole’s five-part series The cut of Empire (1833) mirrors this Herodotean notion of time as his scene moves from savage, to pastoral, to consummation, to devastation, to desolation.\r\nThis vision of time has been tremendously influential in literature: whenever you read a work write in the pastoral mode (literature that looks back with nostalgia to an era of rural life, lost simplicity, and a time when nature and gloss were one), as k yourself whether there is an implicit optimism or pessimism about what follows this lost rural ideal. For example, in Herman Melville’s South Sea novel Typee, we find the narrator in a Tahitian village.\r\nHe seeks to adjudicate if he has entered a pastoral or savage setting: is he surrounded by savages, or is he plunged in a pastoral seventh heaven? Implicit in both is a suggestion that there are earlier forms of civilization than the linked States that the narrator has left behind. Any structural analysis of a work of literature (an analysis that pays attention to how a work is ordered) would do well to consider what notions of accounting are embedded at heart.\r\nIn addition to the structural significance of biography, a dialogue between history and literature is crucial because much of the first literature of the United States can also be categorized as historical documents. It is helpful, therefore, to understand the genres of history. Like literature, history is comprised of different genres, or modes. Historian Elizabeth Boone defines the main traditional genres of history as res gestae, geographical, and annals.\r\nreticuloendothelial system gestae, or â€Å"deeds done,” organizes history through a list of accomplishments. This was a popu- L I T E R AT U R E I N I T S C U LT U R A L C O N T E X T 11 lar form of history for the ancient Greeks and Romans; for example, the autobiography of Julius Caesar chronicles his deeds, narrated in the third person.\r\nWhen Hernan Cortes and other explorers wrote accounts of their travels (often in the form of letter to the emperor), Caesar’s autobiography overhauld as their model. Geographical histories use travel through space to shape the narrative: Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative is an example of a geographical history in that it follows her through a sequence of twenty geographic â€Å"removes” into Indian country and back. Annals, by contrast, use time as the organizing principle.\r\nInformation is catalogued by year or month. Diaries and journals are a good example of this genre. These three genres can also be found in the histories of the Aztecs and Mayans of Mesoamerica and in those of the native communities of the United States and Canada.\r\nFor example, the migration legend, a popular endemical form of history, is a geographical history, whereas trickster tales often tell the early history of the world through a series of deeds. Memoirists also mix genres; for example, the first section of William Bradford’s Of Plimouth Plantation is a geographical history, whereas the second half is annals.\r\nToday the most common historical genres are intellectual history (the history of ideas), political history (the story of leaders), and diplomatic history (the history of foreign relations). To these categories we might add the newer categories of â€Å"social history” (a history of everyday life) and â€Å"gender history† (which focuses on the construction of gender roles).\r\nFinally, history is a crucial tool for understanding literature because literature is written inâ€and arguably often reflectsâ€a specific historical context. Readers of literary works can deepen their understanding by drawing on the tools of history, that is, the records populate leave behind: political (or literary) documents, townsfolk records, census data, newsprint stories, captivity narratives, letters, journals, diaries, and the like.\r\nEven such objects as tools, graveyards, or trading goods can tell us important information about the nature of everyday life for a community, how it worshipped or what it thought of the relationship between life and death. 12 W H AT I S A M E R I C A N L I T E R AT U R E ? temporal Culture [6332]\r\nArchibald Gunn and Richard Felton Outcault, New York Journal’s Colored Comic gear (1896), courtesy of the Library of sex act, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZC4-25 531]. When you look at an object, it may call up associations from the past. For example, for the first-time viewer the clown around figure in the image above may seem innocuous, yet at the end of the nineteenth century his popularity was so intense that it started a newspaper war fierce enough to spawn a whole new term for sensationalist, irresponsible journalismâ€â€Å"yellow journalism. ” Objects such as this comic stick on constitute â€Å"material shade,” the objects of everyday life.\r\nIn Material Culture Studies in America, Thomas Schlereth provides the following useful definition of material culture: Material culture can be considered to be the totality of artefacts in a culture, the vast universe of objects used by humankind to cope with the physical world, to facilitate social intercourse, to delight our fancy, and to create symbols of meaning. . . . Leland Ferguson argues that material culture includes all â€Å"the things that people leave behind . . . all of the things people make from the physical worldâ€farm tools, ceramics, houses, furniture, toys, buttons, roads, cities. ” (2) When we study material culture in conjunction with literature, we wed two notions of â€Å"culture” and explore how they relate.\r\nAs critic John Storey notes, the first notion of culture is what is often called â€Å"high culture”â€the â€Å"general cultivate of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic factors”; and the second is â€Å"lived culture”â€the â€Å"particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group” (2). In a sense, material culture (as the objects of a lived culture) allows us to see how the accustomed intellectual ideas were played out in the chance(a) lives of people in a particular era.\r\nThus, as Schlereth explains, through studying material culture we can learn about the â€Å"belief systemsâ€the values, ideas, attitudes, and assumptionsâ€of a particular com munity or society, usually across time” (3). In reading objects as embedded with meaning, we follow Schlereth’s premise that â€Å"objects made or L I T E R AT U R E I N I T S C U LT U R A L C O N T E X T 13\r\nmodified by humans, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, reflect the belief patterns of individuals who made, commissioned, purchased, or used them, and, by extension, the belief patterns of the larger society of which they are a part” (3). The study of material culture, then, can help us unwrap understand the cultures that produced and consumed the literature we read today. Thomas Schlereth suggests a number of useful models for studying material culture; his â€Å"Art History Paradigm” is particularly famous in that it will help you approach works of â€Å"high art,” such as paintings and sculptures, as well. The â€Å"Art History Paradigm” argues that the interpretive objective of examining the artifact is to â⠂¬Å"depict the historical development and intrinsic moral excellence” of it.\r\nIf you are interested in writing an â€Å"Art History Paradigm” reading of material culture, you might look at an object and ask yourself the following questions, taken from Sylvan Barnet’s Short Guide to Writing about Art. These questions apply to any art object: First, we need to know information about the artifact so we can place it in a historical context. You might ask yourself: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. What is my first response to the work? When and where was the work made?\r\nWhere would the work originally have been seen? What purpose did the work serve? In what condition has the work survived? (Barnet 21â€22) In addition, if the artifact is a drawing, painting, or advertisement, you might expect to ask yourself questions such as these: 1.\r\nWhat is the subject return? What (if anything) is happening? 2. If the double is a portrait, how do the furnishings and the background and the angle of the head or the posture of the head and body (as well as the facial expression) support to our sense of the subject’s character? 3. If the picture is a still life, does it suggest opulence or want? 4. In a landscape, what is the relation between human beings and nature? are the figures at shut up in nature, or are they dwarfed by it? Are they one with the horizon, or (because the viewpoint is low) do they stand out against the horizon and perhaps seem in touch with the heavens, or at least with open air?\r\nIf there are woodwind instrument, are these woods threatening, or are they an inviting place of refuge? If there is a clearing, is the clearing a vulnerable place or is it a place of refuge from dour woods? Do the natural objects in the landscape somehow reflect the emotions of the figures? (Barnet 22â€23; for more questions, see pp. 23â€24) Material culture is a rich and varied resource that ranges from kitchen utensils, to advertisements, to farmi ng tools, to clothing. Unpacking the significance of objects that appear in the stories and poems you read may help you better understand characters and their motives. 14 W H AT I S A M E R I C A N L I T E R AT U R E ?\r\nArchitecture\r\nMost of the time we read the hidden meanings of twists without even thinking twice. Consider the structures below: in a higher place: [9089] Anonymous, Capitol Building at Washington, D. C. (1906), courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-121528]. Right: [6889] Anonymous, Facade of the Sam Wah’s Chinese Laundry (c. 1890 â€1900), courtesy of the Denver Public Library.\r\nEven if we had never seen either of these grammatical constructions before, it would not take us long to determine which was a government structure and which was a smalltown retail establishment. Our having seen thousands of buildings enables us to understand the purpose of a building from architectural clues.\r\nWhen first visual perc eption a work of architecture, it is helpful to unpack cultural assumptions. You might ask: 1. What is the purpose of this building? Is it public or private? What activities take place within it? 2. What features of the building reflect this purpose?\r\nWhich of these features are prerequisite and which are merely conventional? 3. What buildings or building styles does this building allude to? What values are native in that allusion? 4. What parts of this building are in general decorative rather than functional? What does the ornament or lack of it say about the spot of the owners or the people who work there? 5. What buildings surround this building?\r\nHow do they affect the way the building is entered? 6. What types of people live or work in this building? How do they interact within the space? What do these findings say about the relative social status of the occupants? How does the building design restrict or encourage that status?\r\n7. How are people supposed to enter an d move through the building? What clues does the building give as to how this movement should take place? L I T E R AT U R E I N I T S C U LT U R A L C O N T E X T 15 These questions imply two staple fiber assumptions about architecture: (1) architecture reflects and helps establish social status and social relations; and (2) architecture i\r\n'