Masterpieces of the World Modern Literature

Masterpieces of the World Modern Literature

Paulo Coelho The Alchemist (English translation )

 

 

Paulo Coelho (born August 24, 1947) is a Brazilian lyricist and novelist.

 

Biography

The Brazilian author PAULO COELHO was born in 1947 in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Before dedicating his life completely to literature, he worked as theatre director and actor, lyricist and journalist.

Coelho was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he attended law school, but in 1970 abandoned his studies to travel throughout Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, as well as Europe and North Africa.

Two years later he returned to Brazil and began composing popular music lyrics, working with such popular musicians as Raul Seixas. As he confesses in an interview to Juan Arias, during that time he was introduced to the work of controversial English mystic Aleister Crowley, which influenced their collaboration. The influence extended not only to music, but also to plans for the creation of the “Alternative Society,” which was to be an anarchist community in the state of Minas Gerais based on Crowley’s premise: “‘Do what thou wilt’ shall be the whole of the Law.” The project was considered subversive by members of the Brazilian military, which imprisoned all prospective members of the group. Seixas and Coelho are reported to have been tortured during their imprisonment.

After a supernatural experience, described in The Valkyries, Coelho left the society.

Later in Holland he met a person (whom he would refer to as “J” throughout The Valkyries, The Pilgrimage and his website “Warriors of Light online”) who changed his life and Coelho was driven towards Christianity. He became a member of a Catholic group known as RAM (Regnus Agnus Mundi) with “J” as his “Master”. In 1986 he walked along the Road of Santiago, an ancient Spanish pilgrimage and his book The Pilgrimage describes his final initiation.

He and his wife Christina live in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

His works

In 1982 Coelho published his first book, Hell Archives, which failed to make any kind of impact. In 1985 he contributed to the Practical Manual of Vampirism, although he later tried to take it off the shelves since he considered it “of bad quality”. In 1986, Paulo Coelho made the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, an experience later to be documented in his book The Pilgrimage.

In the following year, Coelho published The Alchemist, which is based on Jorge Luis Borges’ Tale of Two Dreamers, which in turn was based on a tale from The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. Slow initial sales convinced his first publisher to drop the novel, but it went on to become one of the best-selling Brazilian books of all time. It has sold more than 41 million copies worldwide and has been translated into some 57 languages. It is also a movie-in-progress produced by Laurence Fishburne, who is a fan of Coelho.

Coelho has sold over 86 million books in over 150 countries worldwide and his works have been translated into 66 languages. He has received numerous literary awards from a variety of countries, including La Legion d’Honneur (France), Grinzane Cavour (Italy). In addition, he has written Maktub, which is a collection of his best columns published in the Braziliaewspaper Folha de São Paulo, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept, and The Valkyries. Despite the popularity of Coelho’s works in Iran, his 2005 novel The Zahir was banned there, with 1,000 copies being confiscated, but a week later it appeared again in bookstores.

He also adapted The Gift (Henry Drummond) and Love letters of a Prophet (Kalil Gibran).

His books have appeared on bestseller lists in countries not only in Brazil but in the UK, the USA, France, Germany, Iran, Canada, Italy, Israel, Finland, Serbia, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Poland and Lithuania. He is the all time best-selling Portuguese language author.

Coelho writes a weekly column publish in more than 45 countries, includingAkşam, a Turkish newspaper, and Freizeit, a weekly supplement published by the Austrian Kurier.

Critical acclaims and criticism

Although Coelho has achieved great international success, his work has not been unanimously appreciated at home; his election to the Brazilian Academy of Letters proved controversial. Seen by some Brazilian literary critics as a lesser author whose material is too simplistic and similar to that of self-help books, criticism of his work arises mostly from his plain, direct style and borrowing of ideas from other authors. Additionally, his works in Portuguese contain grammatical errors and inaccuracies; some of these have been minimized in translation or altered in later editions.

Some consider his books incompatible with mainstream Catholicism, due to their mixture of mysticism, spiritual exercises, meditation and supernatural experiences. Coelho in his website states that Catholicism is his personal way of enlightenment and knowing God, but also claims that religion has nothing to do with his spirituality; he considers that all religions are ‘correct’. Despite spiritual themes, his works do not espouse any specific religion, apart from Catholic elements which figure in some plots. His books have also been translated into 56 other languages.

Coelho wrote song lyrics for many famous performers in Brazilian music, such as Elis Regina and Rita Lee. Yet his most well known work has been done with Raul Seixas. Together they wrote such successes as Eu nasci há dez mil anos atrás (I was born ten thousand years ago), Gita and Al Capone, amongst other 60 songs. His fascination with the spiritual quest dates back to his hippie days, when he travelled the world learning about secret societies, oriental religions, etc.

In 1982 Coelho published his first book, Hell Archives, which failed to make any kind of impact. In 1985 he contributed to the Practical Manual of Vampirism, although he later tried to take it off the shelves, since he considered it “of bad quality”. In 1986, PAULO COELHO did the pilgrimage to Saint James of Compostella, an experience later to be documented in his book The Pilgrimage. In the following year, COELHO published The Alchemist. Slow initial sales convinced his first publisher to drop the novel, but it went on to become one of the best selling Brazilian books of all time. He also adapted The Gift (Henry Drummond) and Love letters of a prophet (Kalil Gibran).

To date, Coelho has sold a total of 85 million copies and, according to the magazine Publishing Trends; he was the most sold author in the world in 2003 with his book Eleven Minutes – even though at the time it hadn’t been released in the United States, Japan or 10 other countries! Also according to Publishing Trends, The Alchemist was to be found in the 6th place of world sales in 2003. Eleven Minutes topped all lists in the world, except for England, where it was in second place. The Zahir, published in 2005, was in third place of bestsellers according to Publishing Trends, after Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons.

The Alchemist was one of the most important literary phenomena of the 20th century. It reaches the first place in bestselling lists in 18 countries, and so far has sold 30 million copies.

The book has been praised by different personalities ranging from the Nobel Prize Kenzaburo Oe to the singer Madonna, who considers it one of her favorite books. It has equally inspired many projects – such as a musical in Japan, theatre plays in France, Belgium, USA, Turkey, Italy, Switzerland. It is also the theme of two symphonies (Italy and USA) and had its text illustrated by the famous French artist Moebius (author of the sceneries for he Fifth Element and Alien).

PAULO COELHO is:

Member of the Board of the Shimon Peres Institute for Peace

UNESCO special counselor for “Intercultural Dialogues and Spiritual Convergences”

Board Member of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship

Member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters

Major prizes and decorations

“I Premio Álava en el Corazón” (Spain 2006)

“Cruz do Mérito do Empreendedor Juscelino Kubitschek” (Brazil 2006)

“Wilbur Award”, presented by the Religion Communicators Council (USA 2006)

Kiklop Literary Award for The Zahir in the category “Hit of the Year” (Croatia 2006)

DirectGroup International Author Award (Germany 2005)

“Goldene Feder Award” (Germany 2005)

“The Budapest Prize” (Hungary 2005)

“Order of Honour of Ukraine” (Ukraine 2004)

“Order of St. Sophia” for contribution to revival of science and culture (Ukraine 2004)

“Nielsen Gold Book Award” for The Alchemist (UK 2004)

“Ex Libris Award” for Eleven Minutes (Serbia 2004)

Golden Bestseller Prize from the largest circulation daily “Večernje Novosti” (Serbia 2004)

“Best Fiction Corine International Award 2002” for The Alchemist (Germany 2002)

“Club of Budapest Planetary Arts Award 2002” as a recognition of his literary work (Germany 2002)

“Bambi 2001 Award” (Germany 2001)

“XXIII Premio Internazionale Fregene” (Italy 2001)

“Crystal Mirror Award” (Poland 2000)

“Chevalier de l’Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur” (France 1999)

“Crystal Award” World Economic Forum (1999)

“Golden Medal of Galicia” (Spain 1999)

Finalist for the “International IMPAC Literary Award” (Ireland 1997 and 2000)

“Comendador de Ordem do Rio Branco” (Brazil 1998)

“Golden Book” (Yugoslavia 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2004)

“Super Grinzane Cavour Book Award” (Italy 1996)

“Flaiano International Award” (Italy 1996)

“Knight of Arts and Letters” (France 1996)

“Grand Prix Litteraire Elle” (France 1995)

Highlights

PAULO COELHO entered he Guinness Book of Records as the author that signed more books in different editions (October 9th 2003, at the Frankfurt Book Fair).

A Norwegian community, Arendal, gave copies of The Alchemist to all its civil servants, as a way of stimulating a new type of thought.

Many MBA courses, such as the one from The Graduate School of Business of the University of Chicago recommends the reading of The Alchemist to its students. This book has equally been adopted in schools in France, Italy, Portugal, Brazil, Taiwan, USA, Spain, etc.

The book The Alchemist has been adopted in schools in more than 30 countries, offering special editions to students.

PAULO COELHO has managed to have three titles at the same time in bestselling lists in France, Brazil, Poland, Switzerland, Argentina, Greece, Croatia, and Russia.

The pope John Paulo II welcomed the author in the Vatican in 1998.

The World Economic Forum gave its most important prize to the author, the Crystal Award.

In March 2000, the French government gave to the author its most prestigious title “Chevalier de L’Ordre National de la Legion d’Honneur”

IN January 2001, Paulo Coelho became member of the board in the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. This foundation favors social projects.

The life of PAULO COELHO has already been the theme of documentaries for the Irish TV (Seven Days – a Journey with Paulo Coelho), Japanese (The road of Kumano in February, The Road of Santiago in September), People & Arts Channel ( Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist of Word), A&E Mundo, TV Prima, amongst others.

Paulo Coelho has now his own drink: chocolate chaud with orange. It is a special homage paid to him by the Hotel Le Bristol’s bar in Paris, which is a setting for some of the passages of his most recent novel The Zahir.

During the months of March, April, May and June, Paulo Coelho travelled to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his pilgrimage to Saint James of Compostella in 1986. He also held surprise book signings – announced one day in advance – in some cities along the way, to have a chance to meet his readers. Iinety days of pilgrimage the author travelled around the globe and took the famous Transiberrian train that took him to Vladivostok. During this experience Paulo Coelho launched his blog Walking the Path in order to share with his readers his impressions.

In 2006, PAULO COELHO launched a compilation of tales, opinions and ideas called Be Like a Flowing River, based on his weekly columns. This book will be launched in most countries only in 2008, since his new book The Witch of Portobello, will have a worldwide release in 2007.

 

The Alchemist (novel)

 

 

Author      

Paulo Coelho

Original title       

O Alquimista

Translator 

Alan R. Clarke

Country     

Brazil

Language   

Portuguese

Genre(s)    

Fiction

Publisher   

Harpertorch

Released    

1988

Media type

mass paperback

Pages

167 (Paperback)

The Alchemist (Portuguese: O Alquimista) is a bestseller that was but first published in Brazil in 1988 and is the most famous work of author Paulo Coelho. It is a symbolic story that urges its readers to follow their dreams.

Summary

In the prologue, an alchemist traveling in a caravan in an unspecified place and time recounts a fable that he read along the way. The story is a modified version of the myth of Narcissus. The twist in this version is that the lake in which Narcissus drowned wept for the death of Narcissus not because of his beauty, but because the lake could gaze at its own beauty in the eyes of the young boy.This idea is taken from a short prose-poem by Oscar Wilde called ‘The Disciple’.

Santiago, the protagonist, grew up with poor parents who had struggled their whole lives to send him to seminary. But Santiago had a strong desire to travel the world, and so his father allowed him to use his inheritance to buy a flock of sheep.

As a shepherd, he spent several years traveling the countryside of Andalusia in southern Spain, enjoying the care-free and adventurous life of a wanderer. As the story begins, we learn that a year ago Santiago met the beautiful daughter of a merchant in a town he is soon to revisit. Even though he spent only a few hours talking with this girl, his strong feelings for her make him question his life as a shepherd and make him consider the merits of a more settled life.

When he arrives in the town where the girl lives he first decides to go to a gypsy fortune-teller to help him decipher a recurring dream that he had been having. Santiago always dreamt that a child was playing with his sheep and then took him by the hand and brought him to the Pyramids of Egypt to show him the location of a hidden treasure. But Santiago always woke up just before the child was going to reveal to him the exact location of the treasure. The gypsy said that he has to go because if it is a child that tells, it exists.

The boy at first did not mind what the gypsy had said but when an old man, who call himself Melchizedeck, the king of Salem, told him that it is his personal legend or his purpose to live. Garland Hackett told him a wonderful story about a man who wanted to find happiness. Santiago decided to travel in Africa. He sold his sheep and went to Tangier. But in Tangier, he was robbed. Losing hope, he decided to walk and up in a hill, he found a crystal shop. Business tamed when the nearby city developed. When the boy entered the shop, he cleaned the dusty crystal glasses in exchange for some food to eat. As he was cleaning two customers entered the store and bought some crystal glasses. The Arab merchant was glad with what happened so he hired the boy. Santiago learns that every person’s fate is written.

After almost a year, the boy decided to leave the crystal shop since he has enough money to buy a flock of sheep twice the number of the ones he had before. But he never bought a single sheep. He decided to fulfill his personal legend – to find his treasure.

He joined the caravan going to the desert where the Pyramids are found. In the caravan, the boy met the Englishman who for 20 years have searched for true alchemists. The Englishman has so many books on alchemy that are unusual to the boy. In the caravan, he learned so many things.

The caravan rolls on toward the oasis. As the Englishman attempts to observe the desert and learn its language, Santiago reads the Englishman’s books and learns about alchemy. The Englishman tells him that the goal of alchemists is to purify metal by heating it for many years until all its individual properties are burned. After a while, he stopped reading and returned the books to the Englishman.

When they arrived in the oasis, they were welcomed and told that they can’t proceed because of the tribal wars.He helped the Englishman look for the alchemist. And there, he met Fatima where he encountered love at first sight. Fatima was a desert woman and therefore understands that Santiago on the oasis through a vision he had. but the alchemist warns him that in the future he would lose his ability to see omens as a result he would lose his position as the councilor and he would regret his decision of not perusing his destiny that is, finding the treasure.

 Notable Passages

 

Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself, and that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.

 

It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.

 

When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it…

 

To realize one’s destiny is a person’s only obligation.

 

God only rarely reveals the future. When he does so, it is for one reason: it’s a future that was written so as to be altered.

 

It’s not what enters men’s mouths that’s evil, it’s what comes out of their mouths that is.

 

The secret of happiness is to see all the marvels of the world, and never to forget the drops of oil on the spoon.

 

Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.

 

…at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the worlds greatest lie.

 

…there is one great truth on this planet: whoever you are, or whatever it is that you do, when you really want something, its because that desire originated in the soul of the universe. Its your mission on earth.

 

We have to take advantage when luck is on our side, and do as much to help it as its doing to help us. Its called the principle of favorability. Or beginners luck.

 

No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn’t know it.

 

One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.

 

A cloud does not know why it moves in just such a direction and at such speed. It feels an impulsion … this is the place to go now. But the sky knows the reasons and the patterns behind all clouds, and you will know, too, when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond the horizons.

 

“My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer,” the boy confides to the alchemist one night as they look up at a moonless night. “Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself,” the alchemist replies. “And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.”

 

Similarities with other works

The plot draws largely from an English legend, “The Pedlar of Swaffham”, which has been also used by Leo Perutz in “By Night under the Stone Bridge” and Borges’ Tale of Two Dreamers, collected in Universal History of Infamy. An even earlier possible source is in the work of the 13th century Persian poet Jalal al-Din Rumi, who in one of the stories of his Mathanawi (written between 1260 and 1273) tells an almost identical tale. In a modern translation the story (told in verse) is titled “In Baghdad, Dreaming of Cairo: In Cairo, Dreaming of Baghdad”. (The Essential Rumi, transl. Coleman Barks, New York: HarperCollins, 1995) In it, a poor man in Baghdad who inherits a lot of money and land only to squander it quickly and become poor again has a dream, in which a voice tells him to go to Cairo and dig in a certain spot to find his wealth. When he gets there, while wandering the streets and begging for coins he is picked up by a night patrol. When he tells his story to the patrolman, the latter calls him a fool and tells him of a similar dream (which he had dismissed) about a place in Baghdad, describing the very street and house in which the poor man lives.

Many have compared The Alchemist to Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, a children’s book about another boy, the Prince, who leaves his home in search of greater things, learning valuable lessons about life and love on the way. It is interesting to note that much of The Little Prince also takes place in the desert.

There are many parallels to Siddhartha’s journey in Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. They both develop a spiritual aspect being alone early in life. Later, just like Siddhartha on his journey, Santiago has to become a business man; his ideas succeed in making him wealthy, but he is apart from the business of business. The Alchemist parallels the boatman in Siddhartha, who, after transporting Siddhartha across the river, sends him on his way to follow his destiny, knowing he will return. The love story develops and ends differently; Santiago has a different Personal Legend in that aspect. Both are “spiral” stories with the same places visited more than once.

Some have also compared and contrasted this story and the journey of Santiago to the biblical account of the Prodigal Son.

Style

The style of writing is simplistic, with correlations to that of The Little Prince, fairy tales, or spiritual writings.

Translations

Originally written in Portuguese, it has, as of 2004, been translated into fifty-six languages, and has sold more than 40 million copies in more than 150 countries, making it one of the best selling books of all time.

In China & Australia it has gained particular success. The Herald Sun listed it as one of the five most commonly stolen books from Melbourne’s book shops.

In the foreword, Coelho explains that this is a symbolic version of his experience described in The Pilgrimage.

Adaptation

A motion picture version is in development at Warner Brothers with Robert Schwartz and Stephen Storer producing, although Coelho has stated on his website that he has tried to buy back the rights to the film for the sum of $5 million.

The English audio book version is read by actor Jeremy Irons.

Overview

Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy, has a dream about finding a treasure in the pyramids of Egypt. A gypsy woman and an old man claiming to be a mysterious king advise him to pursue it. “To realize one’s destiny is a person’s only obligation,” the old man tells him. “And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”

With the courage of an adventurer, Santiago sells his sheep and travels to Tangiers in Africa. After a thief steals his money, Santiago takes a job with a crystal merchant who unwittingly teaches Santiago important lessons for his long journey ahead. After working at the crystal shop for a year, Santiago earns enough money to cover his losses and return home. But then something unexpected happens. On a desert caravan, Santiago meets an intriguing Englishman. The Englishman’s passion for knowledge and his relentless quest to uncover the secrets of alchemy inspire Santiago to pursue his own dream of finding the treasure. As the Englishman searches for the two hundred year old alchemist who resides in the desert oasis, Santiago falls in love with a young woman, Fatima. Exposed to the greatest and eternal alchemy of all–love–Santiago thinks he has found the treasure. But the greatest test of all is yet to come. With the help of the alchemist, Santiago completes the last leg of his journey–dangerous and infused with discoveries of the most profound kind–to find that the treasure he was looking for was waiting for him in the place where he least expected.

This story, timeless and entertaining, exotic yet simple, breaks down the journey we all take to find the most meaningful treasures in our lives into steps that are at once natural and magical. It is about the faith, power, and courage we all have within us to pursue the intricate path of a Personal Legend, a path charted by the mysterious magnet of destiny but obscured by distractions. Santiago shows how along the way we learn to trust our hearts, read the seemingly inconspicuous signs, and understand that as we look to fulfill a dream, it looks to find us just the same, if we let it.

Recommendations for discussion

1. Paulo Coelho once said that alchemy is all about pursuing our spiritual quest in the physical world as it was given to us. It is the art of transmuting the reality into something sacred, of mixing the sacred and the profane. With this in mind, can you define your Personal Legend? At what time in your life were you first able to act on it? What was your “beginner’s luck”? Did anything prevent you from following it to conclusion? Having read The Alchemist, do you know what inner resources you need to continue the journey?     

2. One of the first major diversions from Santiago’s journey was the theft of his money in Tangiers, which forced him into taking a menial job with the crystal merchant. There, Santiago learned many lessons on everything from the art of business to the art of patience. Of all these, which lessons were the most crucial to the pursuit of his Personal Legend?

 3. When he talked about the pilgrimage to Mecca, the crystal merchant argued that having a dream is more important than fulfilling it, which is what Santiago was trying to do. Do you agree with Santiago’s rationale or crystal merchant’s?

4. The Englishman, whom Santiago meets when he joins the caravan to the Egyptian pyramids, is searching for “a universal language, understood by everybody.” What is that language? According to the Englishman, what are the parallels between reading and alchemy? How does the Englishman’s search for the alchemist compares to Santiago’s search for a treasure? How did the Englishman and Santiago feel about each other?

5. The alchemist tells Santiago “you don’t have to understand the desert: all you have to do is contemplate a simple grain of sand, and you will see in it all the marvels of creation.” With this in mind, why do you think the alchemist chose to befriend Santiago, though he knew that the Englishman was the one looking for him? What is the meaning of two dead hawks and the falcon in the oasis? At one point the alchemist explains to Santiago the secret of successfully turning metal into gold. How does this process compare to finding a Personal Legend?

 6. Why did Santiago have to go through the dangers of tribal wars on the outskirts of the oasis in order to reach the pyramids? At the very end of the journey, why did the alchemist leave Santiago alone to complete it?

7. Earlier in the story, the alchemist told Santiago “when you possess great treasures within you, and try to tell others of them, seldom are you believed.” At the end of the story, how did this simple lesson save Santiago’s life? How did it lead him back to the treasure he was looking for?

8.The alchemist (in the form of Melchizedek) says to Santiago, “When you really want something to happen, the whole universe conspires so that your wish comes true.”  Write or create a response which captures a time in your own life when you had a wish, and you felt that the whole universe conspired for OR against you.  What happened to make you feel that way?  Did your wish come true?

9. Santiago is guided by his dreams and by omens which appear to him throughout his journey.  Write about a noteworthy dream you have had, or about an omen which guided you somehow during the course of your life.  How did you interpret the dream or omen, and how did it influence your life?

10.  Santiago is told  that “people are afraid to pursue their most important dreams because they feel they don’t deserve them, or that they’ll be unable to achieve them.”  Create a written or artistic response to the following:   Do you have a goal or dream which intimidates you?  Why do you feel unworthy or fearful of it?  What practical steps might you take to make the goal more accessible or easier to accomplish?  Do you believe some dreams should simply remain as dreams?  Why/why not?

The Alchemist’s Terms:

The Soul of the World,

 Philosopher’s Stone,

 Elixir of Life,

The Language of the World,

 Principle of Favorability

The Alchemist: A Fable about Following Your Dream

“The Alchemist” is a global phenomenon, selling over 30 million copies worldwide. This exciting new edition includes exclusive content, such as a new forward to the book by the author, an interview with Paulo Coelho, and much more, providing an in-depth look at this much-loved title. Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its readers forever. This is such a book – a magical fable about learning to listen to your heart, read the omens strewn along life’s path and, above, all follow your dreams. This is the magical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who dreams of travelling the world in search of a worldly treasure as fabulous as any ever found. From his home in Spain, he journeys to the markets of Tangiers, and from there into the Egyptian desert, where a fateful encounter with the alchemist awaits him. With Paulo Coelho’s visionary blend of spirituality, magical realism and folklore, “The Alchemist” is a story with the power to inspire nations and change people’s lives. The Alchemist is written in a fable format. What is a fable, and why would Coelho use it to tell his story?  Generally speaking, fables use recognizable, simple characters and settings in order to illustrate a simple truth about life or humaature.  What is it that Coelho attempts to teach?

Even though you may not initially understand some of the unusual terminology in the story (Soul of the World, for example), its  themes  are  ones which are  probably familiar to you.  Can you think of some old, familiar proverbs or songs that capture some of these ideas?  For example, think about what ends up being more important for Santiago—the journey….or the destination???  Where is it that Santiago eventually finds happiness?  People have been writing and singing about the answers to these questions for years!

The novel integrates ideas and philosophies of many faiths and historical periods.  Many of these ideas concern the pursuit of truth, one’s intended destiny and the attainment of personal happiness.   Coelho refers to these combined elements as one’s “Personal Legend.”   He tells the story of Santiago in order to teach us how we may find and live out our own Personal Legends.  These ideas, though, have been explored since ancient times in one form or another by countless faiths and peoples.  Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Taoism, Christianity, Judaism, countless  tribal cultures, in addition to ancient and modern philosophers, all attempt to define the idea of one’s Personal Legend (though they may call it by different names), and all subscribe paths to achieving personal fulfillment.  Thus, although the legend is about no faith or philosophy in particular, it is about all faiths and philosophies.

Alchemy is the medieval “science” of transforming rocks into gold.  Alchemy plays an important part in the plot (literal level) of the story, but it also becomes a symbol, or allegorical device, in the legend (figurative level).  Coelho is really using characters, events and symbols as tools to show us how to achieve spiritual alchemy. In other words,  how do we find or recognize the “gold,” — our Personal Legend–   in  the “rocks” of  the everyday, ordinary, simple details of our lives?   As Santiago discovers, sometimes the “gold” is not faraway, not glittery,  not exotic, and not complicated, but it may require a journey of courage, faith and perseverance to discover what it is and where it is hidden.

In an interview, Paulo Coelho talks about “Four Pillars of Alchemy– four important “tips” for finding one’s Personal Legend:

1.     One must believe in “The Soul of the World.”  The ancient Latin term for this concept is “anima mundi.”  In short, this idea suggests that everything in the world is interconnected; that is, what one does affects everything else, from the smallest grain of sand to the largest whale, and vice versa.  Writers and thinkers such as Plato, Walt Whitman and Khalil Ghibran have attempted to illustrate this interconnectedness in their works.

2.     One must listen to the voice of the heart.  Coelho suggests that sometimes we must follow our feelings and intuitions, even if we do not fully understand them.  Through feeling one gains wisdom.

3.     One must be faithful to one’s dreams, for they both test and reward us.  In other words,  the path to achieving one’s Personal Legend may not be an easy one, but we must endure the tests in order to gain the rewards.

4.     One must “surrender oneself to the universe.”  Coelho suggests that we must allow ourselves to be open to recognizing and learning from omens and signs which come our way.   

Questions for Novel Study:

1.     How does Santiago’s father react when his son tells him that he wants to travel?

2.     To what degree is his father’s observation about travelers (“They come in search of new things, but when they leave they are basically the same people they were when they arrived.”) true about Santiago?

3.     How does the King assist Santiago in recognizing omens?  When does Santiago use this help?

4.     How do Santiago’s thoughts and perceptions about himself and the world begin to change on pp. 42-44?  Describe three things that Santiago sees now that he had never noticed before.

5.     What lessons does Santiago learn by working at the crystal shop?  Why do you think Coelho chose crystal?  How does the crystal merchant’s explanation for not taking the pilgrimage to Mecca (p.55) highlight the difference between Santiago and the merchant?  What effect does the merchant say Santiago has had on him?

6.     The Englishman and his goals are described on pp.65-70.  What is he looking for? What does he demonstrate to Santiago that he already knows?  On p. 78, he says that the progress made at the crystal shop is an example of  the principle of the Soul of the World. What does he mean?  How does he define this?  How does he connect the idea to the relationship between the caravan and the desert?

7.     The oasis is described in great detail.  How does its lushness, laughter and color reflect what Santiago finds there?  Where else in the story does Coelho provide details about the physical setting in order to lend more meaning to the events which occur there?  

8.     During his trek through the desert with the alchemist, Santiago is told of many basic truths.  The alchemist says,”There is only one way to learn.  It’s through action. Everything you need to know you have learned through your journey”(p.125).  What are some of the things Santiago has learned through action?

9.     Why did Santiago have to go through the dangers of  the tribal wars on the outskirts of the oasis in order to reach the Pyramids? At this point, the boy remembers the old proverb: ”The darkest hour of the night came just before the dawn.”  How does this apply to his situation now?  At the end of the journey, why did the alchemist leave Santiago alone to complete it?

10. Earlier in the story, the alchemist told Santiago “when you possess great treasures within you, and try to tell others of them, seldom are you believed.”  At the end of the story, how did this simple lesson change Santiago’s life?  How did it lead him back to the treasure he was looking for?

Topics for Research:

What is alchemy?  What processes were involved?  Who performed it and why? Who were the famous alchemists of the medieval period?

Explore the concept of Soul of the World as different religions and philosophies define it.

“The Alchemist” is a novel that may appeal to everybody, because we can all identify with Santiago: all of us have dreams, and are dying for somebody to tell us that they may come true. The novel skillfully combines words of wisdom, philosophy, and simplicity of meaning and language, which makes it particularly readable and accounts for its bestselling status.

Film adaptations

Kajol and Karan Johar at the launch of The Alchemist in India

Coelho said he has been reluctant in selling rights to his books. He believed that a book has a “life of its own inside the reader’s mind”, and seldom did he find an adaptation that lived up to the book. Despite this, with time, Coelho decided to open up the possibility.

In 2003, Warner Bros. bought the rights to the film adaptation of The Alchemist. The project stalled and the movie never materialized, reportedly because of problems with the script. At one point, the script had a battle sequence with 10,000 soldiers, which was “not what the book is about”. Reportedly, Coelho offered a US$2m to Warner Bros. to buy back the film rights to The Alchemist.

 

During the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, Harvey Weinstein announced that he had bought the rights to the film and will serve as its producer. Laurence Fishburne is set to direct, and to play the eponymous character. It will have a reported budget of $60 million. Weinstein, who rarely personally produces movies, stated that “My loyalty is not to Laurence [Fishburne], my loyalty is not to me, my loyalty is not to anyone other than Paulo Coelho.” Coelho added “I am very happy that my book will be filmed in the way I intended it to be and I hope the spirit and simplicity of my work will be preserved. I am excited my friend Laurence Fishburne and Harvey Weinstein will be working together.” The film is scheduled for release in 2014.

The Alchemist Paulo Coelho

Dreams, symbols, signs, and adventure follow the reader like echoes of ancient wise voices in “The Alchemist”, a novel that combines an atmosphere of Medieval mysticism with the song of the desert. With this symbolic masterpiece Coelho states that we should not avoid our destinies, and urges people to follow their dreams, because to find our “Personal Myth” and our mission on Earth is the way to find “God”, meaning happiness, fulfillment, and the ultimate purpose of creation.     The novel tells the tale of Santiago, a boy who has a dream and the courage to follow it. After listening to “the signs” the boy ventures in his personal, Ulysses-like journey of exploration and self-discovery, symbolically searching for a hidden treasure located near the pyramids in Egypt.     When he decides to go, his father’s only advice is “Travel the world until you see that our castle is the greatest, and our women the most beautiful”. In his journey, Santiago sees the greatness of the world, and meets all kinds of exciting people like kings and alchemists. However, by the end of the novel, he discovers that “treasure lies where your heart belongs”, and that the treasure was the journey itself, the discoveries he made, and the wisdom he acquired.     “The Alchemist”, is an exciting novel that bursts with optimism; it is the kind of novel that tells you that everything is possible as long as you really want it to happen. That may sound like an oversimplified version of new-age philosophy and mysticism, but as Coelho states “simple things are the most valuable and only wise people appreciate them”.     As the alchemist himself says, when he appears to Santiago in the form of an old king “when you really want something to happen, the whole universe conspires so that your wish comes true”. This is the core of the novel’s philosophy and a motif that echoes behind Coelho’s writing all through “The Alchemist”. And isn’t it true that the whole of humankind desperately wants to believe the old king when he says that the greatest lie in the world is that at some point we lose the ability to control our lives, and become the pawns of fate. Perhaps this is the secret of Coelho’s success: that he tells people what they want to hear, or rather that he tells them that what they wish for but never thought possible could even be probable.

Coelho also suggests that those who do not have the courage to follow their ” Personal Myth”, are doomed to a life of emptiness, misery, and unfulfillment. Fear of failure seems to be the greatest obstacle to happiness. As the old crystal-seller tragically confesses: ” I am afraid that great disappointment awaits me, and so I prefer to dream”. This is where Coelho really captures the drama of man, who sacrifices fulfillment to conformity, who knows he can achieve greatness but denies to do so, and ends up living a life of void.     It is interesting to see that Coelho presents the person who denies to follow his dream as the person who denies to see God, and that “every happy person carries God within him”. However, only few people choose to follow the road that has been made for them, and find God while searching for their destiny, and their mission on earth.     Consequently, is Coelho suggesting that the alchemists found God while searching for the elixir of life and the philosopher’s stone? What is certain is that the symbolism of the text is a parallel to the symbolism and the symbolic language of alchemism, and similarly the symbolism of dreams is presented as ” God’s language”.     It is also symbolic that Santiago finds his soul-mate, and the secrets of wisdom in the wilderness of the desert. The “wilderness” is a symbol that has been used by many great writers e.g.. Austen in “Mansfield Park”, and Shakespeare in “King Lear”. In the desert, Santiago meets his “twin-soul” and discovers that love is the core of existence and creation. As Coelho explains, when we love, we always try to improve ourselves, and that’s when everything is possible. The subject of love inspires a beautiful lyricism in Coelho’s writing: ” I love you because the whole universe conspired for me to come close to you.”     “The Alchemist” is a novel that may appeal to everybody, because we can all identify with Santiago: all of us have dreams, and are dying for somebody to tell us that they may come true. The novel skillfully combines words of wisdom, philosophy, and simplicity of meaning and language, which makes it particularly readable and accounts for its bestselling status.

What Makes a Literary Masterpiece

A literary masterpiece is one that can withstand a test of time. Time is not only the simple passage of years, but also, with the changing times comes a change of ideals, mindsets, practices, structures of government, also changes in laws and thought patterns of people as a whole. Classic literature must have a theme, which remains thought provoking beyond and despite any differences in the structure of the daily world. There are certain topics that hold true and fast to humans as a race that are not affected by these daily differences.

The ancient Mesopotamian tale Gilgamesh for example, includes themes of power, friendship, love, devotion, honor, grief, loss, and many more can be identified as well as understood even today. Although this tale was written centuries ago in ancient Mesopotamia in a society that structured their daily lives far differently from modern day society, there are still themes that run parallel with core beliefs of modern Americans. When Gilgamesh loses Enkidu and he bitterly laments the loss of his friend. “How can I rest, how can I be at peace? Despair is in my heart. What my brother is now, that shall I be when I am dead,” Any member of modern America voice an example of a person whom they have lost to death and they have felt the same pain, the same resentment, and the same angry need for justice that is exemplified by the King Gilgamesh.

A literary masterpiece is one which speaks not only of specific events that occurred to a single character, but instead masterpieces create characters who are resounding, characters who are dimensional and who hold traits that remain true of people of modern society. Characters in a masterpiece are memorable and clearly defined in their personalities so that their distinct nature can be used as a sort of template of qualities that can be compared and contrasted to anyone of any time period in history.

Characters of a masterpiece are not created and fueled solely by their particular circumstances; instead, their behaviors are directed by the core of their beliefs and can be discussed apart from the situation itself. Arjuna, a character present in the Bhagavad-Gita questions his own moral judgment against that of his god. The questioning nature of his character and the strong moral guidance that directs his actions are housed in the core of his nature that would guide him any period, or situation this character is placed. The careful, calculating and conscience driven personality of this and other masterpiece characters is one that can be discussed in light of any other situation in any culture. “What defines a man deep in contemplation whose insight and thought are sure? How would he speak? How would he sit? How would he move?” The questions, which are put forth in this classic work of literature by this classic character Arjuna, are ones that have been discussed throughout the centuries following the tale and are still redefined and revisited daily in modern day America.

Philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Confucius debated issues comparable to this one. Modern psychologists and philosophers continue to recalculate these moral debates on a variety of different scales and in reference to each new and modern change in society. As long as humans survive on this earth, they will continue to question, define and ponder the world they in which they live and continue to crave the texts of the past which prove to them that all societies and men throughout history, spanning all religions and all cultures similarly wonder at the same types of issues.

 Masterpieces are those that weave a thread of commonality that links together people from any society and any time period due to the presence of topics common to all humanity. A literary masterpiece is one that can withstand a test of time. Time is not only the simple passage of years, but also, with the changing times comes a change of ideals, mindsets, practices, structures of government, also changes in laws and thought patterns of people as a whole.

 Classic literature must have a theme, which remains thought provoking beyond and despite any differences in the structure of the daily world. There are certain topics that hold true and fast to humans as a race that are not affected by these daily differences.

The ancient Mesopotamian tale of Gilgamesh for example, includes themes of power, friendship, love, devotion, honor, grief, loss, and many more can be identified as well as understood even today. Although this tale was written centuries ago in ancient Mesopotamia in a society that structured their daily lives far differently from modern day society, there are still themes that run parallel with core beliefs of modern Americans. When Gilgamesh loses Enkidu and he bitterly laments the loss of his friend. “How can I rest, how can I be at peace? Despair is in my heart. What my brother is now, that shall I be when I am dead,” Any member of modern America voice an example of a person whom they have lost to death and they have felt the same pain, the same resentment, and the same angry need for justice that is exemplified by the King Gilgamesh.

A literary masterpiece is one which speaks not only of specific events that occurred to a single character, but instead masterpieces create characters who are resounding, characters who are dimensional and who hold traits that remain true of people of modern society. Characters in a masterpiece are memorable and clearly defined in their personalities so that their distinct nature can be used as a sort of template of qualities that can be compared and contrasted to anyone of any time period in history.

 Characters of a masterpiece are not created and fueled solely by their particular circumstances; instead, their behaviors are directed by the core of their beliefs and can be discussed apart from the situation itself. Arjuna, a character present in the Bhagavad-Gita questions his own moral judgment against that of his god. The questioning nature of his character and the strong moral guidance that directs his actions are housed in the core of his nature that would guide him any period, or situation this character is placed. The careful, calculating and conscience driven personality of this and other masterpiece characters is one that can be discussed in light of any other situation in any culture.

 “What defines a man deep in contemplation whose insight and thought are sure? How would he speak? How would he sit? How would he move?” The questions, which are put forth in this classic work of literature by this classic character Arjuna, are ones that have been discussed throughout the centuries following the tale and are still redefined and revisited daily in modern day America. Philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Confucius debated issues comparable to this one. Modern psychologists and philosophers continue to recalculate these moral debates on a variety of different scales and in reference to each new and modern change in society.

As long as humans survive on this earth, they will continue to question, define and ponder the world they in which they live and continue to crave the texts of the past which prove to them that all societies and men throughout history, spanning all religions and all cultures similarly wonder at the same types of issues. Masterpieces are those that weave a thread of commonality that links together people from any society and any time period due to the presence of topics common to all humanity.

Literature Major Concentrations

 

The purpose of the upper-division area of concentration is to help students shape a coherent program of study. The department provides several defined concentrations, described below. For all concentrations except national/transnational literatures, texts may be read in the original or in translation.

National/Transnational Literatures These concentrations examine literature within the framework of particular languages or national and regional traditions. National/transnational concentrations require that texts be read in the original language.

English-Language Literatures The study of American and British literature, as well as literatures of other English-speaking peoples around the world.

French Literature The study of French and Francophone literatures, languages, and cultural practices of France, Africa, and the Caribbean.

German Literature The study of the literature, language, and cultural practices of the German-speaking areas of central Europe including Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

Greek and Latin literatures The study of the literature, languages, and cultural practices of ancient Greece and Rome. Students may choose to concentrate in Greek or Latin or both.

Italian Literature The study of Italian literature, language, and cultural practices from the Middle Ages to the present.

Spanish/Latin American/Latino Literatures The study of literatures, language, and cultural practices of Spain, Latin America, and Latino populations in the United States.

Creative Writing The concentration in Creative Writing offers a sequence of workshops, from introductory through advanced levels, in both poetry and fiction. Creative Writing is the only Literature concentration that is selective. Interested students are required to take at least one lower-division workshop at UC Santa Cruz before applying to the Creative Writing concentration.  For more information, see: Creative Writing Concentration.

Modern Literary Studies The study of literature of the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. This concentration examines ways in which modernity in general and literary modernism and postmodernism in particular emerge and develop in different countries and cultures.

Pre- and Early Modern Studies The interdisciplinary study of literatures and cultures from antiquity through the early eighteenth century, especially in Europe. This concentration includes the study of popular culture and everyday life as well as readings in masterpieces of classical, medieval, early modern (Renaissance), and neo-classical literature.

World Literature and Cultural Studies The study of literature and cultural production both within a global context and within specific histories and economies. Courses move beyond the literary text to include nonverbal forms of representation such as social movements and everyday life practices.

Modern American Literature

A.  Spiritual unrest and skepticism dominate the early part of American thought.

1.  Such unrest is traced to the Darwin who brought into question the divine spark in humanity.

2.  Skepticism is based on the miserable life which so many Americans seemingly had to live.

a.  Poverty was everywhere.

b.  Life seemed to have settled into a humdrum existence characterized by work and conformity.

c.  In other words, life seemed to resemble today.

B.  The United States had been altered by urbanization, industrialization, immigration, and technology.

1.  Telephones and electricity changed American homes.

2.  A verbal, visual, and musical culture centered around the radio, phonograph, and cinema began to dominate American creativity.

3.  The result is a creative culture that is centered as much on instantaneous gratification as on thought.

4.  Realism combines with a kind of romanticism based on the desire to be sensually satisfied instantaneously.

C.  The most powerful technological influence was the automobile.

1.  Millions of jobs became dependent on the automobile.

2.  Cities changed as people moved outside inner cities since they could now “drive” to work.

3.  Individual Americans became mobile enough that all parts of the country became accessible.

4.  The result is that there is no more “wilderness” in America; every place becomes accessible as a “vacation spot” and, as a result, the concept of the nature as something to be conquered changes to a concept of nature as a toy, something to be used for one’s own gratification.

5.  Americans preserved nature more when they feared it.

D.  The 1920s saw a great struggle over such concerns as personal freedom, social permissiveness, the pursuit of pleasure, and the results of new affluence.

1.  Traditionalist Americans—believing in the work ethic, social conformity, duty, and respectability—attempted to control social and private behavior according to a model of white, Protestant, small town virtues.

2.  Arrayed against them were newly articulate groups of immigrants, minorities, youth, women, and artists arguing for a diversity of lifestyles.

3.  The passage of the 18th Amendment to prohibit the manufacture and sale of alcohol was countered by the passage of the 19th Amendment which gave women the right to vote.

4.  Women made many social and political changes.

a.  They became voters.

b.  Many entered higher education institutions to become professionals.

c.  Many found employment outside the home, not to supplement fathers’ and husbands’ incomes, but to assert their own economic independence.

i.  Ironically, many of the male writers who spoke up for self-expression and individualism did not extend their ideas of freedom to women.

ii.  Pound, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, and T. S. Eliot all interpreted the “New Woman” as an ominous sign of social breakdown.

5.  African Americans still struggled against segregation.

a.  Many had moved North to find as much discrimination in New York as in Atlanta.

b.  Despite the failure for white America to recognize African American culture, it was alive and well and growing among the African American community.

c.  Much of that culture dealt with the struggle against a society which saw more than 10% of its citizens as cultural, social, and intellectual “inferiors.”

E.  The most important intellectual development in the period between the war was the growth of modern science.

1.   The chief impact on cultural America was science as metaphor for a changing world.

2.  Although people didn’t understand Einstein’s theory of relativity or Bohr’s quantum mechanics theory, they could tell from their very names that scientists saw less certainty and more change in the universe than had nineteenth century scientists whose procedures of labeling and classifying had assumed stability iature.

3.  Distinctions between matter and energy, between observer and observed, and between time and space were blurred at the frontiers of scientific thinking.

F.  Philosophically the two thinkers who ideas had the greatest impact on the period were Freud and Marx.

1.  Freud’s concept of the repressed traumas in the unconscious that could only be freed through analysis is an important element in literature which is, by nature, an analysis of the human condition and unconscious.

2.  Marx’s concept that the root cause of all behavior was economic and that the leading feature of economic life was the division of society into antagonist classes based on the means of production was the opposite theory to Freud’s.

3.  Freud says that internal causes motivate human behavior; Marx says the motivations are external.

4.  However, both theories support a concept of determinism which is contrary to the American belief in free-will and the ability to shape one’s own destiny.

5.  Writers saw Marx’s and Freud’s theories as a means of explaining how such horrible things as war, poverty, and Depression could occur.

6.  Humans are not divine in either theory.

G.  The Great Depression, begun in 1929, ended an American period of affluence.

1.  For American thinkers, it represented all the dangers they were warning about:  moral lassitude, too strict morals; too much intellectual freedom and not enough intellectual freedom; too much prosperity and not enough prosperity for everyone.

2.  In short, everyone found someone else to blame for the Depression.

H.  World War II had two profound effects on America and its culture:  it ended the Depression and it introduced the idea of total annihilation.

1.  The War ended both the economic and the social Depression by focusing American energies on a new pursuit:  the defeat of fascism.

2.  Evil had a face, and it was German and Japanese.

3.  However, the end of the war and the deaths from the Holocaust and the atomic bomb also pointed out just how capable humanity was of destroying itself.

I.  Literature reflected these time periods by dealing with the growing alienation that humans felt in the face of mechanization and technology.

1.  One response was in the poets who took two different approaches.

a.  One approach was like Robert Frost’s who saw nature as a means of reinterpreting the human situation.

b.  Such poets found a beauty in the world—if humanity had the ability to look beyond its loneliness and sense of loss to that beauty.

2.  A second response by poets was to emphasize the loneliness through the interior monologues or character descriptions that focused on individuals’ sense of alienation from each other and the world.

a.  Clearly Robinson belongs in this category.

b.  However, they did want to point out that human alienation is largely dependent on the individuals’ choices.

3.  Novelists and short story writers looked at both the sources for human isolation and the means of avoiding that isolation.

a.  For example, Cather emphasizes the need to take responsibility for one’s life rather than simply lying back and suffering.

b.  Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Sinclair Lewis, Steinbeck, etc., all wrote sympathetically about the human situation in light of the heartlessness of industry and capitalism.

c.  However, they also found a sense of optimism in that people do have the capability to take control of their lives and turn them into something beautiful.

4.  Both prose and poetry was highly symbolic.

a.  Poets particularly found meaning in the specific object or action, as in William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Hilda Dolittle, and T. S. Eliot.

b.  Even prose writers would focus on the significant action as defining the human situation, as in Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Sinclair Lewis.

c.  The idea is that within the microcosm of the specific object and action, there is the macrocosmic world.

It is a question that both students and teachers of literature are faced with regularly: does literature matter anymore? Why bother studying literature, a discipline that, to the world outside the university, is seen as a hobby whose function, at best, is to instill critical and writing skills that could be applied in a �real world� (i.e., non-literary) position? In the university, literature and the rest of the humanities are under fire to justify their purpose and their demands for university money in competition with seemingly more practical and lucrative disciplines. Mark William Roche in his book Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century  sketches out not only a defense of literature but a call to the practitioners of the discipline to return to a less discipline-specific, more broadly humanistic criticism of literature.

Does literature matter in the 21st century? Roche poses this question in his title, but the more compelling problem his book articulates is whether literature exists  in an increasingly technological, utilitarian and alienating age. Texts abound, to be sure, but Roche maintains that literature is an essential quality in writing that links its readers to the ideas and spirit of the world around them. The pursuit of literature is an ethical pursuit, says Roche, not because literature is compelled to make didactic claims upon its readers, but because it forces its readers out of the isolation and solipsism created by the modern age.

Indeed, in the second chapter, Roche claims that literature �makes visible for us the absolute� and this claim is the basis for both his harsh words about the current state of poststructuralist criticism�especially cultural studies and deconstruction�and his assertion that literature, particularly the works of �great literature� that are often under fire in the canon wars, is the ideal discipline for posing questions about humanism and humanity in an increasing technological age. In the technological, utilitarian and alienating world in which we live, studying literature may well be the optimal way to keep us connected to each other and to our environment.

Roche makes his argument about the value of literature alongside an assertion that postructuralist criticism, as both a scholarly and a pedagogical method, is inadequate. If literature connects us spiritually, emotionally, and ethically to our world, then poststructuralist schools of criticism, with their distrust of frameworks and metanarratives, their insistence on relativistic ways of reading and their privileging of �text� over �literature,� has mimicked the alienation of the modern age, while taking very few effective steps to overcome it. For this reason, Roche claims, we need to re-evaluate our poetics of criticism. While he is careful to qualify his argument, reiterating that some poststructuralist criticism has intrepretive value (albeit in a limited fashion), Roche stresses that the failure of this criticism is its dismissal of what he sees as the eternal and ethical in literature. By distrusting the large assumptions and frameworks that foreground ethics and by reducing literature to a cultural construct, Roche claims that poststructuralism suffers greatly from a misreading of what literature is.

The book is divided into three sections. The first, �Moral Principles of Literature and Literary Criticism� is the most provocative part of the book, since Roche, with his claim that literature functions primarily (though not exclusively) as a moral teacher, teeters at times on the brink of the reactionary criticism that is often so distasteful to literary scholars. Roche, to his credit, emphasizes that literature’s value as an arbiter of morality lies in its ability to raise both moral and aesthetic questions in its readers and, echoing the works of such Victorian writers as John Ruskin and John Henry Newman and hearkening back to Kant, argues that the aesthetic components of a great work of literature, namely style and form, enable the reader to refine his or her taste and thus pave the way for a consideration of the ethical lessons he believes are present within a literary work. He in fact goes into great detail discussing the different aesthetic components that make up a work of art�literally the good, the bad and the ugly�stressing that a work of art is an autonomous work which is nonetheless connected, even in an oblique way, to the world in which it is created. Moreover, following the writings of Heidegger, he argues that what makes literature art and what makes art a worthwhile pursuit of study is the presence of an ineffable quality that appeals to the imagination rather than to reason. �Art,� he writes, �addresses the imaginative, emotional, and subliminal parts of the self that motivate the soul more than mere argument does� (25). Roche’s valuing of the complexity of art forms the basis of his critique of current scholarly practices, which he sees as a reductive practice oversimplifying the literary work to fit particular political ideologies. Indeed, in the third chapter, he proposes a pedagogical method that considers the work of literature as having a �unifying dimension� (58) and argues that teaching the student about analyzing parts of the text as offshoots of a central unity teaches them analytic skills applicable to real-world problems.

I read this section with a great deal of enthusiasm, but also with a bit of anxiety. The focus on a work of literature’s unifying component, aesthetic beauty and connected relationship to the world outside of it echoed a great deal of what I as a teacher strive to convey to my students. I am a lover of some highly canonical works for that very reason�I think they are wonderful books that achieve that very complexity and multivariance that Roche claims defines the work of art. I believe that most professors of English have, to varying degrees, these principles of literature in mind when they enter their classes. And, like Roche, I have little patience for oversimplified misreadings of texts. But, unlike Roche, I do not see it as necessarily a systemic fault of poststructuralism, but rather the result of bad readings. Like any theory, postructuralist schools of thought have their strengths and their limitations�they are theories, not dogma�and perhaps the fault lies with the practitioners who do not make this discernment. And this is where the anxiety sets in, for there are also many equally-wonderful works of literature that have, for one reason or another, been eclipsed by the canon. Although Roche is careful throughout this sectioot to unequivocally devalue the non-canonical works, namely the works by previously-marginalized voices that have appeared on course syllabi only relatively recently, his argument strongly suggests a wholehearted return to the traditional canon. I wonder whether there is room in his new literary world for works that do not meet all of the traditional canonical requirements. Art, as he reminds us, is based on taste, and although taste can be learned to a great degree, the very complexity of art that he extols demands an accompanying complexity of taste. In other words, can we not find the same aesthetic value in a Romantic poem not written by one of the Big Six? Or a British modernist work not created by a member or associate of the Bloomsbury group?

In the second and third parts of the book, which discuss literature’s value in a technological age, Roche makes a compelling argument for both the relatedness between literature and technology and for the important differences between them. He argues that the technological age is suffering from an ethical crisis; its utilitarian framework dictates that technological models focus on method rather than ethics, the how rather than the why. Furthermore, the �informational saturation� (138) of the technological age emphasizes quantity over quality, as I am sure any number of research forays on public Internet sites has reminded most of us, as well as giving our culture a poetics of isolation and solipsism. For the reasons he outlined in the first section, Roche claims that the study of literature is necessary to at once counteracting the more isolating elements of the technological age and possibly affecting future transformations in the content of our modern technological texts. For literature, Roche claims, is about connectedness�the relationship that forms between reader and author, between author and the environment, and ultimately between the reader and his or her natural and social surroundings. As he reminds us, �Literature enriches us partly through its intrinsic value, partly as a result of its ability to address neglected values, partly through its simple vitality� (207).

Literature’s value then resides precisely in its lack of utilitarian function. Roche sees it as a link to nature, as a tool to help us form a collective identity, as a means to enable us to step outside the solipsistic tendencies that our culture encourages. And this is precisely why he sees why literature matters and where the importance of teaching literature lies. By focusing on aesthetics, particularly the appeal to those non-utilitarian faculties of emotion and imagination, by teaching students to become judges of quality and to deepen their ethical capabilities, the study of literature can address some of the more pressing problems of the technological age.

 

 

 

 The Research Connection

 

 

Young Adult Literature in the 21^st Century:

Moving Beyond Traditional Constraints and Conventions

Jeffrey S. Kaplan

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, young adult literature looks very different than it did fifty years ago. Indeed, fifty years ago, we were just getting started with the likes of Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye (1951), with Hinton’s The Outsiders (1967), Zindel’s The Pigman (1968), and Cormier’s The Chocolate War (1974) still a gleam in the eye of their literary creators. We have a come along way since then, and I suppose, that is why our humble, yet groundbreaking beginnings have yielded a bountiful harvest of literary works. Today, we face a plethora of young adult books that represent every conceivable genre and literary style. To be sure, we are on the precipice of reinventing ourselves because our young adult books are constantly in search of the new and revealing so that more and more young people will find their way to the delectable hallways of good and engaging reads.

Thus, it is intriguing to look at the spate of recent articles on the nature of young adult fiction in the twenty-first century. Indeed, as the authors of many articles say, the world of young adult literature is being transformed by topics and themes that years ago would have never ever been conceived without someone labeling them ‘daft’ or at least, a little far-fetched and out-oftouch with everyday reality. Furthermore, writers and scholars alike are challenging the whole concept of what young adult literature is. Some think the genre

is too limiting for even the most experienced readers for it delegates good works to a category few, if any, scholars can easily define. And others regard young adult literature as something that once was, but is on the cusp of becoming something totally new and unique. Such are the articles presented in this research column: a solemn look at the changing face of young adult literature and where it is going from here. Enjoy the ride.

Young Adult Science Fiction in the Post-human Age

In “Is He Still Human? Are You?”: Young Adult Science Fiction in the Posthuman Age,” researcher Elaine Ostry analyzes science fiction texts, written for young adults, which deal with the tenets of our new biotechnology age: cloning, genetic engineering, prolongation of life, and neuropharmacology. She discusses how texts—young adult literature concerned with bioethics—use the possibility of biotechnology as metaphors for adolescence. Specifically, these new engaging reads for young adults discuss in vivid and clarifying detail the ethics implied in the study and practice of biotechnology—such as the creation of a super class of human beings and the delicate crossing of the boundaries between human

The authors of many articles say, the world of young adult literature is being transformed by topics and themes that years ago would have never ever been conceived. 11 THE ALAN REVIEW Winter 2005

The once time honored “stuff of science fictioovels”—cloning, genetic engineering, etc.,—is now the everyday realities of young people’s lives. Everything from artificially created limbs to designer babies is very real for today’s adolescents, bringing into question the eternal question, “what does it mean to be human?”

and animal, and that age-old fascination, human and machine. Ostry raises a number of startling questions and propositions in regard to the promulgation of young adult literature which examines in full glory the outlines of a new and ever stranger adult world and concludes that most of these contemporary adolescent fictional texts place “nurture above nature” and promote a safe and traditional vision of humanity.

Still, danger lurks. As Ostry writes, the potential of biotechnology to change human form is ever present in young adult literature that recently has seen science fiction come to life. What their parents and grandparents had always thought of as science fiction, says Ostry, are now realities or possible realities. The once time honored “stuff of science fictioovels”— cloning, genetic engineering, etc.,— is now the everyday realities of young people’s lives. Everything from artificially created limbs to designer babies is very real for today’s adolescents, bringing into question the eternal question, “what does it mean to be human?” After all, if biotechnology can change the human form and mind, and machines can become a reasonable part of the human body, then the term post-human body or “techno-body” is a distinct entity. And with the lines crossed between organic and inorganic, Ostry asserts, the word “human” may never be more challenged, manipulated or questioned.

Clearly, scientific advances have changed the map of young adult literature. Young people on a quest to define their identity, Ostry writes, have never become more soul-searching and desperate. After all, if we as a society are altering our definition of what it means to be human, we can only begin to understand the relevance of our desire to truly understand ourselves in light of our newfound technology. Today, thanks to advances in DNA labeling, we can determine much of a person before he or she is even born, or created by other means. And most science fiction for young adults attempts to mediate the post-human age to young audiences. What are the pros and cons of cloning? Of what value is the human versus the new, “improved” human? And how can young people really know what it means to be fully alive if all they know are people who have been genetically engineered? As Ostry insists, these are all intriguing questions and all indicative of how much young adult literature has changed dramatically in the last twenty years.

The trope that all young adult literature has in common is the search for identity. The dilemma, though, is that in our new post-human age, young people are often questioning not only their emotional identity, but also their biological identity or just “what does it mean to be conventionally human?” As Ostry points out, in the Replica series by Marilyn Kaye, the young protagonist Amy is assigned to write her autobiography in her high school English class. Gradually, Amy begins to realize, though,

In the Replica series by Marilyn Kaye, the young protagonist Amy is assigned to write her autobiography. . . . she sends off for a birth certificate and, to her surprise, finds that there is no record of her birth. Moreover, her file at school is empty. Only the discovery of a baby bracelet that reads “Amy #7” provides her with a clue about her odd birth: she is a clone.

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how little she knows about herself and her family. With little help from absent parents, she sends off for a birth certificate and, to her surprise, finds that there is no record of her birth. Moreover, her file at school is empty. Only the discovery of a baby bracelet that reads “Amy #7” provides her with a clue about her odd birth: she is a clone. Amy is stunned, and the ramifications are many in her desperate search to find her true identity. Likewise, teenagers Mike and Angel team up in Nicole Luiken’s Violet Eyes to figure out why they have so much in common. To their horror, they discover that what they think to be true is not. They are living in the year 2098, not 1987 as they suspect. Moreover, they are a new subspecies of human, Homo sapiens renascentia, thanks to the injection of “Renaissance” genes that make them exceptional. Other examples of young adults finding their true identities in a post-human age abound in young adult literature. As Ostry indicates, in Neal Shusterman’s The Dark Side of Nowhere, Jason’s father tells him that they are actually aliens who have taken over the genetic structure of previous inhabitants of the town. In the Regeneration series by L. J. Singleton, young Allison, a genetically designed baby, blames her distant relationship with her parents on her origins—she wonders was there something genetic in her clone DNA that made her troubled and distant from her family and friends? Or, as her fellow experimentee Varina says, am I a troubled kid because “I wasn’t the product of two loving parents, but the result of experi-

If being human means feeling emotion, continues Ostry, then losing control over one’s emotions or having them controlled for you, puts one’s humanity in direct confrontation with the concept of human freedom.

mental science” (Regeneration, p. 140). And in Carol Matas’ Cloning Miranda, young Miranda learns not only that she is a clone of a dead sister, but also her parents have had another clone made so that she would always have perfect matches for her transplants. Understandably, Miranda is angry with her parents for their implicit deceptiveness and does not forgive them easily.

To be sure, these stories are wild and fanciful in design, but they all, according to Ostry, have one primary element in common; the young adults in these books feel estranged not just from their parents and from the society that would likely shun them, but from themselves as well. They feel that they are not real because they are clones—or otherwise, genetically engineered. “To find out your that your life is a lie is one thing, but to find out that your own face doesn’t even belong to you,” says Jason angrily in Shusterman’s The Dark Side of Nowhere, is to realize that you are living a disguise, “down to every single cell of my counterfeit body” (Shusterman, pg. 61).

Fears about the new biotechnology generated world permeate new young adult literature. As Ostry writes, the linkage between human being and machine is always called into question. Inevitably, the question arises: Are we developing a race of super humans? There is a striking example of genetics creating a class system of super humans in The Last Book in the Universe by Rodman Philbrick. In this provocative read, the world is divided into “normals” and “proovs” The proovs are genetically improved people, who live in Eden, the only place where blue sky and green grass are found. The normals live in the Urbs, concrete jungles of violence and poverty. The narrator, Spaz, is even less than a normal; as an epileptic, he is a “Deef,” or defective. Philbrick’s work is the inevitable conflict that arises when two human beings compete for superior status. In the end, no one wins.

If being human means feeling emotion, continues Ostry, then losing control over one’s emotions or having them controlled for you, puts one’s humanity in direct confrontation with the concept of human freedom. Books using neuropharmacology, as Ostry writes, exploit this idea. Upon reaching puberty, the young adults in Lois Lowry’s The Giver must take a pill that suppresses sexual desires. Jonas, the story’s protagonist, is uncomfortable with this ruling, and secretly stops taking this pill. Suddenly, Jonas discovers that all emotions become heightened. Similarly, the female leaders in Kathryn Lasky’s Star Split stop

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taking the substance that calms their emotions. In Peter Dickinson’s Eva, a mother’s concern for her daughter’s happiness is answered by a doctor’s order for a “microshot of endorphin” (Dickinson, p. 10), as if mere chemicals could alter happiness. And in Philbrick’s The Last Book in the Universe, the human mind is completely mediated by chemically induced sights and emotions.

This new reality, Ostry insists, is becoming more and more real to young adults as the world outside their classroom door becomes more science fact than science fiction. And this new reality lends a new breadth and depth to young adult literature that heretofore, has only existed in the realm of fantasy. Most of the characters in these post-human science fiction books for young adults, writes Ostry, face choices that determines the level of their humanity. The young protagonists display a considerable energy and wit in their defense of humanity. They label themselves as human, using the standards of morality set by the liberal humanist model. They recognize the humanity of others, tolerating others’ weaknesses and rejecting the supremacy of the post-human body.

In these books, Ostry underscores, scientists are seen as fallible. In Marilyn Kaye’s Amy, young Amy’s adoptive mother Nancy says that she thought that by engaging in scientific experimentation with her daughter that she was doing something pure and noble and good. Instead, they learned how dangerous playing with human life forms could really be. In Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Turnabout, the unaging drug is supposed to be arrested by another drug at the age desired, but, unfortunately, the first person to try this medical wonder pill crumbles into dust. Only the young protagonists Melly and Anny Beth ultimately survive the experiment as all others choose suicide or dwell in severe depression. Similarly, in

As Ostry finishes, although these post modern writers may push the envelope in young adult literature in the subject matter and grotesque imagery, most of these writers play it very safe by showing the post-human body as comfortingly familiar—something which may be as far from the truth as can possibly be imagined.

Frank Bonham’s The Forever Formula the aged “gummies” or old people without teeth and wit, suffer from malaise and beg to play “suicide bingo.” And the positive characters in Nancy Farmer’s The House of Scorpion are disgusted by the old men who prolong their lives past the age of 150 years by means of continual implants from clones.

The message that these books give to young readers, Ostry concludes, is a reassuring one: human values and humaature will prevail no matter what changes the human body endures. These values are what literature—and the adult world in general—attempt to inculcate in young people. Still, Ostry insists, for the most part young adult writers are playing it safe because inevitably, the real world is highly more complicated. The future of science and the body is much less certain, Ostry asserts, than most young adult novels would have you believe. No one knows for sure what the personality of a clone would be like. Free will itself may be a combination of genetic factors, yet these possibilities, writes Ostry, are too complicated and radical for the typical writer for young adults today. They stray from the perceived notion in young adult literature of the need to provide a clear moral structure and a hopeful, if not happy, ending. For, as Ostry finishes, although these post modern writers may push the envelope in young adult literature in the subject matter and grotesque imagery, most of these writers play it very safe by showing the post-human body as comfortingly familiar—something which may be as far from the truth as can possibly be imagined. This is the world Ostry dares to paint.

Stretching the Boundaries and Blurring the Lines of Young Adult Genre

In “Stretching the Boundaries and Blurring the Lines of Genre,” authors Lester Laminack and Barbara Bell focus on the confusion regarding the term “genre” and attempt to define and stretch its boundaries. According to Laminack

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and Bell, genre is typically defined as a way of organizing or categorizing literature, “a way to group books with similar style, form, or content “ (Laminack and Bell, p. 248). Yet, in today’s diversified and multicultural world of varied dimensions and rationalities, the lines, as said, between and among genres often become blurred, calling for a re-examination of what is meant by the young adult genre. In particular, Laminack and Bell point to the continued popularity of memoir as a popular genre in books for children and adults. But, can it really be called memoir?

Memoir books, typically, tell of a specific moment or brief span of time in the writer’s life. Many times, Laminack and Bell stress, these books are written in the first person, and the matter recounts the events by reflecting on what has long passed. Stories written as first-persoarratives, Laminack and Bell continue, can share these qualities, allowing them to assume a “memoir-like” feel. And unless, as the authors note, the author of the memoir specifically says that the book is a “memoir of real life events,” the reader may not be able to determine whether or not the events actually occurred in the life of the writer.

This confusing dilemma manifests itself in a few recent works, most notably, Claire Ewart’s The Giant, Ann Rinaldi’s Or Give Me Death: A Novel of Patrick Henry’s Family, and Maria Testa’s Almost Forever. Each book illustrates how blurred the distinction between true-to-life memoir and creative fictional license can become distinctly and unintentionally blurred.

In Claire Ewart’s The Giant, a young girl tells in a first-persoarrative about the loss of her beloved mother. Though she and her father have the farm chores to keep them busy, the young girl continues to look for the “giants” that her mother told her daughter would always look after her. All through the seasons, from planting to harvest, she searches for evidence of her giant—only to discover him in the face of her father. Illustrated handsomely by the author, the reader is left with a vivid portrait of an endearing loss and love, but still confused if the story is an account of her real life loss or a beautiful fantasy of what might be. Again, is this poetry, narrative, memoir, or just a lush and rich children’s bedtime story?

Ann Rinaldi is known for historical fiction. This, in and of itself, is a mixed bag—because the reader is left wondering—did this really happen, or is the author inventing this for pure dramatic effect? In one of her latest works, Or Give Me Death: A Novel of Patrick Henry’s Family, Rinaldi asks the central question, “when do you tell the truth and when do you lie?” Do you lie to protect someone? Is it wrong to keep a secret, when, if you tell, someone gets hurt?

These profound and eternal questions are at the heart of this historical novel about the family members of Revolutionary War hero, Patrick Henry, who must wrestle with a host of family problems—each of whom must face a test in her young life as they struggle to bring a new nation to the birthplace of freedom. With a mother prone to madness and an absentee father, Patrick Henry’s family must cope with larger-thanlife questions as their father faces the impending American revolutionary war and they must decide what actions they should take in his absence and in his defense. Central to the novel is the potential strength of the human spirit to conquer all odds. Yet, although this biography-like novel is actually historical fiction, it is based on true information and reads like the biography of the family of Patrick Henry. Clearly, this can only confuse the uninformed reader.

Finally, Maria Testa’s Almost Forever is beautifully written lyrical novel told from the six-year-old daughter’s perspective. It is the moving story of one family’s experience when the father is sent to Vietnam for a year during the Vietnam War. The young girl believes her father shouldn’t have gone to war because he is a doctor and doctors don’t fight, they heal. She fears that her father will simply disappear from her life, especially when the letters stop coming. Told in haunting poetic language, the author evokes a mood that is both real and dreamy. The reader experiences the emotions of the child, yet simultaneously, longs to know how much is the author’s life, how much is written to evoke a mood, and how much is simply a well-constructed poem? Granted, the effect is the same, but again, the work becomes difficult to classify.

These examples, write Laminack and Bell, are but a few of the many works designed for young adults where the genres are blurred, the distinctions many, and the story painfully true—on many levels. And as Laminack and Bell contend, in a day and age where young

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people are becoming more and more sophisticated about the ways of the world, they increasingly need to know what is fiction and what is fact. No longer content to accept the world as it is, young people hunger for readily identifiable markers so they can explore and define their ever-changing and cyber-reaching universe. Truly, the lines are blurred as we enter the 21^st century.

Exploring Identity Construction in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction

Finally, in “Developing Students’ Critical Litearcy: Exploring Identity Construction in Young Adult Fiction,” authors Thomas W. Bean and Karen Moni challenge how young adult literature is traditionally read and taught in most secondary classrooms. As Bean and Moni state, most adolescent readers view characters in young adult novels as living and wrestling with real problems close to their own life experiences as teenagers. At the center of all these themes are questions of character and identity and values. They argue that an alternative way of looking at these novels, and perhaps, a more engaging technique in a postmodern world, is an exploration through a critical literacy framework. Bean and Moni argue that a critical stance in the classroom empowers students to consider “what choices have been made in the creation of the text” (Janks and Ivanic, 1992, p. 316). Their argument is that, through discussion of such choices, young adults may also better understand how they, as teenagers, are being constructed as adolescents in the

The apparent need to shape a different critical look at young adult literature, insist Bean and Moni, is driven by, of all things, dramatic world changes. The world globalization of markets, they underscore, has resulted in the challenging of long-established ideologies and values related to the traditional ideals of work and family.

texts they are reading, and how such constructions compare with their own attempts to form their identities.

The apparent need to shape a different critical look at young adult literature, insist Bean and Moni, is driven by, of all things, dramatic world changes. The world globalization of markets, they underscore, has resulted in the challenging of long-established ideologies and values related to the traditional ideals of work and family. In a world of constant movement and flow, media images of advertising and commerce seep into our lives and strongly influence identity development. Hence, young adult literature and our interpretation of it as a genre of literary study have been profoundly altered as a result of this dramatic shift in world affairs.

Bean and Moni begin their intriguing look at the changing nature of critical theory and young adult literature by first examining the many theories of identity development prevalent in literary circles. Enlightened views of identity development, as Bean and Moni write, are based on the somewhat fixed social structures and actions of class differences. The “enlightened myth” of the rugged individualist struggling to get ahead in society has been the predominant social and literary theory of the modern age. Bean and Moni, however, conclude that in recent years, this rugged individualist stance has been challenged by a postmodern view, almost Marxist in its orientation, that says that power is the driving force in shaping identity. Furthermore, Bean and Moni argue, even this proposition has been somewhat challenged by cultural theorists who argue that the quest for power has been successfully supplanted by consumerism. “We now live in a world dominated by consumer, multinational or global capitalism, and the older theoretical models that we relied on to critique established systems no longer apply” (Mansfield, p. 163).

Urban teens navigate through shopping malls, train stations, airports, freeways, and the Internet. As Beam and Moni write, these fluid spaces are disorienting, dehumanizing any fixed sense of place, and subsequently, this feeling of emptiness and displacement spills over into adolescents’ interior worlds. Institutions like family, schools, and communities are being replaced by malls, tele

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vision, and cyberspace. Identity in these contemporary worlds, writes Bean and Moni, is constructed through the consumption of goods with selfhood vested in things. And because these worlds are ephemeral and ethereal, feelings of panic and anxiety flow into teens’ lives.

The question for Bean and Moni is that, given this postmodern world of convenience and transience, how do young people find themselves? For if traditional avenues of self-expression are no longer valid—home, school, church, etc.,—how do young people find who they are if they live in seemingly rootless social world? In essence, write Bean and Moni, youths no longer live life as a journey toward the future but as a condition. Young people today live in two different worlds—the world of home and school and the world of culture and commerce. Although in America this has been always been true, today, Bean and Moni insist, this chasm between conformity and modernity is ever more present due to the conflicting social arena in which most teenagers live.

Bean and Moni focus in on life for the urban Australian teenager in their discussion of the aimlessness of today’s youth, but their observation can apply most anywhere. Young people face a world where unskilled laborers rarely can find meaningful work. Instead, in a postmodern world where the stability of life as a factory worker as experienced by their working class parents or life in a town where everybody grows up and nobody leaves, has been replaced by a life of constant change and uncertainty. Much of contemporary teenagers day, write Bean and Moni, is spent in “non-places,”— like the mall and cyberspace.

Moreover, assert Bean and Moni, the places in which teenagers dwell are sanitized and kept free of the poor. Thus, for many young people, their displacement as marginalized members of society is only aggravated by the increasingly complex and global world of market-driven consumerism. This, as Bean and Moni insist, might seem miles away from the world of young adult literature, but they conclude, its influence cannot be denied. Literacy, they write, especially through multicultural young adult novels, provides a forum upon which teenagers can build cosmopolitan worldviews and identities.

In today’s times, teenagers do everything on the run. Hence, this new dynamic—true, always present in the lives of young adults since the end of the second World War, but now ever heightened by modern technology—governs their lives. So, this new life-force of power shaped by social forces beyond traditional boundaries, as Bean and Moni underscore, demands a new language to interpret what students are reading, and more importantly, how they interpret what they read. The language is embedded in a new dialogue for literary interpretation called Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).

CDA asks the reader to look at the novel as a novel, and not just a work in which to identify with the lead characters. In a new postmodern age, where cyberspace is often more important than “real” space, readers are asked to look at a novel in much the same way that a contemporary teen would look at a computer—not as a living, breathing thing, but as a machine with moving parts capable of transforming their temporary world into an ever-engaging ethereal world. The novel becomes, thus, a vehicle for transformative change, and not just a search for identity.

True, there is nothing dramatically new here. As Bean and Moni assert, critical analysis of novels has long been a staple of literary critics. Yet, what makes Critical Discourse Analysis so vital to today’s young adults is that the context in which they live their lives—electronically, globally, and instantly—makes this an even more imperative approach to understanding who they are in their search for personal and spiritual identity. Asking questions about the novel itself—where does the novel come from? What social function does the novel serve? How does the adult author construct the world of adolescence in the novel? Who is the ideal reader of the novel? Who gets to speak and have a voice in this novel—and who doesn’t? How else might these characters’ stories be told? And these characters inhabit certain places and spaces where they construct their identities. What alternative places and spaces could be sites for constructing identity?

These intriguing questions are different from the standard fare of asking students if they identify with the characters in the story and why. They presuppose that students are sophisticated enough to look at a novel as an object in a given time and place, filled with all settings and vagaries of the particular time frame in which the novel occurs. They also assume that young people can examine a work of art

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as both a thing of feeling and a thing of context. To be sure, this is no easy task, but as Bean and Moni assert, in today’s contemporary world of ever changing dynamics and global constructs, of technological marvels and instantaneous gratification, and of changing lifestyles and alternative world views, perhaps, it is time that the young adult novel be analyzed in a new light. Perhaps, young people can see art for what it is—a reflection of the times in which we live.

Conclusion

These three articles all have something in common. They underscore that the outside world in which young people spend most of their waking hours is different from the world inhabited by most protagonists in young adult novels. Yes, the dilemmas, as these researchers insist, are the same, but the dynamics of their own lives— the lives of the teenagers who are reading these good works—have dramatically changed. Today’s young people are the generation who live truly in a new and alternative universe. Technology has made it possible for them to communicate with people around the world in the blink of an eye, and to gratify their every wish— from musical taste to hidden desire—with the flick of a switch or the move of a mouse.

This new normal, the world of cyberspace and cloning, of blurred genres and conventions, and of critical discourse and contextual analysis, is what drives young adult literature in a new and specialized arena of complex thought and ideas. What this portends is that the young adult novel is still growing and becoming, and that the teenage angst expressed so well in The Catcher in the Rye, The Outsiders, The Pigman and The Chocolate War is still present, but just manifested in a world these authors could never imagine. For imagine, if you will, would Holden Caulfield have been a different person with a computer? I wonder.

 

Eleven Minutes

Eleven Minutes

Author(s)   Paulo Coelho

Original title       Onze Minutos

Country     Brazil

Language  Portuguese

Publication date  2003

 

Eleven Minutes (Portuguese: Onze Minutos) is a 2003 novel by Braziliaovelist Paulo Coelho based on the experiences of a young Brazilian prostitute called Maria, whose first innocent brushes with love leave her heartbroken. At a tender age, she becomes convinced that she will never find true love, instead believing that “love is a terrible thing that will make you suffer….”. When a chance meeting in Rio takes her to Geneva, she dreams of finding fame and fortune yet ends up working as a prostitute.

As Maria drifts further away from love, she develops a fascination with sex. But when she meets a handsome young painter she finds she must choose between pursuing a dark path of sexual pleasure for its own sake, or risking everything for the possibility of sacred sex; sex in the context of love. Eleven Minutes is a gripping and daring novel, which sensitively explores the sacred nature of sex and love, inviting us to confront our own prejudices and embrace our “inner light”.

Plot introduction

Maria, a young girl from a remote village of Brazil, with innocent brushes with love failures at an early adolescent stage and hatred for love goes to seek her fortune in Switzerland, only to find that reality is a lot harder than she expected. After working in a nightclub as a samba dancer for a brief period, she realizes that this is not what she wants. After a heated discussion with her manager one night, she storms out and begins to look for a career in modeling. After a long unsuccessful search for a position in that field, and as she starts running out of money, she engages herself for 1000 francs for “one night” with an Arab man. Delighted with the easy money and after compromising with her soul she lands in a brothel on Rue de Berne, the heart of Geneva’s red-light district…

There she befriends Nyah who gives her advice on her “new profession” and after learning the tricks of the trade from Milan, the brothel owner, she enters the job with her body and mind shutting all doors for love and keeps her heart open only for her diary. Quickly she becomes quite successful and famous and her colleagues begin to envy her. Months pass and Maria grows into a professionally groomed prostitute who not only relaxes her clients’ mind, but also calms their soul by talking to them about their problems.

Her world turns upside down when she meets Ralf, a young Swiss painter, who sees her “inner light”. Maria falls in love with him immediately and begins to experience what true love is (according to the author, it is a sense of being for someone without actually possessing him/her). Maria is now torn between her sexual fantasies and true love for Ralf. Eventually she decides that it is time for her to leave Geneva with her memory of Ralf, because she realizes that they are worlds apart. But before leaving, she decides to rekindle the dead sexual fire in Ralf and learns from him about the nature of Sacred Sex, sex which is mingled with true love and which involves the giving up of one’s soul for the loved one.

This book explores the sacred nature of sex. “Eleven minutes” describes the duration of sex. Also, it depicts two types of prostitution: prostitution for money and sacred prostitution. There are also direct references to sadomasochism.

The story is of Maria’s journey to find what true love is by letting her own life guide her. She enters a life that leads her down the path of sexual awakening and almost leads to her self-destruction when she is introduced to all sides of sexual experience. When she has given up hope to find true love, she finds her true “inner light” and her everlasting true love.

Characters

Maria – The main character and protagonist.

Maria’s father – A salesman

Maria’s mother – A seamstress.

Boy from Maria’s childhood – He was Maria’s puppy love, when she was 11 years old. This initial experience encouraged Maria to be bolder with males.

Maria’s boyfriend who gave her the first kiss – Later on, this boy flirted with Maria’s girlfriend. This motivated Maria to earn a lot of money so that one day she could humiliate him (beside buying a farm for her parents).

Maria’s boyfriend to whom she lost her virginity – Maria used him to learn about sex.

Store owner – Maria’s boss. He fell in love with Maria and provided the money for her trip to Rio de Janeiro. He became Maria’s safety net in her future plans.

Maílson – translator / security / agent in Rio de Janeiro, who was the interpreter when Maria met Roger.

Roger – His main interest was to employ beautiful young girls to dance at his club.

Vivian – A cold woman who knew better that the young girls would not get their dream (i.e. adventure, money, husband) while she worked for Roger. She introduced the name “Rue de Berne” to Maria, which is in the red-light district of Geneva.

Arabic boyfriend – Maria’s acquaintance with this man cost her her job at Roger’s club.

Heidi – The woman at the library from where Maria borrowed books.

Maria’s first customer – An Arabic man, who paid 1000 Swiss francs to sleep with her.

The invisible woman – Only Maria could see her. She took the appearance of the Virgin Mary.

Milan – The owner of the “Copacabana” bar, where Maria worked as a prostitute.

Nyah – Prostitute from the Philippines, and Maria’s only female friend at the Copacabana.

Ralf Hart – A successful 29 year old painter with whom Maria secretly falls in love. Ralf has been married twice, but got divorced in both cases because he lost interest in the sexual part of the relationship. He sees Maria as his opportunity to learn about sex once again.

Terence – A wealthy Englishman who introduced Maria to the pleasures of sadomasochism.

 

Eleven Minutes Quotes

“Everything tells me that I am about to make a wrong decision, but making mistakes is just part of life. What does the world want of me? Does it want me to take no risks, to go back to where I came from because I didn’t have the courage to say “yes” to life?”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“When I had nothing to lose, I had everything. When I stopped being who I am, I found myself.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path. No one wants their life thrown into chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control, and are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of the superseded. Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything. Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it – which of these two attitudes is the least destructive? I don’t know.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“Now that she had nothing to lose, she was free.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“When we meet someone and fall in love, we have a sense that the whole universe is on our side. And yet if something goes wrong, there is nothing left! How is it possible for the beauty that was there only minutes before to vanish so quickly? Life moves very fast. It rushes from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“I can choose either to be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It’s all a question of how I view my life.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“Anyone who is in love is making love the whole time, even when they’re not. When two bodies meet, it is just the cup overflowing. They can stay together for hours, even days. They begin the dance one day and finish it the next, or–such is the pleasure they experience–they may never finish it. No eleven minutes for them.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“Life always waits for some crisis to occur before revealing itself at its most brilliant.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“The strongest love is the love that can demonstrate its fragility.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“Don’t listen to the malicious comments of those friends who, never taking any risks themselves, can only see other people’s failures.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“All my life, I thought of love as some kind of voluntary enslavement. Well, that’s a lie: freedom only exists when love is present. The person who gives him or herself wholly, the person who feels freest, is the person who loves most wholeheartedly.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“I am two women: one wants to have all the joy, passion and adventure that life can give me. The other wants to be a slave to routine, to family life, to the things that can be planned and achieved. I’m a housewife and a prostitute, both of us living in the same body and doing battle with each other.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“I’ve learned that waiting is the most difficult bit, and I want to get used to the feeling, knowing that you’re with me, even when you’re not by my side.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“Really important meetings are planned by the souls long before the bodies see each other. Generally speaking, these meetings occur when we reach a limit, when we need to die and be reborn emotionally. These meetings are waiting for us, but more often thaot, we avoid them happening. If we are desperate, though, if we have nothing to lose, or if we are full of enthusiasm for life, then the unknown reveals itself, and our universe changes direction.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“I’ve met a man and fallen in love with him. I allowed myself to fall in love for one simple reason: I’m not expecting anything to come of it. I know that, in three months’ time, I’ll be far away and he’ll be just a memory, but I couldn’t stand living without love any longer; I had reached my limit… Generally speaking, these meetings occur when we reach a limit, when we need to die and be reborn emotionally. These meeting are waiting for us, but more often thaot, we avoid them happening. If we are desperate, though, if we have nothing to lose, or if we are full of enthusiasm for life, then the unknown reveals itself, and our universe changes directions.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“Profound desire, true desire is the desire to be close to someone.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“…but something always went wrong, and the relationship would end precisely at the moment when she was sure that this was the person with whom she wanted to spend the rest of her life. After a long time, she came to the conclusion that men brought only pain, frustration, suffering and a sense of time dragging.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“No one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“Love is not to be found in someone else, but in ourselves; we simply awaken it. But in order to do that, we need the other person. The universe only makes sense when we have someone to share our feelings with.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“Dreaming is very pleasant as long as you are not forced to put your dreams into practice.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“The universe only makes sense when we have someone to share our feelings with.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“The Marquis De Sade said that the most important experiences a man can have are those that take him to the very limit; that is the only way we learn, because it requires all our courage. When a boss humiliates an employee, or a man humiliates his wife, he is merely being cowardly or taking his revenge on life, they are people who have never dared to look into the depths of their soul, never attempted to know the origin of that desire to unleash the wild beast, or to understand that sex, pain and love are all extreme experiences. Only those who know those frontiers know life; everything else is just passing the time, repeating the same tasks, growing old and dying without ever having discovered what we are doing here.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“Considering the way the world is, one happy day is almost a miracle.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“I’m not a body with a soul, I’m a soul that has a visible part called the body”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“Sometimes life is very mean: a person can spend days, weeks, months and years without feeling new. Then, when a door opens – a positive avalanche pours in. One moment, you have nothing, the next, you have more than you can cope with.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“…and that, in the end, the most interesting people always leave.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“What made you fall in love with a prostitute?”“I didn’t understand it myself at the time. But I’ve thought about it since, and I think it was because, knowing that your body would never be mine alone, I had to concentrate on conquering your soul.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“I need to write about love. I need to think and think and write about love-otherwise, my soul won’t survive.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“But if I don’t think about love, I will be nothing.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“He said something like that:“In all languages in the world, there is the same proverb: ‘What the eyes don’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over.’ Well, I say that there isn’t any ounce of truth in it. The further off they are, the closer to the heart are all those feelings that we try to repress and forget. If we’re far from exile, we want to store away every tiny memory of our roots. If we’re far from the person we love, everyone we pass in the street reminds us of them.At the end of the service, I went up to him and thanked him: I said I was a stranger in a strange land, and I thanked him for reminding me that what the eyes don’t see, the heart does grieve over. And my heart has grieved so much, that today I’m leaving.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“Love one another, but let’s try not to possess one another.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“A time to be born, and a time to die;A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;A time to kill, and a time to heal;A time to break down, and a time to build up;A time to weep, and a time to laugh;A time to mourn, and a time to dance;a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;A time to get, and a time to lose;A time to lose; A time to keep, and a time to cast away;A time to rend, and a time to sew;A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;A time to love, and a time to hate;A time of war, and a time of peace”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“The roller-coaster is my life; life is a fast, dizzying game; life is a parachute jump; it’s taking chances, falling over and getting up again; it’s mountaineering; it’s wanting to get to the very top of yourself and feeling angry and dissatisfied when you don’t manage it”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“It is not time that changes maor knowledge the only thing that can change someone’s mind is love.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“Read. Forget everything you’ve been told about books and read.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“a man doesn’t prove he’s a man by getting an erection. He’s only a real man if he can pleasure a woman. And if he can pleasure a prostitute, he’ll think he’s the best lover on the block” -Nyah”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“You experienced pain yesterday and you discovered that it led to pleasure.You experienced it today and found peace.That’s why I’m telling you:Don’t get used to it,because it’s very easy to become habituated:it’s a very powerful drug.It’s in our daily lives,in our hidden sufferings,in the sacrifices we make,blaming love for the destruction of our dreams.Pain is frightening when it shows its real face, but it’s seductive when it comes disguised as sacrifice or se-denial.Or cowardice.However much we may reject it,we human human beings always find a way of being with pain,of flirting with it and making it part of our lives.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“If I must be faithful to someone or something, I have, first of all, have to be faithful to myself.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“Does a soldier go to war in order to kill the enemy? no, he goes in order to die for his country.Does a wife want to show her husband how happy she is? no, she wants him to see how she suffers in order to make him happyDoes the husband go to work thinking he will find personal fulfillment there? no, he is giving his sweat and tears for the good of the familyAnd so it goes on: sons give up their dreams to please their parents, parents give up their lives in order to please their children; pain and suffering are used to justify the one thing that should bring only LOVE..”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“No one owns anything. Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realize that nothing really belongs to them. And if nothing belongs to me, then there’s no point wasting my time looking after things that aren’t mine.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“The most important experiences a man can have are those that take him to the very limit; that is the only way we learn, because it requires all our courage.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“I’ve realised that sometimes you get no second chance and that it’s best to accept the gifts the world offers you. Of course it’s risky, but is the risk any greater than the chance of the bus that took forty-eight hours to bring me here having an accident? If I must be faithful to someone or something, then I have, first of all, to be faithful to myself. If I’m looking for true love, I first have to get the mediocre loves out of my system. The little experience of life I’ve had has taught me that no one owns anything, that everything is an illusion – and that applies to material as well as spiritual things. Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever (as has happened often enough tome already) finally comes to realise that nothing really belongs to them.And if nothing belongs to me, then there’s no point wasting my time looking after things that aren’t mine; it’s best to live as if today were the first (or last) day of my life.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“And the person who loves wholeheartedly feels free.”  ― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

Summary

They’re tosh, of course. But are the mystical parables and spiritual musings of Paulo Coelho enjoyable tosh? Are they, say, in the Matrix class? Laurence Fishburne thinks so; he’s bought the rights to The Alchemist. Coelho has sold about 50 million books, and is still going strong. Every generation has its chosen guru supplying opium to the masses. What is singular about Coelho is that he is a fully globalised guru; he is to tosh what Pele was to soccer. Coelho’s website offers portals io less than 14 languages. Brazilian by origin (and recently elected to that country’s Literary Academy), he locates his allegories all over the world. All the world responds, gratefully.

Coelho’s first (and biggest) hit, The Alchemist, chronicled a search for the “universal language”. He seems to have found it. His native Portuguese slips easily into English. Simplicity has something to do with it; among his cited sources are Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, and the parables of our Lord. Masters of simplicity, all of them.

Coelho was, he tells us, directed into the path of fiction by a mysterious old geezer who appeared to him out of the ether on a tourist visit to Dachau. Look for the symbolic meanings of the great religions of the world, he was instructed. Coelho’s usual plot is the quest in which an ingenuous hero or heroine (usually of the lower orders) discovers the meaning of life. His narratives are larded with such nuggets of higher toshery as: “Life moves very fast. It rushes us from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds”, and “It is the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary; only wise men are able to understand them”. (Wise men like you know who.)

 Eleven Minutes departs somewhat from the Coelho formula. He apologises to his devoted readers in a chatty foreword. This is a novel, we are warned, that will deal with “a subject that is harsh, difficult, shocking”: the international crime of “people trafficking”. The heroine, Maria, is a surpassingly beautiful virgin from the Brazilian back-country. She runs off to Rio where she is tricked into going as a “dancer” to Geneva. There she descends into prostitution.

Thus outlined, Eleven Minutes might seem to promise an exposé of white slavery. It doesn’t. Maria’s experience with the dour punters of Switzerland is as much a voyage of wonderful discovery as Santiago’s treasure hunt in The Alchemist . Through the sex industry, Maria uncovers the core truths of the human condition. In the process, she saves her “soul”; she also saves a useful bank balance. Her rate for 11 minutes (life is not the only thing that moves very fast) is 1,000 Swiss francs. After a year she is able to retire, healthy, wealthy and wise (don’t all foreign prostitutes?).

Maria starts on the road to en-lightenment by reading a truly amazing book by an un-named Brazilian sage – something to do with an Andalusian shepherd boy’s treasure hunt. Her research crystallises in a dilemma, embodied in two of her customers. Ralf, a brilliant artist, worships from a distance the sanctified “light” she exudes. Terence, by contrast, is a rich sadist with an “icy glint” in his eye. He pleasures Maria to the point of ecstatic orgasm with the whip. Is this Brazilian lady of the night, we wonder, the Blessed Virgin Mary, or Mary Magdalen, the spotted whore? Or is she – daring thought – both?

Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho

 

“On 29th May 2002, just hours before I put the finishing touches to this book, I visited the Grotto in Lourdes, in France, to fill up a few bottles with miraculous water from the spring. Inside the Basilica, a gentleman in his seventies said to me: ‘You know, you look like Paulo Coelho.’ I said that I was Paulo Coelho. The man embraced me and introduced me to his wife and grand-daughter. He spoke of the importance of my books in his life, concluding: ‘They make me dream.'”Those are the words from Paulo Coelho in the preface of ‘Eleven Minutes’, the life-enhancing book that have cause great impact to millions of readers.’Eleven Minutes’ tells a story of Maria, a young girl from a Brazilian village whose first innocent brushes with love leave her heart-broken. At a tender age, she becomes convinced that she will never find true love, instead believing that ‘love is a terrible thing that make you suffer…’That set the stage of her journey to discover love, fame and fortune which leads her into the world of prostitution. Maria drifts further and further away from love while at the same time developing a fascination with sex.Eventually, Maria meets a handsome young painter and she has to consider which way she wants her life to be, that is, either to continue to pursue a path of darkness and sexual pleasures, or to risk everything to find her own inner self and the possibility of sex in the context of love.In this novel, Paulo Coelho explores the sacred nature of sex and love and prejudices.I began fascinated with Paulo’s writing after reading his book, ‘The Alchemist’. I used to dislike novels about fictional romance and have always prefered management books. My friend Mohd Adib drag me into the world of Paulo Coelho when he persuaded me to try read The Alchemist. To nurse my curiosity, I pick up that book and drag myself to read it. Thereafter, I have never turn back on any Paulo’s book. I was totally intrigued by the beauty of Paulo’s writing and no words can describe this discovery of profound knowledge.The Alchemist established Paulo’s worldwide fame. The book has already achieved the status of a modern classic, universally admired. Considered a timeless story, it will enchant and inspire a whole new readers from generations to come.’Eleven Minutes’, was no.1 in the 2003 annual list of Publishing Trends, which every year establishes which fiction works sell more copies worldwide.Coelho was born in 1947 in Rio de Janeiro. He grew up in a deeply religious household and was educated by Jesuits. Paulo Coelho has led an extreme rebellious during his youth.Paulo was determined to be a writer from his early years. When Coelho was 17, his parent sent him to an asylum because they thought he was psychotic. “My parent thought I was psychotic because I read a lot. I was very shy and I didn’t socialise very easily. My parent were desperate. They didn’t want to hurt me, but they didn’t know what to do,” Paulo relates.Coelho escaped from the asylum three times and was eventually released in 1967. He then enrolled in Law School, only to drop out to become a hippy. He also wrote popular song lyrics for some of Brazil’s famous pop music stars, including Elis Regina and Raul Seixas. Shortly after, he worked as a journalist.Then, in 1974, Coelho was arrested for ‘subversive’ activities by the authorities (the authorities saw Coelho’s lyrics as leftwing and dangerous).In 1986 Paulo Coelho walked the Road to Santiago, a medieval pilgrim’s route between France and Spain. He would later describe this experience in his book, The Pilgrimage, published in 1987. The following year, his second book The Alchemist established his worldwide fame.Paulo Coelho have the Guinness World Record for most translations (53) of a single title (The Alchemist) signed in one sitting (45 minutes). The record has been attained as a result of an international book signing hold at the Frankfurt Book Fair (2003).Coelho’s books tend to feature some sort of spiritual quest.In his words: “I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don’t hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am.””Many people love my work, some hate it, but I’ve never stopped to think about it, and I’ll go on without giving a thought – what really matters to me is to know that I can share my soul with those who understand me.””I’m a human being, in its full condition, with its positive and negative sides. But I keep my ethics and when I break it, I’m not ashamed to apologize. I think that people waste a lot of time trying to improve themselves – and they do it by following other people’s patterns. What’s the meaning of being better? In my opinion, it is the constant daily struggle in search of my own dream. Man improves himself as he follows his path; if he stands still, waiting to improve before he makes a decision, he’ll never move.”

Paulo Coelho Other titles by Coelho include Brida (1990), The Valkyries (1992), Maktub (1994) – a compilation of his daily columns, By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1994), The Fifth Mountain (1996), The Manual of the Warrior of Light (1997), Veronika Decides to Die (1998) and The Devil and Miss Prym (2000).Coelho’s latest novel ‘O Zahir’ reaches the Brazilian bookstores on April 2nd 2005. It is already the number one in the bestseller lists of all 83 countries in which it has been released; the only exception is in Germany, where it is number two, behind Da Vinci Code (another great novel). O Zahir was published in 83 countries and in 42 languages throughout the globe.Paulo Coelho’s enchanting novel has inspired millions of delighted readers around the world. His story is told in dazzling simplicity and wisdom. His writings is a must read! For those who have not yet read any of his bestsellers, you should start reading his first charting novel – The Pilgrimage and The Alchemist. Eleven Minutes is also a must read.

Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho

“On 29th May 2002, just hours before I put the finishing touches to this book, I visited the Grotto in Lourdes, in France, to fill up a few bottles with miraculous water from the spring. Inside the Basilica, a gentleman in his seventies said to me: ‘You know, you look like Paulo Coelho.’ I said that I was Paulo Coelho. The man embraced me and introduced me to his wife and grand-daughter. He spoke of the importance of my books in his life, concluding: ‘They make me dream.'”Those are the words from Paulo Coelho in the preface of ‘Eleven Minutes’, the life-enhancing book that have cause great impact to millions of readers.’Eleven Minutes’ tells a story of Maria, a young girl from a Brazilian village whose first innocent brushes with love leave her heart-broken. At a tender age, she becomes convinced that she will never find true love, instead believing that ‘love is a terrible thing that make you suffer…’That set the stage of her journey to discover love, fame and fortune which leads her into the world of prostitution. Maria drifts further and further away from love while at the same time developing a fascination with sex.Eventually, Maria meets a handsome young painter and she has to consider which way she wants her life to be, that is, either to continue to pursue a path of darkness and sexual pleasures, or to risk everything to find her own inner self and the possibility of sex in the context of love.In this novel, Paulo Coelho explores the sacred nature of sex and love and prejudices.I began fascinated with Paulo’s writing after reading his book, ‘The Alchemist’. I used to dislike novels about fictional romance and have always prefered management books. My friend Mohd Adib drag me into the world of Paulo Coelho when he persuaded me to try read The Alchemist. To nurse my curiosity, I pick up that book and drag myself to read it. Thereafter, I have never turn back on any Paulo’s book. I was totally intrigued by the beauty of Paulo’s writing and no words can describe this discovery of profound knowledge.The Alchemist established Paulo’s worldwide fame. The book has already achieved the status of a modern classic, universally admired. Considered a timeless story, it will enchant and inspire a whole new readers from generations to come.’Eleven Minutes’, was no.1 in the 2003 annual list of Publishing Trends, which every year establishes which fiction works sell more copies worldwide.Coelho was born in 1947 in Rio de Janeiro. He grew up in a deeply religious household and was educated by Jesuits. Paulo Coelho has led an extreme rebellious during his youth.Paulo was determined to be a writer from his early years. When Coelho was 17, his parent sent him to an asylum because they thought he was psychotic. “My parent thought I was psychotic because I read a lot. I was very shy and I didn’t socialise very easily. My parent were desperate. They didn’t want to hurt me, but they didn’t know what to do,” Paulo relates.Coelho escaped from the asylum three times and was eventually released in 1967. He then enrolled in Law School, only to drop out to become a hippy. He also wrote popular song lyrics for some of Brazil’s famous pop music stars, including Elis Regina and Raul Seixas. Shortly after, he worked as a journalist.Then, in 1974, Coelho was arrested for ‘subversive’ activities by the authorities (the authorities saw Coelho’s lyrics as leftwing and dangerous).In 1986 Paulo Coelho walked the Road to Santiago, a medieval pilgrim’s route between France and Spain. He would later describe this experience in his book, The Pilgrimage, published in 1987. The following year, his second book The Alchemist established his worldwide fame.Paulo Coelho have the Guinness World Record for most translations (53) of a single title (The Alchemist) signed in one sitting (45 minutes). The record has been attained as a result of an international book signing hold at the Frankfurt Book Fair (2003).Coelho’s books tend to feature some sort of spiritual quest.In his words: “I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don’t hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am.””Many people love my work, some hate it, but I’ve never stopped to think about it, and I’ll go on without giving a thought – what really matters to me is to know that I can share my soul with those who understand me.””I’m a human being, in its full condition, with its positive and negative sides. But I keep my ethics and when I break it, I’m not ashamed to apologize. I think that people waste a lot of time trying to improve themselves – and they do it by following other people’s patterns. What’s the meaning of being better? In my opinion, it is the constant daily struggle in search of my own dream. Man improves himself as he follows his path; if he stands still, waiting to improve before he makes a decision, he’ll never move.”

Paulo Coelho Other titles by Coelho include Brida (1990), The Valkyries (1992), Maktub (1994) – a compilation of his daily columns, By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1994), The Fifth Mountain (1996), The Manual of the Warrior of Light (1997), Veronika Decides to Die (1998) and The Devil and Miss Prym (2000).Coelho’s latest novel ‘O Zahir’ reaches the Brazilian bookstores on April 2nd 2005. It is already the number one in the bestseller lists of all 83 countries in which it has been released; the only exception is in Germany, where it is number two, behind Da Vinci Code (another great novel). O Zahir was published in 83 countries and in 42 languages throughout the globe.Paulo Coelho’s enchanting novel has inspired millions of delighted readers around the world. His story is told in dazzling simplicity and wisdom. His writings is a must read! For those who have not yet read any of his bestsellers, you should start reading his first charting novel – The Pilgrimage and The Alchemist. Eleven Minutes is also a must read.

 

A brief history of English literature

Introduction Literary forms Old English, Middle English and Chaucer Tudor lyric poetry Renaissance drama Metaphysical poetry Epic poetry Restoration comedy Prose fiction and the novel          Romanticism Victorian poetry The Victoriaovel Modern literature Writers outside mainstream movements Literature and culture Recent and future trends Evaluating literature Add to this page

Introduction

This study guide is intended for GCE Advanced and Advanced Supplementary (A2 and AS) level students in the UK, who are taking exams or modules in English literature. It should be most useful right at the start of the course, or later as a resource for exercises in revision, and to help you reflect on value judgements in literary criticism. It may also be suitable for university students and the general reader who is interested in the history of literature. This guide reflects a view of literature which is sometimes described as canonical, and sometimes as a Dead White European Male view. That is, I have not especially sought to express my own value judgements but to reflect those which are commonly found in printed guides by judges whose views command more respect than mine.

 I hope that students who visit this page will take issue with the summary comments here, or discuss them with their peers. But young readers will not thank teachers for leaving them in the dark about established critical opinion or the canon of English literature. (If you doubt that there is a canon, look at the degree course structure for English literature in a selection of our most prestigious universities.) Students who recognize that they have little or no sense of English literary culture have often asked me to suggest texts for them to study – this guide may help them in this process. This is NOT a tutorial, in the sense of a close reading of any text. And it is not very interesting to read from start to finish. I hope, rather, that it will be used as a point of reference or way in to literature for beginners. You will soon see if it is not for you.

And while I have made a selection from the many authors who deserve study, I have throughout presented them in a chronogical sequence. At the end I consider briefly questions of genre and literary value. I have not attempted to record the achivements of writers in other languages, though these include some of the greatest and most influential writers of all time, such as Dante Alighieri, Leo Tolstoy, Franz Kafka and Bertolt Brecht. Happily, examiners of Advanced level literature have allowed students, in recent years, to study these foreign authors, in translation, in independent extended literary studies.

Please use the hyperlinks in the table above to navigate this page. If you have any comments or suggestions to make about this page, please e-mail me by clicking on this link.

The typographic conventions of this page are red for emphasis and the names of authors when first mentioned, and when they appear outside of the section which relates to their historic period. Brown type is used in place of italic for titles of works. The screen fonts display in such a way that neither true italic nor bold are very pleasant to read. If you find the text size too small, you can increase it, using the text size item in the view menu of your browser.

Literary forms

Literary forms such as the novel or lyric poem, or genres, such as the horror-story, have a history. In one sense, they appear because they have not been thought of before, but they also appear, or become popular for other cultural reasons, such as the absence or emergence of literacy. In studying the history of literature (or any kind of art), you are challenged to consider

what constitutes a given form,

how it has developed, and

whether it has a future.

The novels of the late Catherine Cookson may have much in common with those of Charlotte Brontë, but is it worth mimicking in the late 20th century, what was ground-breaking in the 1840s? While Brontë examines what is contemporary for her, Miss Cookson invents an imagined past which may be of interest to the cultural historian in studying the present sources of her nostalgia, but not to the student of the period in which her novels are set. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is a long work of prose fiction, but critics do not necessarily describe it as a novel. Why might this be? Knowing works in their historical context does not give easy answers, but may shed more or less light on our darkness in considering such questions.

Old English, Middle English and Chaucer

Old English

English, as we know it, descends from the language spoken by the north Germanic tribes who settled in England from the 5th century A.D. onwards. They had no writing (except runes, used as charms) until they learned the Latin alphabet from Roman missionaries. The earliest written works in Old English (as their language is now known to scholars) were probably composed orally at first, and may have been passed on from speaker to speaker before being written. We know the names of some of the later writers (Cædmon, Ælfric and King Alfred) but most writing is anonymous. Old English literature is mostly chronicle and poetry – lyric, descriptive but chiefly narrative or epic. By the time literacy becomes widespread, Old English is effectively a foreign and dead language. And its forms do not significantly affect subsequent developments in English literature. (With the scholarly exception of the 19th century poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who finds in Old English verse the model for his metrical system of “sprung rhythm”.)

Middle English and Chaucer

From 1066 onwards, the language is known to scholars as Middle English. Ideas and themes from French and Celtic literature appear in English writing at about this time, but the first great name in English literature is that of Geoffrey Chaucer (?1343-1400). Chaucer introduces the iambic pentameter line, the rhyming couplet and other rhymes used in Italian poetry (a language in which rhyming is arguably much easier than in English, thanks to the frequency of terminal vowels). Some of Chaucer’s work is prose and some is lyric poetry, but his greatest work is mostly narrative poetry, which we find in Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales. Other notable mediaeval works are the anonymous Pearl and Gawain and the Green Knight (probably by the same author) and William Langlands’ Piers Plowman.

Tudor lyric poetry

Modern lyric poetry in English begins in the early 16th century with the work of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547). Wyatt, who is greatly influenced by the Italian, Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) introduces the sonnet and a range of short lyrics to English, while Surrey (as he is known) develops unrhymed pentameters (or blank verse) thus inventing the verse form which will be of great use to contemporary dramatists. A flowering of lyric poetry in the reign of Elizabeth comes with such writers as Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), Edmund Spenser (1552-1599), Sir Walter Ralegh (1552-1618), Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) and William Shakespeare (1564-1616). The major works of the time are Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Renaissance drama

The first great English dramatist is Marlowe. Before the 16th century English drama meant the amateur performances of Bible stories by craft guilds on public holidays. Marlowe’s plays (Tamburlaine; Dr. Faustus; Edward II and The Jew of Malta) use the five act structure and the medium of blank verse, which Shakespeare finds so productive. Shakespeare develops and virtually exhausts this form, his Jacobean successors producing work which is rarely performed today, though some pieces have literary merit, notably The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil by John Webster (1580-1625) and The Revenger’s Tragedy by Cyril Tourneur (1575-1626). The excessive and gratuitous violence of Jacobean plays leads to the clamour for closing down the theatres, which is enacted by parliament after the Civil war.

Metaphysical poetry

The greatest of Elizabethan lyric poets is John Donne (1572-1631), whose short love poems are characterized by wit and irony, as he seeks to wrest meaning from experience. The preoccupation with the big questions of love, death and religious faith marks out Donne and his successors who are often called metaphysical poets. (This name, coined by Dr. Samuel Johnson in an essay of 1779, was revived and popularized by T.S. Eliot, in an essay of 1921. It can be unhelpful to modern students who are unfamiliar with this adjective, and who are led to think that these poets belonged to some kind of school or group – which is not the case.) After his wife’s death, Donne underwent a serious religious conversion, and wrote much fine devotional verse. The best known of the other metaphysicals are George Herbert (1593-1633), Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) and Henry Vaughan (1621-1695).

Epic poetry

Long narrative poems on heroic subjects mark the best work of classical Greek (Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey) and Roman (Virgil’s Æneid) poetry. John Milton (1608-1674) who was Cromwell’s secretary, set out to write a great biblical epic, unsure whether to write in Latin or English, but settling for the latter in Paradise Lost. John Dryden (1631-1700) also wrote epic poetry, on classical and biblical subjects. Though Dryden’s work is little read today it leads to a comic parody of the epic form, or mock-heroic. The best poetry of the mid 18th century is the comic writing of Alexander Pope (1688-1744). Pope is the best-regarded comic writer and satirist of English poetry. Among his many masterpieces, one of the more accessible is The Rape of the Lock (seekers of sensation should note that “rape” here has its archaic sense of “removal by force”; the “lock” is a curl of the heroine’s hair). Serious poetry of the period is well represented by the neo-classical Thomas Gray (1716-1771) whose Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard virtually perfects the elegant style favoured at the time.

Restoration comedy

On the death of Oliver Cromwell (in 1658) plays were no longer prohibited. A new kind of comic drama, dealing with issues of sexual politics among the wealthy and the bourgeois, arose. This is Restoration Comedy, and the style developed well beyond the restoration period into the mid 18th century almost. The total number of plays performed is vast, and many lack real merit, but the best drama uses the restoration conventions for a serious examination of contemporary morality. A play which exemplifies this well is The Country Wife by William Wycherley (1640-1716).

Prose fiction and the novel

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), wrote satires in verse and prose. He is best-known for the extended prose work Gulliver’s Travels, in which a fantastic account of a series of travels is the vehicle for satirizing familiar English institutions, such as religion, politics and law. Another writer who uses prose fiction, this time much more naturalistic, to explore other questions of politics or economics is Daniel Defoe (1661-1731), author of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders.

The first English novel is generally accepted to be Pamela (1740), by Samuel Richardson (1689-1761): this novel takes the form of a series of letters; Pamela, a virtuous housemaid resists the advances of her rich employer, who eventually marries her. Richardson’s work was almost at once satirized by Henry Fielding (1707-1754) in Joseph Andrews (Joseph is depicted as the brother of Richardson’s Pamela Andrews) and Tom Jones.

After Fielding, the novel is dominated by the two great figures of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) and Jane Austen (1775-1817), who typify, respectively, the new regional, historical romanticism and the established, urbane classical views.

Novels depicting extreme behaviour, madness or cruelty, often in historically remote or exotic settings are called Gothic. They are ridiculed by Austen in Northanger Abbey but include one undisputed masterpiece, Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley (1797-1851).

Romanticism

The rise of Romanticism

A movement in philosophy but especially in literature, romanticism is the revolt of the senses or passions against the intellect and of the individual against the consensus. Its first stirrings may be seen in the work of William Blake (1757-1827), and in continental writers such as the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the German playwrights Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

The publication, in 1798, by the poets William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) of a volume entitled Lyrical Ballads is a significant event in English literary history, though the poems were poorly received and few books sold. The elegant latinisms of Gray are dropped in favour of a kind of English closer to that spoken by real people (supposedly). Actually, the attempts to render the speech of ordinary people are not wholly convincing. Robert Burns (1759 1796) writes lyric verse in the dialect of lowland Scots (a variety of English). After Shakespeare, Burns is perhaps the most often quoted of writers in English: we sing his Auld Lang Syne every New Year’s Eve.

Later Romanticism

The work of the later romantics John Keats (1795-1821) and his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822; husband of Mary Shelley) is marked by an attempt to make language beautiful, and by an interest in remote history and exotic places. George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) uses romantic themes, sometimes comically, to explain contemporary events. Romanticism begins as a revolt against established views, but eventually becomes the established outlook. Wordsworth becomes a kind of national monument, while the Victorians make what was at first revolutionary seem familiar, domestic and sentimental.

Victorian poetry

The major poets of the Victorian era are Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) and Robert Browning (1812-1889). Both are prolific and varied, and their work defies easy classification. Tennyson makes extensive use of classical myth and Arthurian legend, and has been praised for the beautiful and musical qualities of his writing.

Browning’s chief interest is in people; he uses blank verse in writing dramatic monologues in which the speaker achieves a kind of self-portraiture: his subjects are both historical individuals (Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea del Sarto) and representative types or caricatures (Mr. Sludge the Medium).

Other Victorian poets of note include Browning’s wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) and Christina Rossetti (1830-1894). Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) is notable for his use of what he calls “sprung rhythm”; as in Old English verse syllables are not counted, but there is a pattern of stresses. Hopkins’ work was not well-known until very long after his death.

The Victoriaovel

The rise of the popular novel

In the 19th century, adult literacy increases markedly: attempts to provide education by the state, and self-help schemes are partly the cause and partly the result of the popularity of the novel. Publication in instalments means that works are affordable for people of modest means. The change in the reading public is reflected in a change in the subjects of novels: the high bourgeois world of Austen gives way to an interest in characters of humble origins. The great novelists write works which in some ways transcend their own period, but which in detail very much explore the preoccupations of their time.

Dickens and the Brontës

Certainly the greatest English novelist of the 19th century, and possibly of all time, is Charles Dickens (1812-1870). The complexity of his best work, the variety of tone, the use of irony and caricature create surface problems for the modern reader, who may not readily persist in reading. But Great Expectations, Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend and Little Dorrit are works with which every student should be acquainted.

Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) and her sisters Emily (1818-1848) and Anne (1820-1849) are understandably linked together, but their work differs greatly. Charlotte is notable for several good novels, among which her masterpiece is Jane Eyre, in which we see the heroine, after much adversity, achieve happiness on her own terms. Emily Brontë’s Wüthering Heights is a strange work, which enjoys almost cult status. Its concerns are more romantic, less contemporary than those of Jane Eyre – but its themes of obsessive love and self-destructive passion have proved popular with the 20th century reader.

The beginnings of American literature

The early 19th century sees the emergence of American literature, with the stories of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64), Herman Melville (1819-91), and Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens; 1835-1910), and the poetry of Walt Whitman (1819-92) and Emily Dickinson (1830-86). Notable works include Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby Dick, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

Later Victoriaovelists

After the middle of the century, the novel, as a form, becomes firmly-established: sensational or melodramatic “popular” writing is represented by Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne (1861), but the best novelists achieved serious critical acclaim while reaching a wide public, notable authors being Anthony Trollope (1815-82), Wilkie Collins (1824-89), William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63), George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans; 1819-80) and Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). Among the best novels are Collins’s The Moonstone, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Adam Bede and Middlemarch, and Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Return of the Native, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure.

Modern literature

Early 20th century poets

W.B. (William Butler) Yeats (1865-1939) is one of two figures who dominate modern poetry, the other being T.S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot (1888-1965). Yeats was Irish; Eliot was born in the USA but settled in England, and took UK citizenship in 1927. Yeats uses conventional lyric forms, but explores the connection between modern themes and classical and romantic ideas. Eliot uses elements of conventional forms, within an unconventionally structured whole in his greatest works. Where Yeats is prolific as a poet, Eliot’s reputation largely rests on two long and complex works: The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943).

The work of these two has overshadowed the work of the best late Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian poets, some of whom came to prominence during the First World War. Among these are Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), A.E. Housman (1859-1936), Edward Thomas (1878-1917), Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) and Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918). The most celebrated modern American poet, is Robert Frost (1874-1963), who befriended Edward Thomas before the war of 1914-1918.

Early modern writers

The late Victorian and early modern periods are spanned by two novelists of foreign birth: the American Henry James (1843-1916) and the Pole Joseph Conrad (Josef Korzeniowski; 1857-1924). James relates character to issues of culture and ethics, but his style can be opaque; Conrad’s narratives may resemble adventure stories in incident and setting, but his real concern is with issues of character and morality. The best of their work would include James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Nostromo and The Secret Agent.

Other notable writers of the early part of the century include George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), H.G. Wells (1866-1946), and E.M. Forster (1879-1970). Shaw was an essay-writer, language scholar and critic, but is best-remembered as a playwright. Of his many plays, the best-known is Pygmalion (even better known today in its form as the musical My Fair Lady). Wells is celebrated as a popularizer of science, but his best novels explore serious social and cultural themes, The History of Mr. Polly being perhaps his masterpiece. Forster’s novels include Howard’s End, A Room with a View and A Passage to India.

Joyce and Woolf

Where these writers show continuity with the Victorian tradition of the novel, more radically modern writing is found in the novels of James Joyce (1882-1941), of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), and of D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930). Where Joyce and Woolf challenge traditional narrative methods of viewpoint and structure, Lawrence is concerned to explore human relationships more profoundly than his predecessors, attempting to marry the insights of the new psychology with his own acute observation. Working-class characters are presented as serious and dignified; their manners and speech are not objects of ridicule.

Other notable novelists include George Orwell (1903-50), Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), Graham Greene (1904-1991) and the 1983 Nobel prize-winner, William Golding (1911-1993).

Poetry in the later 20th century

Between the two wars, a revival of romanticism in poetry is associated with the work of W.H. (Wystan Hugh) Auden (1907-73), Louis MacNeice (1907-63) and Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-72). Auden seems to be a major figure on the poetic landscape, but is almost too contemporary to see in perspective. The Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas (1914-53) is notable for strange effects of language, alternating from extreme simplicity to massive overstatement.

Of poets who have achieved celebrity in the second half of the century, evaluation is even more difficult, but writers of note include the American Robert Lowell (1917-77), Philip Larkin (1922-1985), R.S. Thomas (1913-2000), Thom Gunn (1929-2004), Ted Hughes (1930-1998) and the 1995 Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney (b. 1939).

Notable writers outside mainstream movements

Any list of “important” names is bound to be uneven and selective. Identifying broad movements leads to the exclusion of those who do not easily fit into schematic outlines of history. Writers not referred to above, but highly regarded by some readers might include Laurence Sterne (1713-68), author of Tristram Shandy, R.L. Stevenson (1850-94) writer of Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), author of The Importance of Being Earnest, and novelists such as Arnold Bennett (1867-1931), John Galsworthy (1867-1933) and the Americans F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961), John Steinbeck (1902-68) and J.D. Salinger (b. 1919). Two works notable not just for their literary merit but for their articulation of the spirit of the age are Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. The American dramatist Arthur Miller (b. 1915) has received similar acclaim for his play Death of a Salesman (1949). Miller is more popular in the UK than his native country, and is familiar to many teachers and students because his work is so often set for study in examinations.

Literature and culture

Literature has a history, and this connects with cultural history more widely. Prose narratives were written in the 16th century, but the novel as we know it could not arise, in the absence of a literate public. The popular and very contemporary medium for narrative in the 16th century is the theatre. The earliest novels reflect a bourgeois view of the world because this is the world of the authors and their readers (working people are depicted, but patronizingly, not from inside knowledge). The growth of literacy in the Victorian era leads to enormous diversification in the subjects and settings of the novel.

Recent and future trends

In recent times the novel has developed different genres such as the thriller, the whodunnit, the pot-boiler, the western and works of science-fiction, horror and the sex-and-shopping novel. Some of these may be brief fashions (the western seems to be dying) while others such as the detective story or science-fiction have survived for well over a century. As the dominant form of narrative in contemporary western popular culture, the novel may have given way to the feature film and television drama. But it has proved surprisingly resilient. As society alters, so the novel may reflect or define this change; many works may be written, but few of them will fulfil this defining rôle; those which seem to do so now, may not speak to later generations in the same way.

Evaluating literature

The “test of time” may be a cliché, but is a genuine measure of how a work of imagination can transcend cultural boundaries; we should, perhaps, now speak of the “test of time and place”, as the best works cross boundaries of both kinds. We may not “like” or “enjoy” works such as Wüthering Heights, Heart of Darkness or The Waste Land, but they are the perfect expression of particular ways of looking at the world; the author has articulated a view which connects with the reader’s search for meaning. It is, of course, perfectly possible for a work of imagination to make sense of the world or of experience (or love, or God, or death) while also entertaining or delighting the reader or audience with the detail and eloquence of the work, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or Great Expectations.

 

From Classics to Graphics: 6 Literary Masterpieces Turned Into Graphic Novels

 

Abridging classic novels for younger readers is nothing new. But in recent years, classic literature has been graphic novel-ized, making it more accessible for readers young and old while preserving the plot, themes, and sometimes even the author’s voice. English class will never be the same, thanks to these classics gone graphic.

1. The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde’s only novel, about a man who sells his soul to maintain his beauty, was just begging for a more visual makeover. The 2009 graphic novel written by Ian Edginton and illustrated by I.N.J. Culbard abridges the text, but still keeps much of Wilde’s original prose. Marvel’s 2008 version has better graphics, but it reads more like a copy of SparkNotes. Both books are recommended as a supplement to—not a substitute for—the original work. In the words of Dorian Gray himself, “How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. If it were only the other way!”

2. The Metamorphosis

 

The Incredible Hulk. Wolverine. Gregor Samsa. All of these characters undergo major transformations, but only one of them might appear on an AP English exam. Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella about a traveling salesman who wakes up to find he’s turned into a huge insect makes for a compelling graphic novel. Peter Kuper’s 2004 adaptation looks like an enjoyable read, but it goes against Kafka’s wishes. When the cover of the first edition was being designed nearly a century ago, the author asked that Gregor not be drawn as an insect. Instead, he hoped readers would conjure their own image of “horrible vermin” when picturing the creepy-crawly protagonist.

The Trial, Kafka’s dystopiaovel about the perils of bureaucracy, has also been adapted into a graphic novel. And if you want to learn more about the man behind the stories, check out Kafka’s graphic biography by R. Crumb and David Zane Mairowitz.

3. Ulysses

 

Ulysses is one of those works that comes with a few barriers to entry. For starters, the Penguin Classics version is 1040 pages long. Then there are the 18 unstructured chapters that James Joyce boasted “[have] so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.” (Thanks, dude.) But Robert Berry’s “Ulysses ‘seen'” makes the modernist masterpiece more modern—and accessible—than ever. The graphic novel is available for free online or $7.99 on the iPad. Like the original, Berry’s adaptation is serialized and raised a few questions of obscenity—Apple required nude images to be removed. Unlike the original, each chapter comes with a handy reader’s guide.

4. Pride and Prejudice

 

Plenty of readers all over the world have no trouble reading Jane Austen’s most popular novel. But what do you do after you’ve devoured the text and the six-part BBC series with Colin Firth as, omg, Mr. Darcy? Here’s an idea: Get another fix with this 2009 graphic novel version from Marvel. The story’s abridged, but reviewers on Amazon say it’s more true to the novel than some film adaptations. The women’s-magazine-style cover with headlines like “Bingleys Bring Bling to Britain” is fun, too.

And if you like this Marvel graphic novel, there are many others adapted by author Janet Lee, including Sense and Sensibility and Emma.

5. The Diary of Anne Frank

 

Anne Frank couldn’t have imagined that the diary she started two days after her thirteenth birthday in 1942 would ever become a best-selling memoir, a Pulitzer-Prize winning play, and an Academy Award-winning film. The diary’s latest incarnation: a 2010 graphic biography written by Sid Jacobson and illustrated by Ernie Colón. Commissioned by the Anne Frank House Museum, the biography depicts many years before and after Anne’s time in the Secret Annex, from her parents’ early lives to the publication of her diary to her father’s life as the family’s sole survivor.

6. A Wrinkle in Time

It may not be part of the canon, but Madeline L’Engle’s 1962 science fiction fantasy novel is a young-adult classic. While the original work contains a few illustrations, the graphic novel by Hope Larson published October 2 is the first to fully depict Meg, Calvin, Charles Wallace, and the rest of the characters as they journey through space and time. And c’mon, you know you want to see how Larson draws the tessering process.

Read the full text here: http://mentalfloss.com/article/12962/classics-graphics-6-literary-masterpieces-turned-graphic-novels#ixzz2Hhx00XAS –brought to you by mental_floss!

SOME THOUGHTS ON LITERATURE

Literature is not a historical library of the great books, it is a phenomenon produced by writers in their own age, and as such it usually requires interpretation. What that interpretation will be is a function of the time in which it is undertaken and our distance from the original work. Two hundred years ago people looked to the Classics for examples of absolute excellence since it was felt that the ancient societies of Greece and Rome had produced masterpieces which could never be duplicated. Interpretation stood in awe of the great, if somewhat remote Classics, which history had handed down.

Since the Renaissance imitation was considered permissible since Neo-Classical reworking of ancient themes and styles seemed to show a proper reverence for the work of the masters, while making more or less relevant models for later times. As a form of comment and interpretation Neo-Classicism was valid, but as a way of generating new works of art it was in large part a failure, since it choked off the breath of the new life which living societies possesss. By the end of the l9th century Neo-Classicism was expiring as an artistic force, although it lingered on as instruction in the academies of painting, sculpture and architecture for a while, finally ensconcing itself in the cocoon of academic criticism.

The early part of the 20 th. century saw the appearance of the social sciences along with a pervasive sense of social awareness. Soon literature was being analyzed as a part of society, and the cultural connections established between a work of literature and its time-frame were stressed as the dominant meaning literature. Much modern literature was produced in this spirit, fostering a new and perfectly valid kind of writing; but when the critics tried to apply cultural-historical standards to the literature of antiquity, everything changed. Homer was no longer a poet with a vision, but a Janus-like witness on the one hand pointing Mycenean times and on the other hand toward the ensuing centuries which were to build on an ancient heritage. Literature was plowed up for motifs to illustrate relevance to philosophy, religion, and history, since these, rather than the art of words, were the things which really counted. Students of Classics at the middle of this century heard from their teachers a great deal about history and society, and almost nothing about the art writing. Art and esthetics found little place in this diet of harder fare!

About this time, a major Society (which curiously had never been identified before) was identified and became the focus of a new spurt of academic enthusiasm, connecting the men and women of today to the ancients by means of the thread of cultural-history. I am speaking of Western Civilization, a resounding name which automatically confers honor and respectable ancestry on those who employ it, while conveniently shouldering out the Oriental peoples, the world of Islam, the various cultures of Africa and the Americas and all others who fall under the broad classification of “primitive”. If literary critics want to consider themselves primarily students of Man’s behavior and history, Western Civilization can be made to fill in the chapters nicely, but at the cost of blurring the differences among the divergent European traditions, while incurring ipso facto the charge of ethnocentrism. And of course consideration of the art of literature as “art” goes out the window.

If we are speaking about literature as the art of written words, the putting together of ideas in matrices of sounds scored for rhythms in prose or verse, we will not be satisfied with this kind of socio-historical procedure. If we view literature primarily as art rather than an archive odf documents, we will have to find other approaches. Two ways come to mind immediately : First there is the way which works with the complex esthetics of language, and second, there is another way which concerns itself with the artist as a thinking individual working in his art from the base of a private personality. The first way is important, it was certainly the way most ancient critics viewed Greek literature, and we get a good introduction to this kind of thinking in the criticism of Dionysus of Halicarnassus. This is difficult since it involves much analytical technique and a thorough understanding of phonetics, and cannot be treated compactly in a paper of this sort. But the second way, which is concerned with the inner-mind of the artist, is equally important, and possibly a easier to deal with in this paper on the art of Vergil..

When we read an ancient poet’s work, if we can break through the wall of the centuries and the mask of erudite criticism, we will quickly realize that we are dealing with words, phrases and ideas which were put together in that exact form by an individual, who was both an creative artist and a living person. A book on our desk is the artistic output of some part of a personal life. He ate breakfast in the morning and went to bed at night, but in between he focused himself on his poem or his history or his play. It is the precise way he did that marks his work as different from everyone else’s writing.

Some writing transcends the individual identity of the author and enters the canon of the “great” works, which we describe as being somehow “better”, although often we cannot grasp exactly what it is that makes them good. The public has a good nose for great books, yet there is much critical unevenness through the centuries. In the l8th century Homer was considered raw, Chaucer unreadable and Shakespeare verbose, if not dramatically unpresentable without cutting.

At the present time we are in command of vastly increased knowledge about Man and the world around him. Our new understanding of humanity has come about through work in sociology, anthropology, psychology and many of the physical sciences, so that a reasonably educated persoowadays has a greatly increased intellectual library of pertinent materials in his hands. When he reads a novel or a poem he automatically thinks in terms of the disciplines which have developed in this century, he can simultaneously overlap a historical approach with a psychological query, while savoring the phonetics and semantics of words on the printed page. Every thoughtful reader has a panoply of tools at his disposal, he can go farther than anyone in the past could even imagine, and the only danger he faces is that he may lose his intellectual balance in eager bewilderment.

Seeing the ancient writer as a person, but at the same time a special kind of person who invested work and joy in what he was doing, the modern reader will want to ask many questions. Why did this line come out just so? Is there something of personal meaning which we might be missing here? What kind of a man is it who says this kind of thing? Sitting in his study, a modern reader is able to deal on a one-to-one basis with the author, as a reader he is real and alive, with a volume of poetry open before him. But the author is also real and artistically alive although in a different sense of the word, although he died many centuries ago. This relationship of reader to book is very private and personal, but one which calls for some lateral awarenesses. A great deal of learning and acuity is demanded, but the footnotes and historical details will finally melt into the background as the reader grasps the poem with a kind of spiritual lunge. Considering the complexities of the human brain and the wide scope of human knowledge, recognition of this sort may be much more complex than we think, but if reader can “grasp the meaning” in a flash, that will be sufficient for the moment. We don’t have to monitor in detail each intellectual process which we perform, it is quite enough to read the signals and forget some of the machinery.

Contemporary American Literature

The United States is one of the most diverse nations in the world. Its dynamic population of about 300 million boasts more than 30 million foreign-born individuals who speak numerous languages and dialects. Some one millioew immigrants arrive each year, many from Asia and Latin America.

Literature in the United States today is likewise dazzlingly diverse, exciting, and evolving. New voices have arisen from many quarters, challenging old ideas and adapting literary traditions to suit changing conditions of the national life. Social and economic advances have enabled previously underrepresented groups to express themselves more fully, while technological innovations have created a fast-moving public forum. Reading clubs proliferate, and book fairs, literary festivals, and “poetry slams” (events where youthful poets compete in performing their poetry) attract enthusiastic audiences. Selection of a new work for a book club can launch an unknown writer into the limelight overnight.

On a typical Sunday the list of best-selling books in the New York Times Book Review testifies to the extraordinary diversity of the current American literary scene. In January, 2006, for example, the list of paperback best-sellers included “genre” fiction — steamy romances by Nora Roberts, a new thriller by John Grisham, murder mysteries — alongside nonfiction science books by the anthropologist Jared Diamond, popular sociology by The New Yorker magazine writer Malcolm Gladwell, and accounts of drug rehabilitation and crime. In the last category was a reprint of Truman Capote’s groundbreaking In Cold Blood, a 1965 “nonfictioovel” that blurs the distinction between high literature and journalism and had recently been made into a film.

Books by non-American authors and books on international themes were also prominent on the list. Afghan-American Khaled Hosseini’s searing novel, The Kite Runner, tells of childhood friends in Kabul separated by the rule of the Taliban, while Azar Nafisi’s memoir, Reading Lolita in Teheran, poignantly recalls teaching great works of Western literature to young women in Iran. A third novel, Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha (made into a movie), recounts a Japanese woman’s life during World War II.

In addition, the best-seller list reveals the popularity of religious themes. According to Publishers Weekly, 2001 was the first year that Christian-themed books topped the sales lists in both fiction and nonfiction. Among the hardcover best-sellers of that exemplary Sunday in 2006, we find Dan Brown’s novel The DaVinci Code and Anne Rice’s tale Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt.

Beyond the Times’ best-seller list, chain bookstores offer separate sections for major religions including Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and sometimes Hinduism.

In the Women’s Literature section of bookstores one finds works by a “Third Wave” of feminists, a movement that usually refers to young women in their 20s and 30s who have grown up in an era of widely accepted social equality in the United States. Third Wave feminists feel sufficiently empowered to emphasize the individuality of choices women make. Often associated in the popular mind with a return to tradition and child-rearing, lipstick, and “feminine” styles, these young women have reclaimed the word “girl” — some decline to call themselves feminist. What is often called “chick lit” is a flourishing offshoot. Bridget Jones’s Diary by the British writer Helen Fielding and Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City featuring urban single women with romance in mind have spawned a popular genre among young women.

Nonfiction writers also examine the phenomenon of post-feminism. The Mommy Myth (2004) by Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels analyzes the role of the media in the “mommy wars,” while Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards’ lively ManifestA: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (2000) discusses women’s activism in the age of the Internet. Caitlin Flanagan, a magazine writer who calls herself an “anti-feminist,” explores conflicts between domestic life and professional life for women. Her 2004 essay in The Atlantic, “How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement,” an account of how professional women depend on immigrant women of a lower class for their childcare, triggered an enormous debate.

It is clear that American literature at the turn of the 21st century has become democratic and heterogeneous. Regionalism has flowered, and international, or “global,” writers refract U.S. culture through foreign perspectives. Multiethnic writing continues to mine rich veins, and as each ethnic literature matures, it creates its own traditions. Creative nonfiction and memoir have flourished. The short story genre has gained luster, and the “short” short story has taken root. A new generation of playwrights continues the American tradition of exploring current social issues on stage. There is not space here in this brief survey to do justice to the glittering diversity of American literature today. Instead, one must consider general developments and representative figures.

Postmodernism

“Postmodernism” suggests fragmentation: collage, hybridity, and the use of various voices, scenes, and identities. Postmodern authors question external structures, whether political, philosophical, or artistic. They tend to distrust the master-narratives of modernist thought, which they see as politically suspect. Instead, they mine popular culture genres, especially science fiction, spy, and detective stories, becoming, in effect, archaeologists of pop culture.

Don DeLillo’s White Noise, structured in 40 sections like video clips, highlights the dilemmas of representation: “Were people this dumb before television?” one character wonders. David Foster Wallace’s gargantuan (1,000 pages, 900 footnotes) Infinite Jest mixes up wheelchair-bound terrorists, drug addicts, and futuristic descriptions of a country like the United States. In Galatea 2.2, Richard Powers interweaves sophisticated technology with private lives.

Influenced by Thomas Pynchon, postmodern authors fabricate complex plots that demand imaginative leaps. Often they flatten historical depth into one dimension; William Vollmann’s novels slide between vastly different times and places as easily as a computer mouse moves between texts.

Creative Nonfiction: Memoir and Autobiography Many writers hunger for open, less canonical genres as vehicles for their postmodern visions. The rise of global, multiethnic, and women’s literature — works in which writers reflect on experiences shaped by culture, color, and gender — has endowed autobiography and memoir with special allure. While the boundaries of the terms are debated, a memoir is typically shorter or more limited in scope, while an autobiography makes some attempt at a comprehensive overview of the writer’s life.

Postmodern fragmentation has rendered problematic for many writers the idea of a finished self that can be articulated successfully in one sweep. Many turn to the memoir in their struggles to ground an authentic self. What constitutes authenticity, and to what extent the writer is allowed to embroider upon his or her memories of experience in works of nonfiction, are hotly contested subjects of writers’ conferences.

Writers themselves have contributed penetrating observations on such questions in books about writing, such as The Writing Life (1989) by Annie Dillard. Noteworthy memoirs include The Stolen Light (1989) by Ved Mehta. Born in India, Mehta was blinded at the age of three. His account of flying alone as a young blind person to study in the United States is unforgettable. Irish American Frank McCourt’s mesmerizing Angela’s Ashes (1996) recalls his childhood of poverty, family alcoholism, and intolerance in Ireland with a surprising warmth and humor. Paul Auster’s Hand to Mouth (1997) tells of poverty that blocked his writing and poisoned his soul.

The Short Story: New Directions The story genre had to a degree lost its luster by the late l970s. Experimental metafiction stories had been penned by Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, John Barth, and William Gass and were no longer on the cutting edge. Large-circulation weekly magazines that had showcased short fiction, such as the Saturday Evening Post, had collapsed.

It took an outsider from the Pacific Northwest — a gritty realist in the tradition of Ernest Hemingway — to revitalize the genre. Raymond Carver (l938-l988) had studied under the late novelist John Gardner, absorbing Gardner’s passion for accessible artistry fused with moral vision. Carver rose above alcoholism and harsh poverty to become the most influential story writer in the United States. In his collections Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (l976), What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (l981), Cathedral (l983), and Where I’m Calling From (l988), Carver follows confused working people through dead-end jobs, alcoholic binges, and rented rooms with an understated, minimalist style of writing that carries tremendous impact.

Linked with Carver is novelist and story writer Ann Beattie (1947- ), whose middle-class characters often lead aimless lives. Her stories reference political events and popular songs, and offer distilled glimpses of life decade by decade in the changing United States. Recent collections are Park City (l998) and Perfect Recall (2001).

Inspired by Carver and Beattie, writers crafted impressive neorealist story collections in the mid-l980s, including Amy Hempel’s Reasons to Live (1985), David Leavitt’s Family Dancing (l984), Richard Ford’s Rock Springs (l987), Bobbie Ann Mason’s Shiloh and Other Stories (1982), and Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help (l985). Other noteworthy figures include the late Andre Dubus, author of Dancing After Hours (l996), and the prolific John Updike, whose recent story collections include The Afterlife and Other Stories (l994).

Today, as is discussed later in this chapter, writers with ethnic and global roots are informing the story genre with non-Western and tribal approaches, and storytelling has commanded critical and popular attention. The versatile, primal tale is the basis of several hybridized forms: novels that are constructed of interlinking short stories or vignettes, and creative nonfictions that interweave history and personal history with fiction.

The Short Short Story: Sudden or Flash Fiction The short short is a very brief story, often only one or two pages long. It is sometimes called “flash fiction” or “sudden fiction” after the l986 anthology Sudden Fiction, edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas.

In short short stories, there is little space to develop a character. Rather, the element of plot is central: A crisis occurs, and a sketched-in character simply has to react. Authors deploy clever narrative or linguistic patterns; in some cases, the short short resembles a prose poem.

Supporters claim that short shorts’ “reduced geographies” mirror postmodern conditions in which borders seem closer together. They find elegant simplicity in these brief fictions. Detractors see short shorts as a symptom of cultural decay, a general loss of reading ability, and a limited attention span. In any event, short shorts have found a certaiiche: They are easy to forward in an e-mail, and they lend themselves to electronic distribution. They make manageable in-class readings and models for writing assignments.

Drama Contemporary drama mingles realism with fantasy in postmodern works that fuse the personal and the political. The exuberant Tony Kushner (l956- ) has won acclaim for his prize-winning Angels in America plays, which vividly render the AIDS epidemic and the psychic cost of closeted homosexuality in the 1980s and 1990s. Part One: Millennium Approaches (1991) and its companion piece, Part Two: Perestroika (1992), together last seven hours. Combining comedy, melodrama, political commentary, and special effects, they interweave various plots and marginalized characters.

Women dramatists have attained particular success in recent years. Prominent among them is Beth Henley (1952- ), from Mississippi, known for her portraits of southern women. Henley gained national recognition for her Crimes of the Heart (l978), which was made into a film in l986, a warm play about three eccentric sisters whose affection helps them survive disappointment and despair. Later plays, including The Miss Firecracker Contest (1980), The Wake of Jamey Foster (l982), The Debutante Ball (l985), and The Lucky Spot (l986), explore southern forms of socializing — beauty contests, funerals, coming-out parties, and dance halls.

Wendy Wasserstein (1950-2006), from New York, wrote early comedies including When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth (l975), a parody of beauty contests. She is best known for The Heidi Chronicles (l988), about a successful woman professor who confesses to deep unhappiness and adopts a baby. Wasserstein continued exploring women’s aspirations in The Sisters Rosensweig (l991), An American Daughter (1997), and Old Money (2000).

Younger dramatists such as African-American Suzan-Lori Parks (1964- ) build on the successes of earlier women. Parks, who grew up on various army bases in the United States and Germany, deals with political issues in experimental works whose timelessness and ritualism recall Irish-born writer Samuel Beckett. Her best-known work, The America Play (1991), revolves around the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth. She returns to this theme in Topdog/Underdog (2001), which tells the story of two African-American brothers named Lincoln and Booth and their lifetime of sibling rivalry.

Regionalism

A  pervasive regionalist sensibility has gained strength in American literature in the past two decades. Decentralization expresses the postmodern U.S. condition, a trend most evident in fiction writing; no longer does any one viewpoint or code successfully express the nation. No one city defines artistic movements, as New York City once did. Vital arts communities have arisen in many cities, and electronic technology has de-centered literary life.

As economic shifts and social change redefine America, a yearning for tradition has set in. The most sustaining and distinctively American myths partake of the land, and writers are turning to the Civil War South, the Wild West of the rancher, the rooted life of the midwestern farmer, the southwestern tribal homeland, and other localized realms where the real and the mythic mingle. Of course, more than one region has inspired many writers; they are included here in regions formative to their vision or characteristic of their mature work.

The Northeast The scenic Northeast, region of lengthy winters, dense deciduous forests, and low rugged mountain chains, was the first English-speaking colonial area, and it retains the feel of England. Boston, Massachusetts, is the cultural powerhouse, boasting research institutions and scores of universities. Many New England writers depict characters that continue the Puritan legacy, embodying the middle-class Protestant work ethic and progressive commitment to social reform. In the rural areas, small, independent farmers struggle to survive in the world of global marketing.

Novelist Joyce Carol Oates sets many of her gothic works in upstate New York. Richard Russo (1949- ), in his appealing Empire Falls (2001), evokes life in a dying mill town in Maine, the state where Stephen King (1947- ) locates his popular horror novels.

The bittersweet fictions of Massachusetts-based Sue Miller (1943- ), such as The Good Mother (1986), examine counterculture lifestyles in Cambridge, a city known for cultural and social diversity, intellectual vitality, and technological innovation. Another writer from Massachusetts, Anita Diamant (1951- ), earned popular acclaim with The Red Tent (1997), a feminist historical novel based on the biblical story of Dinah.

Russell Banks (1940- ), from poor, rural New Hampshire, has turned from experimental writing to more realistic works, such as Affliction (1989), his novel about working-class New Hampshire characters. For Banks, acknowledging one’s roots is a fundamental part of one’s identity. In Affliction, the narrator scorns people who have “gone to Florida, Arizona, and California, bought a trailer or a condo, turned their skin to leather playing shuffleboard all day and waited to die.” Banks’s recent works include Cloudsplitter (1998), a historical novel about the 19th-century abolitionist John Brown.

The striking stylist Annie Proulx (1935- ) crafts stories of struggling northern New Englanders in Heart Songs (1988). Her best novel, The Shipping News (1993), is set even further north, in Newfoundland, Canada. Proulx has also spent years in the West, and one of her short stories inspired the 2006 movie “Brokeback Mountain.”

William Kennedy (1928- ) has written a dense and entwined cycle of novels set in Albany, in northern New York State, including his acclaimed Ironweed. The title of his insider’s history of Albany gives some idea of his gritty, colloquial style and teeming cast of often unsavory characters: O Albany! Improbable City of Political Wizards, Fearless Ethnics, Spectacular Aristocrats, Splendid Nobodies, and Underrated Scoundrels (1983). Kennedy has been hailed as an elder statesman of a small Irish-American literary movement that includes the late Mary McCarthy, Mary Gordon, Alice McDermott, and Frank McCourt.

Three writers who studied at Brown University in Rhode Island around the same time and took classes with British writer Angela Carter are often mentioned as the nucleus of a “next generation.” Donald Antrim (1959- ) satirizes academic life in The Hundred Brothers (1997), set in an enormous library from which one can see homeless people. Rick Moody (1961- ) is best known for his novel The Ice Storm (1994). The novels of Jeffrey Eugenides (1960- ) include Middlesex (2002), which narrates the experience of a hermaphrodite. Impressive stylists with off-center visions bordering on the absurd, Antrim, Moody, and Eugenides carry further the opposite traditions of John Updike and Thomas Pynchon. Often linked with these three younger novelists is the exuberant postmodernist David Foster Wallace (1962- ). Wallace, who was born in Ithaca, New York, gained acclaim for his complex serio-comic novel The Broom of the System (1987) and the pop culture-saturated stories in Girl With Curious Hair (1989).

 

The Mid-Atlantic The fertile Mid-Atlantic states, dominated by New York City with its great harbor, remain a gateway for waves of immigrants. Today the region’s varied economy encompasses finance, commerce, and shipping, as well as advertising and fashion. New York City is the home of the publishing industry, as well as prestigious art galleries and museums.

Don DeLillo (1936- ), from New York City, began as an advertising writer, and his novels explore consumerism among their many themes. Americana (1971) concludes: “To consume in America is not to buy, it is to dream.” DeLillo’s protagonists seek identities based on images. White Noise (1985) concerns Jack Gladney and his family, whose experience is mediated by various texts, especially advertisements. One passage suggests DeLillo’s style: “…the emptiness, the sense of cosmic darkness. Mastercard, Visa, American Express.” Fragments of advertisements that drift unattached through the book emerge from Gladney’s media-parroting subconscious, generating the subliminal white noise of the title. DeLillo’s later novels include politics and historical figures: Libra (1988) envisions the assassination of President John F. Kennedy as an explosion of frustrated consumerism; Underworld (1997) spins a web of interconnections between a baseball game and a nuclear bomb in Kazakhstan.

In multidimensional, polyglot New York, fictions featuring a shadowy postmodern city abound. An example is the labyrinthine New York trilogy City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), and The Locked Room (1986) by Paul Auster (1947- ). In this work, inspired by Samuel Beckett and the detective novel, an isolated writer at work on a detective story addresses Paul Auster, who is writing about Cervantes. The trilogy suggests that “reality” is but a text constructed via fiction, thus erasing the traditional border between reality and illusion. Auster’s trilogy, in effect, self-deconstructs. Similarly, Kathy Acker (1948-1997) juxtaposed passages from works by Cervantes and Charles Dickens with science fiction in postmodern pastiches such as Empire of the Senseless (1988), a quest through time and space for an individual voice.

New York City hosts many groups of writers with shared interests. Jewish women include noted essayist Cynthia Ozick (1928- ), who hails from the Bronx, the setting of her novel The Puttermesser Papers (l997). Her haunting novel The Shawl (1989) gives a young mother’s viewpoint on the Holocaust. The droll, conversational Collected Stories (l994) of Grace Paley (1922- ) capture the syncopated rhythms of the city.

Younger writers associated with life in the fast lane are Jay McInerney (1955- ), whose Story of My Life (1988) is set in the drug-driven youth culture of the boom-time 1980s, and satirist Tama Janowitz (1957- ). Their portraits of loneliness and addiction in the anonymous hard-driving city recall the works of John Cheever.

Nearby suburbs claim the imaginations of still other writers. Mary Gordon (1949- ) sets many of her female-centered works in her birthplace, Long Island, as does Alice McDermott (l953- ), whose novel Charming Billy (1998) dissects the failed promise of an alcoholic.

Mid-Atlantic domestic realists include Richard Bausch (1945- ), from Baltimore, author of In the Night Season (1998) and the stories in Someone to Watch Over Me (l999). Bausch writes of fragmented families, as does Anne Tyler (1941- ), also from Baltimore, whose eccentric characters negotiate disorganized, isolated lives. A master of detail and understated wit, Tyler writes in spare, quiet language. Her best-knowovels include Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982) and The Accidental Tourist (1985), which was made into a film in l988. The Amateur Marriage (2004) sets a divorce against a panorama of American life over 60 years.

African Americans have made distinctive contributions. Feminist essayist and poet Audre Lorde’s autobiographical Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (l982) is an earthy account of a black woman’s experience in the United States. Bebe Moore Campbell (l950- ), from Philadelphia, writes feisty domestic novels including Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine (l992). Gloria Naylor (l950- ), from New York City, explores different women’s lives in The Women of Brewster Place (1982), the novel that made her name.

Critically acclaimed John Edgar Wideman (l941- ) grew up in Homewood, a black section of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His Faulknerian Homewood Trilogy — Hiding Place (1981), Damballah (1981), and Sent for You Yesterday (1983) — uses shifting viewpoints and linguistic play to render black experience. His best-known short piece, “Brothers and Keepers” (1984), concerns his relationship with his imprisoned brother. In The Cattle Killing (l996), Wideman returns to the subject of his famous early story “Fever” (l989). His novel Two Cities (l998) takes place in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

David Bradley (1950- ), also from Pennsylvania, set his historical novel The Chaneysville Incident (l981) on the “underground railroad,” a network of citizens who provided opportunity and assistance for southern black slaves to find freedom in the North at the time of the U.S. Civil War.

Trey Ellis (1962 – ) has written the novels Platitudes (1988), Home Repairs (1993), and Right Here, Right Now (1999), screenplays including “The Tuskegee Airmen” (1995), and a l989 essay “The New Black Aesthetic” discerning a new multiethnic sensibility among the younger generation.

Writers from Washington, D.C., four hours’ drive south from New York City, include Ann Beattie (1947- ), whose short stories were mentioned earlier. Her slice-of-life novels include Picturing Will (1989), Another You (l995), and My Life, Starring Dara Falcon (1997).

America’s capital city is home to many political novelists. Ward Just (1935- ) sets his novels in Washington’s swirling military, political, and intellectual circles. Christopher Buckley (1952- ) spikes his humorous political satire with local details; his Little Green Men (1999) is a spoof about official responses to aliens from outer space. Michael Chabon (1963- ), who grew up in the Washington suburbs but later moved to California, depicts youths on the dazzling brink of adulthood in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988); his novel inspired by a comic book, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), mixes glamour and craft in the manner of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The South The South comprises disparate regions in the southeastern United States, from the cool Appalachian Mountain chain and the broad Mississippi River valley to the steamy cypress bayous of the Gulf Coast. Cotton and the plantation culture of slavery made the South the richest section in the country before the U.S. Civil War (1860-1865). But after the war, the region sank into poverty and isolation that lasted a century. Today, the South is part of what is called the Sun Belt, the fastest growing part of the United States.

The most traditional of the regions, the South is proud of its distinctive heritage. Enduring themes include family, land, history, religion, and race. Much southern writing has a depth and humanity arising from the devastating losses of the Civil War and soul searching over the region’s legacy of slavery.

The South, with its rich oral tradition, has nourished many women storytellers. In the upper South, Bobbie Ann Mason (1940- ) from Kentucky, writes of the changes wrought by mass culture. In her most famous story, “Shiloh” (1982), a couple must change their relationship or separate as housing subdivisions spread “across western Kentucky like an oil slick.” Mason’s acclaimed short novel In Country (1985) depicts the effects of the Vietnam War by focusing on an innocent young girl whose father died in the conflict.

Lee Smith (1944- ) brings the people of the Appalachian Mountains into poignant focus, drawing on the well of American folk music in her novel The Devil’s Dream (l992). Jayne Anne Phillips (1952- ) writes stories of misfits — Black Tickets (1979) — and a novel, Machine Dreams (1984), set in the hardscrabble mountains of West Virginia.

The novels of Jill McCorkle (1958- ) capture her North Carolina background. Her mystery-enshrouded love story Carolina Moon (1996) explores a years-old suicide in a coastal village where relentless waves erode the foundations from derelict beach houses. The lush native South Carolina of Dorothy Allison (1949- ) features in her tough autobiographical novel Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), seen through the eyes of a dirt-poor, illegitimate 12-year-old tomboy nicknamed Bone. Mississippian Ellen Gilchrist (1935- ) sets most of her colloquial Collected Stories (2000) in small hamlets along the Mississippi River and in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Southern novelists mining male experience include the acclaimed Cormac McCarthy  (l933- ), whose early novels such as Suttree (1979) are archetypically southern tales of dark emotional depths, ignorance, and poverty, set against the green hills and valleys of eastern Tennessee. In l974, McCarthy moved to El Paso, Texas, and began to plumb western landscapes and traditions. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening of Redness in the West (1985) is an unsparing vision of The Kid, a 14-year-old from Tennessee who becomes a cold-hearted killer in Mexico in the 1840s. McCarthy’s best-selling epic Border Trilogy — All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998) — invests the desert between Texas and Mexico with mythic grandeur.

Other noted authors are North Carolinian Charles Frazier (1950- ), author of the Civil War novel Cold Mountain (1997); Georgia-born Pat Conroy (1945- ), author of The Great Santini (1976) and Beach Music (1995); and Mississippi novelist Barry Hannah (1942- ), known for his violent plots and risk-taking style.

A very different Mississippi-born writer is Richard Ford (1944- ), who began writing in a Faulknerian vein but is best known for his subtle novel set in New Jersey, The Sportswriter (1986), and its sequel, Independence Day (l995). The latter is about Frank Bascombe, a dreamy, evasive drifter who loses all the things that give his life meaning — a son, his dream of writing fiction, his marriage, lovers and friends, and his job. Bascombe is sensitive and intelligent — his choices, he says, are made “to deflect the pain of terrible regret” — and his emptiness, along with the anonymous malls and bald new housing developments that he endlessly cruises through, mutely testify to Ford’s vision of a national malaise.

Many African-American writers hail from the South, including Ernest Gaines from Louisiana, Alice Walker from Georgia, and Florida-born Zora Neale Hurston, whose 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is considered to be the first feminist novel by an African American. Hurston, who died in the 1960s, underwent a critical revival in the 1990s. Ishmael Reed, born in Tennessee, set Mumbo Jumbo (1972) in New Orleans. Margaret Walker (1915-1998), from Alabama, authored the novel Jubilee (1966) and essays On Being Female, Black, and Free (1997).

Story writer James Alan McPherson (l943- ), from Georgia, depicts working-class people in Elbow Room (1977); A Region Not Home: Reflections From Exile (2000), whose title reflects his move to Iowa, is a memoir. Chicago-born ZZ Packer (1973- ), McPherson’s student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was raised in the South, studied in the mid-Atlantic, and now lives in California. Her first work, a volume of stories titled Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (2003), has made her a rising star. Prolific feminist writer bell hooks (born Gloria Watkins in Kentucky in 1952) gained fame for cultural critiques including Black Looks: Race and Representation (l992) and autobiographies beginning with Bone Black: Memories of a Girlhood (1996).

Experimental poet and scholar of slave narratives (Freeing the Soul, l999), Harryette Mullen (1953- ) writes multivocal poetry collections such as Muse & Drudge (1995). Novelist and story writer Percival Everett (1956- ), who was originally from Georgia, writes subtle, open-ended fiction; recent volumes are Frenzy (l997) and Glyph (1999).

Many African-American writers whose families followed patterns of internal migration were born outside the South but return to it for inspiration. Famed science-fictioovelist Octavia Butler (l947- ), from California, draws on the theme of bondage and the slave narrative tradition in Wild Seed (l980); her Parable of the Sower (l993) treats addiction. Sherley Anne Williams (l944- ), also from California, writes of interracial friendship between southern women in slave times in her fact-based historical novel Dessa Rose (l986). New York-born Randall Kenan (l963- ) was raised in North Carolina, the setting of his novel A Visitation of Spirits (l989) and his stories Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (l992). His Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (1999) is nonfiction.

The Midwest The vast plains of America’s midsection — much of it between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River — scorch in summer and freeze in scouring winter storms. The area was opened up with the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, attracting Northern European settlers eager for land. Early 20th-century writers with roots in the Midwest include Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and Theodore Dreiser.

Midwestern fiction is grounded in realism. The domestic novel has flourished in recent years, portraying webs of relationships between kin, the local community, and the environment. Agribusiness and development threaten family farms in some parts of the region, and some novels sound the death knell of farming as a way of life.

Domestic novelists include Jane Smiley (1949- ), whose A Thousand Acres (1991) is a contemporary, feminist version of the King Lear story. The lost kingdom is a large family farm held for four generations, and the forces that undermine it are a concatenation of the personal and the political. Kent Haruf (1943- ) creates stronger characters in his sweeping novel of the prairie, Plainsong (1999).

Michael Cunningham (1952- ), from Ohio, began as a domestic novelist in A Home at the End of the World (1990). The Hours (1998), made into a movie, brilliantly interweaves Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway with two women’s lives in different eras. Stuart Dybek (1942- ) has written sparkling story collections including I Sailed With Magellan (2003), about his childhood on the South Side of Chicago.

Younger urban novelists include Jonathan Franzen (1959- ), who was born in Missouri and raised in Illinois. Franzen’s best-selling panoramic novel The Corrections (2001) — titled for a downturn in the stock market — evokes midwestern family life over several generations. The novel chronicles the physical and mental deterioration of a patriarch suffering from Parkinson’s disease; as in Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, the entire family is affected. Franzen pits individuals against large conspiracies in The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) and Strong Motion (1992). Some critics link Franzen with Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace as a writer of conspiracy novels.

The Midwest has produced a wide variety of writing, much of it informed by international influences. Richard Powers (1957- ), from Illinois, has lived in Thailand and the Netherlands. His challenging postmoderovels interweave personal lives with technology. Galatea 2.2 (1995) updates the mad scientist theme; the scientists in this case are computer programmers.

African-American novelist Charles Johnson (1948- ), an ex-cartoonist who was born in Illinois and moved to Seattle, Washington, draws on disparate traditions such as Zen and the slave narrative iovels such as Oxherding Tale (1982). Johnson’s accomplished, picaresque novel Middle Passage (1990) blends the international history of slavery with a sea tale echoing Moby-Dick. Dreamer (1998) re-imagines the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Robert Olen Butler (1945- ), born in Illinois and a veteran of the Vietnam War, writes about Vietnamese refugees in Louisiana in their own voices in A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain (1992). His stories in Tabloid Dreams (1996) — inspired by zany news headlines — were enlarged into the humorous novel Mr. Spaceman (2000), in which a space alien learns English from watching television and abducts a bus full of tourists in order to interview them on his spaceship.

Native-American authors from the region include part-Chippewa Louise Erdrich, who has set a series of novels in her native North Dakota. Gerald Vizenor (1935- ) gives a comic, postmodern portrait of contemporary Native-American life in Darkness at Saint Louis Bearheart (1978) and Griever: An American Monkey King in China (1987). Vizenor’s Chancers (2000) deals with skeletons buried outside of their homelands.

Popular Syrian-Americaovelist Mona Simpson (1957- ), who was born in Wisconsin, is the author of Anywhere But Here (1986), a look at mother-daughter relationships.

The Mountain West The western interior of the United States is a largely wild area that stretches along the majestic Rocky Mountains running slantwise from Montana at the Canadian border to the hills of Texas on the U.S. border with Mexico. Ranching and mining have long provided the region’s economic backbone, and the Anglo tradition in the region emphasizes an independent frontier spirit.

Western literature often incorporates conflict. Traditional enemies in the 19th-century West are the cowboy versus the Indian, the farmer/settler versus the outlaw, the rancher versus the cattle rustler. Recent antagonists include the oilman versus the ecologist, the developer versus the archaeologist, and the citizen activist versus the representative of nuclear and military facilities, many of which are housed in the sparsely populated West.

One writer has cast a long shadow over western writing, much as William Faulkner did in the South. Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) records the passing of the western wilderness. In his masterpiece Angle of Repose (1971), a historian imagines his educated grandparents’ move to the “wild” West. His last book surveys his life in the West as a writer: Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs (1992). For a quarter century, Stegner directed Stanford University’s writing program; his list of students reads like a “who’s who” of western writing: Raymond Carver, Ken Kesey, Thomas McGuane, Larry McMurtry, N. Scott Momaday, Tillie Olsen, and Robert Stone. Stegner also influenced the contemporary Montana school of writers associated with McGuane, Jim Harrison, and some works of Richard Ford, as well as Texas writers like McMurtry.

Novelist Thomas McGuane (1939- ) typically depicts one man going alone into a wild area, where he engages in an escalating conflict. His works include The Sporting Club (1968) and The Bushwacked Piano (1971), in which the hero travels from Michigan to Montana on a demented mission of courtship. McGuane’s enthusiasm for hunting and fishing has led critics to compare him with Ernest Hemingway. Michigan-born Jim Harrison (1937- ), like McGuane, spent many years living on a ranch. In his first novel, Wolf: A False Memoir (1971), a man seeks to view a wolf in the wild in hopes of changing his life. His later, more pessimistic fiction includes Legends of the Fall (1979) and The Road Home (1998).

In Richard Ford’s Montana novel Wildlife (1990), the desolate landscape counterpoints a family’s breakup. Story writer, eco-critic, and nature essayist Rick Bass (1958- ), born in Texas and educated as a petroleum geologist, writes of elemental confrontations between outdoorsmen and nature in his story collection In the Loyal Mountains (1995) and the novel Where the Sea Used To Be (1998).

Texan Larry McMurtry (1936- ) draws on his ranch childhood in Horseman, Pass By (1961), made into the movie Hud in 1963, an unsentimental portrait of the rancher’s world. Leaving Cheyenne (1963) and its successor, The Last Picture Show (1966), which was also made into a film, evoke the fading of a way of life in Texas small towns. McMurtry’s best-known work is Lonesome Dove (1985), an archetypal western epic novel about a cattle drive in the 1870s that became a successful television miniseries. His recent works include Comanche Moon (1997).

The West of multiethnic writers is less heroic and often more forward looking. One of the best-known Chicana writers is Sandra Cisneros (1954- ). Born in Chicago, Cisneros has lived in Mexico and Texas; she focuses on the large cultural border between Mexico and the United States as a creative, contradictory zone in which Mexican-American women must reinvent themselves. Her best-selling The House on Mango Street (1984), a series of interlocking vignettes told from a young girl’s viewpoint, blazed the trail for other Latina writers and introduced readers to the vital Chicago barrio. Cisneros extended her vignettes of Chicana women’s lives in Woman Hollering Creek (1991). Pat Mora (1942- ) offers a Chicana view in Nepantla: Essays From the Land in the Middle (1993), which addresses issues of cultural conservation

Native Americans from the region include the late James Welch, whose The Heartsong of Charging Elk (2000) imagines a young Sioux who survives the Battle of Little Bighorn and makes a life in France. Linda Hogan (l947- ), from Colorado and of Chickasaw heritage, reflects on Native-American women and nature iovels including Mean Spirit (1990), about the oil rush on Indian lands in the 1920s, and Power (1998), in which an Indian woman discovers her own inner natural resources.

The Southwest For centuries, the desert Southwest developed under Spanish rule, and much of the population continues to speak Spanish, while some Native-American tribes reside on ancestral lands. Rainfall is unreliable, and agriculture has always been precarious in the region. Today, massive irrigation projects have boosted agricultural production, and air conditioning attracts more and more people to sprawling cities like Salt Lake City in Utah and Phoenix in Arizona.

In a region where the desert ecology is so fragile, it is not surprising that there are many environmentally oriented writers. The activist Edward Abbey (1927-1989) celebrated the desert wilderness of Utah in Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (1968).

Trained as a biologist, Barbara Kingsolver (1955- ) offers a woman’s viewpoint on the Southwest in her popular trilogy set in Arizona: The Bean Trees (1988), featuring Taylor Greer, a tomboyish young woman who takes in a Cherokee child; Animal Dreams (1990); and Pigs in Heaven (1993). The Poisonwood Bible (1998) concerns a missionary family in Africa. Kingsolver addresses political themes unapologetically, admitting, “I want to change the world.”

The Southwest is home to the greatest number of Native-American writers, whose works reveal rich mythical storytelling, a spiritual treatment of nature, and deep respect for the spoken word. The most important fictional theme is healing, understood as restoration of harmony. Other topics include poverty, unemployment, alcoholism, and white crimes against Indians.

Native-American writing is more philosophical than angry, however, and it projects a strong ecological vision. Major authors include the distinguished N. Scott Momaday, who inaugurated the contemporary Native-Americaovel with House Made of Dawn; his recent works include The Man Made of Words (1997). Part-Laguna novelist Leslie Marmon Silko, the author of Ceremony, has also published Gardens in the Dunes (1999), evoking Indigo, an orphan cared for by a white woman at the turn of the 20th century.

Numerous Mexican-American writers reside in the Southwest, as they have for centuries. Distinctive concerns include the Spanish language, the Catholic tradition, folkloric forms, and, in recent years, race and gender inequality, generational conflict, and political activism. The culture is strongly patriarchal, but new female Chicana voices have arisen.

The poetic nonfiction book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), by Gloria Anzaldúa (1942- ), passionately imagines a hybrid feminine consciousness of the borderlands made up of strands from Mexican, Native-American, and Anglo cultures. Also noteworthy is New Mexican writer Denise Chavez (1948- ), author of the story collection The Last of the Menu Girls (l986). Her Face of an Angel (1994), about a waitress who has been working on a manual for waitresses for 30 years, has been called an authentically Latino novel in English.

California Literature California could be a country all its own with its enormous multiethnic population and huge economy. The state is known for spawning social experiments, youth movements (the Beats, hippies, techies), and new technologies (the “dot-coms” of Silicon Valley) that can have unexpected consequences.

Northern California, centered on San Francisco, enjoys a liberal, even utopian literary tradition seen in Jack London and John Steinbeck. It is home to hundreds of writers, including Native American Gerald Vizenor, Chicana Lorna Dee Cervantes, African Americans Alice Walker and Ishmael Reed, and internationally minded writers like Norman Rush (1933- ), whose novel Mating (1991) draws on his years in Africa.

Northern California houses a rich tradition of Asian-American writing, whose characteristic themes include family and gender roles, the conflict between generations, and the search for identity. Maxine Hong Kingston helped kindle the renaissance of Asian-American writing, at the same time popularizing the fictionalized memoir genre.

Another Asian-American writer from California is novelist Amy Tan, whose best-selling The Joy Luck Club became a hit film in 1993. Its interlinked story-like chapters delineate the different fates of four mother-and-daughter pairs. Tan’s novels spanning historical China and today’s United States include The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), about half-sisters, and The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001), about a daughter’s care for her mother. The refreshing, witty Gish Jen (1955- ), whose parents emigrated from Shanghai, authored the lively novels Typical American (1991) and Mona in the Promised Land (1996).

Japanese-American writers include Karen Tei Yamashita (1951- ), born and raised in California, whose nine-year stay in Brazil inspired Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990) and Brazil-Maru (1992). Her Tropic of Orange (1997) evokes polyglot Los Angeles. Japanese-American fiction writers build on the early work of Toshio Mori, Hisaye Yamamoto, and Janice Mirikitani.

Southern California literature has a very different tradition associated with the newer city of Los Angeles, built by boosters and land developers despite the obvious problem of lack of water resources. Los Angeles was from the start a commercial enterprise; it is not surprising that Hollywood and Disneyland are some of its best-known legacies to the world. As if to counterbalance its shiny facade, a dystopian strain of Southern California writing has flourished, inaugurated by Nathanael West’s Hollywood novel, The Day of the Locust (1939).

Loneliness and alienation stalk the creations of Gina Berriault (1926-1999), whose characters eke out stunted lives lived in rented rooms in Women in Their Beds (1996). Joan Didion (1934- ) evokes the free-floating anxiety of California in her brilliant essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968). In 2003, Didion penned Where I Was From, a narrative account of how her family moved west with the frontier and settled in California. Another Angelino, Dennis Cooper (1953- ), writes cool novels about an underworld of numb, alienated men.

Thomas Pynchon best captured the strange combination of ease and unease that is Los Angeles in his novel about a vast conspiracy of outcasts, The Crying of Lot 49. Pynchon inspired the prolific postmodernist William Vollmann (l959- ), who has gained popularity with youthful, counterculture readers for his long, surrealistic meta-narratives such as the multivolume “Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes,” inaugurated with The Ice-Shirt (1990), about Vikings, and fantasies like You Bright and Risen Angels: A Cartoon (1987), about a war between virtual humans and insects.

Another ambitious novelist living in Southern California is the flamboyant T. Coraghessan Boyle (1948- ), known for his many exuberant novels including World’s End (1987) and The Road to Wellville (1993), about John Harvey Kellogg, American inventor of breakfast cereal.

Mexican-American writers in Los Angeles sometimes focus on low-grade racial tension. Richard Rodriguez (1944- ), author of Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982), argues against bilingual education and affirmative action in Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father (l992). Luis Rodriguez’s (1954- ) memoir of macho Chicano gang life in Los Angeles, Always Running (1993), testifies to the city’s dark underside.

The Latin-American diaspora has influenced Helena Maria Viramontes (1954- ), born and raised in the barrio of East Los Angeles. Her works portray that city as a magnet for a vast and growing number of Spanish-speaking immigrants, particularly Mexicans and Central Americans fleeing poverty and warfare. In powerful stories such as “The Cariboo Café” (1984), she interweaves Anglos, refugees from death squads, and illegal immigrants who come to the United States in search of work.

The Northwest In recent decades, the mountainous, densely forested Northwest, centered around Seattle in the state of Washington, has emerged as a cultural center known for liberal views and a passionate appreciation of nature. Its most influential recent writer was Raymond Carver.

David Guterson (1956- ), born in Seattle, gained a wide readership when his novel Snow Falling on Cedars (1994) was made into a movie. Set in Washington’s remote, misty San Juan Islands after World War II, it concerns a Japanese American accused of a murder. In Guterson’s moving novel East of the Mountains (1999), a heart surgeon dying of cancer goes back to the land of his youth to commit suicide, but discovers reasons to live. The penetrating novel Housekeeping (1980) by Marilynne Robinson (1944- ) sees this wild, difficult territory through female eyes. In her luminous, long-awaited second novel, Gilead (2004), an upright elderly preacher facing death writes a family history for his young son that looks back as far as the Civil War.

Although she has lived in many regions, Annie Dillard (1945- ) has made the Northwest her own in her crystalline works such as the brilliant poetic essay entitled “Holy the Firm” (1994), prompted by the burning of a neighbor child. Her description of the Pacific Northwest evokes both a real and spiritual landscape: “I came here to study hard things — rock mountain and salt sea — and to temper my spirit on their edges.” Akin to Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dillard seeks enlightenment iature. Dillard’s striking essay collection is Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). Her one novel, The Living (1992), celebrates early pioneer families beset by disease, drowning, poisonous fumes, gigantic falling trees, and burning wood houses as they imperceptibly assimilate with indigenous tribes, Chinese immigrants, and newcomers from the East.

Sherman Alexie (1966- ), a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian, is the youngest Native-American novelist to achieve national fame. Alexie gives unsentimental and humorous accounts of Indian life with an eye for incongruous mixtures of tradition and pop culture. His story cycles include Reservation Blues (1995) and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), which inspired the effective film of reservation life Smoke Signals (1998), for which Alexie wrote the screenplay. Smoke Signals is one of the very few movies made by Native Americans rather than about them. Alexie’s recent story collection is The Toughest Indian in the World (2000), while his harrowing novel Indian Killer (1996) recalls Richard Wright’s Native Son.

Global Authors: Voices From the Caribbean and Latin America

WWriters from the English-speaking Caribbean islands have been shaped by the British literary curriculum and colonial rule, but in recent years their focus has shifted from London to New York and Toronto. Themes include the beauty of the islands, the innate wisdom of their people, and aspects of immigration and exile — the breakup of family, culture shock, changed gender roles, and assimilation.

Two forerunners merit mention. Paule Marshall (1929- ), born in Brooklyn, is not technically a global writer, but she vividly recalls her experiences as the child of Barbadian immigrants in Brooklyn in Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959). Dominicaovelist Jean Rhys (1894-1979) penned Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a haunting and poetic refiguring of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Rhys lived most of her life in Europe, but her book was championed by American feminists for whom the “madwoman in the attic” had become an iconic figure of repressed female selfhood.

Rhys’s work opened the way for the angrier voice of Jamaica Kincaid (1949- ), from Antigua, whose unsparing autobiographical works include the novels Annie John (1985), Lucy (1990), and The Autobiography of My Mother (1996). Born in Haiti but educated in the United States, Edwidge Danticat (l969- ) came to attention with her stories Krik? Krak! (1995), entitled for a phrase used by storytellers from the Haitian oral tradition. Danticat evokes her nation’s tragic past in her historical novel The Farming of the Bones (1998).

Many Latin American writers diverge from the views common among Chicano writers with roots in Mexico, who have tended to be romantic, nativist, and left wing in their politics. In contrast, Cuban-American writing tends to be cosmopolitan, comic, and politically conservative. Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s memoir, Next Year in Cuba: A Chronicle of Coming of Age in America (1995), celebrates baseball as much as Havana. The title is ironic: “Next year in Cuba” is a phrase of Cuban exiles clinging to their vision of a triumphant return. The Pérez Family (1990), by Christine Bell (1951- ), warmly portrays confused Cuban families — at least half of them named Pérez — in exile in Miami. Recent works of novelist Oscar Hijuelos (1951- ) include The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien (1993), about Cuban Irish Americans, and Mr. Ives’ Christmas (1995), the story of a man whose son has died.

Writers with Puerto Rican roots include Nicholasa Mohr (1938- ), whose Rituals of Survival: A Woman’s Portfolio (1985) presents the lives of six Puerto Rican women, and Rosario Ferré (1938- ), author of The Youngest Doll (1991). Among the younger writers is Judith Ortiz Cofer (1952- ), author of Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood (1990) and The Latin Deli (1993), which combines poetry with stories. Poet and essayist Aurora Levins Morales (1954- ) writes of Puerto Rico from a cosmopolitan Jewish viewpoint.

The best-known writer with roots in the Dominican Republic is Julia Alvarez (1950- ). In How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), upper-class Dominican women struggle to adapt to New York City. !Yo! (1997) returns to the García sisters, exploring identity through the stories of 16 characters. Junot Diaz (1948- ) offers a much harsher vision in the story collection Drown (1996), about young men in the slums of New Jersey and the Dominican Republic.

Major Latin American writers who first became prominent in the United States in the 1960s — Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges, Colombia’s Gabriel García Márquez, Chile’s Pablo Neruda, and Brazil’s Jorge Amado — introduced U.S. authors to magical realism, surrealism, a hemispheric sensibility, and an appreciation of indigenous cultures. Since that first wave of popularity, women and writers of color have found audiences, among them Chilean-borovelist Isabel Allende (1942- ). The niece of Chilean president Salvador Allende, who was assassinated in 1973, Isabel Allende memorialized her country’s bloody history in La casa de los espíritus (l982), translated as The House of the Spirits (1985). Later novels (written and published first in Spanish) include Eva Luna (1987) and Daughter of Fortune (1999), set in the California gold rush of 1849. Allende’s evocative style and woman-centered vision have gained her a wide readership in the United States.

Global Authors: Voices From Asia and the Middle East

Many writers from the Indian subcontinent have made their home in the United States in recent years. Bharati Mukherjee (1940- ) has written an acclaimed story collection, The Middleman and Other Stories (1988); her novel Jasmine (1989) tells the story of an illegal immigrant woman. Mukherjee was raised in Calcutta; her novel The Holder of the World (1993) imagines passionate adventures in 17th-century India for characters in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Leave It to Me (1997) follows the nomadic struggles of a girl abandoned in India who seeks her roots. Mukherjee’s haunting story “The Management of Grief” (1988), about the aftermath of a terrorist bombing of a plane, has taken oew resonance since September 11, 2001.

Indian-born Meena Alexander (1951- ), of Syrian heritage, was raised in North Africa; she reflects on her experience in her memoir Fault Lines (1993). Poet and story writer Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (1956- ), born in India, has written the sensuous, women-centered novels The Mistress of Spices (1997) and Sister of My Heart (1999), as well as story collections including The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (2001).

Jhumpa Lahiri (1967- ) focuses on the younger generation’s conflicts and assimilation in Interpreter of Maladies: Stories of Bengal, Boston, and Beyond (1999) and her novel The Namesake (2003). Lahiri draws on her experience: Her Bengali parents were raised in India, and she was born in London but raised in the United States.

Southeast Asian-American authors, especially those from Korea and the Philippines, have found strong voices in the last decade. Among recent Korean-American writers, pre-eminent is Chang-rae Lee (1965- ). Born in Seoul, Korea, Lee’s remarkable novel Native Speaker (1995) interweaves public ideals, betrayal, and private despair. His moving second novel, A Gesture Life (1999), explores the long shadow of a wartime atrocity — the Japanese use of Korean “comfort women.”

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982), born in Korea, blends photographs, videos, and historical documents in her experimental Dictee (l982) to memorialize the suffering of Koreans under Japanese occupying forces. Malaysian-American poet Shirley Geok-lin Lim, of ethnic Chinese descent, has written a challenging memoir, Among the White Moon Faces (l996). Her autobiographical novel is Joss and Gold (2001), while her stories are collected in Two Dreams (l997).

Philippines-born writers include Bienvenido Santos (1911-1996), author of the poetic novel Scent of Apples (1979), and Jessica Hagedorn (l949- ), whose surrealistic pop culture novels are Dogeaters (l990) and The Gangster of Love (1996). In very different ways, they both are responding to the poignant autobiographical novel of Filipino-American migrant laborer Carlos Bulosan (1913-1956), America Is in the Heart (1946).

Noted Vietnamese-American filmmaker and social theorist Trinh Minh-Ha (1952- ) combines storytelling and theory in her feminist work Woman, Native, Other (1989). From China, Ha Jin (1956- ) has authored the novel Waiting (1999), a sad tale of an 18-year separation whose realistic style, typical of Chinese fiction, strikes American ears as fresh and original.

The newest voices come from the Arab-American community. Lebanese-born Joseph Geha (1944- ) has set his stories in Through and Through (1990) in Toledo, Ohio; Jordanian-American Diana Abu-Jaber (1959- ), born in New York, has written the novel Arabian Jazz (1993).

Poet and playwright Elmaz Abinader (1954- ), is author of a memoir, Children of the Roojme: A Family’s Journey From Lebanon (1991). In “Just Off Main Street” (2002), Abinader has written of her bicultural childhood in 1960s small-town Pennsylvania: “…my family scenes filled me with joy and belonging, but I knew none of it could be shared on the other side of that door.”

American literature has traversed an extended, winding path from pre-colonial days to contemporary times. Society, history, technology all have had telling impact on it. Ultimately, though, there is a constant — humanity, with all its radiance and its malevolence, its tradition and its promise. 

References:

1.     The Northon Anthology of American Literature. Shorter sixth edition.

2.     Nina Baym, General editor. – 2003.- W.W. Norton @ Company, Inc. NY. – 2930 p.

3.     Paulo Coelho The Alchemist.

4.     From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo Coelho  

 

http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides/alchemist.asp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Coelho

http://www.paulocoelho.com/engl/bio.shtml