Name that Text or Author!
"What happens to a dream deferred?"
Who is Langston Hughes? (Harlem)
Mid-to-late-19th-century movement that sought to depict ordinary life "as it is," rejecting sentimentality and fantasy; Henry James and Kate Chopin are associated with it.
Realism
This medical regimen of forced bedrest, forced feeding, and isolation prescribed to women diagnosed with "hysteria" — the target of Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper."
The Rest Cure
Poetry that abandons fixed meter and rhyme is called this — the signature mode of Walt Whitman.
Free Verse
Mark Twain's sarcastic name for the era of massive wealth, mass poverty, and political corruption that followed Reconstruction.
The Gilded Age
This poet -- and a great fan of the em dash -- famously could not stop for Death, so Death stopped for her.
Emily Dickinson
The entirety of this tiny poem centers on a mobile garden tool, glazed with rain water, beside the white chickens.
"The Red Wheel Barrow" (William Carlos Williams)
The 12-year period (roughly 1865–1877) in which the federal government attempted to rebuild the South and define the rights of newly freed people.
Reconstruction
The 1918–1920 global pandemic that killed tens of millions and shadowed the literary world into which Modernism emerged.
The Spanish Flu (not actually Spanish though)
The 14-line fixed poetic form McKay uses for "If We Must Die" — typically associated with love poetry, repurposed here for militant defiance.
The Sonnet
The summer of 1919 in which white mobs attacked Black communities across American cities — immediate context for McKay's militant sonnet.
Red Summer
Hemingway's short story in which young Nick Adams accompanies his doctor father to an Ojibwe reservation for an emergency birth.
"Indian Camp"
This essayist's 1955 essay collection takes its title from a funeral-time meditation on his father and the Harlem riot of 1943.
James Baldwin (Notes of a Native Son)
The early-20th-century literary movement defined by fragmentation, experimentation with form, and a break with 19th-century conventions.
Modernism
The 1957 trial in which Lawrence Ferlinghetti was charged for publishing Ginsberg's poem — and acquitted on First Amendment grounds.
The Howl Obscenity Trial (or: The People of the State of California v. Lawrence Ferlinghetti)
The early-Modernist poetic movement defined by concision, precise writing, and the rejection of ornament — exemplified by Pound's "In a Station of the Metro."
Imagism
The mass movement of six million African Americans from the rural South to Northern cities between roughly 1910 and 1970.
The Great Migration
Kate Chopin's 1893 story about a young mother whose baby reveals the hidden racial history of her husband's family.
"Desiree's Baby"
This Modernist story of a reclusive Southern woman and the grotesque secret of her upstairs bedroom is narrated by a collective "we" — the town itself.
A Rose for Emily (by William Faulkner)
The 1920s flowering of African American literature, music, visual art, and thought centered in an uptown Manhattan neighborhood.
The Harlem Renaissance
The informal 1877 deal that resolved the disputed 1876 election, withdrew federal troops from the South, and effectively ended Reconstruction.
The Compromise of 1877 (or: the Corrupt Bargain)
The Modernist narrative technique of rendering a character's unfiltered inner thoughts on the page, simulating human thought itself.
Historian Rayford Logan's term for the post-Reconstruction decades (roughly 1877 to the 1910s) when Black civil rights reached their lowest point.
The Nadir of Race Relations
A formerly enslaved man's wry 1865 letter to the man who once owned him, responding to an offer to return to work on the plantation.
Jourdon Anderson ("Letter from a Freedman to His Old Master")
"I have done it again. / One year in every ten / I manage it—" — opening a poem whose speaker compares resurrection and dying to a theatrical art.
Sylvia Plath (Lady Lazarus)
Late-19th-/early-20th-century movement — influenced by Darwin and "social science" — that depicted humans as products of environment, heredity, and chance, often with tragic results.
Naturalism
The social and economic system whose critique runs from Ginsberg's Moloch to DeLillo's supermarkets — a throughline of the postmodern unit.
Capitalism / Consumerism
The technique of repeating the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive lines or clauses — driving Whitman's catalogs and Ginsberg's long "who" lines in Howl.
Anaphora
Du Bois's two-word concept for the Black American experience of constantly seeing oneself through the (often hostile) eyes of a white society.
Double Consciousness
The Wallace Stevens poem — a long meditation on a woman's Sunday reverie and the problem of religious belief in a secular modern age.
Sunday Morning
This author's only published short story deliberately withholds the racial identities of its two protagonists, forcing readers to reckon with their own assumptions.
Toni Morrison (Recitatif)
Pre-Civil War American movement that emphasized intuition, nature, and the divinity of the individual self; Whitman is usually read as carrying its energies into the post-1865 period.
Transcendentalism (or Late Romanticism)
Booker T. Washington's 1895 speech urging Black Americans to pursue vocational training and economic self-sufficiency — later called by Du Bois "the ___ compromise."
The Atlanta Compromise (or: Atlanta Exposition Address)
The technique by which Eliot, in "Prufrock," layers quotations from and allusions to Dante, Shakespeare, and the Bible — fracturing narrative continuity.
Allusion
This literary period or movement sees American cultural narratives (including nationalism, progress, and the American Dream) as themselves constructed fictions to be interrogated.
Postmodernism
This Beat poet -- and a human who was not a man, like most of the Beats -- wrote Memoirs of a Beatnik, and focused often on the intersections of her politics with domesticity.
Diane Di Prima