Characters
Authors
Modernism
The Harlem Renaissance
Potpourri
100
This guy headed to the movies when he couldn't stand to hear his mother's voice any longer.
Who is Tom Wingfield?
100
Jamaican-American writer who wrote sexy, dark, and honest poems about different people - including women - in the Harlem Renaissance.
Who is Claude McKay?
100
20th century lit is typically divided into these two major movements, with several subsets within each period.
What are modernism and postmodernism?
100
This writer believes America never was America to begin with, but, he thinks, it could become what it was meant to be with a little effort on our part.
Who is Langston Hughes?
100
This word literally means “belonging to the present day; of latest kind; using latest styles; of language’s latest stage,” so, technically, each new era really is entitled to call itself this.
What is modern?
200
This character bought poison from the local druggist to ensure her Northerner lover would not leave her. Ever.
Who is Emily Grierson?
200
Modernist writer of "Hills Like White Elephants" who employs sparse, curt dialogue in his stories, and relies little on exposition and description.
Who is Ernest Hemingway?
200
Writers like Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, and Tennessee Williams fall into a subset of Modernism called this.
What is Southern Gothic?
200
Spiritual practices derived from African roots, such as these two examples became popular during the Harlem Renaissance.
What are Voodoo and Santeria?
200
Nickname given to Laura by her high school crush Jim.
What is Blue Roses?
300
This character worries that aborting her baby will forever change her and that she and her lover will never be happy again.
Who is Jig or the girl?
300
This poet moved to Sparta, Georgia to serve as principal of a rural industrial school for African Americans, which gave him ample material for his writing, as he didn’t grow up in the South and was not accustomed to such blatant racism.
Who is Jean Toomer?
300
This was popular in the 1940s and 50s and was an attempt to understand a confused and meaningless world; it investigates the role of perception in establishing our ideas about what is real.
What is existentialism?
300
The Harlem Renaissance pretty much ended when this infamous economic collapse overshadowed all the awesome progress of the movement.
What is The Great Depression?
300
The 20th century response to positivist rationalism criticized this as a faulty way of figuring things out; philosophers like Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud felt that consciousness, psychoanalysis, and subconsciousness were better ways of uncovering insights into human behavior.
What is science?
400
This guy seems to think he knows how to solve everyone's problems, which is easy for an outsider to do, but he does offer Laura some sound advice about how most people have just as many problems as she does, and he gives her a little hope, perhaps, that she isn't so very different.
Who is Jim O'Connor?
400
Southern Gothic writer of The Glass Menagerie, who modeled the play after his own complicated life as a young Southerner transplanted to a mid-western city.
Who is Tennessee Williams?
400
The first half of the 20th century was chalked full of significant literary innovations in regards to style, form, and this third area. But it took a while for the evolving styles to be absorbed by the culture.
What is subject?
400
This refers to the movement of over six million African Americans from the Southern U.S. to urban areas in the Northeast, Midwest, and West from the 1910s to the 1960s.
What is the Great Migration?
400
The 20th Century realized that this is not fixed and stable, and what we actually know has a lot to do with what questions we ask and the methods we use to find the answers.
What is knowledge?
500
This character says everything you've waited so long for tastes like licorice (so it tastes bitter-sweet?)
Who is Jig or the girl?
500
Writer of "A Rose for Emily" who explored darker themes of what it meant to be an old school white Southerner post Civil War.
Who is William Faulkner?
500
The goal of early modernism was to reconstruct conventional images of the world and human nature by changing the forms in which this was usually represented.
What is reality?
500
This critic of some writers of the Renaissance believed they tried too hard to mimic white writers and artists, when they should just focus on being true to themselves.
Who is W.E.B. Dubois?
500
Above all else, each of the texts we read in this unit say something different about this often written about subject in literature.
What is identity?
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