Southern Gothic
According to Kathy Prendergast’s description, this literary tradition is distinctive for its fascination with the horrible, the repellent, the grotesque and the supernatural."
What is the Gothic Tradition?
Sal describes this character as a “young jailkid shrouded in mystery” on the first page of On the Road.
Who is Dean Moriarty?
In “The Secret Integration,” when Tim overhears his mother hurling racist slurs into the telephone, she dismisses it as this.
What is a practical joke?
It’s what Emo keeps in his Bull Durham tobacco sack. (Be specific!)
What are the teeth of Japanese officers?
The Beats helped to inspire a larger movement called this, which set itself at odds against mainstream American culture in the 1950s and 60s.
What is the Counterculture?
“Nowhere in this sinful world can a honest, hardworking man profit,” says, somewhat ironically, this character of Faulkner’s invention.
Who is Anse?
It’s the answer to the question posed in Howl: “What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?”
What or who is Moloch?
Described as a dry run for the “real uprising of the slaves,” it’s the nickname of the plan to sabotage the PTA that Grover, Tim, Carl and Etienne organize.
What is Operation Spartacus?
Kaup’a’ta, or this in English, was the magician who took everything from the people; “he even captured the stormclouds.”
Who is the Gambler?
In Pueblo cosmology, this woman is the creative force that brings life to the first world.
Who is Spider / Thought Woman?
It’s the thing Vardaman saw, that Dewey Dell told him “not to tell nobody."
What is Darl burning down the barn?
It’s the word Terry’s brother uses to summarize his life philosophy in Kerouac’s On the Road.
What is "mañana"?
The story begins with a memory, as Tim recalls the day his mother had taken him to a doctor to examine this.
What is a wart on his finger?
When Tayo encounters the nameless hunter (who appears to live with Ts’eh), a man who “wore his hair long, tied back with white cotton string in the old style the men used to wear,” we’re meant to associate him with this animal, which Tayo had recently encountered on Mount Taylor.
What is a mountain lion?
Pynchon’s “The Secret Integration” was published in 1964, one year after Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested in this Alabama city.
What is Birmingham?
When Addie tells Cora “he” will save her from these two circumstances, Cora assumes she means God, but Addie is really referring to her son, Jewel.
What are "the water and the fire"?
Ginsberg witnessed the destruction of these things by “madness” (need the whole phrase!)
What are "the best minds of my [his] generation"?
While the whole group of children liked to play practical jokes, for this character “it was an obsession.”
Who is Etienne Cherdlu?
Before Buzzard can purify the town, Hummingbird and Fly have to travel west to visit this creature to obtain tobacco.
Who is Caterpillar?
Mount Taylor was the site of intensive mining for this heavy metal, a critical part of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s.
What is uranium?
It’s the phrase Cash repeats as he rides the bumpy wagon trail with a broken leg.
What is "it don't bother none"?
It’s the city in which Sal finds himself in the final section of the excerpts we read for class.
When this character is asked if the group is still integrated at the end of the story, he, somewhat surprisingly, responds: “Ask your father. . . . I don’t know anything.”
Who is Grover?
Early in the novel, Ku’oosh delivers a ceremony for Tayo. Tayo has a hard time understanding what Ku’oosh is saying until the medicine man describes this naturally-occurring land formation.
The Gothic literary tradition can be traced to the publication of this novel, way back in 1764.
What is Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto?