Realism

Question 1

Realism
Characteristics (7)

Answer 1

• Impact of modernization and technology in everyday life.
• Symbolic mark of success (house, car, television, home appliances)
• Main theme: loneliness
  
  • Faceless corporate man (“The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit”, Sloan Wilson)
  • Generalized American alienation (“The Lonely Crowd”, David Riesman)

FICTION RESPONDING TO ALIENATION

• Subtle and pervasive unease.
  
  • stress lurking in the shadows of seeming satisfaction (O’Hara, Cheever, Updike)
• Portray men who fail in the struggle to succeed.
  “Death of a Salesman”, Arthur Miller
  “Seize the Day”, Saul Bellow
• Racism as a continuing undercurrent
  “A Raisin in the Sun”, Lorraine Hansberry

Question 2

Realism
John Updike
Characteristics (3)

Answer 2

• Novels and stories turn him into the most significant transcriber/creator of “middleness” in American writing.
• “The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood”
• Plot: falling in love in high school, meeting a college roommate, going to the eye doctor or dentist, eating supper on Sunday night…

Question 3

Realism
John Updike
Rabbit Tetralogy

Answer 3

• Harry Angstrom: ordinariness + Kierkegaardian angst
  
  • Dreams of success and personal fulfillment never quite realized.
  • Disappointed but never defeated.

“Rabbit, Run
- Mirror of 1950s: Anmstrong = aimless, disaffected young husband.
- Trying to escape from his own town, job, wife…
- Alienated young man
- Spiritual-quest novel couche in an urbane critique of 1950s conformism and inauthenticity.

“Rabbit Redux”
- Counterculture of 1960s: Anmstrong still without a clear goal or purpose, no escape from the banal.

“Rabbit is rich”
- 1970s: Anmstrong = prosperous businessman, Vietnam era.

“Rabbit at rest”
- 1980s: Anmstrong’s reconciliation with life before dying from a heart attack.

Question 4

Realism
Raymond Carver
Characteristics (6)

Answer 4

• Recalls work of Hemingway
  
  • Use of omission.
  • Spaces between words to catch elusive feelings.
  • Quiet stoicism.
  • Packed fiction.
• Link to “Dirty Realism”
• Characters usually working-class, somewhat down on their luck.
  
  • Alcohol as a further depressant.
  • Failures = hopes ( small, even puny)
• Plain, simple manner sticking to the absolute minimum.
• Weariness + wonder
  -Acknowledgement of sheer grind and cruelty of life.
  
  • Occasional moment of relief, revelation, awareness of possibility.
• Complexities of action and motive + artful in the suggestion of repressed violence.

“A Small Good Thing”

“Neighbors” (freedom, escape, curiosity, control, voyeurism)

Question 5

Realism
Richard Yates
Characteristics (5)

Answer 5

• “Age of Anxiety”
• Influences: Raymond Carver, Richard Ford
• Harsh reality.
• Interested in failures, rather than success.
  - Lonely people, outsiders,rejected, striving to become someone else.
• Realism out of time.

Question 6

Realism
Richard Yates
“Revolutionary Road”

Answer 6

• Suburban staleness that defeats a young couple.
• Between romanticism of Fitzgerald and mordancy of Cheever.
• New mode of emasculated male identity.
• Suburbs = ideological defense against Communist enemy + showroom for American prosperity and technological progress.
• Frank Wheeler: archetypal Cold War suburban male.
• April struggles with role of contended suburban housewife/organizational wife.
• Themes: struggle to overcome isolation, gender roles, mental illness, dreams vs reality…

Question 7

Realism
Richard Yates
“Eleven Kinds of Loneliness”
“A Really Good Jazz Piano”

Answer 7

“Eleven Kinds of Loneliness”
- Characters: cab drivers, schoolteachers, secretaries, soldiers…
- Insignificant, unspectacular, recognizably human in traditional realist mode.

“A Really Good Jazz Piano”
- Ken Platt, Carson Wyler