(1945-1970s)
History
•After World War II, the United States emerged as the strongest world power and assumed the role of speaking on behalf of liberal democratic ideals.
•The triumphant Allies attended to their war-ravaged economic infrastructures, but only the United States had the wherewithal to build on its success in the conflict.
•The Cold War (1946–89) between the United States and the USSR involved an ideological struggle between capitalist and communist states worldwide → Korean and Vietnam Wars
•The war effort had shifted industrial production to military ends and recruited women to replace factory workers fighting overseas.
•The triumphant Allies attended to their war-ravaged economic infrastructures, but only the United States had the wherewithal to build on its success in the conflict.
•The Cold War (1946–89) between the United States and the USSR involved an ideological struggle between capitalist and communist states worldwide → Korean and Vietnam Wars
•The war effort had shifted industrial production to military ends and recruited women to replace factory workers fighting overseas.
Post War America: Readjustment and Recovery
- The United States was the only nation involved in World war II that emerged stronger than before the conflict began. For many Americans, World War II and its aftermath ushered in an era of domestic prosperity.
- Many servicemen returned home with the expectation of securing a job, raising a family, and owning their home; for others the expectations of better lives went unfulfilled.
The GI Bill
- To help ease veterans’ return to civilian life, Congress passed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, or the GI Bill of Rights, in 1944. In addition to encouraging veterans to get an education by paying part of their tuition, the GI Bill guaranteed them:
- a year's worth of unemployment benefits while job hunting
- low interest, federally guaranteed loans
- low-cost mortgages
- medical care through Veteran's Administration
- tuition for higher education
- Yet, this bill denied access to some benefits to Native Americans, African Americans, women and homosexual GIs.
Economic Boom: The Thriving Peacetime Economy
- The years following World War II saw one of the longest sustained economic expansions in the history of the U.S.
- The automobile industry played a key role in the expansion with millions of cars quickly produced and the steady construction of the interstate highway system.
- The United States stopped being primarily a goods producer and began a new path as a service provider.
Technology
- A technological revolution transformed the war efforts of the Atomic Commission into a collection of scientist hard at work to improve transportation, satellites, and other consumer goods that were often the byproducts of military research
Demographic Shifts: Baby Boom
- During the Great Depression, the birthrate had dropped to an all-time low
- The birth rate exploded as millions of postwar Americans began families
- The death rate was also declining due to peacetime and new medical breakthroughs
Consensus and Conformity: Roles of Men and Women
- The role of women changed as well. Many women lost their well-paying jobs when men returned, but most remained in the paid labor force in lower-paying female-dominated occupations. The proportion of married women in the paid labor force continued to rise after the war.
- Some women had to work part-time to supplement the family income, a life contrary to the ideal of a full-time homemaker.
Cultural Rebels
- Influences of mysticism and Buddhism
- Writers of the “Beat Generation” Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: developed new styles of writing
- Introduction of the paperback novel
- Elvis Presley and new rebellion of Rock-n-Roll
- Art experimentation: Jackson Pollock
Cold War (1945-1991)
The Cold War was a long period of tension between the democracies of the Western World and the communist countries of Eastern Europe. The west was led by the United States and Eastern Europe was led by the Soviet Union. These two countries became known as superpowers. Although the two superpowers never officially declared war on each other, they fought indirectly in proxy wars, the arms race, and the space race.
Post War Literature
•In literary theory, the school of deconstruction, starting in about 1966, examined the fundamentally unstable quality of all utterances and how any statement depends on often unspoken and arbitrarily constructed assumptions.
•Some writers remained committed to realistic description and traditional connections between text and represented world.
•Large platforms like literary feminism and the Black Arts Movement allowed individual authors to render particular experiences without having to feel they spoke for their race, ethnicity, or gender: Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Adrienne Rich and Ursula Le Guin (powerful women writers).
•In the case of Native American literature, for which historical and cultural contexts did not exist to combat lingering stereotypes, the 1960s saw a parallel movement of critical writings to supplement creative works by Native authors.
•After World War II, America turned outward politically but inward culturally; new ideals of conformity and homogeneity developed that are best seen in works that argue against that conformity, like Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman; Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March; Allen Ginsberg’s Howl; and Philip Roth’s Defender of the Faith.
•The publication in the late 1950s of poetry in the “confessional” mode helped authors break some conventions of formality and universality in the lyric voice in favor of an autobiographical intensity.
•Confessional Poetry: A form of Poetry in which the poet reveals very personal, intimate, sometimes shocking information about himself or herself. Examples of confessional poets include Allen Ginsberg; Robert Lowell (Life Studies); Sylvia Plath (Daddy and Lady Lazarus); and Anne Sexton.
•Some writers remained committed to realistic description and traditional connections between text and represented world.
•Large platforms like literary feminism and the Black Arts Movement allowed individual authors to render particular experiences without having to feel they spoke for their race, ethnicity, or gender: Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Adrienne Rich and Ursula Le Guin (powerful women writers).
•In the case of Native American literature, for which historical and cultural contexts did not exist to combat lingering stereotypes, the 1960s saw a parallel movement of critical writings to supplement creative works by Native authors.
•After World War II, America turned outward politically but inward culturally; new ideals of conformity and homogeneity developed that are best seen in works that argue against that conformity, like Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman; Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March; Allen Ginsberg’s Howl; and Philip Roth’s Defender of the Faith.
•The publication in the late 1950s of poetry in the “confessional” mode helped authors break some conventions of formality and universality in the lyric voice in favor of an autobiographical intensity.
•Confessional Poetry: A form of Poetry in which the poet reveals very personal, intimate, sometimes shocking information about himself or herself. Examples of confessional poets include Allen Ginsberg; Robert Lowell (Life Studies); Sylvia Plath (Daddy and Lady Lazarus); and Anne Sexton.
Literary Movement
Beat Generation
• Widespread discontentment in the 1950s.
• A period featuring a group of American poets and novelists of the 1950s and 1960s — including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti — who rejected established social and literary values.
• Using such techniques as stream of consciousness writing and jazz-influenced free Verse and focusing on unusual or abnormal states of mind — generated by religious ecstasy or the use of drugs — the Beat writers aimed to create works that were unconventional in both form and subject matter.
• Kerouac's On the Road is perhaps the best-known example of a Beat Generation novel, and Ginsberg's Howl is a famous collection of Beat Poetry.
• A period featuring a group of American poets and novelists of the 1950s and 1960s — including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti — who rejected established social and literary values.
• Using such techniques as stream of consciousness writing and jazz-influenced free Verse and focusing on unusual or abnormal states of mind — generated by religious ecstasy or the use of drugs — the Beat writers aimed to create works that were unconventional in both form and subject matter.
• Kerouac's On the Road is perhaps the best-known example of a Beat Generation novel, and Ginsberg's Howl is a famous collection of Beat Poetry.
• Kerouac suggested that "Beat" meant being socially marginalized and exhausted ("beaten down") and blessed ("beatific").
• There are also musical connotations to the name as many members were jazz enthusiasts. • Socially the Beats, many of whom were homosexual or bisexual, extolled individual freedom and attacked what they saw as the materialism, militarism, consumerism, and conformity of the 1950s |
• The Beats were politically radical, and to some degree their anti-authoritarian attitudes were taken up by activists in the 1960s.
• In their writing they encouraged direct and frank communication and, rejecting the formalist; • They cultivated styles that gave the impression of spontaneity and improvisation. • Much Beat poetry was performance orientated (often read in public with jazz accompaniment). |
Post War Authors
From J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories and The Catcher in the Rye to Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, America's madness was placed to the forefront of the nation's literary expression.
Regarding the war novel specifically, there was a literary explosion in America during the post-World War II era. Some of the most well known of the works produced included Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948), Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). MacBird, written by Barbara Garson, was another well-received work exposing the absurdity of war.
The 1940s saw the flourishing of a new contingent of writers, including poet-novelist-essayist Robert Penn Warren (All King’s Men), dramatists Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman) and Tennessee Williams (The Glass Menagerie), and short story writers Katherine Anne Porter (Flowering Judas)and Eudora Welty (The Optimist’s Daughter). All but Miller were from the South. All explored the fate of the individual within the family or community and focused on the balance between personal growth and responsibility to the group.
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Though born in Canada, Chicago-raised Saul Bellow would become the most influential novelist in America in the decades following World War II. In works like The Adventures of Augie March and Henderson the Rain King, Bellow painted vivid portraits of the American city and the distinctive characters peopling it. Bellow went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976.
Émigré Authors such as Vladimir Nabokov, with Lolita, forged on with the theme, and, at almost the same time, the Beatniks took a concerted step away from their Lost Generation predecessors. He’s known for his stylistic subtlety, deft satire, and ingenious innovations in form.
Jack Kerouac also questioned the values of middle-class life. He met members of the "Beat" literary underground as an undergraduate at Columbia University in New York City. His best-known novel, On the Road (1957), describes "beatniks" wandering through America seeking an idealistic dream of communal life and beauty.
In contrast, John Updike showcased what could be called the more idyllic side of American life, approaching it from a quiet, but subversive writing style. He is regarded as a writer of manners with his suburban settings, domestic themes, reflections of ennui and wistfulness, and, particularly, his fictional locales on the eastern seaboard, in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.
His 1960 book Rabbit, Run broke new ground on its release by its characterization and detail of the American middle class. It is also credited as one of the first novels to ever use the present tense in its narration. James Baldwin (Go Tell It On The Mountain)and Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man) mirror the African-American experience of the 1950s. Their characters suffer from a lack of identity, rather than from over-ambition.
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References
Anonymous. (n.d.). Postwar American Literature. Retrieved March 05, 2013, from http://www2.sdfi.edu.cn/netclass/jiaoan/englit/amlit/postwar.htm
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. (n.d.). American Literature resources for American Studies. Retrieved February 23, 2013, from http://www.euro.ubbcluj.ro/americanstudies/american_literature.html
PBS and Thirteen/WNET. (2007). The American Novel: Beat Generation. Retrieved February 23, 2013, from http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americannovel/timeline/beatgeneration.html
Pearson Higher Ed. (n.d.). Chapter 26: Postwar America At Home 1945-1960. Retrieved February 23, 2013, from http://wps.ablongman.com/wps/media/objects/577/590960/.../chp26.ppt
Van Spanckeren, Kathryn. (n.d.). Chapter Eight: American Prose Since 1945: Realism and Experimentation. Retrieved March 05, 2013, from http://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/oal/lit8.htm
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. (2007). Norton Anthology of American Literature: American Literature Since 1945: Making Connections. Retrieved March 05, 2013, from http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/naal7/contents/e/connections.asp
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. (2007). Norton Anthology of American Literature: American Literature Since 1945: Overview. Retrieved March 05, 2013, from http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/naal7/contents/e/welcome.asp
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. (n.d.). American Literature resources for American Studies. Retrieved February 23, 2013, from http://www.euro.ubbcluj.ro/americanstudies/american_literature.html
PBS and Thirteen/WNET. (2007). The American Novel: Beat Generation. Retrieved February 23, 2013, from http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americannovel/timeline/beatgeneration.html
Pearson Higher Ed. (n.d.). Chapter 26: Postwar America At Home 1945-1960. Retrieved February 23, 2013, from http://wps.ablongman.com/wps/media/objects/577/590960/.../chp26.ppt
Van Spanckeren, Kathryn. (n.d.). Chapter Eight: American Prose Since 1945: Realism and Experimentation. Retrieved March 05, 2013, from http://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/oal/lit8.htm
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. (2007). Norton Anthology of American Literature: American Literature Since 1945: Making Connections. Retrieved March 05, 2013, from http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/naal7/contents/e/connections.asp
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. (2007). Norton Anthology of American Literature: American Literature Since 1945: Overview. Retrieved March 05, 2013, from http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/naal7/contents/e/welcome.asp
Post War Group
Alcoran, Nizha
Malapingan, Clare Antonette
Sarasua, Gabrielle
Wright, Cristine
III-11 BSE-English
Alcoran, Nizha
Malapingan, Clare Antonette
Sarasua, Gabrielle
Wright, Cristine
III-11 BSE-English