Multicultural Literature in Perspectives Shandong University Sept. 11, 2012

General staging of American Literature from 1940 to 1970 War and male writing: in the 20 years after the War, the dominance of male writers, with a few exception like Flannery O’ Connor, Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty. The War also marked the ending of writing career of some writers, and 1940s witnessed the deaths of many great figures in the American literature, eg. Fitzgerald and Welty(1940), Sherwood Anderson(1941), Dreiser (1945), Theodore Dreiser(1945), Gertrude Stein(1946) and Willa Cather(1947).

The economic revival makes it possible for the development of consumptive society and new “leisure culture”. Personal life and individual experience is explored. Social rebellion that sprouted before World War II is blooming into such figures as Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye to challenge tradition and authority, and the characters in “On the Road” to embrace change and search. Humorous representation of human fear and anxiety. Eg. Catch-22 by Norman Mailer. Abnormality and absurdity of life is similarly represented by such post-modernist writings as Slaughterhouse-Five.

Important Landmarks 1960s: Hemingway, Bellow, Faulkner and vs. Philip Roth, John Updike, Norman Miller, Thomas Pynchon, Bernard Malamud (take the candidates of winner of 1960’s and 1970’s National Book Award as an example) Norman Miller Why Are We in Vietnam 1967 Bernard Malamud The Fixer (winner) 1968 Thornton Wilder The Eighth Day Bath’s Chimera win the Award Pynchon’s The Gravity Rainbow winner and other finalists as examples DeLillo’s White Noise won the Award.

1983 winner The Color Purple 1989 The Joy Luck Club and Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love as finalists 1992 Winner : All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy ( Dreaming in Cuban as finalist) Waiting by Ha Jin 2001 finalist: The Last Report on the Miracle at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich 2007 winner of Young People’ s Literature: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

Important events in Pulitzer Prize for fiction 1988 winner Beloved by Toni Morrison 1990 winner: Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos (the 1 st Latino winner) 2008 winner The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

The Bluest Eye is Morrison's first novel and was written when she was teaching at Howard University and raising her two sons on her own.

The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker that won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction.

Invisible Man (1952) won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Invisible Man nineteenth on its list of the 100 best English- language novels of the 20th century. It also won Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Special Achievement Award in 1992

Invisibility I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination indeed, everything and anything except me. (Ellison, 1990: 3)

Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of a biochemical accident to my epidermis. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves. Then too, you're constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision.

Or again, you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy. It’s when you feel like this that, out resentment, you begin to bump people back…. You ache with the need to convince yourself you do exist in the real world, that you are part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it's seldom successful. (Ellison, 1990: 3)

Mother-daughter relation, and the negotiation between cultures as important themes; Re-wrting of history Style: Non-fiction or Fictional autobiography The Woman Warrior as winner of National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction

Bharati Mukherjee is India-born writer who has expereinces of studying or living in various countries as England, Canada and the U.S.

Latino Literature Definition of Latino literature Sub-cultural groups: Chicano (Mexican American), Cuban American; Dominican American, Puerto Rico (American) literature History and literature: double colonization of Latino Americans, mestizo race and its literary representation. Heterogeneity of Latino literature: eg. Comparative studies of Cuban, Dominican and Mexican; subcultural braches of Mexican

Hairs Everybody in our family has different hair. My Papa’s hair is like a broom, all up in the air. And me, my hair is lazy. It never obeys barrettes or bands. Carlos’ hair is thick and straight. He doesn’t need to comb it. Nenny’s hair is slippery—slides out of your hand. And Kiki, who is the youngest, has hair like fur.

But my mother’s hair, my mother’s hair, like little rosettes, like candy circles all curly and pretty because she pinned it in pincurls all day, sweet to put your nose into when she is holding you and you feel safe, is the warm smell of bread before you bake it, is the smell when she makes room for you on her side of the bed still warm with her skin, and you sleep near her, the rain outside falling and Papa snoring. The snoring, the rain, and Mama’s hair that smells like bread.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is the 1961 winner of Pulitzer Prize for fiction To be read in comparison with Afro-American fiction, esp. Native Son, Invisible Man and The Bluest Eye