1. The assumption that human reality is a linguistically-based and subjectively-constructed one originated early in the modern period. Describe how this assumption is articulated in each of the following works: Stevens' "The Idea of Order at Key West", Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", Hass' "Meditation at Lagunitas".

A popular conception regarding human reality is that it is based on developed language and is unique to each person. This theory is used in Wallace Stevens' "The Idea of Order at Key West", T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and Robert Hass' "Meditation at Lagunitas" to convey a sense of uniqueness to each person, which is necessary for the reader to develop a relationship, so to speak, with each character and to therefore identify with said character. Additionally, this is to enable each character to represent something different about life, some different perspective, be it about the same idea or some completely foreign topic.

One certainly hopes, reading Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", that this is the case. Here is a man given us by Eliot who possible spends more time wondering what, if anything, he should do, than actually doing anything. It is a wonder we are able to get further with him than "Do I dare to eat a peach?"

Prufrock's framework is formed around what he perceives to be others thought of him; he worries about what others will think of his aging appearance and mannerisms. What will they notice? How will his appearance move or influence them? In Prufrock's world he is unique, and his perception of himself is as well. It is doubtful, no matter how much others think about him, that they share his thoughts, lack of desires, that they share his perspective, else the poem would be devoted more to them than to him.

Prufrock is so paralyzed by his thought, and yet he sees that, in the end, these thoughts and the effects are such that they are "decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse." Should he change? Should he consider changing? Should he even consider that? It is the subjective nature of human reality that he realizes which, in part, causes him to worry so much and drastically over such seemingly pointless exercises; should he even do anything?

“For she was the maker of the song she sang”. This line epitomizes the very essence of “The Idea of Order at Key West”, by Wallace Stevens. Stevens, in this poem, subscribes to the idea that human reality is based on how we can semantically define that which is around us, and furthermore that each of those definitions is unique to each and any of us. This female character, the subject of the poem by Stevens, is the physical embodiment of the idea that everything around us is, to some extent, perceivable by us and nobody else. For this woman, from the point of view of the reader, is not only constructing her own reality from her surroundings but going one step further and constructing a reality out of her own spirit. She is, in effect, taking what is inside her and transforming it such that it becomes part of what makes up her environment.

“And when she sang, the sea,/Whatever self it had, became the self/That was her song, for she was the maker.” This line only serves to reinforce the idea Stevens employs in this poem regarding the construction of human reality and its basis as unique to each and linguistically-based. Here is a woman who is quite literally making her own surroundings. The sea is no the sea but what she has made it, how she perceives it. “ . . . [T]here never was a world for her/Except the one she sang and, singing, made.”

“Meditation at Lagunitas”, by Robert Hass, also subscribes to the previously-introduced idea that human reality is ultimately different for each person and that each person depends on language and its nuances and rules to define that reality. “After a while I understood that,/talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,/pine, hair, woman, you and I.” Hass here uses his speaker to push forward the idea that ultimately each person’s definition of any one word is dependent upon individual experiences, anecdotes, personal experience, and as such they are not completely congruent. Even such supposedly textbook definitions, words assumed to have universal definitions, ideas that seem congruent universally, ultimately differ and so cannot truthfully be considered the same.

“Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,/saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.” Hass has come to terms with the inability of subjective definitions to be congruent and is reconciling himself with the fact that he can at least revel in the existence of this one word whose meaning does not change with her, because he and his lover are partly the same person through the relationship they have. As such, their experiences are shared and it is not entirely dishonest to suggest that their definition, as they become one, also becomes one.

4. The assumption in Freudian psychology that human behavior is motivated by unresolved traumas and emotional conflicts that are not fully conscious due to the dynamics of repression and denial is fairly pervasive in American literature of the twentieth century. Discuss this influence in each of the following texts: Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", Cheever's "The Swimmer", Updike's "Separating", and Beattie's "Weekend".

Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", John Cheever's "The Swimmer", John Updike's "Separating", and Ann Beattie's "Weekend". One theme common to each of these works is the presence and undeniability of Freudian psychological concepts such as the motivation of human behavior by unresolved conflicts, some or many of which are not entirely evident to either the reader or the author. Though each is a different work and incorporates those concepts in a different way, they share that common theme.

As has been observed by so many students and professors of English, Robert Frost was a tortured poet, showing both confidence in himself (one aspect of his "good" side) and increasing amounts of questioning his beliefs and facets of his existence (part of his "bad" side). "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is no exception; on the surface Frost presents a peaceful poem about an equally peaceful winter scene.

This poem, however, is peaceful only if not further examined by the reader. The first stanza sees Frost worried about the owner of a particular plot of forest seeing him stopped there. Frost concerns himself with what seems to be one of the more mundane worries: "He will not see me stopping here/To watch his woods fill up with snow." What will, in other words, the owner of these woods do if he sees me here? Will he mind? Will he shoot me? Will he wonder that something is wrong, or why I have stopped?

His horse is understandably bothered by this action of his master, who has stopped in the cold with no shelter near. These seem to be the actions of someone whose health is not high on his list of priorities. In addition, Frost has stopped on "The darkest evening of the year, and as such is running the very real risk in New England of not only being caught with precious little light to see him home but being caught by whatever weather might be waiting for just such an opportunity, which would quite possibly kill both the horse and his boy.

The third stanza presents the reader with another outwardly peaceful notion, yet below the surface reveals a somewhat eerie existence: "The only other sound's the sweep/Of easy wind and downy flake." Here are Frost and horse in the middle of the woods in the dead of winter. It's going to be getting dark soon, whatever time it is. There likely aren't many lights around, because it's 1923 and electricity running into someone's backwoods just isn't a reality. And other than Frost's horse tossing the harness bells, the area is utterly and completely devoid of sound. This would drive many people insane, but for Frost the opportunity to think without distraction (except the cold and the scenery) is a welcome one.

Frost's tortured soul comes through once again; this time, in the final stanza, he reveals that he cannot do as he wishes, which seems to be to stay where he is. Instead, he must leave the peaceful abode presented by the forest and all its nuances and go home. It is not made apparent to the reader exactly what reasons Frost had for visiting this wood, but given the events in his life it is entirely accurate to assume that he has to get away from the insanity present therein and escape to someplace where he can be alone.

John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” presents his audience with a glimpse at a man whose world has been utterly taken over, taken apart, misassembled and passed off as a meaningful existence by alcohol.

This audience is not given a direct for his drunkenness or dependency on alcohol but a man determined to “swim the county”, for whatever reasons, none of which seems logical or even reasonable to a logical or reasonable reader, but to a man whose body effectively runs on alcohol this is a perfectly sound plan for an afternoon. Or a year, or however long he spends swimming the county, as seasons change before his eyes, or at least perceptions of his surroundings lead him to believe they have changed.

The end of his journey places him at what he firmly believes to be his place of residence, complete with wife and children. Along the way his misguided notions about those whose pools he are swimming lead him to believe they will welcome him happily, though in his drunken stupor he believes himself to be above their pools. It is truly an infected and diseased man Cheever presents to not only his readers but this man’s neighbors, many of whom are displeased, to say the least, as his arrival, plans, and overall existence.

Why the drunkenness? Cheever never makes that clear, which is part of one of the themes in this story: the idea that human behavior is caused by unresolved issues and emotional or psychological conflicts not always totally apparent to us due to the processes of repression and denial. Cheever presents the reader with a man who is one big problem: his alcoholism. He gives his audience some semblance that the man’s family and social or financial situation has something to do with this disease, but as is the case with Neddy Merrill, nobody is made quite sure of what brought this on or what has promulgated it, or if they are one and the same cause.

John Updike’s “Separating” contains perhaps the most obvious example of Freudian psychology: Updike’s audience is given hints as to what has caused this separation between Richard and Judith, who are embarking on the first part of a journey toward a possible divorce (and the title of this story): separating.

Their principle problems as the reader sees them in this story are how to tell their four children, who at least were not fully aware of their parents problems and at most were utterly clueless. They have fallen out of love and into a friendly like, but in an age of increasing ability on the part of a woman to survive independently of a man, this is not an acceptable existence for her, or (reluctantly) him. And she seems to be the mover, for is he who is crying and showing his feelings, while she seems either to have none or (more probably) to cover them with faked wisdom from generations past.

Their children don’t perceive their parents’ growing feeling separation anymore than Richard did initially. And it is the entire sense of “What went wrong?” that keeps Updike’s audience reading, for they are presented with an incomplete picture that asks them both to accept it and to challenge it. These two options cannot exist peacefully, and as it is any responsible reader’s job to ascertain the reasons for these facts about Richard’s and Judith’s characters, one must press on.

Yet the absence of a deeper meaning is that which completes the story, for so rarely in a separation or divorce can the ultimate roots be found (except in cases such as those of abuse or substance abuse) except that “we didn’t love each other anymore”.

Ann Beattie, for her part, introduces whoever is reading to Lenore and George, two dysfunctional people who are strangely enough perfect for each other. George is a womanizer to beat the band; Lenore puts up with it whether out of not caring enough to realize or out of incredible naivete. It speaks to Beattie’s deliberate lack of character development in that area of George that she has not elected to give him a shred of decency in the monogamy department.

They have been together for some time, and have a child, and still he presses on with mistresses, if they can be considered that given he and Lenore are not married. He is confrontational when she asks him what should be simple questions, which Beattie does to establish an unsympathetic character. He is mysterious about his time with those who visit him, though Lenore contributes to this by not asking. In this case the time they have been together is not a valid excuse, given that she has never asked because she does not want to admit to herself, finally, that she is someone he keeps around for otherwise-dry spells. There is no great romance in their relationship, there is no feeling of one-ness or even two-ness, because there is an aspect of Lenore that feels as though she is not enough for him, which serves to lower her self-concept and further enable him to run around with various people, generally younger than he is, as is the case with Lenore.

Beattie presents these characters incompletely, as did Cheever, Updike and Frost, for a reason: they each have an inner struggle, parts of which they cannot identify. Part of the struggle is seen by the reader, part is inferred, and part can only be imagined due to the methods and idea behind this: Beattie here uses the notion that human behavior is motivated by those experiences people have yet to resolve, those emotional fights they have yet to settle, yet these are not fully conscious to the initially-affected person, and in turn to a lesser extent to those surrounding that person, and eventually to the read. She further emphasizes the repression and denial so completely obvious in Lenore’s character that even Lenore herself recognizes it.

5. During roughly the latter half of the twentieth century, writers of American literature have been increasingly concerned with the manner in which racial differences are constructed. Discuss how this concern is manifested in each of the following works: Hughes' "Visitors to the Black Belt", Ellison's "Prologue" to Invisible Man, Walker's "Everyday Use", and Brooks' "a song in the front yard".

Today racial differences are less emphasized than they were during the first half of the last century, when being black or Asian or Hispanic would prevent one from being admitted to any number of public establishments. Race was also a factor in getting a job, going to school, getting into that school, and virtually every other aspect of life in which those of different origins mixed in casual society.

These differences are still visible today, thanks in some part to those who would not ignore them but recorded them, each with his or her own personal history of that discrimination sometimes based on no more than popular (but misguided) perceptions about the quality of a person's character and how that was contingent upon his or her racial background. Those recordings include "Visitors to the Black Belt" by Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison's "Prologue" to Invisible Man, "Everyday Use" by Alice Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks' "a song in the front yard".

Hughes wastes no words in showing us his point of view on poverty, and indirectly, race. His poem "Visitors to the Black Belt" might just as easily be titled "Outsider", for they are the ones to whom he directly speaks in this poem. They, he says, talk about an area as if it is some entity totally apart and separated from them, so as not to confuse themselves with such a poor area. Hughes' writing pointedly suggests that someone is denigrating his boyhood home, the place in which he grew up, or that this someone is trying to win the sympathy vote among supporters by talking about how "we must reach out to our fellow colored man who lives across the railroad tracks, or up in Harlem, or on the South Side of the city". One gets the impression that were Hughes to be present at this sympathy effort he would waste nobody's time allowing this pity to continue, but would ask the simple question "Have you been there?"

Hughes finally asks the other simple question: "Do you know me?" The answer, as is obvious from the poem, is no. This mystery person who talks about these areas of New York as though they are existent but separated from him has known no life of pure poverty, such that one almost yearns to be a number or a name in a book, if only to get someone's attention. This mystery person has read about the poverty present in those areas, and cares about them inasmuch as s/he will gain support among his or her social group by appearing to care about the people there, when the sad reality is that neither this person nor anyone in the social group has ever met, ever talked to, ever consciously walked with someone from the other side, or who lives there, or who knows the hell of a kitchen that serves also as a living room, a bedroom, and a bathroom.

Ellison, in the first paragraph of the prologue to his Invisible Man, wastes the reader's time no more than Ellison; that is to say, not at all. His first five words: "I am an invisible man." His perspective is slightly different than that of Hughes, who complains that though people pretend to see the poor, they do not see the people but the area. Ellison posits (one assumes not entirely seriously) that people quite literally do not see him because of some problem with their eyes. People refuse to see him. He beats a man bloody and nearly slits his throat, yet that man faces a phantom in his own eyes. He takes something that might fill another man with rage, this notion of being invisible, and punishes those who cannot see him; he outright steals the electricity to feed nearly 1,400 light bulbs. He craves that which validates others' existence: light; he says it validates his because of what it means: truth.

Duke Ellington, he says, is invisible but does not know it yet. Those characters he introduces who are black are invisible, it would seem, to the white man. And it is a matter of choice: " . . . people refuse to see me." And if they are not willing to acknowledge his existence, or even if they do now know how, he will take advantage of this and punish their choice or condition.

What is realized upon further contemplation, of course, is that if one fights a visible entity and one is invisible, nothing one does can make that visible entity see, unless perhaps it too becomes invisible to others. And by being invisible, though Ellison uses it to his advantage, he is unable to most effectively fight those who refuse to see him. He can shout as much as he likes or beat them six ways from Sunday, but unless they see him he is ultimately powerless. Unlike Hughes, he has power, but only because another has taken away his most precious right (and with that, power): the ability to be seen by everyone. Hughes can be seen; Ellison has a fate worse than children, for he is not to be seen nor heard.

Alice Walker cannot be invisible; Dee, her daughter, wants her to be very visible as what Dee herself is not: a poor, old, black woman with no future except what her past is. Walker is a victim of a system that closed down her school. She has little in the way of a formal education and does not fit any stereotype of a woman except biologically.

Dee represents the desire to break away from what is or was considered "traditionally" black. She wants to take that which is history and belonging to her mother and sister and turn it into art, believing that this will separate her from the past she shares with both women and turn her into an individual instead of someone with dirt for a living room floor. Dee sees herself as a construct of those who oppressed her and her people before her, and believes that by changing her name she can stop this oppression.

Walker presents the reader with a "stereotypical" black household, if it or anything can truly be considered that; collard greens, chitlins, pork and cornbread make up their meal, which seems to be missing okra and a ceremonial blessing and not much else. In this way she can show us that Dee (who more likely than not has changed her name because of pressure from others who believe that a cosmetic change will change anything but cosmetics) came from a black household and is firm in her desire to leave it all behind as "the past", and press upon with a future in which the past is represented as something she photographed instead of living.

The other way Dee tries to break from her roots is by fundamentally changing the uses of those "artifacts" she wishes to take with her. She'll display the quilts rather than have them be used as quilts, and she intends to use a churner and dasher as decorative pieces in her new home (and if she has her way, new life) instead of deriving practical uses for them or leaving them as they have been.

This represents a point of view not different from those who wish to celebrate minority history or "awareness" by taking things from their natural habitats and placing them on display, where clueless white people can go through a manufactured "typical black household" and "imagine" what it was like to live without cable or electricity or in many cases running water, and to actually place value on things that were not bought at a fancy retail store but made by hand from wood that was neither pre-treated nor dyed to match some already-existing store-contrived decor. Mama wishes to retain her heritage; Dee wishes to quantify it.

Gwendolyn Brooks' poem "a song in the front yard" presents readers with a perplexing question: is she serious about being a relatively naive girl, or is she sarcastically representing the picket fence lifestyle of her white twin, the girl who does not see rampant racism and prejudice every living day of her life?

It is not until the final line of this poem that observers can be sure that it is the not the former representation Brooks intends, and this is what makes the poem so dramatically masterful. It is the rare writer who can keep her audience at bay as to her honest feelings until the final line: "And strut down the streets with paint on my face". Brooks, an African-American poet who carried herself with militant writers of that group, is here poking fun at a then-common childhood perception that those with darker skin had their faces painted, rather than it being natural. One is glad that she does not partake in a less charitable view that black childrens' faces are black from dirt or sin or guilt or shame or inferiority or some other seemingly-negative aspect of life.

It would be incredibly difficult as a black women growing up in the 20s and 30s in this country, for Brooks not to harbor ill-will against Caucasians for their efforts to suppress and sometimes eliminate the minority presence of people such as herself. Brooks takes this ill will and turns it into the naivete of a young person who wants to see the rough side, to see "where the charity children play." The voice in this poem seems to think life is not so bad, other than the tall grasses, and is tired of being pandered to.

Brooks is ever-confusing, though. What is it "they" do in the back yard; what makes things rough and untended; why can they stay out past nine? It is possibly purposeful that Brooks confuses the reader so, for how else would she force these questions and their difficult if not unreachable answers? The message of this poem does not seem to be entirely clear except to say that one cannot see what life is like from the front; one must go beyond the facade and examine the rough, untended areas where people and feelings get lost and are trapped until someone else finds them, purposefully or not.

6. During roughly the latter half of the twentieth century, writers of American literature have been increasingly concerned with the manner in which sexual or gender differences are constructed. Discuss how this concern is manifested in each of the following works: Williams' "The Young Housewife", Clifton's "if i stand at my window", Plath's "Lady Lazarus" and Piercy's "A Work of Artifice".

William Carlos Williams' "The Young Housewife", Lucille Clifton's "if i stand at my window", Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus" and Marge Pierce's "A Work of Artifice" each present a somewhat contrasting view of human sexuality and its manifestations, in addition to providing commentary on the gender stereotyping and practices of respective times in American culture and history.

Williams' "The Young Housewife" presents an effectively paralyzed woman, trapped behind weak, cold, stolid walls by a society that at this point allowed so few rights to women that they effectively did not exist. This woman exists to satisfy her husband's requests and maintain an uninviting house; otherwise she is dead, useless, and effectively un-noticed trash, as Williams points out in his comparison of her to a fallen leaf.

She does not respect herself; this is evident in both the fact that she is dressed in, for all intents and purposes, a nightie by today's standards, and that she has taken no care to make herself presentable to what passes for light company; the ice man and the fish man. These two, though believable visitors, represent her homeliness and her frozen state in life.

Williams leaves her in his car, which is so super fancy as to be noiseless, and effortlessly crushes her with a slight push on his gas pedal. He has taken her entire existence and stripped it down to that of no more than a servant which, once exhausted, will be tossed aside by its patrons and left to slowly decay. Williams is driving over many of her without feeling anything of love or remorse or pain or regret. She has been reduced to a thin sliver of biodegradable matter; it will not be around in a month, if that. It will break apart with wind or a foot and turn into road dust which, when rain comes, will be swept away and never be whole again.

Lucille Clifton’s “if i stand at my window” is everything Williams’ poem is not. She asserts her sexual and personal freedom from the very onset of this poem: “if it stand in my window/naked in my own house/and press my breasts/against my windowpane”. In these four lines we have the very antithesis of Williams’ poem. Here is a woman who owns her own house and calls it as much, and who is firm and confident enough in herself (not so much how she looks, but that she is all woman) to assert her sexuality to whoever may see it, or to nobody but herself and the air around her house.

Williams talked about, essentially, effortlessly crushing another woman as though she were nothing but a sliver of dead, organic matter. Clifton asserts herself as the opposite of that sliver. If a man should come running in dismay at her open display of naked breasts, she will not budge. She is affirming her right to exist as a sexual being and he is free to discover that being in himself (though not her), or go crazy from the shock of a woman who is not afraid to let people see her.

Clifton’s poem might just as easily be titled “i am woman hear me roar”, for that is the message conveyed in her poem. She makes no apologies or excuses for her behavior, nor does she try to hide herself from those who might scorn or accuse of indecency or lack of what they consider to be morals. She takes the common ideals of the conservative religious and pushes those back in the faces of those who hold them, taking power from them and transferring that power to her body, to her property (both her body and her estate), and in an indirect and unspoken way, to every woman who would assert herself if given the chance and the ability to stand proud instead of oppressed and silent.

Marge Piercy’s “A Work of Artifice” is the very embodiment of a living comparison between the bonsai tree, which is typically ruthlessly and unemotionally pruned, picked, shaped, whittled and otherwise manipulated to fit a pre-destined shape. Although a good bonsai artist will work with the tree’s offerings, it is so seldom the way the tree was meant to look.

In that same way, Piercy says, are women treated; not allowed to grow as they might but as others would want; having no regard for their feelings or desires not to have their roots fastened with wires so as to prevent growth, or to have their feet bound with cloth so they are desirable to their husbands (and consequently cannot walk properly), or to have their hair beaten, damaged, fall out, dyed until it is more frail than beach grass. They are not raw materials to shape according to one’s whim but to allow to grow on their own with needed guidance and plenty of fresh air, far away from pruning shears and binding cloth.

“It is your nature/to be small and cozy/domestic and weak;/how lucky, little tree,/to have a pot to grow in”. Replace “tree” with women and not much changes. It is still the case today that women are told how they must be to conform with what their part of society deems normal or acceptable or desired, despite the fact that this is increasingly not the case. One can only imagine how much more prevalent this was in decades past, when the alternative to getting married to a man one did not love was to enter a convent. And it is still seen as a gift to try and shape women (and people in general, for that matter) into what one desires as a result, without necessarily knowing or caring to find out what that particular woman wants to be.

The title of Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” refers to herself as the female version of a man in the Bible who was brought back to life after being dead for some days. Though this poem is not outwardly feminine at the start, there are aspects to it that speak to a certain assertiveness possibly caused by the knowledge of her husband Ted Hughes’ affair with another woman.

Plath’s main outburst of the aforementioned “I am woman” comes in “The peanut-crunching crowd/Shoves in to see/Them unwrap me hand and foot—/The big strip tease”. Here Plath revives the reference to Lazarus, the man Christ saved, and in doing so invokes a certain aspect of female sexuality common in cheap bars and playboy parties—the strip tease. It is to some the ultimate mark of female humility, being paid to remove clothing so that men may point and stare and be aroused. To others it is the ultimate symbol of feminine and female freedom; the ability to freely remove clothing in a sexually provocative way and not feel humiliated or embarrassed to have a body with definite curves, and furthermore to be able to do so and have others look on, some in admiration and others in sexual glee. It is here that she shows she is a sexual being with feelings and femininity, however skinny and un-female she feels. And she further emphasizes her womanliness goes beyond whatever fatty deposits are absent: “I may be skin and bone,/Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.” Regardless of her lack of shape, or so she seems to indicate, she is a woman. Hear her roar.