American 2nd Week

THE ROMANTIC PERIOD (1820-1860:FICTION)
Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily
Dickinson are first major writers in American lit.
Romances were not love stories, but serious novels that used special techniques to
communicate complex and subtle meanings.There is love in it , this love in
American lit is an unreturned , platonic love.
Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe shaped heroic figures larger than life, burning with
mythic significance. The typical protagonists of the American Romance are haunted,
alienated individuals.(phsical ,not supernatural)
In their Works, the pratogonists have great larger than life purpose.(onlar
başaramayacağı)
Because of their obsessive haunting , their mind is in unrest, discomforted

and in torture.
For this discomfort is absence of settled ,traditional community like in

America.Because their community is not settled yet.They didn’t create their
identity.
American novelists were faced with a history of strife and revolution, a geography of
vast wilderness, and a fluid and relatively classless democratic society (Amerikan
romancıları İngilizler gibi traditional societyleri yoktu, tarihten gelenbir huzursuzluk
yasşıyorlar, savaşlar var , oturmuş bir devlet yok, west wildnerness bir doğayı
kaplıyor kızıldereliler ,hayvanlar vs var, sınıfsız demokratik bir toplum var )—Dark
gothic romanticsm , romantism’in nostalgia taraflarını ele alıyor.
Many English novels show a poor main character rising on the economic and
social ladder, perhaps because of a good marriage or the discovery of a hidden
aristocratic past.—Social Starification
American novels frequently reveal a revolutionary absence of tradition.They were

coming up at the literary scene with new, different novels.
Virtually all the great American protagonists have been “loners.”
Americans tend to invent new creative techniques. In America, it is not enough to be

a traditional and definable social unit, for the old and traditional gets left behind; the
new, innovative force is the center of attention.
The Romance
The Romance form is dark and forbidding, indicating how difficult it is to create an
identity without a stable society.
Most of the Romantic heroes die in the end: They Don’t have any happy endings.
All the sailors except Ishmael are drowned in MobyDick, and the sensitive but sinful
minister Arthur Dimmesdale dies at the end of The Scarlet Letter.
The self-divided, tragic note in American literature becomes dominant in the

novels
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
Short story writer
Henry James said that Nathaniel Hawthorne is the most valuable american genius
For Nathaniel.
His novel The House of the Seven Gables, Blithedale Romance (1852), The Marble
Faun (1860), “The Minister’s Black Veil,” “Young Goodman Brown,” and “My
Kinsman, Major Molineux.”,
The Scarlet Letter (1850), has become the classic portrayal of Puritan America
Hawthorne’s gentle style, remote historical setting, and ambiguity softened his grim
themes and contented the general public.( the events take place in a removed
historical point of time , notin the the current, contemporary time)
But sophisticated writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville
recognized the book’s “hellish”( releated to the hell ,darkness) power.Because in
this book , there is witchtrials , the dark puritan values , how men and women are
tortured in witchcraft movements.
In hawthorne’s novels, we see this clash of the religious and

nonreligious ,scientific things ,sexuality or repression , how it is
supressed by religious forces.
it uses allegory, a technique the early Puritan colonists themselves

practiced.( allegory is a story or image with several layers of meaning
behind the literal surface meaning, we have other subtle, secondry ,
deep meanings.The purpose is to celebrate, satirise or criticise
something.(subtexual meaning)
In these novels, Nathaniel Hawthorne is a pro-democracy ,pro-

revolution –innovation.
Hawthorne’s stories and novels repeatedly show broken, cursed, or artificial families
and the sufferings of the isolated individual.. There are characters who are
researchin their own identities.
The American Revolution, from a psychohistorical viewpoint, parallels an adolescent

rebellion away from the parent-figure of England and the larger family of the British
Empire.
Frontier: First setlers in America.---Frontier’lerin-ilk coloniserların-

deneyimlerini Hawthorne yansıtır.
Herman Melville (1819-1891)
His interest in sailors’ lives grew naturally out of his own experiences, and most of
his early novels grew out of his voyages.
In these we see the young Melville’s wide, democratic experience and hatred of
tyranny and injustice.(Amerika’nın toplum düzeninin , demokrasisinin
yüceltilmesi hayranlığı)
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Melville’s masterpiece, is the epic story of the whaling
ship Pequod and its “ungodly, god-like man,” Captain Ahab, whose obsessive quest
for the white whale Moby-Dick leads the ship and its men to destruction
This work, a realistic adventure novel, contains aseries of meditations on the

human condition. Whaling, throughout the book, is a grand metaphor for the
pursuit of knowledge.
“The Right Whale’s Head,” the narrator says that the Right Whale is a Stoic and the
Sperm Whale is a Platonian, referring to two classical schools of philosophy.
(balinacılıktan çıkıp daha felsefi bir düşünceye dönüşüyor, sadece balinacılık ya da
denizcilik değil)
Although Melville’s novel is philosophical, it is also tragic. Despite his heroism, Ahab
is doomed and perhaps damned in the end. Nature, however beautiful, remains
alien and potentially deadly.
In MobyDick, Melville challenges Emerson’s optimistic idea that humans can

understand nature.( It questions whether we can have an authority on nature or
not, nature as a source of wildnerness,unknown , whether we can conquere or
not
differently in gothic novels , nature is the element of fear, unknownibility , it echoes

human suffering because of that gloomy atmosphere)
In Bartleby , we have materialistic ,money oriented people , the heart of the

american financial building .Both Bartlby and Ahap are lonely beings.Perhaps
Batleby and Ahap are dead in the end , but the reason for the death is
different.Ahap can be considered as a naive chracter to Bartleby.Bartleby is
more knowledged person .Even though he reject the all the worldy
things,seperated from all physical ,human things around him.He always says
‘would not prefer to do , very similar to biblical ‘not servium’.(the satan says
this).He reaches god like knowledge.—Overreaching (exceeding the human
limits )is always kind of end up with negative ways , in death.Both of Works
are dealing with this.Overreaching is traditional , and something negative
unlike a portrait of the artist as a young man.
Moby Dick Kitabının Özeti

İsmail'in bütün ömrü denizlerde geçmişti ve kimsesiz, bir başınaydı. İsmail için
deniz çok farklıydı, karada olmak onun için çok anlamsız ve saçmaydı. Bundan dolayı
kendisine gemilerde iş aramaya başladı fakat o daha farklı bir iş peşindeydi: Balina
avcılığı yapmak istiyordu. Balina avcılığı diğer deniz işlerinden daha zordu. Çünkü o
dönemde ampül icat edilmediği için balina yağından mum yapılıyordu. Bir gün
Bedford'da konaklamayı düşünen İsmail, bulduğu bir odayı başka bir adamla
paylaşmıştı. Bu adamın adı Queequeg'di. İsmail, gece mumun etkisinden doalyı
Queequeg'in yüzünden korkuyordu. Fakat Queequeg, İsmail'in bu tepkilerine alışmıştı.
Bu nedenle yatağına kıvrılıp uyurdu ama İsmail, çok zor uyuyabiliyordu.
Ertesi gün İsmail, son günleri olduğu için şehiri turlamaya başlamış ve bir kiliseye
gitmişti. Kilisede Queequeg'i görünce şaşkınlığa uğramıştı. Queequeg'in böyle iyi
yürekli olduğunu düşünmüyordu. Bir süre sonra konakladığı yere dönen İsmail,
Queequeg'den özür dilemişti. Böylelikle Queequeg ile çok yakın arkadaş
olmuştu. Gemide iş bulmaya çalışırken Queequeg de ona eşlik etmeye başlamıştı. Bir
gemiye binmişlerdi ve o geminin ikinci kaptanı Starbuck, üçüncü kaptanı Stubb ve
dördüncü kaptanı Flask vardı. Kaptan Ahab'ın bir bacağı yoktu. Moby Dick yüzünden
bir bacağını kaybetmişti. Bu yüzden kaptan Ahab, Moby Dick'i öldürmeyi bellemişti.
Hepsi bir intikam için okyanusların efsanesi olan Moby Dick’i öldürmek için
canlarını hiçe saymışlardı. İsmail de onlara katılmıştı. Ahab, bu durumu kafasına
çok takıyordu. Moby Dick'i gördüklerinde peşlerine düşüyorlardı ama o koca balinayı bir
türlü yakalayamıyorlardı.
Bir gün Queequeg çok hasta olduğu için onun öleceğini düşünmüşlerdi ve onun için
tabut hazırlamışlardı. Fakat Queequeg ölmemiş, aksine iyileşmişti. Zaman geçtikçe
Kaptan Ahab, okyanus’ta karşılaştığı bütün gemilere Moby Dick’i sorduğunda diğer
gemilerin kaptanları o balinayı gördüklerinde kaçmalarını söylüyorlardı. Zaten Ahab ve
arkadaşlarının son karşılaşmasında herkes öldü. Bir tek sağ kalan kişi İsmail'di.
O da Queequeg için hazırlanmış olan tabut sayesinde olmuştu. Fakat ne olursa
olsun kaptan Ahab, kini ve intikam arzusu nedeniyle bütün herkesin canına sebep
olmuştu.

American 2nd Week

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American 2nd Week

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THE ROMANTIC PERIOD (1820-1860:FICTION)

Because of their obsessive haunting , their mind is in unrest, discomforted

For this discomfort is absence of settled ,traditional community like in

American novels frequently reveal a revolutionary absence of tradition.They were

Virtually all the great American protagonists have been “loners.”

Americans tend to invent new creative techniques. In America, it is not enough to be

The self-divided, tragic note in American literature becomes dominant in the

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

Short story writer

In hawthorne’s novels, we see this clash of the religious and

it uses allegory, a technique the early Puritan colonists themselves

In these novels, Nathaniel Hawthorne is a pro-democracy ,pro-

The American Revolution, from a psychohistorical viewpoint, parallels an adolescent

Frontier: First setlers in America.---Frontier’lerin-ilk coloniserların-

Herman Melville (1819-1891)

This work, a realistic adventure novel, contains aseries of meditations on the

In MobyDick, Melville challenges Emerson’s optimistic idea that humans can

differently in gothic novels , nature is the element of fear, unknownibility , it echoes

In Bartleby , we have materialistic ,money oriented people , the heart of the

Moby Dick Kitabının Özeti

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