5.

I believe that I addressed my problems with identifying different time periods of literature by my responses to the poems in 4.

"The poem describes a man who seems to be the epitome of what everyone wants to be; rich, well dressed, well mannered, and well off. However, at the end of the poem he shoots himself in the head. This shows the feeling of disillusionment that the author was feeling at the time. The poem was in essence saying that being this ideal of a successful human being does not guarantee you happiness. The story of the poem flies in the face of traditional American thinking about success."

4.

Richard Corey

The poem describes a man who seems to be the epitome of what everyone wants to be; rich, well dressed, well mannered, and well off. However, at the end of the poem he shoots himself in the head. This shows the feeling of disillusionment that the author was feeling at the time. The poem was in essence saying that being this ideal of a successful human being does not guarantee you happiness. The story of the poem flies in the face of traditional American thinking about success.

Mending Wall

The poem tells a story about two men who are building walls between each other, seemingly thinking that this is what they should do. The poem has a moment in the middle where the man who is like "an apple orchard" wonders to himself why "good fences make good neighbors". He ponders this for the rest of the poem, but ultimately continues on his path of building the wall of stone between himself and the pine man. The Modernistic qualities of the story are evidenced by the questioning of the norms that the orchard man seems to accept at the beginning of the poem. He wonders to himself what it would be like if he were to not have a fence up separating him from the world.

A Dream Deferred

A Dream Deferred asks the question what does injustice look like in a society? The poem is very modernistic in that it questions the American dream by suggesting that it is like rotting meat that is being waved in front the African Americans of the country.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

The poem shows a mans feelings about his African heritage. It describes his pride of being of African descent and is modernistic in that it shows the world from a very different perspective than the traditional white one.

Incident

Incident describes a boy riding on the subway in Baltimore who is called a nigger by a white man for no reason whatsoever. This moment sticks with him for the rest of his life as his major memory of Baltimore. The story is Modern in that, like A Dream Deferred, it shows the inequality between blacks and whites and shows things from a perspective that does not think everything is well and fine.

3.

I read "Soldier's Home" by Earnest Hemingway and I found it to brilliant. The writing style easily captures the readers attention, while also not being underdeveloped. Hemingway describes very gracefully the sense that this young man, Harold, is more or less dead inside. He returns home from WWI years after the fact, and years after most of his fellow soldiers had come home. He receives no parade and no fanfare upon his return, and is instead expected to enter back into regular society. Harold seems to be deeply disturbed and disillusioned by the horrors he has witnessed in the war. Upon his return, he seems to have zero ambition and zero sex drive. His nature seems to have been corrupted by the atrocities that he has seen or maybe even committed.

His utter lack of interest in the All American activities of taking girls out in a nice car, loving his mother, and working in a good job suggests that his emotional troubles may go even deeper than just disillusionment, and may even be something of the nature of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He no longer sees the world as something to be excited about, and certainly not something that he wishes to be a part of. He sees the world through a lens of truth that interferes with the perfect image of American life that the people in his home town are trying to hoist upon him.

2. Disillusionment

I chose disillusionment as my theme of modernism because I feel that there is still much illusion in every day life around the world and especially in America.

I expect to see this theme portrayed in a very broad manner in the literature from the Modern era. During the first half of the 20th century, it seemed like people finally were not blinded by the lies of government and society. I expect to see examples of disillusionment from all around the world and focusing on a variety of issues.

Unit 4 intro

ELAALRL2 The student identifies, analyzes, and applies knowledge of theme in a work of American literature and provides evidence from the work to support understanding.

Sometimes I have trouble differentiating between two different themes. Such as Naturalism and Romanticism.