ARTS1030 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: One-Drop Rule, Nella Larsen, Clara Reeve
4 Jun 2018
School
Course
Professor
4. 22/03/18 The novel and Nella Larsen’s Passing
The novel
• All about investigating issues of identity
• Aspect of modernity
• Transcendental homelessness
The Eighteenth Century novel
• Extreme realism
The new criticism
• Close reading
• Book / poem should be closed, coherent on its own - removed from social
and historical questions
Rise of the novel
• THEORISTS: Ian Watt, the rise of the novel, studies in Defoe…, Michael
Mekeon, the origins of the english novel
• Emerged out of earlier forms of the narrative
• Employs realism
• Remember, realism =/= truth
Clara Reeve - the progress of romance (1785)
• Heroic fable
• Involves extraordinary events
Key features of the novel
• Plot
• Time and event
• Causation
• Place
• Language
The MODERN novel v. the MODERNIST novel
• Modernism - 1900s-1950s - literary / artistic movement
• Modernist novel is defined against the modern novel
Transcendental homelessness
• Larsen passes between short story and novel form
Nella Larsen - PASSING
• About Clare Kendry who passes as a white woman
• HISTORICAL CONTEXT: Harlem renaissance (1920-1929)
• New negroes
• Pop culture / high culture
• Political adgenda
• Passing was illegal - “social aparthide” - US race laws
• In literature, the passing figure is centre stage
• Distracting the viewer from the truth
• Plessy v. Ferguson
Biography of Larsen (1871-1964)
Modernist short novel
• Protagonists at the heart of an issue of their time
• Eg. Gatsby, Heart of Darkness, Passing
• No interiority to ‘MAIN’ character, figures of mystery
• Figure of Harlem Renaissance (Clare Kendry)
Harlem Renaissance
• Period of massiv creativity and productivity of African Americans from 1920-
29
• New Negro movement
• ‘Double consciousness’ - looking at oneself through the eyes of others
- the inseparability of outside opinion and perspective and self-identity
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