Recategorize the paintings below of American Gothic artwork into Northern and Southern Gothic.
(click on the images to zoom)
Edwin Harleston, Boone Hall Plantation (1925)
"Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon" by Caspar David Friedrich
Still shot from the movie "The VVitch"
"American Gothic" painting by Grant Wood
Question 3
3.
Which of the following motifs is NOT an identifiable motif of Southern Gothic?
Question 4
4.
What "haunts" the south in Southern Gothic lit?
Question 5
5.
What is the most "iconic" symbolic imagery of Southern Gothic movement?
Question 6
6.
Which of the following is NOT an immediately recognizable setting for Southern Gothic.
Question 7
7.
Flannery O'Connor coined the term "generational trauma" to refer to the way you have to be from the South to truly understand its history, culture, and truth.
Question 8
8.
Most Southern Gothic texts center around the ruling class, or the powerful/dominant group.
Question 9
9.
In Southern Gothic lit, you might come into Nature seeking Truth, but you're not going to find it, or, if you do, it will be by accident or grace.
Question 10
10.
Southern Gothic rarely includes the supernatural and monsters, magic, and ghosts are atypical of this movement.
Question 11
11.
While not technicallya Southern Gothic text, Steinbeck ascribes southern gothic themes, and imagery onto migrant workers in California in order to compare migrant worker experience to post-bellum south in the novella Of Mice and Men.
Question 12
12.
Consider this excerpt from Their Eyes Were Watching God:
What sentence here BEST supports the assertion that this text is Southern Gothic?
Question 13
13.
Question 14
14.
Consider this excerpt from Other Voices by Truman Capote:
In this passage, what literary device really heightens the horror?
Recategorize the key elements, themes, and motifs of American Gothic literature into Northern and Southern Gothic. (6 each, you will NOT use any more than once)
anxieties around a judgemental society / wrathful God
witches, demons, vampires, and ghosts
anxieties around race, inheritance, and poverty
the grotesque; the mentally or physically disabled or disturbed; bigotry
madness, corruption, severe guilt, horror, hopelessness
guilt (of one's sins; shame)
dark forests and bitter cold
plantations, intense heat, heavy trees, agricultural motifs
themes on social issues and inequities
Nothern Gothic
Southern Gothic
Nothern Gothic
Southern Gothic
the horror of what people are capable of doing to other people
the history of the south and the "skeletons" of our past (civil war, slavery, etc.)
religious trauma and the fear of God's coming judgment
the fear of your neighbor and what they "could" be up to over there...
Both A and B
Both C and D
sowers, mowers, reapers, and the harvest
creepy castles, mansions, and estates
They say in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against the cruel walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His.
They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.
Consider this excerpt from Other Voices by Truman Capote:
Which THREE phrases BEST supports the assertion that this text is Southern Gothic?
But we are alone, darling child, terribly, isolated each from the other
so fierce is the world's ridicule we cannot speak or show our tenderness
for us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark
all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter, and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us
until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world
dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.