Throughout this semester of studying American Literature, I have come to learn that America is a nation full of paradoxes. This conclusion has arisen  after reading numerous authors and poets whom have consumed themselves in finding unique, yet universal aspects of the American cultural and individual identity.  It began with the transcendentalist movement, lead by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau as they founded the movement with an emphasis on the rejection traditional forms of society in hope that man can think for himself without the external influences of social conditioning. Emerson discusses at length the concept and importance of being self-reliant which entails an individual abandoning all forms of structured life and return to nature in order to facilitate a truer reason and higher numenial understanding of what it is to be human. My understanding of the transcendentalist movement and how it is a paradox to American society is explored in my blog which you can find here.

Alongside the transcendentalist movement, I delved into America’s intense paradoxical struggle with racial identity in Mark Twain’s novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain highlights in his novel the widespread nature of abuse and violence that occurred throughout American society surrounding the years of the Civil War which erupted due to the concerns of slaves. It is in this way, that America is a nation full of paradoxes as exposed in Twain’s novel, as society ultimately fights violence with violence.

The paradoxical nature of American society is most understood within the poetry that flooded the early 20th century. Poets like Walt Whitman (as explored in my blog post), become obsessed with a return to nature and organic settings despite American society at this time seeing themselves as frontiers in the technological revolution. Other poets like William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound (blog here), also tackle previous notions of what is considered poetry in order to reject all traditional forms of writing and re create the identity of American culture and society. These poets began to include free-verse form and stream of consciousness writing which ultimately allowed them to create new forms of poems to express the new emotions and experiences of the technological age in which they developed alongside.

Despite the change within society, there is still a paradoxical presence of violence as exposed in Alice Walker’s short story, and explored in my blog Hang them. The inclusion of Native American writers into this unit further encapsulates the paradoxical nature of America. The fact that Walker demonstrates the physical and emotional struggle of keeping with tradition versus creating an entire new identity is representative of the changing American culture of the time.  This short story targets the issue of not valuing enough or over-valuing history and how to create change in identity for future generations. Other Native American poets that mirror Walker’s concerns include the works of W.E.B Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jean Toomer and Langston Hughes.

Over the course of this semester, my favourite author to study was William Faulkner. Despite the novel, As I lay Dying, epitomising the concerns of human nature, it was his Nobel Prize acceptance speech that captured my attention in relation to being paradoxical to the American nation. In my blog, I explore how Faulkner effortlessly addresses the human experience of suffering by his urging of young people to transform their pain or anguish into creative expression to understand greater what it means to be human. It is in this way America is a nation full of paradoxes, as with along with any society, due the fact that we humanity inflict our own pain due to a lack of deep understanding of what it means to be truthfully human.