2.第二次专题阅读：西方文学和中国文学.docx

Western literature and Chinese Literature Western literatureIntroductionhistory of literatures in the languages of the Indo-European family, along with a small number of other languages whose cultures became closely associated with the West, from ancient times to the present.Diverse as they are, European literatures, like European languages, are parts of a common heritage. Greek, Latin, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic, Celtic, and Romance languages are all members of the Indo-European family. (Finnish and Hungarian and Semitic languages of the eastern Mediterranean, such as Hebrew, are not Indo-European. Literatures in these languages are, however, closely associated with major Western literatures and are often included among them.) The common literary heritage is essentially that originating in ancient Greece and Rome. It was preserved, transformed, and spread by Christianity and thus transmitted to the vernacular languages of the European Continent, the Western Hemisphere, and other regions that were settled by Europeans. To the present day, this body of writing displays a unity in its main features that sets it apart from the literatures of the rest of the world. Such common characteristics are considered here.For specific information about the major national literatures or literary traditions of the West, see such articles as American literature, English literature, German literature, Greek literature, Latin American literature, and Scandinavian literature. Various other Western literaturesincluding those in the Armenian, Bulgarian, Estonian, Lithuanian, and Romanian languagesare also treated in separate entries.Ancient literatureThe stark fact about ancient Western literature is that the greater part of it has perished. Some of it had been forgotten before it was possible to commit it to writing; fire, war, and the ravages of time have robbed posterity of most of the rest; and the restitutions that archaeologists and paleographers achieve from time to time are small. Yet surviving writings in Greek and far more in Latin have included those that on ancient testimony marked the heights reached by the creative imagination and intellect of the ancient world.Five ancient civilizationsBabylon and Assyria, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the culture of the Israelites in Palestineeach came into contact with one or more of the others. The two most ancient, Assyro-Babylonia, with its broken clay tablets, and Egypt, with its rotted papyrus rolls, make no direct literary signal to the modern age; yet Babylon produced the first full code of laws and two epics of archetypal myth, which came to be echoed and re-echoed in distant lands, and Egypts mystical intuition of a supernatural world caught the imagination of the Greeks and Romans. Hebrew culture exerted its greatest literary influence on the West because of the place held by its early writings as the Old Testament of the Christian Bible; and this literature profoundly influenced Western consciousness through translation from about the time of St. Augustine onward into every vernacular language as well as into Latin. Until then, Judaisms concentrated spirituality set it apart from the Greek and Roman world.Though influenced by the religious myths of Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and Egypt, Greek literature has no direct literary ancestry and appears self-originated. Roman writers looked to Greek precept for themes, treatment, and choice of verse and metre. Rome eventually passed the torch on to the early Middle Ages, by which time Greek had been subsumed under a wholly Latin tradition and was only rediscovered in its own right at the Renaissancethe “classical” tradition afterward becoming a threat to natural literary development, particularly when certain critics of the 17th century began to insist that the subjects and style of contemporary writing should conform with those employed by Greece and Rome.All of the chief kinds of literatureepic, tragedy, comedy, lyric, satire, history, biography, and prose narrativewere established by the Greeks and Romans, and later developments have for the most part been secondary extensions. The Greek epic of Homer was the model for the Latin of Virgil; the lyric fragments of Alcaeus and Sappho were echoed in the work of Catullus and Ovid; the history of Thucydides was succeeded by that of Livy and Tacitus; but the tragedy of the great Athenians of the 5th century BC had no worthy counterpart in Roman Seneca nor had the philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle in those of any ancient Roman, for the practical Romans were not philosophers. Whereas Greek writers excelled in abstraction, the Romans had an unusually concrete vision and, as their art of portraiture shows, were intensely interested in human individuality.In sum, the work of these writers and others and perhaps especially that of Greek authors expresses the imaginative and moral temper of Western man. It has helped to create his values and to hand on a tradition to distant generations. Homers epics extend their concern from the right treatment of strangers to behaviour in situations of deep involvement among rival heroes, their foes, and the overseeing gods; the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles are a sublime expression of mans breakthrough into moral awareness of his situation. Among Roman authors an elevated Stoicism stressing the sense of duty is common to many, from Naevius, Ennius, and Cato to Virgil, Horace, and Seneca. A human ideal is to be seen in the savage satire of Juvenal and in Anacreons songs of love and wine, as it is in the philosophical thought of Plato and Aristotle. It is given voice by a chorus of Sophocles, “Wonders are many, but none is more wonderful than man, the power that crosses the white sea. . . .” The human ideal held up in Greek and Latin literature, formed after civilization had emerged from earlier centuries of barbarism, was to be transformed, before the ancient world came to its close, into the spiritual ideal of Judeo-Christianity, whose writers foreshadowed medieval literature.Medieval literatureMedieval, “belonging to the Middle Ages,” is used here to refer to the literature of Europe and the eastern Mediterranean from as early as the establishment of the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire about AD 300 for medieval Greek, from the period following upon the fall of Rome in 476 for medieval Latin, and from about the time of Charlemagne and the Carolingian Renaissance he fostered in France (c. 800) to the end of the 15th century for most written vernacular literatures.Christianity and the churchThe establishment of Christianity throughout the territories that had formed the Roman Empire meant that Europe was exposed to and tutored in the systematic approach to life, literature, and religion developed by the early Church Fathers. In the West, the fusion of Christian and classical philosophy formed the basis of the medieval habit of interpreting life symbolically. Through St. Augustine, Platonic and Christian thought were reconciled: the permanent and uniform order of the Greek universe was given Christian form; nature became sacramental, a symbolic revelation of spiritual truth. Classical literature was invested with this same symbolism; exegetical, or interpretative, methods first applied to the Scriptures were extended as a general principle to classical and secular writings. The allegorical or symbolic approach that found in Virgil a pre-Christian prophet and in the Aeneid a narrative of the souls journey through life to paradise (Rome) belonged to the same tradition as Dantes allegorical conception of himself and his journey in The Divine Comedy.The church not only established the purpose of literature but preserved it. St. Benedicts monastery at Monte Cassino in Italy was established in 529, and other monasticcentres of scholarship followed, particularly after the 6th- and 7th-century Irish missions to the Rhine and Great Britain and the Gothic missions up the Danube. These monasteries were able to preserve the only classical literature available in the West through times when Europe was being raided by Goths, Vandals, Franks, and, later, Norsemen in succession. The classical Latin authors so preserved and the Latin works that continued to be written predominated over vernacular works throughout most of the period. St. Augustines City of God, the Venerable Bedes Ecclesiastical History, the Danish chronicle of Saxo Grammaticus, for example, were all written in Latin, as were most major works in the fields of philosophy, theology, history, and science.Vernacular works and dramaThe main literary values of the period are found in vernacular works. The pre-Christian literature of Europe belonged to an oral tradition that was reflected in the Poetic Edda and the sagas, or heroic epics, of Iceland, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, and the German Song of Hildebrand. These belonged to a common Germanic alliterative tradition, but all were first recorded by Christian scribes at dates later than the historical events they relate, and the pagan elements they contain were fused with Christian thought and feeling. The mythology of Icelandic literature was echoed in every Germanic language and clearly stemmed from a common European source. Only the Scandinavian texts, however, give a coherent account of the stories and personalities involved. Numerous ballads in different countries also reflect an earlier native tradition of oral recitation. Among the best known of the many genres that arose in medieval vernacular literatures were the romance and the courtly love lyric, both of which combined elements from popular oral traditions with those of more scholarly or refined literature and both derived largely from France. The romance used classical or Arthurian sources in a poetic narrative that replaced the heroic epics of feudal society, such as The Song of Roland, with a chivalrous tale of knightly valour. In the romance, complex themes of love, loyalty, and personal integrity were united with a quest for spiritual truth, an amalgam that was represented in every major western European literature of the time. The love lyric has had a similarly heterogeneous background. The precise origins of courtly love are disputed, as is the influence of a popular love poetry tradition; it is clear, however, that the idealized lady and languishing suitor of the poets of southern and northern France were imitated or reinterpreted throughout Europein the Sicilian school of Italy, the minnesingers (love poets) of Germany, and in a Latin verse collection, CarminaBurana.Medieval drama began in the religious ceremonies that took place in church on important dates in the Christian calendar. The dramatic quality of the religious service lent itself to elaboration that perhaps first took the form of gestures and mime and later developed into dramatic interpolations on events or figures in the religious service. This elaboration increased until drama became a secular affair performed on stages or carts in town streets or open spaces. The players were guild craftsmen or professional actors and were hired by towns to perform at local or religious festivals. Three types of play developed: the mystery, the miracle, and the morality. The titles and themes of medieval drama remained religious but their pieces titles can belie their humorous or farcical and sometimes bawdy nature. One of the best known morality plays was translated from Dutch to be known in English as Everyman. A large majority of medieval literature was anonymous and not easily dated. Some of the greatest figuresDante, Chaucer, Petrarch, and Boccacciocame late in the period, and their work convincingly demonstrates the transitional nature of the best of medieval literature, for, in being master commentators of the medieval scene, they simultaneously announced the great themes and forms of Renaissance literature.The RenaissanceThe name Renaissance (“Rebirth”) is given to the historical period in Europe that succeeded the Middle Ages. The awakening of a new spirit of intellectual and artistic inquiry, which was the dominant feature of this political, religious, and philosophical phenomenon, was essentially a revival of the spirit of ancient Greece and Rome; in literature this meant a new interest in and analysis of the great classical writers. Scholars searched for and translated “lost” ancient texts, whose dissemination was much helped by developments in printing in Europe from about 1450.Art and literature in the Renaissance reached a level unattained in any previous period. The age was marked by three principal characteristics: first, the new interest in learning, mirrored by the classical scholars known as humanists and instrumental in providing suitable classical models for the new writers; second, the new form of Christianity, initiated by the Protestant Reformation led by Martin Luther, which drew mens attention to the individual and his inner experiences and stimulated a response in Catholic countries summarized by the term Counter-Reformation; third, the voyages of the great explorers that culminated in Christopher Columbus discovery of America in 1492 and that had far-reaching consequences on the countries that developed overseas empires, as well as on the imaginations and consciences of the most gifted writers of the day.To these may be added many other factors, such as the developments in science and astronomy and the political condition of Italy in the late 15th century. The new freedom and spirit of inquiry in the Italian city-states had been a factor in encouraging the great precursors of the Renaissance in Italy, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The flowering of the Renaissance in France appeared both in the poetry of the poets making up the group known as the Pliade and in the reflective essays of Michel de Montaigne, while Spain at this time produced its greatest novelist, Miguel de Cervantes. Another figure who stood out above his contemporaries was the Portuguese epic poet LusCames, while drama flourished in both Spain and Portugal, being represented at its best by Lope de Vega and Gil Vicente. In England, too, drama dominated the age, a blend of Renaissance learning and native tradition lending extraordinary vitality to works of Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster, and others, while Shakespeare, Englands greatest dramatic and poetic talent, massively spanned the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th.In the 16th century the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus typified the development of humanism, which embodied the spirit of critical inquiry, regard for classical learning, intolerance of superstition, and high respect for men as Gods most intricate creation. An aspect of the influence of the Protestant Reformation on literature was the number of great translations of the Bible, including an early one by Erasmus, into vernacular languages during this period, setting new standards for prose writing. The impetus of the Renaissance carried well into the 17th century, when John Milton reflected the spirit of Christian humanism.The 17th centuryChallenging the acceptedThe 17th century was a period of unceasing disturbance and violent storms, no less in literature than in politics and society. The Renaissance had prepared a receptive environment essential to the dissemination of the ideas of the new science and philosophy. The great question of the century, which confronted serious writers from Donne to Dryden, was Michel de Montaignes “What do I know?” or, in expanded terms, the ascertainment of the grounds and relations of knowledge, faith, reason, and authority in religion, metaphysics, ethics, politics, economics, and natural science.The questioning attitude that characterized the period is seen in the works of its great scientists and philosophers: Descartess Discourse on Method (1637) and Pascals Penses (written 165758) in France; Bacons Advancement of Learning (1605) and Hobbess Leviathan (1651) in England. The importance of these works has lain in their application of a skeptical, rationalist mode of thought not only to scientific problems but to political and theological controversy and general problems of understanding and perception. This fundamental challenge to both thought and language had profound repercussions in mans picture of himself and was reflected in what T.S. Eliot described as “the dissociation of sensibility,” which Eliot claimed took root in England after the Civil War, whereby, in contrast to the Elizabethan and Jacobean writers who could “devour any kind of experience,” later poets in English could not think and feel in a unified way.Effects of conflictA true picture of the period must also take into account the enormous effect of social and political upheavals during the early and middle parts of the century. In England, where the literary history of the period is usually divided into two parts, the break seems to fall naturally with the outbreak of the Civil War (164251), marked by a closure of the theatres in 1642, and a new age beginning with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. In France the bitter internecine struggle of the Fronde (164853) similarly divided the century and preceded possibly the greatest period of all French literaturethe age of Molire, Racine, Boileau, and La Fontaine. In Germany the early part of the century was dominated by the religious and political conflicts of the Thirty Years War (161848) and thereafter by the attempts of German princes to emulate the central power and splendour of Louis XIVs French court at Versailles. The Netherlands was also involved in the first part of the century in a struggle for independence from Spain (the Eighty Years War, 15681648) that resulted not only in the achievement of this but also in the “Golden Age” of Dutch poetr