AmericanLiterature.doc

American LiteratureI The Early American Literature (1620-1781) Puritanism (17th century) Enlightenment (18th century) II The Age of American Romanticism and Transcendentalism (1781-1875) Pre-Romanticism Post-RomanticismIII The Age of Realism and Naturalism(1875-1914) Realism Naturalism Twentieth-century Literature(1914-2000) Modernism PostmodernismThe 17th Century LiteratureKey Words: original sin, hard work, redemption拯救，thrift节俭, piety虔诚, The first settlers came to American out of various reasons: to worship the God in their own way; to escape religious persecution迫害 in England; to seek fortune; to find a paradise. They believed that the church should be restored to the “purity ” of the first-century Church as established by Jesus Christ himself. That is, they wanted to purify the Church of England. In religion, they accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin and the salvation of a selected few. In daily life, they emphasized hard work, thrift, piety, rejected seeking pleasure. And they regarded joy and laughter as symptoms of sin.The 18th Century LiteratureEnlightenment Benjamin Franklina humanist, enlightener, inventor, scientist, essayist散文家, industrialist,statesman, diplomat外交家The Autobiography(自传)the first of its kind in literature. It is the simple yet immensely fascinating record of a man rising to wealth and fame from a state of poverty and obscurity卑微, the faithful account of the colorful career of Americas first self-made man. Written with a simplicity, frankness, and wit that distinguished it as a classic among its kind, Autobiography realistically described the life of Franklin as a shrewd精明的 and industrious勤勉的 businessman, whose rags-to-riches experience became the prototype典范 of many Americans dream of success. commentThe whole book is an impressive record of a man trying to be of value to mankind. through telling a success story of self-reliance, the book celebrates, in fact, the fulfillment of the American dream.Autobiography was also a typical embodiment体现 of Puritanism and the Enlightenment which were prevailing盛行的 in 18th century America. 1920s, Jazz Agev Economically, because of the war, American industry developed fast. The nation is full of bouncing ebullience, fearful of nothing, confident smug isolationism. v Socially, decline of idealism. Patriotism became cynical disillusionment. Unity of family weakened. There appeared the revolt of the Younger Generation. They escaped responsibility and assumed immorality. Jazz Agev After WWI, people found that the war which cost millions of lives failed to provide an abiding持久的 solutions to the worlds problems, that the war was just the traps of political leaders. Such a disillusionment about the value of war, accompanied by the booming of American economy drove people to cynical hedonism. People experiment with new amusements. They restlessly pursued stimulus and pleasures, wallow沉溺 in heavy drinking, fast driving and casual sex. By these, they hoped to seek relief from serious problems.Lost Generationv refers to those writers who were devoid of faith, values and ideals and who were alienated from the civilization the capitalist society advocated. It includes the writers such as (Hemingway, F.S. Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Louis Bromfield) and poets (like Malcolm Cowley, E. E. Cummings, Archibald Macleish, and Ezra Pound), who rebelled against former values and ideas, but replaced them only by despair or a cynical hedonism. They were totally frustrated by the WWI and returned from that “Great War” to their own country only to find the grim reality that the social values and civilization were hollow and affected if compared to the cruel realities of the battleground. They felt alienated from American civilization, which was conveyed in their lives of exile and expatriation.v They had cut themselves off from their past and old values in America and yet unable to come to terms with the new era when civilization had gone mad. They wandered pointlessly and restlessly, enjoying things like fishing, swimming, bullfight and beauties of nature, but they were aware all the while that the world is crazy and meaningless and futile. Their whole life was undercut and defeated. They cast away all past concepts and values in order to create new types of writing, which was characterized by disillusionment with ideals and further with civilization the capitalist society advocated. They painted the post-war western world as a waste land, lifeless and hopeless due to ethical degradation and disillusionment with dreams.Literature v Poetry: v T. S. Eliot The Wasteland. v Novel: v Sinclair Lewis Main Street 1920 v Theodore Dreiser An American Tragedy 1925, v F. S. Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby 1926, v Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises 1926, v A Farewell to Arms, 1929, v William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury, 1929, a rose for emilyv Drama: v Eurgene ONeill, The Emperor Jones, 1920, Anna Christie, 1921, The Hairy Ape 1922, 1930s, Great DepressionLiterature of political and social criticism. The novels mirrored the threats to democratic thought and a strong ideological countercurrent which caused great ideological confusion意识混乱 into Americans. Novels: John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath 1939Post-WWII, 50s,Literature in the 50sv A new generation of American authors appeared writing in the skeptical, ironic tradition of the earlier realists and naturalists. The writers used a prose散文 style modeled on the works of Ernest Hemingway, and F. S. Fitzgerald, narrative techniques of William Faulkner, psychological insights of Sigmund Freud. In the 1950s, the “Beat” writers, in expression of disaffection with “official” American life, were brutally残忍地 and directly歪曲地 dominant统治. The so-called “Beat Generation,” though not expatriate移居国外 like the Lost Generation, were alienated疏离feeling like foreigners in their own country. Beat GenerationIdentifies a loose-kit group of poets and novelists, writing in the second half of the 1950s and early 1960s, who shared a set of social attitudesantiestablishment反对正流派, antipolitical反传统政治, anti-intellectual反知识分子, opposed to the prevailing cultural反对流行文化, and moral values价值观, and in favor of unfettered无拘无束的 self-realization and self-expression. The Beat writers often performed in coffee-houses and other public places, to the accompaniment of drums or jazz music. The group included such diverse figures as Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the novelists William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. Main work v Jack Kerouac, On the Road, v poet： Allen Ginsberg, Howl, v Jewish Writer Saul Bellow, Seize the Day, 1956, v Black Writer：Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man 1956, v Norman Mailer, The Man Who Studied Yoga, 1952, v J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye麦田守望者, 1951.II. Literature in the 1960s.v 1. The writes turned to experimental techniques, to absurd humor, to mocking examination of the irrational and the disordered. The black humor featured the 1960s. v Joseph Heller, Catch-22, 1961, v John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor, 1961, Ken Kesey, v One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, 1962, v Thomas Pynchon, Gravitys Rainbow 1973.Black humorv The use of the morbid and the absurd for darly comic purpose in modern fiction and Drama. The term refers as much to the tone of anger and bitterness as it does to the grotesque and morbid situations, which often deal with suffering,anxiety and death. It is a substantial element in the Anti-novel and the theater of the absurd. Jeseph Hellers catch-22 is an archetypal example.Literature in 1960sv It was a decade when literature began to diverse in style and form. Various themes and different ways of exploration of the meaning of life were experienced.Psychological realistic novels: v John Updike, Rabbit Run, 1960, v Wright Morris, Ceremony in Lone Tree, 1960, v John Cheever, The Wapshot Scandal, 1984,v Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, 1966, v Joyce Carol Oates, A Garden of Earthly Delights 1967, v Saul Bellow, Herzog 1964, v Issac Bashevis Singer, The Manor, 1967.Southern novels: v William Faulkner, The Receivers 1962, v Flannery OConner, The Violent Bear it Away, 1960, v Poetry: Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg. v Drama: Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams.Literature in 1970sv Literature. The 1970s was a stage on which all kinds of literary art were performed. The Southern fiction, Jewish fiction, Psychological fiction, African-American Fiction, Science fiction, feminist fiction, etc., completed interrelatedly to present themselves, which displayed a prosperous panorama of literature. Jewish novelists Saul Bellow and Issac Singer were separately awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976 and in 1978. Bellow was ranked as one of the most important novelists of the 20th century American literature after the WWII. v Black Literature: Richard Wright, Native Son, 1940, Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952, Alex Haley, Malcolm X, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison.v Poetry: poets urged by upheavals of the post-war period participated actively all kinds of political or literary movement with their pens, to express their views, to utter their uneasiness about the uses of social power and industrial power, in poems. v Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, Richard Eberhart, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Sylvia Plath, Delmore Schwarts.Plays after WWIIv Plays after WWII survived under the squeeze of movies and especially television. Old playwrights like Eugene ONeill continued to produce sensational轰动的 plays. New and young playwrights were struggling to broaden the ways and forms of theatrical language in the narrowing art space. The influence of Europes “Theater of the Absurd, “ Eugene ONeills combination of naturalism, expressionism and Greek tragedy, and Broadways commercialization all pushed modern drama to emerge in new faces: “Middle Drama”, “Off-Broadway”, “Off-Off-Broadway”, Black Theater and other experimental forms. Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee. Modernism works Based on different social realities and influenced by different ideas and thoughts, Modernism has been made up of many facetssymbolism, surrealism, expressionism, existentialism, stream of consciousness, Black Humor, the Theatre of the Absurd, and other minor trends.Hemingway main works:l Three Stories and Ten Poems, 1923, l In Our Time, 1925l The Sun also Rises, 1926 l Men without Women, 1927 l A Farewell to Arms, 1929 l Green Hills of Africa, 1935, l To Have and Have not, 1937 (change attitude and style)l For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940l Across the River and into the Wood, 1950l The old Man and the Sea, 1952,l A Moveable Feast, 1962, l Islands in the Stream, 1970. The Old Man and the Sea (1952)l Settings On land, the action takes place in a small village on the northern coast of Cuba, not far from the capital city of Havana. At sea, the action takes place north of Cuba in the Gulf of Mexico. The time is the late 1940s. l Main Characters Santiago: a proud old fisherman who refuses to yield to old age and bad luck. He is an expert fisherman who knows well the sea and its creatures. Manolin :a boy who loves the old man and never loses his faith in him. l Writing Style . Hemingways styledeveloped when he worked as a newspaper reporter and correspondent early in his careeris simple and compact, with short sentences and paragraphs devoid of verbosity. However, this straightforward style often conveys complex themes. In the The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway uses the third-person-limited point of view in some sections and third-person omniscient in others. The book won Hemingway a Pulitzer Prize and later helped win him a Nobel Prize.Symbols l (1) The sea: a challenge, the universe, the life; l (2) the Marlin: an enemy ; l (3) the sharks: the cruel vicissitudes of life; l (4) Manolin: faith, hope, love, loyalty. ThemeAlthough the old man seemingly fails once the sharks steal his fish, they cannot take away the fact that Santiago - the primary target for the jest and pity of other fishermen - has done the unthinkable by staying with and catching a fish bigger than he had ever heard of (63). According to the Hemingway Code, based on principles of courage and endurance, the old man has actually triumphed in spite of his loss. In spite of not successfully bringing the fish back, Santiago fights with dignity - first to land the marlin, then to protect his fish from the sharks - and in doing so asserts his humanity.l Santiago endures and successfully survives his supreme ordeal, fighting the timeless battle of man vs. fate, with honor by remaining resilient in the face of triumph and tragedyIceberg theory .l The emphasis on submerging information is the most revolutionary part of Hemingways theory of the short story. l If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. l the dignity of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. (Death in the Afternoon, p192)A Clean, Well-lighted PlaceAmerican Romanticism1.Background: The rapid growth of population, the westward expansion and the spread of industrialism produced something of an economic boom and, with it, a tremendous sense of optimism and hope among the people.2.American Romanticism shared the general characteristics of European Romanticism. In spite of the strong foreign influence, American Romanticism exhibited from the very outset distinct features of its own: Their subjects were often the national ideals of individualism and democracy, history, and frontier life of the new nation. puritan influence over American romantics was very noticeable3.Representative writers Washington IrvingJames Fenimore CooperWilliam Cullen BryantEdgar Allan PoeRalph Waldo EmersonHenry David ThoreauNathaniel HawthorneHerman MelvilleHenry Wadsworth LongfellowWashington IrvingAmerican short story writer, essayist, poet, travel book writer, biographer, and columnist, Father of American Short StoriesThe Legend of Sleepy Hollow睡谷传说 The sketch book见闻札记 A collection of essays, stretches and stories, including “Rip Van Winkle”(里普.凡.温克尔),became the first book by an American writer to achieve international success. Character analysis Rip Van Winkle:easy-going, loveable, hen-pecked, good-natured, nice to all the ladies except his wife. The great error in Rips composition was an insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labor. In a word, Rip was ready to attend to anybodys business but his own; as to doing family duty, and keeping his farm in order, he found it impossible. He would rather starve on a penny than work for a poundHis wife always complaining, picking, trying to find fault with Winkle.(the representative of European style, the traditional force, a lot of regulation) American: Casual, less-educated, cherishing freedomEuropean: conservative, gentlemanlike, good-mannered, and well-educated.Irvings styleFirst, wrote to amuse and entertain, avoided moralizing说教 as much as possibleSecondly, he was good at enveloping覆盖 his stories in a Gothic and supernatural atmosphere.Thirdly, his characters are vivid and true so that they tend to linger回荡 in the mind of the reader.Fourthly, the humor filled with the very texture of his writings is so effective that the readers can not help laughing while reading him. Lastly, Irvings language is so refined and musical that some people read Irving just for the music of his languageThe literature of Realism (1865-1918)Henry James (1843-1916)Psychological realistic writer, short-story writer, playwright, critic, essayist (22 novels and over 100 short stories and some critical commentaries). the forefather of literature of “Stream of Consciousness” and “modern novel criticism”. the first theorist of fictionTogether with Howells, Mark Twain, James contributed to American realistic novelsMain works: 3 stages 1. 1865-1881, international novel. The American 1877, Daisy Miller, 1878, The Portrait of a Lady, 1881. 2. 1885-1897, more English, focusing on realistic social life. The Bostonians 1886, (a satire account of female emancipation in Boston). 3. 1895-1916, Major phase: on international theme, develop mature style, on peoples psychology when confronted with ethical problems. The Ambassadors, 1903, The Golden Bowl 1904.Mark Twain1835-1910Realistic novelist, humorist, first American writer who used the American vernacular language.本国语 Major Works:The Innocents Abroad傻子国外旅游记1869A Million-Pound Note 百万英镑Running for Governor竞选州长Life on the Mississippi 密西西比河上的生活1883The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 哈克贝利.芬历险记1884 “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. Its the best book weve had”. HemingwayThe Adventures of Tom Sawyer 汤姆.索亚历险记1876Main Characters Protagonist主要人物: Huckleberry Finn Antagonist对抗: Society and its rules and lawsHuckleberry Finn Loyal, cheerful, fair-minded Missouri boy. Because his father abuses him, he runs away and teams with an escaped slave during many adventures on a raft ride down the Mississippi. Huck is the narrator of the novel. Jim