英美文学2教案3

Chapter 4 The Romantic Period I Teaching time 12 teaching hours I Teaching Aim the students should know the reason and effect of American Romanticism and the characteristics of the literature Through learning the selected works the students get to know the writing style of them II Teaching Method a presentation b analysis of the contexts of the works c questions and discussion III Key points writing style of the prose works 1 The American Puritanism and its great influence over American moral values as is shown in American romantic writings 1 American Puritanism Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans The Puritans were originally members of a division of the Protestant Church who came into existence in the reigns Queen Elizabeth and King James The first settlers who became the founding fathers of the American nation were quite a few of them Puritans They came to America out of various reasons but it should be remembered that they were a group of serious religious people advocating highly religious and moral principles As the word itself hints Puritans wanted to purify their religious beliefs and practices They felt that the Church of England was too close to the Church of Rome in doctrine form of worship and organization of authority The American Puritans like their brothers back in England were idealists believing that the church should be restored to complete purity They accepted the doctrine of predestination original sin and total depravity and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace from God But in the grim struggle for survival that followed immediately after their arrival in America they became more and more practical as indeed they had to be Puritans were noted for a spirit of moral and religious earnestness that determinated their whole way of life Puritans lives were extremely disciplined and hard They drove out of their settlements all those opinions that seemed dangerous to them and history has criticized their actions Yet in the persecution of what they considered error the Puritans were no worse than many other movements in history As a culture heritage Puritanism did have a profound influence on the early American mind and American values American Puritanism also had a conspicuously noticeable and an enduring influence on American literature It had become to some extent so much a state of mind so much a part of the national cultural atmosphere rather than a set of tenets 2 One of the manifestations is the fact that American romantic writers tended more to moralize than their English and European counterparts Besides a preoccupation with the Calvinistic view of origina1 sin and the mystery of evil marked the works of Hawthorne Melville and a host of lesser writers 2 New England Transcendentalism New England Transcendentalism is the mot clearly defined Romantic literary movement in this period It was started in the area around Concord Mass by a group of intellectual and the literary men of the United States such as Emerson Henry David Thoreau who were members of an informal club i e the Transcendental Club in New England in the l830s The transcendentalists reacted against the cold rigid rationalism of Unitarianism in Boston They adhered to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential unity of all creation the innate goodness of man and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of the deepest truths The writings of the transcendentalists prepared the ground of their contemporaries such as Walt Whitman Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne The main issues involved in the debate were generally philosophical concerning nature man and the universe Basically Transcendentalism has been defined philosophical1y as the recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively or of attaining knowledge transcending the reach of the senses Emerson once proclaimed in a speech Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind Other concepts that accompanied Transcendentalism inc1ude the idea that nature is ennobling and the idea that the individual is divine and therefore self re1iant 二 美国浪漫主义时期的主要作家 Washington Irving 1783 l859 Irving s position in American literature Washington Irving was one of the first American writers to earn an international reputation and regarded as an early Romantic writer in the merican literary history and Father of the American short stories What are the theme and the artistic features of Rip Van Winkle 1 The theme Irving s taste was essentia1ly conservative and always exa1ted a disappearing past This socia1 conservatism and literary preference for the past is revea1ed to some extent in his famous story Rip Van Winkle The story is a tale remembered mostly for Rip s 20 year s1eep set against the background of the inevitably changing America Rip went to sleep before the War of Independence and woke up after it The change that had occurred in the 20 years he slept was to him not always for the better The revolution upset the natural order of things In the story Irving ski1lfu1ly presents to us paralleled juxtapositions of two totally different worlds before and after Rip s 20 years s1eep By moving Rip back and forth from a noisy world with his wife on the farm to a wild but peaceful natural world in the mountains and from a pre Revolution village to a George Washington era lrving describes Rip s response and reaction in a dramatic way so that we see clearly both the narrator and Irving agree on the preferabi1ity of the past to the present and the preferability of a dream like world to the real one Irving never seemed to accept a modern democratic America 2 The artistic features Rip Van Winkle is not only well known for Rip s 20 year sleep but also considered a model of perfect English in American Literature and in the English language as well Washington Irving has always been regarded as a writer who perfected the best classic style that American Literature ever produced He has a clear easy style a We get a strong sense impression as we read him along since the language he used best reveals what a Romantic writer can do with words We hear rather than read for there is musicality in almost every line of his prose b We seldom learn a mora1 lesson because he wants us amused and relaxed So we often find ourselves lost in a world that is permeated with a dreaming quality He uses genial humor to exaggerate the seriousness of situation He uses dignified words to produce a half mocking effect c The Gothic elements and the supernatural atmosphere are manipulated in such a way that we could become so engaged and involved in what is happening in a seemingly exotic place Rip Van Winkle was overwhelmed by the magic power of the drink and fell into sleep for 20 years d Yet Irving never forgets to associate a certain place with the inward movement of a person and to charge his sentences with emotion so as to create a true and vivid character He is worth the honor of being the American Goldsmith for his literary craftsmanship II Ralph Waldo Emerson 1 Emersonian Transcendentalism Emersonian Transcendentalism is actual1y a philosophical school which absorbed some ideological concerns of American Puritanism and European Romanticism with its focus on the intuitive knowledge of human beings to grasp the absolute in the universe and the divinity of man In his essays Emerson put forward his philosophy of the over sou1 the importance of the Individual and Nature Question What is Emerson s view on nature Emerson s nature is emblematic of the spiritual world alive with God s overwhelming presence hence it exercises a healthy and restorative inf1uence on human mind Go back to nature sink yourse1f back into its inf1uence and you 1l become spiritually who1e again By employing nature as a big symbol of the Spirit or God or the over soul Emerson has brought the Puritan 1egacy of symbolism to its perfection The essay Nature discusses the love of nature the uses of nature the idealist philosophy in relation to nature evidences of spirit in the material universe and the potential expansion of human souls and works that will result from a general return to direct immediate contact with the natural environment In the essay Emerson clearly expresses the main principles of his Transcendentalist pursuit and his love for nature In expressing his belief in the mystical unity of nature Emerson develops his concept of the Over Soul or Universal Mind In the selection Emerson s famous metaphor of a transparent eyeball is employed to illustrate his philosophical discussion III Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804 l864 Imbued with an inquiring imagination an intense1y meditative mind and unceasing interest in the interior of the heart of man s being Nathaniel Hawthorne remains one of the most interesting yet most ambiva1ent writers in the American literary history Hawthorne s major works Hawthorne wrote and published many good works which have doubtlessly become part of the American literary heritage Among them the tales collected in Moses from an Old Manse 1846 and The Snow Image and Other Twice Told Tales 1851 best demonstrate Hawthorn s early obsession with the moral and psychological consequences of pride selfishness and secret guilt that manifest themselves in human beings The Scarlet Letter 1850 always regarded as the best of his works tells a simple but very moving story in which four people living in a Puritan community are invo1ved in and affected by the sin of adultery in different ways The House of the Seven Gables 1851 was based on the tradition of a curse pronounced on the author s family when his great grandfather was a judge in the Salem witchcraft trials The Blithedale Romance l852 is a novel he wrote to reveal his own experiences on the Brook Farm and his own methods as a psychological novelist The Marble Faun 1860 is a romance set in Italy concerned about the dark aberrations of the human spirit 1 Hawthorne s thematic concerns 1 his black vision of life and human beings his concern with human sin and evil Hawthorne s literary world is a most disturbed tormented and problematical one mostly because of his black vision of life and human beings He rejected the Transcendentalists transparent optimism about the potentialities of human nature Instead he looked more deeply and perhaps more honestly into life finding in it much suffering and conflict but also finding the redeeming power of love According to Hawthorne There is evil in every human heart which may remain latent perhaps through the whole life but circumstances may rouse it to activity A piece of literary work should show how we are all wronged and wrongers and avenge one another So in almost every book he wrote Hawthorne discusses sin and evil In Young Goodman Brown he sets out to prove that everyone possesses some evil secret Its hero a naive young man who accepts both societies in general and his fellow men as individuals worth his regard is confronted with the vision of human evil in one terrible night and becomes thereafter distrustful and doubtful The Minister s B1ack Veil goes further to suggest that everyone tries to hold the evil secret from one another in the way the minister tries to convince his people with his black vei1 The Birthmark drives home symbolically Hawthorne s point that evi1 is man s birthmark something he is born with One source of evil that Hawthorne is concerned most is over reaching intellect which usually refers to someone who is too proud too sure of himself The tension between the head and the heart constitutes one of the dramatic moments when the evil of overreaching intellect would be fully revealed Hawthorne s intellectuals are usually villains dreadful because they are devoid of warmth and feeling What s more they tend to go beyond and violate the natural order by doing something impossible and reaching the ultimate truth without a sober mind about their own limitations as human beings Chillingworth Dr Rappaccini in Rappaccini s Daughter are but a few specimens of Hawthorne s chilling cold blooded human animals 2 Hawthorne s view of Puritanism Hawthorne s view of man and human history originates to a great extent in Puritanism He was not a Puritan himself but he had Puritan ancestors who p1ayed an important role in his life and works He believed that the wrong doing of one generation lives into the successive ones and often wondered if he might have inherited some of their guilt This sensibility 1ed to his understanding of evil being at the very core of human life which is typical of the Calvinistic belief that human beings are basically depraved and corrupted hence they should obey God to atone for their sins In many of Hawthorne s stories and novels the Puritan concept of life is condemned or the Puritan Past is shown in an almost totally negative light especially in his The House Of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne is attracted in every way to the Puritan world even though he condemns its less humane manifestations On the one hand it provides him with a subject He inherited the Puritan tradition of moral earnestness and he was deeply concerned with the concepts of original sin and guilt and the claims of law and conscience and on the other with the Puritan world or society as a historical background he discusses some of the most important issues that concern the moral life of man and human history 3 his masterpiece The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne s remarkable sense of the Puritan past his understanding of the co1onial history in New England his apparent preoccupation with the moral issues of sin and guilt and his keen psychological analysis of people are brought to full display in his masterpiece The Scarlet Letter a the story The main character of The Scarlet Letter is Hester Prynne a young married woman who has borne an illegitimate child while living away from her husband in a village in Puritan New England The husband Roger Chillingworth arrives in New England to find his wife pilloried and made to wear the scarlet letter A meaning adulteress on her dress as a punishment for her illicit affair and for her refusal to reveal the name of the child s father Chillingworth becomes obsessed with finding the identity of his wife s former lover He learns that Hester s lover is a saintly young minister Arther Dimmesdale and Chillingworth then proceeds to revenge himself by mentally tormenting the guilt stricken young man Hester herself is revealed to be a compassioned and splendidly self reliant heroine who is never truly repentant for the act of adultery committed with the minister she feels that their act was consecrated by their deep love for each other In the end Chillingworths morally degraded by his monomaniac pursuit of revenge and Dimmesdale is broken by his own sense of guilt and publicly confess his adultery before dying in Hester s arm Only Hester can face the future optimistically as she plans to ensure the future of her beloved little girl by taking her to Europe b theme This novel together with some other of Hawthorne s work assumes the universality of guilt and explores the complexities and ambiguities of man s choices It is marked by a depth of psychological and moral insight seldom equaled and never surpassed by any American writer In this particular nove1 Hawthorne does not intend to tell a love story nor a story of sin but focuses his attention on the moral emotional and psychological effects or consequences of the sin on the people in general and those main characters in particular so as to show us the tension between society and individuals To Hawthorne everybody is potentially a sinner and great moral courage is therefore indispensable for the improvement of human nature as is shown in the The Scarlet Letter c The structure and the form of his writings are always carefully worked out to cater for the thematic concern He was a skillful craftsman with an impressive sense of form Hawthorne was also the master of a classic literary style that is remarkable for its directness its clarity its firmness and its sureness of idiom d With his specia1 interest in the psychologica1 aspect of human beings there isn t much action or physical movement going on in his works and he is good at exploring the complexity of human psychology So his drama is Thought full of mental activities Thought propels action and grows organically out of the interaction of the characters as we can find in The Scarlet Letter e Hawthorne is a master of symbolism which he took from the Puritan tradition and bequeathed to American literature in a revivified form The symbo1 can be found everywhere in his writing and his masterpiece provides the most conclusive proof The scarlet letter A is the central symbol of The Scarlet Letter with which Hawthorne proves himself to be one of the best symbolists As a key to the whole novel the letter A takes on different layers of symbolic meanings as the plot develops At the beginning of the novel Hester was discovered to have committed adultery and was punished to wear a scarlet letter A made of cloth at her bosom and the letter symbolized her sin adultery Then when Hester became gradually accepted by the community through her honesty and hard work it stands for Hester s intelligence and hard work able At the end of the novel the symbol has evolved to represent the high virtues of Hester angelic So the letter changes from a symbol of sin to a symbol of ability and at last of the high human virtue By using Pearl as a thematic symbo1 Hawthorne emphasizes the consequence the sin of adultery has brought to the community and people living in that community f The scarlet letter A is ambiguous People come up with different interpretations and they do not know which one is definite So ambiguity is one of the salient characteristics of Hawthorne s art 2 Hawthorne s writing style As a man of literary craftsmanship Hawthorne is extraordinary in that 1 The structu