Chapter 15美国文学 童明版.ppt

1、Chapter 15,Modernism in the American Grain,Topics A Characteristics of American modernism B Historical, Philosophical, Formal dimensions of American modernism,Definition of Modernism The term modernism is widely used to identify new and distinctive features in the subjects, forms, concepts, and styl

2、es of literature and the other arts in the early decades of the present century, but especially after World War I (1914-18). The specific features signified by modernism (or by the adjective modernist) vary with the user, but many critics agree that it involves a deliberate and radical break with so

3、me of the traditional bases not only of Western art, but of Western culture in general. P 198 Modernism is the attempt to create something new in the space of modern crisis and change.,Characteristics of American modernism International First, American modernism is the process of American literature

4、 merging into the mainstream of Western modern culture. a more complex view of reality Second, literary modernists are just as concerned as reality as the realists are. However, the modernist have a more complex view of reality. Modernism are more aware that language is constitutive of reality, not

5、just a transparent (thus unimportant) medium. several paradigms（范式） Third, there is the question of paradigm for modernism. The attempt to define modernism only in the terms of Eliot and a small group who shares his vision is to mistake one tree for the whole forest.,Characteristics of American mode

6、rnism Based on the afore-mentioned observations that American modernism is less nationalistic but more international and European, that the modernists are more aware of how language constitutes and shapes reality; that modernism includes several paradigms and a whole range of responses to the modern

7、American modernism should be examined in its various dimensions the formal, the historical and the philosophical so that we can perceive more clearly the larger picture of modernism.,The Historical Dimension Late 19th century and first decade of 20th century William James World War I: 1912, 1919 1 P

8、rewar generation: Menken Pound, Eliot, Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams 2 Postwar generation the Roaring Twenties ( the Jazz Age) lost generation: Hemingway; Fitzgerald; Faulkner The radical 30s The Great Depression at the end of the 20s and during the 30s disillusioned people about t

9、he economic stability of the country and eroded utopianist thinking Social involvement in American modernist writings John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, Thomas Wolfe, and John Steinbeck,The Historical Dimension Influence: European modernism The basic impulses of literary modernism emerged in 19th ce

10、ntury Europe. 1 Literature Baudelaire, Flaubert, Dostoevsky 2 social science Nietzsche, Marx, Bergson, and Freud etc.,William James: the Harvard psychologist philosopher-pragmatist He published Principles of Psychology in 1890, which displayed the same interest in a new subjective science of conscio

11、usness that men like Henri Bergson were exploring in Europe. James portrayed human consciousness struggling for pragmatic self-definition in what he called the modern “pluriverse”. His stream of consciousness phrase had rich implication not only for the changing language of perception but for the ni

12、netieth-century novel. stream of consciousness a new metaphor for the processes of mindFor James, consciousness was not a chain of linked segments, a river or a stream are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described.,World War I Then, World War I came, which changed the mood, if not the di

13、rections, of modernism. American modernists: two generations 1 the prewar generation 2 the postwar generation P 192 in examining the intellectual and emotional currents within American modern literature, it is found that the modern era of American writing was launched by the two generations of 1912

14、and 1919 which are so close in age and so divided in experience.,The prewar generation was largely founded in the poetry of Pound and Eliot, Frost and Doolittle, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Conrad Aiken, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters. In theater there was Eugene ONei

15、ll, in fiction Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis, in general ideas Brooks, Randolph Bourne, Mencken. The postwar generation included Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, e. e. cummings, Edmund Wilson, Hart Crane etc. The later generation e

16、mphasis shifted decisively toward the novel, so that by the end of the 1920s both American poetry and American fiction were established on a radical course.,The genteel tradition: Victorianism，Puritanism Yet, in the first decade or so of the 20th century, in the mainstream of American intellectual l

17、ife and culture, the genteel tradition-idealistic, polite, cultured and conservative-continued despite the new directions.,Prewar generation H. L. Menken, Van Wyck Brooks, Santayana, Randolph Bourne and other radical intellectuals called for a rejection of the irrelevant past and present in order to

18、 start a freshly assertive future. But towards the end of the first decade and finally, by 1912, the modern temper that had been sweeping across Europe arrivedthus, even in the prewar years, seeds of opposing views regarding modernism was planted.,The rejection of Victorian gentility was, in any cas

19、e, inevitable. The booming of American industry, with its gigantic, roaring factories, its corporate impersonality, and its large-scale aggressiveness, no longer left any room for the code of polite behavior and well-bred morality fashioned in a quieter and less competitive age. War or no war, as th

20、e generations passed, it became increasingly difficult for our young people to accept standards of behavior that bore no relationship to the bustling business medium in which they were expected to battle for success. (From Advanced English),H. L. Mencken, (18801956),H. L. Mencken As a Jazz-Age Jonat

21、han Swift, he took advantage of this platform to satirize war hysteria, presidents and the conventions that spawned them, book banning, the Ku Klux Klan, Prohibition, and the residual puritanism that he saw as the basis of Americas ills. residual: remaining 残留的,Lost Generation Many prominent America

22、n writers of the decade following the end of World War I, disillusioned by their war experiences and alienated by what they perceived as the crassness of American culture and its puritanical repressions, are often tagged as the Lost Generation.,Lost Generation A number of these writers became expatr

23、iates, moving either to London or to Paris in their quest for a richer literary and artistic milieu and a freer way of life. Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot lived out their lives abroad, but most of the younger exiles”, came back to America in the 1930s. Hemingways The Sun Also Rises and

24、 Fitzgeralds Tender is the Night are novels that represent the mood and way of life of two groups of American expatriates.,The Radical 30s In the radical 30s, the period of the Great Depression and of the economic and social reforms in the New Deal inaugurated by President Franklin Roosevelt, some a

25、uthors joined radical political movements, and many others dealt in their literary works with pressing social issues of the timeincluding, in the novel, William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, Thomas Wolfe, and John Steinbeck, and in the drama, Eugene ONeill, Clifford Odets.,Philosophic

26、al dimension for modernism,Intellectual precursors of modernism Important intellectual precursors of modernism are thinkers who had questioned the certainties that had supported traditional modes of social organization, religion, and morality, and also traditional ways of conceiving the human selfth

27、inkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud.,Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900),Friedrich Nietzsche P 194 He offered the most insightful critique regarding how and why the higher values of Western civilization (a combination of Christianity and Platonism) have devalued themselves. Plat

28、onism: Western rationalism “reevaluation of existing values” is at the heart of Nietzsche. Death of God 虚无主义 nihilism,Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) an Austrian neurlogist, the founding father of psychoanalysis,Sigmund Freud 1 human behavior By clinical observation, Freud explained that human behavior is

29、 largely the result of instinctual drives, such as sexual and aggressive urges. 2 self P 196 Freudian psychoanalysis has shattered the old certainty that the self is a conscious rational entity. The way that psychoanalysis discusses “eros” in relation to civilization is parallel to how Marx presents

30、 “commodity” in relation to the capitalist society.,2 self According to Freud, the “self” (自我) is a dynamism shaped by tension-filled negotiations between the individual desires (id, 本我) and the pressures from civilization (superego, 超我),Freud and psychoanalysis Id, ego and superego The id is the co

31、mpletely unconscious, impulsive, childlike portion of the psyche that operates on the pleasure principle and is the source of basic impulses and drives; it seeks immediate pleasure and gratification. The super-ego is the moral component of the psyche, which takes into account no special circumstance

32、s in which the morally right thing may not be right for a given situation. The rational ego attempts to exact a balance between the impractical hedonism of the id and the equally impractical moralism of the super-ego.,Karl Marx (1818 1883),Marx and modernism Marxism is an important source of moderni

33、sm. P 197 However, classical Marxism does provide some very relevant insights about the modern world and the influence Marxism has reached far and wide, extending to the American politics of art and literature. The perceived importance of Marxism in literary studies continues to be, primarily, how i

34、t can clarify for us the historical content of modernist texts.,Marx and modernism 1“definition of modernism” Marxism is an indispensable paradigm for modernism because it defines “modernism” as a historical stage in which capitalism, profit-oriented and technology-driven, seriously changes the worl

35、d we live in and our “humanity”. 2 “class” Marxist idea of “class” remains poignant conceptual frame in social understanding. In the American context, “class” increasingly informs the discussion of “race” “ethnicity” and “gender”. 3 “alienation” The idea of “alienation,” basic to Marxism, is also ba

36、sic to modern literature.,Marx and modernism 4 Social activism and Proletarian literature John Dos Passos; John Steinbeck Proletarian 无产阶级的；无产者,The Formal Dimension The modernist period: the greatest period of experimentation on literary form and technique. Modernist writers: radical, revolutionary

37、in experimentation on literary form and technique. They follow psychological time, use stream of consciousness, interior monologue, symbolism, myth, juxtaposition (most widely used in the modernist period) etc. juxtaposition 并置；并列对照,P 187 One of the important reasons why there is such exuberance in

38、form is that modernists understand better that if they are to represent reality, they have to learn to represent the perspectives and narratives that make claims for “reality”. exuberance: richness,Avant-garde The catastrophe of the war had shaken faith in the moral basis, coherence, and durability

39、of Western civilization and raised doubts about the adequacy of traditional literary modes to represent the harsh and dissonant realities of the postwar world. T. S. Eliot wrote in a review of Joyces Ulysses in 1923 that the inherited mode of ordering a literary work, which assumed a relatively cohe

40、rent and stable social order, could not accord with the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.“,Avant-garde Major works of modernist fiction subvert the basic conventions of earlier prose fiction by breaking up the narrative continuity, departing from the standard wa

41、ys of representing characters, and violating the traditional syntax and coherence of narrative language by the use of stream of consciousness and other innovative modes of narration.,Uses of narrative point of view In pre-modern fiction: God-like omniscient point of view In modern fiction: Uses of n

42、arrative point of view have become very sophisticated. 1 a first person narrator (maybe unreliable) Willa Cather: My Antonia F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby 2 limited omniscience; Henry James 3 external narrator (这种类型的特点是叙述者如同局外人或旁观者,事件的叙述只限于外部视点以及行为报告。) Ernest Hemingway: In Our Time,Perspecti

43、vism The belief that a truth is something relative to a perspective and therefore reality is interpretable from many perspectives. 1 multi-perspectives 2 Inclusion of perspectives based on gender, race and class. William Faulkner：The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying Wallace Stevens: “Thirteen ways

44、 of looking at a blackbird”,The Sound and the Fury The novel is separated into four distinct sections. The first is written from the perspective of Benjy Compson, a 33-year-old man with severe mental handicaps. The second section focuses on Quentin Compson, Benjys older brother. In the third section

45、 Faulkner writes from the perspective of Jason, Quentins cynical younger brother. In the fourth section Faulkner introduces a third person omniscient point of view. As I Lay DyingThe book is narrated by 15 different characters over 59 chapters.,The formal dimension Fragmentation and open-endedness become