美国文学史7(2)The1920s

1、 The 1920s Part 2 Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) He was a transitional poet between the 19th and 20th centuries. His subject was centered around a small New England town.He named it Tilbury town. In the town most people are failures in life. One of his major themes is the futility of human lif

2、e. He showed that there was no way human could avoid the destructive power of time. He turned to poetry as to an alternative world of elegance and beauty, but wrote his best poems about wasted, blighted or impoverished lives. His brief story and portrait poems are in traditional form with metrically

3、 regular verse, rhymes and elevated diction. Such techniques dignify the subject matter and also provide a contrast, whereas his subject is unpoetic according to traditional standards, that emphasize its sadness and banality.Collection of Poems: The Torrent and the Night Before The Town Down the Riv

4、er: (poem: Miniver Cheevy) The Man Against the Sky Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) To him, a poet lives in two worlds-one of reality and the other of imagination-and builds bridges b/w them. All his poems recorded the unending dialogue of imagination & reality. He tried to stress that the world of imagi

5、nation is important because it supplies an order which the real world lacks. He was firmly sure that the imaginative world is imagination. But he believed that people must move to this world because people need a world of order. His poetry emphasizes the sense of loss and gives a solutionthe realm o

6、f imagination. William Carlos WilliamsHis poetics: 1.The source of information- Life as it is lived is the beginning and the end of the poets endeavor. Life is in itself poetry simple and pure. American poetry must be rooted in America as its fount of inspiration and its source of information and su

7、bject matter. What he wanted to achieve is to reach the universal plane of meaning through the representation of the local. He believes that “localism alone can lead to culture.”2. The language of his poetry- He feels strongly that poetry must be grounded in everyday experience and in the speech of

8、the common man. It must use the common meters of living speech.3.The use of image - He is an excellent imagist poet. To him, Philosophical and metaphysical speculation has absolutely no place in poetry. He says, “Say it! No ideas but in things”. (Paterson)Dont philosophize; visualize in terms of tha

9、t which is physical and particular. poem: Spring and Alllong poem: PatersonProse work: In the American Grain Robert Frost Robert Frost Robert Frost He is one of the most popular American modernist poets. The charm of his poetry is that it seems to be natural,direct and simple and the fact is that it

10、 is deceptively simple. Frosts poems are New England in their setting.The subjects come from country life of ordinary people.He used plain language, traditional poetics and symbols from everyday life to express profound ideas. He combined traditional poetic forms with American vocabulary and speech

11、rhythms.-This is his innovation. He stood aside from the literary movements of the 20th century since he showed little interest in experimentation in form. But for him, form is as important as sense. The ordering of sound and sense(语调与意义的统一) is one major concern of his career. Yet he stood aloft amo

12、ng his contemporary poets because of his modern thematic concern. In his poems. He managed to construct a “ momentary stay against confusion”.（抵御困惑的瞬间智慧）famous poem:The Road Not Taken Stopping By Woods on a Snowy EveningMending WallThe Wood Pile 我想我知道这是谁的森林他的家虽在那边乡村；他看不到我驻足在此地伫望他的森林白雪无垠。我的小马一定会觉得离奇停

13、留于旷无农舍之地在这森林和冰湖之间一年内最昏暗的冬夕。 它将它的佩玲朗朗一牵问我有没有弄错了地点。此外但闻微风的拂吹和纷如鹅毛的雪片。这森林真可爱，黝黑而深邃。可是我还要去赶赴约会，还要赶好几英里路才安睡，还要赶好几英里路才安睡。 His “the sound of sense”（“带意义的语带意义的语调调”） 1.: 全诗由四行首尾韵诗节构成，使用连锁抱韵（interlocking enclosed rhyme），韵式为aaba, bbcb, ccdc,dddd，即每个诗节的一、二、四行押韵，第三行的韵脚成为下一节一、二、四行的韵脚，节节相连，环环相扣，前后呼应，形成一种回环向前的运动感。最

14、后一节押同一韵，重锤定音，却没有单调之感 。整首诗的韵脚都是长元音或双元音，形成流畅、圆润的感觉，衬托了飘雪的夜晚的静谧。 2.“The Death of The Hired Man”（雇工之死）“No, but he hurt my heart the way he lay And rolled his old head on that sharp-edged chair-back.” 第一行中hurt与head押头韵，第二行中rolled与old head都以爆破音结尾，这都属于刺耳音。 sharp-edged chair-back这几个词中，刺耳的辅音又堆在一起，使读者感觉自己就坐在那把

15、硬椅子上，脖子被硬硬的椅子背硌得生疼。3.“The Span of Life”（生命的跨度）The old dog barks backward without getting up.I can remember when he was a pup. 这首诗把一只老狗的衰老 和他年幼时的活泼进行了对比。诗人用了很含蓄的语言。诗的题目赋予这两个相对比的形象以深远的意义，这两个形象不仅代表了动物的一生，也代表了人的一生。这首诗是三音步三音步的抑抑扬格的对句。但是在第一行的第二个音步中, 诗人用一种古典音步 替换了原有的抑抑扬格，这种音步由三个重读音节组成。第一个音步本来是抑抑扬格，由两个弱读音节与

16、一个重读音节组成，紧随着这个重读音节又有三个重读音节，这样四个重读音节就连在一起了old dog barks back(ward).而且这四个重读音节都以重读辅音开头和结尾，所以发音时不能连读，在读每一个音时口形变化都很大。因为每一个音相差都很大，使读者读这一行时发音很费力，朗读速度大大减慢。这一诗行的笨重程度 就如那只衰老的狗，站都站不起来，只有转动脑袋的力气。第二行与第一行的对比非常明显，是标准的抑扬格，其韵律是轻快、规则的，各音节都是以元音或流音结尾，发音时口型变化小，能轻快地连续读下来，整行诗能流畅地从口中吐出。 选择三音节的音步是因为在同样的一拍中，容纳三音节时的语速比容纳两音节时的

17、语速要快，这更能衬托出“Time is fleeting”.特别是在第二行中，更有利于表现这只狗小时候的灵活敏捷。 另外，第一行的单词中爆破音和刺耳的辅音占很大比重d,d,g,b,k,b,k,d,t,g,t,g,p，而第二行中的辅音中滑音占了大部分n,r,m,m,r,wh,h,w。这样，每一行诗句的声音及描述的动作都与这一行诗中的意象相呼应，英语中再也没有其它的只有两句诗行的诗能与这首相媲美。 。 Carl Sandburg He is an important figure in the Chicago Renaissance of arts and letters. His poetic

18、aim was to celebrate the working people of America in poems that they could understand.He said:simple poems for simple people. He was aware that American life was increasingly urban, and he had little interest in the small town and its conventional middle class. In the cities ofthe Midwest, the urba

19、n spectacle seemed to display both the vitality of the masses and their exploitation in an unequal class system.poem: ChicagoFog The Harbor Ernest Hemingway(1899-1961)novel:The Sun Also Rises(1922)A Farewell to Arms(1928)For whom the Bell Tolls(1940s)The Old Man and the Sea(1952)Short stories: In Ou

20、r Time Winner Take Nothing Men without Women To Have and Have Not The Fifth Columnnon-fiction: Death in the Afternoon Green Hills of AfricaHis typical theme: He was generally regarded as spokesman for Lost Generation. In one sense Hemingway wrote all his life about one theme-“grace under pressure” (

21、重压下的风度重压下的风度), and created one hero who acts that theme out. In a time of general despair and pessimism he wrote stories with heroes that the readers could admire. There is a particular term “the code hero” （人物形象的准则） for his character. Features of “the code hero” are 1) extremely great courage, 2) e

22、ndurance 3) man of great action 4)unconquerable will: A man can be destroyed, but not defeated. Almost all his stories deal with the theme of courage in face of tragedy. Hemingways world is a world essentially chaotic and meaningless, in which man fights a solitary sruggle against a force he does no

23、t even understand. The awareness that it must end in defeat, no matter how hard he strives against it, engenders a sense of despair，but the hemingway hero possesses “despairing courage”.(绝望中的勇气) It is this courage that enables a man to behave like a man ,to assert his dignity in face of adversity. T

24、his is the essence of a code of honor（荣誉的准则）, which all his heroes believe in. (Thus the typical Hemingway situations are usually characterized by chaos and brutality and violence, by crime and death, and sport, hard drinking and sexual promiscuity. And the typical Hemingway hero is one who, wounded

25、 but srong, more sensitive and wounded because stronger, enjoys the pleasures of life in face of ruin and death and maintains, through some notion of a code, an ideal of himself.) In his fiction the nihilistic vision of sterility, failure, and death is modified by his affirmative assertion of the po

26、ssibility of living with style and courage. Therefore, he often dealt with war and courage, and with the question of how tolive with pain. His iceberg theory of writing:（冰山原则）（冰山原则） 1/8 of an iceberg is above the water. All of the rest is underneath the water. The same is true with Hemingways writin

27、g. His sentences only give one small bit of the meaning. The rest is implied. One must go very deep beneath the surface to understand the full meaning of his writing.Lost Generation: Name applied to the disillusioned intellectuals and aesthetes of the years following WWI,who rebelled against former ideals and values but could replace them only by despair or a cynical hedonism. The remark of Gertrude Stein. “you are all a lost generation,” addressed to Hemingway, was used as a preface to the latters novel The sun Also Rise