8. Henry James and Mark Twain

1、 COURSE: An Introduction to British and American Literature (I) COLLEGE:College of Foreign Languges Studies LECTURER: ZHAI HE Email: TIME: Preview O. Henry, Jack London and Dreiser 3 of you focus on each of the 3 writers representative works One on The Cop and the Anthem; one on The Sea Wolf; one on

2、 Sister Carrie Read the excerpt from Sister Carrie and pay attention to the depiction of the environment and the characters.Henry JamesHis life Born into an aristocratic family in New York His father a philosopher; his brother William James a prominent philosopher and psychologist, and an influentia

3、l advocate of pragmatism. Received the best education in U.S. and the European continent His friendship with Howells After 1866 he lived in Europe and finally became a British citizenHis major works 1. Novels:The American (1877)Daisy Miller (1878)The Portrait of a Lady (1881)The Bostonians (1886)The

4、 Wings of the Dove (1902)The Ambassadors (1903)The Golden Bowl (1904) 2. Criticism The Art of Fiction (1884)The international theme“The Major Phase”Theme“the international theme”: The “meeting of American and Europe, American innocence in contact and contrast with European decadence, and its moral a

5、nd psychological complications. For the American it was a process of progression from inexperience to experience, from innocence to knowledge and maturity. James presented, through his fiction, the superiority of at least some of the values of the New World to those of the Old. He enjoyed juxtaposit

6、ion American moral innocence with the somber decadence of Europe, or in the words of William Troy, American innocence caught in the toil of European duplicity” (Chang, 125-6).His view about the art of fiction The “aim of the novel is to represent life” (Chang, 127): “The only reason for the existenc

7、e of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life”; “the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel.”“point of view” The core of his aesthetics of the novel “To correspond to life the author should avoid artificial omniscience as much as possible.

8、 Very early in his career James discovered the trick of making his characters reveal themselves with minimal intervention of the author. He used a particular method of telling the story, that is, illumination of the situation and characters through one or several minds. This method he termed point o

9、f view. Here we observe events and people filter through the consciousness of his characters” (Chang, 128).As a forerunner of psychoanalytical novel Because of his emphasis on the “inner awareness and inward movement of his characters” , he became one of the first modern psychoanalytical novel, anti

10、cipating the “stream of consciousness” in the 20th century.An appreciation of the excerpt The point of view? What are the characters of Mrs. Varian and Isabel? Where has the author given way to the consciousness of his characters?Local Colorism By representing in their works characteristics which ar

11、e characteristic of a particular region: speech, customs, regional landscape , local colorists intend to present the local character of a specific region. See Chang and AbramsMark Twain1835-1910 Pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens Born in a small town of Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mississippi Rive

12、r. Received little education A printers apprentice, a tramp printer, a silver miner, a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, and a frontier journalist in Nevada and California. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, a frontier tale The Gilded Age (1873) The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), from which “all modern American literature comes” Life on the Mississippi (1883) Representing “social life through portraits of local places” One of his contribution to American literature “lies i