《新编美国文学史（第三卷）》课件lecture 12

1、The Road Not TakenTWOroads diverged in a yellow wood,And sorry I could not travel bothAnd be one traveler, long I stoodAnd looked down one as far as I couldTo where it bent in the undergrowth;Then took the other, as just as fair,And having perhaps the better claim,Because it was grassy and wanted we

2、ar;Though as for that the passing thereHad worn them really about the same,And both that morning equally layIn leaves no step had trodden black.Oh, I kept the first for another day!Yet knowing how way leads on to way,I doubted if I should ever come back.I shall be telling this with a sighSomewhere a

3、ges and ages hence:Two roads diverged in a wood, and II took the one less traveled by,And that has made all the difference. 1Lecture 12Modernism:1900-1945 (II)William FaulknerOutline Modernist Southern LiteratureWilliam Faulkner“A Rose for Emily” : Discussion3 Washington Irving, James Fenimore Coope

4、r, and William Cullen Bryant James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and William Wadsworth Longfellow; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne; Herman Melville Hamlin Garland, Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg The New Critics; William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Allen Tate,

5、Thomas Wolfe 4About American SouthWagon and DonkeyKu Klux KlanSlavery5Thomas SutpenHenry and Judith Charles Bon 6Modernist Southern Literature“With the war of 1914-1918, the South reentered the world but gave a backward glance as it slipped over the border: that backward glance gave us the Southern

6、renascence, a literature conscious of the past in the present.” （Allen Tate ）“the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”(T. S. Eliot, 1919) “The past is never dead; its not even past.” 7Topic for discussion Is it possible to see the story,

7、 as a symbolic, tragic representation of the Southern tradition?If Emily Grierson is representative of the South, then what is Faulkner saying about the South? 8II. About William FaulknerMajor NovelsThe Sound and the Fury (1929)As I Lay Dying (1930)Light in August (1932)Absalom, Absalom (1936)Go Dow

8、n, Moses (1942)Short StoriesA Rose for Emily(1930)Barn Burning(1939)The Bear (novella) (1942)9李文俊：打场一个人的“战争”钱钟书: 福克纳的东西很烦闷，但存在必有它的理由，翻译恐怕吃力不讨好，你的勇气和耐心值得上帝保佑。李文俊: 大概总有两年，这本书日日夜夜纠缠着我，像一个梦有时是美梦，有时却又是噩梦。10The Paris ReviewINTERVIEWER: Some people say they cant understand your writing, even after they rea

9、d it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them?FAULKNER: Read it four times.INTERVIEWER： Then what would be the best environment for a writer?FAULKNER: If you mean me, the best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion its the perfect mil

10、ieu for an artist to work in. 11 Nobel, 1982Gabriel Garca MrquezMo Yan Nobel, 2012Faulkner “is present in all the novels of Latin America. . . . The Faulknerian method is very effective for relating Latin American reality” “这个奖比较符合我的身份，我只是个会讲故事的农民”。 12他旁若无人，只顾讲自已的，就像当年我在故乡的草地上放牛时一个人对着牛和天上的鸟自言自语一样。在此

11、之前，我一直还在按照我们小说教程上的方法来写小说，这样的写作是真正的苦行。我感到自已找不到要写的东西，而按照我们教材上讲的，如果感到没有东西可写时，就应该下去深入生活。读了福克纳之后，我感到如梦初醒，原来小说可以这样地胡说八道，原来农村里发生的那些鸡毛蒜皮的小事也可以堂而皇之地写成小说。 他的约克纳岶塔县尤其让我明白了，一个作家，不但可以虚构人物，虚构故事，而且可以虚构地理。于是我就把他的书扔到了一边，拿起笔来写自已的小说了。受他的约克纳岶塔法县的启示，我大着胆子把我的“高密东北乡”写到了稿纸上。他的“约克纳帕塔法县”是完全的虚构，我的高密东北乡则是实有其地。我也下决心要写我的故乡那块像邮票那

12、样大的地方。【莫言】福克纳大叔 你好吗？13余华谈师傅：奥克斯福的威廉福克纳我师傅是一位伟大的作家，在生活中他是一个喜欢吹牛的人，他最谦虚的一句话就是说他一生都在写一个邮票大的地方。等我到了奥克斯福，我看到了一座典型的南方小镇，中间是个小广场，广场中央有一位南方将领的雕像，四周一圈房子，其他什么都没有了。我觉得他在最谦虚的时候仍然在吹牛，这个奥克斯福比邮票还小。14William Bill FalknerIn his RAF uniform“Count No Count”The University of Mississippi Post OfficeWilliam Clark Falkner

13、Sherwood AndersonSherwood Anderson and Elizabeth Prall, about 192315Awarded Nobel Prize in 1950Buried in Oxford, 1962Last portraitStudio club in Hollywood, c. 1936In ParisA farmer atStockholm16William Faulkner: Nobel Prize Acceptance SpeechI decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say

14、 that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse t

15、o accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poets, the writers, duty is to write about these thin

16、gs. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poets voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to

17、help him endure and prevail. 171. Most of Faulkners works are set in his native state of Mississippi.Yoknapatowpha County Literary Characteristics William Faulkner, Sole Owner & Proprietor.“a unity of inspiration” 182. the Past: long sentences, flashbacks, and multiple viewpoints“For him the future

18、is not in view, the present is too blurred to make out, and he can see clearly only the past as it streams away before his obsessed and backward-looking gaze. (Jean-Paul Sartre )3. Southern gothic and grotesqueness19III “A Rose for Emily”The story?1. are you shocked by the end of the story?202. Deve

19、lop a timeline of Emilys storydetail what happened in time sequence (of Emilys age) In her 30s/ 40s and 50s/60s and 70s2130 Father died 31 Homer Barron32Bought poison. Barron gone. smell 40 (1894)Painting lessons. Tax remitted44-47Colonel died46-47 Lessons Stopped. Mailbox refused 54-57 Asking for t

20、ax74Died Topic for discussion Why did Faulkner arrange the story of Emily in the present order? Does the narrative order contribute to the description of the character or the theme? How does it effect the reader? 223. what does the title mean?Faulkners tributeHomer The emblem of silence 23The title

21、was an allegorical title; the meaning was, here was a woman who had had a tragedy, an irrevocable tragedy and nothing could be done about it, and I pitied her and this was a salute . . . to a woman you would hand a rose. (Faulkner)Setting Time the chronology of events time is experiencecaptured and

22、held within the consciousness - the past is ever present:wasisis.Place Place: the town of JeffersonNarrator: an unnamed townsperson-“our town” as character, setting & narrative voice How is the town like? 24Themes? “ARoseforEmily”has been read variously as “. . .a Gothic horror tale, a study in abno

23、rmal psychology, an allegory of the relations between North and South, a meditation on the nature of time, and a tragedy withEmilyas a sort of tragic heroine.” 25a “ghost story”a “retrospective Gothic” psychological abnormality: Sexual repressionnecrophilia恋尸癖.26The relations between the North and t

24、he South a Yankee day-laborer killed by a Southerner Faulkner: a writer is ”. . .too busy trying to create flesh-and-blood people that will stand up and cast a shadow to have time to be concious of all the symbolism that he may put into what he does or what people may read into it.”27 the nature of

25、time”. . .time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years.” 28Tragedy and Emily as tragic heroineA criminal or v