现实+自然主义.ppt

1、The historical and socio-cultural background of American Realism,The American society after the Civil War provided rich soil for the rise and development of Realism. This period is characterized with changes, in relation to every aspect of American life, politically, economically, culturally, and re

2、ligiously.,First of all, politically, the Civil War affected both the social and the value system of the country. America had transformed itself into an industrialized and commercialized society. Wilderness gave way to civilization. The burgeoning economy and industry stepped up urbanization.,Howeve

3、r, economically, the changes were not all for the better. The industrialization and the urbanization were accompanied by the incalculable sufferings of the laboring people. Therefore, polarization of the wellbeing between the poor and the rich started to show up.,Thirdly, as far as the ideology was

4、concerned, people became dubious about the human nature and the benevolence of God, which the Transcendentalists cared most. What Mark Twain referred to as “ the Gilded Age” replaced the frontier and the spirit of the frontiersman, which is the spirit of freedom and human connection.,Fourthly, the l

5、iterary scene after the Civil War proved to be quite different a picture. The harsh realities of life as well as the disillusion of heroism resulting from the dark memories of the Civil War had set the nation against the romance. The Americans began to be tired of the sentimental feelings of Romanti

6、cism. Thus, started a new period in the American literary writings known as the Age of Realism, characterized by a great interest in the realities of life.,The Gilded Age,It refers to the period of gross materialism and blatant political corruption in the U.S. history during the l870s that gave rise

7、 to important novels of social and political criticism. The period takes its name from the earliest of these, The Gilded Age (l873), written by Mark Twain in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner.,The novel gives a vivid and accurate description of Washington D.C., and is peopled with caricatures

8、 of many leading figures of the day, including greedy industrialists and corrupt politicians.,The political novels of the Gilded Age represent the beginnings of a new strain in the American literature, the novel as a vehicle of social protest, a trend that grew in the late l9th and early 20th centur

9、ies with the works of the muckrakers and culminated in the proletarian novelists.,What is Realism?,In art and literature, Realism refers to an attempt to describe human behavior and surroundings or to represent figures exactly as they act or appear in life. Realism emerged as a literary movement in

10、Europe in the l850s. In reaction to Romanticism, realistic writers should set down their observations impartially and objectively.,They insisted on accurate documentation, sociological insight, and avoidance of poetic diction and idealization. The subjects were to be taken from everyday life, prefer

11、ably from lower-class life. Realism entered American literature after the Civil War. William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James were the pioneers of realism in the U.S.,The literary characteristics of the Realistic Period in American literature,Guided by the principle of adhering to the truth

12、ful treatment of life, the realists touched upon various contemporary social and political issues. In their works, instead of writing about the polite, well-dressed, grammatically correct middle-class young people who moved in exotic places and remote times,they introduced industrial workers and far

13、mers, ambitious businessmen and vagrants, prostitutes and unheroic soldiers as major characters in fiction. They approached the harsh realities and pressures in the post-Civil War society either by a comprehensive picture of modern life in its various occupations, class stratifications and manners,

14、or by a psychological exploration of mans subconsciousness.,The three dominant figures of the period are William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James. Together they brought to fulfillment native trends in the realistic portrayal of the landscape and social surfaces, brought to perfection the ve

15、rnacular style, and explored and exploited the literary possibilities of the interior life.,The three dominant figures of the Realistic period differed in their understanding of the “truth ”,(l) While Mark Twain and Howells paid more attention to the life of the Americans, Henry James laid a greater

16、 emphasis on the inner world of man. He came to believe that the literary artist should not simply hold a mirror to the surface of social life in particular times and places.,In addition, the writer should use language to probe the deepest reaches of the psychological and moral nature of human being

17、s. He is a realist of the inner life.,(2) Though Twain and Howells both shared the same concern in presenting the truth of the American society, they had each of them different emphasis. Howells focused his discussion on the rising middle class and the way they lived, while Twain preferred to have h

18、is own region and people at the forefront of his stories, which is known as “ local colorism”, a unique variation of American literary realism.,What is local Colorism?,Post-Civil War America was large and diverse enough to sense its own local differences. Regional voices had emerged. “ local coloris

19、m” is a unique variation of American literary realism. Generally, the works by local colorists are concerned with the life of a small, well-defined region or province.,This kind of fiction depicts the characters from a specific setting or of an era, which are marked by its customs, dialects, costume

20、s, landscape, or other peculiarities that have escaped standardizing cultural influence. Yet for all their sentimentality, they dedicated themselves to minutely accurate descriptions of the life of their regions.,They worked from personal experience; they recorded the facts of a unique environment a

21、nd suggested that the native life was shaped by the curious conditions of the locale. Their materials were necessarily limited and topics disparate, yet they had certain common artistic concerns. Writers whose works are characterized with local colors are Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Joseph Kirkla

22、nd and Hamlin Garland.,Characteristics of Local Color,1. Settings are frequently remote and inaccessible 2. Characters may become character types, sometimes quaint or stereotypical. 3. The narrator is typically an educated observer from the world beyond 4. Stories may revolve around the community an

23、d its rituals. 5. An antipathy to change and a nostalgia for an always-past golden age,Mark Twain (l835-l9l0),Realistic novelist, humorist, first American writer who used the American vernacular language. life story: he has been printer, steamboat pilot, volunteer soldiers, silver miner, reporter, w

24、riter, lecturer.,Main Works,The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County l865 The Innocents Abroad l869,. Roughing It l872, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer l876, A Tramp Abroad l880,. The Prince and Pauper l88l, life on the Mississippi l88l, .The Gilded Age,The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn l885, A

25、 Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court l889, Pudds Head Wilson l894,. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc l896, Following the Equator, l897 The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg l900 What is Man l906 The Mysterious Stranger l9l6,Style,Broad, often irreverent humor or biting social satire, realism o

26、f place and language, memorable characters, hatred of hypocrisy and oppression. Simple and plain diction, precise, direct.,His earlier works are light, humorous, optimistic. His later works become darker and more obscure, showing his discontent and disappointment toward the social reality. His last

27、works shows his acute pessimism, despair, skepticism determinism.,Artistic Features,First, he possessed utter clarity of style. He evolved a style so clear and economical that other contemporary styles seemed slightly archaic, rusty, and redundant.,Second, he had a supreme command of vernacular Amer

28、ican English. Before him there had been only American dialect; after him there was an American language. American dialect had been used very well by some other writers, but in their hands it was surrounded and conditioned by a “literary” language that wittingly or unwittingly patronized it. Mark Twa

29、in removed the surrounding frame.,Third, there was Mark Twains humor, which resists explanation. In Twains time, humor, though it was seen as greatly valuable, remained clearly subordinate in the value system of the l9th century. The function of humor was to entertain, but it was not expected to par

30、ticipate in the high seriousness that Matthew Arnold and his age asked of literature.,But Twain liberated humor, raising it to high arta liberation that parallels his creation of vernacular American English. Instead of subduing his humor to seriousness, Twain invaded the citadels of seriousness and

31、freed the humor held captive there.,The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,a story of his seeking for freedom, fame, fortune, love, manhood. The novel reveals the American values: one is hero complex, the other is American dream. His adventures is the realization of American dream. On the other hand, the book

32、 record the rising Age of American Bourgeois system.,It also bears the irony and satire toward the religion and by-then popular rigid, didactic children education, which curbed the imagination of children and their innate nature for freedom and adventures and molded them into a stereotype of lifeles

33、s man.,significance,He portrayed uniquely American subjects in a humorous and colloquial, yet poetic, language. His success in creating this plain but evocative language precipitated the end of American reverence for British and,European culture and for the more formal language associated with those

34、 traditions. His adherence to American themes, settings, and language set him apart from many other novelists of the day and had a powerful effect on such later writers,Twain as a local colorist,Twain is also known as a local colorist, who preferred to present social life through portraits of the lo

35、cal characters of his regions, including people living in that area, the landscape, and other peculiarities like the customs, dialects, costumes and so on. Consequently, the rich material of his boyhood experience on the Mississippi became the endless resources for his fiction, and the Mississippi v

36、alley and the West became his major theme.,Unlike James and Howells, Mark Twain wrote about the lower-class people, because they were the people he knew so well and their life was the one he himself had lived. Moreover he successfully used local color and historical settings to illustrate and shed l

37、ight on the contemporary society.,His use of vernacular,Another fact that made Twain unique is his magic power with language, his use of vernacular. His words are colloquial, concrete and direct in effect, and his sentence structures are simple, even ungrammatical, which is typical of the spoken lan

38、guage. And Twain skillfully used the colloquialism to cast his protagonists in their everyday life.,Whats more, his characters, confined to a particular region and to a particular historical moment, speak with a strong accent, which is true of his local colorism. Besides, different characters from d

39、ifferent literary or cultural backgrounds talk differently, as is the case with Huck, Tom, and Jim.,Indeed, with his great mastery and effective use of vernacular, Twain has made colloquial speech an accepted, respectable literary medium in the literary history of the country. His style of language

40、was later taken up by his descendants, Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, and influenced generations of letters.,His humor,Mark Twains humor is remarkable, too. It is fun to read Twain to begin with, for most of his works tend to be funny, containing some practical jokes, comic details, witty r

41、emarks, etc., and some of them are actually tall tales. By considering his experience as a newspaperman, Mark Twain shared the popular image of the American funny man whose punning, facetious articles filled the newspapers,and a great deal of his humor is characterized by puns, straight-faced exagge

42、ration, repetition, and anticlimax, let alone tricks of travesty and invective. However, his humor is not only of witty remarks mocking at small things or of farcical elements making people laugh, but a kind of artistic style used to criticize the social injustice and satirize the decayed romanticis

43、m.,Huckleberry Finn,Huckleberry Finn, by general agreement, is Twains finest book and an outstanding American novel. Its narrator is Huck, a youngster whose carelessly recorded vernacular speech is admirably adapted to detailed and poetic description of scenes, vivid representations of characters, a

44、nd narrative renditions that are both broadly comic and subtly ironic.,Huck, son of the village drunkard, is uneducated, superstitious, and sometimes credulous; but he also has a native shrewdness, a cheerfulness that is hard to put down, compassionate tolerance, and an instinctive tendency to reach

45、 the right decisions about important matters. He runs away from his persecuting father and, with his companion, the runaway slave Jim, makes a long and frequently interrupted voyage floating down the Mississippi River on a raft. During the journey Huck meets and comes to know members of greatly vari

46、ed groups, so that the book memorably portrays almost every class living on or along the river. Huck overcomes his initial prejudices and learns to respect and love Jim.,The books pages are dotted with idyllic descriptions of the great river and the surrounding forests, and Hucks exuberance and unco

47、nscious humor permeate the whole. But a thread that runs through adventure after adventure is the theme of mans inhumanity to man-of human cruelty. Children miss this theme, but adults who read the book with care cannot fail to be impressed by an attitude that was to become a reiterated theme of the

48、 author during his later years.,The significance of the novel,The book marks the climax of Twains literary creativity. Hemingway once described the novel the one book from which “all modern American literature comes.” The book is significant in many ways. First of all, the novel is written in a lang

49、uage that is totally different from the rhetorical language used by Emerson, Poe, and Melville. It is not grand, pompous, but simple, direct, lucid, and faithful to the colloquial speech. This unpretentious style of colloquialism is best described as “vernacular”. Speaking in vernacular, a wild and

50、uneducated Huck, running away from civilization for his freedom, is vividly brought to life.,Secondly, the great strength of the book also comes from the shape given to it by the course of the rafts journey down the Mississippi as Huck and Jim seek their different kinds of freedom. Twain, who knew t

51、he river intimately, uses it here both realistically and symbolically. Thirdly, the profound portrait of Huckleberry Finn is another great contribution of the book to the legacy of American literature. The novel begins with a description of how Widow Douglas attempts to civilize Huck and ends with h

52、im deciding not to let it happen again at the hands of Aunt Sally. The climax arises with Hucks inner struggle on the Mississippi, when Huck is polarized by the two opposing forces between his heart and his head, between his affection for Jim and the laws of the society against those who help slaves

53、 escape.,Hucks final decision - to follow his own good-hearted moral impulse rather than conventional village morality - amounts to a vindication of what Mark Twain called the damned human race, damned for its comfortable hypocrisies, its thoroughgoing dishonesties, and its pervasive cruelties. With

54、 the eventual victory of his moral conscience over his social awareness, Huck grows.,Henry James (l843-l9l6),Psychological realistic writer, short-story writer, playwright, critic, essayist, 22 novels and over l00 short stories and some critical commentaries. I. life story II. Main works: 3 stages l

55、. l865-l88l, international novel. Watch and Ward l87l, Roderick Hudson, l875, The American l877, Daisy Miller, l878, The Portrait of a lady, l88l.,Main works,2. l885-l897, more English, focusing on realistic social life. The Bostonians l886, (a satire account of female emancipation in Boston), The P

56、rincess Casamassima, l886, (richly observed novel of anarchists and aristocrats in london) The Tragic Muse, l890. 3. l895-l9l6, Major phase: on international theme, develop mature and formidable style, on peoples psychology when confronted with ethical problems. The Wings of the Dove l902, The Ambas

57、sadors, l903, The Golden Bowl l904.,International Theme,Conflicts between New and Old world, traditional, innocent, honest American and complex, sophisticated, snobbish, arrogant, vain Europeans, American freshness of impulse, moral integrity, candor of heart, complexity deviousness of the European

58、mentality.,Style and Subject Matter,Refined, subtle, intricate, later obscure, costive, with long and complex sentences. detailed psychological depiction capable of reproducing every nuances of the fine moral intelligence or expressing the subtlest meanings. Single point of view, scenic progression.

59、 He describes upper-class unmarried women involved in various courtship rituals and marriage rites with upper-class men at the private level, and records the social splits that separate males from females in the nations public life.,Theory on Fiction, The Art of Fiction l884,Novel:an art form of penetrating analysis of individual, confronting society, chronicles of the psychological perceptions that James himself defined as the highest form of experience. “The only obligation to which in advance