美国文学选读(陶洁版)复习资料

美国文学选读（陶洁版）复习资料

ADAM整理

William Faulkner(1897-1962 1949 Nobel price “Stream of Consciousness” 意识流or “interior monologue”,内心独白 is one of the modern literary techniques. It is the style of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images as the character experiences them. It was first used in 1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce.

As I Lay Dying (1930)

Light in the August ( 1932)

Absalom, Absalom (1936)

Go Down Moses (1942) Ernest Hemingway

Iceberg Principle (Theory):冰山法则

The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A good writer does not need to reveal every detail of a character or action. Code hero

a noble but tragic hero; fighting with the overwhelming force; though he knows that he will be defeated at last, he decides to act like a hero. In one sense Hemingway wrote all his life about one theme, which is neatly summed up in the famous phrase “grace under pressure”

Major Works: The Sun Also Rises 1926 (Jake Barnes)

A Farewell to Arms 1928 (a tragic story about war and love) (Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley) For Whom the Bell Tolls 1940 (Spanish civil war) (Robert Jordan)

The Old Man and the Sea 1952 (Santiago)

Herman Melville

代表作：白鲸Moby Dick Other Works are: Billy Budd,Typee, Omoo, Mardi.

Symbolism in Moby Dick：It is regarded as the first American prose epic. 散文史诗？

and knowledge of the universe, a spiritual exploration into man’s deep reality and psychology.

Different people on board the ship are representations of different ideas and different social and ethnic groups; facts become symbols and incidents acquire universal meanings; the Pequod is the microcosm of human society and the. The white whale,

“the lie”

This literary started a new period in the American literary writing known as The Age of Realism.

It is the realistic writing that probes deeply into the complexities of characters’ thoughts and reality lies in the impressions made by life on the spectator, and not in any facts of which the spectator is unaware. Such realism is therefore merely the obligation that the artist assumes to represent life as he sees it.

William Dean Howells：The Rise of Silas Lapham

Henry James：The Portrait of a Lady (Isabel Archer; Madam Merle; Gilbert Osmond)

Daisy Miller (Daisy; Mr. Winterbourne; Mr. Giovanelli)

地方特色 The characteristics of local colorism

Twain preferred to have his own region and people at the forefront of his stories. This particular concern about the local character of a region came about as “local colorism,” a unique variation of American literary realism.

brought him recognition from a wider public. His best works were produced when he was in the prime of his life：

His humor, a kind of artistic style used to criticize the social injustice and satirize the decayed romanticism, is remarkable.

One of the

The Scarlet Letter:红字

Other works: Mosses from an Old Manse; Twice-Told Tales; The Marble Faun; The House of the

Seven Gables

He is a master of symbolism, which he took from the and bequeathed to American literature in a revivified form.

In his masterpiece, by using Pearl as a thematic symbol, Hawthorne emphasizes the consequence the sin of adultery has brought to the community and people living in that community. With the scarlet A as the biggest symbol of all, which is ambiguous, he proves himself to be one of the best symbolists.

American Naturalism 自然主义

The impact of on the American thought and the 19th century French literature on the American men of letters gave rise to another school of realism: The naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral与道德无关的, that men and women had no free will, that lives were controlled by heredity遗传 and environment, that ’s literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by their environment and heredity.

代表作家

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets；The Red Badge of Courage；The Open Boat；

The Black Riders and Other Lines；War Is Kind

：Richard Cory

：The Call of the Wild；The White Fang；The Sea Wolf；Martin Eden

Upton Sinclair：The Jungle

O.Henry (William Sydney Porter)：The Gift of the Magi；The Cop and the anthem

Theodore Dreiser：Trilogy of Desire:1.The Financier2. The Titan3. The Stoic；

；Jennie Gerhardt；An American Tragedy

Two characteristic strains：T.S.Eliot：The Waste Land

Imagism 意象派

insists on the creation of images in poetry and the economy of wording. “poetic techniques to record exactly the momentary impressions” Three main principles of the Imagist Movement (1912) :

[1] direct treatment of poetic subjects

[2] elimination of merely ornamental or superfluous words, to use no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

[3] rhythmical composition in the sequence of the musical phrase rather than in the sequence of a metronome.

Idaho爱达荷洲worked for the Italian government in WW II, engaged in some radio

broadcasts of anti-Semitism and pro-Fascism.

代表作:Cantos; Hugh Selwyn Mauberley; In a Station of the Metro; Cathay

The Red Wheelbarrow

Anecdote of the Jar

1. The relationship of art and life; reality and imagination; fact and miracle; chaos and order.

2. References to painting, music, and color.

3. Abstract, philosophical, and difficult. He saw poetry as a personal transaction between self and reality.

4. Meticulous language, though frequently exotic; coined words, and some are employed simply for sound effects.

Major Features:

1. His verse was terrifying at first, showing the dark side of human life and society. Later, filled with sunshine.

2.New England as the setting; The subjects come from daily life of ordinary life;Rural poetry in pastoral tradition. ( Wordsworth; Emerson)

3.His themes include landscape and people of New England, loneliness and poverty of isolated farmers, beauty, terror and tragedy in nature.

Simple language, a graceful style and traditional forms of poetry.

诗歌鉴赏：In both

same impulse and misgiving or are they distinct? & O’ Henry of Harlem

主要作品：The Weary Blues, The Dream keeper and Other Poems, Fine Clothes to the Jew In the in America, there was an upsurge of Black literature, popularly known as the “Harlem Renaissance”So, “Harlem Renaissance” is a burst of literary achievement in the 1920s by Negro playwrights, poets and novelists who presented new insights into the American experience and prepared the way for the emergence of numerous Black writers after mid-twentieth century.

The Harlem Alain Locke).

Dialect, folklore, and Jazz.

The Modern Period

Part I The 1920s-1930s ( the second renaissance of American literature)

l The Roaring Twenties (economically)

l The Jazz Age (socially)

l “lost” and “waste land” (spiritually)

There had been a big flush of new theories and new ideas in both social and natural sciences.

Darwinism(Darwin), Socialism (Karl Marx), Psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud)

The Lost Generation

The term “Lost Generation” came from Gertrude Stein, who had a salon in her house for English and American expatriates in Paris. The Phrase was a remark she made to a mechanic in Hemingway’s presence that “You are all a lost generation.”

The Jazz Age

The Jazz Age describes the period of the 1920s and 1930s, the years between World War Ⅰand World War Ⅱ, particularly in North America.With the rise of the Great Depression, the values of this age saw much decline.

The most representative literary work of the age is American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, highlighting what some describe as the decadence and hedonism, as well as the growth of individualism.

Fitzgerald is largely credited with coining the term “The Jazz Age”.

Gertrude Stein used the term to describe the post-World War I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war. The term is commonly applied to Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings and some others.

Winners of Nobel Prize for Literature during this period

Sinclair Lewis (1930); Eugene O’Neill (1936); Pearl S. Buck (1938); T.S. Eliot (1948); William Faulkner (1949); Ernest Hemingway (1954); John Steinbeck (1962) l

Carol Milford // Will Kennicott

l Babbitt

Winesburg, Ohio;Hands; Paper Pills This Side of Paradise; Tender is the Night; The Beautiful

and the Damned

The Last Tycoon ( unfinished)

John Dos Passos

Ezra Pound Robert Frost

The is the idea held by many in the United States that through hard work, courage and determination one could achieve prosperity繁荣. These were values held by many early European settlers, and have been passed on to subsequent generations.

The term was first used by James Truslow Adams in his book The Epic of America. He states:

In the United States’ Declaration of Independence独立宣言, our founding fathers:

The Post-War Period 战后

This period is the rising period of post-modern literature. Many forms of post-modern fiction appeared. The same mood in this period is despair, but continuing to search absurdity荒谬 of modern life; lonely, but searching for the meaning of existence; identity. The Beat Generation known especially for their use of

The term

On the Road (1957),

(1956)

Naked Lunch (1959).

To deal with tragic things in comic ways to make it more powerful and more tragic.

It refers to the use of morbid病态的 and absurd荒谬的 for darkly comic purpose. It carries the tone of anger, bitterness in the grotesque situation of suffering, anxiety, and death. It makes the reader laugh at the blackness of modern life. The writers usually do not laugh at the characters. 代表人物：Thomas Pynchon + Joseph Helle

Catch-22 第22条军规

It is not only a war novel, but also a novel about people’s life in peaceful time. This novel attacked the dehumanization of all contemporary institutions and corruptions of individuals who gain power in institutions. Armed-forces are the most outrageous example of the two evils. The first edition of was published in 1855.

In this giant work, openness, freedom, and above all, individualism are all that concerned him.

What he prefers for his new subject and new poetic feelings is “free verse”自由诗体, that is , poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme.

The poet’s essential purpose was to identify his ego with the world, and more specifically with the democratic “en-masse”同一地 of America, which is established in the opening lines of “Song of Myself”.

1. A singer for the ideals of equality , democracy and human dignity.

2. Songs for himself, for the labour of common American people, natural creation, the independence of the country, love and friendship, and for the memorizing of President Lincoln.

3. Free verse, rhythmical unit, phonetic recurrence.

I Died for Beauty；Because I could not stop for Death

Emily was an energetic and outgoing woman while attending the Academy and Seminary.

Most of her poems are about life and nature. They are short; many of them are based on a single

image or symbol.

Ps.

The Colonial Period and the Revolution Period

Anne Bradstreet

Edward Taylor

Philip Freneau

Benjamin Franklin