美国现当代文学讲稿

美国现当代文学讲稿 1 （2010-9-5）

Lecture 1

Introduction

一、 美国文学各历史时期简介

Introduction of Periods of American Literature

1. 殖民地时期 Colonial Period（1607—1765）

2. 启蒙时期与独立战争时期 Period of Enlightenment and Revolution（1785— end

of 18th century）

3. 浪漫主义时期 Period of Romanticism（1800—1865）

4. 现实主义时期 Period of Realism（1865—1914）

二、20世纪美国文学简American literature in the 20th century (1914---2000)

5. 现代主义时期 Period of Modernism （1914—1945）

两次世界大战之间的美国文学 From the First World War to the Second World War.

6.当代文学（1945—2000）

战后美国文学分为两个时期 Now this period is divided into two periods

1) 美国冷战时期的文学From 1945 to 1960s. (the Cold War)

2) 美国当代多元化文学From the end of 1960s to the present day. (Contemporary

diversified literature)

二、美国现代文学简介 Period of Modernism （1914—1915）

1. 历史背景Historic background:

第一次大战使欧洲陷入了一片血与火之中，美国在1917年宣战为了结束一切战争而战。The First World War (1914-1918) brought misfortune on humanity. In 1917 America declared war on Germany and helped to stop the war.

美国人为响应“为和平而战”的号召，奔赴欧洲战场。 Americans were engaged in the war with an unusual amount of enthusiasm, inspired by the ideal of making the world safe for democracy.

战争给人带来灾难的同时刺激了美国军事工业，带来了战后的经济繁荣。

The end of World War I marked the beginning of modern America. The war was an important factor in stimulating American economic development. The great changes took place in the decade following the war. An economic boom, a deceptive affluence, appeared, when the war was over.

1923年到1929年是美国经济的繁荣时期。

From 1923 to 1929 was the periodic “thriving” stage of American economy, which was the main manifestation of the swelling industrial production, the mass production methods and technology, such as telephone, automobiles and radio and so on, which transformed the life of the whole nation.

美国社会充斥着享乐主义和物欲主义，道德观念和传统的信念动摇了。

People wanted to have a good time and enjoyed the new products. People became aware

of a sudden jump in technology. All of a sudden automobiles and radios appeared which helped to widen the horizon of the people and increase their knowledge. A social revolution was going on. Old moral codes were breaking down. Whereas women were covered down to the ankles only a few years earlier, for example, girls now appeared on the scene in short skirts, smoking and drinking, and dancing wildly, “flappers（不受拘束的年轻女子）” (as Fitzgerald calls them) of the “爵士时代Jazz Age”.

美国兴旺的20世纪20年代In the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age

这一时期的美国，情绪是乐观的，金钱就是一切。然而，一些艺术家和思想家却感到恐惧、迷惘、幻灭。The popular mood was optimistic and the feeling was that money was everything. However, it also confronted American artists and thinkers with the brutal actualities of large-scale modern war, so different from imaginary, romanticized heroism. The sense of a great civilization being destroyed or destroying itself, of social breakdown, and of individual powerlessness, became part of the American experience as a result of its participation in World War I. The resulting feelings were fear, disorientation and disillusionment.

1929年纽约股市市场崩溃，1929—1933年是美国经济大萧条时期，给普通百姓带来苦难，三分之的人失业，破产、失业、自杀随处可见。The unprecedented economic crisis which took place in 1929-1933 violently hit the U.S. and the living standard of the broad masses of the U.S. dropped and their purchasing power decreased suddenly. The frivolity of the roaring twenties ended with the Wall Street Crash in 1929, which led to the Great Depression of the 30s, at the peak one-third of all Americans were jobless. Blacks were hit particularly hard by unemployment and racism. The government tried to create jobs by the New Deal. 1930s for America is a time of poverty, unemployment, bleakness, important social and political movements, a new social consciousness and social upheavals.

一战以后，美国文学发生了巨变。现代作家们在主体、文学形式等方面摆脱传统的约束，创造美国的现代文学。After World War I, a great change took place in the world literature. Modern writers carried out many reforms in theme, form, etc., the war broke through people’s convention and they freed themselves from the traditional concepts of culture and morality, and created the literary art of modernism.

美国的作家们在国内除了金钱物欲之外，看不到希望，流亡到法国，去寻求文明的价值观。美国作家Stein 称这一群青年为“迷惘一代，lost generation”。他们脱离旧的美国传统，想寻求新的文学创作形式，但现实使他们看不到希望，而陷入了迷惘之中。There was a tremendous let-down because nothing had changed. Excitement and enthusiasm subsided to make way for disillusionment. Disillusioned by the slogans of patriotism and glory, disgusted by the new frivolous, greedy, heedless way of life in America, and alarmed by the level of culture, many young American writers exiled themselves to Paris because France had the kind of civilized, highly cultured, relaxed, tolerant society which they admired. They were named “lost generation” by the American writer, Gertrude Stein, because they had cut themselves off from their past in America in order to create new type of writing and also because they were caught in the war and cut off from old values and yet unable to come to

terms with the new era when civilization had gone mad. These young writers included such prominent figures as Hemingway, Pound, Eliot, Cummings and Fitzgerald.

2. 美国现代文学的繁荣 Thriving in American Modernism

这些流亡作家从巴黎回国之后，积极投入到美国的政治和社会活动之中，通过文学创作改变社会。他们提倡新的文学表达方式。他们在文学上创新改革，这一时期的美国现代文学繁荣，特别诗歌和小说创造了美国文学高峰时期。The expatriates, known as the “lost generation”, came back from Paris, taking an active part in the political and social movements in America. They used their words as weapons to express their sympathy with the oppressed. They hoped that writing would play a decisive role in bringing about social changes. Therefore, they advocated new ways of writing and reforms in language, a productive and experimental period in the history of American literature. With an unprecedented number of great writers producing a voluminous amount of distinguished literary works. American literature in this period reached new heights, especially in fiction and poetry, throwing off their old restraints and plunging into an era of experiment. Literary giants like T. S. Elliot and Ernest Hemingway and their generation embodied in their writings the spirit of their time. The period of American literature is regarded as American Modernism.

这一时期的美国诗歌创作繁荣。T. S. Eliot、Ezra Pound、W.C. Williams、Wallace Stevens、Robert Frost等一大批诗人使美国诗歌创作达到了高峰。In poetry, the 1920s was the period of high Modernism. British poetry took a sharp turn with T. S. Eliot’s poetry, which revolutionized the British poetry and pioneered the modernist poetry. The 1930s saw the intellectual poems with industrial and urban imagery and political consciousness. Early in the century a rising number of “little magazines” published works by Ezra Pound, T. S. Elliot, Robert Frost, and so on.

三、 20世纪美国当代文学The United States in the second half of the 20th century

and American Contemporary Literature （两个阶段 two periods）

1.20世纪美国当代文学第一个阶段 The period between 1950s and 1960s

二战后美国和苏联为各自利益分为两大阵营，在1949年冷战时期开始（美国的麦卡锡主义反华、反共浪潮）。

At the end of World War II much of Europe was in ruins. An agreement had already been drawn up between the allied powers, particularly the US and USSR, to determine the control of liberated territories. The countries of eastern Europe occupied by the Soviet Red Army remained under Soviet communist influence, while Western Europe fell under the economic and political influence of the US, who provided extensive financial aid for rebuilding and modernization of their economics.

In Asia, meanwhile, the US exerted almost complete control over a defeated Japan. Though both powers had tacitly agreed to stay out of each other’s zone of influence, tension rose in 1949 when Russia acquired the nuclear bomb. The world then fell under the menacing shadow of the Cold War, a thirty-year period of arms building and the prospect of nuclear

confrontation. The US’s determination to protect and consolidate its overseas economic and military interests led to two major conflicts, first in Korea during 1950s and then in Vietnam during 1960s and 70s, a conflict that led to the emergence of an international anti-war movement.

American society of the immediate post-war years, during the administrations of Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, was conditioned to conform to a standard way of life based around the nuclear family, employment in corporate business for men and suburban homemaking for women.

By the all-pervading atmosphere of the Cold War, a number of demagogues in the US government and military realized the political potential of anti-communist rhetoric to generate votes and in the 1950s Senator Joseph McCarthy, assisted by the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover, set up the House of Un-American Activities committee, leading to the notorious witch-hunts in which a considerable number of politicians, intellectuals, artists and figures from the entertainment industry were persecuted and forced into exile for their vaguely socialists sympathies.

From the end of World War II, it is a period of complex trends in American literature. There are also crises lurking on every side in people’s spiritual life. Confronted with World War II, Cold War, and McCarthy Time, many Americans feel perplexed at the life and the future, and they begin to believe that the world is absurd. American dream of achieving material success has driven many people crazy. The main criticism is that the American Dream is misleading. The white middle-class domination of culture which persisted up to the war has gradually been eroded by the appearance of working-class, feminist and ethnic minority writers.

2.20世纪美国文学第二阶段The period from the end of 1960s till the present day 1961 saw the election of John F. Kennedy who became a figure of great symbolic importance to the nation, especially after his assassination in1963. It was Kennedy who presided over the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis ( the installation of Soviet nuclear missiles on the island) . USSR withdrew the installation of nuclear missiles and American’s aborted invasion of Cuba, at the Bay of Pigs(猪罗湾), which for a brief moment brought the world close to nuclear war.

After World War II, the Western world has developed quickly in cultivating the material civilization. The United States lived through another economic boom engineered by a huge progress in technology and new media: in 1947, more than 30 millions radios were in use and television started to spread. Color television was introduced in 1953. Telephones were becoming a very popular community. The first digital computer (30 tons in weight) was developed in Philadelphia in 1946. Under the new social, cultural, and intellectual conditions, American literature has become so diversified. The term post-modernism can not describe various contemporary literary trends, so it is not accurate term to generalize literary trends. This

diversification of voices is a reflection of an increasingly plural and multi-cultural society, in which everybody has their own story to tell. It is also true that the novel, like music and films, increasingly involves the combination of many different styles, genres and approaches. The ethnic minorities are producing a literature reflective of their own particular version of the American experience.

As for the American Dream, although proponents of the American dream would claim that starting wealth is irrelevant because of the belief that there is no level of poverty one cannot rise from with hard work. It also fails to take inheritable traits such as intelligence quotient and physical attributes including height, shape, and beauty into account. The American Dream is seen as being somewhat superficial or meaningless.

四、美国现当代文学作品选读：

美国现代文学：

Unit 1 F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

The Great Gatsby

Unit 2 William Faulkner (1897-1962)

A Rose for Emily

Unit 3 Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

美国作家受现代主义的影响，出现了一大批文学巨匠，Fitzgerald 是一个典型

的代表作家。他在The Great Gatsby 小说中揭示出所谓的“美国梦American Dream”金钱至上虚伪社会。In novels, American writers were influenced by modernist movements. Fitzgerald was regarded as the spokesman of his time, especially of the reckless 1920s. Most of Fitzgerald’s works pictured the mental and material life of Americans after the First World War. Post- war, for America, was an era of economic boom, so most people thought that there would be no wars in the future and began to be lost in hedonism. Especially for the youngsters, they abandoned the old values and traditions, indulging themselves in the crazy jazz music for pleasures, and wearing eccentric clothes for fashion. Fitzgerald, in his novel The Great Gatsby, revealed the emptiness of the American worship of wealth and the unending American dream of love, splendor, and fulfilled desires. Fitzgerald saw decadence and corruption in the so-called “American Dream” .

美国著名作家Faulkner是这一时期的文学巨匠，他的作品主要讲述了美国南

方社会的变革，贵族没落，传统价值观的解体，以及人在变革过程中的精神生活。Faulkner’s novels are set in his fictional world “Yoknapatawpha County”. In his novels, histories of some southern aristocratic families are accounted. The fall of those families is doomed as they have displaced the Indians and enslaved the black race. What Faulkner is talking about concerns not merely the American South but the human situation in general. Using the decay and corruption of the South after the American Civil War

(1861-1865) as a background, Faulkner portrayed the tragedy that occurs when the traditional values of a society disintegrate.

美国著名作家Hemingway是迷惘作家的主要代表之一。他的作品通过简洁的

语言风格表现了硬汉风格。Hemingway is essentially a negative writer. He holds a black, naturalistic view of the life, and sees it as “all a nothing” and “all nada” (“A Clean Well-Lighted Place”). He sees life in terms of battles and tension. His protagonists, very much like himself, are desperately in search of a meaning in the modern world. They are usually men who demonstrate an iron-will masculinity that can be destroyed but never defeated, that often come up with a graceful dignity under great pressure.

Unit 4 American Modernist Poetry (I)

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

The extract‘The burial of the dead’ from The Waste Land.

Ezra Pound (1885-1973):

In a Station of the Metro

The Tree

Wallace Stevens(1879-1955):

The Snowman (Link 318)

Unit 5 American Modernist Poetry (II)

Robert Frost (1874-1963): （57）

The Road Not Taken

Mending Wall

Stopping by Woods on a Snowing Evening

Fire and Ice

Langston Hughes (1902-1967): （64）

Dreams

Me and the Mule

Unit 6 Eugene O’Neill: (1888-1953) （68）

Desire Under the Elms—Scene IV

Ezra Pound was one of the leading writers of the Imagist movement. He rejected the traditional 19th century poetry and aimed at a new clarity and exactness in the short lyric poem. Ezra Pound and other Imagist poets put emphasis on the “direct treatment of the thing”, “economy of expression” and “the music phrase”. Their poems enable the reader to see the physical thing rather than put him through an abstract process. Therefore, it often contains a single dominant image. Williams Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens were greatly influenced by imagism, and Wallace Stevens went the furthest in this direction through poems that were increasingly self-referential.

When American poets seemed almost ready to throw off all connection with the past and tradition, Robert Frost was a conservative as well as experimenter. He shared in the vitality of the movement without accepting its radicalism, and he was ready to prove that the heritage

from American formal verse of its conventional restraints. Langston Hughes was the leading writer of the Harlem Renaissance, and one of the most original and versatile black writers. He is remembered for his poetry.

在戏剧方面，O’Neil 剧作代表了美国戏剧的创作高峰。In drama, Eugene O’Neil, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller represent the best of American theatre in the 20th century. O’Neill’s creation of plays is greatly influenced by society and other great thinkers. In some way, he is a social writer as well as a psychological writer. His early plays show many great expectations while his mid-term plays absorb elements of various schools of thoughts and combine a lot of narrative skills.

美国当代文学第一时期

Unit 7 Arthur Miller: (1915-2005 )

Death of a Salesman - Act II

Unit 8 Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

On the Road

Unit 9 Joseph Heller (1923-1999) Catch -22

In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), the main character Willy Loman struggles to realize his dream, but only finds the fact that his American Dream is unattainable. It told us that "Money doesn't buy happiness” and that perhaps not everyone's dream should be to achieve great monetary gain.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a group of American writers, who were regarded as the Beat Generation, came to prominence and the cultural phenomena: a rejection of mainstream American values, experimentation with drugs and alternate forms of sexuality, and an interest in Eastern spirituality. The major works of Beat writing are Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959) and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957). The members of the Beat Generation quickly developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity. The Beat writers emphasized a instinctive engagement in worldly experiences combined with a quest for deeper spiritual understanding; many of them developed a strong interest in Buddhism. The original "Beat Generation" writers met in New York. Later, the central figures ended up together in San Francisco in the mid-1950s. During the 1960s, the rapidly expanding Beat culture underwent a transformation: the Beat Generation gave way to The Sixties Counterculture, which was accompanied by a shift in public terminology from "beatnik" to "hippie".

During the period between 1950s-1960s, there were some anti-war novels. Joseph Heller was an anti-war writer and published the novel Catch-22 (1961), a novel that exposes and satirizes the contemporary American society trenchantly. Heller developed a very satirical approach towards institutions, particularly the national government and the military. He was deeply cynical of war, which was best exemplified by the "black humor" of Catch-22.

美国当代文学第二时期

Unit 10 Isaac Bashevis Singer ( 1904- 1991)

The Son from America

Unit 11 Tony Morrison (1931- )

Beloved

Unit 12 Don Delillo (1936 - )

White Noise

Unit 13 Jonathan Franzen (1959- ) The Corrections

From the 1970s till now, some foreign-born writers who have become American citizens are among the best in the modern world. Isaac Bashevis Singer is a Jewish writer, the Nobel Prize winner (in 1978), said that while literature is a form of entertainment to him, his art is concerned with loss of spirituality in the modern world. His precise views about Jews, Judaism, and the Jewish God are subject to much interpretation. Whatever they are, they lie at the center of his literary art.

The Nobel Prize winner Tony Morrison makes an important contribution to Afro-American literature. Morrison has described that black people are not marginal anomalies but a genuine human society. She insists on nothing less than the full membership in humanity for black people. Morrison probes into the terror and trauma of racial oppression, into the complex behaviors of living under duress, into the psychology of survival. While she explores gender and racial conflicts, she also investigates how the pressures of the community and patterns established within families impact the ways in which one expresses one’s self. Morrison’s Beloved (1987) has reopened the wounds of the experience of slavery.

A more realist approach to fiction continued, but realism took on a new tone. American contemporary writer Don Delillo’s novels reflect the forces that shape American life and psyche: consumerism, the omnipresence of the media and its dominion over reality, the anxiety caused by environmental disasters, weaponry and waste, the cold War and the uncertainties of American life. Jonathan Franzen is a contemporary writer of a younger generation in the 20th century. Franzen’s The Corrections is concerned with contemporary reality, a complex tapestry in which, through the very different yet interconnected lives of the members of a single American family. It shows the transformation and decline into decadence of an entire culture.

This course is just to give an overview of American Modernism and American contemporary literature. The American writers who are introduced in this book are important representatives of the 20th American literature. Many other important writers are not included in the book, for the limit of the lecture periods of this course. However, we can grasp the main trends of American Modernism and American contemporary literature in various aspects from what we read.