自考美国文学chapter3

Chapter 3 The Modern Period

I. Background

In the early 20th century, nothing had more important and long-lasting effect on America than the two great world wars. America entered the era of big industry and big technology, a mechanized age that deprived individuals of their sense of identity. The war affected young writers' attitude toward life, society, and writing. Also during the interval between the two wars, some significant events exerted great influence on American literature.

II. Modern period characters

First, many young American writers and artists lived abroad for months and years.

Second, Marxism and Freudianism were widely studied. They changed people's view of society and themselves. Third, up to this point, the typical American writer had been native-born, white, more or less rich, Protestant and Anglo-Saxon. After the war, the voices of new groups of Americans were heard. They were poor, or immigrants, or Jews, or blacks. There was the new literature coming out of the South and the literature written by women with awakened self-consciousness.

Fourth, during this period there occurred in America an intense reexamination of the structure of literature and of the nature of the critical activity itself.

During the first decades of the 20th century, modernism became an international tendency against positivism and representational an in art and literature.

a. compared with earlier writings, especially those of the 19th century, modern American writings are notable for what they omit---the explanations, interpretations, connections, and summaries. A typical modern work will seem to begin arbitrarily, to advance without explanation, and to end without resolution.

b. Modernistic techniques and manifestos were initiated by poets first and later entered and transformed fiction in this period as well like the poets, prose writers strove for directness,compression, and vividness and were sparing of words.

III. Main writers:

I. Robert Lee Frost(1874-1963)

In 1912, Robert Frost took his family to England. There he met Ezra Pound who had a very good opinion about his poems and helped him to find British publishers.A Boy's Will(1913) and North of Boston(1914) were published and highly acclaimed in England.

Most of his major poetry was written before 1930, although he continued writing all the way through the 1950s and into the early 1960s. His major books include Mountain interval (1916), New Hampshire(1923), West-Running Brook (1928), A Further Range (1936), A Witness Tree (1942), A Mosque of Reason (1945), A Masque of Mercy(1947), A Steeple Bush(1947), Complete Poems(1949), and In the Clearing(1962). Although recognition came late to him at the age of forty, Robert Frost was the most popular American poet from 1914 to his death.

a. During the course of his career, he changed from a national critic to a national hero.

b. His verse at first was terrifying, showing a dark side of human life, human society, and the problems which confronted his own life.

c. By the end of his life, his poems were filled with more sunshine. He was more pleasant. This is an important change because America needed such a poet that it could admire, especially because the other modernist poets during this time were obscure. They were intellectuals. They could not be understood by the average person. Robert Frost could be understood by the average person and his poetry is full of life, truth, and wisdom.

Frost's achievement was fantastic. He won the Pulitzer Prize four times, received honorary degrees from

forty-four colleges and universities, and became the nation's unofficial Poet Laureate when he was invited to read "The Gift Outright" at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961.

d. he used simple spoken language and conversational rhythms, and achieved an effortless grace in his styl

e. He combined traditional verse forms—the sonnet, rhyming couplets, blank verse—with a clear American local speech rhythm, the speech of New England farmers with its idiosyncratic diction and syntax.

II: F. Scott Fitzgerald(1896-1940): he was a most representative figure of 1920s. who was mirror of the exciting age in almost every way.

Main works:

This Side of Paradise

The Beautiful and Damned.

The Great Gatsby

Tender is the Night

The Last Tycoon

Flappers and Philosophers

Tales of the Jazz Age

All the Sad Young Men

Taps at Reveille

Babylon Revisited(short stories)

His works characters:

a.He was thought of in his day a short-story writer, too.

b.most critics have agreed that he is both an insider and an outsider of the Jazz Age with double vision.

c. his fictional world is the best embodiment of the spirit of the Jazz age, in which he shows a particular interest in upper-class society, especially the upper-class young people.

d. he never spared an intimate touch in his fiction to deal with the bankruptcy of the American Dream, which is highlighted by the disillusionment of the protagonists personal dreams due to the clashes between their romantic vision of life and the sordid reality.

e.he is still a great stylist in American literature. His style closely related to his themes, is explicit and chilly. his accurate dialogues, his careful observation of mannerism, styles, models and attitudes provide the reader with a vivid sense of reality

III: Ernest Hemingway(1899-1961): a Nobel Prize winner for literature.

Main works: In Our Time

The Sun Also Rises

A Farewell to Arms

For Whom the Bell Tolls

The Old Man and the Sea

Men without Women(The Undefeated, The Killers, Fifty Grand)

Death in the Afternoon

The Green Hills of Africa

The Snow of Kilimanjaro

To Have and Have Not

His works characters:

a. His world is limited. He deals with a limited range of characters in quite similar circumstances and measures then against an unvarying code, known as …grace under pressure?, which is actually an attitude towards life that Hemingway had been trying to demonstrate in his works.

b. Typical of the …iceberg?analogy is Hemingway?style, which he had been trying hard to get.

c. His style is actually polished and tightly controlled, but highly suggestive and connotative.

d. Render vividly the outward physical events and sensations Hemingway expresses the meaning of the story and conveys the complex emotions of his characters with a considerable range and astonishing intensity of feeling.

e. He develops the style of colloquialism initiated by Mark Twain

f. The accents and mannerisms of human speech are so well presented that the characters are full of flesh and blood and the use of short, simple and conventional words and sentences has an effect of clearness, terseness and great care.

IV. William Faulkner(1897-1962): is regarded as one the leading American writers in the literary history of the United States.

Main works:

The Marble Faun

Soldiers? pay

Sartoris

The Sound and the Fury

As I Lay Dying

Light in August

Absalom, Absalom

Wild Palms

The Hamlet

The Unvanquished

Go Down, Moses

The Portable Faulkner

Intruder in the Dust

Requiem for a Nun

The Fable

The Town

The Mansion

Though in decline in the 20th century, the family retained some of the old customs and it was from his own family history, the southern region's characteristic of white social status, racial violence, honor codes, and traditional moral values that Faulkner drew the material for most of his fiction.

With his friend Phil Stone's money he published The Marble Faun, a book of poems, in 1924. Since then his primary occupation was writing fiction.

In 1925 he went to New Orleans where some of his early poems, articles, and sketches were published, and where he came into contact with the new intellectual current of his day, notably Freud's psychology and James Joyce's vanguard fiction.

His works characters:

a. he has always been regarded as a man with great might of invention and experimentation. He added to the theory of the novel as an art form and evolvedhis own literary strategies.

b. his works were to explore and represent the infinite possibilities inherent in human life.

c. he was a master of his own particular style of writing. His prose, marked by long and embedded sentences, co mplex syntax and vague reference pronouns on the one hand and a variety of “registers” of the English language on the other, is very difficult to rea

d.

d. he captured the dialects of the Mississippi characters, including Negroes and the red neck, as well as more refined and educated narrators like Quentin.

IV. Terms definition:

1. The Lost Generation: the disillusioned intellectuals and artists of the years following the First World War,

who rebelled against former ideals and values but could replace them only by despair or a synical hedonism;/ you are all a lost generation, addressed to Hemingway by Gertrude Stein, which was used as a Preface to The Sun Also Rises, which brilliantly describes those expatriates who had cut themselves off from their past in America in order to create new types of writing.

2. The Imagist Movement: Led by the American poet Ezra Pound;/a poetic movement that flourished in the U.S. and England between 1909-1917;/three main principles endorsed by Pound as guidelines for Imagism: direct treatment of poetic subjects, elimination of merely ornamental or superfluous words, and rhythmical composition should be composed with the phrasing of music, not a metronome.

3. Stream-of-Consciousness: a term coined by Willam James in his The Principles of Psychology to describe the flow of thoughts of the waking mind, now widely used in a literary context to describe the unspoken thoughts and feelings of the characters, without resorting to objective description or conventional dialogue;/ adapte d and developed by Joyce, V. Woolf, and others;/ the ability to represent the flux of a character?s thought, impressions, emotions, or reminiscences, often without logical sequence of syntax, marked a revolution in the form of novel at that time.

V. Questions and Answers

1. Comment on Robert Lee Frost’s poetic style

a. well known as a lyrical poet, difficult to be classified with the old or the new: learned from the tradition and made the colloquial New England speech into a poetic expression;

b. images and metaphors in his poems taken from simple rural life and pastoral landscape, profound ideas revealed under the disguise of plain language and simple form.

c. combines traditional verse forms with a clear American local speech rhythm, writes in both the metrical forms and the free verse, and sometimes writes in a form that might be called semi-free conventional.

2. Why is The Great Gatsby a successful novel?

a. evoking a haunting mood of a glamorous, wild time that seemingly will never come again.

b. sense of loss and disillusionment that comes with the failure embodied fully in the personal tragedy of a young man whose “incorruptible dream””smashed into pieces by the relentless reality”;

c. Gatsby, a mythical figure whose personal experience approximates a sense of mind of the American; the last of the romantic heroes, whose energy and sense of commitment take him in search of his personal grail, Gatsby?s failure predicts to a great extent the end of the American dream.

3. Briefly introduce William Faulkner’s narrative techniques.

a. would never step between the characters and the reader to explain

b. purposely broke up the chronology of his narrative by juxtaposing the past with the present.

c. the modern stream-of-consciousness technique also exploited to emphasize the reactions and inner musings of the narrator; the inner monologue helps achieve the most desirable effect of exploring the nature of human consciousness;

d. good at presenting multiple points of view, which gave the story a circular form;

e. the other narrative techniques include symbolism and mythological and biblical allusions.

VI: Topic Discussion:

1. Summarize the artistic features of imagist poems.

a. Imagist poems tend to be short, composed of short lines of musical cadence rather than metrical regularity, to avoid abstraction, and to treat the image with a hard, clear precision rather than with overt symbolic intent/ the influence of Japanese forms, tanka and haiku, obvious in many.

b. most of the imagist poets wrote in free verse and they like to employ common speech.they stresses the freedom in the choice of subject matter and form.

2. Comment on Robert Frost’s nature poems

a. Robert Frost(1874-1963), American poet, known for his verse concerning New England life/ learned the familiar conventions of nature poetry from his predecessors, made the colloquial New England speech into a poetic expression; A poem so conceived thus becomes a symbol or metaphor, a careful, loving exploration of reality;

b. Images and metaphors in his poems are drawn from the simple country life. However, profound ideas are delivered under the disguise of the plain language and the simple form;

c. the thematic concern include the terror and tragedy in nature, as well as its beauty, and the loneliness and poverty of the isolated human being. In short, the nature poems demonstrate Frost?s love of life and his belief in

a serenity that comes from the common experience.

3. Comment on the stylistic features of Hemingway’s novels

a. Hemingway once s aid,”The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water”.typical of this “iceberg”analogy is Hemingway?s style: Hemingway?s economical writing style often seems simple, but his method is calculated. In his writing, Hemingway provided detached descriptions of action, using simple nouns and verbs to capture scenes precisely to avoid describing his characters? emotions and thoughts directly. Hemingway was deeply concerned with authenticity in writing. Besides, Hemingway develops the style of colloquialism initiated by Mark Twain. The accents and mannerisms of human speech are well presented, and the use of short, simple words and sentences has an effect of clearness, terseness and great care.

4. Summarize the feature of the main character in W. Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily.

The story focuses on Emily, and eccentric spinster who refused to accept the passage of time, or the inevitable change and loss that accompanies it. As a descendent of the Southern aristocracy, Emily is typical of those in Faulkner?s Yoknapatwapha stories that are the symbols of the Old South but the prisoners of the past. The deformed personality and abnormity of Emily demonstrates Faulkner?s point of view that by alienating oneself from reality, a person is bound to be a tragedy. Emily is regarded as the symbol of tradition and the old way of life. Thus her death parallels with the decline of the Old South.