American modernism美國現(xiàn)實主義文學(xué)

1、American Modernist Literature (1914-1945) Modernism Broadly speaking, it refers to modern thoughts, characters, or actions. More specifically, it encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the traditional forms were becoming outdated in the new conditions of an emerging fully industrial

2、ized world. rejected the Enlightenment thinking and also that of the existence of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator the stress on self-consciousness the assessment of the past as different to the modern age; the recognition that the world was becoming more complex; the old final authorities (God

3、, government, science, and reason) were subject to intense critical scrutiny; Some views modernism in the 20th century as modernism and post-modernism while others think theyre the same genre. . Backgrounds . features1. a strong and conscious break with tradition 2. Stream of Consciousness a phrase

4、coined by William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890) to describe the flow of thoughts. used in a literary context to describe the narrative method whereby certain novelists describe the unspoken thoughts and feelings of their characters, without resorting to objective description or conven

5、tional dialogue. The ability to represent the flux of a characters thoughts, impressions, emotions, or reminiscences, often without logical sequence or syntax, marked a revolution in the form of the novel. Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway James Joys: Ulysses William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury repr

6、esentatives1. F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) the image of an American ideal “the angel of the twenties” life Born in 1896 into middle-class family; expensive education life in Princeton and WWI expensive marriage with Zelda Sayre wrote to support their extravagant life and broke down at Zeldas ment

7、al illness Loneliness, alcohol, awareness of losing talent; died from frustration at the age of 44 worksThis Side of the Paradise (1920)The Beautiful and Damned (1922)The Great Gatsby (1925)Tender Is the Night (1934)The Last Tycoon (1941) Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) “the Jazz Age” the period after

8、the end of WWI, through the Roaring Twenties, ending with the onset of the Great Depression. the public embrace of technological developments typically seen as progress cars, air travel and the telephone - as well as new modernist trends in social behavior, the arts, and culture. a legend of “Americ

9、ans adolescence before pain set in” The Great Gatsbya. the story It is set on Long Islands North Shore and in NYC during the summer of 1922 and is proposed as a critique of the American Dream. b. the disillusionment of American Dream dream disenchantment a sense of failure and despair (physical &

10、; spiritual) i. Gatsbys personal tragedy: materialistically abundance + spiritual sterility = ? ii. the “cultural-historical allegory” for the nation the vanishing of the great expectations which the first settlement of the American continent had inspired.c. third-person narrator Nick Carraway a rel

11、iable narrator i. contribute to the wholeness of the story ii. add to the superb effect of mystery and suspense2. Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) life born in Oak Park, Illinois, 1899 left school at 17 and worked mainly as a journalist enlisted in the army as an ambulance driver and went to Europe suff

12、ered at least a dozen injuries to the brain, survived three bad automobile accidents and two air crashes; 237 steel fragments taken out of his body married four times during his life shot himself dead with his favorite gun, on July 2, 1961 worksIn Our Times (1925)The Sun Also Rises (1926)A Farewell

13、to Arms (1929)Death in the Afternoon (1932)For whom the Bell Tolls (1940)Across the River and into the Trees (1950)The Old Man and the Sea (1952) -Nobel Prize in 1954 themes i. “Grace under pressure” typical Hemingway situations: a negative writer chaos and brutality and violence; crime and death an

14、d sport; hard drinking and sexual promiscuity a black, naturalistic view of the world, and sees it as “all a nothing” and “all nada”. typical Hemingway heroes: an average man of decidedly masculine tastes, sensitive and intelligent, a man of action, and one of few words; “despairing courage”:“A man

15、is not made for defeat A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” ii. “the Lost Generation” a term used to characterize a general feeling of disillusionment of American literary notables who lived in Europe, most notably Paris, after the WWI. From the end of WWI to the beginning of the GreatDepressio

16、n. the Lost Generation included authors and artists such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, etc. attributed to Gertrude Stein, then popularized by Hemingway the epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises style: “The Iceberg Theory”

17、The meaning of a piece is not meant to be immediately evident from the surface story, because the crux of the story liesbelow the surface. If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a

18、 feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. Death in the Afternoon irony, simplici

19、ty, naturalness, directness, clarity, freshness; concisepolishvigorous and positive language; Highly suggestive and connotativecolloquial style;“his powerful style-forming mastery of the art”3. William Faulkner (1897-1962) Yoknapatawpha County Stories 19 novels & 3 collections of over 70 short s

20、tories Nobel Prize in 1950 themes: a. Tragic rise and fall of American south symbolizing the human situation in general. description of those southern aristocratic families: the Compsons, the Sartories, the Sutpens, etc. b. The spiritual deterioration which characterizes modern life, stemming directly from the loss of love and want of emotional responses. c. the healthy life of primitive man and his natural world; styleThe writer: “interested in all mans behavior with no judgment whatever”b. Characters: equipped with their own idiosyncrasies and even self-contradict; resem