英美文学笔记6

人的恰当功能是活，而不是生。我不会用延长日子，把时光浪费，我要利用时间。
Jack London’sLife
•(1)name: John Ariffith London; born in San Francisco
•(2)lived in the lowest part of society in his youth
•Ruth Morse: the young bourgeois woman who captivatesEden. Theybecome engaged but not without condition: they cannot marry until her parents approve of his financial and social status
American Naturalism
•Representatives:
•Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London and Theodore Dreiser.
•These writers’ detailed description of the lives of the downtrodden and the abnormal, their frank treatment of human passion and sexuality, and their portrayal of men and women overwhelmed by blind forces of nature still exert a powerful influence on modern writers.
•Martin Eden:
•a rough, uneducated sailor from a working class background
•the Morses:
•a bourgeois family
•a union between them would be impossible
•until he reaches their level of
Themes
1. Walcutt identifies survival, determinism, violence, and taboo as key themes.
2.The "brute within" each individual, composed of strong and often warring emotions: passions, such as lust, greed, or the desire for dominance or pleasure; and the fight for survival in an amoral, indifferent universe. The conflict in naturalistic novels is often "man against nature" or "man against himself" as characters struggle to retain a "veneer of civilization" despite external pressures that threaten to release the "brute within."
Martin Eden
•1.Major Characters
•2. Summary
•3. Major themes
Main characters
•Martin Eden : a former sailor from a working class background, then become a famous writer
Newsboy报童(at 10)
↓
Oyster pirate (16)
↓
A hard laborer(muscle seller)
↓
A tramp流浪者, beggar (at 18)
A knowledge pursuer
↓
A successful writer
↓
A rancher (大农场主)
His Major Works
•The People of the Abyss(1903)深渊中的人们
•The Call of the Wild(1903)野性的呼唤
•The Sea Wolf(1904)海狼
•White Fang(1906)白牙
•The Iron Heel(1908)铁蹄
•Martin Eden(1909)马丁.伊登(autobiographical) (Arthur Morse, Ruth Morse) (disillusionment and broken American Dream)
3. The forces of heredity and environment as they affect--and afflict--individual lives.
4. Nature as an indifferent force acting on the lives of human beings.
1.Summary
•inOaklandat the dawn of the 20th century
•Martin Eden is an impoverished sailor who pursues, obsessively and aggressively, dreams of education and literary fame.
•The Valley of the Moon(1912)月谷
•The Star Rover(1915)星游人
•The Little Lady of the Big House(1916)大屋里的小妇人
Theme of Jack London’s Works
primitive violence, Anglo-Saxon supremacy, biological evolution, class warfare, and mechanistic determinism
Hope for human civilization.
Father of American proletariat（工人阶级）literature
Realist, spokesman of socialism
Great thinker
Writing Style
•Forceful, and colorful;
5. An indifferent, deterministic universe. Naturalistic texts often describe the futile attempts of human beings to exercise free will, often ironically presented, in this universe that reveals free will as an illusion
•As his education progresses,Edenfinds himself increasingly distanced from his working class background and surroundings.
•the main driving force:
•his love for Ruth Morse
•Subjectivity and enthusiasm
•His characterizations were often stiff and his dialogue stereotyped.
•Jack London is considered as“Father of American Proletarian Literature
我愿做一颗华丽的流星，愿我的每一颗粒都呈现那动人的光辉，而不做那沉睡并永远不灭的行星。
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time.”
•(3)decided to change his life by intellectual effort
•(4)his works were rejected many times
•(5)at last succeeded and became a millionaire
•(6)fame and upper class life made him feel boring; committed suicide
•Lizzie Connolly: the cannery worker, loveEdendeeply for who he is, not for money and fame
•Joe Dawson :Eden's boss at the laundry
•Russ Brissenden:Eden's sickly writer counterpart
美国文学史及选读（第二册）笔记
The Literature of Realism
陈银2014/4/5
Lecture 6（Jack London）
Naturalism
DefinitionNaturalismwas a new and harsher realism in the late 19th century . Naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classesห้องสมุดไป่ตู้who were determined by their environment and heredity. In presenting the extremes of life, the naturalists sometimes displayed an affinity to the sensationalism of early romanticism, but unlike their romantic predecessors, the naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral, that men and women had no free will, that lives were controlled by heredity and environment, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death. In American literature, Jack London ,Stephen Crane, Frank Norrisand Theodore Dreiser are representatives of naturalism.