美国文学重点整理

美国文学重点整理
美国文学题型：
1.60分三篇小说，三个诗歌，作者，出处，作品分析
2.20分名词解释
3.20分论述
1. 20世纪美国文学发展的经济背景
关键词：
Urbanization（new farm machines, rising productivity, rising leisure time）Industrialization(electric lights, camera, telephone, radio, type writer) Commercialization
Globalization.
Philosophy: Schopenhauer叔本华
Nietzsche 尼采
Jean Paul
Freud
补充：Fitzgerald：tender is the night, all the sad young man, the rich boy,
2. What is Lost Generation?
①It is a term to describe a group of American intellectuals, poets, artists and writers who fled to France in the post WWI years to reject the values of American materialism and to seek the bohemian lifestyle in Paris.
②It is full of youthful idealism, seeking the meaning of life, drank excessively, have love affairs,creating some of the finest American literature to date.
③American poet Gertrude Stein coined this expression, speaking to Hemingway, she said, you are all a lost generation.the term stuck the mystique surrounding these individuals continues to fancy us.
④Main representatives: F. Scott.Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos
3. What is modernism? Main features.
A cultural movement that generally includes the progressive art and architecture, design, literature, music, dance,painting and other visual arts which emerged in the beginning of the 20century, particularly in the years following WWI. It was a movement of artists and designers who rebelled against late 19th century academic and historic tradition, and embraced the new economic ,social and political aspects of the emerging modern world.
The avant-garde movements that followed including impressionism, post-impressionism, cubism（立体主义）, futurism, expressionism, contructivism（构
成主义）are generally defined as modernism
.
4. The Great Gatsby
作者： F. Scott Fitzgerald
男女主人公：Jay Gatsby & Daisy Fay Buchanan
Why is Gatsby great? Why did he die?
His flaws in characteristics: Naive,innocent, ideal
正是因为美国社会缺乏盖茨比精神，社会不重视精神世界的充实，人们经历spiritual emptiness, 所以盖茨比伟大。

Post-war delusion（迷幻，错觉）
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
补充：Fitzgerald：tender is the night, all the sad young man, the rich boy,
几个重点背景：roaring twenties, jazz age, the lost generation, American dream
5. Ernest Hemingway
主要作品：
The Sun Also Rises《太阳照常升起》
A Farewell to Arms 《永别了，武器》Frederic Henry & Catherine Barkley
For Whom the Bell Tolls 《丧钟为谁而鸣》
The Old Man and the Sea 《老人与海》Santiago
“Man is not made for debeat…A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” From The Old Man and the Sea
What is Hemingway Code Hero? His writing style. What is Iceberg-principle?
补充：海明威的writing style:
Heroic code : Hemingway has his own understanding of hero. What the hero does is to face adversity with grace. He emphasizes self-control and other facts of his idea of manhood. What people achieve or fail at external is not as significant to heroism as comporting ourselves with inner nobility. As Santiago says, man is not made for defeated. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
Colloquial style
Emphasis on emotion
Ice burg theory
Short story: man without women
Winter takes nothing
主题主要是：life and death, experience and the meaning of life, the physical and psychological wound of the soldier.
Hemingway’s writing style: simple, telegraphic, natural, direct, clear, fresh, terse(简洁的，精练的), controversial, commonly found, fundamental words, lean and emotional,simple sentences, ice burg principle, symbolism. His style is probably the most widely imitated of any in the 20th century. He is generally known for his “mastery of the art of modern narration”. He once said, the dignity of movement of an iceburg is due to only 1/8of it above water. According to H, good literature writing should be able to make readers feel the emotion of the characters directly and the best
way to produce the effect is to set down exactly every particular kind of feeling without any authorized comments, without conventionally emotive language, and with a bare minimum of adj, and modifiers. His fiction usually focuses on people living essential, dangerous live -- soldiers, fisherman, athletes, who meet the pain and difficulties of their existence with stoic（坚忍的，苦修的）courage. His celebrated lit stylhe is direct,terse and often monotonous, yet particularly suited to his elemental subject matter. Masculine, man of action, self-discipline, terse.
The Hemingway hero code
It refers to some protagonists in Hemingway’s works. In the general situation of Hemingway’s novels, life i s full of tension and battles. The world is in chaos and man is always fighting a losing battle. Those who survive and perhaps emerge victorious in the process of seeking to master the code with a set of principles such as honor, courage, endurance, wisdom, discipline and dignity are known as Hemingway code. To behave well in the lonely, losing battle with life is to show “grace under power” and constitutes in itself a kind of victory, a theme clearly established in The old man and the sea.
A Farewell to arms
Is henny a good soldier?
No. he escaped and said goodbye to aimless, meaningless war and ran to Switzerland. It is not our war. He is anti-war thinking love may be disastrous, bring death. So man should be cold.
6. William Faulkner, Southern writer
主要作品：The Sound and the Fury 《喧哗与骚动》,Absalom, Absalom. Go down, moses. Light in august.
故事发生地：fictional Yoknapatawpha County
四大家族：
主题: The burden of history; the South’s conservative culture; the South’s troubled history; family; the land; religion; guilt; identity; death; the search for the redemptive meaning of life.
Writing features:
1. stream of consciousness and interior monologue.
2. multiple point of view
3. Violation of chronology
4.anti-hero: weak, fable(寓言，无稽之谈), vulnerable,
5.mythological pattern and open ending
7. The Color Purple
作者：Alice Walker 南方黑人女性作家alic
主人公：Celie & Nettie
论述: Sophia: “All my life I had to fight. I had to fight my daddy. I had to fight my uncles. I had to fight my brothers. A girl child ain't safe in a family of men,
but I ain't never thought I'd have to fight in my own house!”
The Color Purple is an epistolary（书信体的）novel, made up of 91 letters written by Celie and her sister Nettie. Taking place mostly in rural Georgia, the story focuses on black female life during the 1930s in the Southern United States.
8. The Bluest Eye
作者：Toni Morrison 其他作品：Song of Solomon; Beloved.
主人公：Pecola Breedlove: inferiority complex,
（说过要考几种literary form fiction, poetry, drama）
American Drama
What is drama: a drama is a work of literature or composition which delineates life and human activities by means of presenting various actions, and dialogues between a group of characters and it is designed for theatrical presentation.
Elements: plot, character, theme, diction(措辞)，music and auditory aspect of a play.
1920s: little theater movement began after 1912 Washington square players. They are free from the conventional theater and can be as experimental as they like.
1930s: Eugene O’Neil
Post war: Arthur Miller
60s：theater of absurd: Edward Albee
1.美国最早的剧作家：William Darby
代表作：Ye Bare and Ye Cubb
2.一定会考第一位获得诺贝尔奖的剧作家：Eugene O’Neil被称为“剧作家之
父”
Neil is credited with raising America drama theater from its narrow origins to an art from respected around the world. He is regarded as America’s premier playwright.
Feature: introduce the European theatrical trends of realism, naturalism and expressionism to the American stage as devices to express his comprehensive interest in his life and humanity. His purpose it to get the root if human desires and frustrations, disappointments and perplexities. As result his tragic and nihilistic view of life, his words in general, indicated chaos and hopelessness.
The long days journey
The emperor jones
The hairy ape
写作风格：realism, naturalism, expressionism
代表作：The Emperor Jones,The Long Days Journey Into Night, The Hairy Ape His purpose is to get the root of human desires and frustrations.
3.Arthur Miller应该不会考
代表作：Death of a Salesman.
Main characters: Willy Loman, Biff Loman
4.Tennessee Williams代表作：A Street Car Named Desire应该会考
流派：Theater of the Absurd 荒谬派
Beckett
Features:
the basic assumption: human life lacks coherence and is chaotic. Life operates without rules.
The world is meaningless, so the play appears to be meaningless.
It examines the problems of life and death, of isolation and communication
It satirizes people who are unaware of the ultimate reality: death
In absurd drama, situation is more important than characteristics and events. The dramatists want to show people what their situation is. Therefore, he constructs a play which presents a picture of the universal situation. One result of these is that the characters are so often comic and humorous.
5.Edward Albee
代表作：The Zoo Story, Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?
6.post-moderism
post-modernism is a complicated term, or set of ideas, one that has only emerged as am area of academic study since the mid-90s. post moderation is hard to define because it is
A.An emphasize on impressionism and subjectivity in writing. It emphasize on how
seeing(or reading or perception itself) takes palce.
B. A movement away from the apparent objectivity prob=vided by omniscient
third-person narrators, fixed narrative points of view and clear cut moral positions.
C. A blurring of destitution between genres so that poetry seems more dominating
and prose seems more poetic.
D.An emphasize on fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and
random-seeming collages of different materials.
E. A tendency toward reflexivity, or self-conscious about the production of
self-consciousness about the production of the work of art, so that each piece calls attention to its own status as a production, as sth constructed and consumed in particular ways.
F. A rejection of elaborate formal aesthetics in favor of minimalist designs(as in the
poem of williams) and a rejection in large part .
G.A rejection of the distinction between high and low or popular culture, both in
choice of materialism used to produce art and in methods of displayingm distributing and consuming art.
H.Post-modernism, like modernism, follows most of the ideas, rejecting boundaries
between high and low forms of art, rejecting rigid genre distinctions, emphasizing pastiche, parody, irony and playfulness. But modern art favors reflexivity and self-consciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity, ambiguity, simultaneity
：
世界著名剧作家名字：Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, V oltaire, Diderot, Beaumarchais, Henrik Ibsen, Bernard Shaw, Chekhov
American novels (World War Ⅱ—)
1.Jerome David Salinger
代表作：The Catcher in the Rye
Main character: Holden Caulfield
2.Vladimir Nabokov
代表作：Lolita
Main characters: Humbert, Lolita
3.Jack Kerouac
代表作：On the Road
Main characters: Sal Paradise, Dean Monriarty
The Beat Generation:
Features: rejection of standard narrative values, the spirit quest, exploration of American and Eastern religious, rejection of materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.
4.Postmodernism: like modernism
Features of modernism: self-consciousness, spontaneity, fragmentation, discontinuity, ambiguity and simultaneity.
American poetry (anti-tradition school)
1.Black Mountain School
代表诗人：Charles Olson
Feature: projective verse
Black Mountain Review黑山学派的刊物
2.The San Francisco School
3.Beat Poets
代表诗人：Allen Ginsberg (Howl 1956), Jack Kerouac
Beat poetry is oral, repetitive and immensely effective. It is the most anti-establishment form of literature in America.
4.The New York School
They have the best formal educations of any group.
Post realism 战后现实主义
Features: despair, ethnic groups, existential crisis，oppressed, despair, nihilism, brutality,
1.Norman Mailer
代表作：The Naked and the Dead, The Armies of the Night
2.John Updike
代表作：Five Rabbit books:
Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit is Rich; Rabbit at Rest; Rabbit Remembered Main character: Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom
Black Humor
Features: grotesque or morbid humor; express the absurdity, insensitivity, paradox and the cruelty of the modern world.
1.Kurt V onnegut
代表作：Slaughter House Five
2.Joseph Heller
代表作：Catch-22 (means dilemma)
Anti-hero: Joseph Yossarian
Poems
20世纪disappointment disillusionment allusions
T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, E.E.Cummings, Robert Frost (the road not taken)
Appreciation of poems: meter and rhyme
1. T.S.Eliot 诗歌之父
考印象派诗歌（不知道对应）
Imagism:20世纪美国文坛流派：Modernism: lost generation. Imagism came into being in Britain and US at around 1910 as a reaction to the traditional English poetry to express the sense of fragmentation and dislocation. T he imagists, with Ezra Pound leading the way, hold that the most effective means to express these momentary impressions is through the use of dominant image.
3 poetic principles of imagism:
Direct treatment of subject matter
Economy of expression
As regards rhythm, to compose in the sequence of musical phrase, not in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of metronome.
Chaotic and structure less
必考：Pound: in a station of the metro
It is a well known imagism poem
人群中那些亡魂的脸
花瓣，在潮湿的黑色枝头
Ezra Pound
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
考：TS Elliot the waste land
五个章节分别是：
The burial of the died
A game of chess
The fire sermon
Death by water
What the thunder said
Robert Frost: the road not taken
Realistic depiction
Rural life
Colloquial speech
Features: simple graceful tradition
Longfellow: a psalm of life
记住art is long and time is fleeting ,
And our hearts, though stout and brave
Still, like muffled drums, are beatifuneral marches to the grave
小说补充洛丽塔第二十二条军规。