美国文学讲稿(新稿)2

The first lecture
1. A general look at the American literature
Phases of the history of American literature:
1)Colonial America ---- the 17th century from the
settlement of North America in the early seventeenth century through the end of it.
2)Reason and revolution ---- the 18th century
3)Romanticism ---- the first half of the nineteenth century,
till the beginning of the Civil War ( 1861-1865)
4)Realism ---- from the civil war till the early period of 19th
century (1861—1919)
5)20th century literature ---- the 1920s and 1930s.
2.Historical introduction of the literature of Colonial America 1) Indians were migrants form eastern Siberia and might belong to the Mongoloid peoples. They traveled into the New World more than 20,000 years ago.
2) About A.D. 1000, Norsemen from northern Europe happened on American, but their contact did not exert a tremendous influence in the world at that time. In 1492, the date of the discovery of America, Columbus sailed here. 3) The first permanent English settlement in North America
was established at Jamestown, Virginia in May 14, 1607.
4) In 1620, Mayflower with 102 passengers sailed to
Massachusetts. They were the first group of puritans
4) A large number of the settlers themselves left home in the first years of the 17th century in earnest quest of an ideal of their own. It is true that they wished to escape religious persecution ---- and the English government regarded its American colony as an ideal dumping ground for the undesirables, but they were also determined to find a place where they could worship in the way they thought true Christians should. When they arrived and saw the virgin forests, the virgin land, and the vast expanse of wilderness
that stretched miles around before them, they became aware that God must have sent them there for a definite purpose to reestablish a commonwealth based on the teachings of the Bible, restore the lost paradise, and build the wilderness into
a new Garden of Eden.
3.Puritan thoughts
1)American Puritanism was one of the most enduring
shaping influences in American thought and American literature
It has become so much a part of the national cultural atmosphere that the Americans breathe, that, without some understanding of Puritanism, there can be no real understanding of American culture and literature.
2) They accepted the doctrine of predestination,
original sin and total depravity, and limited
atonement through a special infusion of grace from
God.
2)the book
3)the Puritans dreamed of living under a perfect order and
worked with courage and confident hope toward building
a new Garden of Eden in America, where man could at
long last live the way he should.
Fired with such a sense of mission, the Puritans looked even the worst of life in the face with a tremendous amount of optimism. And this went to the making of American literature.
4. The first American writer -- John Smith (1580-1631)
1)life
He was England adventurer and one of the chief founders of the first permanent settlement in North America, the colony of Jamestown.
In 1604, he came to know a group of people who were ready to go to north America to establish colonies there
after returning to England from Russia. They landed on May 14, 1607, and soon he became the leader of the newly-established colony, and one year later he became the governor.
He was once captured by Indians, whose chief was Powhatan (波瓦坦), but was rescued by the famous Indian princess, Pocahontas, the daughter of the chief.
And this story becomes a legend.
2)writings
A True Relation of Such Occurances and Accidents of
Note as Hath Happened in Virginia Since the First Planting of That Colony( in 1608) (<殖民地第一次在佛吉尼亚开拓以来发生的各种事件的真实介绍>
A Map of Virginia: with a Description of the Country( in
1612) (<佛吉尼亚地图: 一个乡村的描述>)
General History of Virginia(1624) (<佛吉尼亚通史>)
3)his writings about America became the source of
information about the New World for later settlers.
And his narratives reveal the early settlers’ vision of the new land as something capable of being built into a new Garden of Eden.
The second lecture
1.Reason and Revolution
Historical Introduction
People are industrious, natural resources are rich and economy developed. Fast developing economy will influence politics. Economy asked for political rights.
English ruling class made huge profits out of American colonies. Laboring people suffered. Even the merchants and manufacturers did suffer because buying and selling were monopolized. South slave-owners were dissatisfied with the
British as the price of tobacco and cotton they produced was fixed.
1764, Sugar Act. 1765, Stamp Act. To levy tax on everything.
Clashes were unavoidable. In April, 1775, some British troops were sent to Lexington and Concord, small towns 30 miles from Boston, to disarm the militiamen. The first shot.
In 1783, colonies won independence.
In 1787, the Constitution passed.
2. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
1)life
Born in 1760 into a poor candle-maker’s family –―poor and obscure‖
He had little education but he was a voracious reader.
When still very young, he apprenticed to his older half-brother, a printer, and began at 16, to publish essays under the pseudonym, Silence Dogood.
At 17, he ran away to Philadelphia to make his own fortune and set himself up as an independent printer and publisher.
A s a scientist (the book)
As a statesman (the book), he was the only American to sigh the four documents that created the United States: the Declaration of Independence, the treaty of alliance with France, the treaty of peace with England, and the constitution.
2）writings
Poor Richard’s Almanac (<穷理查德的警句>)
The Autobiography (<自传>)
1)Poor Richard’s Almanac
He kept writing it for almost a quarter of a century. Apart from poems and essays, he managed to put in a good many axioms and commonsense witticisms which
became, very quickly, household words and mottoes of the most practical kind.
―Lost time is never found again.‖
―A penny saved is a penny earned.‖
―God help them that help themselves.‖
―Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.‖
Those and many other similar statements filled the almanac, and taught as much as amused.
4) The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
A fascinating record of a man rising to wealth and
fame from a state of poverty into which he was born,
a faithful account of the colorful career of America’s
first self-made man.
A Puritan document. It is Puritan because it is a
record of self-examination and self-improvement, and
a convincing illustration of the Puritan ethic that, in
order to get on in the world one has to be industrious,
frugal, and prudent.
It is also an eloquent elucidation of the fact that Franklin was a spokesman for the new order of eighteenth-century enlightenment, and that he represented in America all its ideas, that man is basically good and free by nature endowed by God with certain inalienable rights of liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Franklin told himself and his fellowmen that for that century moderation and temperance were among the best virtues of man.
The third lecture
The Literature of Romanticism
1.The Romantic period stretches from the end of the eighteenth century through the outbreak of the Civil War.
2.Historical introduction
1)Political review
George Washington
Thomas Jefferson (1800-1808)
During the two administrations of Jefferson, the relations between U. S. and Britain were becoming worse.
The British were not reconciled to the loss of their thirteen colonies.
Jefferson had to take some actions, but he had to try to avoid war as he knew the U.S. was ill-prepared.
Madison
In1812, Madison asked Congress to declare war on Britain, and the war broke out. The war lasted for
three 3years and ended in another American victory
over the British.
This war has one important result – the strengthening of national unity and patriotism. And it was only after
this that the United States was able to effect the
change of a semi-colonial economy into a really
independent national economy.
James Monroe (1816-1824)
In 1823, President Monroe announced his foreign policy which has come to be known as the Monroe
Doctrine. The main idea of the doctrine was that
European nations should not establish new colonies
in the Western Hemisphere; European nations
should not intervene in the affairs of independent
nations of the New World; and the United States
would not interfere in the affairs of European
nations.
2)Territorial expansion
In 1780s, the American government passed some laws to encourage people to move to the frontier region between
the Mississippi and the Ohio rivers.
May 2, 1803, the acquisition of Louisiana (New Orleans) 1845, annexed Texas
1846, the Oregon territory settlement between Britain and the U.S.
1846, war on Mexico. The states of California, New Mexico and Arizona became part of the United
States.
3) Economic changes
In the south, slavery was the foundation of the economic system. After 1812, cotton played a
critical role in the developing market economy of
the entire nation. Consequently, slaves, who
worked in the cotton field, became rooted in the
South.
In the North, commerce and industry were the main character for its economy. Some northerner
expected to get the blacks from the south.
4) The Civil War
February 4, 1861, representatives from the seceded states met in Montgomery, Alabama. And they
organized the Confederate States of America. Also a
constitution was passed.
On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office.
In April 1861, the Confederates took Fort Sumter in the South Carolina and the Civil War began. The War lasted for 4 years from 1861 to 1865.
The outcome of the war placed the northern capitalists in solid control of the federal government. It swept
away the last obstacle to the development of U.S.
capitalism.
5) In this period we see a rising America fast burgeoning
into a political, economic, and cultural independence it
had never known before.
3.Romanticism: Romantics share certain general characteristic: moral enthusiasm, faith in the value of individualism and intuitive perception, and a presumption that the natural world was a source of goodness and man’s societies a source of corruption.
4.American romanticism
1)Foreign influences added incentive to the growth of
romanticism in America. The Romantic Movement, which had flourished earlier in the century both in England and Europe, proved to be a decisive influence without which the upsurge of American romanticism would hardly have been possible. Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Byron, Robert Burns and many other English and European masters of poetry and prose all made a stimulating impact on the different departments of the country’s literature.
2)Although foreign influences were strong, American
Romanticism exhibited from the very outset distinct features of its own. It was different from its English and European counterpart because it originated from factors that were altogether American rather than anything else.
American romanticism was in essence the expression of ―a real new experience‖ and contained ―an alien quality‖for the simple reason that ―the spirit of the place‖was radically new and alien.
3)Then there is American Puritanism as cultural heritage to
consider. American moral values were essentially Puritan.
Public opinion was overwhelmingly Puritan; the Puritan atmosphere of the nation predominantly conditioned social life and cultural taste. Puritan influence over
American Romanticism was conspicuously noticeable.
American romantic authors tended more to moralize than their English and European brother. Many American writings intended to edify more than they entertained.
Sex and love, for instance, were subjects American authors were particularly careful in approaching.
The forth lecture
Washington Irving (1783-1859)
1.Life
Gently born and well educated, the youngest of eleven children of a prosperous New York merchant, he began a genteel reading for the law at sixteen, but preferred a literary Bohemianism. At nineteen he published in his brother’s newspaper his ―Jonathan Oldstyle, a satire of New York life. By the age of twenty-three, when he as admitted to the New York bar, he had roamed the Hudson valley and been a literary vagabond in England, Holland, France, and Italy, reading and studying what pleased him.
From 1826 to 1829 he was in Spain on diplomatic business. And he served as secretary of the American legation in London from 1829 to 1831. In 1832 he was on the way back to united States. In 1836, he made his home at Sunnyside, near Tarrytown. From 1842 to 1845 he served as minister to Spain, then settled at Sunnyside. He died in 1859.
2.Two important phases of his writing career
1)From the first book in 1809 to 1832.
The first period was predominantly ―English,‖ in which he was drawn to the ruins and relics of Europe and writing, most of the time, about subjects either English or European.
He seemed to be endowed with a love for the antique that amounted to an obsession. He found value in the past and
in the tradition of the Old World. America, being young, didn’t have what Europe had to offer for a man of imagination.
A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to
the End of the Dutch Dynasty (1809) (<纽约外史>)
Sketch Book (1819-1820) (<见闻札记>)
Bracebridge Hall (1820) (<布雷斯布里奇田庄>)
Tales of a Traveler (1824) (<旅行者的故事>)
Charles the Second, or The Merry Monarch(<查尔斯二世>, 或<快乐君主>)
A History of the Life and Voyage of Christopher Columbus
(1828) (<哥伦布生平及航海史>)
A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829) (<格林纳
达征服史>)
Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus (1831) (<哥伦布同伴的生平及航海>)
Alhambra (1832) (<阿尔罕伯拉>)
2)Stretching over the remaining years of his life from
1832-1859.
Back in America, Irving found a whole new spirit of nationalism in American feeling and art and letters and awoke to the fact that there was beauty in America.
A Tour on the Prairies (1835) (<草原游记>)
Astoria (1836) (<阿斯托里亚>)
The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837) (<伯纳维尔船长历险记>)
Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1840) (<奥利弗.戈尔德史密斯传>)
Life of George Washington (published 1855-1859) (<华盛顿传>)
3.Features of his writing
1)Irving avoids moralizing as much as possible; he wrote
to amuse and entertain.
2)He is good at enveloping his stories in an atmosphere,
the richness of which is often more than compensation for the slimness of plot.
3)The finished and musical language has been the critical
attention for a long time.
4.Irving’s contribution to American literature is unique in more ways than one.
He was first great belletrist, writing always for pleasure, and to produce pleasure. In Sketch Book appeared the first modern short stories and the first great American juvenile literature.
He was the first American writer of imaginative literature to gain international fame. Americans took this as a sign that American literature was emerging as an independent entity.
To say that he was father of American literature is not much exaggeration. The short story genre in American literature probably began with Irving’s The Sketch Book.
5.Rip Van Winkle
Rip Van Winkle, ―one of those happy mortals, who take the world easy, eat white bread or brown, whichever can be got with least thought or trouble, and would rather starve on a penny than work for a pound. If left to himself, he would have whistled life away in perfect contentment.‖
The story reveals, to some extent, the conservative attitude of its author. Rip goes to sleep before the War of Independence and wakes up after it. The change that has occurred in the twenty years he slept is to him not always for the better. The story might be taken as an illustration of Irving’s argument that change –revolution –upset the natural order of things, and of the fact that Irving never seemed to accept a modern democratic America.
6.The Legend of Sleep Hollow
Ichabod Crane, a memorable character with the mixture of shrewdness, credulity, self-assertiveness, and cowardice. Brom Bones, his rival in love, a Huck Fine –type of country bumpkin, rough, vigorous, boisterous but inwardly very good, a frontier type put out there to shift for himself, headless horseman throwing his head at his rival in love. Katrina
The fifth lecture
Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849)
1.Life (the book)
Poe's parents, David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins, were touring actors; both died before he was 3 years old, and he was taken into the home of John Allan, a prosperous merchant in Richmond, Va., and baptized Edgar Allan Poe. The remaining children were cared for by others. Poe's brother William died young and sister Rosalie become later insane. At the age of five Poe could recite passages of English poetry. Later one of his teachers in Richmond said: "While the other boys wrote mere mechanical verses, Poe wrote genuine poetry; the boy was a born poet." His childhood was uneventful, although he studied (1815-20) for 5 years in England. In 1826 he entered the University of Virginia but stayed for only a year. Although a good student, he ran up large gambling debts that Allan refused to pay. Allan prevented his return to the university and broke off Poe's engagement to Sarah Elmira Royster, his Richmond sweetheart. Lacking any means of support, Poe enlisted in the army. He had, however, already written and printed (at his own expense) his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), verses written in the manner of Byron.
Temporarily reconciled, Allan secured Poe's release from the army and his appointment to West Point but refused to provide financial support. After 6 months Poe apparently contrived to be dismissed from West Point for disobedience of orders. His fellow cadets, however, contributed the funds for the publication of Poems by Edgar A. Poe ... Second Edition(1831), actually a third edition. This volume contained the famous To Helen and Israfel, poems that show the restraint and the calculated musical effects of language that were to characterize his poetry.
Poe next took up residence in Baltimore with his widowed aunt, Maria Clemm, and her daughter, Virginia, and turned to fiction as a way to support himself. In 1832 the Philadelphia Saturday Courier published five of his stories -- all comic or satiric -- and in 1833, MS. Found in a Bottle won a $50 prize given by the Baltimore Saturday Visitor.
Poe, his aunt, and Virginia moved to Richmond in 1835, and he became editor of the Southern Literary Messenger and in 1836, he married Virginia.
Poe published fiction, notably his most horrifying tale, Berenice in the Messenger, but most of his contributions were serious, analytical, and critical reviews that earned him respect as a critic. His contributions undoubtedly increased the magazine's circulation, but they offended its owner, who also took exception to Poe's drinking. The January 1837 issue of the Messenger announced Poe's withdrawal as editor but also included the first installment of his long prose tale, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, five of his reviews, and two of his poems. This was to be the paradoxical pattern for Poe's career: success as an artist and editor but failure to satisfy his employers and to secure a livelihood.
First in New York City (1837), then in Philadelphia
(1838-44), and again in New York (1844-49), Poe sought to establish himself as a force in literary journalism, but with only moderate success.
In 1842, Virginia bust a blood vessel and remained a virtual invalid until her death from tuberculosis five years later. After the death of his wife, Poe began to lose his struggle with drinking and drugs. He had several romances, including an affair with the poet Sarah Helen Whitman, who said: "His proud reserve, his profound melancholy, his unworldliness - may we not say his unearthliness of nature - made his character one very difficult of comprehension to the casual observer." Though Virginia's death, Poe continued to write and lecture. In the summer of 1849 he revisited Richmond, lectured, and was accepted anew by the fiancee he had lost in 1826. After his return north he was found unconscious on a Baltimore street. In a brief obituary the Baltimore Clipper reported that Poe had died of "congestion of the brain."
2.Writings
A dozen poems and seventy short stories.
Poe’s literary output is small, but it is immensely interesting and influential as a literary inheritance.
Tamerlane and Other Poems(1827) (《帖木尔》)
Poems by Edgar A. Poe ... Second Edition(1831)
Ms. Found in a bottle (in 1833) (<瓶中的房德小姐>)
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (in 1838)
Tales of Grotesque and Arabesque (in 1839) (<怪诞奇异故事集>)
The Murders in the Rue Morgue(1841) (which is sometimes considered the first detective story.)
3.Unfavorable criticism on Poe
For a long time after Poe’s death Poe remained probably the most controversial and most misunderstood literary figure in the history of American literature.
As a critic Poe was perceptive, but the fact that he wrote some scathing criticisms on the works of such distinguished New England literary celebrities as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow incurred the wrath of quite a few of his contemporaries .
And his executor, Rufus Griswold, spared no pains, after his death, to sully his reputation. He painted him as a Bohemian, depraved, and demonic, a villain with no virtue at all.
Mark Twain declared his prose to be unreadable.
Henry James made the ruthless statement that ―an enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive state of development.‖
And Whitman, who was the only famous literary figure present at the Poe Memorial Ceremony in Baltimore in 1875, had mixed feelings about him: he did admit Poe’s genius, but it was ―its narrow range and unhealthy, lurid quality‖ that most impressed him.
4.Poe’s poems
His poetic theories are remarkable in their clarity.
The poems, he says, should be short, readable at one sitting. Its chief aim is beauty, namely, to produce a feeling of beauty in the reader.
The Raven
In this poem, one of the most famous American poems ever, Poe uses several symbols to take the poem to a higher level.
The most obvious symbol is, of course, the raven itself.
When Poe had decided to use a refrain that repeated the word "nevermore," he found that it would be most effective if he used a non-reasoning creature to utter the word. It would make little sense to use a human, since the human could reason to answer the questions (Poe, 1850). In "The Raven" it is important that the answers to the questions are
already known, to illustrate the self-torture to which the narrator exposes himself. This way of interpreting signs that do not bear a real meaning, is "one of the most profound impulses of human nature" (Quinn, 1998:441). Poe also considered a parrot as the bird instead of the raven; however, because of the melancholy tone, and the symbolism of ravens as birds of ill-omen, he found the raven more suitable for the mood in the poem (Poe, 1850). Quoth the Parrot, "Nevermore?"
Another obvious symbol is the bust of Pallas. Why did the raven decide to perch on the goddess
of wisdom? One reason could be, because it would lead the narrator to believe that the raven spoke from wisdom, and was not just repeating its only "stock and store," and to signify the scholarship of the narrator. Another reason for using "Pallas" in the poem was, according to Poe himself, simply because of the "sonorousness of the word, Pallas, itself" (Poe, 1850).
A less obvious symbol, might be the use of "midnight" in the first verse, and "December" in the
second verse. Both midnight and December, symbolize an end of something, and also the anticipation of something new, a change, to happen. The midnight in December, might very well be New Year’s eve, a date most of us connect with change. This also seems to be the last night of the year had arrived. Kenneth Silverman connected the use of December with the death of Edgar’s mother (Silverman, 1992:241), who died in that month; whether this is true or not is, however, not significant to its meaning in the poem.
The chamber in which the narrator is positioned, is used to signify the loneliness of the man, and
the sorrow he feels for the loss of Lenore. The room is richly furnished, and reminds the narrator of his lost love,
which helps to create an effect of beauty in the poem. The tempest outside, is used to even more signify the isolation of this man, to show a sharp contrast between the calmness in the chamber and the tempestuous night.
The phrase "from out my heart," Poe claims, is used, in combination with the answer
"Nevermore," to let the narrator realize that he should not try to seek a moral in what has been previously narrated
To Helen
5.Poe’s short stories
The Fall of the House of Usher
Roderick Usher, the brother
The sister, Madeline
Roderick’s school friend, the narrator
The narrator is a boyhood friend of Roderick Usher. He has not seen Roderick since they were children; however, because of an urgent letter that he received from Roderick which requested his aid, the nameless narrator decides to make the long journey.
Roderick and Madeline Usher are the sole, remaining
members of the long, time-honored Usher
race. When Madeline supposedly "dies" and is placed in her coffin, the narrator notices "a striking similitude between brother and sister...." It is at this point that Roderick informs his friend that he and the Lady Madeline had been twins, and that "sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them." Due to limited medical knowledge or to suit his purposes here, Poe treats Madeline and Roderick as if they were identical twins (two parts of one personality) instead of fraternal twins. He implies that Roderick and Madeline are so close that they can sense what is happening to each other. This becomes an important aspect in the unity of effect of this particular story.
The sixth lecture
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
1.Life (the book)
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804.
Some of his ancestors were men of prominence in the Puritan theocracy in seventeenth-century New England. One of them was a colonial magistrate notorious for his part in the persecution of the Quakers, and another, John Hathorne, Hawthorne’s grandfather, was a judge at the Salem Witchcraft Trial in 1692. Young Hawthorne was intensely aware of the misdeeds of his Puritan ancestors, and this awareness led to his understanding of evil being at the core of human life.
His father, Nathaniel Hathorne, was a sea captain. He died when the young Nathaniel was four year old. Elizabeth Clarke Manning Hathorne, his mother, withdrew to a life of seclusion, which she maintained till her death. From Salem the family moved to Maine, where Hawthorne was educated at the Bowdoin College (1821-24). In the school among his friends were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Franklin Pierce, who became the 14th president of the U.S. Between the years 1825 and 1836, Hawthorne worked as a writer and contributor to periodicals. (the book)
In 1842 Hawthorne became friends with the Transcendentalists in Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who also drew on the Puritan legacy. However, generally he did not have much confidence in intellectuals and artists, and eventually he had to admit, that "the treasure of intellectual gold" did not provide food for his family. (the book) In 1842 Hawthorne married Sophia。