文学讲稿12.1

讲稿内容备注Chapter 21The Confessional school and The Beat Generation
I. Revision and Homework-checking
Ask students the following questions:
1.The women writers talked about in the previous lecture.
2.What about the famous works by these female writers?
II.The Confessional school
The Confessional school:
One distinct group in the postwar period is the Confessional school.
A. In a broad way, many people whose poetry seems to share common
features such as a ruthless, excruciating self-analysis of one’s background
and heritage, one’s own most private desire and fantasies etc., and the urgent
“I’ll-tell-it-all-to-you” impulse.
B. In a narrow way survey of the scene, Lowell, Plath, and Sexton seem to
stand closer and have been mentioned and meant often when the epithet “Confessional” is brought up in the context of a poetry discussion.
Robert Lowell(1917-1977)
A. life:
1. born in 1917 into one of Boston's oldest and most prominent families.
2.He attended Harvard College for two years before transferring to Kenyon
College,
3.His first and second books, Land of Unlikeness(1944) and Lord Weary's
Castle (for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, at the age of thirty),
were influenced by his conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism and
explored the dark side of America's Puritan legacy.
4. Under the influence of Allen Tate and the New Critics, he wrote rigorously
formal poetry that drew praise for its exceptionally powerful handling of
meter and rhyme.
5. He suffered from severe episodes of manic depression, for which he was
repeatedly hospitalized.
2. works:
Poetry
Day by Day (1977)
For Lizzy and Harriet (1973)
For the Union Dead (1964)
History (1973)
Imitations (1961)
Land of Unlikeness (1944)
Life Studies (1959)
Lord Weary's Castle (1946)
Near the Ocean (1967)
Notebooks, 1967-1968 (1969)
讲稿内容备注Poems, 1938-1949 (1950)
Selected Poems (1965)
Selected Poems (1976)
The Dolphin (1973)
The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951)
Prose
The Collected Prose (1987)
Anthology
Phaedra (1961)
Prometheus Bound (1969)
Drama
The Old Glory (1965)
3. form and style of Lowell’s works
Began as a strict formalist of the New Critical school in the 1940s. All his
poetry before the end of the 1950s was regular in form, witty, packed, and
well crafted.
After 15 years of immersion in the New Criticism, he felt fed up with
building its clever type of artifice and thirsted, along with the trend of his
time, for “human richness”. He was never slack and undisciplined in form.
Although he wrote in free verse (and was autobiographical), there is always
visible discipline in his artistic control. He always kept his formal values in
mind.
4. theme
Thematically, the change was a natural corollary of the gradual evolution of
Lo well’s vision of man’s fate and “the fate of selfhood in time.”
A. first volume of poetry Land of Unlikeness reveals that man’s soul has
changed; it is no longer like God and even itself. Man is in danger. He is
heading for Hell.
Second volume of poetry Lo rd Weary’s Castle portrays modern man as dull
and hopeless and neglecting salvation.
In third volume of poetry The Mills of the Kavanaughs, he run away from his
religious enthusiasm to some more secular material like society and
individual life stories, and explores the possibility for people to find stability,
a secular stability, through supra-personal forms of belief, myth, or meditation.
5. masterpiece: Life Studies (consists of four parts)
A. part one delimits the context of human behavior and offers the frame of
reference for subsequent revelations.
B. part two is the book’s prose section, entitled “91 Revere Street.” strictly autobiographical segment, which reveals the poet’s anxiety over a decaying
culture as he sees if embodied in his father’s perso nality.
讲稿内容备注C. part three is designed to explore the possibility of art as an avenue of
escape and survival for the poet.
D. part four: all about failure and the long overdue self-examination: the
poem implies that he must not only stay away from tradition, but also find
own way to survival. But he is confronted with the question, whether he has
the will and the sense of direction to survive the wreckage that he has now
become.
Sylvia Plath(1932-1963)
1. life:
Was a very sensitive person. She was frail and sensitive ever since she was a
child. She was of German descent: her father immigrated to America in
1901. She had a hart time integrating herself into the rest of her community.
She felt guilty of being of German extraction. Father’s death was the biggest
incident of her life after which she was said to be never happy again.
Abnormal psyche– she loved and adored her father.
2. Works: (1) poems
A Winter Ship
The Colossus and Other Poems
Ariel
Uncollected Poems
Crystal Gazer and Other Poems
Winter Trees
(2) novel
The Bell Jar
Daddy, the most famous of all Plath’s poems, spearheads its attack mainly at
her father and in passing, but no less intensely, at her husband, and obliquely
at her mother to whom the poet reveals her consistent hostility in poems.
Lady Lazarus dramatizes her life in a more gruesome way. It is about her
repeated attempt at suicide.
3. Ideas
writing was a process of release, of exorcising her acute sense of “existential
anxiety;( caused by her self- consciousness of being a German descendant,
the shadow of her father’s death, her intense subconscious dislike of her
mother, and the hurt she received from the infidelity of her husband which
she did not succeed in alleviating for herself) So she was obsessed with death
and suicide.
Anne Sexton(1929-1974)
1. comment:
A. Lived a rather colorful life. She eloped with her lover, gave birth to two daughters, experienced mental disturbances, and attempted suicide, stayed in
a mental hospital and was advised to write as part of her treatment.
讲稿内容备注B. She was at her best when dealing with the subtleties of human emotions,
especially those of her own.
C. Was a forefront Confessional poet. She found her creative spring in her
mental breakdowns and was further inspired during her stay at McClean’s.
D. She felt that poetry should shock the senses and should almost hurt. She
was painfully open about herself.
2. Basic themes: madness, victimization, a sense of engulfing chaos,
fascination with suicide and death, incest, adultery, illegitimacy, guilt, and addiction. Her work represents the journey of life that she went through, an emotionally eventful one, one that she took, struggling for survival, but
eventually failing to find salvation.
3. works:
All My Pretty Ones:contains poems about her parents’ death within thre e
months of one another and her deliberations on death.
To Bedlam and Part Way Back focuses on her mental problems, her stay in
an institution, and her patching it up with her daughter and her husband.
Her Kind:her signature poem, there are three stanzas, each of which
addresses one aspect of her personality.(371)
Anna Sexton’s contribution to Confessional poetry is great. Some even think
of her along with Lowell as parents of the school. Her personal truth may be
becoming an expression of the public truth, which ensures a place in history.
III. The Beat Generation
1. the term explanation
A. in the 1950s there was a widespread discontentment among the postwar generation, whose voice was one of protest against all the mainstream culture
that American had come to represent.
B. the word “beat” represented a non-conformist, rebellious attitude toward conventional values concerning sex, religion, the arts, and the American way
of life.
C. it was an attitude that resulted from the feeling of depression and exhaustion and the need to escape into an unconventional, sometimes communal, mode of living.
D. “Beat” literature offered something like a fresh breath of wind both in the
prose and poetry of the 1950s and 1960s.
2. characteristics
A. the Beats were fed up with the official explanations of why things happened.
B. the Beats rejected middle class values, commercialism, and conformity.
C. they withdrew from politics and from the obligations of citizenship. By
and large they were in favor of peace
D. they rejected universities and the academic tradition.
讲稿内容备注E. they evolved a free, non-materialistic, religion with no formal church, but
based loosely on the teaching of Buddha, comprising love, gay, and anarchy.
The Beats regarded modern American life as so cruel, selfish, and impersonal that writers and artists were being driven to madness.
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
Life: Ginsberg was the poet Laureate of the Beat generation. Born in
Newark, new Jersey, in 1926, of Russian Jewish Immigrant parents. Grew up
and finished high school in Parterson, New Jersey., attended Columbia University. By the beginning of the 1950s, he had basically completed his
education for a poetic career with a clear vision of his literary future: he
would write a kind of poetry of anti-mainstream in a natural, spontaneous
diction. He was a Home-sexual.
2. works:
A. Howl and other Poems (1956):
(1) written in a long tumbling lines in the poetic tradition of Black and Whitman.
(2) Ginsberg tried to present his ideas as they were actually thought in rapid
visual images.
(3) Howl is now regarded as a consummate work of carefully worded invectives, a torrent of deliberate voluble curses, condemning American
society which has destroyed the best minds of the postwar generation.
(4) Howl is now regarded as the most significant long poem of the contemporary period, ranking, among others, with Whiteman’s “song of
Myself” and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land( p 381-383)
B. Kaddish and Other Poems(1960)
C. Empty Mirror (1960)
D. reality Sandiwiches (1963)
E. The Change (1960)
F. Planet News (1969)
3. Ginsberg’s poetic style
A. his poetry shows great influence of Whitman: he used long lines, lists,
oratory or spoken poetry, and the persona “I”.
B. immediacy: he was interested in the immediate effect.
C. The use of language: he wanted to capture the rhythm of speech and
obscene language and repetition.
D. He was at his best giving a sense of both doom and beauty.
5. reputation
He has received and is still receiving abundant attention as a major figure on
the contemporary literary landscape. He will be remembered, first and foremost, as the spokesman of the postwar Beat generation in American
literary history.
讲稿内容备注Gary Snyder (1930-)
1.Growing up in Oregon, he had an Emersionian love for nature
2. He imbibed the American West wildness and primitive myths such as
those of the American Indians so that these were woven into the very fabric
of his system.
3. For Snyder the wildness is always a tonic to man. He feels that we humans
need to sink back in nature to brace up for life even if it is for a stay as brief
as one night.
4. The “stillness” is central to his poetic concern. He seeks to locate a point
of stillness amid the constant change of the universe.
5. The job of the poet is to catch sight of the poetic, and the poetic resides
nowhere but in the natural world.
6. His poetry portrays the erotic experience, one primal activity of human
life.
7. the tone of his works is always celebratory
W.S. Merwin (1927-)
1. Born in New York, son of a clergyman. He studied medieval literature and
romance language, and stayed long in Europe.
2. the theme of his poetry is generally concerned with the dilemmas of humankind and the wholesome effect of the natural world
3. tone: pessimistic,( he believes that the future is so bleak that there is no
point in writing, take “For Coming Extinction for example: the poet sees
the death of the future for the humans along with the extinction of their
fellow species)
4. Style: Merwin’s style has undergone some changes over the years, but
there is always his emphasis on myths and emblems which he sees in the occurrences of daily lives. And there is always conscious artistry
Robert Bly (1926-)
1. Grew up on a farm in Madison, Minnesota. Enlisted in the navy during the
war and returned to complete his B.A. AT Harvard.
2. Started a literary magazine, first entitled The Fifties, then The Sixties, The Seventies, and The Eighties.
3. His first volume of verse, Silence in the Snowy Fields, came out In 1962,
in which appeared some of his best “Snowy Field” poetry.
4. Theme: pastoral life, the beauty of natural scenery, and the stillness and
solitude, free of the intrusion of noise and crowds, are extolled as conducive
to the life of the mind.
5. His views: in addition to his surrealism, he feels that the poet must free
himself from his rational ego and release the deeper; the less conscious levels
of the mind, and that modern poetry should grasp the flowing psychic
energy. His notion on imagery is known as the “deep image”
讲稿内容备注IV. Conclusion and Homework
In this lecture, we mainly talked about the Confessional school and the Beat Generation in the 20th Century. We have introduced some of the representatives and you should try to review them after class.
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