自考英美文学选读 English -Modern

Modernism
• Symbolism • Expressionism, surrealism, Dadaism, imagism, stream of consciousness • Post-modernism: existentialism, black humor, theater of the absurd
Viewpoints
Works
Literary Features
• • • • Problem plays Characterization Inversion Plot disregarded
T. S. Eliot
Life
• Born in U.S., then took English citizenship
• John Osborne, the first “Angry Young Men”
– Theater of Absurd
• Samuel Beckett, Waiting For Godot
George Bernard Shaw
Life
• Left school at 14, self-educated
• Theatre of absurd works usually employ illogical situations, unconventional dialogue, and minimal plots to express the apparent absurdity of human existence.
• Stream of Consciousness, literary technique, employed to evince subjective as well as objective reality. It reveals the character's feelings, thoughts, and actions, often following an associative rather than a logical sequence, without commentary by the author.
• Imagism was a movement in early twentieth century Anglo–American poetry that favored precision of imagery, and clear, sharp language, as opposed to decorous language and unnecessary meter and rhyme.
• Surrealism, artistic and literary movement that explored and celebrated the realm of dreams and the unconscious mind through the creation of visual art, poetry, and motion pictures.
Part One English Literature
Chapter 5 The Modern Period
ห้องสมุดไป่ตู้
Historical Background
• Two world wars • Disintegration of the British Empire
Philosophical Ideas
Works
• Poems
– Early poems
• “Prufrock” • The Waste Land
– Later poems
• Ash Wednesday, Four Quartets
• Verse dramas • Prose
D. H. Lawrence
Life
• Greatest from working class
Works
• Novels
– White Peacock, The Trespasser – Sons and Lovers – The Rainbow, Women in Love – Aaron’s Rod, Kangaroo, The Plumed Serpent, The Lady Chatterley’s Lover
– – – – Urgent social problems Some modern technique Pessimistic mood Working-class writers
• “Angry Young Men”
– Lower-middle class or working class background – Kingsley Amis, the first to attack on middle-class privilege
• Black humor, a form of humor that regards human suffering as absurd rather than pitiable, or that considers human existence as ironic and pointless but somehow comic.
• Dadaism, early 20thcentury art movement, whose members sought to ridicule the culture of their time through deliberately absurd performances, poetry, and visual art.
• Irish National Theater Movement
– W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge
• Revival of poetic drama • The English dramatic revolution
– Working-class drama
• • • • • • Marx & Engels’ scientific socialism Darwin’s theory of evolution Social Darwinism to colonialism Einstein’s theory of relativity Freud’s analytical psychology Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson’s irrationalism
The 20th Century Poetry
• Early years
– Thomas Hardy and war poets – Modern poetry
• Red thirties
– Radical political enthusiasm and strong protest against fascism
• Existentialism, philosophical movement or tendency, emphasizing individual existence, freedom, and choice, that influenced many diverse writers in the 19th and 20th centuries.
• Expressionism, in the visual, literary, and performing arts, a movement or tendency that strives to express subjective feelings and emotions rather than to depict reality or nature objectively.
Modernism
• Origin: skepticism and disillusion • Theoretical base: irrational philosophy and psycho-analysis • Theme: distorted relationship • Subjects: inner being of an individual • Relation to realism: Against realism
• 1950s
– Return of realistic poetry
The 20th Century Novels
• Realistic novels in the early 20th century
– Continuation of Victorian tradition
• Realistic novels in 1930s
• In literature, symbolism was an aesthetic movement that encouraged writers to express their ideas, feelings, and values by means of symbols or suggestions rather than by direct statements.
• Short stories • Poems • Trilogy
Literary Features
• reaction against the mechanical civilization • Psychology • realism
• Stream of consciousness novels
– James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson
• Pioneering modern dramatists
The 20th Century Dramas
– Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest – George Bernard Shaw, best-know dramatist after Shakespeare