美国文学纲要

美国文学纲要
Part Ⅳ
The Literature of Realism
Historical Background
(The American Civil War)
1860 Presidential campaign; success of Republican Party (Abraham Lincoln)
1862 Emancipation Proclamation
1865 Southern army surrendered
Industrialization
Sufferings of the laboring people
The Gilded Age
What is realism?
Realism was a literary doctrine that called for “reality and truth” in the depiction of ordinary life.
Realism first appeared in America in the literature of local color
William Dean Howells defined Realism as “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.”
Some representative local colorists :
Bret Harte (1836—1902), the first American writer of local color to achieve wide popularity.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
Mark Twain
American Realism has its salient features:
V erisimilitude of details derived from observation
Representative in plot, setting and character
An objective rather than an idealized view of human
experience
American Realism produced three great masters:
William Dean Howells (1837—1920)
Henry James (1843—1916)
Mark Twain (1835—1910)
American Naturalism
Charles Darwin
Struggle for existence
Natural selection
Survival of the fittest
Herbert Spencer (Social Darwinism)
Definition: Those who are weak, stupid will be got rid of by the society
Major Features
Heredity
Environment
Thematically, naturalistic writers
wrote detailed descriptions of the lives of the downtrodden and of the abnormal
had frank treatment of human passion and sexuality
were concerned about how men and women were overwhelmed by the forces of environment and by the forces of heredity
Technically, naturalistic writers
made detailed documentation of life: nothing but the truth, more naked and wicked than realism
created gloomy and pessimistic atmosphere
Walt Whitman
One of the great innovators in American literature
He gave America its first genuine epic poem:
Leaves of Grass
The themes in Whitman’s poetry
Extols the ideal of equality, democracy, nature, labor and creation, openness, and freedom ?Celebrates man’s dignity, the self-reliance spirit, the individual value and brightest future of mankind
Praises the expansion of America
Leaves of Grass
9 editions
Over 400 poems
“Song of Myself”《自我之歌》
“There Was a Child Went Forth”《有个小孩走过来》
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”《过布鲁克林渡口》
“Passage to India”《向印度行进》
Comments on Leaves of Grass
Where there is earth, where there is water, there is grass.
Grass, is an image of the poet himself, a symbol of the rising American nation, and an embodiment of his ideals about democracy and freedom.
Emily Dickinson
Her Poems
Wrote nearly 1,800 poems, only 7 of which were published before her death.
Features of Dickinson’s poetry
no titles
telling images, striking, suggestive and connotative sometimes incomprehensible
a severe economy of expression
direct and plain words, simple syntax
no regular rhyme
unusual capitalization
unusual use of punctuation marks
Thematic Concerns
A great potion of her poems concern death and immortality.
Dickinson sees nature as both gaily benevolent and cruel.
I taste a liquor never brewed
Emily Dickinson was greatly influenced by Emerson’s transcendentalism. She had a profound love for nature and was often intoxicated with the beauty of nature.
The poet compares nature to liquor that has never been brewed and herself to a debauchee who loves wine more than her life.
I Heard a Fly buzz—when I died—
The poem is a description of the moment of death.
One’s death may be a most trivial event, leading to no after-life.
Mark Twain
His Works
Innocents Abroad (1869)
Roughing it (1872)
The Gilded Age (1873)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
Life on the Mississippi (1883)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Characteristics of his works
1. His works sum up the tradition of Western humor and frontier realism.
2. He writes about his people and his own life.
3. His greatest achievement on literature is his use of the dialect and his portrayal of the locale. Discussion T opics:
1. What realistic elements can you find in this story?
Background: Gold Rush
California was a world of men, isolated, homesick, and eager for entertainment.
Gambling was one of the easiest and most popular ways to amuse themselves.
The Easterners had a reputation for being civilized, cultured, and advanced; whereas the Westerners were considered to be less-educated, less-refined and easy to be deceived.
2. What role does language play in the story?
Informal language vs. formal language
To highlight the educational background of the characters To help create a realistic picture of how the characters speak To make the narration more vivid
3. How is the story narrated?
first person within another first person point of view
Third person: more objective, balanced view
First person: personal, emotional, sensational, more vivid
O. Henry
His works
The Four Million (his best volume)
“The Gift of the Magi”,
“The Cop and the Anthem”
“The Last Leaf ”
“The Furnished Room”
Theme
Many of his stories tell about the lives of poor people in New Y ork, as well as other cities Characteristics of his writing Clever and interesting plot
Humor and satire
Surprise ending
The artistic features of the short story Lexical features
Big words
Collocation deviation:
Syntactic features
Rhetorical questions
Parallelism
Repetition
Tense deviation
Semantic features/figures of speech Simile
Metaphor
Metonymy
Euphemism
Irony。