美国文学资料[精华]

American Literature

Literature

Preface

When you enter the world of literature, your life will be more colorful and meaningful!

Definition

-Literature is writing for the sake of art.

--Art is the expression and creation of beauty.

--Beauty: combination of qualities that give pleasure to the senses or to the moral sense or to the intellect.

----Aristotle: harmonious; symmetrical

----Kant: pure reasoning (subjective creativity)

----Confucian: generosity

-A body of written works related by subject-matter (e.g. the literature of computing),by language or place of origin(e.g. Russian literature),or by prevailing cultural standards of merit.

-Broader sense: a totality of written or printed works

-Last sense: oral, dramatic, and broadcast compositions

-19th century: imaginative, creative, or artistic value

-More restrictive: poetry, drama, and fiction

-20th century: non-fictional writing

-Russian formalists: define literariness in terms of linguistic deviati ons

References: Peter Widdowson, Literature, 1998

Origination

Literature comes from art and art comes from work.

primitive activities-physical--hunting

--fishing

-mental--witchcraft ---content: singing

dancing

poetry

---purpose: utility

pleasure

---reason: physiological

psychological

Witchcraft-religion

-art--literature: myth poem prose novel drama

--fine art: drawing painting sculpture ballet dance music

Classification

Literature-fiction--novels

--short stories

--plays

--poems

-non-fiction---description

---narration

---exposition

---argumentation

What do we read for in literature?

The first level: what is going on? Emotional need

The second level: what can we learn? Educational need

The third level: how it is said? Aesthetic need

An Introduction American Literature

1.Colonial Period/Puritanism

-From the settlement of American in the early 17th through the end of 18th -Jonathan Edwards

-Benjamin Franklin

2.Romanticism

-The first half of 19th

-A rising American

-Washington Irving:

First important writer in American literature;

The Sketch Book is placed at the top of any reading list.

-James Fennimore Cooper: Leather stocking Tales

3.New England Transcendentalism/American Renaissance

-Culminated around the 1840s(1836-1855)

-Ralph Waldo Emerson :

The leading transcendentalist;

Nature: the manifesto of American transcendentalism;

The American scholar: the declaration of intellectual independence

-Henry David Thoreau : Walden

4. Black Romanticism