3.1 Washington Irving (1783-1856)

Theme
• 《李伯大梦》以一个诙谐的传奇故事为载体,用象征的手 法反映出美国独立战争前后美国社会及其民众的思想状况。 • 小说当中最让人称道的一段，当是华盛顿· 欧文借由陌生 化的手法，叙述李伯眼中的独立新美国，四处都满布了星 星和条纹的奇怪旗子，满口“选举，民权和自由”的年轻 人，甚至是被改装成乔治华盛顿的英王乔治图像。 • 华盛顿欧文所欲表达的是美国梦不堪检视的脆弱一面，并 暗喻民众钟情于美国梦的愚昧行为。小说末，李伯踽踽独 行的身影正好说出了华盛顿欧文内心的寂寥。当所有人盲 目的歌颂美国梦的美好及伟大，他却在小说作品里批判美 国梦背后的黑暗层面。
A History of New York --a masterpiece of American humor --Significance of Knickerbockers：to mean a person from NY,and also how the present NY basketball team got its name.
“Her mighty lakes, like oceans of liquid
7.The Legend of Sleepy Hollow:
• Setting :when & where • Who are the main characters? • The plot
• suspense • horrible • short story
hoax
Brom Van Brunt
Whole view of Sleepy Hollow
The story
• It tells a miraculous story about the unsuccessful love affair of Ichabod Crane, a country teacher, which is combined with the legend of a headless horseman. The two stories share legendary elements, which the critics either interpret as an expression of the author’s conservative attitude toward the American Revolution and his nostalgia for the life before the Revolution, or doubt for their credibility.
The grave
2.Irving Primary works
• A History of New York 《纽约外史》(1809) • The Sketch Book 《见闻札记》(1819—1820) / The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. : “Rip Van Winkle” 《瑞普.凡.温克尔》 “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” 《睡谷的传说》 —marked the beginning of short story as a genre in Am. literature —marked the beginning of American romanticism • The History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus 《哥仑布传》(1828) • A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada 《攻克格拉纳达》 (1829) • The Alhambra 《阿尔罕伯拉》(1832)
The Fall of the Catskills
Irving is conservative. (e.g. Rip felt into sleep before American Independence and woke after it.) (love of old world's tradition) ("an old gentleman speaking English not American)
silver; her mountains, with their bright aerial tints; her valleys, teeming with wild fertility肥沃; her tremendous cataracts大瀑布, thundering in their solitudes; her boundless plains, waving with spontaneous verdure( 新鲜 ); her broad deep rivers, rolling in solemn silence to the ocean; her trackless forest, where vegetation植被 puts forth all its magnificence; her skies, kindling with点燃 magic of summer clouds and glorious sunshine.”
5.Rip Van Winkle VS.《药》
• Rip---rest in peace • simple, natural and henpecked • attended to anything but his own business • lived a peaceful life till he could not suffer from his term against his wife any longer and walked into the Catskill Mountains where he slept for 20 years and woke up to find everything changed. #The common people do not understand the meaning of revolution.
The Sketch Book
• Life of Goldsmith 《歌德斯密传》 • Life of Washington 《华盛顿传》 • The Crayon Miscellany: “A Tour on the Prairies” 《草原游记》 “Astoria” 《阿斯托里亚》 “Adventures of Captain Bonneville”
Rip Van Winkle
• a short story by W. Irving published in 1819, as well as the name of the story's fictional protagonist. It was part of a collection of stories entitled The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon. The story has become a part of cultural mythology: even for those who have never read the original story, "Rip Van Winkle" means either a person who sleeps for a long period of time, or one who is inexplicably (perhaps even blissfully) unaware of current events. • Although the story is set in New York's Catskill Mountains, Irving later admitted, "When I wrote the story, I had never been on the Catskills."
6.The Author’s Account of himself
• What is the main idea of it? • What are the main experiences of the author? P.63
It opens the Sketch Book.
P.64
Selected reading
《博纳维尔船长历险记》
3.Irving Familiar style
① imitative, but highly skillful; ② never shocking and a bit sentimental at times; “The style is the man”文如其人 ③ He avoids moralizing as much as possible; write to amuse and entertain. ④ good at creating an atmosphere; ⑤ His characters are vivid and true; typical Americanized. ⑥ He writes with great jocular humor. ⑦ finished and musical language His books are used as textbooks in The U.S.
4.Types of Humor
• Jocular humor: light-hearted,for fun/pleasure 小品 • Satirical humor:for laugh and think ( Mark Twain,Lu Xun) • Tearful humor:for laugh and sympathy (Charlie Chaplin,Lao She) • Desperate/Black humor: absurdity + horror (Joseph Heller,Kurt Vonnegut,John Updike)
Washington Irving (1783-1856)
Famous short story writer
The American Goldsmith
1.Irving Main Achievements
• Father of American Short Stories • The First American author to make a living by his pen • The first great prose stylist of American romanticism • The first American author of imaginative literature to achieve international fame
• "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is a short story by W. Irving contained in his collection The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., written while he was living in Birmingham, England, and first published in 1820. With Irving's companion piece "Rip Van Winkle", "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is among the earliest examples of American fiction still read today.
• Note: the difference between the adapted movie and the original story
ቤተ መጻሕፍቲ ባይዱ
Sleepy Hollow
Schoolmaster: Ichabod Crane cemetery the Headless Horseman
2
18-year-old Katrina Van Tassel the daughter and sole child of a wealthy farmer