美国文学知识美国文学教学教案

American Literature

Early American Literature: Colonial Period to 1815

1.In Native American oral literature, three main types of stories could be found: origin stories,

trickster tales, and historical narratives.

2.Conventionally, we view that Captain John Smith (1580—1631) was the first American writer,

who wrote the “First book of American”—A True Relation to Virginia.

3.The American dream for the Puritans, as the Massachusetts Puritan governor John Winthop

put it, was to build a “city on the hill.”

4.Anne Bradstreet was a woman poet in the colonial period. Her “domestic”poems and the

Contemplations are today recognized as her best literary achievement.

5.In 1692, the biggest witchcraft hunting took place in Salem. One of the eight judges was the

great grandfather of Nathaniel Hawthorne. As a notorious historical event, the Salem trials also provided, in the 20th century, the basis and material for Arthur Miller’s drama The Crucible and Maryse Conde’s novel I, Tituba.

6.Poor Richard’s Almanac was written by Benjamin Franklin. “Early to bed and early to rise,

makes a man healthy wealthy and wise,”proverbs like this showed Franklin’s wisdom. He also wrote The Way to Wealth and Autobiography.

7.The Declaration of Independence was drafted by Thomas Jefferson in June, 1776. It is a

national symbol of liberty and a monument to Jefferson as a statesman and author. American Romanticism: 1815-1865

8.The Age of American Romanticism generally referred to the fifty-year period from 1815 till

1865.

9.“Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” are today two of Washington Irving’s

best known stories.

10.James Fenimore Cooper created an enduring American mythic hero in his Leather-stocking

novels, writing on such subjects as the Revolution, the frontier, and the wilderness.

11.“Thanatoposis (meditation on death),”was a poem written by William Cullen Byrant, a

romantic poet in his passion for American wilderness and for a culturally independent America.

12.Transcendentalism, as a way of knowing (or epistemology), believes that individuals can

intuitively receive higher truths otherwise unavailable through common methods of knowing, thus transcending the limits of rationalism.

13.Ralph Waldo Emerson, the leading spokesman for Transcendentalism, is today regarded as the

“Father”of American literature. His famous essays include “Nature”, “The American Scholar”, “Self-reliance”, “The Over-Soul”, etc. “Self-Reliance”epitomizes Emerson’s practical philosophy and is most quoted. The idea of non-conformity—“Trust thyself”—is keeping with Emerson’s Puritan inheritance.

14.Henry David Thoreau is primarily remembered by two of his works: Walden (1854) and the

essay “Civil Disobedience” (1849). They were written as a result of two of his most extreme acts: that he went to live in a hut in the woods by the Walden Pond, and that he once refused

to pay tax to protest against the Mexican War and was imprisoned for it.

15.Literary historians believe that The Scarlet Letter was undoubtedly the first great American

novel. Hawthorne is not only connected with the Puritan heritages but is ambivalent towards it.

His truth is conveyed mainly through allegory and symbol.

16.Herman Melville’s Moby Dick tells the strange story of the possessed and implacable Captain

risking his life, those of his crew and his ship on the rough seas in search of a monstrous white whale.

17.Edgar Allan Poe is a critic, poet and short story writer. His “Ligeia”and “The Fall of the

House of Usher” are two famous Gothic tales. “The Raven” is one of his most famous poems.

18.Walt Whitman first published Leaves of Grass in 1855. In the poems we find a poet who is a

fervent advocate for equality and democracy, a poet celebrating the people in villages and cities of America, a poet in love with a Nature embodying the Over-soul, and a poet who expresses the pleasures of sex and the sexuality of the body. Technically speaking, Whitman’s poetry is “free verse”in that the lack of meter and rhyme is known as his major technical innovation. “Song of Myself”is the longest and one of the best in Whitman’s canon. “O Captain! My Captain!” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” were occasioned by President Abraham Lincoln’s tragic death and the subsequent nation-wide mourning.

19.Emily Dickinson once wrote in a poem: “This is my letter to the World/That never wrote to

Me.” In her poems, there is a spiritual and emotional intensity expressed in unique imagery.

Most of her poems were published after her death.

American Realism: 1865-1914

20.The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is Mark Twain’s master work, the one book from which

as Ernest Hemingway noted, “all modern American literature comes.”His other fictional works include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Gilded Age, The Innocents Abroad, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.

21.Henry James’fame rested largely upon his handling of his major fictional theme, “the

international theme”, which defines American characters in the European context and contrasts the two societies and cultural forces. The Wings of Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl are three of his best novels.

22.Most of William Dean Howell’s literary-aesthetic ideas are best elucidated in his Criticism

and Fiction.

23.Two of Stephen Crane’s well-known short novels are Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and The

Red Badge of Courage. Both are impressionistic studies of elemental fear, one associated with shame, the other with the failure of courage in military battle. Each portrays a young person facing a crisis in life.

24.The Epic of the Trilogy of the Wheat by Frank Norris consists of The Octopus, The Pit and

The Wolf.

25.Jack London’s wrote The Call of the Wild, The Sea Wolf, Martin Eden, etc..

26.Theodore Dreiser’s novels Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy are well known to readers

in China.

Modernism: 1914-1945

27.As the most popular modern poet, Robert Frost wrote poems that show, on the surface, a

simplicity of thought, but accommodates irony and ambiguity in such a way that readers eventually realize that there is a profound understanding of life beneath the surface simplicity.

His most anthologized poems include “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by the Woods on

a Snowy Evening”.

28.For Willa Cather, the world of pioneering and immigrants’ lives provided the materials for her

fiction. O Pioneers!and My Antonia are two representative novels exploring the pioneer experience.

29.Sherwood Anderson is primarily remembered as the author of Winesburg, Ohio. In this

collection of stories, Anderson depicted “grotesque”characters who are so handicapped by their ability to communicate that their behavior seems odd and their isolation becomes haunting.

30.The term “Lost Generation” was first used by Gertrude Stein, one of the American expatriate

writers who stayed in Europe before and after World War I. She also said, “America is my country and Paris is my hometown and it is as it has come to be.”

31.Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” has been regarded as a classic specimen of Imagist

poetry. He defined Imagism as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”

32.Yoknapatawpha Saga refers to a series of fictions written by William Faulkner. His The Sound

and the Fury used “stream of consciousness” in which the story was told through the thoughts of characters. Other major works include As I Lay Dying, Light in August and Absalom, Absalom. His most anthologize short story A Rose for Emily compels the readers to piece together the fragments in order to find out why Emily is the way she is.

33.Ernest Hemingway is considered one of the finest stylists of the 20th century, although we

must add that his style is not just a matter of writing but also a way of living with courage when faced with problems in the modern world. His style is noted for its simplicity, but this stylistic simplicity best conveys the very complex emotions involved in Hemingway’s subject matters: tragedies of life, confrontation of reality, the devastations of war, etc. His major works include The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls.

34.F. Scott Fitzgerald is considered as the chronicler of the “roaring 20s”when American

society was marked by wild pursuit of material of wealth and political ignorance. His most important novel The Great Gatsby is a complex study of the American dream—a romantic materialism.

35.T .S Eliot was the dominant figure in poetry and in criticism from the end of World War I till

the end of World War II .His “The Waste Land”echoed the feeling of hopelessness the Western world experienced after World War I as it defined the post-war era as a dispiritualized desert.

36.Wallace Stevens’s poetry predicated on the theme that reality is an integration of imagination

and the external world. His most anthologized poems include “Anecdote of the Jar” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”“Snow Man”“The Idea of Order at Key West”

37.“The Red Wheelbarrow”, one of the shortest serious poems by William Carlos Williams,

exemplifies the hard, stark, controlled quality of his poetry. The poet avoided ideas in order to highlight images or things. He advocated “No ideas but in things.”

The Red Wheelbarrow

So much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

38.In the early 1920s, African American writers, painters, photographers, musicians congregated

in New York City, started magazines, published anthologies, and promoted the creative work of the “New Negro.” Their work transformed Harlem, an African American neighborhood in New York, into an intellectual and cultural center. This movement is known as the “Harlem Renaissance.”

https://www.360docs.net/doc/7a1953846.html,ngston Hughes, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston were representative

writers of Harlem Renaissance.

American Literature Diversified: From 1945 to the 21st Century

40.Eugene O’Neill was America’s first dramatist of world stature. His major works include The

Emperor Jones, Beyond the Horizon, The Hairy Ape and Desire Under the Elms.

41.Tennessee Williams was the most important dramatist that emerged after World War II. His

best-known plays include The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire.

42.Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, produced in 1949, won him a Pulitzer Prize and a

Critic’s Circle Award. In 1953 his controversial play The Crucible appeared. The play dramatizes the 17th century witch trials in Salem, but it actually draws a parallel to the anti-Red (or anti-comm unism) “witch hunts” of McCarthyism of the 1950s.

43.Invisible Man was Ralph Ellison’s epic-scope novel, which portrayed the invisible man—the

unnamed African American protagonist/narrator. Ellison admits in the “introduction” that the invisible man is a desc endant of the “underground man” of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground.

44.James Baldwin is a brilliant fiction writer and essayist. His best-known novel is Go Tell It on

the Mountain, published in 1953. What is impressive about this novel is how its prose takes on the rhythm and resonance of the Bible.

45.Flannery O’Conno r is a Southern writer in the sense that she uses all her materials, Southern

localism included, to build a moral language with which she conveys her religious vision. In style and in substance, the vision is expressed in a terrifying and comical violence, so much so that readers may sometimes lose sight of the intended moral purpose of her fictive violence.

Her best-known works include Wise Blood, “Good Country People”and “A Good Man is

Ha rd to Find”.

46.Eudora Welty’s command of the short story as an art form makes her a master. She dramatizes

something out of the seeming nothingness of human situations with an insightful feminine sensitivity. “A Memory” and “Petrified Man” are two of her bes t-known short stories.

47.Saul Bellow was a leading novelist in post –World War II America. He won the Noble Prize

in Literature in 1976. His earlier works include Dangling Man (1944), a comic and mordant existentialist tale set in wartime America. Henderson the Rain King concerns an American millionaire who pursues a mythic search for spiritual power in Africa and becomes a rainmaker and heir to a throne. In Mr. Sammler’s Planet, reveals the inner process of a Holocaust survivor who wonders about the Earth’s future.

48.Bernard Malamud, like Bellow, creates the American Jew as a symbol of the modern man’s

struggle. His best-known novel The Assistant tells a story of conversion. Frank Alpine, who was brought up in a Catholic orphanage on the West coast, comes to New York where, initially, he commits a crime but gradually struggles out of evil into good and becomes a Jew.

49.after his The Catcher in the Rye won critical acclaim and attracted almost a cult following,

later said: “I enjoyed a small part of it [the popular success], but most of it I found hectic and professionally and personally demoralizing.”The main value of this novel may have to do with the mood of anxiety it creates, an anxiety that bespeaks of an age where innocence lost means innocence not to be regained. In the novel, Holden’s extended monologue is fittingly delivered in his defiant, ungrammatical and cryptic speech.

50.Joseph Heller’s experience as a B-25 wing bombardier during World War II provided the

inspiration for Catch-22, an anti-war novel that is built on the alternating play of humor and horror and has come to exemplify “black humor’. The phrase, “Catch-22”, is today an idiomatic expression in the English language, meaning a self-contradictory dilemma. This is how the phrase begins: Out of fear for flying, Yossarian visits Doctor Daneeka, pleading him to ground him on the basis of insanity. Daneeka tells Yossarian that according to army regulation Catch-22, insane men who ask to be grounded must prove themselves sane through

a concern for personal safety. Truly insane people are those who readily agree to fly more

missions. The only way to be grounded it to ask for it. But, asking to be grounded demonstrates sanity. Thus, sane or insane, you have to fly.

51.Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, makes great contribution to

American and world literature in that she has fictionalized a territory in which black people are not marginal anomalies but a genuine human society. Some of her most outstanding novels include The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby and and Beloved.

52.John Updike wrote a tetralogy od “Rabbit”: Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit

at Rest. Each book in the sequence is about an era: the 1950s, the 1960s, the late 1970s, and the 1990s.