A brief introduction to American literature

一、单选

Romanticism: (1)early. (2)Late: §1 novelists. §2 Transcendentalism: (p90).Thoreau was another renowned New England Transcendentalist. His great Transcendentalist work is Walden.

(p80)Emerson---the leader of New England Transcendentalism. He was widely known and admired as a poet, philosopher, public lecture, and essayist of his day, whose essays were the most important work in English prose produced in the nineteenth century. He formed the Transcendentalist club to discuss matters of interest to the life of the nation as a whole and found the Transcendentalist journal, The Dial. In 1831 Emerson published his epoch-making book Nature, which is generally regarded as the Bible of New England Transcendentalism.

§3 Poets:

(p65)Emily Dickinson (romantic poets)（辨析题第一题）Dickinson’s view and Theme(五大主题)

1、By far the largest portion of Dickinson’s poetry concerns death and immortality.

“My life closed twice before its close.”

“Because I could not stop for death,”

“As imperceptibly as grief”

2、immortality

“I heard a fly buzz when I died.”

3、Dickinson’s nature poems are also great in number and rich in matter. Nature phenomena, changes of seasons, heavenly bodies, animals, birds and insects, flowers of various kinds, and many other subjects related to nature find their way into her poetry.

4、Her love poems were original.

5、ethics.

Features of Dickinson’s poems

In addition to such characteristics as the abundant use of dashes, and irregular and often idiosyncratic punctuation and capitalization, her mode of expression is characterized by cleat-cut and delicately original imagery, precise diction, and fragmentary and enigmatic metrical pattern. Similarities and differences between Whitman and Dickinson:

Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are considered by many to be the greatest and most original poets. Both of them were independent American poets. Both extolled an emergent America, it’ expansion, its individualism and its Americanness, but in their different ways. Whitman seemed to keep his eye on society at large while Dickinson explored the inner life of the individual. In technical terms, both added to the literary independence of the new nation by breaking free of the convention of the iambic pentameter (抑扬格五音部) and exhibiting a freedom in form unknown before, also in different ways. Whitman’s form is noted for its

endless, all-inclusive catalogs, whereas Dickinson’s is characterized by its concise, direct and simple diction and syntax.

(p118)Moby Dick的象征意义：

Moby Dick is regarded as one of the world classic. The story illustrates Melville’s black view that the world is Godless and purposeless. Man lives a meaningless and futile life. Man must place himself at the mercy of nature. He can not try to find power over nature. If he does so as Ahab does, he is doomed. (p29)Romanticism

The rapid growth of population, the western expansion and the spread of industrialism produced something of an economic boom and with it a tremendous sense of optimism and hope among the people along with the European Romantic movement.

Romanticism as a literary movement swept through western Europe, culminate in England from 1748 to 1832, and came to American early in the 19th century. Yet Romanticism shared certain general characteristic:

Standing in reaction against the neoclassical who stressed formality, order, and authority, the romantic emphasized freedom and individualism, believing that imagination and emotion were formally superior to rules and reason.(自由，个性)

The romantic was full of moral enthusiasm, and believing ideality and elevation was a reality that was more lofting and realistic than the evidence of the substantial things (material reality).(高于现实)

The romantic assumed that the natural world is source of goodness and man’s societies a source of corruption. Thus he showed a profound admiration and love for nature, believing the beauty and perfection of nature could produce in him an unspeakable joy and exaltation.(大自然) The romantic had a persistent interest in the medieval literature, such as epics, ballads, and other forms of folk literature, in which he formed inspiration of various kinds.(崇尚民族体裁)

Romantic also laid emphasis on mystery and the supernatural as opposed to common sense.

American Romanticism exhibited from the very outset distinct features of its own:

First, American romantic authors were quite responsive to the stimulus which American experience offered. Their subjects were often the national ideals of individualism and democracy, history, and frontier life of the new nation.

Secondly puritan influence over American romantics was conspicuously noticeable. One of its manifestations is the fact that American romantic authors tended more to moralize than their European brothers.

(p89) Transcendentalism

New England Transcendentalism was the summit phase of American Romanticism. Its features can be summarized as follows:

First, the Transcendentalists placed emphasis on spirit, or Oversoul, as the most important thing in the universe.

Secondly, Transcendentalists stressed the importance of the individual. Thirdly, the Transcendentalists offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the spirit.

Realism

(p130)Mark Twain的特点：

Mark Twain’s style is his humor, his theories of localism in American fiction, and his use of colloquial speech.

Henry James(问答题第一题)

Howell

Naturalism

(p196)Theodore Dreiser

Theodore Dreiser was a prolific writer and he was one of the most significant of American naturalist. He learned to regard man as merely an animal driven by greed and lust in a struggle for existence in which only the “fittest”, the most ruthless, survive. To him, the world is a machine and man is only its mechanism, who has no control over his destiny; and human tragedy results from the collision between man’s biological needs and society’s ruthless manipulation. Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)’s first two novels, Sister Carrie (1900) and Jennie Gerhardt. In 1912 Dreiser published The Financeer, the first of his “Cowperwood” trilogy, the other two of which are The Titan and the Stoic, which published posthumously in 1947.

Dreiser’s works are mainly concerned with the tragic nature of the human condition by depicting the coarse, vulgar, cruel, and terrible aspects of life like sex and crime.

In terms of style, Dreiser has sometimes been censured for his clumsy syntax, deficient characterization, and inept and dull prose.

Naturalism 的含义（问答题第二题）

Modernism

(p282)Ernest Hemingway’s typical hero is one who, wounded but strong, enjoys the pleasures of life (sex, alcohol, sport) in face of ruin and death and maintains, through some notion of a code, an ideal of himself. Hemingway’s point of view was shaped by his experience as a young man in The First World War, and his near death on the battle field. Many of his stories dealt with war or injury, and his exploration of courage took many forms. He wrote about courage as “an instinctive mov ement toward or away from the center of violence, with self-preservation and

self-respect the mixed motives.” He also wrote about courage with which men face the tragedies with life that can never be remedied.

(p252)Imagism

Imagism was a poetic movement in England an the U.S from 1909 to 1917. It rose a protest against the conventional Victorian poetry that was loaded with abstraction, windy rhetoric, and moralization. The movement with Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell as its leading spokesman, strove for a freedom in the selection of subject matter, clarity or images, exact unfrilled language, and musical rhythm. Imagism as a movement flourished only briefly, but had considerable influence on the development of form and subject matter in modern poetry. Poets like

T.S.Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and E.E.Cummings, recognizing strengths in imagist philosophies, made poems of the Imagist type

二、辨析

(p65)Emily Dickson

(p253)Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound was a great poet, critic, and translator, who contributed a lot to open the way to modern poetry. To him life was sordid personal crushing oppression, and culture produced nothing but “intangible bondage.” His mature poetry became a diagnosis of culture worth. Pound’s poetry represents a wide diversity of f orms. The Cantos is a long poem written in sections over a period of over thirty years. The cantos present a world of cheerlessness and somberness. Hug Selwyn Mauberley is one of Pound’s best poems. It summarized Pound’s literary career in London from 1980 to 1920, and expressed Pound’s disillusionment (醒悟语) with the war and England.

(p80)Emerson

(p60)Whitman

Walt Whitman was one of the late romantic poets others are Dickinson and Poe.

His masterpiece is Leaves of Grass Whitman was a daring experimentalist. He broke the freedom of the traditional iambic pentameter and wrote free verse. One of the major principles of Whitman’s technique is parallelism or a rhythm of thought in which the line, not the conventional foot, as the rhythmical unit. Another principle

is phonetic recurrence. Contemporary American poetry, whatever school or form, bears witness to his great influence. His innovations in diction and versification, his frankness about sex, his inclusion of the common place and the ugly and his censure of the weaknesses of the American democratic practice have paved his way to a share of immortality in American literature.

三、问答

1、(p151)Henry James

Henry James (1843-1916) was a prolific American writer of realism. His creative life can be divided into three periods.

In the first period he produced a number of novels. Theses novels reveal James’ fascination with the international theme, that is, American innocence in contrast with European sophistication.

In the second period James wrote tales of subtle studies of international relationship.

In James final phase of creativity, he revived his international theme and wrote.

Henry James wrote on a limited range of themes but with subtlety and charm. He frequently depicts the clash of American inexperience and European sophistication and he always combine the international theme with other themes.

Henry James is a psychological realist. His fiction is likely life. In his famous essay “The Art of Fiction”, he state that “The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.” He used the trick of making his characters reveal themselves with minimal intervention of the author. The use of the restricted point of view makes his plots hard to follow but exciting. Therefore, his work is very demanding to the reader.

Henry James is a great critic. His immense contribution to literary criticism is that he developed gradually from early evaluation in terms of still moral standers to inductive inquiry, flexibility and a subtle perception of aesthetic nuances.

James’ major works include Roderick Hudson, The American, The Portrait of a Lady, etc.

2、(p175,p191)Naturalism

Naturalists belief that the destiny of human beings, like the biological fate of other creatures, is so much determined by factors beyond the control of individual will or choice that ethical judgement or moral comment by author is irrelevant or impertinent.

Naturalism was a further extention of realism privileged to explore every aspect of life, particularly those earlier considered unmentionable. Naturalism should deal with the exceptional, the grotesque, the violent,

and that naturalism was in fact romanticism set in the milieu of actual social conditions.

3、(p117)Herman Melville

Melville (1819-1891) was an American novelist of late romantic period. He held a black view of the world. In relation to his black view is Melville’s theme of alienation. Another theme Melville employed and shared with Cooper and Haw thorne is “rejection and quest”. Melville managed to achieve the effect of ambiguity through employing the technique of multiple view in his narratives. His masterpiece is Moby Dick.

4、(p128)Mark Twain

Mark Twain (1835-1910) was an American novelist of realism. His nostalgic account of his past personal experience, especially his reminiscence of boyhood freedom and independence, which were mostly related to the Mississippi and the West, became his major theme. By quoting from his own experience, Mark Twain managed to transform into art the finest elements of Western culture.

Mark Twain was a social critic and he was a great artist also. He contributed to the development of realism and the American literature as a whole was through his humor, his theories of localism in American fiction and his use of colloquial speech.

Mark Twain started off as a teller of tall tales and local colorist. He said: “the novelist lays before you the ways and speech and life of a few people grouped in a certain place-his own place-and that is one book. In time, he and his brethren will report you the life and the people of the whole nation.”

Mark Twain was filled with loathing of the wordy, flowery eloquence and sentimentality of romanticism. Instead, he developed a clear, vigorous colloquial style, the essence of which lies in the will to fuse form and function.

Mark Twain’s masterpieces are The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Gilded Age, etc.

四、例文阅读（要求：说明出处、作者、大意或所要表达的内容）

1、（p85）第一自然段：This paragraph is expert from Nature. The author is Emerson. It express the ideal of Transcendentalism.

2、(256)A Pact 所要表达的是批判与继承（critic and succeeding）

In A Station Of The Metro 采用的修辞方法是暗喻（metaphor）

The author is Pound.