American literature

American literatureChapter1 American Romantic PeriodThe romantic period stretches from the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War.It started with Washington Irving's <The Sketch Book> and ended with Whitman's <Leaves of Grass>, also called 'the American Renaissance'.In most of the American writings in the period there was a new emphsis upon the imaginative and emotional qualities of literature. The Americans also placed an increasing emphasis on the free expression of emotions and displayed an increasing attention to the psychic states of their characters. Heroes and heroines exhibited extremes of sensitivity and excitement. The strong tendency to exalt the individual and the common man was almost a national religion in America.They have their own characteristics. Pioneering into the West. The desire for an escape from society and a return to nature became a permanent convention of American literature.The American Puritanism influences the American moral values. One of the manifestations is the fact that American romatic writers tended more to moralize than their English and European counterparts.A preoccupation with the Calvinistic view of original sin and the mystery of evil marked the works of Howthorne& Melville and a host of lesser writers.Free expression of emotion, escapes from society, and return to nature New England Transcendentalism.新英格兰的超验主义运动Transcendentalism has been defined philosophically as “ the recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or of attaining knowledge transcending the reach of the senses.”And it include the idea that nature is ennobling and the idea that the individual is divine and, therefore ,self-reliant.主要作家Washington Irving - father of the American short stories, the American Goldsmith for his literary craftsmanship,Perfected the best classic style that American literature ever producedHis taste was essentially conservative. He likes the past & a dream-like world.First novel <A History of New York>;<The Sketch Book> ;<Rip Van Winkle> <The Legend of Sleepy Hollow> contains German folk tales. Ralph Waldo Emerson - the spokesman of New England Transcendentalismmovement; an essayist<Essays>Emerson Transcendentalism is actually a philosophical school which absorbed some ideological concerns of American Puritanism and European Romanticism, with its focus on the intuitive knowledge of human beings to grasp the absolute in the universe and the divinity of man. He put forward his philosophy of the over-soul, the importance of the Individual, and Nature. He rejected both the formal religion of the churches and the Deistic philosophy; instead he based his religion on an intuitive belief in an ultimate unity, which he called the “over-soul”. Emerson believed that there should be an emotional communication between an individual soul and the universal “over-soul”,since the over-soul is an all pervading power from which all things come from and of which all are a part. Emerson‟s remarkable image of “a transparent eyeball‟ marks a paradoxical state of being, in which one is merged into nature, the over-soul,while ar the same time retaining a unique perception of the experience. Emerson is affirmative about man‟s intuitive knowledge, with which a man can trust himself to decide what is right and to act accordingly. The ideal individual should be a self-reliant man. “Trust yourself” he wrote in <Self-reliance>, by which he means to convince people that the possibilities for man to develop and improve himself are infinite. Emerson‟s nature is emblematic of the spiritual world, alive with God‟s oeverwhelming presence;hence, it exercises a healthy and restorative influence on human mind. “Go back to nature, sink yourself back into its influence ang you‟ll become spiritually whole again.” By employing nature as a big symbol of Spirit, or God, or over-soul, Emerson has brought the Puritan legacy of symbolism to its perfection..Emerson‟s essays often have a casual style, for most of them were derived from his journals or lectures. They are usually characterized by a series of short, declarative sentences, which are not quite logically connected but will flower out into illustrative statements of truth and thoughts. Emerson‟s philosophical discussion is sometimes difficult to understand but he uses comparisons and metaphors to make the general idea of his work clearly expressed.<The American Scholar>show the world a distinctive American stytle., <Self - Reliance>, <The Over-Soul><The Poet> a reflection upon the aesthetic problems in terms of the present state of literature in America<Experience> a discussion about the conflict between idealism and ordinary lifeAmerican Puritanism, European Romanticism, intuitive knowledge, over-soul, individual, nature<Nature> is regarded as the Bible of New England TranscendentalismNathaniel HawthorneInterior of the heartHawthorne‟s literary world turns out to be a most diturbed,tormented and problematical one possible to imagine. …There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole life, but circumstances may rouse it to activity.‟A piece of literary work should “show how we are all wronged and wrongers, and avenge one another.”Hawthorne discusses sin and evil in his works.Hawthorne was nor a Puritan himself, but he had Puritan ancestors who played an important role in his life and works. He believed that “the wrong doing of one generation lives into the successive ones,” and often wondered if he might have inherited some of their guilt.This sensibility led to his understanding of evil being at the very core of human life, which is typical of the Calvinistic belief that human beings are basically depraved and corupted, hence, they should obey God to atone for their sins. In many of Hawthorne‟s stories and novels, the Puritan concept of life is condemned. Hawthorne is attracted in every way to the Puritan world, even though he condemns its less humane manifestations. On the one hand, it provides him with a subject, and on the other, with the Puritan world or society as a historical background, he discusses some of the most important issues that concern the moral life of man and human history.As a man of literary crafsmanship, Hawthorne is extraordinary. The structure and the form of his writings are always carefully worked out to cater for the thematic concern. With his special interest in the psychological aspect of human beings, there isn‟t much action, or physical movement going on in his works and he is good at exporing the complexity of human psychology. So his drama is full of mental activies. Thought people action and grows organically out of the interaction of the characters, as we can find in the <The Scarlet Letter>. Hawthorne is also a greater allegorist and almost every story can be read allegorically, as is the case in <Young Goodman Brown>. Whereas allegory is used to hold fasr against the crushing blows of reality, the symbol serves as a weapon to attack and penetrate it. Hawthorne is a master of symbolism, which he took from the Puritan tradition and bequeathed to American literature in a revivified form.<Mosses from an Old Manse>,<The Snow-Image ang Other Twice-Told Tales> best demonstrate Hawthorne‟s early obession with the moral and psychological consequences of pride, selfishness,and secret guilt that manifest themselves in human beings.<The Scarlet Letter> the best of his works<The Blithedale Romance><The Marble Faun><The Minister‟s Black Veil><The Birthmark><Young Goodman Brown> one of Hawthorne‟s most profound talesWalt WhitmanOpenness, freedom, individualismI - me, my nation (society),Free verse poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme A looser and more open-ended syntactical structure is frequently favored. Lines and sentences of different lengths are left lying side by side just as things are, undisturbed and separate. There are few compound sentences to draw objects and experiences into a system of hierarchy. By means of “free verse ,” Whitman believed, he has turned the poem into an open field, an area of vital possibility where the reader can follow his own imagination to play. As a poet , Whitman can be conversational and casual, in the fluid, expansive, and unstructured stuyle of talking, like one of the ordinary men. However, there is still a strong sense of the poems being rhythimical. Rather than giving a description of those conrete things, Whitman catalogues them. These details in the catalogue are not given as a separate event, but as one phase in the movement of feeling. Different things would mean a different wave of feeling. Parallelism and phonetic recurrence at the beginnig of the lines also contribute to the musicality o f his poems.Contrary to the rhetoric of traditional poetry, Whitman‟s is relatively simple and evern rather crude. Most of the pictures he painted with words are honest, undistorted images of different aspects of America of the day. Unifying images of the body, the crowd, the sexuality are pervasive in his poems. The particularity about these imagesis that they are unconventional in the way they break dowm the social division based on religion, gender, class, and race. One of the most often-used methods in Whitman‟s poem is to make colors and images fleet past the mind‟s eye of the reader. This kaleidoscope was rather laughed at when it made its first appearance, but its effectiveness was acknowledged before long. Another characteristic in Whitman‟s language is his strong tendency to use oral English, which has a lot to do with his early career as a newspaperman and the Americans‟ traditional love for orations and orators. Whitman‟s vocabulary is amazing. He would use powerful, colorful, as well as rarely-used words, words of foreign origin and sometimes even wrong words.He was attacked in his lifetime for his offensive subject matter of sexuality and for his unconventional style, but Walt Whitman has proved a great figure in the literary history of the United States because he embodies a new ideal, a new world, a newlife-style. Love for Whitman and his poetry is bound to in crease to an unprecedented height.<Leaves of Grass >uniquely poetic embodiment of American democratic ideals as written in the founding documents of both the Revolutionary War in the United States and the Civil War. Poet poem<There Was a Child Went Forth> how a child is greatly influenced by his growing environments<Cavalry Crossing a Ford> a scene of the American Civil War, all the movements described in this picture are frozen.<Song of Myself> Whitman is a man bubbling with energy and laden with ideas, spontaneous expression of his original ideasHerman Melville - a master of allegory and symbolism, like HawthorneIn the early works, Herman Melville is more enthusiastic about setting out on a ques for the meaning of the universe,hence they are more metaphysical and the main characters are ardent and self-dramatizing “ I ,” defying God, as the best reflected in …M0by-Dick‟. In the late works, Melville becomes more reconciled with the world of man, in which, he admits, one must live by the rules. However , the purpose of Melcille‟s fictional tales, exotic or philosophical, is to penetrate as deeply as possible into the metaphysical, theological, moral, psychological, and social truths of huamn exitence.<Moby-Dick> the first American prose epic It is a tragic epic.It turns out to be a symbolic voyage of the mind in quest of the truth and knowledge of the universe, a spiritual exploration into man‟s deep reality and psychology. The white whale, Moby Dick, symbolizes nature for Melville, for it is complex, unfathomable, malingnant, and beautiful as well. For th character Ahab, however, the whale represents only evil. Moby Dick is like a wall, hiding some unknown, mysterious things behind. Ahab wills the whole crew on the Pequod to join him in the pursuit of the big whale so as to pierce the wall, to root out the evil, but only to be destoryed by evil, in this case, by his own consuming desire, his madness.Ishmael both as a character and a narrator, the captain, For the author, as well as the reader and Ishmael, Moby Dick is still a mystery, an ultimate mystery of the universe, inscrutable and ambivalent, and the voyage of the mind will forever remain a search, not a discovery, of the truth.Ahab is a monomaniacChapter2 Realistic periodThe period ranging from 1865 to 1914 has been referred to as the Age of Realism in the literary history of the United States. It is a movement or tendency that dominated the spirit of American literature, especially American fiction, from the1850s onwards.Mark Taind “The Gilded Age”, the poor poorer and the rich richer, people's attention was now directed to the interesting features of everyday existence . picture the pioneers of the Far West, the new immigrants and the struggles of the working classesLocal colorismThe “reality” of life many works introduced industrial workers and farmers, ambitious businessmen and vagrants, prostitutes and unheroic soldiers. They approached the harsh realities and pressures in the Post-Civil War society either by a comprehensive picture of modern life in its various occupations, class stratifications and manners, or by a psychological exploration of man‟s subconsciousness.The impact of Darwin‟s evolutionary theory social Darwinism, the influence of the 19th century French literature on the American naturalism American naturalism: bestiality, especially as an explanation of sexual desire Artistically naturalistic writings are usually unpolished in language, lacking in academic skills and unwieldy in structure. Philosophicallu the real and true, beyond man's control In a world, naturalism is evolved from realism when the author‟s tone in writing becomes less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and morepessismistic. It is no more than a different philosophical approach to reality, or to human existence.Mark Twain - the true father of American literatureLocal colorist, vernacular, simple sentence, <The Gilded Age> Written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, the novel explored the scrupulous individualism in a world of fantastic speculation and unstable values. Twain‟s dark view of the society become more self-evident in his later works.3 boyhood books <Life on the Mississippi>,;<The Adventures of Tom Sawyer>,<Adventures of Huckleberry Finn>the former is for boys about their particular horrors and joys, the latter is for adults, describing a journey down the Mississippi undertaken by two fugitives, Huck and Jim.Their episodic set of encounters presents a sample of the small-town world of America and a survey of the social world from the bank of the river that runs through the heart of the country. A record of a vanished way of life in the pre-Civil War Mississippi valley and it has moved millions of people of different ages and conditions all over the world; and the books are noted for their unpretentious, colloquial yet poetic style, their wide-ranging humor, and their universally shared dream of perfect innocence and freedom. The word is not grand, pompous, but simple, direct, lucid, and faithful to the colloquial speech. This unpretentious style of colloquialism is best described as “vernacular”.… Huckleberry Finn‟ Hemingway “all modern American literature comes ”Speaking in vernacular, a wild and uneducated Huck, running away from civilization for his freedom, is vividly brought to life. The great strength of the book also comes from the shape given to it by the course of the raft‟s journey down the Mississippi as Huck and Jim seek their different kinds of freedom. Twain, who knew the river intimately, use it here both realistically and symbolically. The climax arises with Huck‟s inner struggle on the Mississippi, when Huck is polarized the two opposing forces between his heart and his head, between his affection for Jim and the laws of the society against those who help slaves escape. Huck‟s fianl decision- to follow his own good-hearted moral impulse rather than conventional village morality-amounts to a vindication of what Mark Twain called 'the damned human race' damned for its comfortable hypocrisies, its thoroughgoing dishonesties, and its pervasive cruelties.<Adventures of Huckleberry Finn> Huck's inner conflict about whether or not he should write a letter to tell Miss Watson where Jim is.Henry James the son of the theological writer Henry James the brother of the distinguished philosopher and psychologist William James, who made a great contribution to the theory of the stream-of-consciousness technique.international theme(the literary carrer::the first period and the last period), psychological realist emphasis on psychology and on the human consciousnessthat is why James is generally regarded as the forerunner of the 20th-century “stream-of-consciousness”Stream of consciousness, interior monologue, free association<Daisy Miller> brought James the international fame for the first time a novella about a young Amerian girl who gets “killed” by the winter in Romethe narrator is an expatriated American, named Winterbourne.Daisy is the most innocent girl. She becomes the American Girl in Europe, a celebrated cultural type who embodies the spirit of the New World. However, innocence, a keynote of her character, turns out to be an admiring but a dangerous quality and her defianceof social taboos in the Old World finally bring her to a disasterin the clash between two different cultures. James‟s sympathy for Daisy could be easily felt when we think of a tender flower crushed by the harsh winter in Rome. <The Portrait of A Lady> his masterpieceEmily Dickinson“the letter to the world”Based on her own experiences, her sorrows and joys. But wither her little lyrics Dickinson addresses those issues that concerns the whole human beings, which include religion, death, immortality, love, and nature. Her potiec idiom is noted for its laconic brevity, directness and plainness. Poems are short. Many of them are centered on a single image or symbol and focused on one subject matter. Simplicity. Vatiety. Subtlety. RichnessDickinson‟s poetry is unique and unconventional in its own way. No titles a paticular stress pattern( dashes uesd as a musical device to create cadence and captial letters for emphasis) the form likes the hymns in community churches, familiar, communal, and irregular.<This is my letter to the World> express Dickinson's anxiety about her communication with the outside world.<I heard a Fly buzz - when I died - > description of a moment of death the masterpiece religious subjectLove subject <if you were coming in the Fall>Nature subject her acute observation, her concern for precise details and her interest in nature are pervasive, from sketches of flowers, insects, birds, to the sunset, the fully detailed summer storms, the changes of seasons; from keen perception to witty analysis.<I like to see it lap the Miles> Dickinson makes the train part of nature by animalizing it, like a horse.<Because I could not stop for Death - > personify death and immortality so as to make her message strongly feltTheodore Dreiser - America's literary naturalistsCase history including everything Determinism (heredity biological & environment), survival of the fittest, the jungle law<Trilogy of Desire> - <The Financier>, <The Titan>, <The Stoic><Sister Carrie> 'who shall cast the first stone?' Dreiser was launching himself upon a long career that would ultimately make him one of the most signigicant American writers of the school later known as literary natualism. Dreiser set himself to project the Americna values for what he had found them to be –materialistic to the core. Living in such a society with such a value system, the human individual is obsessed with a never-ending, yet meaningless search for statisfaction of his desire. One of the desires is for money which was a motivating purpose of life in the United States in the 19th century. Dreiser never forgot to imply that these human desires in life could hardly be defined. They are like a powerful “magnetism” governing human existence and reducing human beings to nothing. So like all naturalists he was restrained from finding a solution to the social problems that appeared in his novels and accordingly almost all his works have tragic endings.As a genre, naturalism emphasized heredity and environment as important deterministic forces shaping individualized characters who were presented in special and detailed circumstances. At bottom, life was shown to be ironic, even tragic. Dreiser described the life as “ a welter of inscrutable forces” “victim of forces over which he has no control”. To him , life is “so bad, so strange, so mysterious and so inexplicable.”The effect of Darwinist idea of “ survival of the fittest” was shattering. It is not surprising to find in Dreiser‟s fiction a world of jugle, where “kill or be killed”.Chapter 3 The modern periodThe 20th century began with a strong sense of social breakdown. Two world wars.a transformation from order to disorder The Great Economic Depression in the 1930sSeize the day, enjoy the present There was a decline in moral standard and the first few decades of the 20th century was best described as a spiritual wasteland. The censor of a great civilizaton being destroyed or destroying itself, social breakdown, and individual powerlessness and hopelessness became part of the American experience as a result of the First World War, with resulting feelings of fear, loss, disorientation and disillusionment.Apart from Darwinism, which was still a big influence over the writers of this period, the two thinkers whose ideas had the greatest impact on the period were the German Karl Marx and the Austrian Sigmund Freud. American psychologist William James “stream of consciousness”Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung “collective unconscious”and “archetypal symbol”The second American Renaissance, the expatriate movement. American writer, Gertrude Stein, an expatriate, “ the Lost Generation”. Poet ,Allen Ginsberg, whose <Howl> became the manifesto of the Beat MovementA break with the past, discontinuity and fragmentationpsychoanalysisImagist movement, Jazz AgeEzra Pound - a leading spokesman of the 'Imagist Movement'<Confucius><Shih-Ching>,which have not only cast light on Pound‟s affinity to the Chinese and his strenuous effort in the study of Oriental literature, but also offered us a clue to the understanding of his poetry and literary theory. From the analysis of theChinese ideogram Pound learned to anchor his poetic language in concrete, perceputal reality, and to organize images into larger patterns through juxtaposition..The Imagist Movement flourished from 1909 to 1917 and involved quite a number of British and American writers and poets. This is a movement that advanced modernism in arts which concentrated on reforming the medium of poetry as opposed to Romnticism, especially Tennyson‟s wordiness and high-flown language in poetry. As one of the leaders of the imagist, Pound endorsed the group‟s three main principles, which include direct treatment of poetic subjects, elimination of merely ornamental or superfluous words, and rhythmical composition in the sequence of the musical phrase rather than in the sequence of a metronome. Pound wrote in 1914, “ The point of Imagism is that it does not use images as ornaments. The image itself is the speech. The image is the world beyond formulated language .” . obviously the primary Imagist objective is to advoid and moralizing, to stick closely to the object or experience being described, and to move from explicit generation<The Cantos><In a Station of the Metro> a typical example of the Imagist ideas. Pound attempts to produce the emotion he felt when he walked down into a Paris subway station and suddenly saw a number of faces in the dim light. To capture the emotions, Pound uses the image of petals on wet, black boughs.<The River - Merchant's Wife: A Letter><A Pact> agreement with Whitman's free verseRobert Lee Frost - four times awarded Pulitzer Prize, pastoral life and sceneA serious poet a regional poet whose subject matters mainly based on the landscape and people in New England, he wrote many poems that investigate the basic themes of man‟s life in his long poetic career: the individual‟s relationships to himself, to his fellow-man, to his world, to his God. He learned from the traditional, especially the familiar conventions of nature poetry and of classical pastoral poetry, and made the colloquial New England speech into a poetic expression. A poem so conceived thus becomes a symbol or metaphor, a careful, loving exploration of reality, in Frost‟s version, “a momentary stay against confusion.”Many of his poems are drawn from the simple country life and the pastoral landscape that can be easily understood. Most of Frost‟s poems are simple in the way that they are dramatic monologues or dialogues, they are short and direct on the informational level, and they have simple diction. However, profound ideas are delievered under the disguise of the plainlanguage and the simple form, for what Frost did is to take symbols from the limited human world and the pastoral landscape to refer to the great world beyond the rustic scene. These thematic concerns include the terror and tragedy in nature, as well as its beauty, and the loneliness and poverty of the isolated huaman being. But first and foremost Frost is concerned with his love of life and his belief in a serenity that only come from working usefully, which he practiced himself throughout his life.<New Hamoshine> the first Pulitzer Prize <Collected Poems >< A Further Range > gathered the second and third Pulitzer Prize <A Witness Tree> include “The Gift Outright ”----he recited at President Kennedy‟s inauguration.<After Apple-Picking><The Road Not Taken> In this meditative poem, the speaker tells us how the courseof his life was determined when he came upon 2 roads that diverged in a wood. Forced to choose, “he took the one less traveled by , And that has made all the difference.”<Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening>Eugene O'Neill–the greatest playwright,the founder of the American drama, won the Pulitzer Prize four times the only dramatist ever to win a Nobel PrizeOf all the plays O‟Neill wrote, most of them are tragedies, dealing with the basic issues of human existence and predicament: life and death and reality,self and society, desire and frustration. O‟Neill‟s finall dramas became “transcendental”, in the way that the dramatization of man‟s effort in finding the secret of life results in a reconciliation with the tragic impossibility.<The Hairy Ape> This play concerns the problem of modern man‟s identity. Yank‟s senseof belonging nowhere, hence homelessness and rootlessness, is typical of the mood of isolation and alienation in the early 20th century in the United States and the whole world as well.<The Iceman Cometh><Long Day‟s Journey Into Night> autobiographically beyond its immediate subject, dedicated not only to the life of the American family,but also “to the life of man , to life itself”. As a product of hard-won art, its status likes a world classic and simultaneously marks the climax of O‟Neill‟s literary career and the coming of age of American drama.。