英美文学第六章

1、Part Six The American Literature between the two world wars (in the 1920s and 1930s ) Chapter I Historical Background of the 1920s The first half of the 19 century was American Renaissance, and then the decade of the 1920s, with a great number of great writers producing a voluminous amount of distin

2、guished literary works, can be termed as the second renaissance in the history of American literature. There are two important factors that make the 1920s different from the periods both preceding and following it: the First World War, and the sense of life being dislocated and fragmented which was

3、more keenly felt XI. in the firs t years of the 20 cen tury. The war was the bigges t eve nt that had a profound impact on the period The people went into the war with an unusual amount of enthusiasm, inspired by the ideal of making the world safe for democracy It proved, also, tremendously profitab

4、le; the United States made a great deal of money in the war and became, as a whole, a lot richer, so that there appeared an economic boom, a deceptive richness, when the war was over There was a feeling that there was money everywhere, and no one could-or bothered to foresee the crash to befall the

5、country in 1929 People became aware of a sudden jump in technology. All of a sudden automobiles and radios appeared which helped to widen the horizon of the people and increase their knowledge A social revolution was going on. Old moral codes were breaking down Whereas women were covered down to the

6、 ankles only a few years earlier, for example, girls now appeared on the scene in short skirts, wearing bobbed hair, smoking and drinking, and dancing wildly of the Jazz Age After the war there was a tremendous letdown because nothing had changed Excitement and enthusiasm subsided to make way for di

7、sillusionment It was as if the party was over and an anticlimax of discontentment and restlessness and disgust followed, as well expressed in Dos Passos? U S A It was also an era of great contempt for the law The Prohibition of alcohol outraged popular taste; bootleggers moved in to reap huge profit

8、s from illegal sales At the same time there was a general feeling among many who were living through it, like Fitzgerald, that this was a sad period; the dream had failed, and the country was building up economic troubles all along and heading direct to ward disas Meanwhile, the loss of faith, which

9、 began noticeably with Darwin ， s theories of evolution and was intensified by the development of modern science, con tin ued with a grea ter int ensi ty into t his cen tirry. By the end of the first decade, all forces seemed to be pulling apart There appeared a reality with no mythical center, with

10、 God expelled from the universe Modern science destroyed man， s ability to believe unquestioningly. Without faith man could no longer keep his feeling and thought whole; hence the sense of life being fragmented. And without faith man no longer felt secure and happy and hopeful in his world; hence th

11、e feeling of gloom and despair In short, people found themselves living in a spiritual wasteland, where life was a meaningless affair and man felt homeless and haunted by a sense of doom Thus, the 1920s was a peculiar period in which the postwar economic boom and the sense of spiritual disorientatio

12、n combined to produce a peculiar mood of the age The greatness of the literature of the decade lies in the fact that it managed to capture that mood and keep it on record for posterity. Chapter III Literary Trend between the Two World Wars American Modernism The word “modern means of the recent time

13、s , but when it is used in literature, it refers to the literature after 1914 or after World War I. in modern times, a great change took place in the world literature. Modern writers carried out many reforms in theme, form, etc. , and gained important achievements. Consequently, there appeared many

14、great writers and typical works of modernism in American literature, such as TSEliot and his The Waste Land, Ernest Hemingway and his The Sun Also Rises, William Faulkner and his The Sound and the Fury. World War I broke through people， s convention and made people， s minds more active than ever bef

15、ore They gradually freed themselves from the traditional concepts of culture and morality, and created the literary art of moder ni sm. Un like Roma nticism or Naturalism, moder nism does not refer to any specific literary group or writing style. Instead, it includes all the writings after World War

16、 I, which are characterized as a strong and conscious break with traditional forms and techniques of expression Imagism, the Lost Generation, the St:ream of Consciousness name a few, are all in eluded in the in elusive moder ni sm Chapter IV The Coming of the Image The new age demanded proper litera

17、ry expression Between 1912 and 1922 there came a great poetry boom in which about 1000 poets published In deed, to express the moder n spirit, the sense of fragmentation and dislocation was the aim of quite a few modern literary movements, of which Imagism was one It came as a reaction to the tradit

18、ional English poetics with its iambic pentameter But it served to meet the n eed of express ing the temper of the age Nobody put forward the point more convincingly t han the first Imagist theorist， the English writer T E Hulme Hui me suggests that modern art deals with expression and com muni cati

19、on of mome nt ary phases in the poe t mind Poe tic t ech niq ues, he goes on to state, should become subtie eno ugh to record exactly the momentary impressions The key word here is mome nt ary The mos t effec tive means to express these momentary impression is through the use of one dominant image “

20、Each word must be an image seen ” The image is a represen tat ion of a physical object, and the reader is made to react to it. These became the basic principles on which the movement was launched The Imagist poem was the invention of a small group of English and American poets who came together in t

21、he first years of this century to work out some new way of writing poetry. The movement underwent three phases in its brief and yet immensely important history. The second phase was under the leadership of Ezra Pound, which turned out to be the most prolific and influential phase both in the short h

22、istory of Imagism but also in the history of American poetry. During this phase, something like an Imagist manifesto came out in 1912 which set forththree Imagist poetic principles: 1) Direct treatment of the “thing , whether subjective or objective; 2) To use absolutely no word tha/t does not cont

23、rib ute to the presen ta/tion; and 3) As regarding rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome In the history of American poetry, Imagism was only a transient phase of no longer than a decade It began in 1908 till 1917. No great poetry came out of the

24、 movement But the movement was important in a number of ways in the development of modern poetry. It was a rebellion against the traditional poetics which failed to reflect the new life of the new century. In fact, it is no exaggeration to state that the movement was a training school in which many

25、great poets learned their first lessons in the poetic art. Almost all major modern poets were associated with it and benefited from it in a significant way. Apart from Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, there are Wallace Stevens, T. S Eliot, Carl Sandburg, and Marianne Moore , to mention just a

26、 few American names Its literary theories and poetic forms have continued to exercise their influence on modern and contemporary poetry. It is this movement that helped to open the first pages of modern English and American poetry. Imagism, to a great extent, is a poetic revolution. Ezra Pound was i

27、ts pioneer and leader His masterpieceThe Cantoshas been called Pound， s intellectual diary since 1915 ” Containing a total of 117 poems, it is social history, an amalgam of heterogeneouscultures and languages, a poet， s attempt to impose, through art, order and meaning upon a chaotic and meaningless

28、 world The Cantoscan be notoriously difficuIt in some sections, but delightfully beautiful in others; it is, on the whole, not easily approachable Few have made serious study of the long poem; fewer, if anyone at all, have had the courage to declare that they have conquered Pound; and many seem to a

29、gree that the Cantos is a monumental failure Among them, Eliot was famous for his The Waste Land which reveals the spiritual crisis of postwar Europe It reads like the manifesto of the “Lost Generation and established Eliot s position as the leader not only of new American poetry, but of a whole gen

30、eration of writers later to be identified as aWaste Land paintersV like Hemingway and Faulkner In this poem, the fisher King sins against God, who then punishes him by making him sexually impotent. The disability of the King is reflected on his land, so that his kingdom becomes a waste land Hence El

31、iot had this title. Eliot was one of the first to sense the futility and fragment of modern life and see modern society at its most disgusting. Chapter V Three Prominent NovelistsFitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner The Lost Generation: Fitzgerald and Hemingway 1. F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) A. Hi

32、s Life Just as Mark Twain and William Howells grew up thinking that America would become the hope of the world and became very bitter old men in the end, so Fitzgerald and Hemingway as young people were very enthusiastic and excited about this new world they were living in but lived to realize event

33、ually that instead of success, it was all disaster For Fitzgerald, who lived in the midst of the roaring twenties and was part of it all 一driv ing fast cars, dr inking hard whisky, and tak ing an imme nse delight in it, America was a moon that never rose As much as enjoyed the Uroaring of the post-w

34、ar boom years, he foresaw its doom and failure Fitzgerald was born in 1896 into a middle-class family. He had an expensive education first in private schools, and then at Princeton, where he became part of the intellectual club He began to write for the shows of the club, became editor of a universi

35、ty magazine, and was developing a reputation. He felt that he was heading for the upper class life in which he would play a leading part as a writer. Then he had to leave Princeton, probably partly because of his academic record that had suffered from his illness and from too heavy an extra-curricul

36、um schedule and also because the First World War that was going on offered him s good excuse to stay away for a while A year? s absence from the university wounded his pride and ambition so that it ironed itself into his consciousness as one of the major disappointments he suffered in his short, unh

37、appy life He returned to Princeton only to stay for another year in which he managed to finish the draft of his first novel, This Side of Paradise Then he left for the army. Fitzgerald was never sent abroad One of the major events during the period was his meeting Zelda Zelda was the daughter of a j

38、udge, a beautiful society girl, who told Fitzgerald that she liked him well enough but was too expensive for him After his discharge from the army early in 1919, it became apparent that he had no means of supporting this woman with such great financial and social expectations; he had no way of makin

39、g a fortune by writing advertisements in New York Zelda soon broke their engagement and Fitzgerald went back to his father， s home to rewrite his nove1 Six months later he got the news that his novel had been accepted and promised to sell wel1 Zelda agreed to marry him when the novel was published T

40、his book is not really very good but it became popular for the simple reason that it caught the tone of the age Essentially autobiographical, the book describes Fitzgerald s sense of failure with his academic performance and the frustration of his dreams at Prince ton. It por trays at the same time

41、a genera, tion grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faith in man shaken ” On the strength of this one successful book, Fitzgerald won the expensive prize of Zelda, and began a life of making money to support her This affected his writing. The Fitzgerald stormed into New York as the p

42、attern of youth, wea1th, and beauty and became the admiration of all who met them This was also a period in which short stories were very profitable. Writers received good payment It was short stories that made Fitzgerald and Hemingway popular The Fitzgeralds lived in expensive style, and their need

43、 for money was tremendous Fitzgerald wTote at a rapid speed and made a large amount of money, which went as soon as it came After producing his second novel, he began to feel the decline of his powers as a writer. But it was amazing that he was still artistically whole enough to produce in Paris his

44、 masterpiece, The Great Gatsby(1925) After this he wrote one more important book, Tender Is the Night, which is to trace the moral doom of its protagonist Fitzgerald and Zelda were not always happy in their married life They were loving each other without question at all. But they were also fighting

45、 each other all the time. Zelda had to be put in a mentai institution. This occurred in the early thirties it was a tragic time. Fitzgerald was cracking up. Meanwhile he had to write more to earn more money to send his wife to the best hospital and their daughter to the best school Three things even

46、tually combined to break him down: loneliness, alcohol, and the awareness that he was dissipating his talent Fitzgerald was tormented virtually all his life by the fact that he could not concentrate on the novel and the improvement of his art. In 1940, at the age of 44, he died of frustration. B. Hi

47、s Literary Achievements and Contributions Fitzgerald sgreatness lies in the fact that he found intuitively in his personal experience the embodiment of that of the nation and created a myth out of American life The story of The Great Gatsby i s a good illustration. Gatsby is a poor youth from the Mi

48、dwest He falls in love with Daisy, a wealthy girl, but is too poor to marry her The girl is then married to a rich young man Tom Buchanan Determined to win his lost love back, Gatsby engages himself in bootlegging and other illegal activities, thus earning enough money to buy a magnificent imitation

49、 French villa There he spreads dazzling parties every weekend in the hope of alluring the Buchanans to come They finally come and Gatsby meets Daily again, only to find that the woman before him is not quite the ideal love of his dreams A sense of loss and disillusionment comes over him Then Daisy k

50、ills a woman in an accident, and plots with Tom to shift the blame on Gatsby. So Gatsby is shot and the Buchanans escape Now Gatsby， s life follows a clear pattern: There is, at first, a dream, then a disenchantment, and finally a sense of failure and despair In this, Gatsby， s personal experience a

51、pproximates the whole of the American experience up to the first few decades of 20 century. America had been a fresh, green breast of the new world ” had pandered to the last and greatest of all human dreamsand promised something like the orgiastic future ” for humanity. Now the virgin forests have

52、vanished and made way for a modern civilization, the only fitting symbol of which is the Uvalley of ashes , the living hel 1 Here modern men live in sterility and meaninglessnessand futility as best 订lustrated by Gatsby? s essentially pointless parties The crowds hardly know their host; many come an

53、d go without invitation. The music, the laughter, and the faces, all blurred as one confused mass, signify the purposelessnessand loneliness of the partygoers beneath their masks of relaxation. The shallowness of Daisy whose voice is a full of money” , the restless wickedness of Tom, the representat

54、ive of the egocentrie, careless rich, and Gatsby who is, on the one hand, charmingly innocent enough to believe that the past can be recovered, tragically convinced of the power of money, however, the behavior of these all clearly denote the vanishing of the great expectations which the first settle

55、ment of the American continent had inspired The hope is gone; despair and doom have set in. Thus Gatsby， s personal life has become a cultura.l-historical allegory ” for the nation. Here, then, lies the greatest intellectual achievement that Fitzgerald ever achieved Benjamin Franklin s Autobiography

56、 has inspired generations of Americans, and his success story has been taken as the best embodiment of American dream, while Fitzgerald was another in the 1920s, however, when the story was retold this time, not applause but tears and sighs came out the book and the heart of the readers Fitzgerald w

57、as essentially a twentiethcentury person. He was part of it and eventually- died with it. Inside he knew it wel 1 Out side he saw it ironicall y. And he continued to write about it throughout his life Fitzgerald died in despair in 1940 His death indicated the end of the Jazz Age and a cracked Americ

58、an Dream Fitzgerald was one of the great stylists in American literature. His prose is smooth, sensitive, and completely original in its dietion and metaphors Its simplicity and gracefulness, its skill in manipulating the relation between the general and the specific, its bold impressionistic and co

59、lorful quality, in short, its competence to convey the vision of the author all reveal Fitzgerald s consummate artistry. 2 Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) A. His Life Hemingway was born in Illinois His father was a physician, fond of hunting and fishing, who took young Ernest with him on his trips Hemi

60、ngway ， s style of living as an aduIt and the fact that his books abound in sports terms are partly traceable to his early life As a boy Hemingway liked boxing and football and wTote humorous stories He had a happy boyhood though he did run away from home twice At 17 he tried to enlist in the army,