美国文学之现代主义文学.ppt

1、PART TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE,1914-nowadays,The historical and socio-cultural background of the American literature between the two World Wars:,(1) The two World Wars (2) Marxism (3) Freudianism (4) European modern art (5)The expatriate movement,The historical and socio-cultural background of th

2、e American literature after the World War :,the dropping of an atomic bomb over Hiroshima in Japan the Cold War the Korean War the Vietnam War The assassination of John F. Kennedy, and of Martin Luther King the Water-Gate scandal,American literature between the two world wars,The Imagist Movement,Le

3、d by the American poet Ezra Pound, Imagist Movement is a poetic movement that flourished in the U.S. and England between 1909-1917. It advances modernism in arts which concentrates on reforming the medium of poetry as opposed to Romanticism, especially Tennysons worldliness and high-flown language i

4、n poetry. Pound endorsed three main principles as guidelines for Imagism, including direct treatment of poetic subjects, elimination of merely ornamental or superfluous words, and rhythmical composition should be composed with the phrasing of music, not a metronome. The primary Imagist objective is

5、to avoid rhetoric and moralizing, to stick closely to the object or experience being described, and to move from explicit generalization. The leading poets are Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, D.H.Lawrence, etc.,the artistic characteristics of imagist poems,The characteristic products of the movement ar

6、e more easily recognized than its theories defined; they tend to be short, composed of short lines of musical cadence rather than metrical regularity, to avoid abstraction, and to treat the image with a hard, clear precision rather than with overt symbolic intent. The influence of Japanese forms, ta

7、nka and haiku, is obvious in many. Most of the imagist poets wrote in free verse and they like to emply common speech. They stressed the freedom in the choice of subject matter and form.,The Lost Generation,It refers to, in general, the post-World Wargeneration, but specifically a group of expatriat

8、e disillusioned intellectuals and artists, who experimented on new modes of thought and expression by rebelling against former ideals and values and replacing them only by despair or a cynical hedonism. The remark of Gertrude Stein, You are all a lost generation, addressed to Hemingway, was used as

9、an epigraph to the latters novel The Sun Also Rises, which brilliantly describes those expatriates who had cut themselves off from their past in America in order to create new types of writing. The generation was lost in the sense that its inherited values were no longer relevant in the postwar worl

10、d and because of its spiritual alienation from a U.S. that seemed to its members to be hopelessly provincial, materialistic, and emotional barren. The term embraces Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, E.E.Cummings, and many other writers who made Paris the center of their literary activities

11、 in the 1920s.,Expressionism,Expressionism is used to describe the works of art and literature in which the representation of reality is distorted to communicate an inner vision, transforming nature rather than imitating it. In literature it is often considered a revolt against realism and naturalis

12、m, a seeking to achieve a psychological or spiritual reality rather than to record external events. In drama, the expressionist work was characterized by a bizarre distortion of reality. Expressionist writerss concern was with general truths rather than with particular situations, hence they explore

13、d in their plays the predicaments of representative symbolic types rather than of fully developed individualized characters. Emphasis was laid not on the outer world, which is merely sketched in and barely defined in place or time, but on the internal, on an individuals mental state; hence the imita

14、tion of life is replaced in Expressionist drama by the ecstatic evocation of states of mind. In America, Eugene ONeilles Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, etc. are typical plays that employ Expressionism.,The concept of wasteland in relation to the works of those writers in the twentieth-century America

15、n literature,The Waste Land is a poem written by T.S.Eliot on the theme of the sterility and chaos of the contemporary world. This most widely known expression of the despair of the post-War era has appeared over and again in the works of those writers in the twentieth-century American literature. F

16、itzgerald sought to portray a spiritual wasteland of the Jazz Age. Beneath the masks of relaxation and joviality, there was only sterility, meaninglessness and futility amid the grandeur and extravagance, there was a hint of decadence and moral decay. Hemingway, the leading spokesman of the Lost Gen

17、eration, dramatized in his novels the sense of loss and despair among the post-war generation who are physically and psychologically scarred. Though disillusioned in the post-war period, he strove to bring about mans grace under pressure and tried to bring out the idea that man can be physically des

18、troyed but never defeated spiritually. William Faulkner exemplified T.S. Eliots concept of modern society as a wasteland in a dramatic way.,The concept of wasteland in relation to the works of those writers in the twentieth-century American literature,He created his own mythical kingdom that mirrore

19、d not only the decline of the Southern society but also the spiritual wasteland of the whole American society. He condemned the mechanized, industrialized society that has dehumanized man by forcing him to cultivate false values and decrease those essential human values such as courage, fortitude, h

20、onesty and goodness.,Postwar American literature,The Beat Generation,Also called Beat Movement, it is an American social and literary movement originating in the 1950s. Beat Generation writings expressed profound dissatisfaction with contemporary American society and endorsed an alternative set of values. They rejected traditional forms and advocated personal release, purification, and illumination through the heightened sensory awareness.Beat poets sought to liberate poetry from academic preciosity and bring it back to the streets. Allen Ginsbe