南京工业大学 备课笔记
Lecture One An Introduction to American Literature
I. Colonial Period (from the settlement of America in the 17th century, that is, the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620, to the end of the 18th century.)
II. Romantic Period (from the end of 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War) Features of Romanticism: Romanticism was spread to America in the early 19th century. Its manifestations were varied yet romantics frequently shared certain general characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in the value of individualism and intuitive perception, and a presumption that the natural world was a source of goodness and man’s societies a source of corruption. Romanticism influenced the major forms of American prose: transcendentalist writings, historical fiction and sentimental fiction.
(1). Pre-Romanticism (Romantic Individualism)
Representatives: Washington Irving and James F Cooper
Washington Irving: He was the first American author to achieve international renown. He was regarded as Father of American Literature in that he began the short stories as a genre in American Literature. His work, The Sketch Book, a collection of essays and tales, marked the beginning of American romanticism.
Cooper: He was regarded as the first great American writer of fiction. He initiated three genres of fiction: the historical novel, sea novel, and frontier novel. His novels are filled with action-packed plots and vivid portrayal of American life in the wild land. Now he is remembered as the author “Leather-stocking Tales”, a series of five novels about the frontier life of American settlers in the formative period of the American nation.
(2). Transcendentalism(American Renaissance/ Culmination of Romanticism):
Definition: A literary and philosophical movement in New England in the early and middle part of the 19th century. It gave the expression to several strains of thought: the weakening of Calvinistic views about the corruption of human nature; the rise of Romantic attitudes towards the pervasiveness of the divine and inherent power of the individual imagination; and the frustration with what was seen as the polite and unemotional rationalism of Unitarianism.(Its principles include the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of men, the leadership of Jesus, salvation by character and continued progress of mankind.)
Representatives: Emerson and Thoreau
Emerson: He was a prominent essayist, philosopher and poet. He was the most representative of the philosophical and literary school which was American Transcendentalism and it inspired a whole generation of famous authors like Thoreau, Whitman and Dickinson. His Nature was regarded as the manifesto of Transcendentalism and The American Scholar as “American declaration of Intellectual Independence.” Thoreau: He was a friend of Emerson. His masterpiece Walden was a great Transcendentalist work. (3). Post-Romanticism
A. Romantic Novelists: Hawthorne and Melville
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南京工业大学 备课笔记
Hawthorne: He was haunted by his sense of sin and evil in life. Evil exists in the human heart as well. To him sin will get punished one way or another. As a result, his works are deeply concerned with the ethical problems of sin, punishment, and atonement. The Scarlet Letter was his masterpiece.
Melville: He was a major literary figure whose exploration of psychological and metaphysical theme foreshadowed 20th-century literary concerns. When he was still alive, he was oblivious. His works remained in obscurity until the 1920s, when his genius was finally recognized. Moby-Dick represented the bleak view of the world in which he lived. This book was a tragedy of man fighting against an indifferent universe.
B. Poets: Whitman, Dickinson, Allan Poe and Longfellow
Whitman and Dickinson: They were the important poets of American Literature. Leaves of Grass had nine editions and the first one was published in 1855. It was a monumental work and the embodiment of American democratic ideals. Dickinson’s poetry was a clear illustration of her religious-ethical and political-social ideas.
Longfellow: one of New England (Schoolroom or Fireside) poets and it was with him that American poetry began its emergence from the shadow of its British Parentage. Fireside Poets: Longfellow and other poets constituted a group sometimes called the Fireside Poets. They earned this nickname because they frequently used the hearth as an image of comfort and unity, a place where families gathered to learn and tell stories. These tremendously popular poets also were widely read around the hearthside of 19th-century American families. The consensus of American critics was that the Fireside Poets first put American poetry on an equal footing with British poetry. Allan Poe: American poet, short story writer and critic.
III. Realistic Period(1865-1914)
Realism: It was characterized by a great interest in the realities of life. It aimed at the interpretation of the actualities of any aspect of life, free from subjective prejudice, idealism, or romantic color. Instead of thinking about the mysteries of life and death and heroic individualism, people’s attention was directed to the interesting features of everyday existence, to what was brutal or sordid, to the open portrayal of class struggle. The three dominant figures of the period are William, Dean Howells, Mark Twain and Henry James.
(1). Critical Realism: Howells focused his discussion on the rising middle class and the way they lived.
(2). Local Colorism: American colorism was a unique variation of American literary realism. Generally, the works by local colorists are concerned with the life of a small, well-defined region. This kind of fiction depicts the characters from a specified setting of an era, which are marked by its customs, dialects, costumes, landscape, or other peculiarities that have escaped standardizing cultural influence.
Representative: Mark Twain
(3). Psychological Realism: Henry James laid a great emphasis on the “inner world” of man. He tried to probe reaches of the psychological and moral nature of human beings.
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南京工业大学 备课笔记
He was a realist of the inner life. He was regarded as the forerunner of the Stream of Consciousness.
IV. The Modern Period (1914-1945)
Modernism: a complex and diverse international movement in all creative arts, originating about the end of the 19th century. It provided the greatest renaissance of the 20th century. It was made up of many facets, such as the Stream of Consciousness, Symbolism, Surrealism, Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, etc. It has also been called “the tradition of the new”-a conscious rejection of established rules, traditions and conventions, and “ the dehumanization of art”-pushing into the background traditional notions of the individuals and society. Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. The modernist writers are mainly concerned with the inner being of an individual. As a result, modernism casts away almost all the traditional elements in literature such as story, plot, character, etc. The works are often labeled as anti-novel, anti-poetry and anti-drama.
The roaring 20s:
In Poetry (Imagist Movement):
Led by the American poet Ezra Pound, Imagist Movement is a poetic movement that flourished in the U.S and England between 1909-1917. Pound endorsed three main principles as guidelines for Imagism, including direct treatment of poetic subjects, elimination of merely ornamental of superfluous words, and rhythmical composition should be composed with the phrasing of music, not a metronome. The primary Imagist objective is to avoid rhetoric and moralizing, to stick closely to the object or experience being described, and to move from explicit generalization. Poets: T.S. Eliot. William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost
Novels---Novelists of the 20s(The Lost Generation)
The Lost Generation: It refers to the disillusioned intellectuals and artists of the years following the First World War, who rebelled against former ideals and values but could replace 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 a Preface to the latter’s 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.
William Faulkner: an American novelist known for his epic portrayal of the tragic conflict between the old and the new South. Faulkner’s complex plots and narrative style alienated many readers of his early works but he was recognized later as one of the greatest American writers. Most of his works are set in the American south, with his emphasis on the southern subjects and consciousness. His masterpiece is The Sound and the Fury.
Fitzgerald: an American writer, whose novels and short stories chronicled changing social attitudes during the 1920s, a period dubbed “The Jazz Age” by the author.
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南京工业大学 备课笔记
His major works include This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night.
Hemingway: A Nobel Prize winner in Literature, he is one of the greatest writers. He is known for his writing styles, Hemingway heroes and Hemingway themes.
The 30s during the period of the Great Depression:
The Depression Writers: John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck
John Dos Passos: the leading naturalist of the depression, and his masterwork USA was probably the best work that came out of period.
John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath is about the migration of the Joad family to California during the economic depression of the 30s.
V. Post-modern Period (1945- )
Post-modernism: After the second world war, a variety of post-modernism like existentialist literature, the theatre of the absurd, new novels and black humor, rose with the spur of the existentialist idea “ the world was absurd and the human life was an agony.”
Lecture Two Benjamin Franklin
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南京工业大学 备课笔记
1. His achievements: US author, diplomat, inventor, physicist, politician & printer; published \Richard's Almanack\1732-1757; founder & 1st president of American Philosophical Society 1769-1790.
2. Personal information:
Best Known As: The Founding Father who wrote Poor Richard's Almanac
3. Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin represent the whole of the colonial mind. Are there any differences in their thought? American Puritanism is a two-faceted tradition of religious idealism (Edwards) and pragmatic individualism (Franklin). Franklin was the spokesman of the 18th enlightenment. Owing to the influence of Newton’s discoveries, the idea of order became the watchword of the day. He believed in human self-reliance, self-examination and self-perfection. To say that because of Franklin’s beliefs American Revolution was possible isn’t exaggeration. Edwards was the firm disciple of Calvinist beliefs and tenets. To him, man was evil and sinful and he must worship God. He urged people to enjoy the change of heart with the help of the grace of God. He believed in inward communication of man and God, and in the immanence of God in nature.
4. Why was Franklin called Jack of all trades?
He was a rare genius in human history. He was the initiator of American Enlightenment, one preeminent scientist of his day, an industrialist, one of the leaders of the American Revolution and a famous writer.
5. His masterpieces
5.1 Poor Richard’s Almanac: In it there are many maxims, many of which could be easily identified as his reshaping of the sentences borrowed from Pope---( He was a representative of the Enlightenment and one of the first to introduce rationalism into England. He was the greatest poet of his time. He strongly advocated neoclassicism, emphasizing that literary works should be judged by classical rules of order, reason, logic, restrained emotion, good taste and decorum..), Swift(Anglo-Irish writer, a journalist, poet and outstanding prose satirist. Gulliver’s Travels is a satire.), and other European men of letters. His excellence lies in his brilliant ability to make the proverbs possess amusing and instructive qualities. e.g.
Lost time is never found again. A penny saved is a penny earned.
Fish and visitors stink in three days.
Early to bed and early to rise make a man healthy, wealthy and wise. A small leak will sink a great ship. Little strokes fell great oaks.
5.2 Autobiography:
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