Review Chapter II—American Realism 1. The time of this period. 2. Three features of the realism. 3. Three greatest realist novelists and their differences

Review Chapter IIAmerican Realism 1. The time of this period. 2. Three features of the realism. 3. Three greatest realist novelists and their differences.

Analysis on works II. look at the pictures, then answer the questions briefly. Who are the books writers? What are the Writers features?

Read the following poem, try to analyze whose poem it may belong to, tell the features of the poet, analyze the poems form, theme and structure. Im Nobody! Im nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then theres a pair of us dont tell! Theyd banish us. You know! How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog!

This poem is written by Emily Dickinson. The reason is: 1. It does not have one title, the first sentence is its title, this is Dickinsons habit. 2. The poem is very short, not the same as the other contemporary poets poetry. 3. It is very simple and plain. 4. It has one dash in the poem, this is Dickinsons style. This poem is written in dramatic monologue, the speaker is talking to one silent listener.

Form The two stanzas of "I'm Nobody!" are highly typical for Dickinson, constituted of loose iambic trimeter occasionally including a fourth stress ("To tell your name--the livelong June--"). They follow an ABCB rhyme scheme (though in the first stanza, "you" and "too" rhyme, and "know" is only a half-rhyme, so the scheme could appear to be AABC), and she frequently uses rhythmic dashes to interrupt the flow.

Structure In the first stanza, Dickinson adopts the persona of a child who is open, naive, and innocent. The child-speaker welcomes the person who honestly identifies herself and who has a true identity . These qualities make that person "nobody" in society's eyes. To be "somebody" is to have status in society; society, the majority, excludes or rejects those who lack status or are "nobody"--"they'd banish us" for being nobody.

Chapter 3 American literature Between Two World Wars--Modernism Introduction of the period (Time, 20 century) Features of the period Lost generation and its representatives. Imagism poetry and its representatives. Influential writers Some terms (lost generation, Imagism and expressionism) Some exercises

Important points 1. The artistic features of this period. 2. Literary forms and their representatives. 3. Ernest Hemingways Works features. 4. Fitzgeralds works and his style. 5. William Faulkners works features. 6. Imagism poets three principles.

Difficulty points 1. Lost generation 2. Imagism 3. Expressionism

1. Age: Second half of the 19th century to early decades of the 20th century. 2. Background: (1) The U.S. has become the most powerful country. (2) Technological revolution. (3) A decline in moral standard, a spiritual wasteland, feelings of fear, loss, disorientation and disillusionment .

3. Influencing ideas: (1)the same as English Modern period: Karl Marx, Darwin, Freud. (2)Stream of consciousness: 4. The Lost Generation 5. John Steinbeck: "The Grapes of Wrath"

The Rise of the Modern American literature Writers of the first postwar self- consciously acknowledged that they were a lost generation, devoid of faith and alienated from a civilization In the years between two world wars American literature achieved a new diversity and reached its greatest heights.

Forms of literature Novels (lost generations representative: Earnest Hemingways works) Drama: (the Emperor Jones, Anna Christie, and the Hairy Ape) Poetry: (Imagism Ezra Pound ) Harlem Renaissance: An African American cultural movement of the 1920s and early 1930s that was centered in the Harlem neighborhood of NY City. Variously known as the New Negro movement.

The features of modernism literature Literature: convey a vision of social breakdown and moral decay Writers : develop techniques that could represent a break with the past. Modernistic works are discontinuity and fragmentation .

Features: (1)American writers emphasize the concrete sensory images or details as the direct conveyor of experience. (2) Modern fiction employ the first narration or confine the reader to the central consciousness or one characters point of view. (3) Common ground: directness, compression, vividness, sparing of words.

Lost Generation and its representatives The lost Generation came from the expatriate movement. Disillusioned and disgusted by the frivolous , greedy and heedless way of life in America, many young men began to write and they wrote from their own experiences in the war. These writers were later named by an American writer, Gertrude Stein, also an expatriate, the Lost Generation( ).

Among those greatest figures in the Lost Generation or modern American literature are famous poets such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner are considered to be the masters in the field of American fiction.

John Steinbeck is a representative of the 1930s, when Novels of social protest became dominant on the American literary scene. His The Grapes of Wrath proves to be a symbolic journey of man on the way to finding some truth about life and himself, and a record of the dispossessed and the wretched farmers during the Great Depression as well.

Lost Generation fiction writers and their representatives Ernest Hemingway F. Scott. Fitzgerald William Faulkner (the southern famous writer)

Ernest Hemingway

Life and creation Main works: In Our Time The Sun Also Rises A Farewell to Arms , For Whom the Bell Tolls The Old Man and the Sea Men without Women (The Undefeated, The Killers, Fifty Grand) Death in the Afternoon The Green Hills of Africa The Snow of Kilimanjaro

His works features: His world is limited. Typical of the iceberg analogy is Hemingways style, which he had been trying hard to get. His style is actually polished and tightly controlled, but highly suggestive and connotative .

Render vividly the outward physical events and sensations . He develops the style of colloquialism initiated by Mark Twain. The accents and mannerisms of human speech are so well presented.

Hemingways achievements Hemingways hero: one who acts the theme out, learn to live in grace under pressure. Almost all of his characters are worldly-weary, but they maintain their grace under the inescapable pressure of realitys violence. Hemingways prose style is simple, clear, direct and precise. His diction is fundamental, favoring plain words. His sentences are short, declarative. He uses the technique of the repetition of words, phrases and sentence structure.

the use of dialogue Dialogue is another distinguishing feature of his style. the master of pause. That is, how the action of his stories continues during the silence, during the times his characters say nothing. This action is full of meaning. To sum up, a statement made by the Nobel Prize Committee, They were highly impressed by his powerful style-forming, mastery of the art of writing modern fiction.

His writing theories characterization and style: 1. Hemingways Iceberg Theory: If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.

2. Hemingways Code heroes : those who survive in the process of seeking to master the code with the honesty, the discipline, and the restraint. Code: in the general situation of his novels, life is full of tension and battle; the world is in chaos; man is always fighting desperately a losing battle. However, though life is but a losing battle, it is a struggle man can dominate in such a way that loss becomes dignity; man can be physically destroyed but never defeated spiritually.

3. His masculine heroesthe tough man fond of outdoor sports such as bullfighting, hunting and fishing. 4. Grace Under Pressure: actually an attitude of his Code heroes towards life or his ideal of mans greatest achievement (continuing to work even in difficult times) that he had been trying to demonstrate in his works. Hemingways limited fictional word implies a much broader thematic pattern and serious philosophic concerns with its mystery of darkness and irrationality.

Hemingways theory about his creation: Iceberg Theory (The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one eighth of its being above water.) That part above the water is formed by hard facts. Readers can understand it. Hemingway acts as a naturalist. Actually, we should explore what is under the water. He built those parts like a poet, like a symbolist.

The readers should explore the meaning hidden under it. He has a skillful craft. He knew how to get the most from the least and how to prune language and avoid waste motion, how to multiple intensities , how to tell nothing but truth in a way that always allowed for (considered) telling more than the truth.

F. Scott Fitzgerald(1896-1940) Fitzgeralds fictional world is the best embodiment of the spirit of the Jazz Age , in which he shows a particular interest in the upper-class society, especially the upper- class young people.

His creation This Side of Paradise 1920 The Beautiful and The Damned 1922 The Great Gatsby 1925 Tender Is the Night 1934 The Last Tycoon 1940

Fitzgerald's style: 1. He is a great stylist in American literature. 2. His style, closely related to his themes, is explicit and chilly . 3.His accurate dialogues, his careful observation of mannerism , styles, models and attitudes provide the reader with a vivid sense of reality.

4.He follows the Jamesian tradition in using the scenic method in his chapters, each one of which consists of one or more dramatic scenes, sometimes with intervening passages of narration, leaving the tedious process of transition to the readers' imagination. 5. He also skillfully employs the device of having events observed by a "central consciousness" to his great advantage. The accurate details, the completely original diction and metaphors, the bold impressionistic and colorful quality have all proved his consummate artistry.

William Faulkner (1897-1962) Simultaneously original and assimilative , is regarded as one of the leading American writers in the literary history of the USA, and has become the most frequently and intensely interpreted writer of modern American literature. Difficult as it is, his work is a text endlessly searched for meanings.

1.Works: The Sound and The Fury; Light in August; Absalom, Absalom!; , ! Go Down, Moses; , As I Lay Dying; Wild Palms; Intruder in the Dust (Nobel Prize); The Bear; Requiem for a Nun; The Fable; One trilogy: consisting of The Hamlet; The Town; The Mansion

2. Works background: American South, Northern Mississippi, Yoknapatawpha County 3.Theme: Almost all his heroes are tragic. (1) They are prisoners of the past or of the society, or of some social and moral taboos, or of their own personalities.

(2) Society conditions man with its laws and institutions and eliminates mans chance of responding naturally to the experiences of his existence. (3) Man tries to explain the incomprehensible by turning away from reality, but becomes weak, cowardly and confused (Emily-coward) (4) nostalgic in The Sound and The Fury

5. Works features: (1)Use of narrative techniques is remarkable, let the characters explain themselves, the reader experiences the work of art directly. (2)Breaks up chronology, juxtaposes , the past with the present. (3)Stream of consciousness. (4)Inner musings of the narrator. (5)Good at presenting multiple points of view.

Ezra Pound 1.Imagist: (1)Direct treatment of poetic subjects. (2)Eliminat ornamental words. (3)rhythmical composition in the sequence of the musical phrase rather than in the sequence of a metronome . For example: "In a Station of the Metro

2. Works: Pound composed poems, wrote criticisms and did translations. (1) His poetic works: The Cantos 1915, which spanned from 1917 to 1959. A lume Spento ( 1908), Personae (1909), His other poetic works include twelve volumes of verse Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound (1982), and some longer pieces.

(2) His critical essays: Make It New (l934), Literary Essays (l954), The ABC of Reading (1934) and Polite Essays (l937), etc. (3) His translations: The Translations of Ezra Pound (1953), Confucius (1969), and Shih-Ching (1954) These translations have not only cast light on Pounds 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.

3. Ezra Pounds poetic subjects or themes: (1) His earlier poetry is saturated with the familiar poetic subjects that characterize the 19th century Romanticism. (2) Later he is more concerned about the problems of the modern culture: the contemporary cultural decay and the possible sources of cultural renewal as well.

4. His artistic achievement (1) He is the leader of the Imagist Movement: (2) His use of myth and personae: Pound argued that the poet cannot relate a delightful psychic experience by speaking out directly in the first person: he must "screen himself" and speak indirectly through as impersonal and objective story, which is usually a myth or a piece of the earlier literature, or a "mask," that is a persona. (3) His language: His lines are usually oblique yet marvelously compressed. His poetry is dense with personal, literary, and historical allusions, but at the expense of syntax and summary statements.

What is Persona? Persona: It is an invented person; a character in drama or fiction. Persona, a Latin word meaning mask, is used in Jungian psychology to refer to ones public personality-the faade or mask presented to the world but not representative of inner feelings and emotions. In literary criticism, persona is sometimes used to refer to a person figuring in, for example, a poem, someone who may or may not represent the author himself.

Poem analysis Read the following poem, try to get its meaning and theme.

In a Station of the Metro The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.

Theme This poem is an observation of the poet of the human faces seen in a Paris subway station or a description of a moment of sudden emotion at seeing beautiful faces in a Metro in Paris. He sees the faces turned variously toward light and darkness like flower petals which are half absorbed by half resisting the wet dark texture of a bough.

Robert Lee Frost 1.Works: The Road Not Taken - Mountain Interval, uncertainty of the speakers choice between safety and unknown (meditative) Stopping by Woods on a snowy Evening -New Hampshire After Apple-Picking, a mans best efforts ever satisfy God? 2.Idea: a momentary stay against confusion, like Wordsworth. 3.The Road Not Taken: took the one less traveled by and that has made all the difference.

His thematic concerns (1) Generally Frost is considered a regional poet whose subject matters mainly focus on the landscape and people in New England. These thematic concerns include the terror and tragedy in nature, as well as its beauty, and the 1oneliness and poverty of the isolated human being. (2) Frost wrote many poems that investigate the basic themes of man's life: the individual's relationships to himself, to his fellow-man, to world, and to his God. Profound meanings are hidden underneath the plain language and simple form.

Frost's style in language 1. By using simple spoken language and conversational rhythms, Frost achieved an effortless grace in his style. 2. He combined traditional verse forms -- the sonnet, rhyming couplets, blank verse with a clear American local speech rhythm, the speech of New England farmers with its idiosyncratic diction and syntax. 3. In verse form he was assorted; he wrote in both the metrical forms and the free verse, and sometimes he wrote in a form that borrows freely from the merits of both, in a form that might be called semi-free or semi-conventional.

Eugene ONeill(1888-1953) Category: American Literature Born: October 16, 1888 New York City, New York, United States Died: November 27, 1953 Boston, Massachusetts

Eugene ONeill 1.works: Bound East of Cardiff 1913-1914, The long voyage Home 1916-1917, The Moon of the Caribbeans 1916-1917 Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, 1920, ALL the Gods children Got Wings, 1923 Desire Under the Elms 1924, The Great God Brown 1925.

2. The Hairy Ape Concerns the problem of modern mans position. Yanks sense of belonging nowhere is a typical of the mood of isolation and alienation in the early twentieth century in the US and the whole world as well. ONeills characters seek meaning and purpose in their lives through love or religion or revenge. The result is disappointment or despair.

3. His works features a. Most of his works are tragedies, dealing with the basic issues of human existence and predicament : life and death, illusion and disillusion, alienation and communication, dream and reality, self and society, desire and frustration etc. b. His characters in the plays are described as seeking meaning and purpose in their lives in different ways, but all meet disappointment and despair.

c. As a playwright, he himself was constantly wresting with these issues and struggling with the perplexity about the truth of life. d. His language: he frequently wrote the lines in dialect, or spelled words in ways which indicate a particular accent or manner of speech. Sometimes, make his plays difficult to read, but when they are spoken aloud, the sense becomes clear and the meaning is amplified by the accent.

Terms Imagism poetic movement that flourished in the US and England between 1909 and 1917. The movement was led by the American poets Ezra Pound and later Amy Lowell. This is a movement that advanced modernism in arts which concentrated on reforming the medium of the poetry as opposed to Romanticism, especially Tennysons wordiness and high-flown language in poetry.

It follows the three principles which include direct treatment of poetic subject, elimination of merely ornamental or superfluous words and rhythmical composition in the sequence of the musical phrase rather than in the sequence of metronome. Influential poets of the periods are T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, E.E. Cummings and Wallace Stevens.

Expressionism It 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 naturalism, 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. Expressionism writers concern was with general truths rather than with particular situations, hence they explored in their plays the predicaments of representative symbolic types rather than of fully developed individualized characters.

Emphasis was laid on the internal, on an individuals mental state-the emotional content, the subjective reactions of characters, and symbolic or abstract representations of reality; hence the imitation 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 to highlight the theatrical effect of the rupture between the two sides of an individual human being, the private and the public. The movement, though short-lived, gave impetus to a free form of writing and of theatrical production.

Lost generation The lost Generation came from the expatriate movement. When the First World War broke out, many young men volunteered to take part in the war to end wars only to find that modern warfare was not as glorious or heroic as they thought it to be. Disillusioned and disgusted by the frivolous, greedy and heedless way of life in America, they began to write and they wrote from their own experiences in the war. These writers were later named by an American writer, Gertrude Stein, also an expatriate, the Lost Generation. Among those greatest figures in the Lost Generation or modern American literature are famous poets such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost.

Summary of the chapter III Introduction of the period (Time, 20 century) Features of the period influential writers Some terms (lost generation and Imagism)

Some exercises There are four multiple choices to be chosen, please analyze first, then answer.

1. In the first part of the 20th century apart from Darwinism there were two thinkers whose ideas had the greatest impact on the period. A. the German Karl Marx and the Austrian Sigmund Freud B. the German Karl Marx and the American Sigmund Freud C. the Swiss Carl Jung and the American William James D. the Austrian Karl Marx and the German Sigmund Freud A

2. Which of the following can be said about Eugene ONeill plays. A. Most of his plays are concerned about the root the truth of human desires and human frustrations. B. His tragic view of life is reflected in many of his works. C. His plays are concerned about the relationship between man and nature as well as man and woman. D. both A and B. D

3. As to the great American poet Ezra Pound which of the following is not right A. His language is usually oblique yet marvelously compressed and his poetry is dense with personal literary and historical allusions. B. His artistic talents are on full display in the history of the Imagist Movement.

C. From his analysis of the Chinese ideogram Pound learned to anchor his poetic language in concrete perceptual reality and to organize images into larger patterns through juxtaposition. D. For he was politically controversial and notorious for what he did in the wartime his literary achievement and influence are somewhat reduced. DD

4. In his poetry Robert Frost made the colloquial ___speech into a poetic expression. A. England B. New England C. Plymouth D. Boston BB

1. Which of the following statements is right about Robert Frosts poetry C A. He combined traditional verse forms with the difficult and highly ornamental language. B. He combined traditional verse forms with the pastoral language of the Southern area. C. He combined traditional verse forms with a simple spoken language-the speech of New England farmers. D. He combined traditional verse forms with the experimental.

2. Which of the following statements can be said about the works of Scott Fitzgerald a spokesman of the Roaring 20s A. Many of them portrayed the hollowness of the American worship of riches and the unending American dream of fulfillment. B. They are symbolic of the psychological journey of the modern man and his helplessness in the modern world. C. They show the primitive struggle of individuals in the context of irresistible natural forces. D. They penetrate into the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself. A

3. As Fitzgeralds writing style is concerned which of the following is not right A. The author dropped off the device of having events observed by a central consciousness B. His intervening passages of narration leaves the tedious process of transition to the authors imagination. C. The scenic method is employed each of which consists of one or more dramatic scenes. D. His diction and metaphors are partially original and details accurate. 4. Which of the following is not written by Ernest Hemingway one of the best-known American authors of the 20th century C A. The Sun Also Rises B. The Old Man and the Sea C. Mosses From the Old Manse D. The Green Hills of Africa A

5. Which of the following statements is right about the novel A Farewell to Arms A. The author favored the idea of nature as an expression of either gods design or his beneficence. B. The author attempted to write the epitaph to a decade and to the whole generation in the 1930s. C. The author emphasizes his belief that man is trapped both physically and mentally and suggests that man is doomed to be entrapped. D. It tells a story about the tragic love affair of a wounded American soldier with an Italian nurse. CC

6. Which of the following is depicted as the mythical county in William Faulkners novels A. Cambridge. B. Oxford. C. Mississippi. D. Yoknapatawpha 7. To Faulkner the primary duty of a writer was to explore and represent the infinite possibilities inherent in human life. Therefore a writer should ______. A. observe with no judgment whatsoever B. reduce authorial intrusion to the lowest minimum C. observe at a great distance and sometimes participate in the events D. both A and B 6. D 7. D

8. Which of the following is not right about American fiction from 1945 onwards A. A group of new writers who survived the war wrote about their ideals within the artistic field. B. There appeared a significant group of Jewish- American writers whose works were set against the Jewish experience and tradition. C. Black fiction began to attract critical attention during the 1950s. D. American fiction in the 1950s and 1960s proves to be a harvest which derived from its predecessors. B

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Review Chapter II—American Realism 1. The time of this period. 2. Three features of the realism. 3. Three greatest realist novelists and their differences