American Literature

Revision What is American Naturalism? Who are the representatives of American Naturalism? Please name some of major works by Theodore Dreiser? Which is the First American Naturalistic novel? Say something about The Red Badge of Courage. Please answer the following questions:

The 1920s, Imagism and Ezra Pound 意象主义 埃兹拉 庞德 Chapter Eleven

Outline of American Literature ( 6 periods ) [1]. Colonial Period ----Puritanism ( ) Chapter 1 [2]. The Period of Enlightenment (1765-end of 18th C.)Chapter 2 [3]. American Romanticism ( ) Chapter 3-7 Summit of Romanticism---- American Transcendentalism [4]. The Age of Realism ( ) Chapter 8-9 [5]. American Naturalism ( ) Chapter 10 [6]. 20th Century Literature Chapter11-26

Introduction to the 1920s

Outline The decade of the 1920s has been one of special interest in more ways than one. Sandwiched as it was between two events of great historic significance, the First World War and the Great Depression （经 济大萧条）, it assumed a unique importance of its own.

The Background from the material aspect （从物质角度） 1) The First World War (1914 – 1918) First, the war was the biggest event 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 profitable; 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 affluence, 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 country in 1929.

The Background from the material aspect （从物 质角度） 2). Science development (radio, automobile, movie) The development of science helped to widen the horizon of the people and increase their knowledge.

The movie revolution and the music, notably jazz, now becoming available to everybody, enriched and impacted the way of people thinking.

The country became urban in these years; a new type of industrial economy developed. Mass production, mass consumption, and mass leisure became essential to economic and cultural life and were soon to dominate the nation’s culture and institutions. A social revolution was going on. Old moral codes were breaking down. Old modes of perception were questioned.

The Background from the material aspect （从物质角度） 3). Social changes Now new women appeared on the scene, demanding the same social freedom as men enjoyed and affecting life significantly. Traditions regarding courtship and marriage, rearing of children, dress length, etc., everything that involved women, underwent a rapid, palpable change.

Summary After the war, the idealism that had spurred dozens of young men into war evaporated in face of its disastrous effects. The heroism, patriotism, and the zeal for democracy that the romantic notion of war had inspired now proved to be false and tasteless to a generation who had once had faith in them. Excitement and enthusiasm subsided to make way for disillusionment.

The Background from the spiritual aspect （从精神角度） 1). The Darwin’s theories and the development of modern science intensified the loss of faith. 2). The German philosopher Nietzsche declared the death of God. 3). There appeared a reality with no mythical center, with God expelled from the universe. 4). Without faith man no longer felt secure and happy and hopeful in his world. Hence the feeling of gloom and despair. 5). In short, people found themselves living in a spiritual wasteland.

The postwar boom and the sense of spiritual disorientation Produced a peculiar mood of the age.

Literary Scenes  A large group of writers began to make all kinds of literary experiments because they felt old literary form can’t express the new spirits.  Since the early 20th century, US literature stepped into the modern age. And the beginning part of the 20th century was called the second renaissance in American literature. (First Nobel Prize, several great writers, Southern Renaissance, Harlem Renaissance)

Modernism?? Modernism is a cultural movement that generally includes the progressive art and architecture, design, literature, music, dance, painting and other visual arts which emerged in the beginning of the 20th century, particularly in the years following World War I. It was a movement of artists and designers who rebelled against late 19 th century academic and historic tradition, and embraced the new economic, social and political aspects of the emerging modern world.

Modernism in Literature Modernist literature is a literature of discontinuity, both historically and aesthetically, being based upon a sharp rejection of the procedures and values of the immediate past, to which it adopts an adversary stance; The modernist movement in literature around the turn of the century ( ) created an incredible change in the way writers viewed their art. This new group of writers were affected by the new perception held of the world and our place in it, and they tried to communicate their fears and opinions through unique new writing styles.

The work of Modernist writers is characterized by showing the disenchantment 清醒, dislocation 混乱, and alienation of men in the world, and by the emphasis on experimentation and formalism and objectivism which are, in most cases, a reaction to the cataclysm known as the Modern Age. Among American writers, the best-known Modernists are T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and so on.

Revision The period of 1920s 1). From the material aspect: the speciality of the decade of 1920s? the impact of the WWI on America? the impact of the science development? the changes of the New Women? 2). From the spiritual aspect: the loss of faith, Darwin’s theories, “the death of God”------the feeling of gloom and despair, living in a world of spiritual wasteland

Modernism in poetry Imagism ( ) I Can Choose!

The coming of Imagism What does Imagism reject and embrace in poetry?

Imagist Movement Three phases  1908 – London. T. E. Hulme Basic principles (P159); more discussion, less writing  1912 – Ezra Pound Manifesto, three principles, first anthology (P160)  1914 – Amy Lowell No great achievements

Imagist Movement Definition  Imagism : poetic movement of England and the U.S., flourished from 1908 to  (1) the creation of new rhythms;  (2) absolute freedom in choice of subject matter;  (3) opposed to the romantic conception of poetry;  (4) characterized by concrete and concise language and figures of speech, clear images.

Imagist Movement Image (P159. P160)  the image is a representation of a physical object, and the reader is made to react to it as such. “each sentence should be a lump, a piece of clay, a vision seen.” The four imagist anthologies  (Des Imagistes, 1914; Some Imagist Poets, 1915, 1916, 1917), and the magazines poetry (from 1912) and The Egoist (from 1914), in the United States and England, respectively, published the work of a dozen imagist poets.

Imagist Movement Contributions  Offering a new way of writing;  Influenced lots of modern poets. Limitation  A single dominate image is hardly capable of sustaining long poems.

Connections with Chinese poems:  Picture-like characters, using of images, short and concise, abundant connotation 内涵  The imagists translated lots of Chinese poems into English.

A Chinese imagistic poetry: Autumn Evening crows perch on old trees wreathed with withered vine, Water of a stream flows by a family cottage near a tiny bridge. A lean horse walks on an ancient road in western breeze, The sun is setting in the west, The heart-broken one is at the end of the Earth. 《天净沙 · 秋思》 马致远 枯藤、老树、昏鸦，小桥、流水、人家， 古道、西风、瘦马，夕阳西下，断肠人在天涯。

 There are nine nouns or nominal phrases placed in the first three lines in isolation from each other.  To appreciate the poem you should link the scenes produced through these words up in your imagination by way like montage in movie art. So, a vivid picture like a story will be displayed in your mind: In sight of the beautiful scenery with withered vine, old tree, crow returning home at dusk, small bridge, river and households, a man, accompanied by west wind and a thin horse on the ancient road, is suffering from homesickness

Imagist Poems The Red Wheelbarrow so much depends so much dependsupon a red wheel a red wheel barrow barrow glazed with rain glazed with rainwater beside the white beside the white chickens. chickens. W. C. Williams

Imagist Poems Alba 《晨曲》 As cool as the pale wet leaves of lily-of-the-valley 铃兰 She lay beside me in the dawn. Ezra Pound

Imagist Poems Wind and Silver Greatly shining, The Autumn moon floats in the thin sky; And the fish-ponds shake their back and flash their dragon scales As she passes over them. Amy Lowell

Ezra Pound ( )

his attitude towards traditional poetry his ambitious obligation of being a poet

1. His Life: 1) Born in Idaho in 1885 and raised in Pennsylvania, Ezra Pound spent most of his life in Europe and became one of the 20th century's most influential -- and controversial -- poets in the English language. 2) Pound was undoubtedly a genius. Before he graduated from university, he had mastered 9 languages as well as English grammar and literature. After college in Pennsylvania and a brief stint as a teacher, in 1908 Pound traveled to Venice and then to London, where he refined his aesthetic sensibilities and edited the anthology Des Imagistes (1914).

3) Pound championed the likes of T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams and James Joyce and, influenced by Chinese and Japanese poetry, advocated free meter and a more economical use of words and images in poetic expression, leading the Imagist Movement of poetry.  He moved to Paris in 1920 and got acquainted with Gertrude Stein and her circle of friends (which included Ernest Hemingway), then settled in Italy in  Enamored with Benito Mussolini, Pound made anti- American radio broadcasts during World War II. He was arrested as a traitor in 1945 and initially confined in Pisa. He was then sent to the U.S., where he was deemed mentally unfit to stand trial for treason.

4) Pound was confined for 12 years in a hospital (actually prison) for the criminally insane in Washington. During this time he translated works of ancient Greek and ancient Chinese literature. While in prison, he was awarded a prestigious poetry prize in 1949 for his last Cantos. 5) In 1958 he returned to Italy, where he continued to write and make translations until he died in 1972.

2. His works: 1) Pound wrote 70 books and over 1500 articles in his life. 2) His major work of poetry is The Cantos, a long poem which he wrote in sections between 1915 and ) Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (condemned the commercialization and depravity of arts and showed his own point of views on poetry and art)

3. His masterpiece: The Cantos 《诗章》  In this poem, he traces the rise and fall of eastern and western empires, the destruction caused by greed and materialism.  He deplores the corruption of America after the heroic time of Jefferson.  The last part, produced from his own suffering, is the most moving.

Features of his writing  direct treatment of the “thing”, whether subjective or objective;  to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation;  as regarding rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.

In a Station of the Metro Ezra Pound The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. 地铁站里 人群中幽然浮现的一张张脸庞， 黝黑的湿树枝上的一片片花瓣。

 About the poem:  The “Metro” is the underground railway of Paris.  The word “apparition”, with its double meaning, binds the two aspects of the observation together:  Apparition means “appearance”, in the sense of something which appears, or shows up; something which can be clearly observed.  Apparition means something which seems real but perhaps is not real; something ghostly which cannot be clearly observed.

 The poem is an observation of the poet of the human faces seen in a Paris subway station.  He tries to render exactly his observation of human faces seen in an underground railway station. 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.  Repeating it, you can have a colorful picture, also you can feel the beauty of music through its repetition of different vowels and consonants, such as /p/ and /au/. Especially the repetition of /e/ in the second line emphasizes its sense of music.

 In this brief poem, Pound uses the fewest possible words to convey an accurate image, according to the principles of the “Imagists”. Pound wrote an account of its composition, which claims that the poem’s form was determined by the experience that inspired it, evolving organically rather than being chosen arbitrarily.  Whether truth or myth, the piece has become a famous document in the history of Imagism.

T.S. Eliot ( ) 艾略特 Life  T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot was born in St. Louis in 1888 to a family with prominent New England roots. He settled in England in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I.  He attended Harvard as an undergraduate in 1906; got a master’s degree from Harvard in  Poet, Dramatist, and critic. In 1948, he won the Nobel Prize for literature. “Waste Land Painters” 荒原画家

T.S. Eliot ( ) Poems 1. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The original title of the poem was "Prufrock Among the Women,“ 2.The Waste Land 《 J· 阿尔弗瑞德 · 普鲁弗洛克的情歌》 《荒原》

T.S. Eliot ( ) Four Quartets 1943 《四个四重奏》 Murder in the Cathedral 1935 《大教堂中 的谋杀》 The Cocktail Party 1950 《鸡尾酒会》 The Sacred Wood 1920 《神圣的树林》 (essays)

T.S. Eliot ( ) The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 1.The Title: ironic for the absence of love. 2.Protagonist: Prufrock, a timid middle aged man going to propose marriage to a lady but hesitating all the way there. A Hamlet Hero. 3. The name: Prufrock gives a sense of the upper class. 4. Epigraph( 序 ): taken from Dante’s Inferno, is in fact a confessional, a kind of “I’ll tell you all.” It also implies that modern man inhabits a nightmarish inferno. 5. The speaker is like the flame of Guido suffering in the eighth circle of Hell for consular fraud, indicating that Prufrock is like Guido, also in Hell or a Hellish situation.

T.S. Eliot ( ) The Waste Land (1922) 1.the title draws its significance from the Fisher King Legend, to which the plan of the poem relates. 2.The fisher man sins against the God, who then punishes him by making him sexually impotent. The disability is reflected on his land, so that his kingdom becomes a waste land. Hence the title. Restore—a quest—the Holy Grail—Jesus Christ

T.S. Eliot ( ) 3. The epigraph of the poem is taken from the Satyricon of Petronius, the Roman Satirist of the first century. 4. The sexual failure connotes spiritual debilitation. 5. Five parts of the poem 1) The Burial of the Dead 2) A Game of Chess 3) The Fire Sermon 4) Death by Water 5) What the Thunder Said 《死者的葬礼》 《对弈》 《火诫》 《水边之死》 《雷电之语》

T. S.Eliot point of view  The modern society is futile and chaotic.  Only poets can create some order out of chaos.  The method to use is to compare the past and the present.

T.S.Eliot Style  Fresh visual imagery, flexible tone and highly expressive rhythm  Difficult and disconnected images and symbols, quotations and allusions  Elliptical structures, strange juxtapositions, an absence of bridges

After this class, you should Know: What is Modernism? What is Modernism in literature? What is imagism? And what is image ? What are the imagist manifesto by Ezra Pound or what is his writing features? Name and analyze some of the famous imagist poems?

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