1、American Modernist Literature (1914-1945)Modernism Broadly speaking,it refers to modern thoughts,characters,or actions.More specifically,it encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the traditional forms were becoming outdated in the new conditions of an emerging fully industrialized w
2、orld.rejected the Enlightenment thinking and also that of the existence of a compassionate,all-powerful Creator the stress on self-consciousness the assessment of the past as different to the modern age;the recognition that the world was becoming more complex;the old final authorities(God,government
3、,science,and reason)were subject to intense critical scrutiny;Some views modernism in the 20th century as modernism and post-modernism while others think theyre the same genre.Backgrounds .features1.a strong and conscious break with tradition 2.worksThis Side of the Paradise(1920)The Beautiful and D
4、amned(1922)The Great Gatsby(1925)Tender Is the Night(1934)The Last Tycoon(1941)Tales of the Jazz Age(1922)“the Jazz Age”the period after the end of WWI,through the Roaring Twenties,ending with the onset of the Great Depression.the public embrace of technological developments typically seen as progre
5、ss cars,air travel and the telephone-as well as new modernist trends in social behavior,the arts,and culture.a legend of“Americans adolescence before pain set in”The Great Gatsbya.the story It is set on Long Islands North Shore and in NYC during the summer of 1922 and is proposed as a critique of th
6、e American Dream.b.the disillusionment of American Dream dream disenchantment a sense of failure and despair(physical&spiritual)i.Gatsbys personal tragedy:materialistically abundance+spiritual sterility=?ii.the“cultural-historical allegory”for the nation the vanishing of the great expectations which
7、 the first settlement of the American continent had inspired.c.third-person narrator Nick Carraway a reliable narrator i.contribute to the wholeness of the story ii.add to the superb effect of mystery and suspense2.Ernest Hemingway(1899-1961)life born in Oak Park,Illinois,1899 left school at 17 and
8、worked mainly as a journalist enlisted in the army as an ambulance driver and went to Europe suffered at least a dozen injuries to the brain,survived three bad automobile accidents and two air crashes;237 steel fragments taken out of his body married four times during his life shot himself dead with
9、 his favorite gun,on July 2,1961 worksIn Our Times(1925)The Sun Also Rises(1926)A Farewell to Arms(1929)Death in the Afternoon(1932)For whom the Bell Tolls(1940)Across the River and into the Trees(1950)The Old Man and the Sea(1952)-Nobel Prize in 1954 themes i.“Grace under pressure”typical Hemingway
10、 situations:a negative writer chaos and brutality and violence;crime and death and sport;hard drinking and sexual promiscuity a black,naturalistic view of the world,and sees it as“all a nothing”and“all nada”.typical Hemingway heroes:an average man of decidedly masculine tastes,sensitive and intellig
11、ent,a man of action,and one of few words;“despairing courage”:“A man is not made for defeat A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”ii.“the Lost Generation”a term used to characterize a general feeling of disillusionment of American literary notables who lived in Europe,most notably Paris,after the
12、 WWI.From the end of WWI to the beginning of the GreatDepression.the Lost Generation included authors and artists such as Ernest Hemingway,F.Scott Fitzgerald,Ezra Pound,Sherwood Anderson,John Dos Passos,John Steinbeck,etc.attributed to Gertrude Stein,then popularized by Hemingway the epigraph to his
13、 novel The Sun Also Rises style:“The Iceberg Theory”The meaning of a piece is not meant to be immediately evident from the surface story,because the crux of the story liesbelow the surface.If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader,i
14、f 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 ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his w
15、riting.Death in the Afternoon irony,simplicity,naturalness,directness,clarity,freshness;concisepolishvigorous and positive language;Highly suggestive and connotativecolloquial style;“his powerful style-forming mastery of the art”3.William Faulkner(1897-1962)Yoknapatawpha County Stories 19 novels&3 c
16、ollections of over 70 short stories Nobel Prize in 1950 themes:a.Tragic rise and fall of American south symbolizing the human situation in general.description of those southern aristocratic families:the Compsons,the Sartories,the Sutpens,etc.b.The spiritual deterioration which characterizes modern l
17、ife,stemming directly from the loss of love and want of emotional responses.c.the healthy life of primitive man and his natural world;stylea.The writer:b.“interested in all mans behavior with no judgment c.whatever”b.Characters:equipped with their own idiosyncrasies and even self-contradict;resembli
18、ng the actual ones;“flesh-and-blood people”with autonomy and independencec.languages:Words:running together without capitalization and proper punctuation;use of pronoun with irritating perplexity Sentences:long ones without clear indication Prose:colloquial®ional dialects&courtroom rhetoricd.Narr
19、ation:Fallible narrator or multiple narrators;Dealing with information;Interior monologues;Stream of consciousness;workscategories of his novels:a.story-novel b.novels of formal juxtaposition c.counterpoint novels d.Fused novelsThe Sound and the Fury(1929)As I Lay Dying(1930)Sanctuary(1931)Light in August(1932)Absalom,Absalom!(1936)Go Down,Moses(1942)
