1、Part V.Twentieth-Century Literaturen1920s,Jazz Age.nI.Historical Background:WWI,peace-making period/boom time.nPolitically,US entered WWI in 1917 for purity and democracy.The period of peace-making ended with general disillusionment about the value of war:only a sense of the failure of political lea
2、ders and a belief in the futility of hope.No abiding solutions to the worlds problems was found.And the resurgence of nationalism and the rise of new totalitarianism produce a second world war.20s,Jazz AgenEconomically,because of the war,American industry developed fast.The nation is full of bouncin
3、g ebullience,fearful of nothing,confident smug isolationism.nSocially,decline of idealism.Patriotism became cynical disillusionment.Unity of family weakened.There appeared the revolt of the Younger Generation.They escaped responsibility and assumed immorality.Jazz AgenAfter WWI,people found that the
4、 war which cost millions of lives failed to provide an abiding solutions to the worlds problems,that the war was just the traps of political leaders.Such a disillusionment about the value of war,accompanied by the booming of American economy drove people to cynical hedonism.People experiment with ne
5、w amusements.They restlessly pursued stimulus and pleasures,wallow in heavy drinking,fast driving and casual sex.By these,they hoped to seek relief from serious problems.Lost Generationnrefers to those writers who were devoid of faith,values and ideas and who were alienated from the civilization the
6、 capitalist society advocated.It includes the writers such as (Hemingway,F.S.Fitzgerald,Thomas Wolfe,and Louis Bromfield)and poets(like Malcolm Cowley,E.E.Cummings,Archibald Macleish,and Ezra Pound),who rebelled against former values and ideas,but replaced them only by despair or a cynical hedonism.
7、They were totally frustrated by the WWI and returned from that“Great War”to their own country only to find the grim reality that the social values and civilization were hollow and affected if compared to the cruel realities of the battleground.They felt alienated from American civilization,which was
8、 conveyed in their lives of exile and expatriation.Lost GenerationnThey had cut themselves off from their past and old values in America and yet unable to come to terms with the new era when civilization had gone mad.They wandered pointlessly and restlessly,enjoying things like fishing,swimming,bull
9、fight and beauties of nature,but they were aware all the while that the world is crazy and meaningless and futile.Their whole life was undercut and defeated.They cast away all past concepts and values in order to create new types of writing,which was characterized by disillusionment with ideals and
10、further with civilization the capitalist society advocated.They painted the post-war western world as a waste land,lifeless and hopeless due to ethical degradation and disillusionment with dreams.II.LiteraturenPoetry:T.S.Eliot The Wasteland.nNovel:Sinclair Lewis Main Street 1920 nTheodore Dreiser An
11、 American Tragedy 1925,nF.S.Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby 1926,nErnest Hemingway,The Sun Also Rises 1926,A Farewell to Arms,1929,nWilliam Faulkner The Sound and the Fury,1929,nDrama:Eurgene ONeill,The Emperor Jones,1920,Anna Christie,1921,The Hairy Ape 1922,1930s,Great DepressionnI.Historical Backgrou
12、nd:under the attack of the grave world economic crisis,all contradictions inherent in the capitalist system intensified.slow recovery,social upheavals,the world drifted toward another great war.The bounce gone,the populace terrified.They lost confidence in everything.nII.Literature of political and
13、social criticism.The novels mirrored the threats to democratic thought and a strong ideological countercurrent which caused great ideological confusion into Americans.nNovels:John Steinbeck:The Grapes of Wrath 1939.Post-WWII,50s,nI.Historical Background:nAfter the WWII,the nuclear time had unmistaka
14、bly claimed itself and Americans were suddenly brought to face a completely new world in which old rules and guidelines turned out to be helpless.The united States got even more involved in the international affairs.n50s,Americas rival with another big power of war victorthe Soviet Unionresulted in
15、the initial of the Cold War.As much as the escalation of the Cold War a series of major incidents occurred to the attention of the world.as Trumans containment to East Asia faltered,Korean War broke out in June 1950.This was the first war that American had ever fought without victory.This unbalance
16、and lost war tarred the prestige of Americans as heroes of the second World War and shed a dark shadow on the mind of Americans.II.Literature in the 50s.nA new generation of American authors appeared writing in the skeptical,ironic tradition of the earlier realists and naturalists.The writers used a
17、 prose style modeled on the works of Ernest Hemingway,and F.S.Fitzgerald,narrative techniques of William Faulkner,psychological insights of Sigmund Freud.In the 1950s,the“Beat”writers,in expression of disaffection with“official”American life,were brutally and directly dominant.The so-called“Beat Gen
18、eration,”though not expatriate like the Lost Generation,were alienatedfeeling like foreigners in their own country.Beat Generationnbeat generation,term applied to certain American artists and writers who were popular during the 1950s.Essentially anarchic,members of the beat generation rejected tradi
19、tional social and artistic forms.The beats sought immediate expression in multiple,intense experiences and beatific illumination like that of some Eastern religions(e.g.,Zen Buddhism).In literature they adopted rhythms of simple American speech and of bop and progressive jazz.Among those associated
20、with the movement were the novelists Jack Kerouac and Chandler Brossard,numerous poets(e.g.,Kenneth Rexroth,Allen Ginsberg,Lawrence Ferlinghetti,and Gregory Corso),and others,many of whom worked in and around San Francisco.Perhaps the only true nihilist of the group was William S.Burroughs.During th
21、e 1960s beat ideas and attitudes were absorbed by other cultural movements,and those who practiced something akin to the beat lifestyle were called hippies.Main Works nJack Kerouac,On the Road,poet Allen Ginsberg,Howl,nJewish Writer Saul Bellow,Seize the Day,1956,nBlack Writer Ralph Ellison,Invisibl
22、e Man 1956,nNorman Mailer,The Man Who Studied Yoga,1952,nJ.D.Salinger,The Catcher in the Rye,1951.1960snI.Historical Background:The Cuban missile crisis took place in Oct,1962.Vietnam War(1965-73)was another stage of the Cold War.The U.S.continuous slaughter proved little military efficiency.The War
23、 in Vietnam seemed to Americans a life-swallow machine without end and victory in sight.Disillusionment spread throughout the United States.Anti-war movement grew in size and militancy.More than 500,000 soldiers were deserted during the Vietnam years.This unjust war ended in Americans humiliating wi
24、thdrawal of their exhausted troops from“a small unimportant country”in 1973.The war left a permanent scar in the memory of Americans.II.Literature in the 1960s.n1.The writes turned to experimental techniques,to absurd humor,to mocking examination of the irrational and the disordered.The black humor
25、featured the 1960s.nJoseph Heller,Catch-22,1961,nJohn Barth,The Sot-Weed Factor,1961,Ken Kesey,nOne Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest,1962,nThomas Pynchon,Gravitys Rainbow 1973.Black humor nblack humor,in literature,drama,and film,grotesque or morbid humor used to express the absurdity,insensitivity,parado
26、x,and cruelty of the modern world.Ordinary characters or situations are usually exaggerated far beyond the limits of normal satire or irony.Black humor uses devices often associated with tragedy and is sometimes equated with tragic farce.For example,Stanley Kubricks film Dr.Strangelove;or,How I Lear
27、ned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb(1963)is a terrifying comic treatment of the circumstances surrounding the dropping of an atom bomb,while Jules Feiffers comedy Little Murders(1965)is a delineation of the horrors of modern urban life,focusing particularly on random assassinations.The novels of
28、such writers as Kurt Vonnegut,Thomas Pynchon,John Barth,Joseph Heller,and Philip Roth contain elements of black humor.nblack comedy,a kind of drama(or,by extension,a non dramatic work)in which disturbing or sinister subjects like death,disease,or warfare,are treated with bitter amusement,usually in
29、a manner calculated to offend and shock.Prominent in the theatre of the absurd,black comedy is also a feature of Joe Ortons Loot(1965).A similar black humour is strongly evident in modern American fiction from Nathanael Wests A Cool Million(1934)to Joseph Hellers Catch22(1961)and Kurt Vonneguts Slau
30、ghterhouseFive(1969).Literature in the 60snIt was a decade when literature began to diverse in style and form.Various themes and different ways of exploration of the meaning of life were experienced.nPsychological realistic novels:nJohn Updike,Rabbit Run,1960,nWright Morris,Ceremony in Lone Tree,196
31、0,nJohn Cheever,The Scandal,1984,nTruman Capote,In Cold Blood,1966,nJoyce Carol Oates,A Garden of Earthly Delights 1967,nSaul Bellow,Herzog 1964,nIssac Bashevis Singer,The Manor,1967.Literature in the 60snSouthern novels:nWilliam Faulkner,The Receivers 1962,nFlannery OConner,The Violent Bear it Away
32、,1960,nPoetry:Robert Lowell,Allen Ginsberg.nDrama:Arthur Miller,Edward Albee,Tennessee Williams.1970snI.Historical Background.nII.Literature.The 1970s was a stage on which all kinds of literary art were performed.The Southern fiction,Jewish fiction,Psychological fiction,African-American Fiction,Scie
33、nce fiction,feminist fiction,etc.,completed interrelatedly to present themselves,which displayed a prosperous panorama of literature.Jewish novelists Saul Bellow and Issac Singer were separately awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976 and in 1978.Bellow was ranked as one of the most important
34、 novelists of the 20th century American literature after the WWII.Literature in the 70snBlack Literature:Richard Wright,Native Son,1940,Ellison,Invisible Man,1952,Alex Haley,Malcolm X,Alice Walker,Toni Morrison.nPoetry:poets urged by upheavals of the post-war period participated actively all kinds o
35、f political or literary movement with their pens,to express their views,to utter their uneasiness about the uses of social power and industrial power,in poems.nTheodore Roethke,Robert Lowell,Richard Wilbur,Richard Eberhart,Allen Ginsberg,Gary Snyder,Sylvia Plath,Delmore Schwarts.Imagist Movement 190
36、9-1917nImagist movement is a movement of English and American poets in revolt from romanticism,seeking clarity of expression through the use of precise images.Its first anthology:Des Imagistes,published in 1914,edited by Pound.The principles of the imagist manifesto were laid down by Pound in 1913.t
37、he official credo was prepared the 1915 anthology:Some Imagist Poets,edited by Amy Lowell.n As a broad movement,imagism signals the beginning of English and American modernism,and a definite break with the Romantic-Victorian tradition.As a particular school,les imagists are the heritages of T.E.Hulm
38、es 1909 group of impressionist poets who experimented with brief visual poems in the Oriental manner.Imagist MovementnIt shares the penchant/tendency for sculptural hardness and immaculate craftsmanship,the accent on pure poetry to the exclusion of all extrapoetic content,the practice of irregular,f
39、ree verse.It is a laconic/brief complex in which“painting or sculpture seems as if it were just coming over into speech.”4Iits significance resides in its revaluation of Romanticism and 19th century which,with few exceptions,it dismissed as a sentimental,blurry,manneristic period;its insistence on the functional,rather than the merely ornamental,potentiality of the poetic image,and the latters capacity for conveying the concrete and definite.
