Appreciation of 20th Century British
and American Literature
Jeanette Zhao
Outline of the Course
Part One
Appreciation of 20th Century British Literature
Part Two
Appreciation of 20th Century American Literature
Part One
Chapter One Introduction to 20th Century English Literature
I.
From the End of 19thCentury to1914
1.Historical Background
The period from the end of 19th century to that before World War I can be said to be a
transitional period in many fields. The end of the Victorian Age, beginning in the 1890’s, was
marked by radical
changes in old traditions, in social standards and in men’s thoughts. With the death of
Queen Victoria came not only the weakening of the Victorian values, but also the economic and
political decline of the whole state. The accompaniment of the end of the Victorian Age was the
loss of faith and the rise of pessimism, which is reflected in almost all the literature of the time.
2. Literature Movement
In the literature of this period, realism still occupied a dominant position in literary
techniques, yet the co-existence in Europe of many other literary tendencies and schools such as
naturalism, aestheticism and symbolism, and the rising of some new experimenting art such as
impressionism and expressionism shown in paintings had a great influence on the British writers
In poetry, some poets were against Victorian tradition and followed the Romantic
conventions combined with new tendencies such as aestheticism, symbolism and impressionism in
their poetry-writing , such as W.B.Yeats.
In novels, there was a new concern with the internal feelings or subjective sensibilities.
D.H.Lawrence created his ‘psychological realistic’ novels under the influence of the theories of
Sigmund Freud.
In drama, the first important playwright in a modern sense was Oscar Wilde, who introduced art
for art’s sake. And the first serious and the most influential playwright was Bernard Shaw, whose
realistic plays dealing with social problems.
3. Major Writers
Poets:
W.B.Yeats, A.E.Houseman, Rudyard Kipling, John Masefield, and Thoms Hardy
Novelists:
D.H.Lawrence,Joseph Conrad,John Galsworthy, Henry James
Playwrights:
Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw
4. Literature Tendencies and Terms
1) Aestheticism: an art movement that focused on that art exists for the sake of its beauty alone.
It studies beauty in nature,art and literature. The aesthetics in literature concerns the sense of the
beautiful, rather than on moral, social, or practical considerations.
2) Symbolism: broadly, symbolism is the use of one object to represent or suggest another;or,
in literature, the use of symbols in writing, particularly the serious and extensive use of such
symbols. It sees the immediate, unique and personal emotional response as the proper subject of
art and its full expression as the ultimate aim of art.
3) Naturalism: the application of the principles of scientific Determinism to literature. It
gains from Newton’s mechanistic determinism; from Darwin’s Biological Determinism;from
Marx a view of history as a battleground of vast economic and social forces;from Freud a view of
the determinism of the inner and subconscious self. Naturalist sees human beings as the victims of
‘destiny’ or ‘fate’. Human beings are portrayed as animals driven by fundamental
urges-fear,hunger, and sex.
4) Imagism: it signals the
beginning of modernism. The imagist poems tend to be short,
composed of short lines of musical cadences rather than metrical regularity,to avoid abstraction,
and to treat the image with a hard, clear precision rather than with overt symbolic intent.The
movement in literature was led by Pound, he translated ancient Chinese poems and got hints, that
is to describe the scene or the object and then express the feelings.李白的《长干行》，
《赠汪伦》。
The language is precise, clear. “In a Station of the Metro”:The apparition of these faces in the
crowd;Petals on a wet, black bough.
5) Impressionism: derived from painting technique, the fleeting impression emerges in the
observer’s eyes from the proper distance. Painters concentrate on the general impression produced
by the scene or the object. (Van Gogh)Painter’s work is to record the direct and sensuous
impression when observing objects, without making modification according to your knowledge or
experience. Writers hold that the personal attitudes and moods of the writer were legitimate
elements in depicting characters or setting or action.
6) Expressionism: German painters tend to express emotion by distortion of form and violent
color, leading to exaggeration. It is used to describe any art that raises subjective feelings above
objective observations. In literature, writers attempt to exhibit the distortion of the objects of the
outer world, and the violent dislocation of time sequence and spatial logic by the impressions or
moods of a character.
II. From 1914 to 1945
1. Historical Background
World War I had a very shocking influence on Great Britain. Firstly, Britain became a debtor
nation, because the British government borrowed 1000 million dollars from America. Secondly,
the British empire began to lose its territories, the colonies of the empire gradually broke away and
formed independent states.
Thirdly, the worldwide Economic Depression from1929 to 1933 weakened Britain further. Finally,
World War II(1939-1945) destroyed Great Britain as a great world power. The British Empire of
the 19th century remained only as a symbol and metaphor for an increasingly bitter and
disillusioned literature. The war and its historical and psychological impact were one of the chief
topics of the literature. War, as a psychological wound, was omnipresent.
2. Literature Movement
 In poetry, the 1920s was the period of high Modernism. British poetry took a sharp turn with
the rise of a new star T.S.Eliot, whose works revolutionized the British poetry and pioneered the
modernist poetry. The 1930s saw the intellectual poems with industrial and urban imagery and
political consciousness. The 1940s was the period of Neo-Romanticism. The poets of this period
afforded a warmer emotional release than was available in Modernist or Metaphysical poetry.
In novels, the writing technique was influenced by modernist movements. The two world wars
brought tremendous hurt to people. The disillusionment and dissatisfaction with the drift of
material civilization in the west drove some writers to turn to religion for their spiritual comfort
and some of them joined Catholicism.
In drama, the stress of war increased the demand for light entertainment and the theatre goers
were limited to a small audience. The English stage saw the decline of the English drama.
3.Major Writers
Poets:
T.S.Elliot, W.H. Auden
Novelists:
James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, George Orwell
Playwrights:
Noel Coward
4. Literary Tendencies and Terms
1) Modernism: was an international movement in literature and arts,which began in the late 19th
century and flourished until 1950s. It covers Symbolism,Surrealism,Imagism, Impressionism,
Stream of Consciousness, Expressionism, Futurism,Cubism, Abstractism ,etc. modernism takes the
irrational philosophy and the theory of psychoanalysis as its theoretical base.The modernist
writers concentrate more on the private and subjective than on the public and objective, mainly
concerned with the inner being of an individual. The major themes of the modernist literature are
the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between man and nature, man and society, man and
man, and man and himself.
2). Dadaism: a movement in art and literature founded in Zurich in 1916 and it lasted until 1922,
about 1924 it developed into surrealism. In certain respect it seems to have been a forerunner of
the anti-realistic novel and the theatre of the absurd. The aim of Dada was destructive, denying
sense and order.
3). Surrealism: a movement in art and literature which began in Paris in 1924. It aims to deprive
poetry and prose writing of conscious mental control and aesthetic technique, allowing the
subconscious and all irrational impulses the freedom to express other traditional principles or
standards. It is often regarded as an outgrowth of Dada and influenced by Freud. The study of
dreams, of hallucinations, the practice of automatic writing under the dictation of the subconscious
were considered by the surrealists as the true means of knowledge.
4) Stream of Consciousness: created by William James in his “Principle of Psychology” to
describe the flow of thoughts of waking mind. In literature, it has been used to describe the
narrative technique. The assumption is that in the mind of an individual at a given moment his or
her stream of consciousness is a mixture of all the levels of awareness, an unending flow of
sensations, thoughts, memories, associations, and reflectionsIf the exact content of the
mind(‘consciousness’) is to be described at any moment, then these varied, disjointed, and
illogical elements must find expression in a flow of words, images, and ideas similar to the
unorganized flow of the mind. The term ‘interior monologue’ is also sometimes used.
II.
From 1945 to 1960s
1. Historical Background
After the WWII, the Cold War between the two superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union
appeared. Britain was in economic and political crisis and had to attach itself to the US.The impact
of the Second World War on human consciousness and artistic expression was far greater than that
of the First World War. The destructive force of science and the possibility of self-annihilation set
people thinking about the meaning of existence and life. The most influential expression of
Western philosophy over the post-war years was Existentialism.
The men of letters showed the absurdity and emptiness of existence, the human anguish and
despair and the inner vacancy of self on the one hand and showed a serious concern for the future
and affirmed the need for a moral regeneration to the other.
2. Literature Movement
There was a general international spirit of ‘new consciousness’ and a sense of dissatisfaction
with the reality which were shown through the ‘angry’ protest in Britain. The 1950s was called the
period of ‘Angry young Men’. The English literary situation looked depressingly bleak after the
Second World War.Writers mainly followed the 19th-century realistic tradition and focused on the
post-war reality of the English society. They created a lot of anti-heroes educated out of the
working class and expressed a great dissatisfaction with and revolt against the social mores
.
3. Major Writers:
poets
Philip Larkins
Novelists
Kinsley Amis, William Golding
Playwrights
John Osborne, Samuel Beckett,
Arnold Wesker
4. Literature Tendencies and Terms
1) Existentialism: a school of philosophy which had a great influence on European
literature since World War II. Existentialists tend to emphasize the unique and particular in human
experience. They place the individual person at the center of their picture of the world. Each man
is what he chooses to be or make himself.Individual is the source of all value and obliged to
choose for himself what to do and what standards to adopt or reject, consciousness of such
freedom is a condition of ‘authentic’ existence. Thus existentialists give priority to sincerity and
creativity in the moral life.
2) Post- modernism: World War II brought people into a post-period, post- war,
post-ideological, post-atomic and post-modern. Its tendency is towards historical discontinuity,
alienation, asocial individualism, and also existentialism. The modernists intended to construct
intricate forms, to interweave symbols elaborately, and to create works of art. Traditional forms,
such as the novel, have given way to denials of those forms, such as the anti-novel. The typical
protagonist has become not a hero but an anti-hero.
3) Theatre of the Absurd: a term given by the critic Martin Esslin about some dramatists, whose
plays hold that human existence was without meaning. The form and content of the plays
express the rejection to logical construction, and the creation of meaningless speeches and silence.
III.
From the 1970s to the End of the Century
1. Historical Background:
Britain was hit hard by the economic recession. Of all the industrial nations, it suffered the
highest rate of inflation. In 1979 Margaret Thatcher took office, ‘Thatcher Revolution’ quickly
transformed the social, political and cultural climate, and brought a well-established liberal
consensus to an end.
2. Literature Movement:
In the 1970s, there appeared many novels which not only dealt with the past history, but were
also concerned with its process of development and its relationship with the present lives of people.
With the appearance of feminism, many notably female or feminist careers flourished or developed
over the1970s. The 1980s was an era of political dismay. The 1990s saw the internationalization
of themes and plurality in form. In poetry, from the 1960s to 1970s, through the 1980s, even 1990s,
there was an active Irish poet Seamus Heaney. Drama was declining in the age of highly
commercialized culture.
3.Major Writers
poets
Andrew Motion, Douglas,Black Morrion
Novelists
Martin Amis, Margaret Drabble, Julian Barnes
Playwrights
Tom Stoppard
4.Literature Tendencies and Terms
1) Feminism:In literature and criticism, a general position, not necessarily confined to women,
having to do with the advocacy and encouragement of equal rights and opportunities for women
politically, socially, psychologically, personally and aesthetically. Feminism criticism comes in
many forms, and feminist critics have a variety of goals. Some are interested in rediscovering
the works of women writers overlooked by a masculine-dominated culture. Others have revisited
books by male authors and reviewed them from a woman’s point of view to understandhow they
both reflect and shape the attitudes that have held women back. Still others have been interested in
more fundamental questions involving the psychological and linguistic development of women in
patriarchal or masculine-dominated culture.
2.) Black humor: a kind of humor or a form of drama which displays a marked disillusionment
and cynicism. It shows human beings without convictions and with little hope, regulated by fate or
fortune or incomprehensible powers. The term refers as much to the tone of anger and bitterness.
Black humor is a substantial element in the an-ti novel and the theatre of the Absurd.
Chapter Two 20th Century English poetry
I. Introduction
1910s: Thomas Hardy, traditional rural poetry
W.B.Yeats, Symbolism, Aestheticism
1920s: T.S.Eliot, Modernism
1930s: W.H.Auden, political concern
1940s: Dylon Thomas,Romanticism
1950s: Philip Larkins, modern and traditional
1960s: Ted Hughes, Post-modernism
1970s: Andrew Motion, narrative
II. T.S.Eliot (1888-1965)
His Life
He was educated between 1906 and 1910 at Harvard University, where he studied philosophy,
which Eliot adopted and reflected in his poetry. He was influenced by anti-Romanticism and the
Italian Renaissance, particularly in Dante’s poetry. He went to France and Germany to study
literature and philosophy. Then he studied at Oxford University.From 1917 to 1919 he was
assistant editor of “The Egoist” , a magazine advocating the Imagist Movement. In 1921 his
marriage was a failure and then he went to Switzerland to receive medical treatment. Two months
later he gave Ezra Pound the manuscript of The Waste Land. In 1927 he was received into the
Church of England.
His main works:
1.The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock（1915）《J. 阿尔弗雷德.普鲁弗洛克的情歌》
2.*The Waste Land (1922)《荒原》
3.Four Quartets （1943）《四个四重奏》包括:
1)．Burnt Norton(1936) 《烧毁的诺顿》
2)．East Coker(1940) 《东科克》
3)．The Dry Salvages(1941) 《干燥的萨尔维 吉斯》
4)．The little Gidding (1942) 《小吉丁》
4.Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)《普鲁夫洛克及其他》
5.The Gerontion (1919)《小老头》
6.The Sacred Wood (1920) 《圣林》
7.Homage to John Dryden(1924) 《向约翰·德莱顿致敬》
8.The Hollow Men （1925）《空心人》
9.For Lancelot Andrews (1928) 《纪念兰斯洛特·安德鲁斯》
10.Ash-Wednesday （1930） 《圣灰星期三》
11.Murder in the Cathedral（1935）《大教堂谋杀案》
12.Family Reunion (1939) 《大团圆》
13.The Cocktail Party (1950) 《鸡尾酒会》
The Waste Land
Published in 1922 in “The Criterion” and dedicated to Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot’ poem The Waste
Land is 433 lines long, and includes five parts. It involves lots of borrowings from 35 different
writers and 6 foreign languages, so it is obscure and hard to understand. It is broadly
acknowledged as one of the most recognizable landmarks of modernism.
The Waste Land
The title derives from the Fisher King legend and benefits from Jessie L.Western’s From ritual
to Romance（《从仪式到传说》） and James Frazer’s The Golden Bough（《金枝》）. Jessie
L.Western tells of the Grail legend of which the story of the Fisher King is a part. The Fisher King
sins against God,who then punishes him by making him sexually wounded, and this disability is
reflected on his land, so that his kingdom becomes a waste land. To make the King well, the Holy
Grail, the Cup which is said to have been used by Jesus at the Last Supper, must be searched for
by the quester. The quester must not get the Cup, but he must come to right place and ask the right
question about the nature of the Cup. Western also states that the Holy grail legend is connected
with the Arthurian legend(Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). King Arthur sends his knights to
look for the Grail to save his kingdom. The knight’s searching for the Holy Grail is one plot of
the poem. The title symbolizes the decay of Western culture and the disorder of the modern
civilization, so in fact it is the spiritual crisis of the postwar Europe.
Five Parts
I. The Burial of the Dead
II. The Game of Chess
III. The Fire Sermon
IV. Death by Water
V. What the Thunder Said
"Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meisvidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri
dicerent:Sibylla ti theleis; respondebat illa: apothanein thelo."¹(epigraph) For Ezra Pound
ilmiglior fabbro ²
1.Quoted from “Satyricon”（《风流韵事记》） by Petronius Arbiter（佩特罗尼斯）.In English:
“For I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl of Cumae hanging up in a bottle, and when the boys said,
‘Sibyl, what do you want?’ she replied ‘I want to die.’ ”Sibyl of Cumae, the famous prophetess
who has been given long life by Apollo but has failed to ask for eternal youth and health.So she
withered into miserable old age. Like the Waste Land dwellers, she fears and wishes to escape her
sterile life.
2. From Dante’s Purgatorio. The better poet.
I.THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
April 4 is the cruelest month, breed 5ing³
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.6
3.Varied rhythm, not fixed, and varied length, irregular. But it is still harmonious.
4.April-spring-death
5. Winter-breed-life. Death and life are inverted, alive in body but dead in spirit.
6. Tone: pessimistic,despair
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee7
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour8.
7.place:lake,and park (both in Munich)
8 action:drank, talk
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch. 9
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I 10was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
9.German, “I ‘m not Russian, I’m pure German, from Lithuania.”
10.Heroes: Marie, II :speaker,Tiresias, prophete
the author talked with Mary, a countess,who described the depression of Austria after WWI.
The author reminisce his past the Stream of consciousness
In the mountains, there you feel free.I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
What are the roots11 that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man12,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
11. They are dead and barren,images of death and terror.
12.Jesus;以结,forefather of Israel
A heap of broken images13, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,14
And the dry stone no sound of water15. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,16
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
13. Quoted from《以西结书》, images of God, “broken” because they have no power to command
faith
14 “Ecclesiastes”（《传道书》）of the Bible
image:dry land, no water, dying, fear inherent
15.water: natural symbol of life
16. The rock on Jesus’coffin, rock is the belief of the Church,hope of security by God, the
theme:search for the Holy Grail.
Your shadow17 at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.18
Frisch weht der WindDer Heimat zuMein Irisch Kind,Wo weilest du?19
"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;“
They called me the hyacinth girl20.“
17. Failure of sex
18. Bible, “from the dust the body is formed, to which it returns”
19.from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde德国华格纳的《特利斯坦和伊索尔德》
Fresh blows the wind
To the homeland
My Irish child
Where are you waiting?
The love of Tristan and Isolde is part of Legend of Arthur, Tristan,a knight of the Round Table
20.hyacinth:god of breed;symbol of love
––Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden21,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing22,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed' und leer das Meer. 23
21. Place of growth and regeneration
22.I ,Tiresias fails to ask question about the Holy Grail, no ability to get love, Fisher king cannot
recover, land is waste. No love, no belief-theme.
23. From Wagner’s opera Tristan ans Isolde. Tristan, dying , asks a servant to look at the sea,
hoping Isolde is coming. Answer” Vast and void is the sea.” Tristan died.
Madame Sosostris24, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold25 nevertheless,
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. 26
24. A “gypsy” fortune teller, from Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow（铝黄），
25. Winter has not kept her warm
26. The Tarot pack of cards
Here, said she,Is your 27card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes29. Look!)28
Here is Belladonna 30, the Lady of the Rocks,31
The lady of situations.
27. Tirasias
28.from Shakespeare’s The Tempest,
29. Rebirth
30 pretty girl
31. From Leonardo da Vinci’s “ Madonna of the Rocks”（《岩石的夫人》）
Here is the man with three staves32, and here the Wheel33,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I34 am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man35. Fear death by water.
32.the Pope of Tarot
33. The wheel of fate
34. Madame Sosostris
35. Jesus, people cannot find Jesus- belief
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring36.Thank you. If you see dear Mrs.
Equitone37,Tell her I bring the horoscope38 myself:One must be so careful these days.39
36. The crowd looking for the Holy Grail.
37.dull woman
38.tool of astrology, symbol of combination of past richness of meaning with present emptiness.
39. Warning by Mrs. Equitone
Unreal City40,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
40. From Baudelaire’s poem “ Les Spept （法国波德莱尔0vieillards”(The Seven Old Men)
“Teeming city, city full of dreams, Where the specter in broad daylight accosts the passerby”（ 这
拥挤的城，充满迷梦的城，/那里的鬼魂在白昼招呼行人。The scene is like an earthly urban hell,
souls are purposeless
I had not thought death had undone so many.41 Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth42 kept the hoursWith a dead sound on the final stroke of nine43.
41.From Dante’s Inferno,
“ so long a train /of people, that I never would have thought/That death had undone so many”,
42. A church
43.Jesus died at nine.
Nine means a beginning of a new day,dull, to death
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying "Stetson!“44You who were with me in the ships
at Mylae!"That corpse45 you planted last year in your garden,"Has it begun to sprout? Will it
bloom this year?"Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?“46Oh
44. Modern everyone, waste lander. “I”is both an onlooker and one member of them
46. The Dead God
45.fear there will be no revival or rebirth of nature. Sprout and bloom : rebirth. Frost: refuse
rebirth
keep the Dog47far hence, that's friend to men,"Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!"You!
hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frere!“48
47.Sirius， 天狼星
48.from Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal（《恶之花》）“you! Hypocrite reader!-my likeness,-my
brother《致读者》把无聊写成人之 极恶，读者也知道这点，却还帮闲凑趣，故曰”虚伪“。
Waste lander’s inward agony
Analysis
The first part represents the stirring life in the land after the barren winter; the second contrasts the
splendors of the past represented by Cleopatra with uneasiness and despair of modern life; the
third makes an imaginative silhouette sketch of the ugliness of cities and the mechanization of
modern life and emotion; the fourth presumptively proving by the vision of a drowned phoenician
sailor that water is not only the constructive source of life, but also the destructive source of death
because of drowning and also its absence as well, which causes drought;the fifth presents a picture,
through symbols of the Grail legend, of the drought, the decay and emptiness of modern life. The
five parts don’t have sufficient formal connection between them. Things stop and begin without
clear shift, the transition from one thing to another thing is sudden and abrupt, with no hint of
logical order. The separate fragments are weaved together through the plot and theme. The poet
intends the reader to see and feel the fragmentary nature of life.The poem reveals the author’s
historical sense. He holds that the goal in poetry is a search for
impersonality. The past is
of great importance to writers, the past should be changed by the present and the present is
directed by the past. In this poem he is trying to throw into relief the negative qualities of the
present by contrasting them with the positive ones of the past, and shock the reader into a
recognition of the dismal truth about modern life. The poem is a social criticism. But through the
whole poem the author still implies the hope for salvation for the West. It is a representative work
of the High Modernism of the 1920s, impersonal, discontinuous with its fragments, full of literary
allusions and ancient myths, measuring modern life against the historical past. It marked a literary
revolution in English poetry. Its influence was so powerful that a whole pseudosociology was
developed in keeping with its attitude.
Writing Technique
1.symbolism:
1) The waste land symbolizes the spiritual crisis and debility of the modern individual, and the
disillusionment of the traditional values and the fear and despair for the great impact by the
science advancement after the First World War.
2) Water symbolizes life.
3) the hyacinth girl symbolizes the romantic love
4) sprout and bloom symbolize rebirth
2.Expressionism:
1) dislocation of time sequence:for example, April is the …, Summer surprised us, …, And when
we were children
2) dislocation of spatial logic: for example, coming over the the Starnbergersee , …into the
Hofgarten,… from the hyacinth garden,… unreal city, London Bridge, King William Street
3.Stream of consciousness: Marie and I talked about the past , … the hyacinth girl ,… Madame
Sosostris,… London Bridge. From place to place and from time to time, suddenly changed.
Structure
It was organized like “music”: the poem created sequences of emotions, rather than the sounds,
and rhythms. The different phases of emotions interrelated to make a complex whole. This was
partly shown by the special feature of the poem-the repetition in separate contexts of the same or
easily associated scenes, images and allusions. The broken pieces of the images and allusions
converge into some kind of unity.
Style
It abounded in vivid episodes, startling transitions, learned allusions and mythological images.
It was full of echoes and symbolic correspondences. It mixed literary and religious language,
especially dramatic and lyric modes in a lament for the contemporary spiritual and cultural
wilderness of post-war Europe.
Theme
It showed the spiritual breakup of the post- war generation and an urban civilization,and the
despair and depression after the first World War, and the decline of the western culture which had
lost its roots, meaning , significance and purpose.It is regarded as a reflection of the 20th
–century people’s disillusionment and frustration in a sterile society. It also brings self-awareness
of the spiritual thirst, and search for salvation for the West through revival of religion and change
in the individual.
III W.B.Yeats(1865-1939)
His Life
Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland. He lived in London from 1887 and became a founder of Irish
Literary Society in London in 1891. He met Maud Gonne, a passionate Irish nationalist in 1889
who gave him inspiration for many of his love poems andhis love for her hunted him for more
than ten years.He was also a founder of Abbey Theatre, Dublin in 1904. He met many outstanding
literary men of the time, such as William Morris and Oscar Wilde, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. He
wrote many poems, plays, fiction and others, but he was mainly remembered for his poems and
plays. He received Nobel Prize for literature in1923.
His Main Works
Poems:
1. The Lake Isle of Innisfree 《茵尼斯弗 利湖岛》
2. The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems(1889)
3. When You Are Old (1893) 《步入暮色》
4. The Wind among the Reeds (1899) 《芦苇中的风》
5. In the Seven Woods (1903)
6. Sailing to Byzantium 《驶向拜占庭》
7. On Baile’s Strand (1905)
8. No Second Troy (1910) 《没有第二个特洛伊》
9. Responsibilities (1914)《责任》
10.Easter 1916(1916) 《一九一六年复活节》
11.The Wilde Swan s at Coole (1919) 《柯尔的野天鹅》
12. September 1913 (1913) 《 1913 年九月》
13. The Second Coming(1920) 《第二次降临》
14. Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) Sailing to Byzantium 《驶向拜占庭》
15. The Tower (1928 )《塔》
16. The Winding Stair (1933) 《盘旋的楼梯》
Plays:
1.The Land of Heart’s Desir (1904)《理想的国土》
2. The Hour Glass (1901) 《时漏》
3. Dedidre (1907)《 黛德尔》
Terms About Poem
1.Meter: in poetry the recurrence of a rhythmic pattern, or the rhythm established by the regular
or almost regular occurrence of similar units of sound pattern. There are four basic kinds of
rhythmic pattern poetry. 1) quantitative, in which the rhythm is established through units
containing regular successions of long and short syllables; this is the classical meter. 2) accentual,
in which the occurrence of a syllable marked by stress or accent determines the basic unit, old
English versification employs this kind of meter. 3) syllabic, in which the number of syllables in a
line is fixed, much Romance versification employs this meter, 4) accentual syllabic, in which both
the number of syllables and the number of accents are fixed or nearly fixed; when the term meter
is used in English, it usually refers to accentual-syllabic rhythm.
2. Foot: the rhythmic unit within the line is called a foot. Iambic （抑扬格）, trochaic（扬抑格）,
anapestic（抑抑扬格）, dactyllic（扬抑抑格）, spondaic （扬扬格）, and pyrrhic （抑抑格）
are the standard feet in English accentual syllabic verse. The number of feet in al line forms
another means of describing the meter. The following are the standard English lines: monometer,
one foot; dimeter, two; trimeter, three; tetrameter, four; pentameter, five; hexameter, six, also
called the alexandrine. Heptameter, seven; octmeter, eight and etc.
When You Are Old
When you are old and gray and full of slee1p,2
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your wyes and once, and of their shadows deep;当你老了
当你老了，白发苍苍，睡意朦胧，
在炉前打吨，请取下这本诗篇，
慢慢吟诵，梦见你当年的双眼
那柔美的光芒与青幽的晕影；
1.rhyme-scheme:
abbacddceffe(end rhyme)
2. Iambic,and pentameter,three quatrains
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,3
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
多少人真情假意，爱过你的美丽，
爱过你欢乐而迷人的青春，
唯独一人爱你朝圣者的心，
爱你日益凋谢的脸上的哀戚；
3.to Maud Gonne, she devoted her life to the Irish
independence cause. Yeats was in deep love with her for many yearsAnd bending down besides
the glowing bars4
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
当你佝偻着，在灼热的炉栅边，
你将轻轻诉说，带着一丝伤感；
逝去的爱，如今已步上高山，
在密密星群里埋藏它的赧颜。
4. fireplace
Chapter Three 20th Century English Novels
I.Introduction:
1. Realistic tradition: Henry James, John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennet;
2. Symbolism and impressionism: Conrad
3. Psychological analysis: D.H.Lawrence4. Realism: E.M.Foster
5. Stream of consciousness James Joyce and Virginia Woolf
6. Communism: Aldous Huxley, George Orwell
7. Catholicism: GrahamGreen
II.D.H.Lawrence(1885-1930)
His LifeLawrence was born in a mining village, his father is a miner, and his mother, a middle
class woman, better educated than her husband, she resented her coarse and often drunken
husband and turned to her sons with a protective and possessive love. She encouraged her children
out of the life of working class. She had a deep influence on Lawrence’ s life. After the death of
her eldest son, Lawrence became the center of his mother’s emotional life, which frustrated his
relationship with girls and the personal problems and conflicts, and these are presented in his
distinguished autobiographical novel, Sons and Lovers (1913). Spurred by his mother, Lawrence
was educated at Nottingham University, and became a teacher, clerk, and writer respectively. He
was a novelist, poet, painter, a critic and essayist, but he was mainly remembered for his novels.
During his lifetime and even afterwards Lawrence was a controversial figure because of his frank
treatment of sex and his insistence upon a need for a readjustment in the relationship between the
sexes.Lawrence’s works represent a revolt against the values and ideals of the nineteenth century.
He felt that the society of that period was lifeless and artificial. The industrialization of Britain
made men mechanical uniform,Christianity was full of prohibitions and feelings of guilt. The
simple passion of man and woman was not allowed to take its natural course in this rather rigid
society. Lawrence poured his heart and soul into his writing and was passionate and subjective. He
concentrated on the individuals and explored their souls inside. He can be rated as a pioneer of
modern novels, exploring hither to forbidden territory and opening up a new, frank approach to
life.
His Main Works
1. The White Peacock (1911)《白孔雀》
2. The Trespasser (1912)《逾矩的罪人》
3. Sons and Lovers (1913)《儿子与情人》
4. Love Poems and Others (1913)《爱情诗集》
5. The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914)《普鲁士军官》
6. The Rainbow (1915)《虹》
7. Women in Love (1916)《恋爱中的妇女》
8. Aaron’s Rod (1922) 《亚伦的手杖》
9. Kangaroo (1923) 《袋鼠》
10. The Plumed Serpent(1926)《羽蛇》
11. Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)《查泰莱夫人的情人》
Sons and LoversThe first of D.H.Lawrence’s important novels, based on his own early life in
the midland coal-mining village of Eastwood, on his relationship with his mother and with his
father who was a mineworker, and on those with his early women friends. The novel is a good
presentation of the working of the
Oedipus Complex.
Oedipus Complex: a term of psychoanalysis which refers to a libidinal feeling that develops in
a child between the ages of three and six, for the parent of the opposite sex. This attachment is
generally accompanied by hostile attitude towards the parent of the child’s own sex. The Oedipus
Complex is usually repressed. In instances when it persists, it can work emotional havoc. The
legend of Greek tragedy is the prototype .
The legend of Oedipus Complex is:
In Greek legend, son of Laius, king of Thebes, and his wife, Jocasta. Laius had been warned by
an oracle that he was fated to be killed by his own son; he therefore abandoned Oedipus on a
mountainside. The baby was rescued, however, by a shepherd and brought to the king of Corinth,
who adopted him. When Oedipus was grown, he learned from the Delphic oracle that he would
kill his father and marry his mother. He fled Corinth to escape this fate, believing his foster
parents to be his real parents. At a crossroad he encountered Laius, quarreled with him, and killed
him. He continued on to Thebes, where the sphinx (mythical beast of ancient Egypt, symbolizing
the pharaoh as an incarnation of the sun god Ra. The sphinx was represented in sculpture usually
in a recumbent position with the head of a man and the body of a lion) was killing all who could
not solve her riddle. Oedipus answered it correctly and so became the king and married the
widowed queen. When a plague descended on Thebes, an oracle declared that the only way to find
and expel the murderer of Laius.Through a series of painful revelations, brilliantly dramatized by
Sophocles in Oedipus Rex, the king learned the truth and in an agony of horror blinded himself.
The queen committed suicide. The story gave Sigmund Freud the name for the Oedipus complex,
a primal desire on the part of a young male to completely possess the mother and kill the father.
Freud found that the infant has the instincts or drives of sex from the moment of birth, the infant is
driven in his actions by the desire for bodily/sexual pleasure, where this is seen by Freud in almost
mechanical terms as the desire to release mental energy. Initially, infants gain such release, and
derive such pleasure, through the act of sucking, and Freud terms this the 'oral' stage of
development. And it develops a deep sexual attraction for the parent of the opposite sex, and a
hatred of the parent of the same sex (the 'Oedipus complex'). This, however, gives rise to (socially
derived) feelings of guilt in the child. When mature genital development begins, and the pleasure
drive refocuses around the genital area.
The Structure of the Mind
Freud distinguished three structural elements within the mind, which he called id, ego, and
super-ego. The id is that part of the mind in which are situated the instinctual sexual drives which
require satisfaction; the super-ego is that part which contains the 'conscience', viz.
socially-acquired control mechanisms (usually imparted in the first instance by the parents) which
have been internalized; while the ego is the conscious self created by the dynamic tensions and
interactions between the id and the super-ego, which has the task of reconciling their conflicting
demands with the requirements of external reality. It is in this sense that the mind is to be
understood as a dynamic energy-system. All objects of consciousness reside in the ego, the
contents of the id belong permanently to the unconscious mind, while the super-ego is an
unconscious screening-mechanism which seeks to limit the blind pleasure-seeking drives of the id
by the imposition of restrictive rules.
The story of Sons and Lovers: the hero, Paul Morel, resembles Lawrence in the family. His
father, Walter Morel, is a miner, often getting drunk and taking no responsibility for the family
and the children. His mother, Mrs Morel is a refined woman from the middle class. She was very
disappointed at her rough and uneducated and drunken husband. The marriage is an unhappy
one.Mentally isolated, she pins her hopes on her children. After the death of her eldest son, Mrs
Morel invests in Paul all her hopes and passions. But her all- possessive affection for her son
becomes a hindrance to his independent development as a man. She opposes Paul’s love for
Miriam, a farmer’s daughter.Paul has spiritual and emotional demand upon Miriam. Paul feels the
love intolerable and cannot get satisfaction, so he turns to Clara, a woman estranged from her
husband, and engages in a sensual love affair with Clara. This physical love relation is also
opposed by Mrs Morel. Paul is unconsciously subjected to his mother all the time. In the end, Mrs
Morel dies of cancer. Paul finally stands free and is on his way to a new life. In the novel, Mrs
Morel, Miriam and Clara all want to possess Paul. The complicated relations of Paul with his
mother and his two sweethearts, together with their psychological activities, are described in detail.
This shows the influence of Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, especially that of the “Oedipus
Complex”.
Chapter X
This move on the part of Clara brought them into closer intimacy. The other girls noticed that
when Paul met Mrs. Dawes(Clara) his eyes lifted and gave that peculiar bright greeting 1 which
they could interpret. (on page432).
1.Paul has a instinct impulse and sexual desire for Clara. This love is normal demand for a young
man.
He was like so many young men of his own age. Sex had become so complicated in him that he
would denied that he ever could want Clara or Miriam or any woman whom he knew. Sex desire
was a sort of detached thing, that did not belong to a woman.2
2.Paul cannot deal with his personal feeling correctly. He loves the two women, but he cannot face
the love frankly. He is at a loss.
He grew warm at the thought of Clara, he battled with her, he knew the curves of her breast and
shoulders as it they had been moulded inside him; and he did not positively desire her3. (on
page436)
3.Paul wants Clara out of the instinct desire, but he is controlled by his spiritual sense, that is he
loves Miriam in spirit, at the same time he loves Clara physically, so he does’t know what to do.
437 “You know,” he said, “ Miriam and I have been a lot to each other ever since I was
sixteen-that’s seven years now.”
“It’s a long time,” Clara replied.
“yes; but somehow she-it doesn’t go right-”
“How?” asked Clara.
“She seems to draw me and sraw me, and she wouldn’t leave a single hair of me free to fall out
blow awayShe’d keep it.”
“but you kike to be kept.”
“ No,” he said, “I don’t. I wish it could be normal, give and take- like me and you. I want a
woman to keep me, but not in her pocket.4”
“but if you love her, it couldn’t be normal, like me and you.”
“Yes; I should love her better then. She sort of wants me so much that I can’t give myself.”
4.Paul loves Miriam, but wants to escape from her,because she wants to possess and control him
in spirit. He has no spiritual freedom.
“ Wants you how?”
“Wants the soul out of my body. I can’t help shrinking back from her.”
“ And yet you love her!”
“ No, I don’t love her. I never even kiss her.” “Why not?” Clara asked.
“I don’t know.”
“ I suppose you’re afraid,” she said.
“I’m not. Something in me shrinks from her like hell she’s so good, when I’m not good.” 5
5. Paul thinks the instinct desire for Miriam is guilt, in his eyes Miriam is pure and innocent and
good, but he has a feeling of committing sin. He doesn’t know whether he loves Miriam or not.
“How do you know what she is?”
“I do!” I know she wants a sort of soul union.”
“but how do you know what she wants?”
“I’ve been with her for seven years.”
“And you haven’t found out the very first thing about her.”6
6. Paul doesn’t satisfy himself from Miriam’s spiritual love, so he wants something else
“What’s that?”
“ That she doesn’t want any of your soul communion. That’a your own imagination. She wants
you.”
He pondered over this. Perhaps he was wrong.
“but she seems-”he began.
“you’v never tried,” she answered.7
7. Clara analyzes the feeling inharmony between Paul and Miriam from her point of view, that is
physical satisfaction.
The theme: the novel was about the attempted escape of Paul, through his own struggle of
individuation, from triangle love web woven by the three types of love:mother type(his mother),
spiritual type(Miriam) and physical type(Clara). On the one hand, the three types of love have
dominating and destructive forces on him, on the other hand, they evoke the life forces on him too
Paul finally wants a new life. and seeks a whole identity or self-realization.The author emphasized
the significance of these love-types to Paul in his growth, for it was out of these forces grew a new
Paul, with a new understanding of the relationships between men and women..
Chapter Four 20th Century English Drama
I.Introduction:
1.Oscar Wilde-estheticism
2.Bernard Shaw-realism
3. John Osborne-angry young man
4.Samuel Beckett-existentialism and stream of consciousness
II.Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
His Life He was born in Dublin, educated at Trinity College. Later at Oxford, he became under the
influence of old aesthetic theories of John Ruskin and Walter Pater. He established himself as a
writer and as a spokesman for the school of Aestheticism(art for art’s sake), and made a lecture
tour to America and Canada on the aesthetic movement in 1882, where he met Walt Whitman and
then went to Paris where he met Zola and Balzac.In Wilde’s view, this school included not only
French poets and critics but also a line of English poets going back through Rossetti and
Pre-Raphaelites to Keats. In his writings he excelled in a variety of genres:as a critic of
literature and of society, and also as a novelist, poet, and dramatist. In 1895, he was suddenly put
into jail because of a homosexual relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, which ruined him and
the aesthetic movement itself suffered a severe setback not only with the public but among writers
as well. His two years in jail led Wilde to write two sober and emotionally highpitched works, his
poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and his prose confession, De Profoundis. James Joyce saw in
this final phase of Wilde’s life something of the figure of the martyred artist. After leaving jail,
divorced and bankrupt, Wilde emigrated to France under an assumed name, and was buried in
Paris in the same cemetery as the poet, Charles Baudelaire, whose Fleurs du Mal had porfoundly
affected his attitudes towards life and literature.
His Main Works
1.Ravenna(1878) 《拉文纳》
2. Vera, or The Nihilists (1880)《薇拉，或虚无党人》
3.The Duchess of Padua (1883)《帕多瓦公爵夫人》
4. The Happy Prince and other Tales (1888) 《快乐王子故事集》
5. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)《道林•格雷的画像》
6. Intentions (1891) 《意图》
7. Lady Windermere’s Fan(1892)《温德梅尔夫人的扇子》
8. A Woman of No Importance (1893)《一个无足轻重的女人》
9. An Ideal Husband (1895)《理想丈夫》
10. The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)《认真的重要》
11. The Ballad of Reading Gaol（1898)《累丁监狱之歌》
12.De Profundis (1905) 《从深处》
His Point of View
He was a spokesman for aestheticism. He followed the literary theory advocated by Walter
Pater and stated that art was amoral and totally separated with morality( art for art’s sake) and art
was above life and the function of real art was to attract, to please and to provide enjoyment. He
also claimed that doing nothing and discussing everything were the finest modes of life and the
ideal position for the critic was as spectator of life. Sincerity and seriousness tended sadly to lack
detachment and self-consciousness in concentration on the object, the latter being important
elements for the formation of clear ideas about life.
The Story and Chapter X on page …
The Plot The hero Dorian was originally an innocent young man. The sophisticated dandy Lord
Henry Wotton did his best to influence Dorian, who became a hedonist and was indulged in all
sorts of depravity. Though he looked as handsome and as innocent as before, his portrait bore all
the signs of his depravity and age. So one night he stabbed at the portrait with a knife. He actually
stabbed himself and looked terrible, yet his portrait became as handsome and as innocent as
before.
The Theme Art was above life and only pure art could reflect the true nature of life, though at the
same time the novel itself seemed to expound a moral lesson on the evils of self-regarding
hedonism.
Part Two Appreciation of 20th Century American Literature
Chapter One A History of 20th Century American Literature
Between the two World Wars1.
The historical background:
In July 1914, the war in which the European imperialists redivided the world by force
inevitably burst forth between the two imperialist groups: Entente countries composed of the
Britain, France, and Russia, and the Allied Nations composed of Germany And Austro-Hungary.
The U.S did not enter the war till April, 1917. After entering the war the U.S. dispatched the army
to Europe to cooperate with the Anglo-French allied forces, which was enormously beneficial to
the resistance of the Entente countries to the German army. The First World War (1914-1918)
brought misfortune on humanity, but was an important factor in stimulating American economic
development. From 1923 to 1929 was the periodic “ thriving” stage of American economy, which
was the main manifestation of the swelling industrial production. Under the stimulus of seeking
superprofits, the American monopoly capitalists made the production of auto, electric,architectural,
and iron and steel industries of the country rise rapidly. The unprecedented serious economic crisis
which took place in 1929-1933 swept over the whole of capitalist world, and violently hit the
U.S.. Owing to the economic depression of the whole capitalist world market,
the living standard of the broad masses of the U.S. dropped and their purchasing power decreased
suddenly. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared to carry out the Anti-crises measures, the
so-called “New Deal.” ,which played a suppressive and obstructive role .Under the attack of the
grave world economic crisis between 1929 and 1933, all the contradictions inherent in the
capitalist system intensified. In Europe and in Asia there emerged two hotbeds of war. On
September 1,1939 Germany launched Poland, the Second World war broke out on a full scale.
On may2, 1945 the Red Army of the Soviet Union captured Berlin, on May 8 Germany concluded
the agreement of unconditional surrender. On August14 Japanese imperialism was forced to
announce its unconditional surrender, and formally signed the agreement on September 2. Up to
then, the whole antifascist Second World War closed victoriously.
2. The development of literature
American Modernism:
It refers to the literature after 1914 or after World War I. In modern times, a great change took
place in the world literature. Modern writers carried out many reforms in theme, form, etc., the
war broke through people’s convention and they freed themselves from the traditional concepts of
culture and morality, and created the literary art of modernism. In the years preceding World War
I, nineteenth century realism and naturalism remained vital forces in American literature. Early in
the century a rising number of “little magazines” published works by Ezra Pound, T.S.Elliot,
Robert Frost, and so on. Ezra Pound founded the imagism obtained an increasing influence
At the end of the First World War took place a most important literary development: the
modernistic trend in which a new group of writers called the “Lost Generation” rebelled against
former ideals and values, cast away all past concepts, but replace them only by despair or a cynical
hedonism. American literature of the 1920s, therefore was characterized by disillusionment with
ideals and civilization the capitalist society advocated. The writers of the Lost Generation in the
1920s showed a sense of loss after the war and took up the despairing tone . A group of young
writers used their wartime experience as the basis for their works, as did Ernest Hemingway,
F.Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, cummings, Thomas Wolfe and so on. The writers of the
Lost generation were totally frustrated by the First World War, and returned from that “Great War”
to their own country, when they came to know the grim reality that the social values and
civilization were hollow and affected if Compared to the cruel realities of the battleground. Their
alienation fro America, consequently, was conveyed by their lives of exile and expatriation;
Hemingway spent much of his young life in Europe, while F.Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe
were frequent visitors. The novelists of the Lost Generation deliberately retreated into private
emotion, and became precociously in tragedy, suffering agony. They were often haunted by their
painful recollections of war and by images of violence, were cynical about idealism of any mode.
The decade of the 1920s frequently called “the Jazz Age” or the “Roaring Twenties.”. Jazz music
of the American Negro- the most influential art form to originate in the United States- spread
throughout the world. And with the slow disintegration of old prejudices came the “Harlem
Renaissance”, a burst of literary achievement in the 1920s by Negro playwrights, poets, and
novelists who presented new insights into the American experience and prepared the way for the
emergence of numerous black writers after mid- century.
3. Main writers and their works:
1)Ezra Pound(1885-1972): imagism, In a Station of the Metro
2)Edwin Arlington Robinson 艾德文•阿林顿•鲁滨逊(1869-1935):The Man Against the Sky《衬
托着天空的人》
3) Robert Frost(1874-1963): Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
4)Carl Sandburg卡尔.桑德堡
(1878-1967):Chicago
5)Wallace Stevens华莱士•史蒂文斯(1879-1955):Anecdote of the Jar
6)F.Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940):The Great Gatsby
7)Ernest Hemingway(1899-1961): A Farewell to Arms
8) John Steinbeck(1902-1968): The Grapes of Wrath
9)William Faulkner (1897-1962):The sound and the Fury
10) Eugene O’Neill尤金.奥尼尔 (1888-1953):Long Day’s Journey Into Night《进入黑夜的漫长
旅程》
11) Anderson, Sherwood(1876-1941):Death in the Woods
12）John Dos Passos 约翰.多斯.帕索斯Manhattan Transfer《曼哈顿中转站》
II. American Literature since 1945
1. The historical background:
After WWII, the nuclear time had unmistakably claimed itself and Americans were suddenly
brought to face a completely new world in which old rules and guidelines turned out to be helpless.
America’s rival with another big power of war victor-the Soviet Union-resulted in the Cold War.
Korean War broke out in June 1950. This was the first war that American had ever fought without
victory. This unbalance 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. The Cuba missile crisis took place
in October 1962. Vietnam War was another stage of the Cold War.Disillusionment spread
throughout the United States. Anti- war movement grew in size. The war left a permanent scar in
the memory of Americans.
2. Literature Movement:
In the 1950s, the “Beat” writers, in expression of disaffection with”official” American life, were
brutally and directly dominant. The so-called “Beat Generation,” were alienated- feeling like
foreigners in their country.The black humor featured the 1960s. It 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 experimented, such as psychological realistic novels, southern novels,
existential fiction and surrealistic fiction. The 1970s was a stage on which all kinds of literary art
wereperformed, such as the Southern fiction, Jewish fiction, psychological fiction,
African-American fiction, science fiction, feminist fiction, war novels. Poetry after WWII
flourished in various forms. Most of the poets are grouped under such poetical schools as Black
Mountain, the Beat Generation, New York poets black poets, Confessional poets, and West Coast
School. Plays after WWII survived under the squeeze of movies and television. New and young
playwrights , in the way of “Theatre of the Absurd”, naturalism, expressionism and Greek tragedy,
explored the themes of sickness, failure and human inadequacy.
3. Main writers and their works:
Novelists:
1)Jack Kerouac杰克.凯鲁亚克: On the Road 《在路上》
2)Saul Bellow(1) 索尔.贝洛: Seize the Day《只争朝夕》
3)Ralph Ellison拉尔夫.艾里森: Invisible Man《看不见的人》
4)Joseph Heller约瑟夫.海勒 : Catch-22《第22条军规》
5）Norman Mailer 诺曼.梅勒The Naked and the Dead《裸者和死者》， An American Dream 《美
国梦》
6）J. D. Salinger 塞林格Catcher in the Rye 《麦田的守望者》
7）Kurt Vonnegut Jr.库尔特.冯尼戈特Slaughterhouse-Five 《第五号屠场》
8）Donald Barthelme 唐纳德.巴塞尔姆
Snow White 《白雪公主》
9）Tennessee Williams 田纳西.威廉斯A Streetcar Named Desire《欲望号街车》
10）Margaret Michelle玛格丽特.米歇尔 Gone With the Wind 《飘》or《乱世佳人》
11）AlexHaley 亚利克斯.哈利Roots《根》
12）Martin Luther King 马丁.路德.金I Have a Dream 《我有一个梦想》
13)Richard Wright理查德.赖特Native Son 《土生子》
Poetry:
1) Allen Ginsberg 艾伦.金斯堡
Howl 《嚎叫》
2) Robert Lowell 罗伯特.洛威尔Life Studies 《生活研究》
Drama:
1)Arthur Miller 阿瑟.米勒Death of a Salesman 《推销员之死》
2)Edward Albee 爱德华.阿尔比 Who ‘s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 《谁害怕弗吉尼亚.沃尔
夫?》The Zoo Story 《动物园的故事》
Chapter Two American Modernism
I. Lost Generation: Seeking the bohemian lifestyle and rejecting the values of American
materialism, a number of intellectuals, poets, artists and writers fled to France in the post World
War I years. Paris was the center of it all.
American poet Gertrude Stein actually coined the expression "lost generation." Speaking to Ernest
Hemingway, she said, "you are all a lost generation."
The term stuck and the mystique surrounding these individuals continues to fascinate us.
Full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love
affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date.
There were many literary artists involved in the groups known as the Lost Generation. The three
best known are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos
Others usually included among the list are: Sherwood Anderson, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Ford
Maddox Ford and Zelda Fitzgerald. The Lost Generation writers all gained prominence in 20th
century literature. Their innovations challenged assumptions about writing and expression, and
paved the way for subsequent generations of writers.
II. Ernest Hemingway(1899-1961)
His Life
Born in Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at
the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer
ambulance unit in the Italian army.
Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent
considerable time in hospitals. After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for
Canadian and American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the
Greek Revolution.During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate
Americans in Paris.The study of an American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and
his role as a deserter provided Hemingway writing materials,and his experiences as a reporter
during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel For Whom the Bell
Tolls.
His Works:
1.Three stories and Ten Poems (1923) 《三篇短篇小说和十首诗》
2. In Our Time (1925) 《在我们的时代里》
3.The Sun Also Rises (1926) 《太阳照样升起》—the first long novel
4.A Farewell to Arms (1929) 《永别了，武器》
5.Death in the Afternoon (1932) 《午后之死》
6.Green Hills of Africa (1935) 《非洲的青山》
7.Winner Take Nothing (1933) 《胜者无所得》
8.To Have and Have Not (1937) 《富有与贫穷》
9.For whom the Bell Tolls (1940) 《丧钟为谁而鸣》
10.The Old Man and the Sea (1952) 《老人与海》
Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954
His point of view:
He holds a black, naturalistic view of the world, he sees the world as “all a nothing” and “all nada”;
man is nothing, too. His negative attitude toward life, sees life in terms of battles and tension.
His style:
Style of irony
Simplicity and apparent naturalness of his prose, directness, clarity and freshness;
Economy of expression: concrete, specific, casual and conversational words short sentences and
paragraphs; Vigorous and positive language Deliberate avoidance of gorgeous adjectives.
Hemingway theme with a Hemingway hero—an average man of decidedly masculine tastes,
sensitive and intelligent, a man of action, and one of few words; typical hero is one who, wounded
but strong, more sensitive and wounded because stronger, enjoys the pleasures of life (sex, alcohol,
sport) in face of ruin and death and maintains,
through some notion of code, an ideal of himself.
Despairing courage—a man is not made for defeat…A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
Grace under pressure
Typical Hemingway situations are characterized by chaos and brutality and violence, by crime and
death; and sport, hard drinking and sexual promiscuity.
A Farewell to Arms
It is an important novel written by Hemingway, in which the author deals the war directly and
there are obvious autographical origins.
The Story: Lieutenat Ferderic Henry was a young American , a member of an Italian Ambulance
unit on the Italian front in WWI. When Henry returned to the front from leave he learned from
his friend that a group of British nurses had arrived in his absence to set up a British hospital unit.
His friend introduced him to nurse Cathrine Barkley.
Henry called on Miss Barkley. He liked the frank young English girl . Before he left the front,
she gave him a ST. Anthony medal. At the front, Henry was badly wounded in the legs, and was
taken to a field hospital. Catherine Barkley came to the hospital and Henry knew that he was in
love with her. After his operation, Henry made a rapid recovery with Catherine Barkley as his
attendant. Together
they dined in out of the way restaurants, and together they rode about the countryside in a carriage.
Henry’s wound had healed. Before he left for the front, Catherine told him she was pregnant.
Henry returned to the front with orders to load his three ambulances with hospital equipment. The
German divisions had reinforced the Austrians, the
Italians began their retreat. Soldiers were throwing down their arms and officers were cutting of
rank from their sleeves. During the retreat Henry had made his farewell to arms. He borrowed
civilian clothes from an American friend in Milan and went by train to Stresa, where he met
Catherine. They stayed at a small restaurant. The authorities were planning to
Arrest him. Henry and Catherine escaped to Switzerland. They stayed at a hotel there. They talked
about what they would do together after the war. When Catherine’s confinement approached , they
went to a nearby hospital. At the hospital Catherine’s pains caused the doctor to use an anesthetic
on her
After hours of suffering she was delivered of a dead baby. The nurse sent Henry out to get
something to eat. When he went back to the hospital, he learned that Catherine had had a
hemorrhage. He went into the room and stayed with her until she died. There was nothing he could
do, no one he could talk to, no place he could go. Catherine and
The baby died, only himself left. He left the hospital and walked back to his hotel in the dark. It
was raining heavily.
Chapter XL I
“What’s the matter with the baby?” I asked. “ Didn’t you know?” “No.” “He wasn’t alive.” “ He
was dead?” “ They couldn’t start him breathing. The cord was caught around his neck or
something.”1
1.The baby died.
“ What is wrong?”” Mrs. Henry has had a hemorrhage.”
“I’m gong to die,” she said; then waited and said,” I hate it.”2 “You will be all right, Cat. I
know you’ll be all right.” “ I meant to write you a letter to have if anything happened, but I didn’t
do it.” “ Do you want me to get a priest3 or any one to come and see you?”
2Hate death,war
3 belief
“ just you,” she said. “ I’m not afraid . I just hate it.”4
“ Is she dead?” “No, but she is unconscious.”
It seems she had one hemorrhage after another. They couldn’t stop it. I went into the room and
stayed with Catherine until she died.
Outside the room, in the hall,
4.strong hate against the war,disaster
I spoke to the doctor, “ is there anything I can do tonight?” “No. There is nothing to do. Can I
take you to your hotel?” “No, thank you. I am going to stay here a while.” “ I know there is
nothing to say. I cannot tell you-” “ No,”I said. “ There’s nothing to say.” 5“ Good-night,” he
said.
5 Great pain, suffergs,
Reason, sense, silent
“I cannot take you to your hotel?”
“No, thank you.” “ It was the only thing to do,” he said. “ The operation proved-”
“ I do not want to talk about it,” I said. “ I would like to take you to your hotel.” “ No, thank
you.”6
6 still polite, no cry, no tears, not crazy, grace under pressure.
But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn’t any good. It was
like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to
the hotel in the rain.7
7Baby and sweet die. Only himself in a foreign country. Despair and hopeless. Accept fate.
The Analysis
The novel turned to Hemingway’s war experiences in Italy, and , with its deserter-hero,is a
study in disillusionment. Frederic Henry goes to the war and discovers the insanity of the universe
in which he lives. Guns that spit out death, the Carabinieri killing the innocent in the rain at night,
his own wound and the death of Catherine –all this happens in world of complete unreason.
Henry becomes a very emibittered man, fighting single handed against overwhelming odds. Here
stands the Hemingway hero, an average man of decidedly masculine tastes, sensitive and
intelligent, a man of action, and one of few words. Here is an individualist, alone even when with
other people,
somewhat an outsider, keeping emotions under control, self-disciplined in a dreadful place where
one cannot have happiness. Henry is completely disillusioned. He has been to the war, has seen
nothing sacred and glorious but has found like a veritable Chicago slaughterhouse. Henry is
shocked into the realization that “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were
obscure,”
and feels “always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious,and sacrifice and the expression in
vain.” This novel caught the mood of the post-war generations, and brought international fame
to young Hemingway.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
The story: a novel by Hemingway in 1940. An American university lecturer in Spain, Robert
Jordan, served with the Republicans in Spain during the Civil War, and instructed to blow up a
bridge across a gorge.
The explosion is to be timed with absolute precision to prevent Falangist reinforcements using the
bridge to oppose a republican attack aiming to capture Segovia. The American
Joins a party of guerrillas camping at a cave in the mountains and led by Pablo, renowned as a
military organizer. When the time is approaching, it is found that Pablo has stolen the exploder
and detonators from the
Dynamite packes and decamped. And the Falangists are well prepared for the Republican attack.
Jordan dispatches a warning to headquarters, but a crazed commissar
Holds up the message until it is too late to countermand the attack. Pablo, having relented, returns
and confesses that he has thrown the stolen articles into the river.
Jordan proceeds with his mission,employing bombs To explode the dynamite. The bridge is
destroyed but Jordan dies to save the others.
The Title
It is from John Donne’s Meditation :” Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in
Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
Analysis
Robert Jordan is a man living all the time in the shadow of fate and doom. He is clearly aware
all along that he is fighting a losing battle, but he keeps on striving. He may
Have planned well and tried to get things done his way, but that his doom is sealed is a foregone
conclusion. The whole action takes place within some seventy hours, which corresponds
To the three score and ten years of man, and there are Robert’s references to the fact that he has
lived his whole life in the seventy hours. He dose love a woman and try to give up
Himself and join with her, but the universe tends to frustrate any human effort. The war dominates
so that the love story represents a mere dream which the realities of life do not allow to realize.
He is no longer alone, having a cause to work for and a group to fight with and, more important,
someone to love and die for. The war he is fighting for, for him, a metaphor for a struggle for
freedom.
It is for democracy that he sacrifices himself. Nowhere else in Hemingway is the theme of human
brotherhood so emphasized.
Chapter Three
American Post Modernism
•Beat Generation:
In the 1950s, the “Beat”writers , in expression of disaffection with “official”American life,
were brutally and directly dominant.
Bohemian rebellion against established society came to prominence about 1956 and had
its centers in San Francisco and New York. The term “Beat “ expressed both exhaustion and
beatification in that the writers, tired of conventional society, and disgusted by it, believed that
thoroughgoing disaffiliation from all aspects of the manners and mores of
of what they saw as a corrupt, crass, commercial world would bring its own kind of blissful
illumination, aided by drink and drugs. Writers of the movement expressed their views in their
own “hip” vocabulary, combined with phrases from Buddhism, by which they were influenced.
Post-modernism :Media-influenced aesthetic sensibility of the late 20th century characterized by
open-endedness and collage. Post-modernism questions the foundations of cultural and artistic
forms through self-referential irony and the juxtaposition of elements from popular culture and
electronic technology.
II. Allen Ginsberg
His life: Allen Ginsberg is probably one of the best known contemporary poets in recent history. He
was born in 1926 in Newark, NJ and received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1948.Like
many other artists, Ginsberg held a variety of odd jobs before becoming an established writer.
His employment history includes work on various cargo ships, a spot welder, a dishwasher and he
also worked as a night porter in Denver. He has participated in numerous poetry readings, including
the famous
Six Gallery event that occured in San Fransisco.In 1954, San Francisco painter Robert LaVigne
introduced his model and companion, Peter Orlovsky to Ginsberg. Soon after this first meeting,
Orlovsk and Ginsberg became lovers and moved in together, defining their relationship as a
marriage.
Despite periods of separation, this arrangement remained intact until Ginsberg's death in April
1997. Ginsberg was the recipient of numerous honors and awards during his lifetime including: the
Woodbury Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, the National Book Award for Poetry, NEA
grants and a Lifetime Ahievement Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.
Ginsberg is perhaps one of the most respected and revered Beat writer's. Ginsberg's writing has
been compared to Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman and has been said to contain "that old gnostic
tradition".
Chapter Four War Fiction
Introduction:
Writing after war, here after the two world wars, from realism to postmodernism. John
Limon points out “Beauty is the source of war's irrationality; and the irrationality of war needs to
be restored to beauty” For war thus serves art. Art has war offer art this bargain: make me
beautiful, and I will make you historical“ “War's failure is literature's justification. American
literary history is demarcated by wars, as if literary epochs, like the history of literature itself,
required bloodshed to commence. But from realism, generally taken to be a product of the Civil
War, through modernism, usually assumed to be a prediction or result of the Great War, up to
postmodernism which followed World War II and spanned Vietnam.
Joseph Heller(1923-1999)
His life: was born and brought up in a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York. In 1942, he joined
the U.S. army and served as a bombardier in the 12th Air Force, stationed on an island in
Mediterranean. When the war was over, he studied at new York University, took a
M.A. in literature from Columbia University and spent a year at oxford in England. During the
1950s, he taught an Pennsylvania State University but later he turned to work in the advertising
sections of various national magazines, including Time.
Ever since 1961 he has been working as a full- time writer. In 1977 he became a member of
National Institute of Arts and Letters. He started his writing career before he graduated. His
experience during the war inspired his writings. It took him six years to finish Catch-22.
His Works:
Novels:
Catch-22 (1961)
Something Happened (1976) As Good As Gold (1979)
Plays:
1.We Bombed in New Haven (1968)
2. Sex and Single Girl
Catch-22:
The story:the protagonist is Captain Yossarian, an American Air Force bombardier. He is shaped
as an “anti-hero”, without any traditional qualities of an army man. He is a coward. He pleads
madness to get out of combat missions. During the missions he drops
Bombs and runs for life without considering whether they hit the target. He even changes the
bombing target in the military map so as to fly to a safe place. He extremely fears death,
suspecting that everybody around him is planning to murder him. He thinks everyone is insane
Except himself. At last he escapes to Sweden successfully,freeing himself from the Catch-22.
Though without any sense of justice and any touch of patriotism, he is Heller’s hero. In this novel,
Heller doesn't mean to comment on the justice of war,nor the necessary quality
Of a soldier. Instead, he wants to show the conflict between an ordinary man and the absurd
American bureaucracy. In this novel, Heller does not mention Yossarian’s physical appearance,
nor his origin. The author tries to show his readers that Yossarian is the only one who is sane ,and
who dares to
Challenge authority and refuses to submit to it blindly. He sees the insane and inhuman doings of
the so called heroes. They are authorities, and under the cover of patriotism and heroism, they
playfully plunge the world into violence and chaos. Yossarian is not trying to escape the war, he is
trying to escape the bondage of absurd conventions and the
Inhuman authority as represented by Catch-22, which is the antagonist of the novel. It is not a
concrete regulation. It exists, though unreadable, untouchable and invisible. Nevertheless, it is
rather powerful, comprehensive and concise. It symbolizes a well-knitted trap nobody can escape.
In creating this humorous effect, Heller carefully manipulates language and logic patterns. Words
with apparently contradictory meanings are often juxtaposed. This humorous and comic approach
to despair and tragedy makes readers laugh first and grieve soon afterwards. A humor out of
despair and a laughter out of tears.
On page…