Chapter 10 American Naturalism美国自然主义文学

Background：social condition: post-bellun(战后美国)

People’s thought: Darwin’s evolution(达尔文进化论)

”the survival of the fittest”&”the human beast”

Literary climate

Stephen Crane(斯蒂芬 柯兰) 自然主义先驱之一(与艾米丽 狄更斯齐名)

Works： Maggie： A Girl of the Streets (街头女郎 梅吉) The Red Badge of Courage (红色的英雄勋章) The Open Boat (海上扁舟) The Blue Hotel（蓝色旅馆）

◆Major theme：In his themes and styles, Crane is an avant-grade writer(前卫的). Crane writes

about extreme experiences that are confronted by ordinary people. His characters are not larger-than-life, but they touch the mysterious edges of their capacities for perception, action and understanding. They are all struggling to survive. ◆简要评价：Crane was a pioneer writing in the naturalistic tradition. He was also a pioneer in the

field of modern poetry. His early poems, brief, quotable, with their unrhymed, unorthodox conciseness, and impressionistic imagery, were to exert a significant influence on modern poetry. He is now recognized as one of the two precursors of Imagist poetry.

Frank Norris Works： The Octopus(章鱼)

McTeague（麦克提格） Theodore Dreiser 西奥多 德莱赛 Works： Sister Carrie 嘉莉妹妹 Jennie Gerhardt 珍妮姑娘

欲望三部曲： The Financier金融家 The Titan 巨头The Stoic 斯多葛 The Genius

An American Tragedy

Dreiser Looks at Russia 德莱赛眼中的俄罗斯 ◆“writing themes on man” He was widely read in literature.

1) He learned to regard man as an animal driven by greed and lust in a struggle for existence in which only the “fittest”, the most ruthless, survive.

2) Man is only a “mechanism” reacting to “chemic compulsions” and human tragedy comes as a result of the collision between man’s biological needs and society’s ruthless manipulation. 3) Life is predatory.

4) No one is ethically free; everything is determined by a complex of internal chemisms and by the forces of social pressure.

Dreiser had a warm heart. His sympathies were always with the oppressed and the weak.

◆德莱赛的评价

1） He faced every form of attack that a serious artist could encounter

misunderstanding, mis representation, artistic isolatition and commercial sedduction. But he survived to lead the rebellion of the 1920s.

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2） Dreiser has been a controversial figure in American literary history.

3） His works are powerful in their portrayal of the changing American life, but his

style is considered crude.

4） It’s in Dreiser’s works that American Naturalism is said to have come to age.

5) His novels are formless at times and awkwardly written, and his characterization is found deficient and his prose pedestrian and dull, yet his very energy proves to be more than a compensation.

6) Dreiser’s stories are always solid and intensely interesting with their simple but highly moving characters.

7) Dreisers is good at employing the journalistic method of reiteration to burn a central impression into the reader’s mind.

8) Here lies the power and permanence that have mad Dreiser one of the America’s foremost novelists.

Jack London 杰克伦敦 The Sea Wolf 海狼

The Call of the Wild 野性的呼唤 Martin Eden 马丁医生

Chapter 11 Imagism&Pound 意象主义&庞德

◆Features of Imagism

1） It’s a movement in US and English poetry characterized by the use of concrete language and figures of speech, modern subject matter, metrical freedom and avoidence of romantic or mystrical themes aming at clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images.

2） It grew out of the symbolist movement in 1912 and was initially led by Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell and others.

3） The imagist manifest came out in 1912 showed three imagist poetic. ◆Definition of Imagism

1)T.E.Hulme suggests that it’s modern art that deals wih expression and communication of momentary phrases in the poet’s mind. Poetic techniques, he goes on to state, should become subtle enough to record exactly the momentary impressions.

2)The most effective means to express these momentary impressions is through the use of one dominant image.

3)The image is a representation of a physical object, and the reader is the made to react to it.

?? Imagist manifesto came out in 1912 in which Pound and Flint laid down three ．．．．．Imagist poetic principles: 1, Directly treatment of the “thing”, whether subjective or ．．．．．．．．．．．．．．．．．．．．．．．

objective.2, To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation 3, As regarding rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.

4) Pound defined an image as that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time, and later he extended this definition when he stated that an image was “a vortex or cluster offused ideas” ”endowed with energy”.

5) These existed influence of Chinese poetry on the Imagist movement. Imagists

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found value in Chinese poetry was because Chinese poetry is , by virtue of the ideographic and picographic nature of the Chinese language, essentially imagistic poetry.

◆发展三阶段：

1） It first began in London iin the years 1908-1909 T.E.Hulme Absolutely accurate presentation and no verviage

2) The second phase of the movement was the period of some three years(1912-1914) Ezra Pound

3) The third phase of Imagism(1914-1917) Amy Lowell

Ezra Pound （700 books 1500 articls）

The artist was morally and culturally the arbiter and the “savior” of the race Works: A Lume Spento 灯火熄灭之时 Cathay Cantos

Homage to Sextus Propertius Hugh Selwyn Mauberley ◆Poetic features of Pound

Pound is often considered as the poet who is the most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. His critical theories have great influence on many important American and British poets.

Throughout the 1920s, he was much involved in the most of the major artistic movement. He was the leader of the imagist school in poetry. He believed that good poetry was based on images rather than ideas.

As an imagist himself, he advocated and followed the imagist??, writing succinct(简洁的) verse of dry clarity and hard outline in which an exact visual image made a total poetic statement.

His technique came from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry. On one hand the stressed clarity, precision and economy of language, on the other hand, Pound mused the traditional rhyme and meter in order to, as Pound put it, “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of metronome”

Chapter12

T.S.Eliot Works： The Waste Land 荒原

Ash Wednesday 圣灰星期三 Four Quartets 四个四重奏

Murder in the Cathedral 大教堂谋杀案 Cocktail Party 鸡尾酒会

The basic themes of his criticism concerned the relationship between tradition and individual talent, and between the past, the present, and the future. ◆Impersonal Theory 非个性理论

1） He claims that the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual

extinction of personality.

2） He employs the term ”depersonalization” for this critical notion.

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