I. Benjamin Franklin 1. works (1) Autobiography 自传 (2) Poor Richard’s Almanac 穷理查德年鉴 2. contribution (1) He helped found the Pennsylvania Hospital and the American Philosophical Society. (2) He was called “the new Prometheus who had stolen fire (electricity in this case) from heaven”. (3) Everything seems to meet in this one man – “Jack of all trades”. Herman Melville thus described him “master of each and mastered by none”. II. Thomas Paine 1. works (1) Common Sense (2) American Crisis III. Thomas Jefferson 1. works (1) The declaration of Independence IV. Philip Freneau 1. works (1) The wild honey suckle (2) The Indian Burying Ground (3) To a Caty-Did 2. contribution (1) Poet of the American Revolution (2) Father of American poetry (3) Transitional role of neoclassicism and Romanticism Enlightenment (1) It was an intellectual movement and it originated in Europe in 17th C and come to American in 18th C. (2) It stressed the power of human reason, the important of scientific methods and discoveries. (3) It contributed to freezing American from the limitations of Puritanism and stimulating. (4) Emphasized independent democratic nation. American Romanticism

1. American romanticism is a literary movement swept though western Europe.

2. Emphasized freedom and individualism, like to write sth about moral enthusiasm.

3. Interest in medieval literature

4. Show love of nature, emphasized mystery and supernatural. I. Washington Irving 1. several names attached to Irving (1) first American writer win international fame (2) the messenger sent from the new world to the old world (3) father of American history, write history and biography as literary entertainment 2. works

(1) First novel <A History of New York> 纽约外史won him wide popularity (2) <The Sketch Book> 见闻札记 won international fame

(3) The Sketch Book :the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle.

II. James Fenimore Cooper

1. several names attached to Irving the first important American novelist began his literary career on dare. 2. works Leatherstocking Tale

III. William cullen Bryant

The first American to gain stature of a major poet.

1. Thanatopsis” 死亡随想曲

2. To the Waterfowl 致水鸟 most perfect brief poem in the language.

IV. Edgar Allan Poe

1. works (1) the fall of the house of Usher (2) to Helen (3) Annabel Lee 2. contribution (1) a master of the horror tale (2) first important critics (3) a start of the detective story

Transcendentalism.超验主义

1. It is a philosophical and literary movement that flourished in New England.

2. Emphasized intuition, the spirit or the oversoul ,

3. Emphasized individualism

4. For transcendentalists, nature is a symbol of the spirit or God

5. they believe in self-trust and self-reliance

6. They appreciated the dignity of manual labor

7. represent writer: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau

V. Ralph Waldo Emerson

1. works: Nature: Bible of American transcendentalism. 2. one of his statement was in The American Scholar

VI. Henry David Thoreau

Walden 瓦尔登湖

VII. Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Scarlet Letter 红字 Hester Prynne 3A:adultery able angel VIII. Herman Melville

Moby Dick

IX. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A Psalm of Life：stresses the importance of a full and sincere activity in making the most of life’s brief span, rather than succumbing to moods of vain regret and dejection.

Realism: a literary movement in Europe and the United States in the last half of the last half of the 19th, early year of 20th. The attempt in literary and art to represent life as it really is, without sentimentalizing or idealizing it. It described Everyday life and speech of ordinary people. Represent writer: William Dean ,Mark Twain ,Henry James.

I. Walt Whitman

Leave of grass

Free words 自由体

II. Emily Dickinson

I died for beauty-but was scarce

Because I could not stop for death

III. Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens

1. works:

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

2. contribute:

(1) The true father of all the national literature.

(2) Lincoln of our literature.

(3) The fountainhead of all modern literature.

(4) His writing style: colloquial language dialects, local color, sentence simple brief, sometimes ungrammatical; humor, social critic.

IV. O. Henry

William Sidney Porter

1. works:

(1) The Cop and the Anthem

(2) The Four Million

(3) The Gift of the Magi

(4) A Municipal Report

(5) An Unfinished Story

(6) Phoebe

(7) The Furnished Room

(8) A Lickpenny Lover

Naturalism:

(1) It was an outgrowth and extreme form of realism.

(2) It is sometimes defined as the technique of portraying a scientifically accurate, detached picture of life, including everything and selecting nothing.

(3) It conveyed that social conditions, heredity and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character.

(4) Its characteristics: pessimism, determinism, objectivity. V. Henry James

He defined the American literature in the international context. Works:

(1) The Portrait of A Lady

(2) The Bostonians

(3) The Wings of the Dove,

(4) Daisy Miller

VI. Jack London

(1) The Sea Wolf

(2) The Iron Heel

(3) The Call of the Wild

(4) Martin Eden

VII. White Fang

(1) Sister Carrie

(2) Trilogy of Desire 欲望三部曲：The Financier , The Titan, The topic: identification of potency with money

VIII. Ezra Pound

(1) Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

(2) The Cantos :A Pact, In a Station of the Metro

IX. Robert Frost

(1) A Boy’s Will

(2) North of Boston

(3) Mountain interval

(4) New Hampshire

(5) A Further Range

(6) A Witness Tree

(7) Steeple Bush

(8) In the Clearing The Stoic

(9) The Road Not Taken

(10) Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

X. Thomas Stearns Eliot ---T.S Eliot

(1) The Hollow Man

(2) The Waste land

(3) The Love Son of J. Alfred Prufrock

XI. F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby,

Tender Is the Night

XII. Ernest Hemingway

A farewell to Arms,

For Whom the Bell Tolls

The Old Man and the Sea

XIII. John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath:

earn him a Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962 XIV. William Faulkner

A rose of Emily: get Nobel Prize for Literature

第二篇：美国文学中的PPt总结

modernism

A complex and diverse international literary movement, originating at about the end of the 19th century and reaching its maturity in the mid 20th .

Rooted in the social upheavals, promoted by the new ideas and thoughts:

Nietzsche’s philosophy of unconsciousness

Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis

Bergson’s intuitionism

Darwinism

I. Historical Background (WWI-WWII)

1. 1920s

A. economical prosperity: new inventions, highly-consuming society

B. Spiritual barrenness: dislocation, fragmentation

decline in moral code

2. 1930s Great Depression — 1929 New York stock market crash

shake people's trust & belief in the values of capitalism

Key words: frustration, perplexity, distorted, dislocated

Features of the literature

Break with traditional forms & techniques of expression

Traditional old values had gone, god is gone, life is meaningless.

Stress a sense of alienation, loss, and despair

Techniques—stream of consciousness

imagism ( poetry, Ezra Pound）

Prefers the unconsciousness to the self-consciousness

Elevate the individual and the inner being over the social human being

Imagism 意象主义

Influenced by French symbolism, ancient Chinese poetry, Japanese literature Haiku

Principles:

1. Direct treatment of thing,

2. Economy of expression—(To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation)

3. Rhythm: musical phrase

In a Station of the Metro --Ezra Pound

The Apparition of these faces in the crowds;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

地铁车站

人群 粉面 幽灵

黝湿 枝头 花瓣

Important events

1920s Expatriates/ lost generation迷惘的一代

1930s the Great Depression

–left wing literature/ John Steinbeck

The 1920s– a flowering period of American literature.

Considered as ―the second renaissance‖ of American literature.

Nickname for this period

Roaring 20s –comfort

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dollar decade –rich

Jazz Age –Jazz music

The Great Gatsby --The 1920s

Writers in 1920s

Writers: three groups

1. participants

2. expatriates—lost generation( Anderson, Hemingway, Fitzgerald)

3. bohemian (unconventional way of life) –on-lookers

WWI— ―a war to end all wars‖

War means violence, devastation, blood and death.

the Lost Generation/ American expatriates

It defines a sense of moral loss or aimlessness.

The WWI destroyed the innocent ideas, many good young men went to the war and died, or returned damaged, both physically and mentally; their moral faith were no longer valid--- they were ―Lost.‖

To whom does it refer?

Narrow sense: a group of American writers, including Hemingway, F.S.Fitzgerald, J.Dos Passos, E.E.Cummings,

Sherwood Anderson, and Hart Crane, etc. Who left America and went to Europe.

Broad Sense: the entire post -WWI American young generation.

What are the main characteristics?

Suffering from the war, losing beliefs, being cut off from the past, disillusioned, strong sense of loss, puzzled, confused, unable or unwilling to settle back into the routines of peacetime life, indulged in drinking and partying, can not adjust themselves to the present life.

What are the main subject matters?

The sense of lost, nada and wound (Hemingway), the breaking up of the American dream (Fitzgerald), the sociological zero (Dos Passos),

The Great Depression 1930—financial crisis

On October 24, 1929, Black Thursday, the stock market.

Prices kept dropping, and on October 29, 1929, Black Tuesday, more than 16 million shares were sold, but by the end of the day, most stocks ended below their previous value, and some stocks became totally worthless. Because of that, some people became homeless and penniless, all because of the Stock Market Crash.

1930s The Great Depression

Left-wing literature(左翼文学）/ influenced by Marxism

John Steinbeck—the Grapes of Wrath

The Fugitives (逃亡者派）

maintain the southern tradition in literature, advocate the south keep the agricultural tradition.

(John Ransom, Robert Warren, Allen Tate)

Protest Literature （抗议文学）

Richard Wright—Native Son (Blacks are not cruel by nature)

Modernism in Literature

Anti-romantic:do not avoid the ugly, horrible, and sexual descriptions

Anti-traditional: experimenting with different techniques to reflect modern people’s inner mind.

Anti-heroes:no totally good or bad characters

Major Writers

Among American writers, the best-known Modernists are T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest 2

Hemingway, William Faulkner and so on.

Modernism—1950s –Post Modernism

Thematically ( different attitude towards life)

Modernism: impose shape and significance on life; attempt to control the meaningless and disorder through art Post-modernism: accept life for what it is.

Formally,

Modernism: retrospective, full of interior monologues, stream of consciousness

Post-modernism:

Free to borrow techniques from all kinds of works.

Sherwood Anderson(1876-1941)

Small-towns people, lower class

Writer’s writer

Psychological complexity

grotesque

Colloquial style

Influence on modern novelists

―The father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing which our successors will carry on.‖ ----William Faulkner

Anderson’s important works

1916 Windy McPherson’s Son 《饶舌的麦克逊的儿子》（modeled on his childhood, discuss the father-son relationship)

1917 (41yrs) Marching Men (1917)-- a collection of prose poems

1919 Winesburg,Ohio(确立美国文坛地位)-- a series of fictionalized sketches of "grotesques," his term for people defeated by false dreams, people whose illusions have left them vulnerable to profound hurts from which they never recover. Perhaps the best sketch is "Hands," the story of Wing Biddlebaum, a eccentric who recounts his experience: he was once a loving small-town , but narrow-minded , acting on nothing more than a child's and false report, branded Wing as a sexual , drove him from the town, and almost lynched him.

1920 Poor White, a novel

1921- 1922 ―The Triumph of the Egg‖， impressions of American life in tales and poems . Wins the Dial award of two thousand dollars , meets Ernest Hemingway and , in Europe , James Joyce , Gertrude Stein , and Ford Madox Ford . a collection of stories, the most notable of which is "The Egg," a haunting symbolist tale of a man who has violated his nature by accommodating himself to his wife's ambitions.

1924 ―A Story Teller’s Story‖-- autobiography.

1933 Death in the Woods and Other Stories. 《林中之死及其他》

1937 Plays: Winesburg and Others. The others are three one-act plays: The Triumph of the Egg, Mother , and They Married Later . Elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters .

Small town life:

Key words of understanding

American’s small-town life----Thwarted emotions, repressed drives, frustrated lives and distorted natures became the distinct features of American’ s small-town life.) （ American passes from a rural to a predominantly industrial 3

society. The transition is a painful experience in small town. ）

Grotesques----Alienation, loneliness, and want of love and understanding made life intolerable, and turned people into ―grotesques‖.

Winesburg, Ohio ---This historic importance of Anderson lies in the fact that he offered in his best works a rather timeless record of these for posterity. It is a book of the grotesques, of people each with a ruling kind of passion which distorts their personalities.

theme

The psychological and emotional aspect of American small-town life, with emphasis chiefly on lower-class figures, the unsuccessful, the depraved, and the inarticulate.

作品：

―It was the truths that made the people grotesques……The moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesques and the truth he embraced a falsehood.‖ ------Sherwood Anderson

Winesburg, Ohio is the title and the setting for Sherwood Anderson’s book. The book has a unique setup where the story centers around a number of themes, but lacks a general plot. The characters in the book are vivid, rich individuals who are all linked together through their unsatisfied lives in Winesburg. The characters' untraditional connections to each other are what make this book so interesting. Every single one of the characters seems to have gone through a very hard time in their lives and just about all of those characters attribute their failures to living in this small town. Throughout the novel, there are references to the city and its life style which hint to the notion that the city is where everything happens and there are more opportunities and people's lives are generally better. A lot of these characters stress that if they were to leave to the city, their dreams and lives would not be failures as they are now in small town Winesburg.

Hands

―For twenty years Adolph Myers had lived alone in Winesburg. He was forty but looked sixty-five.‖

The story

Perhaps the best sketch is "Hands," the story of Wing Biddlebaum, a eccentric who recounts his experience: he was once a loving small-town , but narrow-minded , acting on nothing more than a child's and false report, branded Wing as a sexual , drove him from the town, and almost lynched him.

One of the twenty-five stories in the book, Winesburge, Ohio, relates the bitter story of Adolph Myers (Wing Biddlebaum) and his pair of sensitive hands which have lost their right to express the love of man.

Myers has never been able to recover from his traumatic experience of being beaten out of his job as a school teacher because of his hands.

The key point

Hands: Hands are made for loving; but hands making mechanical things grow callous, preoccupied…fail at love. The Egg

Of all Anderson’s short fictions ―The Egg‖ most deserves to be placed among the great stories of the world. Understanding of the story

The story

the classical American story: ambition prodding a simple man into a situation he cannot control and thereby bringing about his spiritual destruction.

The story is not primarily as a social portrait or a filial gesture, but as a parable of human defeat.

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The egg

a token of all the energy in the universe—arbitrary, unmotivated, ridiculous, and malevolent—against which man mush pit himself.

The image of man

a deeply pessimistic one: he is not merely defeated but is tricked in his defeat, his very hunger for life is the source of his humiliations, his wish to live becomes his impulsion to the death.

The protagonist

The world in which he lives is unremittingly hostile and, in part, the story’s point is to show how the boy gradually realizes the full extent of, and his own subjection to, that hostility.

characterization

His characters are often twisted, warped by their inability to express the passion or dream with them, stifled by the conventions of Victorian American.

Theses people cannot communicate.’

Summary

Sherwood Anderson was a writer of an important period in American history, one in which America passed from a rural to a predominantly industrial society.

Thematically he had the courage to explore new material for fiction: the psychological and emotional aspect of American small-town life, with emphasis chiefly on lower-class figures, the unsuccessful, the depraved, and the inarticulate.

Technically, Anderson was a highly original writer.

Anderson wrote his stories that appeal through the sheer emotional force of moments of revelation.

He observed human grotesqueness and eccentricity from a Freudian psychological point of view and tries to reveal the abnormal state mind.

Anderson was endowed with ―a gift for pouring a lifetime into a moment.‖

His style

In colloquial style.

He regarded the vernacular as an honest medium and developed a style :

clarity, directness, and a deceptive simplicity.

UNIT 9

Task 1:

?1-5 F T T T T 6-10 T F F F T 11-15 F T T F T 16-20 F F T F T

Task 2

?What is ―American Dream‖? What do you think about it? From this story, can you find out the writer’s idea about ―American Dream‖?

? Formally, a poor young man from the West trying to make his fortune in the East, but thematically, the young man goes on a journey of discovery from dream, through disenchantment, and finally to a sense of failure and despair. In this general pattern of the protagonist’s personal experience is incarnated the whole of American experience.

Task 3. Answer the questions according to the text.

?1) What made Father and Mother become ambitious?

?The American passion for getting up in the world took possession of them, i.e American dream made them ambitious.

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?2) Who is narrating the story? How does the narrator describe himself?

?The story was narrated through the first person ―I‖ persona, a young boy who recalled his mother and father’s events in their daily life. He described himself as a gloomy man inclined to see the darker side of life, and he attributed it to the fact that what should have been for me the happy joyous days of childhood were spent on a chicken farm.

?3) How does the narrator think of his parents and their venture?

?The narrator thought his parents’ venture was due to the American passion. The first venture into which the two people went turned out badly.

?4) Why the story is entitled ―The Egg‖? What is its importance?

? The whole story was evolved around egg. Father’s American dream all connected with egg. To some extent, egg stands for American dream. Just like from the egg came the hen who again lid the egg, this is an circular cycle which symbolizes that American dream will passed down generation after generation.

? Egg is a token of all the energy in the universe—arbitrary, unmotivated, ridiculous, and malevolent—against which man mush pit himself.

?5) What was their first venture? Were they successful?

?They rented ten acres of poor stony land and launched into chicken raising, but it was a failure. For ten years they struggled to make our chicken farm pay and then they gave up that struggle and began another.

?6) Why did the parents decide to run a restaurant?

?It was Mother’s idea that the restaurant would be profitable in view of its location. Traveling men would be always waiting around to take trains, out of town and town people would come to the station to await incoming trains.

?7) Why did the father feel angry and cry that night?

?Father got ambitious in his second venture, and he want to fulfill his dream by entertaining his guests. But he could not give an excellent performance due to his ―stage fright‖, and was regarded as ―mildly insane‖. The disillusionment of his dream made him angry and cry.

?8) Describe the father’s attempt at being an entertainer. Why does he want to put up a show for Joe Kane? ?Joe was left alone with father that night, thus, father want to entertain him in order to make him less boring. He tried many times to make the egg stand on the table but was ended in failure. And then he showed his exhibition of those ―deformed‖ eggs which made Joe feel a little ill.

9) Was the father successful in his show? Why or why not?

? Father was failed in his show, because Joe showed no interests to his show and thought Father was ―mildly insane‖.

? father was a deeply pessimistic figure: he is not merely defeated but is tricked in defeat, his very hunger for life is the source of his humiliations.

?10) What did Mother and Father realize at the end of the story?

?On that night, however furious, father did not destroy the egg, but instead, lay them gently on the table in presence of Mother and me. Although suffered from some setbacks, Mother and father still insist on their struggle to fulfill their dream.

–The world in which he lives is hostile and the boy gradually realizes the full extent of, and his own subjection to that hostility.

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