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日期：2004-4-2 作者：Cathy  
American Literature

Chapter 3 The Modern Period
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III Questions and answers:
1. Analyze the background of the Modern Period.

Answer:
(1) The U.S. participated in The First World War marked a crucial stage in the nation’s evolution/development to a world power.

(2) The technology has brought about great changes in the life of the American people. (P544)

2. The ideology analyses about the people and especially the authors.
(The ideology analysis of "The Lost Generation)

Answer:
(1) People became less certain about what might arise in this changing world and more cynical about accepted standards of honesty and morality. The idea of "seize the day" or "enjoy the present" was pervasive.

(2) There was a decline in moral standard and the first few decades of the twentieth century was described as a spiritual wasteland. The censor/standard of a great civilization being destroyed or destroying itself, social breakdown, and individual powerlessness and hopelessness became part of the American experience as a result of the First World War, with resulting feelings of fear, loss, disorientation and disillusionment.

(3) Disillusioned and disgusted by the frivolous, greedy, and heedless way of life in America, they began to write and they wrote from their own experience in the war.

(4) The sense of loss and despair prevails among the post-war generation who are physically and psychologically scarred; Faulkner creates his own mythical kingdom that mirrors not only the decline of the Southern society but also the spiritual wasteland of the whole American society.

(5) The world is even more disintegrating and fragmentary and people are even more estranged and despondent.

(6) These writers shared almost the same belief that human beings are trapped in a meaningless world and that neither God nor man can make sense of the human condition.

(7) In general terms, much serious literature written from 1912 onwards attempted to convey a vision of social breakdown and moral decay and the writer’s task was to develop techniques that could represent a break with the past. (P545-552)

3. List some characteristic writers you know in the Modernism.

Answer:
(1) The spirit of frivolity and carelessness is brought vividly to life in "The Great Gatsby" (1925).

(2) Faulkner’s footsteps in portraying the decadence and evil in the Southern society in a Gothic manner.

(3) Salinger is considered to be a spokesman for the alienated youth in the post-war era and his The Catcher in the Rye is regarded as a students’ classic.

(4) O’Neill is remembered for his tragic view of life and most of his plays are about the root, the truth of human desires and human frustration. (P548---549)

4. What are the styles of the modernists in writing?

Answer:
(1) The defining formal characteristics of the modernistic works discontinuity and fragmentation.

(2) The biggest shift is from the external to the internal, from the public to the private, from the chronological to the psychic, from the objective description to the subjective projection.

(3) Modern American writers in general emphasize the concrete sensory images or details as the direct conveyer of experience.

(4) Their language is direct, compressive, vivid and sparing of words.

(5) Modern fiction tended to employ the first person narration or limit the reader to the "central consciousness" or one character’s point of view. This limitation accorded with the modernistic vision that truth does not exist objectively but is the product of a personal interaction with reality. (P552---553)

5. Some theories and ideologies influenced the Modernists, what are they?

Answer:
(1) Darwinism;

(2) Karl Marx’s scientific socialism;

(3) Freud’s "unconsciousness" and psychoanalysis;

(4) William James’ "stream of consciousness";

(5) Carl June’s "collective unconscious", "archetypal symble". (P546)

6. What are the characteristics of the Eugene O’Neill’s plays?

(1) Of all the plays O’Neill wrote, most of them are tragedies, dealing with the basic issues of human existence and predicament: life and death, illusion and disillusion, alienation and communication, dream and reality, self and society, desire and frustration, etc. His characters (The Hairy Ape) in the plays are described as seeking meaning and purpose in their lives in different ways, some through love, some through religion, others through revenge, but all meet disappointment and despair.

(2) Dramatization of man’s effort in finding the secret of life results in a reconciliation with the tragic impossibility.

(3) "The Hairy Ape" is a play that concerns the problem of modern man’s identity. Yank’s sense of belonging nowhere, hence homelessness and rootlessness, is typical of the mood of isolation and alienation in the early twentieth century in the United States and the whole world as well. (P570-571)

7. Analyze "The Hemingway Code Hero"

Answer:
(1) They are always Exposed to and victimized by violence in various forms, Nick becomes the prototype of the wounded hero who, with all the dignity and courage he could muster, confronts situation.

(2) They are a group of wandering, amusing, but aimless people, who are caught in the war and removed from the path of ordinary life.

(3) They are the men trapped both physically and mentally.

(4) God’s design or his beneficence and to suggest that man is doomed to be entrapped.

(5) They believe: life is worth living and there are causes worth dying for.

(6) In a tragic sense, the struggle of Hemingway’s heroes show: it is a representation of life as a struggle against unconquerable natural forces in which only a partial victory is possible. Nevertheless, there is a feeling of great respect for the struggle and mankind.

(7) Hemingway hero of athletic prowess and masculinity and unyielding heroism.

(8) To master the code with the honest, the discipline, and the restrains are Hemingway Code heroes. In the general situation of his novels, life is full of tension and battles; the world is in chaos; man is always fighting desperately a losing battle. However, though life is but a losing battle, it is a struggle man can dominate in such a way that loss becomes dignity; man can be physically destroyed but never defeated spiritually. (P600---603)

8. About William Faulkner:
I. Analyses about his life and his theme:
Answer:
1) His works criticizes the stratified society among the aristocrats, the new rich, the poor whites and the blacks.
2) His work shows a panorama of the experience and consciousness of the whole Southern society.
3) His works focus on the collision of the intelligent, sensitive, and idealistic protagonist/hero (Emily) with the society of the twentieth century.
4) Almost all his heroes turn out to be tragic. They are tragic because they are prisoners of the past, or the society, or some social and moral taboos, or of their own introspective personalities.
5) Faulkner suggests that society, which conditions man with its hierarchical stratification and with its laws and institutions, eliminates man’s chance of responding naturally to the experience of his existence, against this imprisoned, confused, fragmented social being is the primitive man who, not conditioned by the civilization and social institutions, accepts the life-death pattern of human existence.
6) By turning away from reality, by alienating himself from truth with his attempts to explain the inexplicable, becomes weak and cowardly, confused and ineffectual.
7) Theme of imprisonment in the past. The past that Faulkner uses in this book to set off the present is not the past of an earlier society or historical period, but the immediate past---the world of childhood, innocent and idealistic. (P612---614)

II. Analyses on Faulkner’s techniques in writing:
Answer:
1) He holds/believes in the infinite possibilities inherent in human life. Therefore a writer should observe with no judgment whatsoever and reduce authorial intrusion to the lowest minimum. The range of narrative techniques used by Faulkner is remarkable. He would never step between the characters and the reader to explain, but let the characters explain themselves and hinder as little as possible the reader’s direct experience of the work of art. (detached)
2) He deliberately broke up the chronology of his narrative by juxtaposing the past with the present.
3) Faulkner was good at presenting multiple points of view. (P615-616)

III. The character analyses about Miss Emily Grierson:

Answer:
1) She is an eccentric spinster who refuses to accept the passage of time or the inevitable change and loss that accompanies it.
2) She is the symbols of the Old South but the prisoners of the past.
3) Something about plots: Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, and she vanquished the people in the town, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell. And she is the victim of the idea of her family: none of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such. Then she fell in love with a Northerner, but some of the ladies began to say that it was a disgrace to the town and a bad example to the young men. (P617)