一、Background:

   ① World War I 第一次世界大战，America have great profit.

   ② Jump in technology (automobile / radio) 科技方面的跳跃 （汽车/收音机）

   ③ old moral code breaks 旧道德体系破碎

 

1、Imagism 意象派：is a poetic movement of England and the United States, flourished from 1909-1917. Its credo, expressed in Some Imagist Poets, included the use of the language of common speech, project matter, the evocation of images in hard, clear poetry, and concentration.

 

2、Lost Generation：迷惘的一代，Writers of the first postwar era self-consciously acknowledged that they were a “Lost Generation,” devoid of faith and alienated from a civilization. It describes the Americans who remained in Paris as a colony of “expatriates” or exiles. It describes the writers like Hemingway who lived in semipoverty. It describes the Americans who returned to their native land with an intense awareness of living in an unfamiliar changing world.

 

3、Modernism现代主义：is loosely a synonym of anything contemporary. Strictly, especially in literary criticism, which began in the late 19^th century and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. They pay more attention to the psychic time than the chronological one.

 

4、现代主义的标志：T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, the most significant American poem of the twentieth century, helped to establish a modern tradition of literature rich with learning and allusive thought.

 

5、典型的迷惘一代：

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Great Gatsby” 《了不起的盖茨比》  novel

Ernest Hemingway “The Sun Also Rises”《太阳照样升起》 “A Farwell to Arms”《告别了，武器》

William Faulkner  “The Sound and the Fury” 《喧嚣与骚动》

 

6、Playwrights戏剧、剧作家：Eugene O’Neill “The Emperor Jones”《琼斯国王》、“Anna Christie”《安娜.克里斯蒂》、“The Hairy Ape”《毛猿》 

 

7、The Jazz Age(享乐时代)：when New Orleans musicians moved “up the river” to Chicago, and the theatre of New York’s Harlem pulsed with the music that had become a symbol of the times. Fitzgerald portrays the Jazz Age as a generation of “the beautiful and damned”, drowning in their pleasures.

 

二、代表作家：

1、Ezra Pound 埃兹拉.庞德  诗人

    ①Imagism 意象派的代表人物。Pound and Eliot became the early leaders in restoring to poetry the use of literary reference as an imaginative instrument. 庞德和爱略特都是运用意象主义作为文学表现手法的早期诗人。

    ②major work of poetry is the long poem called “The Cantos”

 

2、Robert Frost  罗伯特.弗洛斯特  自然主义诗人 poet

    ①诗歌特点和内容：(1)rejected the revolutionary poetic principles of his contemporaries, choosing instead “the old-fashioned way to be new.” He employed the plain speech of rural New Englanders and preferred the short, traditional forms of lyric and narrative.

       (2)He saw nature as a storehouse of analogy and symbol.

       (3)His concern with nature reflected deep moral uncertainties, and his poetry, for all its apparent simplicity, often probes mysteries of darkness and irrationality in the bleak and chaotic landscapes of an indifferent universe where men stand alone, unaided and perplexed.

    ②he become a national bard美国民族诗人的翘首, win four Pulitzer Prizes获得了四次普利兹奖.

    ③“The Road Not Taken”、“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”向往大自然，想逃避社会；死亡、迷惑

 

3、Wallace Stevens 华莱士.斯蒂文斯  诗人

    ①His work is primarily motivated by the belief that “ideas of order,” that is ,true ideas, correspond with an innate order in nature and universe, and that it is the high privilege of individuals and mankind to discover this correspondence. 作品动机起源于秩序理念，他的秩序就是真理，就是自然与宇宙天然一致的次序，是人类与个体发现这种一致性的特权。

    ②代表作：“The Man with the Blue Guitar”《带蓝吉他的人》；

             “Necessary Angel”《必要的天使》，collection of his occasional lectures on poetry诗歌的评论.

             “Anecdote of the Jar”《坛子的轶事》jar – man made – art, wildness – nature, jar bring order/meaning to the nature, 艺术到自然的秩序， integrated 统一体

    ③特点：(1)he adopted a variety of experimental styles, created poetic surfaces of Frenchified elegance, exotic imagery, odd sounds, curious analogies, and inscrutable titles.尝试过多种实验性的写作风格。

       (2)he confronted the contemporary abandonment of traditional values and sought to come to terms with the confusions of his time. The problem of the interrelation between the ideal and the real became a constant theme in his later poetry.理想和现实中所交叉的矛盾。

       (3)a series of oppositions between inner and outer worlds – between subject and object, perceiver and perceived, fiction and fact, “imagination and reality”(想象与现实)

  

★4、Thomas Stearns Eliot 托马斯.斯特恩斯.爱略特 现代主义代言人

    ①多重身份：poet诗人, critic评论家, playwright剧作家

    ②代表作：

     “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”poems，holds its place in the development of Eliot’s poetry as a whole.

     “Tradition and the Individual Talent”essay,随笔《传统和个人天才》, the earliest statement of his aesthetics第一次阐释了自己的审美观点. provided a useful instrument for modern criticism.成为现代评论极为有效的评判标准。

     “The Waste Land”《荒原》one of the major works of modern literature. Use a new form — the orchestration of related themes in successive movement. 新的文学形式即相关的主题在连续运动中构成交响效果。

     “Four Quartets”《四个四重奏》poem

     “Murder in the Cathedral”，poetic tragedy, 诗歌悲诗, a drama(戏剧) of impressive spiritual power.极富感染力的戏剧

      ③作品特点：

       (1) concerns various aspects of the frustration and enfeeblement of individual character as seen in perspective with the decay of states, peoples, and religious faith.触及人性中的软弱沮丧的弱点，正确思索了国家、人民、宗教信仰等的丧失。

       (2)poem conceived as a made object, an organic thing in itself, whose concrete elements are true correlatives of the artist’s imagination and experience with respect to that poem.诗歌是客观成型的东西，诗歌的具体元素与艺术家的想象和经历密切相关，也与诗歌相一致。

       (3)The degree to which fusion and concentration of intellect, feeling, and experience were achieved was Eliot’s criterion for judging the poem.知识、情感、体验的融合与集中程度是爱略特判定诗歌好坏的标准。

 

5、F. Scott Fitzgerald  F.司各特.菲茨杰拉德  novelist 小说家

    ①作品：“This Side of Paradise”《人间天堂》，the first novel.

           “The Great Gatsby”  《了不起的盖茨比》  novel

           “Tender Is the Night” 《夜色温柔》 novel

    ②第二本小说的开展过程：dream梦想 → Daisy self-centered 理想化的淑女，自我为中心 → disenchantment, disillusion魔法消失，(因阶级差异)梦想破灭 → sense of failure and despair (light)失败和绝望

       Ash 灰(象征) → forest树木，西部开发，树木变成灰了

    ③limited point of view有限视角 → suspense悬念 + mystery神秘真实性→reliable可信的，不偏，不评价

 

6、Ernest Hemingway 厄恩斯特.海明威  novelist 小说家

    ①写作特点：(1)he developed a spare, tight, reportorial prose based on simply sentence structure and using a restricted vocabulary, precise imagery, and an impersonal, dramatic tone.推动了报告文学的发展，认为报告文学句子结构要简单，用语要节制，想象要简练，要采用不受感情影响的、戏剧化的语调。

       (2) His primary concern was an individual’s “moment of truth,” and his fascination with the threat of physical, emotional, of psychic death is reflected in his lifelong preoccupation with stories of war.主题强调换个体“真理的瞬时性”，痴迷于描写肉体情感方面面临的威胁和心灵死亡等主题。

       (3) man’s greatest achievement is to show grace under pressure作品主题, or purity of line through the maximum of exposure最大限度地挖掘自己使自己成为一个纯粹的人.

    ②代表作：“The Sun Also Rises” Hemingway became the spokesman for “a lost generation”

             “A Farewell to Arms”、“For Whom the Bell Tolls”、“The Old Man and the Sea”

 

7、John Steinbeck 约翰.斯坦贝克

    ①the foremost novelist of the American Depression.美国大萧条时期最杰出的小说家。

    ②代表作：

“Of Mice and Men”《人鼠之间》 portrayed the tragic friendship between two migrant workers

“The Grapes of Wrath”《愤怒的葡萄》regarded as masterpiece 视为杰作。

 

8、William Faulkner 威廉.福克纳

    ①作品的主题：the universal theme of “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself”人类心灵与自己冲突是宇宙永恒的主题。

    ②作品：“The Sound and the Fury”《喧嚣与骚动》成名作、“Absalom, Absalom!”、“Go Down, Moses”

    ③narrative method叙述方法:1、stream of consciousness 意识流

                               2、multiple point of view, narrator多角度，多个叙述者