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American Literature:
Lecture 8 Modernism
(1914 - 1945)
退出
American Literature (I) Autumn 2008
Objectives
To enable the Ss to get a general idea about American Modernism; To enable the Ss to get in touch with some important modern poets such as Robert Frost and Ezra Pound;
2)
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II Major Features of Modernism
3) Modernism in literature is not easily summarized, but the key elements are experimentation, antirealism, individualism and a stress on the cerebral rather than emotive aspects. The work of Modernist writers is characterized by showing the disenchantment, dislocation, and alienation of men in the world, and by the emphasis on experimentation and formalism and objectivism which are, in most cases, a reaction to the cataclysm known as the Modern Age. Among American writers, the best-known Modernists are T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and so on.
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II Major Features of Modernism
1) Modernism is a cultural movement that generally includes the progressive art and architecture, design, literature, music, dance, painting and other visual arts which emerged in the beginning of the 20th century , particularly in the years following World War I. It was a movement of artists and th designers who rebelled against late 19 century academic and historicist tradition, and embraced the new economic, social and political aspects of the emerging modern world. The avant-garde movements that followed-including Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Constructivism and Abstract Expressionismare generally defined as Modernist.
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4)
5)
III. The Schools of American Modernism
1) 2) Modern poetry: experiments in form (Imagism) Prose Writing: modern realism (the Lost Generation)
3)
II. The Major Representatives of the Modern Poetry:
Ezra Pound (1885- 1972) T.S.Eliot (1888 - 1965) Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955) William Carlos Williams (1883 - 1963) Robert Frost (1874 - 1963) e.e.cummings (1894 - 1963)
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I. T. S. Eliot (1888 - 1965)
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I. About the author:
1) 2) Thomas Stearns Eliot, American-British poet and critic, was born from a middle-class family in St. Louis in 1888. During his studies at Harvard in America, the Sorbonne in Paris, and Oxford in England, Eliot mastered French, Italian, English literature, as well as Sanskrit. In 1914 Eliot accepted a job in London as a bank clerk establishing his residence in London. Soon the erudite young man joined the literary circle of Pound and Yeats and started to write poetry. In 1917 his first poem was published and caused a great deal of comment on both side of the Atlantic. After the bank clerk, Eliot worked as an assistant editor of the Egoist (1917–19) and edited his own quarterly, the Criterion (1922–39). With the help of Pound he published 美国文学 his best-known work, The Waste Land, in 1922.
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 of fused ideas, endowed with energy.‖ 5) There existed great influence of Chinese poetry on the Imagist movement. Imagists found value in Chinese poetry was because Chinese poetry is, by virtue of the ideographic and pictographic nature of the Chinese language, essentially imagistic 美国文学 poetry.
altered the nineteenth century romantic view that nature, especially human nature, was benign. Herbert Spencer and the "Gospel of Wealth" or Social Darwinism: reconciled individualism with capitalism by suggesting that the interests of each citizen as well as the interests of the state are served by free economic expansion. The work of Marx, and Freud, as well as other great intellectual explorers and rebels had mounted an assault against orthodox religious faith that lasted into the twentieth century. World War I in particular deepened doubt and reauthorized disillusionment. Another source of disillusionment was the rapid transformation of American society that accelerated with World War I.
Novels of Social Awareness (Sinclair Lewis and John
Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes)
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6)
The Fugitives and New Criticism
The 20 Century American Drama (Eugene O‘Neill)
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Teaching Materials
