美国文学史及选读教案

闽江学院教案课程名称:主要英语国家文学史及文学作品选读 2 课程代码: 31020022授课专业班级：英语本科, 英语师范, 英语专升本****：***系别：外语系2010年3 月2 日IntroductionTeaching aid tool: a map of early AmericaTeaching aim: the students learn why and how to learn literature course, get the general idea of the colonial America and their literary forms.Key Points: a. learning aim;b. Learning method;c. Colonial American characteristics.I.Introduction of the course1.Why should we learn the course:a.One of the main reasons might be that literature offers a bountiful and extremely varied body of written material, which is “important in the sense that it says something about fundamental human issues and which is enduring rather than ephemeral. Its relevance moves with the passing of time, but seldom disappears completely the Shakespeare plays whose ending were rewritten to conform to late 17th century taste and which were later staged to give maximum prominence to their romantic hero figures are now explored for their psychoanalytic import. In this way, though its meaning does not remain static, a literary work can transcend both time and culture to speak directly to a reader in another country or a different period of history.Literature is authentic material. By that we simply mean that most works ofliterature are not fashioned for the specific purpose of teaching a language.Recent course materials have quite rightly incorporated many authenticsamples of language---for example, travel timetable, city plans, forms,pamphlets, cartoons, advertisements, newspaper or magazine articles.Learners are thus exposed to language that is as genuine and undistorted ascan be managed in the classroom context. In reading literary texts, studentshave also to cope with language intended for native speakers and thus wegain additional familiarity with many different linguistic uses, forms andconventions of the written mode with irony, exposition, argument, narrationand so on.b. Cultural enrichment:For many language learners, more indirect routes to understand a country must be adopted so that they gain an understanding of the way of life of the country: radio programmers, films and videos, newspapers and last, literary works. It is true of course that the “world” of a novel, play, or short story is a created one, yet it offers a full and vivid context in which characters from many social backgrounds can be depicted. A reader can discover their thoughts, feelings, customs, and possessions: what they buy, believe in, fear, enjoy; how they speak and behave closed doors. Reading the literature of a historical period is one of the ways we have to help us imagine what life was like in that other foreign territory. Literature is perhaps best seen as a complement to other materials used to increase the foreign learner’s insight into the country whose language is being learnt.c. language enrichment: we have said that reading literary works exposes the studentto many function of the written language, but what about other linguistic advantages? Language enrichment is one benefit often sought through literature, while there is little a=doubt that extensive reading increases a learner’s receptive vocabulary and facilitates transfer to a more active form of knowledge, it is sometimes objected that literature does not give learners the kind of vocabulary they really need. It may be “authentic” in the sense already mentioned, but the language of literary works is not typical of the language of daily life, nor is it like the language used in learners’textbooks. We would not wish students to think that Elizabeth Berret Brownning’s “How Do I love Thee? Is the kind of utterance normally whispered into a lover’s era nowadays! The objection to literature on the grounds of lexical appropracy has some validity, but it need not be an overriding one if teachers make a judicious choice of the text to be read, considering it as a counterpoise and supplement to other materials.On the positive side, literature provides a rich context in which individual lexical or syntactical items are made more memorable. Reading a substantial and contextual zed body of text, students gain familiarity with many features of the written language ---the formation and function of relines, the variety of possible structures, the different ways of connecting ideas---which broaden and enrich their own writing skills. The extensive reading required in tackling a novel or long play develops the student’s ability to make inferences from linguistic clues, and to deduce meaning from context, both useful tools in reading other sorts of material as well. Literature helps extend the intermediate or advanced learner’s awareness of the range of language itself. Literary language is not always that of daily communication, as we have mentioned, but it is special in its way. It is heightened: sometimes elaborate, sometimes marvelously simply yet, somehow, absolutely “right”.2.What should we learn?History and Anthology of American literature3.Some Literary works:Selected Reading in American Literature 扬岂深Selected Reading in American Literature 陶洁Selected Reading in American Literature 常耀信Contemporary American Literature with Collateral Readings 秦小孟High Lights of American Literature 钱青An Anthology of 20th Century American Fiction 万培德A Survey of American Literature 常耀信20世纪美国文学导论李公昭二十世纪美国文学导读张立新Part I The Literature of Colonial AmericaI.Teaching Time: 2 teaching hours.II.Teaching Aim: through introduction, the students should get an idea about the history and development of American nation and how did the American literature came into being and what is the characteristic of its early literature.III.Teaching method: Teacher’s Presentation.IV.Teaching Tool: multi-medium.V.Key points: the characteristics of early literature.IntroductionI.The native Americans and their culture:Before being explored by European adventurers the American Continent had long been inhabitated by the natives---American Indians. Physical characteristics of the American Indians are mongolocial or a mixture of that with something else. They probably first began coming from Asia to America during the Ice ‘Age,8000-5999 BC. They crossed Berring Strait by raft. Through hundred and thousands of years these earliest inhabitants developed their own civilizations. They learned agriculture, basketry and pottery. The most striking achievements were in agriculture. Maize---“Indian Corn” was developed from a wild grass. The white potato, the cacao bean, tobacco were all developed by Indians. Indians remained in tribe society.II.The historical background of the Colonial Time:1.the first England settlement: Christophe Columbus (1451 hebelieved the world is round, find the route to East by sailing West, heasked the help from Queen of Spain to support him. On Aug. 3. 1492,three small vessels set sail with 100 crews, after several months ofsailing they arrived at Balama Island---San Salvador on Oct. 12.1492. He landed and in March 1493 returned. He had 4 voyages inhis lifetime.2.English settlement:1607 Captain Christopher Newport, three ships --- Chesapeake BayJamestown Mayflower 1620 PlymouthPuritans New England area3.Conflicts with Indians and the founding of 13 colonies.III.The development of Literature:American literature emerged out of obscurity into history only some four centuries ago. It is the newest of the literatures of great nations, yet it is original in many aspects. It is original because it mirrors the history of America, and epitomizes the development of political and economics, social and psychological institutions. It is original because upon it has played most of those great historical forces and factors that have molded the modern world: immigration, nationalism, individualism, imperialism, religion,science, technology and democracy. In addition to its realistic and vividreflection of the madding of the distinctly shaped character of Americanpeople, it is original in variety and cultural colors; such features of Americanliterature may find expression in its products in the colonial period.John Smith a British soldier of fortune“A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as hathhappened in Virginia”“New England Trials”“The General History of Virginia”Within a few decades a considerable number of learned people, such asPuritan clergymen and governors, produced a considerable body of writing ofhigh literary quality, yet they were not literary people in the professionalsense. Their writing included diaries, travel books, collections of letters,journals, histories, poetry, biographies, autobiographies and prose, to whichthe Puritans contributed much. In addition to being true believers of theirreligious doctrines, the early puritans generally have college education with asound knowledge of the literary classics, and learned much about the basicqualities of literature from the ancient and contemporary authors in the oldcontinent. Such responsible for the two essential characteristics of the earlyAmerican literature: their religious subject and imitation of English literarytraditions.(1)William Bradford (1590-1657)Of Plymouth Plantation(2) John Winthrop (governor of Massachusetts Bay)Journal 1790The History of New England(3) Edward TaylorThe New England Quarterly(4) Cotton MatherMagnolia Christi AmericanaCharacteristics:In spite of the unique features that the colonial men of letters, reflected in their writings, some common characteristic run through almost all the principal works of the major literary figures of the colonial period, which mirrored the nature of colonial American literature and continued to be the subsequent development of American literature and of America itself. Puritanism was central to colonial American literature and its impact could find expression in almost all respects concerning literature. The conviction that all religious progress centered in the individual led colonial writers to make records of his spiritual development in the forms of diary and autobiography: a strenuous self-analysis and ceaseless searching of conscience in the writings of the Puritans was the result of their belief that “election” would show itself in the behavior and in the experiences of the inner life of the individual. In keeping with the beliefthat American literature should concern itself with spiritual and in the experiences of the inner life of the individual. In keeping with the belief that literature should concern with spiritual values, the sermon became the most highly developed and the most popular of Puritan and compact expression, and its avoidance of rhetorical decoration excellently illustrated Puritan aesthetic and moral theories. In accordance with their way of life, the Puritans preferred a style characterized by homeliness of imagery, simplicity of diction and an emphasis on the values most easily recognized by their readers. It is for the same reason that they disliked the sensuous appeal of certain types of imagery and favored the figures and images drawn from the common experiences of the New England settlers.Questions for discussion:1.What were the features of colonial America?2.What were the literary characteristics?3.What was the Puritanism?Reference Books: 1. 《美国文学教程》第一章常曜信2．《美国文学的周期》 E. Spiller3. 《新编美国文学史》第二章刘海平Part II The Literature of Reason and RevolutionI, Teaching time: 2 teaching hoursII.Teaching Aim: the students should know the reason and effect of American Revolution, and the characteristics of the literature. Through learning the selected works, the students get to know the writing style of them.III.Teaching Method: a. presentation, b. analysis of the contexts of the works, c.questions and discussion.IV.Key points: writing style of the prose works.Introduction:I.The Historical Background:a)two revolutions {American RevolutionEnlightenment(1)European’s conflicts in the New Continent;(2)The cause of the Revolution;(3)The procedure of the Revolution;(4)The significance of the Revolution.II.The Development of Literature:(1)prose of Thomas Paine, Franklin and Thomas Jefferson;(2)Poetry of ByrantQuestions for Discussion:(1)What do you know about American Revolution?(2)What do you know about Washinton?(3)What is the main trend of literature?III.Authors and their writings in this period:(1)Benjamin Franklina.his life and works: Benjamin Franklin was a brilliant, industrious and versatile man. Starting as a poor boy in a family of 17 children, he became famous on both sides of the Atlantic as a statesman, scientist and author. Despite his fame, he always remained a man of industry and simple tastes.Franklin’s writings range from informal sermons on thrift to urbane essays. He wrote gracefully as well as clearly with a wit which often gave an edge to his words. Though the style he formed came from imitating two noted English essayists, Addison and Steele, he made it into his own. His most famous work is his Autobiography. Before his autobiography, his “Poor Richard’s Almanac(1733-1758) became popular readings which contain many proverbs like:Early to bed, and early to rise,Makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.Franklin’s Autobiography is many things. First of all it is an inspiring account of a poor boy’s rise to a high position. Franklin tells his story modestly, omitting some ofhis misdeeds, his errors as being much less than perfect. He is resigned to the fact that his misdeeds will often receive a punishment of one sort or another. Viewing himself with objectivity, Franklin offers his life story as a lesson to others. It is a positive lesson that teaches the reader to live a useful life. In fact the Autobiography is a how-to-do it book, a book on the art of self-improvement.In 1771, while living in England and serving as ambassador for most of the colonies, Franklin began his autobiography as a letter to his son, Willliam. He got as far as the year 1730(including his arrival in Philadelphia) being interrupted by “the affairs of the Revolution”. In 1784, while living at Passy, France, then a suburb of Paris, he extended his Autobiography through 1731. The bulk of the remainder of the work was added in 1788 and the final few pages were written in1790, the year of his death. None of this was published while Franklin lived. Shortly after his death, a French translation of his life to 1731 ( the first two section that Franklin wrote) was published. Though this was soon translated into English and published in London, the “official text did not appear until 1818, as part of the works of Benjamin Franklin,”edited by his grandson William Temple Franklin. The first “complete”Autobiography---with the pages written in 1790---did not appear until 1868, edited by John Bigelow, who had bought Franklin’s original manuscript from a Franklin family the previous year.The Autobiography covers Franklin’s life only until 1757 when he was 51 years old, well before his major accomplishments as a diplomat. The work as a whole was written by a man well beyond the normal age of retirement, yet it is not the less lively for that fact. Franklin’s mastery of a prose style characterized by clarity, concision, flexibility and order was central to his fame as a great man of letters. Such major features of his style was summarized by himself in a short paragraph:The words used should be the most expressive that the language affords, provided that they are the most generally understood. Nothing should be expressed in two words that can as well be expressed in one; that is, no synonyms should be used, or rarely, but the whole should be as short as possible, consistent with clearness: the words should be placed as to agreeable to the ear in reading; summarily, it should be smooth, clear, and short for the contrary qualities are displeasing.(2)Analysis of the Selected part:A.3 paragraphs: a. what interest did Franklin have as a child;a.Being an apprentice to his brother, Franklin began writing;b.Improving argumentation.Summary: Franklin was thirty to knowledge and trying to learn the language with practical methods.B a. the way of learning languages;b.Practice makes perfect;c.Relations to his relatives;d.Learning club.Summary: Franklin was a practical man. In learning languages we know he had a strong endurance and leaver mind.Part III The Literature of RomanticismI.Teaching Time : 8 periods.II.Teaching Aim: the students should know the characteristic of the origin and development of romanticism in American literature. Transcendentalism as a typical American literature trend developed in American land should be mastered. The students should know how to analyze Bryant’s two poems.III.Key Points: characteristic of American romanticism and their writers.Part One: Historical Introduction:We are now dealing with one f the most important periods in the history of American literature, the Romantic period, which stretches from the end of the eighteenth century through the outbreak of the Civil War. Here we see a rising America fast burgeoning into a political, economic and cultural independence it had never known before. Democracy and political equality became the ideals of the new nation. Radical changes came about in the political life of the country. Parties began to squabble and scramble for power, and a new system was in the making. The spread of industrialism, the sudden influx of immigration, and the “pioneers”pushing the frontier further west---all these produced something of an economic boom and, with it, a tremendous sense of optimism and hope among the people. A nation bursting into new life for literary expression. The buoyant mood of the nation and the sprit of the times seem in some measure responsible for the spectacular outburst of romantic feeling in the first half of the nineteenth century. The literary milieu proved fertile and conducive to the imagination as well. Among other things, magazines appeared in ever-increasing numbers, of which The North American Review, The New York Mirror, The American Quarterly Review, The New England Magazine, The Southern Review, The Southern Literary Messenger, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine and Knickerbockers Magazine played an important role in facilitating literary expansion in the country.Foreign influences added incentive to the growth of romanticism in America. The Romantic Movement, which had flourished earlier in the century both in England and Europe, proved to be a decisive influence without which the upsurge of American romanticism would hardly have been possible. Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Cole ridge, William Wordsworth, Byron, Robert Burns and many other English and European masters of poetry and prose all made a stimulating impact on the different departments of the country’s literature. The influence of Sir Walter Scott was particularly powerful and enduring. His border tales and Waverley romances inspired many American authors such as James Fennimore Cooper with irresistible creative impulses. Scott’s Waverley novels were models for American historical romance, and his The Lady of the Lake, together with Byron’s Oriental romances, helped toward the development of American Indian romance. He was, in a way, responsible for the romantic description of landscape in American literature. The Gothic tradition, and the cult of solitude and of gloom came through interest in the works of writers like Mrs. Radcliff, E.T.A. Hoffman, James Thomson and the “graveyard’poets. Robert Burns and Byron both inspired and spurred the American imagination for lyrics oflove and passion and despair. The impact of Lyrical Ballads of Wordswoth and Coleridge added, to some extent, to the nation’s singing strength. Thus American romanticism was in a way derivative: American romantic writing was some of them modeled on English and European works.On the other hand, American romanticism had distinct features of its own. Different from their European counterparts, American romantics tended to moralize, to edify rather than to entertain. They presented an entirely new experience alien to European culture. The exotic landscape, the frontier life, the westward expansion, the myth of a New Garden of Eden in America, and the Puritan heritage were just a few examples of the native material for an indigenous literature. Evidently, it produced a feeling of “newness” which inspired the romantic imagination.Part II. Writers of the period1.Washington Irving (1783-1859)I.Introduction of his life and works: Washington Irving was the first American writer of imaginative literature to gain international fame. He became, in the words of the English novelist Thakeray, “the first Ambassador whom the new World of letters sent to the old.” Irving was born the youngest of seven children of a precious reader and the author of juvenile poems, plays and essays when he was 16; he began the study of the law for which he had little relish. He preferred instead to pass his time in desultory reading and in the society of literary wits of New York. At 19, he began to contribute a serious of sketches or “letters” on society and the theater to the Morning Chronicle, a New York newspaper. When he was 21, Irving went on a grand tour of Europe. Two years later he returned to New York to be admitted to the bar and to begin the leisurely life of a gentleman lawyer; shortly afterward, Irving started work on what was to be his first literary triumph, his “History of New York (1809) by “Derrick Knickerbockers.”It was an irreverent to spoof of historical scholarship, salted with off-color comments. The book satirized the complacent Dutch burghers of early New York and pointed at the political follies of 19th century America. It also marked the beginning of the “Knickerbockers school” of New York literary satirists including Paulding, Fitzgreen Hallack and Joseph Rodman Drake who took their names and humorous tone from Irving’s knickbocker History and flourished in New York in the first decades of the 19th century.At the end of the war of 1812, Irving was sent to England to supervise the Liverpool Branch of the family firm, but in 1818, as a result of the war and bad management, the firm went bankrupt. Irving was left only with a dislike for the “dirty soul-killing”world of business and a need to find a livelihood. His “History of New York”has earned the magnificent sum of $3000, so he turned to writing and began preparation of “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent(1820). It was the first work by an American to receive wide international acclaim and it made Irving a celebrity, praised alike in America and England. In it was the two tales that brought him his most enduring fame. “Rip Van Winckles” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”With his new literary success, Irving gave up all thought of returning to America and the world of trade or law. He set out to become a professional man of letters. The Sketch Book was soon followed by Bracebridge Hill (1822), a series of sketches onEngland country life. In 1824, he published “Tales of a Traveller”, his first volume of fiction, filled with years of the supernatural and clanking with the ghostly machinery of romantic Gothicism. In 1826 his literary fame earned him appointment as an American diplomatic attaché in Spain and there he gathered material for a biography of Christopher Columbers(1826). He wrote severy such kind of biographies.Irving then returned to England, where he accepted appointment as an American diplomat in London and three years later when he was nearing 50, he returned to the United States after an absence of 17 years. He bought “Sunnyside” his famous home on the Hudson River at Tarrytown and there, except for four years as United States minister to Spain he lived as a country spire, writing a series of histories and biographies.A study of Irving’s works would lead to the conclusion that humor was at the root of almost everything that was significant in them. What was more impressive was that his humor was always well meaning, mild and easy to be accepted. Early in the 19th century when most of the American writers were speaking in the authoritative voice of a gentleman who seems to be superior in maturity, knowledge, sense, and good taste, and when the majority of American periodicals depended heavily on a broad, explosive humor and sarcasm that gradually vulgarized the periodical essay tradition, Irving’s humor did much to cultivate a new literary taste.The style of Irving’s work is characterized by simplicity, poise and ease flow. Unlike the tightly structured stories of Poe and Hawthorne, the tastes of Irving lie in his literary innovations and transitional role in the development of American literature. III.Analysis of the tale:1.Plot structure of action:e.Exposition: time, place, persons preliminary condition of affairs;f.DevelopmentConflicts Crane to Brom Bones; Crane to the girl; Crane to farmers;Crane to ghost;g.Summary ----pumpkin, Bones marries the girl, some still believe inghosts,h.Setting -----i.StyleQuestions for discussion:1.What is the plot of the story?2.How did the conflict develop in the story?3.What is the function of the setting?4.What is the style of the story?Homework: Read the story Rip Van Winkle.2.James Fennimore Cooper (1789-1851)(a)Introduction: Cooper never saw the frontier. The advanced line of settlement that moved westward from the Atlantic had passed beyond Cooperstown, New York before his birth and throughout his life; he never traveled farther west than Michigan. Yet his writing helped create a mythical west that transcended the reality of life on thefrontier, and in his greatest character ---Natty Bumppo, or “Leatherstocking”---Cooper created an archetypal western hero whose many literary descendants range from the cowboys of popular fiction and the movies to the hero of Melville, Twain and Faulkner.James Cooper was born in Burlington, New Jersey. When he was thirteen months old, he was taken with his family to a small wildness settlement on Lake Otsego, 150 miles north of New York City. The village was named Cooperstown after his father, William Cooper, a rich member of the landed gentry who had acquired vast tracts of land in New York State following the American Revolution. James Cooper was raised in the rural family “Manor House”, and he roamed the edge of a wildness that stretched a thousand miles to the Mississippi. Although he saw the white hunters and the numerous wagon trains of settlers that passed through Cooperstown on their way west, he saw little of the once numerous reedmen of the eastern forests. Later in life he acknowledged, “ I was never among the Indians. All that I know of them is from reading and from hearing my father speak of them.”When Cooper was fourteen, he entered Yale, but in his junior years after a series of undergraduate brawls and pranks he was expelled and was sent to sea as a common sailor on an Atlantic merchant ship. In 1808, he became a mild shipman in the U.S navy and served on Lawrence. In 1811, after the death of his father left him an inheritance of $50,000, Cooper resigned from the navy. He then married and began the free-spending life of a wealth gentleman. By 1819, his inheritance was gone and he was heavily in debt. To regain his fortunes, he speculated in land, invested in a frontier store and a whaling ship, and in 1820 he began writing the fiction that eventually brought him wealth and worldly fame.According to tradition, he once tossed aside a popular-sentimental novel with the comment that he could do better himself. When his family challenged him to fulfill his boast he wrote a tale that he quickly recognized as a botch and destroyed. His second attempt was Precaution (1820). It was a full-length novel of English life, written in imitation of Jane Austin and filled with the conventional sentimentality of the day’s best sellers. Precaution was dull, and a financial failure, but it brought Cooper recognition and helped prepare the way for his next work. The Spy (1821), a novel of the American Revolution. The Spy appealed to patriotic American hungry for exciting fiction that dealt with American scenes and events. It soon went through three editions; it was translated into several European languages and turned into a stage play. And it started Cooper on his career as the first eminent American novelist.Two years later Cooper published The Pioneers (1823), a romance of the American frontier that was an immediate best seller. It was the first of the “Leatherstocking Tales,”five novels of the life of Natty Bumppo. They included “The Last of Mohicans”(1826), The Prairie(1927), The Pathfinder(1840), and the Deerslayer(1841). Following his success with The Pioneer, Cooper drew upon his own experiences and wrote The Pilot(1841) the first of eleven novels of the sea that he wrote over a period of three decades.In 1926, with his financial burdens eased by the profits from his writing Cooper left America to live abroad, partly to escape his remaining debts and partly to experience。