American Literature 美国文学概论.ppt

American Literature
美国文学教学内容主要包括五部分
早期美国文学(Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, etc. );
美国浪漫主义与超验主义文学(Ralph W. Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson , etc );
美国现实主义与自然主义文学(Mark Twain, Jack London , etc );
美国现代主义文学(Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O’Neill , etc );
战后美国文学:美国戏剧(Eugene O’Neil,Tennessee Williams,Arthur Miller,Theatre of the Absurd , etc ),还有犹太文学(Saul Bellow , etc ),黑人文学(Ralph Ellison,Toni Morrison)
Chapter 1 Colonial Period
the settlement of North America——1607
the Independence War——1783
Early history
In 1542, Christopher Columbus found the new continent called America
In 1607, Captain John Smith led some Englishmen across the ocean.
In 1620, 102 passengers sailed on the ship Mayflower across the ocean and settled on the new continent “New England”
Background: Puritanism
Puritans wanted to purify the church to its original state,
they thought the churches are corrupted
Features of Puritanism
Predestination: God decided everything before things occurred.
Original sin: Human beings were born to be evil, and this original sin can be passed down from generation to generation.
Total depravity
Limited atonement: Only the “selected” can be saved.
Idealist: they dream to build a new Eden on earth.
Everlasting myth--garden of Eden.
Pragmatists: e tougher, more practical: hard conditions for survival, upied with business and profit
A group of good qualities – hard work, thrift, piety, sobriety (serious and thoughtful) influenced American literature.
. Influence on literature: Symbolism: the American puritan’s metaphorical mode of perception was chiefly instrumental in calling into being a literary symbolism which is distinctly American
types of writing: diaries, histories, journals, letters, travel books, autobiographies/biographies, sermons
Their writing style is fresh, simple and direct; the rhetoric is plain and honest, not without a touch of nobility ofte