Transcript **********1

American Literature
Lecture One
030533/4/5, 12th Sep. 2006
Part I. Introduction
Part I: answer the questions
1. What is literature?
2. Why do people read literature?
3. Why is it necessary for you to study
literature?
4. How to define American Literature?
5. Basic qualities of American writers?
6. How to study literature?
7. How to improve reading skills?
1. What is literature?
1) The definition of 14th century:
 It means polite learning through reading. A man
of literature or a man of letters = a man of wide
reading, “literacy”
2) The definition of 18th century:
 practice and profession of writing
3) The definition of 19th century:
 the high skills of writing in the special context
of high imagination
4)

5)

Robert Frost’s definition:
performance in words
Modern definition:
We can define literature as language
artistically used to achieve identifiable
literary qualities and to convey
meaningful messages. Literature is
characterized by beauty of expression and
form and by universality intellectual and
emotional appeal.
2. Why is it necessary for you to study literature?
1) It improves your language
proficiency.
2) It enriches your knowledge about
the English culture.
3) It helps you explore the nature of
human beings. It gives you
spiritual and psychological relief.
3.why do people read literature?
1) Reading for Pleasure
 Howells think that “the study of literature should begin
and end in pleasure”. Apart from its role of protest,
education, cognition and aesthetic appreciation,
literature is primarily give pleasure.
2) Reading for Relaxation
 Get readers away to an imaginary world, thus forget
their problems and obligations of everyday life.
3) Reading to Acquire Knowledge
 It gives readers an insight into the tradition , custom,
belief, attitudes, folklore, values of the age in which it
is written.
4) Reading to Confront Experience
 Literature is appealing mainly because of its
relationship to human experience. It sheds light
on the complexity and ambiguity of human
experiences and thus broadens readers’
awareness of the possibilities of the experience.
5) Reading for Artistic Appreciation
 Good craftsmanship and the beauty of
expression and form; It can be analyzed
according to literary theories and criteria;
literary criticism, to clarify, explain and
evaluate literature from an aesthetic point of
view.
4. How to define the American
literature?
American literature mainly
refers to literature produced
in American English by the
people living in the United
States.
5.Basic Qualities of American Writers
1) Independent
2) Individualistic
3) Critical
4) Innovative
5) Humorous
6. How to study literature
1) Analytical Approach
 Be familiar with the elements of a literary work,
eg: plot, character, setting, point of view, etc;
answer some basic questions about the text
itself.
2) Thematic Approach
 “What is the story, the poem, the play or the
essay about?”
3) Historical Approach
 Aims at illustrating the historical development
of literature.
7. How to Improve Reading Skills
1) Form a habit of intelligent guessing at the meaning of
new words with the clues provided by the context. But
for the key words in the sentence, you need not check
each new word in the dictionary.
2) Learn how to notice details, how to get the main idea,
and how to skim to locate the most meaningful
passages in a literary work.
3) Cherish a strong desire to extract greater meaning
from a literary work by relating ideas found in your
reading with your own experience.
Part II. The periods of
American literature
1.


2.
The colonial period (约1607 - 1765)
The main features
Puritanism
The period of enlightenment and the Independence
War (1765 -1800)
 Benjamin Franklin
3. The romantic period (1800 - 1865)
1) The early romanticism
Washington Irving
James Fenimore Cooper
2) “New England Transcendentalism” or “American
Renaissance (1836 - 1855)”
Emerson
Thoreau
Whitman
Dickinson
Hawthorne
Melville
Allan Poe
3) “New England Poets” or “Schoolroom Poets”
Bryant
Lowell
Longfellow
Whittier
Holmes
4) The Reformers and Abolitionists
Beecher Stowe
Frederick Douglass
4. The realistic period (1865 - 1914)
1) Midwestern Realism
William Dean Howells
2) Cosmopolitan Novelist
Henry James
3) Local Colorism
Mark Twain
4) Naturalism
Stephen Crane
Jack London
Theodore Dreiser
5) The “Chicago School” of Poetry
Masters
Sandburg
Lindsay
Robinson
6) The Rise of Black American Literature
Washington
Du Bois
Chestnutt
5. The period of modernism (1914 - 1945)
1) Modern poetry: experiments in form (Imagism)
Ezra Pound
Robert Frost
Carlos Williams
Wallace Stevens
T.S.Eliot
2) Prose Writing: modern realism (the Lost Generation)
William Faulkner
F.Scott Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway
3) Novels of Social Awareness
Richard Wright
Dos Passos
Sinclair Lewis
John Steinbeck
4) The Harlem Renaissance
Langston Hughes
Zora Neals Hurston
5) The Fugitives and New Criticism
6) The 20th Century American Drama
Eugene O’ Neil
6.
The Contemporary Literature (1945 2000)
I. American Poetry Since 1945: the Antitradition
II. American Prose Since 1945: Realism
and Experimentation.
I. Poetry:
1) Traditionalism
2) Idiosyncratic poets
3) Experimental poetry
4) Surrealism and Existentialism
5) Women and Multiethnic poets
6) Chicano / Hispanic / Latino poetry
7) Native American poetry
8) African-American poetry
9) Asian-American poetry
10) New Directions

1)
2)
3)
4)
Experimental Poetry:
The Black Mountain School
The San Francisco School
Beat Poets
The New York School
II. Prose:
1.
2.
3.
4.
The Realist Legacy and the Late 1940s
The Affluent but Alienated 1950s
The Turbulent but Creative 1960s
The 1970s and 1980s: New Directions
1. The Realist Legacy and the
Late 1940s
1) Robert Penn Warren
2) Arthur Miller
3) Tennessee Williams
4) Katherine Anne Porter
5) Eudora Welty
2. The Affluent But Alienated 1950s
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
7)
8)
9)
10)
11)
12)
John O’Hara
James Baldwin
Ralph Waldo Ellison
Flannery O’Conner
Saul Bellow
Bernard Malamud
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Vladimir Nabokov
John Cheever
John Updike
J.D.Salinger
Jack Kerouac
3. The Turbulent but Creative 1960s
1) Thomas Pynchon
2) John Barth
3) Norman Mailer
4. The 1970s and 1980s: New
Directions
1) John Gardner
2) Toni Morrison
3) Alice Walker