LocalColorism地方色彩文学.ppt

Local Colorism地方色彩文学 General Introduction(1)DefinitionThe detailed representation in prose fiction of the setting,dialect,customs,dress and ways of thinking and feeling which are distinctive of a particular region(2)OriginsA.Social Background:different culture in different places(no overwhelming mainstream culture)B.frontier humors since early 19th centuryC.good pay from magazinesRepresentativesMark Twain(mainly wrote about areas along the Mississippi)(4)InfluenceLiterature about American South William Faulkner as a representative“Wessex Novels”written by Thomas HardyMark Twain(1835-1910)Samuel Langhorne Clemens,18351910.an American author,a humorist,narrator,and social observer.Twain is unsurpassed in American literature.Mark Twain(1835 1910)A.He lived in a town named Hannibal along the Mississippi when he was a child.His life experience in the town was used in his famous novels.B.His father died when he was 12 and then he left school.C.He lived on all kinds of odd jobs and then went to the West.He worked as a reporter there and wrote lots of frontier humors.D.After marriage he moved to New England and then gradually became a famous writer.E.His late life was a tragedy.(failure of investment,death of his wife and two daughters)Mark Twain and The Mississippi River Half twain!Quarter twain!M-a-Half twain!Quarter twain!M-a-r-kr-k twain!”twain!”“two fathoms depth of navigable water”.For most people,the name Mark Twain is virtually synonymous with the life along the Mississippi River immortalized in the authors writing.Clemens first signed his writing with the name in February 1863,as a newspaper reporter in Nevada.Works(short stories,novels,social critic)A.Short story:most famous one is“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”(a frontier humor which made Twain become famous)“The Million Pound Note”“Running for Governor”B.NovelsThe Gilded Age(The novel is not an excellent one but it gives the name of an age the several decades after the Civil War.)The Adventures of Tom SawyerThe Adventures of Huckleberry FinnLife on Mississippi”masterpiecesThe Adventures of Tom SawyerThe Adventures of Huckleberry FinnAll modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huck Finn There was nothing before.There has been nothing as good since.The novel is filled with rich descriptions of the river and the colorful people who lived along it.He also employed humor to involve his readers in issues of justice and morality.The Adventures of Huckleberry FinnSetting:around 1850s,before the Civil War;a small town near the Mississippi Inspired by many of the authors own experiences as a riverboat pilot,the book tells of two runawaysa white boy and a black manand their journey down the mighty Mississippi River.The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is regarded by many as the greatest literary achievement America has yet produced.When the book first appeared,it scandalized reviewers and parents who thought it would corrupt young children with its depiction of a hero who lies,steals,and uses coarse language.In the last half of the twentieth century,the condemnation of the book has continued on the grounds that its portrayal of Jim and use of the word nigger is racist.The novel continues to appear on lists of books banned in schools across the country.From the beginning The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was also recognized as a book that would revolutionize American literature.The strong point of view,skillful depiction of dialects,and confrontation of issues of race and prejudice have Inspired critics to dub it the great American novel.theme:humanism will finally winD.Notice:this novel was the first famous novel about growing up and showing the contradictions between adults world and teenagers worldE.The novel used vivid details from actual life successfully.F.Special point of view:serious social problems discussed through the narration of a little illiterate boyE.Colloquial style:a very important contribution of this novel to American literatureSocial CriticMark Twain is an idealist who believed freedom,justice and brotherhood of man.He wrote lots of passages criticizing the racial discrimination towards Chinese in America and he also wrote a passage condemning the unfair invasion of China in 1900.Mark Twains contribution to the development of realism and to American literature as a whole was partly through his theories of localism in American fiction,and partly through his colloquial style which we shall discuss in detail in connection with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.I took the sack of corn meal and took it to where the canoe was hid,and shoved the vines and branches apart and put it in;then I done the same with the side of bacon;then the whisky-jug.I took all the coffee and sugar there was,and all the ammunition;I took the wadding;I took the bucket and gourd;took a dipper and a tin cup,and my old saw and two blankets,and the skillet and the coffee-pot.I took fish lines and matches and other things everything that was worth a cent.I cleaned out the place.I wanted an ax,but there wasnt any,only the one out at the woodpile,and I knowed why I was going to leave that.I fetched out the gun,and now I was done.Features of the language used in the novel:mostly Anglo-Saxon in origin,short,concrete and direct in effect;sentence structure is mostly simple or compound;repetition of words;ungrammatical elementsWhy Mark Twain chose to use the colloquial style?(A:To show the actual speech habit of an uneducated boy from the American South of the mid-nineteenth century)Mark Twain made the colloquial speech an accepted,respectable literary medium in the literary history of America.Great influence of Twains colloquial style:Ernest Hemingways style;J.D.Salingers style in Catcher in the Rye Why Mark Twain chose to use the colloquial style?(A:To show the actual speech habit of an uneducated boy from the American South of the mid-nineteenth century)Mark Twain made the colloquial speech an accepted,respectable literary medium in the literary history of America.Great influence of Twains colloquial style:Ernest Hemingways style;J.D.Salingers style in Catcher in the Rye NaturalismNaturalism is a term of literary history,primarily a French movement in prose fiction and the drama during the final third of the 19th-cent.although it is also applied to similar movements or groups of writers in other countries in the later decades of the 19th and early years of the 20th cents.In France Emile Zola(1840-1902)was the dominant practitioner of Naturalism in prose fiction and the chief exponent of its doctrines.The emergence of Naturalism does not mark a radical break with Realism,rather the new style is a logical extension of it.Broadly speaking,Naturalism is characterized by a refusal to idealize experience and by the persuasion that human life is strictly subjected to natural laws.The Naturalists shared with the earlier Realists the conviction that the everyday life of the middle and lower classes of their own day provided subjects worthy of serious literary treatment.Emphasis was laid on the influence of the material and economic environment on behaviour,especially in Zola,on the determining effects of physical and hereditary factors in forming the individual temperament.American Naturalism自然主义(1890-to the first two decades of the 20th-century)Origin(1)Industrialism:create a large group of very poor people;live in slums and cannot control their lives;self-reliance disappeared in the fast development of economy(2)The Origin of Species(Charles Darwin,1859,godless world,human beast,the survival of the fittest,cruel natural law correspond with cruel social realities(3)Herbert Spencer:Social Darwinism(human controlled by heredity and outside social power)(4)Howells“smiling aspect”realism seems too genteel and even false.Thus the influence of French naturalism,Tolstoy and Turgenev came to American literature.Significance(1)Breaking through some forbidden area in literature(violence,death,sex etc.)(2)Greatly influencing the 20th century writers such as Hemingway and FaulknerRealism and NaturalismIn contrast to a Realist,a Naturalist believes that a character is fundamentally an animal,without free will.To a Naturalistic writer,a character can be explained in terms of the forces,usually heredity and environment,which operate on him/her.Realism is a manner and method of composition by which the author describes normal,average life,in an accurate,truthful way.Naturalism is a manner and method of composition by which the author portrays life as it is in accordance with the philosophic theory of determinism.1.The subject matter:a.The subject matter deals with those raw and unpleasant experiences which reduce characters to degrading behavior in their struggle to survive.b.The milieu is the commonplace and the unheroic;life is usually the dull round of daily existence.But the naturalist discovers those qualities in such characters usually associated with the heroic or adventurous-acts of violence and passion leading to desperate moments and violent death.c.There is discussion of fate that affect a character;generally the controlling force is society and the surrounding environment.2.The concept of a naturalistic character:a.characters are conditioned and controlled by environment,heredity,chance,or instinct;but they have compensating humanistic values which affirm their individuality and life-their struggle for life becomes heroic and they maintain human dignity.b.the Naturalists attempt to represent the intermingling in life of the controlling forces and individual worth.They do not dehumanize their characters.The Naturalists introduced new topics and helped broaden the scope of American fiction:Prostitution and seduction-in Maggie,The Octopus,and Sister Carrie.Exposure of social conditions and social evils-The Octopus.RepresentativesStephen Crane Jack London Theodore DreiserStephen Crane(1871-1900)born into a New Jersey Methodist clergymans family.attended a military prep school,Lafayette College,and Syracuse University where he stayed for less than a year.moved into New York to earn his living as a free-lance journalist.First-hand knowledge of New York slum areas furnished him with material for his Maggie:A Girl of the Streets(1893).The first uncompromising naturalistic novel in Americadied of tuberculosis in Germany at the age of 28.Works(1)Maggie:A Girl of the Streets(resistance of her slum life and at last suicide)(2)The Red Badge of Courage(changes of a young mans psychological state in the civil war)Against the Romantic view of war as a symbol of courage and heroism;Telling the alarming truth and horrible sides of war as a mass slaughter;First realistic novel which took the war as the subject matter;Influenced Hemingway and Dos Passos and so on(3)The Black Riders(poem collection)Concise,unrhymed,impressive imagesCrane and Emily Dickinson were two forerunners of Imagism.A Girl of the StreetsIt relates the story of a good womans downfall and destruction in a slum environment.Maggie grows up in a typical naturalistic home background where mere existence became a battle and where men behave like animals.Maggie is not resigned to her fate.She has her own aspirations and craves for self-fulfillment.When old enough,she goes to work in a factory where the conditions of life turn human beings into machines.Her home proves also suffocating so that Maggie tries to leave her beastly mother and brother.She places hope and trust in Pete who,fails to come to her rescue after he has seduced her.In despair she is forced to walk the streets and eventually to plunge herself into the river.As Crane says,environment is a tremendous thing for an insignificant human being to battle against.Crane was a pioneer writing in the naturalistic tradition.As critics have noted,his writings gave the whole esthetic movement of the nineties a sudden direction and a fresh impulse.The red Badge of CourageCommonly considered Stephen Cranes greatest accomplishment,The Red Badge of Courage(1895)ranks among the foremost literary achievements of the modern era.The red Badge of Couragea story set in the period of the Civil War.The basic theme of the animal man in a cold,manipulating world runs through the whole book.A boy-soldier is enlisted and dispatched with his untried regiment to the front.In face of danger he is imperceptibly seized with panic.He finds himself asking the question,Will I run from a battle?And he does run away.Hearing that his regiment has held back the enemy charge.,he feels ashamed of his cowardice and tries to convince himself that he was right to preserve his own life.After a time,Henry joins a column of wounded soldiers winding down the road.He is deeply envious of these men,thinking that a wound is like“a red badge of courage”;visible proof of valorous behavior.He meets a man who has been shot twice and who speaks proudly of the fact that his regiment did not flee.He repeatedly asks Henry where he is wounded.Against the romantic view of war as a symbol of courage and heroism,Crane talks about war in alarming honesty.War in The Red Badge is a plain slaughter-house.There is nothing like valor or heroism on the battlefield,and if there is anything,it is fear of death,cowardice,the natural instinct of man to run from danger.By thus de-romanticizing war and heroism,Crane initiated the modern tradition of telling the truth at all costs about the elemental human situation,and writing about war as a real human experience.Now this was an event of a revolutionary nature both in theme and technique,one which was bound to produce a far-reaching influence on later writers:Hemingway,Dos Passes,and,in recent history,Norman Mailer,Kurt Vonnegut,Joseph Heller,and Thomas Pynchon.It is no exaggeration to state that Crane anticipated the chief phenomena of American literature in the first few decades of the present century.Conclusion(1)Basic motif:environment and heredity overwhelm men(2)Pioneer of naturalismTheodore Dreiser(1871 1945)1.Life(1)Indiana,German-speaking family(2)Extremely poor childhood(3)Worked as a reporter and his first book Sister Carrie was rejected many times(4)In his later life,he turned to Communism.Works(1)Sister Carrie(Carrie Meeber,Drouet,Hurstwood)(no control of her own life;driving blindly to catch all opportunities to make life better)A country girl,Sister Carrie,comes to Chicago to look for a better life.She first stays with her sister is too poor to keep her.Winter is coming and she is seriously ill.A traveling salesman,Druet,comes to her rescue and takes her home as his mistress.Sister Carries beauty appeals to Druets friend,Hurstwood,so that the respectable manager deserts his comfortable home and family and forces her to elope with him.They run first to Canada and then settle down in New York.But Hurstwood proves himself to be utterly unfit to survive.He can not find work,and begs for and receives some occasional support from Sister Carrie.Sister Carrie m