美国文学大题

1. What are the artistic characteristics in Hemingway's novels? Under the influence of Mark Twain and with the help of Gertrude Stein, and Pound, Hemingway developed a new colloquial style characterized by directness, freshness, simplicity and apparent naturalness. Hemingway always managed to choose words concrete, specific, common, casual and conversational; and employ them often in a syntax of short, simple sentence. But his style is deliberate and its simplicity can be deceptive. It is highly suggestive and connotative. This style is a reflection of Hemingway's view of good writing. He said that "I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg". 2. Hemingway’s Code Hero. The “Hemingway Code” of manhood does not involve mere physical strength, sexual potency, or ability to accumulate (or spend) wealth. According to this code, a man is defined by will, pride, and endurance: the endurance to accept pain, even loss---when the loss cannot be avoided; the pride of knowing that one has done one's best, with the courage to act truly according to one's own nature; and the will to face defeat or victory without whining on one hand or boasting on the other. Grace Under Pressure 3. What are Faulkner's literary achievements? His attitudes toward the southern aristocratic families is ambiguous. He was a daring formal experimentalist. His characterization was to reveal the multifaceted nature of man. He carried on ceaseless technical experimentation all his literary career. He was a difficult writer. 4. What is “The Lost Generation”? The term is first used by Stein, one of the leaders of the group. It means that this generation had lost beautiful sense of the calm idyllic past. Stein’s comments suggests the ambiguous and pointless lives of expatriates as they aimlessly wandered about the Continent, drinking, making love, and traveling from place to place and from party to party. These activities seem to justify their search for new meaning to replace the old ones. Yet in fact, being cut off from their past, disillusioned in reality, and without a meaningful future to fall on, they were lost in disillusionment and existential voids. They indulged in hedonic in order to make their life less unbearable. The representatives of the group should be Fitzgerald and Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Erza Pound,T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Thornton Wilder, Thomas Wolfe, Ford Maddox Ford, John Steinbeck; Zelda Fitzgerald and others. They all were a generation of the “purest sense” and their emotional responses to the changes in the world around them were very alike. By the end of the war they were completely irritated by the numerous senseless patriotic slogans of the senseless war and too so many priceless lives. 5. what is the Southern Renaissance? In American literature, the South is a mysterious and romantic place. Lots of literary productions took it as the background. Since the beginning of the 20th century, there have emerged a few generations of southern writers who have tried to root their works in the south with a view to achieving universal applicability. Faulkner is the main representative. 6. State Hemingway’s Iceberg Theme. After the publication of his last major work, The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway explained his "iceberg" theory of fiction writing in a Paris Review interview: “If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg.” Hemingway's "iceberg theory" of prose style suggests that the writer should leave unsaid the vast majority of what might be written on a subject. The writer gains power by knowing what to leave out. 7. Fit zgerald’s literary achievements. 1) He found intuitively, in his personal experience, the embodiment of that of the nation and created a myths out of American life. 2) Fitzgerald’s craftsmanship is impeccable: dramatic narrator. 3) He was one of the great stylists in American literature. 8. Explain the meaning of New Criticism. The New Criticism is a type of formalist literary criticism that reached its height during the 1940s and 1950s and th at received its name from John Crowe Ransom’s 1941 book The New Criticism. New Critics treat a work of literature as if it were a self-contained, self-referential object rather than basing their interpretations of a text on the reader’s response, the author’s stated intentions, or parallels between the text and historical contexts (such as author’s life), New Critics perform a close reading, concentrating on the relationships within the text that gives it its own distinctive character or form. 9.The features of New Criticism. 1)It focuses on the analysis of the text rather than paying attention to external elements such as its social background, its author’s intention and political attitude, and its impact on society. 2)It explores artistic structure of the work r ather than its author’s frame of mind or its readers’ responses. 3)It also sees a literary work as an organic entity, the unity of the content anf form, and places emphasis on the close reading of the text. 4)For poems, it kept the basic modernism values. 10.Explain the Confessional School. In a broad way, it includes many people whose poetry seems to share common features such as ruthless, excruciating self-analysis of one’s own background and heritage, one’s own most private desires and fant asies, the urgent “I’ll-tell-it-all-to-you” impulse. The main poet is Lowell. His works, Llife Studies, gave the poetry a new level of popularity in unprecedented manner. 11.What is the Beat Generation? In the 1950s there was a widespread discontentment among the postwar generation, whose voice was one of protest against all the mainstream culture that American had come to represent . This has come to be known as the Beat Generation. “Beat” means a non-conformist, rebellious attitude toward conventional values concerning sex, religion, the arts, and the American way of life. It was an attitude that resulted from the feeling of depression and exhaustion and the need to escape into an unconventional mode of living. 12.State the American literature in 1950s Background: After the WWII, the nuclear time had unmistakably claimed itself and Americans were suddenly brought to face a completely new world in which old rules and guidelines turned out to be helpless. The United States got even more involved in the international affairs. In the 1950s, America’s rival with another big power of war victor—the Soviet Union—resulted in the initial of the Cold War. As much as the escalation of the Cold War a series of major incidents occurred to the attention of the world. as Truman’s containment to East Asia faltered, Korean War broke out in June 1950. This was the first war that American had ever fought without victory. This unbalance and lost war tarred the prestige of Americans as heroes of the second World War and shed a dark shadow on the mind of Americans. In literature,a new generation of American authors appeared writing in the skeptical, ironic tradition of the earlier realists and naturalists. The writers used a prose style modeled on the works of Ernest Hemingway, and F. S. Fitzgerald, narrative techniques of William Faulkner, psychological insights of Sigmund Freud. In the 1950s, the “Beat” writers, in expression of disaffection with “official” American life, were brutally and directly dominant. The so-called “Beat Generation,” though not expatriate like the Lost Generation, were alienated—feeling like foreigners in their own country. 13. State the American literature in 1960s Background: The Cuban missile crisis took place in Oct, 1962. Vietnam War (1965-73) was another stage of the Cold War. The U. S. continuous slaughter proved little military efficiency. The War in Vietnam seemed to Americans a life-swallow machine without end and victory in sight. Disillusionment spread throughout the United States. Anti-war movement grew in size and militancy. More than 500,000 soldiers were deserted during the Vietnam years. This unjust war ended in Americans’ humiliating withdrawal of their exhausted troops from “a small unimportant country” in 1973. The war left a permanent scar in the memory of Americans. In literature, the writes turned to experimental techniques, to absurd humor, to mocking examination of the irrational and the disordered. The black humor featured the 1960s. 14. Briefly sate Bellow’s writing themes. First: he views contemporary as a threat to human life and human integrity. Second, in such environment, people tend to become paranoid, high-strung, and impotent, and so lose their sanity. Third, there is the quest motif, a quest for truth and values, difficult excruciating, but successful in a way. 15. State the common features for The New York School. For one thing, they were all up against the dominant New Critical values, and tried to assert their individual poetic voice. They also introduced the popular and the low features of life into their writings like songs, comic strip figures and Hollywood movies. Thirdly, they exhibited a huge sense of humor, offering room as their poems did for elements. Finally, they experimented with Surrealism for a while. 16. What is the absurd? The absurd means that neither God nor man, nor theology nor philosophy can make sense of the human situation. The notion lasted for quite a long time since Hemingway and Faulkner in 1920s and 1930s and Bellow and Norman Mailer near the end of 1940s and throughout the fifties. The major difference between these authors and the “absurd”novelists of the 60s lies in the fact that, while the former represent the absurdity theme essentially in traditional novelistic devices, the latter tend to regard t he conventional novel as “literature of exhaustion”. They needed to find a new way to update it. If only the thinking minds felt the chaoes and meaninglessness of modern existance, the 1960s and 70s proved to be a period in which the common run of humanity had also come to sense absurdity existing on all conceivable levels of life, and it fee l to the “absurd” novelists to discover a new rehtoic effective enough to voice that feeling in literature. 17. Briefly summarize the features of the absurd. 1)The novelists of the absurd tend to burlesque traditional novelistic devices. They parody other novels, other styles and forms and take them highly equivocal attitudes. 2)They intend to upset all traditions and create confusion in the readers, so as to jostle them into the recognition that the absurdity of the universe dose not disappear. 3)They use a comedy to display the society in order to provoke in the readers to the blackness of modern life by laughter. 4)About the social reality, they regarded the society as what it is. They open themselves up to the disorder and continency. They regard these features of modern existence as normal and accept them. They attempt to generate meaning in the face of, but without denying, chaoes and absurdity. 18. Analyze the features/techniques of Heller’s Novel Catch-22. 1)It displays the absurdist theme with absurdist techniques. It protests against the absurdity of modern American. 2)Another object of ridicule is the military inherent in the monstrous establishment. 3)The absurd linguistic surface is used to reflect the depth of the absurdity of the modern world. 4)Another is its formlessness