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Unit 6 The 20th Century American Literature (1900—2000) l Key Words: Modernism, Imagism, Modern Poetry, Modern Fiction, Lost Generation , The Southern Renaissance, Harlem Renaissance, Modern Drama, Postwar Literature, Postwar Poetry, Postwar Realism, Beat Generation, Black Humor, Black Literature l Target: This unit aims at introducing the American Literature in the 20th century. The relevant literary history, the leading writers and their famous works will be fully discussed. l Study Points: 1. Modern Poetry; 2. Modern Fiction Before 1945; 3. Modern Drama; 4. Postwar Literature; 5. Black Literature l Teaching Hours: 16 (History: 8 hours and Reading: 8 hours) Part IV Postwar Literature (1945—?) ◆ Significant Events · August 6, 1945 - atomic explosion over Hiroshima, Japan
· The AIDS epidemic ◆ The Decades The 1950s, referred by poet Robert Lowell as "the tranquilized fifties," has been ridiculed as a smug, irresponsible, and materialistic decade. The outstanding literary work is J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Other important works are Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking, (1952), and Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd (959). With Allen Ginsberg reading aloud his poem, Howl, aloud in San Francisco in 1955, this decade also saw the beginning of the Beat generation led by Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The 1960s, in literary terms, is marked by the loosening of censorship and the discussion of "taboo" topics. This begins with the publication of the previously banned D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1959. Sexual fantasies, extremes of adventure, and "black humor" (humorous satire using shock or cruelty) are commonly used as subjects of literary works. The journalistic essay becomes a popular style of writing. This decade is also marked by freedom movements such as Black power, women's liberation, and gay rights. The 1970s mark the emergence of the women's movement led by the 1970 publication of Sexual Politics. In this work the author Kate Millet attacks the male writers for their use of antifemale attitudes. Others picking up Millet's theme are Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, and Joan Didion. The 1980s and 1990s are too recent and contemporary for evaluations of literary trends. Note should be made of the achievements of Toni Morrison (1993 Nobel prize for literature). Also appearing on the literary scene are the so-called multicultural writers like Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, James Welch, Bharati Mukherjee, and Sandra Cisneros. This is a very simple overview of the literary achievements of this period. It is heartening to know that literary activity is vigorous and continues to explore new visions and boundaries. 1. Postwar Fiction (1945—1961)
His most important work, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), established him as a leading author and is still widely read, especially among adolescents. The hero of the book, Holden Caulfield, became a prototype of the rebellious and confused adolescent who discerns the "phoniness" of the adult world. Other works by Salinger include the short-story collection Nine Stories (1953), Franny and Zooey (1961), and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (both 1963). All of these works of fiction are concerned with the problems of the extremely bright and overly sensitive children of the Glass family. John Updike (1932—?) Updike, John (1932- ), American writer, known for his writings about the American suburban scene. Updike is noted for well-crafted prose in which he explores the often hidden tensions of middle-class American life. His characters frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations, and marital fidelity. ◆ Life and Career Ø John Hoyer Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, and educated at Harvard University and the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford (England). Ø He was a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine from 1955 to 1957. Ø Updike's first book, The Carpentered Hen (1958), is a collection of verse. Ø His first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), is about the inhabitants of a home for the aged, and it received a great deal of critical praise. Ø One of his best-known works, Rabbit, Run (1960), tells the story of the character Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a young man in flight from the responsibilities of life and the disillusionment they entail for him. Ø Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981; Pulitzer Prize, 1982), and Rabbit at Rest (1990; Pulitzer Prize, 1991) also follow Rabbit as he navigates through middle-class life in the changing America of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Ø In The Centaur, which was given the 1963 National Book Award for fiction, Updike adapted characters from Greek legend as a Pennsylvania schoolteacher and his adolescent son. Ø Of the Farm (1965) is a short, intense look at a man torn between past and present, as represented by his mother and his wife. Ø Couples (1968) probes the world of suburban married couples in the mid-1960s. Ø Bech: A Book (1970) is a collection of seven interrelated stories about a writer. Ø Updike's later works include The Coup (1979), a novel set in an imaginary African country; Bech Is Back (1982); The Witches of Eastwick (1984; motion picture, 1987), which drew sharp criticism for what was considered an antifeminist stance; Brazil (1994); The Afterlife (1994), a collection of short stories; and In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996). Updike's perceptive literary criticism is displayed in his essay collection Hugging the Shore (1983). 2. Beat generation (1950s) 1. Definition Beat Generation, group of American writers of the 1950s whose writing expressed profound dissatisfaction with contemporary American society and endorsed an alternative set of values. The term sometimes is used to refer to those who embraced the ideas of these writers. The Beat Generation's best-known figures were writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, who met as students at Columbia University in the 1940s, and San Francisco-based poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore, in the North Beach section of San Francisco, became a center of Beat culture and remained an enduring symbol of alternative literature into the 1990s. Another center of Beat activity was New York City’s East Village, where Ginsberg made his home. The term Beat Generation was first used by Kerouac in the late 1940s. The word beat had various connotations for the writers, including despair over the beaten state of the individual in mass society and belief in the beatitude, or blessedness, of the natural world and in the restorative powers of the beat of jazz music and poetry. Beat writing generally called for a renunciation of material goods and acquisitiveness in favor of a rediscovery of the erotic, artistic, and spiritual self through the use of drugs, casual sex, music, and the mysticism of Zen Buddhism. The term beatnik was coined in the late 1950s to refer, often disparagingly, to people who embraced the ideas and attitudes of the Beat writers. 2. Characteristics 1) The Beats were fed up with the official explanations of why things happened. 2) The Beats rejected middle class values, commercialism, and conformity. 3) The Beats withdrew from politics and form the obligation of citizenship. 4) The Beats rejected universities and the academic tradition. 5) The Beats evolved a free, non-mat eristic religion with no formal church, but based loosely on the teaching of Buddha, comprising love, gay, and anarchy. 6) The Beats regarded modern American life as so cruel, selfish, and impersonal that writers and artists were being driven to madness.
◆ Life and Career Ø Born in Newark, New Jersey, Ginsberg was educated at Columbia University. Ø During his time in New York City he met Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, who would later become integral members of the Beat movement. Ø After graduating from Columbia in 1948, Ginsberg worked at various jobs before moving to San Francisco in the early 1950s. There he met American poets such as Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ø Ferlinghetti’s bookstore, City Lights, published Ginsberg’s first book, Howl (1956). Howl was initially seized by the government under obscenity charges, but the charges eventually were dropped, and the book is now recognized as the first important poem of the Beat movement. An angry indictment of America’s false hopes and broken promises, Howl uses vivid images and long, overflowing lines to illuminate Ginsberg’s thoughts. Howl and Ginsberg’s subsequent poetry show the influence of English poet William Blake (who Ginsberg claimed once spoke to him in a vision) and American poets Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. Ginsberg’s poetry is informal, discursive, and often repetitive. Its immediacy, honesty, and explicit sexual subject matter frequently give it an improvised quality. Ø Beginning in the late 1950s Ginsberg began to travel throughout the world, commonly giving public readings of his poetry. Ø In the United States young people looked to Ginsberg as a guide through the turbulent 1960s, and although some of his early poems were written under the influence of drugs, in the early 1960s Ginsberg renounced drug use as a form of inspiration. Ø His participation in political protests was reflected in his poetry. He often took up social causes such as gay rights and, later, environmental issues. Religious philosophy also influenced Ginsberg, and he drew on Jewish and Buddhist ideas in his work and in his lifestyle. Ø Other volumes of Ginsberg’s poetry include Kaddish (1961), a long poem mourning his mother; Reality Sandwiches (1963); Planet News; (1968); Collected Poems 1947-1980 (1984); White Shroud: Poems 1980-1985 (1987); and Selected Poems 1947-1995 (1996). Ø In 1995 a collection of Ginsberg’s early writings was published as Journals Mid-Fifties (1954-1958). The volume deals with such themes as his acceptance of his homosexuality, his literary friendships, his extensive travels, and his rejection of American materialism. ◆ Style 1. His poetry shows great influence of Whitman. 1) He used long lines. His poem looks more like prose than like a modernist poem. 2) Another similarity to Whitman is catalogue, the use of list. A catalogue means a list of images. 3) Another influence of Whitman is oratory, or spoken poetry. 4) He used the persona “I”. Walt Whitman talked about himself as “I of Mountain Son.” Ginsberg did the same thing. 2. Immediacy: Ginsberg was interested in the immediate effect. He wanted the poem to be read as if just come off the top of his head, not like an academic poem. 3. The use of language: 1) He wanted to capture the rhythm of speech. 2) Ginsberg used obscene language. 3) He applied repetition. 4) His disconnected phrase can accumulate as narrative shrieks, or, at other moment, can build as a litany of prayer. 4. Ginsberg at his best gave a sense of both doom and beauty, whether in the denunciatory impatient prophesies of Howel and Other Poems or in the catalogue of suffering in Kaddish and Other Poems (1960). ◆ Study Questions Allen Ginsberg's use of long lines was a deliberate experiment for him, the "long clanky statement" that permits "not the way you would say it, a thought, but the way you would think it-i.e., we think rapidly in visual images as well as words, and if each successive thought were transcribed in its confusion . . . you get a slightly different prosody than if you were talking slowly." Read Howl and other anthologized poems, paying particular attention to Ginsberg's use of the long line. 3. Postmodern Fiction (1961—?) ◆ Background In the 1960s and 1970s American writers were doubting the very reality of the political events they were witnessing: the blunders of the Johnson administration, the lies of the Nixon administration, the Vietnam War, the Watergate debacle, the proliferation of the nuclear we, etc. All the official versions were being mistrusted. The blurring of fact and fiction brought about new mode of writing which filled the linguistic gap created by the disarticulation of the official discourse. American fiction began to question, mock, parody the official discourse. Thus the line between the real and the imaginary was erase, meaning collapsed, and absurdity permeated on all levels of social life. The narrative became fragmented, discontinuous, ironic, and full of black humor. Black humor refers to the use of the morbid and the absurd for darkly comic purposes. It carries the tone of anger and bitterness in the grotesque situations of suffering, anxiety and death. It makes readers laugh at the blackness of modern life. The black humorists feel amused at their characters’ vain attempt to create order in their absurd world. In literature, postmodernism has its origins in the rejection of traditional mimetic fiction in favor of a heightened sense of artifice, a delight in games and verbal pyrotechnics, a suspicion of absolute truth and a resulting inclination to stress the fictionality of fiction. ◆ Major Concept 1. As Burroughs states in Naked Lunch, “The world cannot be expressed, it can perhaps be indicated by mosacs of juxtaposition, like objects abandoned in a hotel room, defined by negatives and absence.” Postmodern writers brooded over what they perceived to be absence of answers and continuity by emphasizing randomness, discontinuity, and by blurring the distinction between author and fictional character. They insisted on drawing the reader into the confidence that the text was the only reality. 2. As postmodern writers rejected the traditional referential of art, they produced self-reflexive works. 3. It seems that the fundamental rule of the postmodern fiction is the absurd and the arbitrary. Postmodern fiction seems to turn in a void, but not without cling irony and black humor. At the end of the postmodern fiction there is no real message, no order, no easy resolution, no false moral statement, only a text that offers itself as a kind of nonsense delirium that, to a great extent, reflects the nonsense of historical events and the delirium of the language recounting the events. 4. Postmodern writers held that the reality of modern life was too elusive and uncertain for people to rationalize and idealize. 5. The distrust of traditional mimetic genres, allied to the philosophical climate of structuralism and deconstruction, has encouraged postmodernism to embrace popular forms, such as detective fiction, science fiction, and fairy tales. Joseph Heller (1923—1999)
Ø Born on May 1, 1923, in Brooklyn, New York, Heller was educated at New York University. Ø During World War II, he flew more than 60 missions in 1943 and 1944 as a B-25 wing bombardier for the United States Army Air Forces in Europe, earning the rank of first lieutenant. Ø In the 1950s he worked as an advertising writer for high-circulation magazines such as Time, Look, and McCall's while writing short fiction and Catch-22. Heller used his combat experiences as background material for Catch-22。Catch-22 is about a group of American servicemen posted on an island in the Mediterranean Sea during World War II. The “catch” of the title refers to a fictitious army regulation stating that an insane person was excused from bombing missions, but seeking to avoid the missions was an indication of sanity. In the book it features the airman Yossarian as the hero and moral center of a satirical depiction of life in the army. Yossarian is portrayed as one of the last rational people in an insane war. In the novel, the absurdities of military life are represented by the regulation "Catch-22" (a phrase Heller introduced). The regulation, which prevents airmen from escaping service in bombing missions by pleading insanity, states that any airman rational enough to want to be grounded cannot possibly be insane and therefore is fit to fly. Ø Heller's other novels include Something Happened (1974), a study of the fearfulness and anxiety of an American businessman; Good as Gold (1979); God Knows (1984); Picture This (1988); and Closing Time (1994), a sequel to Catch-22 which depicts a robust but aging Yossarian in a collapsing New York City during the early 1990s. Heller also wrote the plays We Bombed in New Haven (1967) and Catch-22: A Dramatization (1971), as well as several screenplays and an autobiography, No Laughing Matter (1986). Catch-22 was dramatized as a motion picture in 1970. The themes and style of Heller's writing have been compared to those of Jewish American writers such as Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth, as well as to those of American satirist Kurt Vonnegut Heller's grotesque renderings of moral crises are also reminiscent of the works of American author Nathanael West and European writer Franz Kafka, and of such European antiwar novels as All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) by Erich Maria Remarque and The Good Soldier Schweik (1920-1923) by Jaroslav Hasek. Ø American writer Joseph Heller, whose darkly comic novels centered on the lunacy of modern society, died on December 12, 1999, at his home in East Hampton, New York. He was 76 years old. Part V. Black Literature ◆ Black Literature experienced three periods: 1) Oral traditions 2) Literature in written form 3) Harlem Renaissance ◆ The Four stages of the black people images in literature: 1) 1st Stage: docile; —Uncle Tom’s Cabin (By Harriet Beecher Stowe) 2) 2nd Stage: protesting;—Native Son (By Richard Wright) 3) 3rd Stage: finding identity;—Invisible Man (By Ralph Waldo Ellison) 4) 4th Stage: new-consciousness ◆ Writers: Richard Wright (1908—1960)
Wright, Richard Nathaniel (1908-1960), American writer, whose novels and short stories helped redefine discussions of race relations in America in the mid-20th century. Wright publicly opposed racial prejudice and was perhaps the most eloquent spokesperson in the United States for his generation of blacks. His most acclaimed works are the novel Native Son (1940) and the autobiographical memoir Black Boy (1945). ◆ Early Life Ø Wright was born outside of Natchez, Mississippi. His father left the family when Wright was still young and his mother, a schoolteacher, was stricken with a paralyzing illness when he was a child. Ø Raised mostly by relatives, Wright was an unruly student and quit school at the age of 15. Ø He subsequently moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where he worked at odd jobs and began a remarkable process of self-education, which included having a white friend borrow books for him from the segregated public library. Ø During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Wright worked on various writing and editing projects for the Federal Writers' Project in Chicago. ◆ Literary Career Ø Wright’s first book, Uncle Tom's Children (1938; revised 1940), consisted of four novellas that dramatize racial prejudice. The book won first prize in a writing competition sponsored by the Writers’ Project. Ø In 1937 Wright moved to New York City. He worked there on a Writers’ Project guidebook to the city entitled New York Panorama (1938) and wrote the book’s essay on the Harlem neighborhood. Ø Wright had joined the Communist Party while in Chicago, and once in New York he published reviews and political essays in Communist Party publications such as New Masses. Wright remained an active member of the party into the 1940s before leaving over ideological issues. Ø After winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1939, Wright completed his novel Native Son. ◇ Native Son The book explores the violent psychological pressures that drive Bigger Thomas, a young black man, to murder. In the story, Thomas, a 20-year-old from the largely black South Side of Chicago, takes a job as a chauffeur for a wealthy white family whose fortune is based on real estate dealings in black neighborhoods. The daughter of the family seduces Bigger, and he accidentally smothers her to death when he fears they will be discovered together in bed. The quick-paced melodrama of the first half of the novel then yields to a more deliberate treatment of Bigger’s trial for murder. In the second half of the book, Wright presents a careful psychological and social examination of the story’s events—and of American race relations. Native Son was an immediate sensation with white and black readers, and this wide appeal helped make Wright the first black American writer to have a best-seller. With dramatist Paul Green, Wright adapted the story for the stage in 1941. In 1950 he produced a film version. Ø Wright moved to France in the late 1940s. He published several more novels during his lifetime, including The Outsider (1953), which describes an African American character's involvement with the Communist Party in Chicago; and The Long Dream (1958), about a boy’s childhood in Mississippi. The short-story collection Eight Men (1961) and the novel Lawd Today (1963) were published after Wright’s death. Wright also produced a considerable body of nonfiction. Ø His first autobiographical work, Black Boy, reveals in bitter personal terms the devastating impact of racial prejudice on young black males in the United States. Black Boy points out the many psychological and cultural similarities between 20th-century racism and its predecessor, slavery. Ø Wright’s other nonfiction works include Black Power (1954), a commentary on the emerging nations of Africa; The Color Curtain (1956), which focuses on the so-called Third World; Pagan Spain (1957), which addresses the Fascist rule in that country; and American Hunger (1977), a second autobiographical work. Ø In 1941 Wright collaborated with photographer Edwin Rosskam on 12 Million Black Voices, a folk history of blacks in America. Ralph Ellison (1914—1994)
Ellison, Ralph (1914-1994), American author and educator, one of the most influential black American writers of the 20th century. Ø Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and educated at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University). Ø His best-known work, Invisible Man (1952), expounds the theme that American society willfully ignores blacks. ◇ Invisible Man The novel is the account of an unnamed young Southern black man’s journey from innocence to experience as he searches, first in the South and then in the North, for his place in the world. Ellison uses rich, varied, and powerful language to portray the black experience in all its vitality and complexity. The novel was one of the first works to describe modern racial problems in the United States from a black American point of view. It received the National Book Award for fiction in 1953. Ø In his essay collections Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), Ellison addressed various aspects of American culture. Ø He is also noted for many magazine articles and short stories, and during his career he lectured at many colleges and universities on the subject of the black American. Ø From 1970 to 1979 Ellison was Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University, and in 1985 he was one of the first recipients of the National Medal of Arts. Ø At his death his long-awaited second novel, delayed in part by the destruction of hundreds of pages in a 1967 fire, was left uncompleted. Ø In 1995 The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison was published. Ø The following year several of his unpublished stories were discovered by John F. Callahan, his literary executor. Two of them, "Boy on a Train" and "I Did Not Learn Their Names," appeared in The New Yorker magazine later in 1996. Flying Home and Other Stories (1997), a collection of Ellison’s stories written between 1937 and 1954, includes six previously unpublished pieces.
Toni Morrison (1931—?)
Morrison, Toni (1931- ), American writer, whose works deal with the black experience and celebrate the black community. Morrison’s work features mythic elements, sharp observation, compassion, and poetic language and is often concerned with the relationship between the individual and society. In 1993 she won the Nobel Prize in literature. Ø Born in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison was christened Chloe Anthony Wofford and grew up during the Great Depression of the 1930s in a poor and close-knit family. Ø In 1949 she entered Howard University, where she became interested in theater and joined a drama group, the Howard University Players. Ø Morrison went on to earn an M.A. degree in English at Cornell University in 1955. Ø She subsequently taught at Texas Southern University from 1955 to 1957 and then at Howard University from 1957 to 1964. Ø While at Howard she met and married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect. The couple had two children and then divorced in 1964. Ø While teaching at Howard, Morrison began to write fiction. After leaving teaching she worked as an editor at Random House, first in Syracuse, New York, then in New York City. Ø Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, an expansion of an earlier short story, was published in 1970, and she attracted immediate attention as a promising writer. Ø This was followed by the novel Sula (1973), about a woman who refuses to conform to community mores. Ø Morrison's next novel, Song of Solomon (1977), was hailed by critics as a major literary achievement. It tells the story of a character named Milkman Dead, who in his search for his family's lost fortune discovers instead his family history. Ø Tar Baby (1981), about a tense romance between a man and a woman, was equally well received. Ø Beloved (1987; Pulitzer Prize, 1988) is regarded by many as Morrison's most successful novel. ◇ Beloved It is the story of Sethe, a mother who kills her daughter Beloved rather than have her grow up as a slave. The book explores many complex themes, including black Americans' relationship to slavery. Morrison's use of multiple timeframes and fantastic occurrences (such as the reappearance of Beloved) demonstrate her lyric storytelling abilities. Ø The novels Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1998) and the nonfiction book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) were also well received. Morrison’s seventh novel, Paradise (1998), focuses on an all-black town called Ruby, and a violent attack that a group of men make on a small, all-female community at the edge of town. Alice Walker (1944—?)
Walker, Alice (1944- ), American author and poet, most of whose writing portrays the lives of poor, oppressed African American women in the early 1900s. Ø Born Alice Malsenior Walker in Eatonton, Georgia, she was educated at Spelman and Sarah Lawrence colleges. Ø She wrote most of her first volume of poetry during a single week in 1964; it was published in 1968 as Once. Ø Walker's experiences during her senior year at Sarah Lawrence, including undergoing an abortion and making a trip to Africa, provided many of the book's themes, such as love, suicide, civil rights, and Africa. Ø She won the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for her best-known work, the novel The Color Purple (1982), which was praised for its strong characterizations and the clear, musical quality of its colloquial language. The novel was made into a motion picture in 1985, and Walker's book The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (1996) contains her notes and reflections on making the film. Ø Walker's other works include the novels The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Meridian (1976), The Temple of My Familiar (1989), and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992); the volumes of poetry Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973) and Goodnight, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning (1979); and the essay collections In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983) and Living by the Word (1988). Ø Walker received many additional honors and awards. She was also active in the movements for civil and women's rights. Part 1 || Part 2 || Part 3 || Part 4 Reference Books: q Chang Yaoxin: A Survey of American Literature, the 2nd edition. Tianjin: Nankai University Press, 2003.12 q Liu Cunbo: Selected Readings in British and American Literature, Beijing: Higher Education Press, 2001 q 陈新选著：《英美名家短篇小说精品赏析》，北京：中国对外翻译出版公司， q 李翠葶，李正栓：《美国文学学习指南》，北京：清华大学出版社，2002 q 万 莉，陈范霞：《英美文学选读》，北京：光明日报社，2001 q 吴定柏：《美国文学大纲》，上海：上海外语教育出版社，1998
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