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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 I. Modern Poetry Historical Background 1. The United States entered WWI in 1917. The war fundamentally transformed the outlook of many Americans. As the war scare and enthusiasm dissipated, some of those who had fought the war “to make the world sate for democracy” soon perceived themselves to have been deceived and were disappointed. 2. After the WWI, consumerism reached its peak when America witnessed an unparalleled economic boom. The new inventions and economic prosperity brought about dramatic changes in people’s lives. 3. The 1920s was also an age of swift, social transformation in many respects—fads, manners, and morals. Women’s liberation was in full bloom. The “roaring twenties” or “jazz age” bred a host of prolific writers. Great changes in the public’s ideology had a strong influence upon American literature. “Knowledge is power” — Aristotle In Modernism: Knowledge brings us disasters, wars, destructions, etc. Nature is always nature. It never considers our human beings, and it is never on a close tern with human beings. It always keeps a distance with human beings. It can never be conquered by human beings. Any attempt of it will only be rewarded with punishment. In Romanticism: Man and nature are close in relationship. Man can conquer nature. Man is superior to nature. Modernism: (Hemingway, Fitzgerald) We must fight; even the fighting is in vain. We still should fight. The meaning is in fighting. (描写精神上的痛苦：明知不可为而为之) Fitzgerald “Charles still wants to come back. Even the ending is failure. “The way out: even it is a long way, we still should go out.” Hemingway “a losing battle” Postmodernism: Why must we trouble ourselves to do it? If we can’t make it, we give it up. 王朔：不一定要去征战。既然荒诞，就享受荒诞吧！（黑色幽默，表面的放荡不羁，实则更悲观。） [Modernism] During the first decades of the 20th century, modernism became an international tendency against positive and representational art in art and literature. It began in Germany in the 1890s, spread worldwide and ended in 1940ss.It is assumed that modernism was the consequence of the transformation of society brought about by industrialism and technology in the course of 19th century. It included a wide range of artistic expressions such as symbolism, impressionism, post-impressionism, futurism, constructivism, imagism, vorticism, expressionism, data, and surrealism "Defining modernism is a difficult task. ... A historical definition would say that modernism is the artistic movement in which the artist's self-consciousness about questions of form and structure became uppermost. ... In brief, modernism asks us to consider what we normally understand by the center and the margins." - Heath Anthology, Vol. 2, 4th ed., 887-888. The Centers of Modernism [* Optional in Edward’s Teaching] 1. Stylistic innovations - disruption of traditional syntax and form. 2. Artist's self-consciousness about questions of form and structure. 3. Obsession with primitive material and attitudes. 4. International perspective on cultural matters. Modern Attitudes [* Optional in Edward’s Teaching] 1. The artist is generally less appreciated but more sensitive, even more heroic, than the average person. 2. The artist challenges tradition and reinvigorates it. 3. A breaking away from patterned responses and predictable forms. Contradictory Elements [* Optional in Edward’s Teaching] 1. Democratic and elitist. 2. Traditional and anti-tradition. 3. National jingoism and provinciality versus the celebration of international culture. 4. Puritanical and repressive elements versus freer expression in sexual and political matters. Literary Achievements [* Optional in Edward’s Teaching] 1. Dramatization of the plight of women. 2. Creation of a literature of the urban experience. 3. Continuation of the pastoral or rural spirit. 4. Continuation of regionalism and local color. Modern Themes [* Optional in Edward’s Teaching] 1. Collectivism versus the authority of the individual. 2. The impact of the 1918 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. 3. The Jazz Age. 4. The passage of 19th Amendment in 1920 giving women the right to vote. 5. Prohibition of the production, sale, and consumption of alcoholic beverages, 1920-33. 6. The stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression of the 1930s and their impact. Modernism and the Self [* Optional in Edward’s Teaching] 1. In this period, the chief characteristic of the self is one of alienation. The character belongs to a "lost generation" (Gertrude Stein), suffers from a "dissociation of sensibility" (T. S. Eliot), and who has "a Dream deferred" (Langston Hughes). 2. Alienation led to an awareness about one's inner life. Modernism and the New Negro Renaissance [* Optional in Edward’s Teaching] 1. The relationship between the two is complex. 2. They both share the important motif of alienation. 3. However, American modernism is inspired by the European avant-garde art; the Renaissance represents the unique and distinct experience of black Americans. 4. Modernism borrows from the Renaissance the themes of marginality and the use of folk or the so-called "primitive" material. 5. The use of the blues tradition - important for the Renaissance - is not shared by white modernists; considered too limiting (mere complaint about one's repressed and exploited condition), the blues tradition represents images and themes of liberation and revolt. 6. This relationship requires reevaluation; the Renaissance is important for black and white readers and writers. Features of Modernism 1. Modernism dramatized discontinuity (a sense of disjunction) and imminent severance from the past while making determined efforts to use the past, its values and artistic forms by incorporating them in new literary production. 2. Modernism has a sense of fragmentation in social communities and the fragmentation within the individual himself. Hence fragmentation became a common theme in modernist writing. 3. The distinctive feature of literary modernism was strong and conscious break wit traditional forms, perceptions, and techniques of expression, and its great concern with language and all aspect of its media. It was persistently experimental. Imagism 1. Emergence Modernism displayed its momentum first in the movement of Imagism as a reaction to Victorian and Edwardian poetry. It began with Thomas Ernest Hulme (1883—1917), an English philosopher and writer who founded the Poet’s Club in London in 1908. He called on poets to express their momentary impressions through the use of one dominant image. In America, it started in Chicago in 1912 when a new magazine was launched under the title of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, published by Harriet Monroe (1860—1936), who was interested in improving of modern poetry. This event marked a poetic renaissance in the United States and the beginning of modern American poetry in rebellion against Victorian poetry and against the conventional technique of the time. Imagists were a group of poets prominent between 1908 and 1917. They ushered in a whole new era of poetic experimentation. 2. Major Features 1) With a spirit of revolt against conventions, imagism was anti-romantic and anti-Victorian. Victorian poetry was characteristic of moralizing tendencies, overpadding of extra-poetic matter, and traditional iambic pentameter. But Imagism stressed free choice of subject matters (often dealing with single, concentrated moments of experience), concreteness of imaginary, musical phrases, economy of expression, and the use of dominant image, or a quick succession of related images. 2) Imagism produced free verse without imposing a rhythmical pattern. The rhythm was composed as if the poet were making a musical phrase. 3) In a sense, imagism was equivalent to naturalism in fiction. Both of them came from the same basis of determinism. Naturalism was based on scientific observation, a feeling of determinism that the reader should look only at the outside objects with no attempt to get ride inside of them. The imagist writers also had the same feeling of determinism that the reader should look only at the image. 4) Imagism tried to record objective observations of an object or a situation without interpretation or comment by the poet. 3. Comment 1) The most outstanding figures of the movement were Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell (1874—1925), and Hilda Doolittle (1886—1961). Pound championed the movement from 1912 to 1914, setting down the imagist principles. Then Lowell led the movement into the period of “Amygism,” as Pound called it, from 1914 to 1917. And 1917 marked the end of short-lived movement. The imagist theories call for brief language, pinpoint the precise picture in a few words as possible. This new way of poetry composition has a lasting influence in the 20th century poetry. 2) The second lasting influence of imagism is the form of free verse. Free verse means that poetry is free from metrical restriction. In [Blank Verse], each line must have five poetic feet, composed of ten syllables and then a stressed syllable with five of them being accented. The pattern must appear in every single line in the poem. In [Free Verse], there is absolutely no such restriction. Some lines may be long, others may be very short. There are no metrical rules. The rhythmical unit of the line divides the material into cadences, into phrases that the poet believes work together. Free verse isolates phrases (cadences) according to mood or image. It uses the lines as its way of structuring the material. Ezra Loomis Pound (1885—1972)
◆ LifeØ He was born in the frontier mining town of Hailey, Idaho, on October 30, 1885. Ø In 1887 his family moved to Wyncote, Pennsylvania and Pound was brought up there. Ø From 1901 to 1903 he attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he met William Carlos Williams and had a romance with Hilda Doolittle. Ø In 1903 he transferred to the Hamilton College, where he majored in Romance philology and began work on some of the poems. Ø In 1905 he returned to the University of Pennsylvania to begin graduate work in Romance language. Ø After receiving an M.A. degree in 1906, he spent the summer in Europe pursuing research on the Spanish playwright Lope de Vega. When he returned to the University of Pennsylvania, he was at odds with his teachers. He abandoned graduate work in 1907. Ø In 1907, he taught Romance languages and literature at Wabash College, India, and was fired in six months for being immoral in personal behavior. Ø He left for Italy in February, 1908. Ø After a summer in Venice, he settled in London and supported himself by teaching and reviewing for several journals. Ø He studied in London, on and off, from 1908 to 1920, and later in Paris and in Italy. Before long he extended his interest from classics of western tradition to oriental literature. Ø In 1920 he moved to Paris. As part of Gertrudes Stein’s circle, he helped T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway by editing their writings. Ø In 1925 he arrived in Rapallo, Italy and settled down there. He continued to write the Cantos. Ø He worshiped Benito Mussolini (1883—1945) and became a supporter of him. He was indicated for treason by the United States in 1943. In 1945 he was arrested and then brought back to Washington D. C. He was confined to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in the city from 1946 to 1958. Ø On the release in 1958, he returned to Pisa, Italy where he continued to write and translate. Ø He completed Cantos 1-117 (《诗章》)in 1970. Meanwhile, he received Harriet Monore Poetry Award in1962, American Poet Academy Award in 1963, and Emerson-Thoreau Award in 1972. Ø He died in Venice on November 1, 1972. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery on the nearby island of San Michele. ◆ Literary Achievements Ø In 1915 he finished Cathy, a volume of Chinese translations. Ø In 1914, Ezra published an anthology: Des Imagistes in French. Ø In 1915, London, he began working on Cantos,(《诗章》) a modern epic. During his stay in London, he also finished two major poems of disillusionment: High Selwyn Mauberley: Life and Contacts and Mauberley. (《休·塞尔温·莫伯利》1920)。 In them, he described the death of the Western civilization during WWI and resulting futurity of all poetic aims. ◆ Literary Appreciation 1) In a Station of the Metro
2) The River—Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
3) A Pact
◆ Life Ø Robert Lee Frost received the Pulitzer Prize four times and was the only poet ever invited to read one of his poems at a presidential inauguration (at the age of eighty-seven). Ø Although he was born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874, Frost was a New England family and was taken back at the age of ten to the New England, where his poetry is identified. Ø After a brief attendance at Dartmouth, where he disliked the academic attitude, he became a bobbin(绕线) boy in a Massachusetts mill, and a short period at Harvard was followed by further work, making shoes, editing a country newspaper, teaching school, and finally farming. Ø This background of craftsmanship and husbandry had its effect upon his poetry in more than the choice of subjects, for he demanded that his verse be simple as and honest as an axe or hoe. Ø After a long period of farming, he moved to England (1912-15), where he succeeded in meeting Ezra Pound who read his poetry, recognized its value, and immediately set about finding an English publisher. ◆ Literary Career Ø Two volumes—A Boy’s Will, named for one of Longfellow’s best poems, and North of Boston---were published in 1913and 1914 and were well enough received to create favorable repercussions (echo) in the US. Ø He returned to the US to settle on a New Hampshire farm, having achieved a reputation as an important American poet through the publication of North of Boston, which was described by the poet a book of people and shows brilliant insight into New England character and the background that formed it. Ø Among the poems are Mending Wall, The Death of the Hired Man, Home Burial. The same expressive idiom and brilliant observation appear in Mountain Interval (1916), containing such poems as The Road Not Taken, Birches, and Bond and Free. Ø The shrewd humor and Yankee understatement that distinguished “The Cow in Apple Time,” and “A Hundred Collars” are exhibited also in Frost’s witty self-critical remarks, such as “I might be called a Synecdochist; for I prefer the synecdoche in poetry---that figure of speech in which we use a part for the whole. Ø In both emotion and language he was restrained, and conveyed his messages by implication. Ø Although his blank verse is colloquial, it is never loose, for it possesses the pithy(精练的), surcharged economy indigenous to the New Englander. Ø His genre pieces, in the form of dramatic idylls or monologues, capture the vernacular of his neighbors north of Boston. Ø Frost explained his realism by saying, “There are two types of realist—the one who offers a good deal of dirt with his potato to show that it is a real one; and the one who is satisfied with the potato brushed clean….To me, the thing that art does for life is to clean it, to strip it to form.” Ø His next book, New Hampshire (1923, Pulitzer Prize), shows his ability to deal with genial (kind), informal subjects, as in “The Star-Splitter,” “Maple,” and to concentrate emotional impact into a few clean stripped lines, as in “To Earthward,” “Two Look as Two” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Fire and Ice.” Ø In 1928 he issued a fifth new volume, West-Running Brook, with the same warm lyrical quality that had characterized his first book. His Collected Poems (1930, Pulitzer Prize) assembled in one volume the work that has a lifelong continuity in its rhythms, its clear focusing on the individual, and its observation of the native New England background. Ø After collecting his poems, although he held positions as an affiliated teacher at Amherst, Harvard, and Michigan, he continued his literary career and in 1936 published A Further Range (Pulitzer Prize), whose lyrics, though more playful in blending fact and fantasy, have beneath their frivolity a deep seriousness. A new edition of Collected Poems (1939) was followed by A Witness Tree (1942, Pulitzer Prize); two blank verse plays, A Masque of Reason (1945) and A Masque of Mercy (1947). ◆ Features of Frost’s Poetry Ø He uses old forms in new ways. He rejected the revolutionary poetic principles of his contemporaries, choosing instead “the old-fashioned way to be new.” He employed the plain speech of rural New Englanders and preferred the short, traditional forms of lyric and narrative. Ø As a poet of nature he had obvious affinities with romantic writers, notably Wordsworth and Emerson. He saw nature as a storehouse of analogy and symbol, announcing, “I’m always saying something that’s just the edge of something more,” but he had little faith in religious dogma or speculative thought. Ø His concern with nature reflected deep moral uncertainties, and his poetry, for all its apparent simplicity, often probes mysteries of darkness and irrationality in the bleak and chaotic landscapes of an indifferent universe where men and women stand alone, bereft, unaided and perplexed. Ø Frost was not inclined to take sides when confronted by paradoxes of life. He seemed universally calm and controlled, standing in the middle of the road viewing good and evil, beautiful and ugly. He did not stoop to answer, to explain, leaving conclusions to be drawn by the reader, or even, by future time. Ø Frost’s best work includes a number of dramatic monologues or, often dialogues. There is the statement of two opposed viewpoints with the resolution, if any, left to the reader. Two good examples are “Mending Wall,’ and “The Death of the Hired Man.” ◆ Literary Appreciation 1) Mending Wall Ø Two neighbors meet every spring to replace the field stones which, in New England, are traditionally used to bound each farmer’s land. Ø Since neither of the two farmers now keep cattle the on telling the story---the poet himself---thinks it would be better to let the wall be forgotten since “something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Ø The other says, as his father did before him. “Good fences make good neighbors.” Written in blank verse, this poem is a good instance of the way Frost makes poetry. That is, he lets a part stand for the whole. Ø The two neighbors are utterly different, whose opinions are expressed in the first line and the last line respectively. Ø On the surface, the poem is about mending wall, but careful reading will show that it is actually about puling down the wall. Ø Structurally, exactly in the middle of the poem stands “There where it is we do not need the wall.” Ø Syntactic and structural arrangement is employed not only for unity and cohesion, but also for comparison and contrast. Ø The contrast is tradition against development, nature against man, distance between people, law against nature. Ø The only one who sticks to Good fences make good neighbors moves in darkness, which symbolizes darkness is in the heart and mind which makes him follow convention blindly. Questions 1. Characterize the speaker of this poem. How does his personality come out in the first line? 2. To what might “whom” in line 34 refer? Might it have more than one possible reference? Explain. 3. Notice that the first line and line 27 are repeated. What is the purpose of repetition? 4. What is the difference in attitude between the speaker and his neighbor? Why does it seem to the speaker that his neighbor “moves in darkness”? What is the significance that the neighbor’s favorite saying, “Good fences make good neighbors” was spoken by his father? 2) The Road Not Taken Ø This poem is written in classic five-line stanzas, with the rhyme scheme abaab and conventional rhythm. Ø The poem seems to be about the poet, walking in the woods in autumn, choosing which road he should follow on his walk. Ø In reality, it concerns the important decisions which one must make in life, when one must give up one desirable thing in order to possess another. Ø Then, whatever the outcome, one must accept the consequence of one’s choice for it is not possible to go back and have another chance to choose differently. Ø In the poem, the poet hesitates for a long time, wondering which road to take, because they are both pretty. Ø In the end, he follows the one that seems to have fewer travelers on it. Symbolically, he chose to follow an unusual, solitary life; perhaps he was speaking of his choice to become a poet rather than some commoner profession. Ø But he always remembers the road which he might have taken, and which would have given him a different kind of life. Ø The “sigh” helps to characterize the speaker and provides the first hint that the poem may be a gentle parody of the kind of person whose life in the present is distorted by nostalgic regrets for the possibilities of the past, and who is less concerned for the road taken rather than for the “road not taken.” Ø The poem can be explained symbolically. The retold story in the last three lines makes the poem particularly symbolic. Thus the diverging roads become a simple and graphic symbol for the roads of life. Each of us is what we are as a result of having chosen either a conventional or unconventional way through life. Questions 1. If the choice of roads suggests something more than the decision a person must make at a fork in the road, what do roads in the poem symbolize?2. Although the speaker in the poem took the road less traveled by, the passing there/Had worn them really about the same. How does this apparent contradiction affect the meaning of the poem?3. What is the speaker like? Which part of the poem suggests that the speaker is a person who does not conform to convention? How?3) Stopping by Woods on a Snowy EveningØ The following analysis was written by the critic Laurence Perrine: Ø There is more than meets the eye in this lyric, perhaps the most famous and certainly one of the most controversial of Frost’s poems. Ø On the surface it is an unadorned narrative of a simple incident. Some readers stop there and they are rewarded with a memorable experience. Other readers find more much more beneath the surface. Ø Large meanings are packed into this small poem. Think a moment about the symbols Frost uses. What does the owner of the woods mentioned in the poem stand for? Ø Probably for the village and village life at the very least and, more likely, for the social responsibilities of civilized life as opposed to the loneliness of the woods. Ø The little horse, too, is a symbol, representing a kind of life that does not understand why a man should stop by a patch of woods to watch the snow come down. Ø In contrast to the world of civilization symbolized by the owner, the little horse stand for the animal, natural or even brute world. Ø The woods, the cold, and the dark, the frozen lake, and the falling snow constitute a third symbol—the powerful attraction to all this lovely dark-and-deep, which may sensibly be interpreted as the attraction of beauty. Ø Beauty is certainly one aspect of the scene and, therefore, one meaning of the symbol. But this explanation does not exhaust its meaning. Ø Another interpretation is that the man feels an invitation from these woods to final surrender and rest. Some readers go even further and say that the attraction of the woods represents a wish, however momentary, to die. Ø Several things in the poem suggest that the man is on some kind of journey, but Frost never tells us specifically what business the man is on. He may have intended to suggest a journey in life and, thereby, to leave the meaning on the broadest level. Ø Attracted by the woods partway on his journey, the man has paused—perhaps to work out a mental conflict. He has promises to keep at the end of the journey. Ø One part of the sensitive man would like to give up the conflict and surrender. But another part is aware of social responsibilities. Ø The thought of the “lovely, dark, and deep” lingers, but the man’s final decision is to cast off the mood and continue his journey. He has promises to keep and miles to go before he sleeps. Ø Speaking of the same poem, Annette T. Rubinstein says, “For years after first reading this I thought of it as the poem about a country doctor and was startled on rereading to find that Frost had never specified the responsibilities his spokesman had to honor. Ø No doubt other readers who love the poem have imagined other promises to be kept. Such differences are not important, but it is important that Frost frequently succeeds in enlisting his readers’ imaginations so that they become active participants rather than passive audience. Ø 在《林中驻马》一诗中，“我睡前不要赶许多哩路”从文字上看是对旅人的写实；但自然的象征语言中，睡就是死；如果我们再把诗中“林子真可爱，又黑又深”一句与带有道德和社会约束的实践诺言相对照，我们就不能完全否认，这里象征带有死亡的含义，也就是把某种死亡看作一个人负责的表现的审美的沉思…… Ø 弗罗斯特所以吸引了大量的读者正是因这他诗中的象征。可有些读者一旦把握了他的象征的可能性，就过分强调他这些自然象征及其有关的东西，把他的多义象征性固定为一种僵硬的解释，完全违背诗歌表述的实质，特别是当代诗歌表述的实质。（《文学理论》，韦勒克，活伦，第191页） Ø Woods in this poem stands for nature. This poem suggests deep thought about death and life. The strange attraction of death to man is symbolized by the dark woods silently filled up with the coldness of snow. Ø The attraction of the beauty of nature makes the speaker stop in his journey. He finally turns away from it, with a certain weariness and yet with quiet determination, to face the needs and demands of life. Ø This stresses the central conflict of the poem between man’s enjoyment of nature’s beauty and his responsibilities in society. Ø A difficult rhyme scheme is used in this poem. Instead of the usual abba, Frost uses aaba; he also picks up the unrhymed sound and carries it over to become the main rhyme in the next stanza. Ø In the final stanza, Frost uses dddd to replace dded to terminate the rhyme scheme, and in this way to suggest the end of the actin in the poem as well as the end of life—death. Questions1. How do you interpret the speaker’s attraction to the woods?2. What do the last three lines suggest about every one’s life? Why do you think Frost ended the poem with repetition of a line? What is the effect of the repetition?Thomas Sterns Eliot (1888—1965)
◆ Life Eliot was a poet, playwright, and literary critic. His literary reputation is generally deemed greater than his teacher Ezra Pound. He became the knowledged leader of the new poetry and criticism by 1925 and almost dominated poetry and criticism in the period between two world wars and shaped the tastes and critical vocabulary of a generation. Ø Eliot was born on September 26, 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri in the Midwest. His father was a businessman from an intellectual family and his mother was a poet. Ø Eliot studied as undergraduate at Harvard in 1906—1910, at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1910—1911, and again at Harvard in 1911—1914 for a Ph. D in Philosophy. Ø He began writing poems as a college student and in traditional modes at first. Then he was greatly influenced by the French symbolist poets. Ø In 1911 he drafted The Love Song J. Alfred Prufrock, a poem that reveals the spiritual crisis of modern intellectual. Ø In 1913, he won a traveling fellowship to Germany which was interrupted by World War I. Ø In 1915 and 1916 he was at Merton College, Oxford. Ø From about 1915, he settled in England and married Vivien Haigh-Wood in the same year. He first worked as a teacher and then from 1917 to 1925 in the foreign department of Lloyds Bank. Meanwhile he joined the literary circle of Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats. Ø His first wife died in 1947, and he married his assistant Valerie Fletcher in 1957. Ø He died in London on January 4, 1965. ◆ Literary Career Ø In 1915 he published The Love Song J. Alfred Prufrock, (《阿尔弗瑞德·普鲁弗洛克的情歌》) in Poetry and Preludes in Blast. Ø His first book of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations, appeared in1917, and Gerontion came out in 1920. Ø In 1922, with Pound’s help, he published his great work, The Waste Land, which catches precisely the state of culture and society after WWI and graphically illustrates the spiritual poverty of the West of the time. The Waste Land The Waste Land has been regarded as a central text of modernism. It shows the search for recognition by people who live in a chaotic world. It consists of five segments, each of which contains many fragments incorporating in a variety of voices and characters not only literary and historical allusions but bits and pieces of contemporary life, of the historical past, and of myth and legend. The organizing principle of the poem is the myth of death and rebirth. The poem is not affirmative as the quest for regeneration remains unfulfilled. This poem reads like the manifesto of the “Lost generation.” It has evoked a great deal of comment on its originality and on its severe attack on postwar Europe. Ø In 1925, he published The Hollow Men (《空心人》). Ø In 1927 he became a naturalized British subject and a devout member of the Church of England. In the preface to his book of essays published in 1928, he declared himself a “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.” Ø He turned conservative after the publication of Ash Wednesday (1930《圣灰星期三》). Ø In 1934 he returned to America and worked as a professor of poetry at Harvard. Ø He was so fascinated by the theater that he wrote several verse plays as Sweeney Agonistes (1932), Murder in the Cathedral (1935《大教堂谋杀案》), The family Reunion (1939《大团圆》), The Cocktail Party (1949《鸡尾酒会》), The Confidential Clerk (1953), and The Elder Statesman (1959), all religious in theme. Ø His best work is a group of four long poems entitled Four Quartets, (1935《四个四重奏》) written between 1935 and 1942, first published in together in 1943. Ø Collections of his critical essays include The Sacred Wood (1920), Homage to John Dryden (1924), Four Lancelot Andrewes (1928), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), Elizabethan Essays (1934), Essays Ancient and Modern (1936), On Poetry and Poets (1957), and To Criticize the Critic (1965). ◆ Study Questions 1. In “The Love Song …,” how does Prufrock deal with the world around him? What does he mean when he asks, “Do I dare / Disturb the universe?” and “How should I begin?” Discuss the recurrent phrase, “decisions and revisions”, in relation to Prufrock’s nature? 2. How is the city portrayed in “The Love Song …,”? Does this sense of the city bear any relation to Prufrock’s char acter and his dilemma? What is the picture of modern life given in the poem? 3. What distinctions between tradition and individuality does Eliot make in the opening paragraphs of “Tradition and the Individual Talent’? Discuss Eliot’s comments on the relation of the past to the present. What does he mean by conformity? What does he mean when he says that a really new work of art changes all the works that have preceded it ? What does he mean by saying that tradition “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour”? 4. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is an interior, dramatic monologue. Is it a love song in any traditional sense? In any modern sense? Also comment on the use of “we” in the last three lines. Do they suggest an attempt by Eliot to demonstrate the universal quality of Prufrock’s existence, to suggest that all live lives without meaning and confront death without dignity? Part 1 || Part 2 || Part 3 || Part 4 || PPT 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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