2. Plays

• Murder in the Cathedral
• Sweeney Agonistes
• The Cocktail Party
• The Confidential Clerk

3. Critical essays

• The Sacred Wood
• Essays on Style and Order
• Elizabethan Essays
• The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticisms
• After Strange Gods

3. point of view
   1. The modern society is futile and chaotic.
   2. Only poets can create some order out of chaos.
   3. The method to use is to compare the past and the present.
4. Style
   1. Fresh visual imagery, flexible tone and highly expressive rhythm
   2. Difficult and disconnected images and symbols, quotations and allusions
   3. Elliptical structures, strange juxtapositions, an absence of bridges
5. The Waste Land: five parts
   1. The Burial of the Dead
   2. A Game of Chess
   3. The Fire Sermon
   4. Death by Water
   5. What the Thunder Said

VIII. Robert Frost

1. life
2. point of view

1. All his life, Frost was concerned with constructions through poetry. “a momentary stay against confusion”.
2. He understands the terror and tragedy in nature, but also its beauty.
3. Unlike the English romantic poets of 19^th century, he didn’t believe that man could find harmony with nature. He believed that serenity came from working, usually amid natural forces, which couldn’t be understood. He regarded work as “significant toil”.

3. works – poems

the first: A Boy’s Will

collections: North of Boston, Mountain Interval (mature), New Hampshire

4. style/features of his poems

1. Most of his poems took New England as setting, and the subjects were chosen from daily life of ordinary people, such as “mending wall”, “picking apples”.
2. He writes most often about landscape and people – the loneliness and poverty of isolated farmers, beauty, terror and tragedy in nature. He also describes some abnormal people, e.g. “deceptively simple”, “philosophical poet”.
3. Although he was popular during 1920s, he didn’t experiment like other modern poets. He used conventional forms, plain language, traditional metre, and wrote in a pastured tradition.

IX.     e. e. cummings

      “a juggler with syntax, grammar and diction” – individualism, “painter poet”

Novels in the 1920s

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald

1. life – participant in 1920s
2. works

1. This Side of Paradise
2. Flappers and Philosophers
3. The Beautiful and the Damned
4. The Great Gatsby
5. Tender is the Night
6. All the Sad Young Man
7. The Last Tycoon

3. point of view

1. He expressed what the young people believed in the 1920s, the so-called “American Dream” is false in nature.
2. He had always been critical of the rich and tried to show the integrating effects of money on the emotional make-up of his character. He found that wealth altered people’s characters, making them mean and distrusted. He thinks money brought only tragedy and remorse.
3. His novels follow a pattern: dream – lack of attraction – failure and despair.

4. His ideas of “American Dream”

It is false to most young people. Only those who were dishonest could become rich.

5. Style

Fitzgerald was one of the great stylists in American literature. His prose is smooth, sensitive, and completely original in its diction and metaphors. Its simplicity and gracefulness, its skill in manipulating the relation between the general and the specific reveal his consummate artistry.

6. The Great Gatsby

Narrative point of view – Nick

He is related to everyone in the novel and is calm and detected observer who is never quick to make judgements.

Selected omniscient point of view

2. Ernest Hemingway

1. life
2. point of view (influenced by experience in war)

1. He felt that WWI had broken America’s culture and traditions, and separated from its roots. He wrote about men and women who were isolated from tradition, frightened, sometimes ridiculous, trying to find their own way.
2. He condemned war as purposeless slaughter, but the attitude changed when he took part in Spanish Civil War when he found that fascism was a cause worth fighting for.
3. He wrote about courage and cowardice in battlefield. He defined courage as “an instinctive movement towards or away from the centre of violence with self-preservation and self-respect, the mixed motive”. He also talked about the courage with which to face tragedies of life that can never be remedied.
4. Hemingway is essentially a negative writer. It is very difficult for him to say “yes”. He holds a black, naturalistic view of the world and sees it as “all a nothing” and “all nada”.

3. works

1. In Our Time
2. Men Without Women
3. Winner Take Nothing
4. The Torrents of Spring
5. The Sun Also Rises
6. A Farewell to Arms
7. Death in the Afternoon
8. To Have and Have Not
9. Green Hills of Africa
10. The Fifth Column
11. For Whom the Bell Tolls
12. Across the River and into the Trees
13. The Old Man and the Sea

4. themes – “grace under pressure”

1. war and influence of war on people, with scenes connected with hunting, bull fighting which demand stamina and courage, and with the question “how to live with pain”, “how human being live gracefully under pressure”.
2. “code hero”

The Hemingway hero is an average man of decidedly masculine tastes, sensitive and intelligent, a man of action, and one of few words. That is an individualist keeping emotions under control, stoic and self-disciplined in a dreadful place. These people are usually spiritual strong, people of certain skills, and most of them encounter death many times.

5. style

1. simple and natural
2. direct, clear and fresh
3. lean and economical
4. simple, conversational, common found, fundamental words
5. simple sentences
6. Iceberg principle: understatement, implied things
7. Symbolism

3. Sinclair Lewis – “the worst important writer in American literature”
   1. life
   2. works

1. Main Street
2. Babbitt
3. Arrowsmith
4. Dodsworth
5. Elmer Gantry
   3. point of view – satirical critic of American middle class

1. Lewis showed the villagers to be narrow-minded, greedy, pretentious and corrupt.
2. He attacked middle class for its indifference to art and culture, and its assumption that economic success made it superior.
   4. style

1. photographic, verisimilitude
2. colloquialism
3. characterization: he often created a type of character rather than an individual
4. old fashioned in theme
5. lack in psychological exploration

4. Willa Cather
   1. life
   2. works

1. Alexander’s Bridge
2. O Pioneers
3. The Song of the Lark
4. My Antonia
   3. features of her works

1. She was one of the few “uneasy survivors of the nineteenth century”. Hanging onto the traditional values, she was never able to come to terms with modernity.
2. Old west becomes in most of her novels the centre of moral reference against which modern existence is measured.
3. She withdraws in her later fiction into the historical past.
4. She often uses women protagonists in her novels.

Southern Literature

1. Heritage

American southern literature can date back to Edgar Allen Poe, and reach its summit with the appearance of the two “giants” – Faulkner and Wolfe. There are southern women writers – Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor.

2. Southern Myths – guilt, failure, poverty

1. Chevalier heritage
2. Agrarian virtue
3. Plantation aristocracy
4. Lost cause
5. White supremacy
6. Purity of womanhood

Southern literature: twisted, pessimistic, violent, distorted

Gothic novel: Poe

3. William Faulkner

1. life
2. literary career: three stages

1. 1924~1929: training as a writer

• The Marble Faun
• Soldier’s Pay
• Mosquitoes

2. 1929~1936: most productive and prolific period

• Sartoris
• The Sound and the Fury
• As I Lay Dying
• Light in August
• Absalom, Absalom

3. 1940~end: won recognition in America

• Go Down, Moses

3. point of view

He generally shows a grim picture of human society where violence and cruelty are frequently included, but his later works showed more optimism. His intention was to show the evil, harsh events in contrast to such eternal virtues as love, honour, pity, compassion, self-sacrifice, and thereby expose the faults of society. He felt that it was a writer’s duty to remind his readers constantly of true values and virtues.

4. themes

1. history and race

He explains the present by examining the past, by telling the stories of several generations of family to show how history changes life. He was interested in the relationship between blacks and whites, especially concerned about the problems of the people who were of the mixed race of black and white, unacceptable to both races.

2. Deterioration
3. Conflicts between generations, classes, races, man and environment
4. Horror, violence and the abnormal

5. style/features of his works

1. complex plot
2. stream of consciousness
3. multiple point of view, circular form
4. violation of chronology
5. courtroom rhetoric: formal language
6. characterization: he was able to probe into the psychology of characters
7. “anti-hero”: weak, fable, vulnerable (true people in modern society)

He has a group of women writers following him, including O’Connor and Eudora Welty

Section 2 The 1930s

Radical 1930s

1. Background

Great Depression (1929 “Black Thursday”)

2. Literature

1. Writers of the 1920s were still writing, but they didn’t produce good works.
2. The main stream is left-oriented.

3. Writers of 1930s

1. social concern and social involvement
2. revival of naturalistic tradition of Dreiser and Norris

4. John Steinbeck

1. life
2. works

1. Cup of Gold
2. Tortilla Flat
3. In Dubious Battle
4. Of Mice and Men
5. The Grapes of Wrath
6. Travels with Charley
7. Short stories: The Red Pony, The Pearl

3. point of view

1. His best writing was produced out of outrage at the injustices of the societies, and by the admirations for the strong spirit of the poor.
2. His theme was usually simple human virtues, such as kindness and fair treatment, which were far superior to the dehumanizing cruelty of exploiters.

4. style

1. poetic prose
2. regional dialect
3. characterization: many types of characters rather than individuals
4. dramatic factors
5. social protect: spokesman for the poverty-stricken people

5. The Grapes of Wrath

Chapter 6 The Post-War Period: 50s & 60s

1. Historical Background – multi-faceted

1. Cold War
2. McCarthyism (persecution of communists)
3. Korean War
4. Civil Rights Movement
5. Counter-culture Movement – political, economical and military achievement

2. Literature in the 1950s

1. Regional literature emerged from the south, etc. Many women writers appeared.
2. Dramatists wrote about everyday people, e.g. Arthur Miller.
3. Minority literature developed quickly.

3. Literature in the 1960s

This period is the rising period of post-modern literature. Many forms of post-modern fiction appeared, such as metafiction, surfiction, parafiction, self-reflexive fiction, self-begetting fiction, anti-novel, etc. The literature in this period is considered as “multi-cultural” literature. The same mood in this period is despair, but continuing to search absurdity of modern life; lonely, but searching for the meaning of existence; identity.

Section 1 Poetry

1. Features

1. Some poets found inspiration in the past.
2. Poetry became more attuned to political and social issues of the period.
3. Poets became more visible in American public life.
4. There was no prescribed form for poetry.
5. Poets became more political. Themes such as homosexuality, racism, etc. are included in the poems. In 1960s, poetry became more and more political.

2. Schools of Poetry (time, representatives, major features)

1. Confessional Poets: Robert Lowell

The greatness of Lowell lies in the fact that, in talking candidly about himself, he is examining the culture of his nation. The identification of personal experience with that of an age has always ensured greatness and even immortality as it did.

2. Black Mountain Poets: Charles Olson

There is an emphasis on the importance of the moments of awareness. It portrays a world of “awakened, contemplative awareness”, one in which civilization appears alien, cold, and almost unreal.

3. Beat Generation: Alien Ginsberg

In the fifties, there was a widespread discontentment among the post-war generation, whose voice was one of protest against all the mainstream culture America had come to represent.

Section 2 Fiction

1. General Features

1. matter of fact
2. frank, amazingly detailed about war experiences
3. lacking social consciousness

2. Overview

1. Post-war Realism: Cheever, Oates
2. Black Novel: Richard Wlight, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Malcolm, Leroi Jones
3. Jewish Novel: Saul Bellow

3. Post-War Realism

1. Features

1. Naturalistic depiction has become explicit: old-fashioned realism is combined with modernism.
2. While following the realistic and naturalistic tradition, these writers borrowed various experimental forms and techniques in probing the inner world in detail.
3. It has been a search for a way to connect an oppressed response to society and history and an awareness of individual loneliness.

2. J. D. Salinger

1. Life
2. Point of view

One of his frequent themes is young people longing for simplicity and truth instead of complexity and hypocrisy of the life they observed around them. In his novels, he questions the moral foundations of society and often places innocent idealist characters in setting where a vicious, corrupt society could destroy them. Although his stories are often pessimistic, the characters represent hope rather than despair. They want to affirm truth. They deplore the lies with which the society conceals its own corruption. They withdraw the society, become drop-outs rather than participants in the society.