This excerpt below is taken from the story, describing for us Rip's difficulties at home, which he often escapes by going to the local inn to spend his time with his friends and sometimes by going hunting in the woods with his dog, and then focusing on Rip 's return from his 20 years' sleep to his greatly altered home village. Here, Irving's pervasive theme of nostalgia for the unrecoverable past is at once made unforgettable.
What are the theme and the artistic features of "Rip Van Winkle"?
(1) The theme：Irving's taste was essentia1ly conservative and always exa1ted a disappearing past. This socia1 conservatism and literary preference for the past is revea1ed, to some extent, in his famous story "Rip Van Winkle." The story is a tale remembered mostly for Rip's 20-year s1eep, set against the background of the inevitably changing America. Rip went to sleep before the War of Independence and woke up after it. The change that had occurred in the 20 years he slept was to him not always for the better. The revolution upset the natural order of things. In the story Irving ski1lfu1ly presents to us paralleled juxtapositions of two totally different worlds before and after Rip's 20 years' s1eep. By moving Rip back and forth from a noisy world with his wife on the farm to a wild but peaceful natural world in the mountains, and from a pre-Revolution village to a George Washington era, lrving describes Rip's response and reaction in a dramatic way, so that we see clearly both the narrator and Irving agree on the preferabi1ity of the past to the present, and the preferability of a dream-like world to the real one. Irving never seemed to accept a modern democratic America.
(2) The artistic features:
"Rip Van Winkle" is not only well-known for Rip's 20-year sleep but also considered a model of perfect English in American Literature and in the English language as well. Washington Irving has always been regarded as a writer who "perfected the best classic style that American Literature ever produced." He has a clear, easy style.
(a) We get a strong sense impression as we read him along, since the language he used best reveals what a Romantic writer can do with words. We hear rather than read, for there is musicality in almost every line of his prose.
(b) We seldom learn a mora1 lesson because he wants us amused and relaxed. So we often find ourselves lost in a world that is permeated with a dreaming quality. He uses genial humor to exaggerate the seriousness of situation. He uses dignified words to produce a half-mocking effect.
(c)The Gothic elements and the supernatural atmosphere are manipulated in such a way that we could become so engaged and involved in what is happening in a seemingly exotic place.( Rip Van Winkle was overwhelmed by the magic power of the drink and fell into sleep for 20 years.)
(d)Yet Irving never forgets to associate a certain place with the inward movement of a person and to charge his sentences with emotion so as to create a true and vivid character. He is worth the honor of being "the American Goldsmith" for his literary craftsmanship.
II. Ralph Waldo Emerson
一.一般识记His life ：Ralph Waldo Emerson is the chief spokesman of New England Transcendentalism, which is unanimously agreed to be the summit of the Romantic period in the history of American literature.
Emerson was son of a Unitarian minister. Though born of an impoverished family, Emerson never failed to receive some formal education. Whi1e a student at Harvard he began keeping journals, a practice he continued throughout his 1if e. He later drew on the journal for materials for his essays and poetry. After Harvard, he taught as a schoolmaster, which he soon gave up for the study of theology. He began preaching in 1826 and three years later he became a pastor in a church in Boston. Emerson was ardent at first in his service in religion, but gradually grew skeptical of the beliefs of the church; feeling Unitarianism intolerable, he finally left the ministry in l832.
Emerson was greatly influenced by European Romanticism. He Carlyle, and listened to some famous Romantic poets like Coleridge and Wordsworth. Through his acquaintance with these men he became closely involved with German idea1ism and Transcendentalism. After he was back from Europe, Emerson retreated to a quiet study at Concord, Massachusetts, where he began to pursue his new path of "self-reliance." Emerson formed a club there at Concord with peop1e like Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, which was later known as the Transcendenta1 Club. And the unofficial manifesto for the Club was Nature(l836), Emerson's first little book, which established him ever since as the most eloquent spokesman of New England Transcendentalism. Nature was the fundamental document of his philosophy and expressed also his constant, deeply-felt love for nature. It was called "the Manifesto of American Transcendentalism". He also helped to found and edit for a time the Transcendental journal, The Dial. Emerson lived an intel1ectually active and significant life between the mid-1830s and the mid-1840s, 1ecturing all over the country, and occasionally, abroad. He preached his Transcendental pursuit and his reputation expanded dramatically with his lectures and his essays. Though the rest of Emerson's life was a slow anticlimax to his midd1e years, people continued to honor the most influentia1 prophet and the intellectua1 liberator of their age, and his reputation as a family man of conventional life and a decent, solid citizen has remained always.
二．识记内容： His major works:
Emerson is generally known as an essayist. During all his life he worked steadily at a succession of essays, usually derived from his journals or lectures he had already given. Nature did not establish him as an important American writer. His lasting reputation began only with the publication of Essays (1841 ). Many of his famous essays are included in Essay, which convey the best of his philosophical discussions and transcendental pursuits, such as The American Scholar, Self Reliance, The Over Soul. The second collection of Emerson's essays, Essays: Second Series (1844) demonstrated even more thorough1y than the first that Emerson's intellect had sharpened in the years since Nature. The Poet and Exprience are examples, the former a reflection upon the aesthetic problems in terms of the present state of literature in America and the latter a discussion about the conflict between idealism and ordinary 1ife.
三．领会 1. Emersonian Transcendentalism
Emersonian Transcendentalism is actual1y a philosophical school which absorbed some ideological concerns of American Puritanism and European Romanticism, with its focus on the intuitive knowledge of human beings to grasp the absolute in the universe and the divinity of man. In his essays, Emerson put forward his philosophy of the over-sou1, the importance of the Individual, and Nature.
(1) Emerson's philosophy of the over-sou1
Emerson rejected both the formal religion of the churches and the Deistic philosophy; instead he based his religion on an intuitive belief in an ultimate unity, which he called the "over-soul." Emerson and other Transcendentalists believed in the transcendence of "over-soul". It is an impersonal force that is eternal, moral, harmonious, and beneficient in tendency. They believed that there should be an emotional communication between an individual soul and the universal "oversoul", since the over-sou1 is an all-pervading power from which all things come from and of which a1l are a part. One of the tendencies of the "over-soul " is to express itself in form, hence the world of nature as an emanation of the world of spirit. Emerson's remarkable image of "a transparent eyebal1" marks a paradoxical state of being, in which one is merged into nature, the over-soul, whi1e at the same time retaining a unique perception of the experience.
(2) Emerson's philosophy of the importance of the Individual
Emerson is affirmative about man's intuitive knowledge, with which a man can trust himself to decide what is right and to act accordingly. The ideal individual should be a self-reliant man. "Trust thyself," he wrote in Self Reliance, by which he means to convince people that the possibilities for man to develop and improve himself are infinite.
(3) Emerson's view on nature
Emerson's nature is emblematic of the spiritual world, alive with God's overwhelming presence. It mediates between man and God, and its voice leads to higher truth; hence, it exercises a healthy and restorative inf1uence on human mind. "Go back to nature, sink yourse1f back into its inf1uence and you'1l become spiritually who1e again." By employing nature as a big symbol of the Spirit, or God, or the over-soul, Emerson has brought the Puritan 1egacy of symbolism to its perfection.
Emersonian Transcendentalism inspired a whole generation of famous American authors like Thoreau, Whitman, and Dickinson.
2.Thoreau's Transcendentalism
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) is most often mentioned as inspired by Emerson, the most representative of the phi1osophical and literary school which is American Transcendenta1ism. Thoreau embraced his master's ideas as a disciple. In 1845 he built a cabin on some land belonging to Emerson by Walden Pond and moved in to live there in a very simple manner for a litt1e over two years, which gave birth to a great transcendentalist work Walden (1854). The book not only fully demonstrates Emersonian ideas of self-reliance but also develops and tests Thoreau's own transcendental philosophy.
(1)For Thoreau, nature is not merely symbolic, but divine in itself and human beings can receive precise communication from the natural world by way of pure senses. So he was often alone in the woods or by the pond, lost in spiritual communion with nature.
(2)Thoreau strongly believed in se1f-culture and was eager to identify himself with the Transcendental image of the self-reliant man. To achieve personal spiritual perfection, he thinks, the most important thing for men to do with their lives is to be self- sufficient, so he sought to reduce his physical needs and material comforts to a minimum to get spiritual richness.
(3)His positiveness about the importance of individual conscience was such that he even considered the society fetters of the freedom of individuals.
Though Thoreau became more than Emerson's disciple eventually, his indebtedness to Nature and its author has never been over1ooked.
3. The style of Emerson's essays
Emerson's essays often have a casual style, for most of them were derived from his journals or lectures. They are usually characterized by a series of short, declarative sentences, which are not quite logically connected but will flower out into illustrative statements of truth and thoughts. Emerson's philosophical discussion is sometimes difficult to understand but he uses comparisons and metaphors to make the general idea of his work clearly expressed. Well-read in the classics of Western European literature, Emerson often employed these literary sources to make and enrich his own points but never let them take the full reins of his discussion. In general, Emerson was showing to the world a distinctive American style.
四．应用Selected Reading: An Excerpt from Nature
Question : What is Emerson's view on nature?
Emerson's nature is emblematic of the spiritual world, alive with God's overwhelming presence; hence, it exercises a healthy and restorative inf1uence on human mind. "Go back to nature, sink yourse1f back into its inf1uence and you'1l become spiritually who1e again." By employing nature as a big symbol of the Spirit, or God, or the over-soul, Emerson has brought the Puritan 1egacy of symbolism to its perfection.
The essay Nature discusses the love of nature, the uses of nature, the idealist philosophy in relation to nature, evidences of spirit in the material universe, and the potential expansion of human souls and works that will result from a general return to direct, immediate contact with the natural environment. In the essay Emerson clearly expresses the main principles of his Transcendentalist pursuit and his love for nature. In expressing his belief in the mystical "unity of nature," Emerson develops his concept of the" Over- Soul" or" Universal Mind." In the selection Emerson's famous metaphor of "a transparent eyeball" is employed to illustrate his philosophical discussion.
III. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-l864)
Imbued with an inquiring imagination, an intense1y meditative mind, and unceasing interest in the "interior of the heart" of man's being, Nathaniel Hawthorne remains one of the most interesting, yet most ambiva1ent writers in the American literary history.
一．一般识记 Hawthorne's life and writing career
His life story is tota1ly without the exciting events which characterize the lives of so many American writers. He was born on the Fourth of July, l804 in Salem, Massachusetts, into a prominent Puritan family. His first American ancestor, William Hawthorne, as a magistrate of the Bay Colony, was active in the 1650's in persecution of the Quakers, while William's son, John, was a judge at the Salem witchcraft trials. However, the 17th century prominence of his family dec1ined during the century that followed. Nathaniel's father, a sea captain, died of yellow fever in 1808 leaving at Salem a widow and three children in genteel poverty. With the financial support from his more prosperous maternal relations, Hawthorne passed a serene childhood in spite of his father's death and spent his adolescence reading some books of those literary master minds, especially Bunyan, Spenser and Shakespeare, which were essential for his formation as a writer. From 1821 to 1825, he attended Bowdoin Co1lege in Maine, where the decision to devote himself to writing was gradually taking shape and finally put into practice during those years when he was living with his mother in Salem. The solitary years proved to be fruitful, for in 1837, he published Twice-Told Tales, a collection of short stories which attracted critical attention.
After 1837, a series of salient events of Hawthorne's life happened that mattered a lot to his literary imagination and creation. He met Sophia Peabody, whom he married later and with whom he had three children: he worked in the United States Custom House in Boston and later in Salem, which definitely provided some authentic materials for his long works; he also stayed for some time at Concord and Lenox, where he met the principal literary figures of the time, Emerson and Thoreau and Melville. He was affected by the former's transcendentalist theory and struck up a very intimate relationship with the latter, and all the three people had played an indispensable role in Hawthorne's literary career.
二．识记 Hawthorne's major works
Hawthorne wrote and published many good works, which have doubtlessly become part of the American literary heritage. Among them, the tales collected in Moses from an Old Manse (1846) and The Snow-Image and Other Twice-Told Tales (1851) best demonstrate Hawthorn's early obsession with the moral and psychological consequences of pride, selfishness, and secret guilt that manifest themselves in human beings; The Scarlet Letter (1850), always regarded as the best of his works, tells a simple but very moving story in which four people living in a Puritan community are invo1ved in and affected by the sin of adultery in different ways; The House of the Seven Gables (1851 ) was based on the tradition of a curse pronounced on the author's family when his great-grandfather was a judge in the Salem witchcraft trials; The Blithedale Romance (l852) is a novel he wrote to reveal his own experiences on the Brook Farm and his own methods as a psychological novelist. The Marble Faun (1860) is a romance set in Italy, concerned about the dark aberrations of the human spirit.
三．领会 1. Hawthorne's thematic concerns
(1) his "black" vision of life and human beings: his concern with human sin and evil
Hawthorne's literary world is a most disturbed, tormented and problematical one mostly because of his "black" vision of life and human beings. He rejected the Transcendentalists' transparent optimism about the potentialities of human nature. Instead he looked more deeply and perhaps more honestly into life, finding in it much suffering and conflict but also finding the redeeming power of love. According to Hawthorne, "There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity." A piece of literary work should "show how we are all wronged and wrongers, and avenge one another." So in almost every book he wrote, Hawthorne discusses sin and evil. In "Young Goodman Brown," he sets out to prove that everyone possesses some evil secret. Its hero, a naive young man who accepts both societies in general and his fellow men as individuals worth his regard, is confronted with the vision of human evil in one terrible night, and becomes thereafter distrustful and doubtful. "The Minister's B1ack Veil" goes further to suggest that everyone tries to hold the evil secret from one another in the way the minister tries to convince his people with his black vei1." The Birthmark" drives home symbolically Hawthorne's point that evi1 is man's birthmark, something he is born with.
One source of evil that Hawthorne is concerned most is over-reaching intellect, which usually refers to someone, who is too proud, too sure of himself. The tension between the head and the heart constitutes one of the dramatic moments when the evil of "overreaching intellect" would be fully revealed. Hawthorne's intellectuals are usually villains, dreadful because they are devoid of warmth and feeling. What's more, they tend to go beyond and violate the natural order by doing something impossible and reaching the ultimate truth, without a sober mind about their own limitations as human beings. Chillingworth, Dr. Rappaccini in "Rappaccini's Daughter" are but a few specimens of Hawthorne's chilling, cold-blooded human animals.
(2)Hawthorne's view of Puritanism:
Hawthorne's view of man and human history originates, to a great extent, in Puritanism. He was not a Puritan himself, but he had Puritan ancestors who p1ayed an important role in his life and works. He believed that "the wrong doing of one generation lives into the successive ones," and often wondered if he might have inherited some of their guilt. This sensibility 1ed to his understanding of evil being at the very core of human life, which is typical of the Calvinistic belief that human beings are basically depraved and corrupted, hence, they should obey God to atone for their sins.
In many of Hawthorne's stories and novels, the Puritan concept of life is condemned, or the Puritan Past is shown in an almost totally negative light, especially in his The House Of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne is attracted in every way to the Puritan world, even though he condemns its less humane manifestations. On the one hand, it provides him with a subject, He inherited the Puritan tradition of moral earnestness, and he was deeply concerned with the concepts of original sin and guilt and the claims of law and conscience; and on the other, with the Puritan world or society as a historical background, he discusses some of the most important issues that concern the moral life of man and human history.
