Курс лекций по предмету Романо-германская филология

MIDWESTERN REALISM

Love, ambition, idealism, and temptation motivate his characters; Howells was acutely aware of the moral corruption of business tycoons during the…

COSMOPOLITAN NOVELISTS

Henry James once wrote that art, especially literary art, "makes life, makes interest, makes importance." James's fiction and criticism is… James is noted for his "international theme" -- that is, the complex… James's second period was experimental. He exploited new subject matters -- feminism and social reform in The…

NATURALISM AND MUCKRAKING

Naturalism is essentially a literary expression of determinism. Associated with bleak, realistic depictions of lower-class life, determinism denies… The 19th-century American historian Henry Adams constructed an elaborate… Stephen Crane, the son of a clergyman, put the loss of God most succinctly:


THE "CHICAGO SCHOOL" OF POETRY

Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950)
By the turn of the century, Chicago had become a great city, home of… Among the intriguing contemporary poets the journal printed was Edgar Lee Masters, author of the daring Spoon River…

TWO WOMEN REGIONAL NOVELISTS

Glasgow was from Richmond, Virginia, the old capital of the Southern Confederacy. Her realistic novels examine the transformation of the South from… Cather, another Virginian, grew up on the Nebraska prairie among pioneering…

THE RISE OF BLACK AMERICAN LITERATURE

Booker T. Washington (1856-1915)
Booker T. Washington, educator and the most prominent black leader of his day,… W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963)


Topic 6



Modernism and Experimentation: 1914-1945


M any historians have characterized the period between the two world wars as… Nor could soldiers from rural America easily return to their roots. After experiencing the world, many now yearned for…

MODERNISM

In literature, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) developed an analogue to modern art. A resident of Paris and an art collector (she and her brother Leo… A Table A Table means does it not my dear it means a whole steadiness. Is it… Meaning, in Stein's work, was often subordinated to technique, just as subject was less important than shape in…

POETRY 1914-1945: EXPERIMENTS IN FORM

Ezra Pound was one of the most influential American poets of this century. From 1908 to 1920, he resided in London, where he associated with many… Pound furthered Imagism in letters, essays, and an anthology. In a letter to… Pound's interests and reading were universal. His adaptations and brilliant, if sometimes flawed, translations…

BETWEEN THE WARS

Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962)
Edward Estlin Cummings, commonly known as e.e. cummings, wrote attractive,… Like Williams, Cummings also used colloquial language, sharp imagery, and words from popular culture. Like Williams,…

Topic 7




PROSE WRITING, 1914-1945: AMERICAN REALISM

The importance of facing reality became a dominant theme in the 1920s and 1930s: Writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and the playwright Eugene… F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald's life resembles a fairy tale. During World War I, Fitzgerald enlisted in the U.S. Army…

NOVELS OF SOCIAL AWARENESS

Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
Harry Sinclair Lewis was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, and graduated from… Lewis's other major novels include Babbitt (1922). George Babbitt is an ordinary businessman living and working in…

THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

Among the rich variety of talent in Harlem, many visions coexisted. Carl Van Vechten's sympathetic 19267 novel of Harlem gives some idea of the… The poet Countee Cullen (1903-1946), a native of Harlem who was briefly… Jean Toomer (1894-1967)


LITERARY CURRENTS: THE FUGITIVES AND NEW CRITICISM

Ironically, the most significant 20th-century regional literary movement was that of the Fugitives -- led by poet-critic- theoretician John Crowe… These three major Fugitive writers were also associated with New Criticism, an…

TH-CENTURY AMERICAN DRAMA

During the 19th century, melodramas with exemplary democratic figures and clear contrasts between good and evil had been popular. Plays about social… Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953)
Eugene O'Neill is the great figure of American theater. His numerous plays combine enormous technical originality with…

Topic 8



American Poetry Since 1945: The Anti-Tradition

A shift away from an assumption that traditional forms, ideas, and history can provide meaning and continuity to human life has occurred in the… It is not hard to find historical causes for this disassociated sensibility in… American poetry has been directly influenced by mass media and electronic technology. Films, videotapes, and tape…

TRADITIONALISM

The previous chapter discussed the refinement, respect for nature, and profoundly conservative values of the Fugitives. These qualities grace much… The tall camels of the spirit
Steer for their deserts, passing the last groves loud


IDIOSYNCRATIC POETS

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
Sylvia Plath lived an outwardly exemplary life, attending Smith College on… Plath's storybook life crumbled when she and Hughes separated and she cared for the young children in a London…

EXPERIMENTAL POETRY

Inspired by jazz and abstract expressionist painting, most of the experimental writers are a generation younger than Lowell. They have tended to be…

The Black Mountain School

Robert Creeley (1926- ), who writes with a terse, minimalist style, was one of the major Black Mountain poets. In "The Warning" (1955),… For love -- I would split open your head and put a candle in behind the… Love is dead in us if we forget the virtues of an amulet and quick surprise

The San Francisco School

San Francisco poets include Jack Spicer, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Duncan, Phil Whalen, Lew Welch, Gary Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, Joanne Kyger,… At its best, as seen in the work of Gary Snyder (1930- ), San Francisco poetry… On a hill snowed all but summer A land of fat summer deer, They came to camp. On their Own trails. I followed my own…

Beat Poets

Beat poetry was the most anti-establishment form of literature in the United States, but beneath its shocking words lies a love of country. The… Poems like Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956) revolutionized traditional poetry:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,


The New York School

The major figures of the New York School -- John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch -- met while they were undergraduates at Harvard… New York City is the fine arts center of America and the birthplace of… Ashbery's fluid poems record thoughts and emotions as they wash over the mind too swiftly for direct articulation. His…

Surrealism and Existentialism

Although T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Ezra Pound had introduced symbolist techniques into American poetry in the 1920s, surrealism, the major… During the 1960s, many American writers -- W.S. Merwin, Robert Bly, Charles… Surrealists like Merwin tend to be epigrammatic, as in lines such as: "The gods are what has failed to become of…

WOMEN AND MULTIETHNIC POETS

Literature in the United States, as in most other countries, was long based on male standards that often overlooked women's contributions. Yet there… The second half of the 20th century has witnessed a renaissance in multiethnic… Minority poetry shares the variety and occasionally the anger of women's writing. It has flowered recently in…

Chicano/Hispanic/Latino Poetry

Chicano, or Mexican-American, poetry has a rich oral tradition in the corrido, or ballad, form. Recent works stress traditional strengths of the… Some poets write largely in Spanish, in a tradition going back to the earliest… Lost in a world of confusion Caught up in a whirl of a gringo society, Confused by the rules, Scorned by attitudes,…

Native American Poetry

Simon Ortiz (1941- ), an Acoma Pueblo, bases many of his hard-hitting poems on history, exploring the contradictions of being an indigenous American… In "Star Quilt," Roberta Hill Whiteman (1947 - ), a member of the… out of the thick ice sky


African-American Poetry

Another recently honored African-American poet is Rita Dove (1952- ), who was named poet laureate of the United States in 1993. Dove, a writer of… Michael Harper (1938- ) has similarly written poems revealing the complex… We reload our brains as the cameras, the film overexposed in the x-ray light, locked with our double door light…

NEW DIRECTIONS

This is Paradise, a mildewed book left too long in the house
Bob Perelman's "Chronic Meanings" begins:
The single fact is matter. Five words can say only. Black sky at night, reasonably. I am, the irrational residue...
…

Topic 8



American Prose Since 1945: Realism and Experimentation

N arrative since World War II resists generalization: It is extremely various and multifaceted. It has been vitalized by international currents such… In the past, elite culture influenced popular culture through its status and… To say this is not to trivialize recent literature: Writers in the United States are asking serious questions, many of…

THE REALIST LEGACY AND THE LATE 1940s

World War II offered prime material: Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead, 1948) and James Jones (From Here to Eternity, 1951) were two writers who… The 1940s saw the flourishing of a new contingent of writers, including… Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)


THE AFFLUENT BUT ALIENATED 1950s

Yet loneliness at the top was a dominant theme; the faceless corporate man became a cultural stereotype in Sloan Wilson's best-selling novel The Man… The 1950s actually was a decade of subtle and pervasive stress. Novels by John… The fiction of American Jewish writers Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Isaac Bashevis Singer -- among others prominent in…

THE TURBULENT BUT CREATIVE 1960s

The 1960s was marked by a blurring of the line between fiction and fact, novels and reportage, that has carried through the present day. Novelist… As the 1960s evolved, literature flowed with the turbulence of the era. An… In a different direction, in drama, Edward Albee produced a series of nontraditional psychological works -- Who's…

THE 1970s AND 1980s: NEW DIRECTIONS

In literature, old currents remained, but the force behind pure experimentation dwindled. New novelists like John Gardner, John Irving (The World… John Gardner (1933-1982)
John Gardner, from a farming background in New York State, was the most important spokesperson for ethical values in…

THE NEW REGIONALISM

There are several possible reasons for this occurrence. For one thing, all of the arts in America have been decentralized over the past generation.… The most refreshing aspects of the new regionalism are its expanse and its… Prolific novelist, story writer, poet, and essayist Joyce Carol Oates also hails from the northeastern United States.…

List of Books on American Literature

2. E.A. Poe.The Fall of the House of Usher
3. M. Twain.The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
4. J. London.Martin Eden


Exam questions on American literature

2. Revolutionary literature. The American Enlightenment.
3. The creative work of W. Irving.
4. The creative work of J. F. Cooper.