The Scarlet Letter is one of the best-known novels of Hawthorne. The story describes the illicit love affair of Hester Prynne with Arthur Dimmesdale. The novel is set in the American colonial era two hundred years ago and it exposes the social cruelty, religious deception and moral hypocrisy in 19th century under capitalist development in America.
Hester Prynne, the story's protagonist, is a young married woman whose husband was presumed to have been lost at sea on the journey to the new world. She begins a secret adulterous relationship with Arthur Dimmesdale. The highly regarded town minister, and gives birth to girl, Pearl. She is then publicly verified and forced to wear the scarlet A on her clothing to identify her as an adulteress. But she loyally refuses to reveal the identity of her lover. She accepts the punishment with grace and refuses to be defeated by the shame inflicted upon her by her society. Eventually, Dimmesdale publicly admit his part in the adultery and dies in Hester's arms.
Them — This novel assumes the universality of guilt and explores the complexities and ambiguities of man’s choices. Hawthorne does not intend to tell a love story nor a story of sin, but focuses his attention on the moral, emotional, and psychological effects or consequences of the sin on the people in general and those main characters in particular, so as to show us the tension between society and individuals. To Hawthorne, everybody is potentially a sinner, and great moral courage is therefore indispensable for the improvement of human nature.
Hawthorne uses symbolism throughout the novel. The scarlet letter at first is a token of shame, Adultery, then the genuine sympathy and help she offers to her fellow villagers change it to Able. Later in the end A appears in the sky, signifying Angel.
Her life eventually acquires a real significance when she establishes a meaningful relationship with her fellowmen.
The characters, plots and language are all quite subjective which full of imagination and the writer often put the description of character's mental activities and intuition in the first place. Thus, The Scarlet Letter is not only the representative of American Romantic novels but also the beginning of the American psychological
novels.
Realism
1. American realism
① Realism reacts against romanticism’s emphasis on intuition, imagination, idealism, and so on.
② Realists claim that they seek truth, that is verifiable by experience and has practical consequences. They do not seek obstruct truth.
③ Realism is embedded in a mimetic theory of art. Mimesis means imitation.
Realists believe that literature imitate reality.
④ Realists try to describe a small portion of the knowable world in order to maintain
“objectivity”.
⑤ Local color and regional writings constituted the early phase of realism
2.
Please explain Realism and representative writer.
As a literary movement, Realism came in the later half of the 19th century and as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism. It expressed the concern for the world of experience, of the commonplace and for the familiar and the love.
Realism had originated in France as realism, literary doctrine that called for "reality and truths"in the depiction of ordinary life. William Dean Howells finds realism as
"nothing more and nothing less than truthful treatment of material". (07,11 选）Mark Twain, Howells and Henry James are three leading figures of American realism.
Mark twain was the first literary giant in that he broke the narrow limits of local color and described the breadth of Americans as no one had ever done before. He first created the American boy in his book. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, It has always been regarded as one of the greatest books of western literature and western civilization. His novel describe the life of the lower class.
William Dean Howells is a famous realist. In his view, writing should be simple, natural and honest and should not delve into a "romantic exaggeration ＂ .His famous definition of the function of a writer: our novelists, therefore, concern themselves with more smiling aspects of life. He emphasized the importance of ethics in his works such as the Rise of Silas Lapham, A Modern Instance. He writes about the rising middle class and the way they lived.
Henry James is considered the founder of psychological realism. He stresses the psychology of human being and his realism is characterised by his psychological
approach to his subject matter. He was the first American writer to conceive his artistic work in international themes. His novels describe the life of the upper class and they are marked by highly refined languages. His famous works include Daisy Miller and the Portrait of a Lady.
3. Give a brief description to the American realists of the later part of the 19th century.
In the later part of the 19th century, famous American realists include Mark Twain, Henry James, Jack London and Theodore Dreiser.
Mark twain was the first literary giant in that he broke the narrow limits of local color and described the breadth of Americans as no one had ever done before. He first created the American boy in his book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It
( 三个人的对比:
Mark twain: lower class&local color;
William Dean Howells: middle class＆ moral ethic；
Henry James: psychological＆ international theme＆ upper class）
The most famous of the local colorists was mark twain with his masterpiece the Huckleberry Finn.
Chief characteristics：
① Emphasis of elements which characterize a local culture, such as speech, customers and the mores，peculiar to one particular place.
② Emphasis of physical setting and those distinctive qualities of landscape which influence human thought and behavior
7. Please introduce Henry James the Portrait of a Lady.
The Portrait of a Lady is generally regarded as the masterpiece of Henry James earlier period of writings. This novel reflects James' continuing interest in the differences between the new world and old, often to detriment to the former. It also treats in a profound psychological way, the themes of personal freedom, responsibility, betrayal, and sexuality.
The novel tells about the fate of one of those splendid James' American girls, Isabel Archer, arriving in Europe, full of hope and with a will to live free and noble life, only to fall prey to the sinister designs of two expatriates, Madam' Merle and Gilbert Osmond. Isabel's dream and expectations evaporate: her unawareness of evil around her and her money combine to work her undoing.
8.
Please explain naturalism.
American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. It evolved from realism but went a step further than it in portraying social reality.
In nineties, French naturalism with its new technology and its new ways of writing, appealed to the imagination of younger generation like Crane, Norris and Theodore Dreiser. They tore the mask of gentility into pieces and wrote about the helplessness of man, his insignificance in a cold world and his lack of dignity in face of the crushing forces of environment and heredity.
The naturalist works reveal a bitter and wretched world where human beings battle hopelessly against overwhelming odds in a cold and harsh environment. They have no means whatever of manipulating. The whole picture is sober and dark. And the general tone is one of hopelessness and even despair.
Naturalists believe that men are controlled and conditioned by heredity,instinct and chance.
Sister Carrie is regarded as the most significant work of naturalism.
9. Please introduce Sister Carrie.
Sister Carrie is Dreiser's masterpiece. It is also regarded as the most significant work of naturalism. It tells about a country girl who comes to Chicago to look for a better life or to pursue the American Dream.
In this novel, with a painstaking documentation of detail, Dreiser portrays three different worlds in which Sister Carrie moves and which between them offer a
panoramic view of the crude and the savage aspects of social life at the turn of 20th century. These include her sister's working class existence, her life with Druet in Chicao, and with Hurstwood in New York. The world is cold and harsh to her, alone and helpless. She moves along like a mechanism driven by desire and catches blindly at any opportunities for a better existence. A feather in the wind, she is totally at the mercy of forces she cannot comprehend, still less to say control.
Sister Carrie embodies Dreiser's naturalistic belief that men are controlled and conditioned by heredity, instinct and chance.
10. The Red Badge of Courage
(1) It is a story set in the period of the Civil War. The basic theme of the animal man in a cold, manipulating world runs through the whole book. Here Crane is looking into man's primitive emotions and trying to tell the elemental truth about human life.
(2) Crane's debunking of war has a singularly modern touch about it. War in this novel is a plain slaughter-house. There is nothing like valor or heroism on the battlefield, and if there is anything, it is fear of death, cowardice, the natural instinct of man to run from danger. By de-romanticizing war and heroism, Crane initiated the modern tradition of telling the truth at all costs about the elemental human situation, and writing about war as a real human experience.
11.
Make a brief comment on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.
(17) (19)Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin looks at slavery from the perspective of a Christian lady and addresses the question of whether Christianity and slavery can coexist in a society. The question is a part of a larger one, one that is commonly referred to as"the problem of evil". Stowe poses another question about the society of
which she writes, and that is whether we are radically superior and whether that is any justification of acts of conquest.
Uncle Tom's Cabin is about a horrible world in which the law, the government, the economy, even the church worked for the evil slave system. The theme of love runs strongly throughout the book, as it should for a book commenting on Christianity.
The fundamental teaching of Christ was that of love. In that sense, there are two true Christians in Stowe's novel: Uncle Tom and Eva. Eva is the daughter of Augustine, and it's often referred to as an angel. She is often seen playing with her father's slave, Uncle Tom. Also, she is regarded as Uncle Tom's spiritual pillar.Uncle Tom's Cabin traces the trials, sufferings and human dignity of Uncle Tom, an old black slave.
The novel helped tremendously Americans know more about the cruelty and inhumanity of slavery and hurried on a great war, which was acclaimed the greatest of all anti-slavery manifestos.
Modernism (1918-1945)
1. Please explain imagism and representative writer Pound.
Imagism came into being in Britain and the U.S. around 1910 as a reaction to
the traditional English poetry to express the sense of fragmentation and dislocation.
The imagists, with Ezra Pound leading the way, hold that the most effective means to express these momentary impressions is through the use of one dominate image.
Imagism is characteristic by the following principles:
① Direct treatment of the thing, whether it is subjective or objective;
② To use absolutely no words that does not contribute to the presentation;
③ As regarding rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase not in the sequence of metronome.
Ezra Pound was identified as the most influential leader of the Imagist movement.
He saw the West presenting a world of chaos, fragmentation and barbarism than in the first years of the 20th century. His poem In a Station of the Metro is a well-known imagist poem.
2. Please give a brief introduction to the Great Gatsby. (13)
The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. It is a sad story of an idealist Gatsby, who was destroyed by the influence of the wealthy, pleasure-seeking people around him. The book mirrors the experiences and attitudes of the 1920s. The novel
embodies the disillusionment of the American dream.
The Great Gatsby recounts the rise and fall of Jay Gatsby, who is a poor youth from the Midwest. He falls in love with Daisy, a wealthy girl, but he is too poor to marry her. The girl then is married to a rich young man, Tom. Determined to win his lost love back, Gatsby engages himself in contraband and other shabby activities, thus earning enough money to buy a magnificent French villa. There he spreads dazzling parties every weekend in the hope of alluring Daisy and Tom to come.
They finally come and Gatsby meets Daisy again, only to find that the woman before him is not quite the ideal love of his dreams. A sense of loss and disillusionment comes over him. Then Daisy kills a woman, who is her husband’s mistress in a car accident, and Tom misleads Myrtle’s heartbroken husband George, implying that the accident was Gatsby’s fault. Gatsby is consequently shot by George, and George commits suicide immediately afterward.
3. Make a brief comment on William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily.
(18)
Faulkner's attitude toward the southern "aristocratic families" that he wrote about is ambiguous. Alongside his censure of their injustice to the African Americans. There
is some indication of pity, or sympathy. One of his famous short stories A rose for Emily is a good index to the mixed feelings that his works reveal.
Emily is the last of long line of the southern aristocrats. Obstinate and asocial, she lingers, when alive, as a "monument"to the glory gone with the wind, never to return. Yet she possesses a measure of dignity, a stature of tragic dimensions, which inspires s wonder and admiration. Her past represents, to some townspeople, something not dead, but eternally alive. When she dies, she lies in state under a mass of bought flowers for people to view.
The"rose" in the title indicates, as the tone of the story indicates, a feeling not altogether unfriendly, one probably of compassion.
4. The Sound and the Fury.
The Sound and the Fury is a well-known novel written by Faulkner. It tells a story of deterioration from the past to the present. This novel is split into four sections.
In the Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner used the technique of stream of consciousness in which the whole story was told through the thoughts by one character. It describes the decay and downfall of an old southern aristocratic family that symbolizes the old order. It was told from multiple points of view.
5. Please introduce the Sun Also Rise.
The Sun Also Rise is Hemingway's first important novel. This book paints the image of the Lost Generation. This include the young English and American
expatriates as well as men and women caught in the world and cut off from the old values and yet unable to come to terms with the new era when civilization had gone mad.
The characters in the novel are seen wandering pointlessly and restless and impotent, enjoying things like fishing, swimming, bullfight and beauties of nature, but aware all the while that the world is crazy meaningless and futile. Jack Barnes, the protagonist, wounded and made sexual impotent in the war, finds life a nightmare after it.
The strength to live on with any dignity comes from nowhere himself. He comes to see that, in a world in which all is vanity and vexation of spirit, there is nothing one can do but to take care of one's own life and be tough against fate and tough with grace under pressure. (这段可不背）
His physical impotence is a token of modern man's spiritual impotence.
6. Make a brief comment on Ernest Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms. (10, 15,16)
A Farewell to Arms can be read as a footnote to the Sun Also Rises in that it
explains how people like Jake Barnes come to behave the way they do. A Farewell to Arms is a semi-autobiographical- novel. It describes the poignant love between an American soldier Henry and an English nurse Catherine. It is an anti-war novel.
It tells the story of a young American ambulance driver serving in the Italian army during world war I. Henry falls in love with the English nurse, Catherine. After he is wounded at the front, she tends to him in the hospital during his recuperation and their relationship develops. But Henry must return to the front after the recuperation.
Henry narrowly escaped death at the hands of fanatical Italian soldiers and flees to Switzerland with Catherine. Unfortunately their child dies after being born, and Catherine dies after due to hemorrhages.
A Farewell to Arms caught the mood of the postwar generation and brought international fame to young Hemingway.
7. For Whom the Bell Tolls.
For Whom the Bell Tolls is one of Hemingway's famous works. The title of For Whom the Bell Tolls comes from John Donne's meditation: Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls to Thee."
In this novel, the protagonist Robert Jordan is a new image. He is no longer alone, having cause to work for and a group to fight with, and more important, someone to love and die for. The war he is fighting is, for him, a metaphor for a struggle for freedom. It is for democracy that he sacrifices himself. The theme of human brotherhood is emphasized in this novel.
8.
Please introduce the Old Man and the Sea.(20)
The Old Man and the Sea is one of Hemingway's most famous works. It is a
short novel, a fable of a kind, about an old Cuban fisherman Santiago and his battle with great marlin.
For 84 days Santiago does not catch a single fish, but he does not feel discouraged. He goes far out into the sea and hooks a giant marlin. A desperate struggle ensues in which Santiago manages to kill the fish and tie it to his boat, only to find that on the way home he has to find a more desperate struggle with some dangerous giant sharks, which eat up the marlin, leaving only a skeleton. The old man brings it home and goes to bed to dream, almost dead with exhaustion.
Here in Santiago we see again the spirit of the noble- if tragic-Hemingway- type of individualism, contending with the force he knows it is futile to battle with.
He keeps on fighting because he believes that “ a man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.