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English Literature


p> In “The Making of America” describing the history of the Gestland family she tries at the same time to give a picture of American history. She tried to describe individual & general simultaneously. And that resulted in the style, which was very awkward. She also tried to use the technique that she borrowed from cinematography, like in a film each next shot presents a slight variation from the previous one. Each next sentence differed from the previous one only insignificantly (regularly-repeated phrases, key words). It may look ridiculous, stupid, but many modern writers took this repetition from her.

Another side the so-called portraits in literature were created on the basis of rhythmic principle. Every person has his own rhythm & in portraying a person’s life she tried to combine & match these rhythms – literary expressionism. The result of this was simplification of syntax, foregrounding of the verbs, minimal punctuation & omission of nouns & adjectives. “Tender Buttons” is a collection of poems, examples of this technique. The reaction was not unanimous. They accused the style for deintellectualization. For example, Malcolm Kowly said that “reading her style annoys us…”. Stein’s experiments are not so important by itself because they warned other artists against taking the same route. Her works are fruitless & senseless – they distract the communication. But her experiments are noticeable in Hemingway’s syntax, Faulkner’s “continuous present” (=past does exist in the present), Sherwood Anderson’s principles of cinematography. Her significance – she was the first English writer who expressed those tendencies which were the distinctive features of the avant- garde movement.

John Doss Passos (1896-1970)

He was born in Chicago. He lived a long life but his most productive period was in the 20-30’s of the XXth century. He reflected the progressive ideas of the time, produced the epic of American life within the framework of a literary experiments. He graduated from Harvard. In 1916-17 studied architecture in Spain & this background can be felt in his works in their architecture. Participated in the war & after that he began to write. His first book – “One Man’s Initiation”(1920). It was the first book in
American literature, which treats the war topic. It is a lost generation book because it was motivated by post-was disillusionment that young people experienced. The pathos is clearly antiwar. It is autobiographical. The pacifist motives are very strong here. The style doesn’t differ much from that of his mature works. Dos Passos chose the fragmentary way of organization of material, which is to his mind, more expressive. The book is in the form of interior monologue – to express more precisely the crash of a young American world in the war.

He continued the same technique in “Three Soldiers”. He attacks the corruption of the world, socialist motives become more explicit in his work. Here he experiments with writing technique – plot. The lives of three young people – Americans – are in the focus of his attention. At first their lives are connected, they met each other on the same boat but this is the only point where their fates are close. As they arrive in Europe their ways diverge. Each one follows his own path. The plot decenters, follows the life of each of three heroes. All of them are ruined at the war, feel lost, disillusioned. It is a typical lost generation novel written in the modernist technique. John Andrews is a painter, he dreams to express his protest against the war by artistic means. Both J. Andrews in the book & J.
D. Passos fear capitalist tyranny & revolutionary enthusiasm. Antibourgeois pathos is rather strong.

These tendencies increase in his next works. “Manhattan Transfer”
(novel) is a kaleidoscope of numerous episodes, names, dates where the reader can hardly find the characters. It consists of independent stories, which are all mixed. The only similar feature is the place & the time. Dos
Passos considered that such composition will enable him to show the reality objectively, a stream of New York life. Characters represent different social layers. The author introduces clips from newspapers, some glimpses of literature, which are not connected with the novel. It produces disorder. But it was his intention – city is a chaos; life is a chaos.
Reaction to the novel was contradictory. Some thought that it was a collectivist novel. Dos Passos was not in the individual lives, troubles or joys. A collectivist writer was interested in social relations but the paradox was that social relations were abstract from his work. He didn’t dispose social. His attitude to the events is not clear. The lack of objective conclusions was intentional but the writer can’t do that. He tried to produce such works where the generalization should be.

He was popular in 20-30’s in Soviet Union, unfortunately his popularity was short-lived for political reasons. As soon as he began to criticize & warn against totalitarianism he fell out of grace. He lived through the economic crises of 1929 & this found its expression in the novel “USA”.

Dos Passos wrote “USA” – a big epic where he paid more attention to generalization. He wrote it for 20 years. It consists of 3 novels: “The 42
Parallel”, “1919”, “The Big Money”. Dos Passos tried to be more precise with the composition, developed a scheme of it. It is a big panoramic work.
The real hero is American society, the country. It is shown against the social background of the nation. It is an epic of American life. The structure is very logical & coherent. Each chapter falls into several parts, which are made up of for components & the combination of these components is very different. These four components are:

V novel - the portraits of literary characters

V biographies of historical personalities

V news-reel, i.e. news of the day

V camera obscure (eye) – inner monologue of the author
Each piece has a title & a number. The biographies of historical personality were intended to create the historical background, dedicated to famous people of political, social, scientific, artistic activities. It included the stories about the outstanding people.

News of the day was to documentarize the specific moments in the USA history to create the historical colouring & objective picture of that epoch. It included popular songs, headlines from papers. Here they try to follow the stream of consciousness of the newspaper reader.

Camera obscure were to show the author’s attitude to life, to bring an individual lyrical touch to the story, personal meditations upon certain subjects, reminiscences of the things passed, expression of author’s ideas upon various aspects of life. It gave a picture of the author’s evaluation for 30 years.

Novels are fictions. The portraits of literary characters were imaginary literary heroes. There were 11 of them – typical representatives of all the layers of the American society. The central characters John Wool McHouse.
The author tries to trace his relations with other characters but it doesn’t mean that he knows all of them.

From the unique combination of these elements the unique picture of
American life springs up. The general mood is that of confusion, tension, tumult, frustration of hopes, feeling that the present is ugly & intolerable. People are too fussy about their daily routine. In this work he showed how life was lived on the national scale.

Dos Passos was concerned with the history of the country primarily. The writer must be an architect of history. His work was a literary conclusion
– different elements were assembled. The work is considered to be an achievement in the American literature. The author tried to use cinematographic principles in writing: close up, precision in details, the art of assembly. He also used the technique of montage or juxtaposition. In his later works he perfected this technique & achieved quite a success in it. Later he became a radical writer. He was a passionate individualist & individual freedom was most important to him.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

He belongs to the lost generation but he gave his own name to it – “jazz age”. Jazz was representative of the general atmosphere of the years – the feeling of instability in life. Age of transition of social values. To his mind jazz beat ideally expressed that feeling of hopeless despair with which his young men & women tried to experience the every passing moment of their lives, their age. There is a recurrent “capre diem”(ëîâè ìîìåíò) theme in his novels. His heroes indulge & overindulge. Jazz age expresses instability & changebility of life present in mind of many people who tried to flee from the feeling of being lost, for they no longer believed in life, so they tried to live it to their full. Fitzgerald was not very rich but was educated in Princeton. He dropped out of it because of poor health
& poor performance, he didn’t get to front though he enlisted. He was painfully aware of the difference between himself & rich students. He had hatred for the rich. The main topic of his work – money & its corruptive influence. For him money & wealth were social categories. He regarded the rich to be another race, whose habits & moral principles differ very much.
He looked into the phenomenon of being rich. For him a rich person is one for whom everything is permitted & they lack human qualities, he tried to penetrate to the very heart of the matter. So, money & wealth for him were not economic categories but social phenomena. He regarded rich as another race, alien kind of people whose habits, moral principles, views were not as the habits of the ordinary people. They are the people to whom everything is permitted & consequently they lack certain human qualities that of pity, compassion, and sympathy. In his works Fitzgerald striped this world of this mysterious veil. He tried to penetrate to the very depths exploring the ethics of the rich world. Wealth has dehumanizing impact on human personality. He had a feeling that something awful is coming. “All the stories that come to my head have touch of disaster”. He produced the collection of short stories “All the Sad Young Men”, “Tales of the Jazz Age”. They are permeated with appocaliptical feeling of tragedy of American life. Fitzgerald was not the only one who treated this topic –
Theodore Dreiser in “American Tragedy” did the same.

His finest achievement is the novel “The Great Gatsby” which showed the contrast between material wealth & the spiritual poverty of the heroes.
Concerning this work in Soviet criticism the term “ïîýçèÿ îòðèöàòåëüíûõ âåëè÷èí” was used. It means that he tried to show people who were real characters, strong individuals, but this all is directed not to a right channel – to make one’s life to the top, to get something from life, strive for the world success. For Gatsby wealth is not the purpose but means to have everything that money can give, a key to personal happiness = relations between Jay Gatsby & Daisy whom he loves. In youth he suffered feeling of inferiority, for she was the daughter of rich parents & he was a poor soldier. He seeks to get money by bootlegging but it turned out that happiness could not be achieved even with money because Daisy had changed, she is very deaf & blind spiritually, feeling of all-permissiveness increased in her. She doesn’t stop short in the fraud (car accident).
Gatsby was killed, Daisy departed, fled with her husband without any remorse. Gatsby’s tragedy lies in the fact that he hoped to find happiness, sympathy, love in the world where these feelings don’t exist. The tragedy is that money changes people & money changed him & Daisy & he didn’t understand this tragedy couldn’t foresee it.

Was he a positive or a negative character for the author? He possesses good moral qualities but he is not the paragon of moral beauty, he obtained his wealth by not clear ways. It’s clear that he is a tragic person. He wastes his talent for money. Very often he is compared to Clyde Griffite
(Dreiser’s). But Gatsby is a personality.

Fitzgerald’s own story in a way repeats Gatsby’s story: he lived bohemian life, gradually writing became an obligation. He appeared to be a hostage of his own success. He also had drinking problems, & his wife whom he loved very deeply had some mental problems.

The other works are “This Side of Paradise”, “Tender is the Night”, “The
Last Typcoon”, “The Beautiful & the Damned” where he developed the same topic. Fitzgerald also had a dilemma & he had to choose to write for money that ruined his health. He died in 1940.

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

A unique personality born in small town of Oxford (Mississippi) he grew up in an impoverished southern aristocratic family & it had impact on him
(the spirit of the South). His education was not systematic. He inherited the tragic confrontation of white & black. In 1925 he mat Sherwood
Anderson, dropped out of the university. He tried his hand in different areas. After an unsuccessful attempt to become a pilot (was wounded in the
WWI), he did different odd jobs, worked in a bank, had a published collection of poems. He wrote a couple of books imitating lost generation novels. He produces novels “Soldier’s Pay”, “Mosquitoes”. Though published they were not welcomed by critics. Their words were rather hush: “Faulkner has no voice of his own, he has nothing to say.” So he decided to write in a unique style, did not bother himself with any literary tradition. If you don’t like it – it is your problem. All his life he lived in that small town &it became a background for most of his books. It is known as
“Yoknapatawpha County”

But he found writing to be a pleasure for him. In 1929 he wrote “The
Sound & the Fury”, “Sartoris”. This year was a turning point for him. He wrote as he pleased disregarding traditions. His perspective was to make things clear to himself. He began to write about the things that he knew firsthand. Both these novels look into the decay of south’s families.
Faulkner mercifully exposes the degradation of the South. There are moral reasons for this: here the topic of slavery springs up, topic of incest, moral impurity of people living there, their sins. At the same time one can feel Faulkner’s anxiety even hatred about the civilization, contemporary life. The civilization did only harm. The alternative is a patriarchal way of living. Much as he scorned the past he still longed for those times.

He needn’t invent anything – “The Sound & the Fury” is taken from
Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”. He alluded to the words that Macbeth said before his death:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts & frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound & fury,

Signifying nothing.

It seems that the same feeling of confusion is familiar to Faulkner. The story is about the decay of the Compson’s family. The novel consists of four parts. The first is told by Benjamin Compson who is mentally handicapped. He is that very idiot who tells the story of life’s confusion.
Events are given as fragments of his perception as if through the stain glass. He doesn’t know what’s going on, he is subconsciously aware of the conflict in the family. Everything is blurred, mixed, no chronology. We can indicate time by the hints the characters drop now & then. He uses device of interrelated temporal plains. The second part is told by Quentin. He is a romantic type of a person who feels deeply & suffers deeply. He is too fragile, too frail. He cannot cope with the harsh world (committed a suicide). The third – by Jason Compson. He is practical, persistent, knowing what he waits from life, a tenacious man. The fourth is told by
Faulkner himself. He tries to be objective, was to put everything their places. Everything is centred round their sister Caddy. Use of subjective viewpoint, inner monologue, stream of consciousness – achieved a striking effect – highly individual characters become universal types: Bengy – childish perception, Quentin – adolescent consciousness, Jason – pragmatic.
All of them are contrasted to authors representation of things – combining particular & general. The degradation of one family is the symbol of the decline of the South in general. He shows that the family gradually collapses, people are driven to death & despair. Life is chaos of sound & fury. Another message was that Faulkner himself didn’t put up with darkness
& gloom. Positive note is present in the book. His intentions are realized in the fourth part.

The following works treated the same topic. In 1945 he produced the chronological supplement to the work “Light in August”, “Absalom!
Absalom!”, “The Sanctuary”, “ As I Lay Dying”.

The decline of the South, race conflict & the constant overlap of the past & the present, loss of human values are the themes of his works. A line of descendants of formerly rich South families. The values of the past generation became corrupted in the modern world. Atmosphere of doomed despair. He got a Nobel prize in 1950. The values for him are courage, honour, pride, hope, sympathy, self-sacrifice, compassion.

In 30’s his style changed. These works are easy to read. He turns to another topic – the trilogy “The Hamlet”, “The Town”, “The Mansion”. He thought he had spotted a disease in American society called “snopecism”
(from Flem Snopes – the main character of one of the parts of the trilogy).
Snopecism is evil, the product of capitalist civilization, lust for money, put on the pedestal of American society. Money dominates American life. It is people’s God. The trilogy is written in a realistic key. It deals with the snopes – former poor white people. Flem is the first in the rank who by cunning, corruption, bribe, general unscrupulousness elevated himself to a ruling financial class. It is shown how this lust for money leads Flem to come over his friends, family to power. Faulkner shows that a collision with Snopes ruins people, especially if they are not of his kind. He is to blame for many deaths. He didn’t do it with his own hands but he drove them to such circumstances. He is not human. Makes him socially dangerous.
People fall victims of his thirst for money. The character who opposes Flem is his stepdaughter Linda. Faulkner makes her a communist (probably he saw no other force in the society that could oppose snopecism as a social phenomenon).

The change in Faulkner’s outlook resulted in the structure of the novel.
Chain of associations is not so unruly as previously.

Faulkner is also famous for his short stories collected into two volumes:

“Knight’s Gambit”

“Collected Stories”

Their theme is decline & deterioration o South. Here we meet the same heroes or allusions to the characters & events of earlier novels. Every book is interrelated. “The Bear” is a perfect example of Faulkner’s style.
It illustrates his concerns. Faulkner had a reputation of a writer for intellectuals.

Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953)

He laid the foundation forAmerican drama. He comes form actor’s family, education was not systematic, he did different odd jobs – gold digger in
Gonduras, sailor, journalist, etc. This enriched him with knowledge of life firsthand. He developed interest for drama when he treated his tuberculosis in sanatorium. He read Ibsen. Then after he took a course in theory of drama in Harvard. 1914 is his literary debut “Thirst & Other One-Act
Plays”. From 1919 O’Neill collaborated with Provincetown players company.
They staged his first works, & with this company his success is associated.
He worked with them up to 1924. The plays of this period:

“The Emperor Jones”

“The Hairy Ape”

“All God’s Chillun Got Wings” (chillun = children)

These plays voiced his protest against racism & exploitation. His plays differed from typical Broadway production. They are very experimental. On the one hand, they are realistic dramas, showing the life of people who never before were the subject of writers’ interest. On the other hand, his plays exhibit his search for the adequate form to treat this topic.
Traditional realism is combined with the elements of expressionist drama, touch of Ibsen’s influence; innovative approach to the use of the elements of classical drama & biblical motives. [Ibsen introduced the drama of ideas, where not the events were important but ideas that were discussed & disclosed by these events. He is very close to Chekhov]

“The Hairy Ape” is a story of a young proletariat Robert Smith whom everybody calls Jank. He was offended by a daughter of a certain man of property & so he is expressed his …to such a degree that he was put to jail where he absorbed certain socialistic ideas. But when he is released he tries to find his “áðàòüåâ ïî äóõó” he is taken for provocateur. He is very much shocked and baffled so he goes to the zoo where he lets an ape out of the cage. Eventually this ape kills him & he dies in the ape’s cage.

His remarks to the play are very important & he pays great attention to the setting. First scene shows the worker’s dwelling. It must remind a cage by O’Neill. Then the scene shifts to a stove-hall is shown. There must be a flame: the fire symbolizes the hell of capitalists exploitation. The next scene shows the fashionable hotel – the paradise of the rich. The last scene is also an ape cage. It finishes the cycle.

The naturalistic symbolism conveys the idea of inhumanity of exploiters, shifts the accents from the conditions, turning man to a beast to the biological characteristics.

In his work of 30-40’s experiment takes to realism.

“The Great God Brown”

“Lazarus Laughed”

“Strange Interlude”

He resorted to various techniques of modern theatre – psychoanalysis, inner monologue, mask theatre.

His masterpiece is trilogy “Mourning Becomes Electra”. Here he develops classical notion of the tragic & transfers it to American soil of the civil war period. He takes an eternal conflict & puts it to America. Histories of
O’Neill’s characters are compared to the lives of Electra, Orestas,
Clitemnestra. But the environment is different.

Later he intended to write a saga about wealthy people. It materialized in two plays:

“A Touch of the Poet”

“More Stately Mansions”

O’Neill showed how several generations of American families gradually lose their values, their destines mingle. Individual lives become part of national history.

The plays crowning his career are “A Moon for the Misbegotten”, “Long
Day’s Journey into Night”. The latter is the most autobiographical.

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)

He is a southerner born in Columbus, Missouri, where his grandfather was the Episcopal clergyman. When he was 12 his father who was a travelling salesman moved with his family to St. Louis, & both he & his sister found it impossible to settle down to the city life. He entered college during the Depression & left after a couple of years to take a clerical job in a shoe company. He stayed there for two years, spending the evenings writing.
He entered the University of Iowa in 1938 & completed his course, at the same time holding a large number of part-time jobs of great diversity. He received a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1940 for his play “Battle of Angels” & he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 & 1955.

In 1940 he started journey around the country & ended it up in New York.
There he wrote poetry & short stories. 1945 – his first success “The Glass
Menagerie”. Autobiographical elements are very strong in the play. Williams managed to create a special lyrical atmosphere of the Wickfield family. It consists of three people – mother, crippled daughter & son. Each of them lives in his or her own glass menagerie i.e. imaginary world which has nothing to do with reality. They fear the reality, its hoarse & repulsive jungle for they cannot adjust to the law of these jungles. Main idea is that kindness & good feelings are doomed in clash with reality. These people are too fragile, too sensitive.

The play introduced features of new plastic theatre. The principles of this theatre Williams formulated in the afterward to the play “Note for
Reproduction”. It is characterized by tense emotional atmosphere, certain romanticism, masterly music & light effects, attention is given to cinography & attraction of expressive means of other arts. In stage remarks
Williams is scrupulous about details for they bear important meaning. he calculated to produce certain effect on the audience.

His second play “A Streetcar Named Desire” gained him a reputation of leading stage writer & Pulitzer Prize. In this play there is a clash between realism & imagination; physical forces, brutishness & helplessness; sexual drive &thirst for poetic love; naked ugly truth & illusion, world of fantasy. The main character is Blanche du Beau. The action takes place in
New Orleans in French quarters (it is often compared to the “Cherry
Orchard” by Chekhov). Blanche visits her sister’s family after their parents died & the family estate is sold. Blanche wears old ridiculously looking dresses as a symbol of the world she lives in. Blanche meets her sister’s brute of a husband Stan. Her sister gets out of the way to the hospital to give birth to a baby. Blanche and Stan detest each other. He hates a woman who lives in Ivory tower & she hates his brutishness. She denies & longs for him at the same time. In the end he is taken into lunatic asylum.

Williams plays with human subconsciuosness. But he finds that the core of the conflict is not inherent in the struggle between masculine & feminine but a complex interrelation of personal circumstances: social & others.

Tennessee Williams’ human type is an outcast, lonely, constantly in search of a relative soul with whom to share a burden of loneliness. But life is such that the outsider is doomed to defeat. The only salvation is love (but even this is questionable). Broken & lost people who are not able to defend themselves & their dreams can find love that will help them to sustain.

Williams is a prolific writer, he also wrote 2 collections of poems. He combined poetry & realism & this unique combination singles him out from other writers.

“Camino Real” is an allegoric drama, very experimental. “This is my conception of contemporary world in which I live,” he said. The scene is divided into two parts:

V fashionable hotel in which people are bored & degraded

V slums in which people are weak, humiliated, apathetic

The town is in terror, free thoughts are persecuted, people are killed in the streets, brainwashing is actively underway. All problems are solved by an old gypsy woman who provides a certain entertainment. The city is called Camino Real[re’a:l], that is the way of hope & dream. It ends to sound real[ri:al], that is the way of reality, dead end of civilization.

Killroy is an ordinary American who feels that atmosphere of social hysteria & he tries to make sense in life. Old literary characters (Don
Quixote, Byron) come to rescue him. The play has an optimistic ending:
Killroy finally finds the way out of the city to terra incognita. Williams idealized past, his future is uncertain. His past is good but dead, & the present is abhorrent.

His other plays “Baby Doll”, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, “Something
Unspoken”, “Suddenly Last Summer”, “Sweet Bird of Youth”, “The Milk Train
Doesn’t Stop Here Any More”, “The Night of the Iguana”, etc.

Post Modernism.

Post modernism can be regarded in two aspects:

V as a literary trend

V as a phenomenon which doesn’t belong exclusively to literature – a certain mentality of post industrial age.

Post modernism appeared after the second WW. In 50’s, especially 60’s new type of fiction, new writing emerged, drastically different from previous writers. The idea that permeated this works: there is need to reevaluate old values, the values that lead Western civilization (idea of emancipation, enlightenment). But the WWII showed that the belief that a human is a reasonable creature who can build a reasonable society is inconsistent.


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