American Literature

1
American Literature
Lecture One
030533/4/5, 12th Sep. 2006
2

• Part I. Introduction

3
Part I answer the questions

• What is literature?
• Why do people read literature?
• Why is it necessary for you to study literature?
• How to define American Literature?
• Basic qualities of American writers?
• How to study literature?
• How to improve reading skills?

4
1. What is literature?

• The definition of 14th century
• It means polite learning through reading. A man
  of literature or a man of letters a man of wide
  reading, literacy
• The definition of 18th century
• practice and profession of writing
• The definition of 19th century
• the high skills of writing in the special context
  of high imagination

5

• Robert Frosts definition
• performance in words
• Modern definition
• We can define literature as language artistically
  used to achieve identifiable literary qualities
  and to convey meaningful messages. Literature is
  characterized by beauty of expression and form
  and by universality intellectual and emotional
  appeal.

6
2. Why is it necessary for you to study
literature?

• It improves your language proficiency.
• It enriches your knowledge about the English
  culture.
• It helps you explore the nature of human beings.
  It gives you spiritual and psychological relief.

7
3.why do people read literature?

• Reading for Pleasure
• Howells think that the study of literature
  should begin and end in pleasure. Apart from its
  role of protest, education, cognition and
  aesthetic appreciation, literature is primarily
  give pleasure.
• Reading for Relaxation
• Get readers away to an imaginary world, thus
  forget their problems and obligations of everyday
  life.
• Reading to Acquire Knowledge
• It gives readers an insight into the tradition ,
  custom, belief, attitudes, folklore, values of
  the age in which it is written.

8

• Reading to Confront Experience
• Literature is appealing mainly because of its
  relationship to human experience. It sheds light
  on the complexity and ambiguity of human
  experiences and thus broadens readers awareness
  of the possibilities of the experience.
• Reading for Artistic Appreciation
• Good craftsmanship and the beauty of expression
  and form It can be analyzed according to
  literary theories and criteria literary
  criticism, to clarify, explain and evaluate
  literature from an aesthetic point of view.

9
4. How to define the American literature?

• American literature mainly refers to literature
  produced in American English by the people living
  in the United States.

10
5.Basic Qualities of American Writers

• Independent
• Individualistic
• Critical
• Innovative
• Humorous

11
6. How to study literature

• Analytical Approach
• Be familiar with the elements of a literary work,
  eg plot, character, setting, point of view, etc
  answer some basic questions about the text
  itself.
• Thematic Approach
• What is the story, the poem, the play or the
  essay about?
• Historical Approach
• Aims at illustrating the historical development
  of literature.

12
7. How to Improve Reading Skills

• Form a habit of intelligent guessing at the
  meaning of new words with the clues provided by
  the context. But for the key words in the
  sentence, you need not check each new word in the
  dictionary.
• Learn how to notice details, how to get the main
  idea, and how to skim to locate the most
  meaningful passages in a literary work.
• Cherish a strong desire to extract greater
  meaning from a literary work by relating ideas
  found in your reading with your own experience.

13
Part II. The periods of American literature
14

• The colonial period (?1607 - 1765)
• The main features
• Puritanism
• The period of enlightenment and the Independence
  War (1765 -1800)
• Benjamin Franklin
• The romantic period (1800 - 1865)
• The early romanticism

James Fenimore Cooper
Washington Irving
15

• New England Transcendentalism or American
  Renaissance (1836 - 1855)

Hawthorne Melville Allan Poe
Emerson Thoreau
Whitman Dickinson

• New England Poets or Schoolroom Poets

Lowell
Whittier
Bryant
Longfellow
Holmes

• The Reformers and Abolitionists

Beecher Stowe
Frederick Douglass
16

• The realistic period (1865 - 1914)
• Midwestern Realism

William Dean Howells

• Cosmopolitan Novelist

Henry James

• Local Colorism

Mark Twain

• Naturalism

Stephen Crane
Jack London
Theodore Dreiser
17

• The Chicago School of Poetry

Sandburg
Lindsay
Robinson
Masters

• The Rise of Black American Literature

Chestnutt
Washington
Du Bois
18

• The period of modernism (1914 - 1945)
• Modern poetry experiments in form (Imagism)

Ezra Pound
Carlos Williams
Robert Frost
T.S.Eliot
Wallace Stevens

• Prose Writing modern realism (the Lost
  Generation)

William Faulkner
F.Scott Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway

• Novels of Social Awareness

Richard Wright
Dos Passos
Sinclair Lewis
John Steinbeck
19

• The Harlem Renaissance

Langston Hughes
Zora Neals Hurston

• The Fugitives and New Criticism

• The 20th Century American Drama

Eugene O Neil
20

• The Contemporary Literature (1945 - 2000)
• American Poetry Since 1945 the Anti-tradition
• American Prose Since 1945 Realism and
  Experimentation.

21

• I. Poetry
• Traditionalism
• Idiosyncratic poets
• Experimental poetry
• Surrealism and Existentialism
• Women and Multiethnic poets
• Chicano / Hispanic / Latino poetry
• Native American poetry
• African-American poetry
• Asian-American poetry
• New Directions

22

• Experimental Poetry
• The Black Mountain School
• The San Francisco School
• Beat Poets
• The New York School

23

• II. Prose
• The Realist Legacy and the Late 1940s
• The Affluent but Alienated 1950s
• The Turbulent but Creative 1960s
• The 1970s and 1980s New Directions

24

• The Realist Legacy and the Late 1940s
• Robert Penn Warren
• Arthur Miller
• Tennessee Williams
• Katherine Anne Porter
• Eudora Welty

25

• The Affluent But Alienated 1950s
• John OHara
• James Baldwin
• Ralph Waldo Ellison
• Flannery OConner
• Saul Bellow
• Bernard Malamud
• Isaac Bashevis Singer
• Vladimir Nabokov
• John Cheever
• John Updike
• J.D.Salinger
• Jack Kerouac

26

• The Turbulent but Creative 1960s
• Thomas Pynchon
• John Barth
• Norman Mailer

27

• The 1970s and 1980s New Directions
• John Gardner
• Toni Morrison
• Alice Walker