主题：英美文学串讲

II. Read the quoted part and answer the questions:
1. "Time grew worse and worse with Rip Van Winkle as years of matrimony rolled on: a tart temper mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edge tool that grows keener by constant use. For a long while he used to perpetual club of the sages, philosophers, and other idle personages of the village.

Questions:
1) Please identify the author and the title of the work.
2) What’s the meaning of this passage?

参考答案:
1) This is an excerpt from "Rip Van Winkle" by Washington Irving. (P408)

2) With his wife’s dominance at home, the situation became harder and harder for Rip Van Winkle. His wife’s temper became worse and she scolded him for more often. He had to stay in the club with idle people. (P407)

附:
Question: Please describe the changes Rip Van Winkle experienced.

Answer: 1) Rip Van Winkle was the hero in Irving’s works. He was a good-natured man, a henpecked (惧内的，妻管严的) husband.
2) Because his wife’s shrewish (泼妇一样的) treatment, Rip had to escape from his home to the little inn in the village. When it failed to give him some restful air, he had to go hunting in the high mountain, where Rip met a stranger, and the man asked Rip to carry keg for him. Then Rip reached the place in the valley, where many strangers were playing nine-pins. Later Rip got drunk after drinking the liquor, which made him sleep for 20 years.
3) Rip woke up as an old man, entering the village learned that his wife had died, he got the freedom of his own,; and the American had been dependent from the control of Britain, he had changed from a subject of the King (George III) into a citizen of the independent new U.S.....
2. " I celebrated myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you"

Questions:
1) Please identify the author and the title of the poem that had used when published.
2) What is the theme of this poem?

参考答案:
1) In the 1856, the title was "Poem of Walt Whitman, an American",
then it became "Walt Whitman" in 1860, until 1881, it finally became "Song of Myself". The author is Walt Whitman. (P456--457)

2) In this poem Whitman sets forth two principle beliefs:
A. The theory of universality (普遍性), which is illustrated by lengthy catalogues of people and things;
B. The belief in the singularity (个别性) and equality(平等性) of all beings in value. (P457)

3. "Standing on the bare ground, ----my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -----all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all."

Questions:
1) Please identify the author and the title of the work.
2) Please briefly interpret this passage.
3). What rhetorical device of "transparent eye-ball".
4) Emerson said he want to become a transparent eye-ball, what king idea did he want to express?

参考答案:
1) This selection is from "Nature" by Emerson. (P427)

2) In the essay Emerson clearly expresses the main principles of his Transcendentalist pursuit and his love for nature. Emerson develops his concept of "Over-Soul" Or "Universal Mind". Last but not the leas, it affirms the divinity of the human beings. (P423)

3) It used the device of metaphor. (P423)

4) He wanted to tell us: Nature can purify (净化) our quality and let us get comfort. (P243)

III. Questions and answers:
1. The Romantic Period was called "The American Renaissance". Discuss the background of the Romantic Period, and compare it with the Romanticism of Britain.

Answer:
1) The two Romanticism both stress the imaginative and emotional qualities of literature;

2) They all pay attention to psychic states of the characters and exalt the individual and common man;

3) American Romanticism revealed unique characteristics: (difference)

<1> American authors describe their native land,, especially the spirit of the pioneering into the west, the desire for an escape from society and a return to nature;
<2> American writers use local dialect in language;
<3> Puritanism has great influence over American Romantics;
<4> Calvinism of original sin is obvious in their works;
<5> Transcendentalism is very important theory in American Romanticism;
<6> The important setting in American Romanticism are: ① the early puritan settlement; ② the confrontation with the Indians; ③ the frontiersmen’s life; ④ the wild west; ⑤ imagination. (P399—402)


2. Analyze the themes and characteristic of Hawthorne.

Answer:
Hawthorne was a man with inquiring imagination, meditative mind and dark vision to life.

His themes in writing are:
1) Man was born with evil and sin, one source of them is over-reaching intellect, whose image was always villain; (Chllingworth e.g.)

2) Hawthorne was influenced greatly by Puritanism, while he criticized it bitterly;

3) He believed Calvinistic ideas, thinking man was depraved and corrupted; they should obey God for saving the spirits;

4) He concerned the moral life of man and human history;

5) He was keen on the description of man’s development of psychology. (P432—433)

3. Explain the theory of Transcendentalism, then list its important author and works.

Answer:
Transcendentalism is a very important theory in American Romanticism, its main ideas are:

1) Man has the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or the ability of getting knowledge transcending the senses;

2) Nature is ennobling and individual is divine, therefore, man should be self-reliant.

3) Man is divine/holy and perfectible and man can trust himself to decide what is right and act accordingly; (but to Hawthorne and Melville man is a sinner);

4) Universe is over-soul -a symbol of the spirit, God or the universe, there is an emotional communication between an individual soul and the universal "over-soul" -unity of Nature.

5) The important authors are: Emerson (The American Scholar) and Thoreau.

6) "Nature", Emerson’s works, is called the unofficial manifesto for the club. (P421—P422)

4. Hawthorne was a master in using symbol and allegory; cite some example to analyze it.

Answer:
1) Allegorically, Young Goodman Brown becomes an Everyman called Brown, who will be aged in one night by an evil adventure, and the evilness makes everyone a fallen idol in the world.

2) In the angle of Symbol: "Brown look up to the Heaven and resist the wicked one" symbols Brown has the force to resist the evilness of the Nature and he still has the faith to God; but "he is alone in the forest" symbols the society is the place full of sins and evilness, Brown’s strength is not enough at all; then after returning, he lives a dismal and gloomy life symbols he has been crushed down by the social evilness and lost his belief in goodness and piety. (P434—435)

5. Washington Irving was called "Father of the American short stories" and "the American Goldsmith". What characteristics did he have?

Answer:
1) He was nostalgic author, and he always juxtaposing the Old and the New world;

2) He remained a conservative and always exalted a disappearing past, and he prefer the past to present, prefer a dream-like world to a real one;

3) His stories were always from legend, especially German legends, showing best classic style. (P405—406)

6. Sea adventures are Melville’s favorite subject; "Moby-Dick" is a great novel in the theme, which is also noted for its symbolism, please analyze it in detail.

Answer:
1) About the sea adventure: it symbols the voyage of the mind in quest of the truth and knowledge of the universe; a spirit exploration into man’s deep reality and psychology;

2) About the boat; it symbols the society, and the crew symbol all kinds of people with different social and ethnic ideas;

3) About the white whale: To the author, it symbols nature, it is a complex, unfathomable and beautiful; To the captain Ahab, it is evilness, is a wall. So he will lead all his crew to cut through the wall to dig out all the unknown, mysterious things behind it. To the narrator, Ishmael, it is a mystery. (P460—461)

7. Walt Whitman is a unique poet. Can you explain what make him unique?

Answer:
1) His themes are: Democracy; the Revolutionary War and the Civil War; freedom; openness; brotherhood; individualism; the growth of industry and the wealth of the cities; universality.

2) His styles are special: "free verse"; "catalogue"; simple and even crude language. (P448-551)

PART TWO AMERICAN LITERATURE

Chapter 2 The Realistic Period

I. Choose the right answer:

1. Emily Dickinson was sometimes curious about the feeling of speech of death and in one of her poems she wrote about the______of death, the title of the poem is "I heard a Fly buzz when I died".
A. moment
B. suffering
C. happiness
D. meaning
Answer: A (P518)

2. Theodore Dreiser belonged to the school of literary ______which emphasized heredity and environment as important deterministic forces shaping individualized characters who were presented in special and detailed circumstances.
A. naturalism
B. realism
C. determinism
D. humanism
Answer: A (P524)

3. More than five hundred poems that Dickinson wrote are about nature, in which her general _____about the relationship between man and nature is well expressed.
A. scepticism
B. eulogy
C. happiness
D. denial
Answer: A (P518)

4. "This is my letter to the World" is a poem expressing Emily Dickinson’s _____about her communication with the outside world.
A. happiness
B. anger
C. anxiety
D. sorrow
Answer: C (P520)

5. Though secluded herself in her own house, Emily Dickinson was never really indifferent of the outside world, as could be seen in her poems such as "I like to see it lap the Miles", which describes a(n) ______, an embodiment of modern civilization.
A. snake
B. animal
C. the road
D. train
Answer: D (P521)

6. After "The Adventure of Tom Sawyer", Twain gives a literary independence to Tom’s buddy Huck in a book called_____, and the book from which "all modern American literature comes".
A. Life on the Mississippi River
B. The Gilded Age
C. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
D. The Sun Also Rises
Answer: C (P479---480)

7. Winterbourne is used as a ______in Henry James’s "Daisy Miller".
A. Protagonist
B. Narrator of the events
C. A character of central consciousness
D. Persona
Answer: C (P499)

8. Emily Dickinson’s verse is most aptly characterized as ___________.
A. exposing the evils of the society
B. paving the way for the following generation of free verse poets
C. sharing the same poetic conventions as Walt Whitman
D. exhibiting sensitiveness to the symbolic implications of experience, such as love, death, immortality and etc.
Answer: D (P518)

9. The author of "The Portrait of a Lady" is best at_______.
A. probing into the unsearched secret part of human life
B. a truthful delineation of the motives, the impulses, the principles that shape the lives of actual men and women.
C. a dramatizing the collisions between two very different cultural systems on an international scene
D. disclosing the social injustices and evils of a civilized society after the Civil War.
Answer: C (P496)

10. The period ranging from 1865 to 1914 has been referred to as _____________.
A. the Age of Realism
B. the Age of Modernism
C. the Age of Romanticism
D. the Age of Colonicalism
Answer: A (P471)

11. Who exerts the simple most important influence on literary naturalism?
A. Emerson
B. Jack London
C. Theodore Dreiser
D. Darwin
Answer: D (P475)

12. One of the most familiar themes in American naturalism is the theme of human "______".
A. bestiality
B. goodness
C. compassion
D. greed
Answer: A (P476)

13. ______is considered by H.L. Mencken as "the true father of our national literature."
A. Hemingway
B. Poe
C. Irving
D. Twain
Answer: D (P477)

14. Mark Twain wrote most of his literary works with a _______language.
A. grand
B. pompous
C. simple
D. vernacular
Answer: D (P481)

15. Henry James’s fame generally rests upon his novels and stories with________.
A. international theme
B. national theme
C. European theme
D. Regional theme
Answer: A (P497)

16. In the following writers, who is generally regarded as the forerunner of the 20th century "Stream-of-consciousness" novels and the founder of psychological realism______________.
A. Henry James
B. Mark Twain
C. Emily Dickenson
D. Theodore Dreiser
Answer: A (P498)

17. In Henry James’ "Daisy Miller", the author tries to portray the young woman as an embodiment of ___________.
A. the corruption of the newly rich
B. the free spirit of the New World
C. the decline of aristocracy
D. the force of convention
Answer: B (P499)

18. Which of the following is NOT a usual subject of poetic expression of Emily Dickinson’s?
A. War and peace
B. Love and marriage
C. Life and death
D. Religion
Answer: A (P517)

19. The following titles are all related to the subject that escapes from the society and returns to nature except__________.
A. Dreiser’s Sister Carrie
B. Copper’s Leather-Stocking Tales
C. Thoreau’s Walden
D. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Answer: A (P401 / P526)

20. The greatest work written by Theodore Dreiser is__________.
A. Sister Carrie
B. An American Tragedy
C. The Financier
D. The Titan
Answer: B (P525)

21. Closely related to Emily Dickinson’s religious poetry are her poems concerning ___________.
A. Childhood
B. Youth and happiness
C. Loneliness
D. Death and immortality
Answer: D (518)

22. With Howells, James, and Mark Twain active on the literary scene, _________became the major trend in American literature in the seventies and eighties of the 19th century.
A. sentimentalism
B. romanticism
C. realism
D. naturalism
Answer: C (P474)

II. Read the quoted part and answer the questions:

1. "It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt tow things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to my self:
"All right, then, I’ll go to hell"----and tore it up.
It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never though no more about reforming."

1) Who was the "I", which book was the passage taken from? And by whom?
2) Why did he think "it was awful thought"? Analyze it.
3) Analyze the characteristic of the hero.

Answer:
1) The character is Huckleberry Finn, the passage is taken from "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain. (P489)

2) It is the climax of the Huck’s inner struggle on the Mississippi, when Huck is conflicting whether or not he should write a letter to tell Miss Watson where Jim is, and he is polarizing/contradicting by the two opposing forces between his heart and his head, between his affection for Jim and the laws of the society against those who help slaves escape. Huck’s final decision -to follow his own good hearted moral impulse rather than conventional village morality. During his thinking Huck thinks of the consequence of helping Jim (the runaway slave), he might go to hell, "it was awful thought", with the eventual victory of his moral conscience over his social awareness, Huck grows. (P480)

3) Huck is an innocent and reluctant rebel, a typical American Boy with a "sound heart and deformed conscience". Through the eyes of Huck, the Pre-Civil War American society is fully exposed and we are deeply impressed by Mark Twain’s thematic contrasts between innocence and experience, nature and culture, wildness and civilization. (P483)

2. "I should think it might be arranged," Winterbourne was thus emboldened to reply. "Couldn’t you get some one to stay----for the afternoon---with Randolph?"
Miss Miller looked at him a moment; and then with all serenity, "I wish you’d stay with him!" she said.

Questions:
1) Please identify the work and the author.
2) Please analyze the character of Daisy Miller in literature.
参考答案:
1) It is taken from Henry James’s "Daisy Miller". (P513)

2) She is the American Girl in Europe, a celebrated type who embodies the spirit of the New World. However, innocence, the keynote of her character, turns out to be an admiring but a dangerous quality and her defiance of social taboos in the Old World finally brings her to a disaster in the clash between two different cultures. (P499-500)

3. "We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess---in the Ring---
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain----
We passed the Setting Sun---”

Questions:
1) Please identify the poem and the poet;
2) What does "the School, the Fields of Gazing Grain and the Setting Sun" stands for?

Answers:
1) The lines are from "Because I could not stop fro Death", Emily Dickinson. (P523)

2) It stands for three stages of life: the School----youth;
the Fields of Gazing Grain----mature period;
the Setting Sun------end of life. (P523)

4. "The Eyes around---had wrung them dry---
And breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset----when the King
Be witnessed---in the Room----"

Questions:
1) What is the meaning of the first line?
2) What does "the King" refer to?
3) What idea does the poem from which this stanza is taken express?

Answers:
1) It means the relatives and friends had cried and cried so that there were no tears any more. (P521)

2) "The King" refers to the God of death. (P521)

3) The poem expresses that the author even imagined her own death, the loss of her own body, and the journey of her soul to the unknown. (P518)

III. Questions and answers:
1. What are the main ideas of Realists of America?

Answer:
The harsh life and disillusion from the dark memories of the Civil War made the nation dislike the romance, the new generation of writers came up with new inspirations:

1) They were interested in the realities of life. It aimed at the interpretation of the actuality of any aspect of life;

2) People’s attention was now directed the interesting features/things of everyday existence/things -something brutal, sordid/mean, class struggle etc.

3) The authors introduced common people such as: industrial workers and farmers, ambitious businessmen, vagrants, prostitutes/street girls, and unheroic soldiers in fiction;

4) American writers displayed native trends in portrayal of the landscape ad social surface realistically;

5) They formed perfect vernacular style in language;

6) Some authors explored and exploited/used the literary possibilities of the interior life/psychology, such as Henry James;

7) The representatives were: Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells;

In short, they set the example and pictured the future course for the modernism. (in the subject, themes, techniques, and styles of fiction)
(P472---474)