【導(dǎo)讀】Generaltone:happy,easy,lively,humorous.CatholicChurch.hewasnotofanage,but

　　

【正文】 e of the society Modernism Modernism is an omnibus term for a number of tendencies in the arts which were prominent in the first half of the 20th century。 in English literature, it is particularly associated with the writings of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats and F. M. Ford. Broadly, Modernism reflects the impact upon literature of the psychology of Freud and the anthropology of Sir J. Frazer. A sense of cultural relativism is pervasive in much modernist writing, as is an awareness of the irrational and the workings of the unconscious mind. Technically, it was marked by a persistent experimentalism. It rejected the traditional framework of narrative, description, and rational exposition in poetry and prose, in favor of streamofconsciousness presentation of personality, a dependence on the poetic image as the essential vehicle of aesthetic munication, and upon myth as a characteristic structural principle. ? It takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psychoanalysis as its theoretical base. ? Concentrate more the private than the public, more on subjective than the objective ? More concerned with the inner being of an individual Main writers of Modernism Oscar Wilde (18541900)。 Gee Bernard Shaw (18541900)。 T. S. Eliot(18881965)。 James Joyce(18821941)。 . Lawrence (18791970)。 Virginia Woolf(18821930) Robert Browning Robert Browning is famous for his Dramatic Monologue. Oscar Wilde Known for his barbed and clever wit, he was one of the most successful playwrights of late Victorian London, and one of the greatest celebrities of his day. Art for Art’s Sake Art for Art’s Sake is the theory that the fine arts are independent of socialhistorical reality and have nothing to do with moral or religious purposes. A work of art is free to seek beauty and its values are aesthetic. Oscar Wilde is a most famous writer practicing this theory. Gee Bernard Shaw A brilliant dramatist He regarded the establishment of socialism by the emancipation of land and industrial capital from individual and class ownership as the final goal. He was against the means of violent revolution or armed struggle in achieving the goal of socialism。 he also had a distrust of the uneducated working class in fighting against capitalists. He held that only those superior intellects could have the ability to shoulder this task. And it was his ideal to bring about evolutionary socialism by legal and democratic means, by revealing the evil capitalists and by educating the mon people. This reformist view caused him a painful, conscious, inner conflict between his sincere desire for the new world and his inability to break out of the snobbish intellectual isolation throughout his life and work. On literature, he was against ―art for art’s sake‖ and thought that art should serve social purposes by reflecting human life, revealing social contradictions and educating the mon people. Shaw followed the great traditions of realism. As a realistic dramatist, he took the modern social issues as his subjects with the aim of directing social reforms. Most of his plays are concerned with political, economic, moral, or religious problems, thus can be termed as problem plays. One feature of Shaw’s characterization is that he makes the trick of showing up one character vividly at the expense of another. His plays have plots but they do not work by plots, the plot is usually the disregarded backbone to one long, unbroken conversation. It is the vitality of the talk that takes primacy over mere story. Problem play: a play that explores a controversial social issue of its day. T. S. Eliot Achievement T. S. Eliot was the most dominant literary figure between the two world wars. Poet William Carlos Williams describes the effect of The Waste Land as that of an atom bomb. He conceives a poem as an object, an anic thing in itself, demanding a fusion and concentration of intellect, feeling, and experience. He suggests that, through cultural memory, a poet unconsciously continues the tradition of his culture. His poetry presents difficulties of numerous allusions, use of foreign language, use of metaphysical conceit, and an absence of obvious narrative structure. The Waste Land, considered being a remarkable and extraordinary achievement, deals with the failure of Western civilization as shown by World War I. style Eliot’s style in the Waste Land was deliberately impersonal, concrete, fragmentary, and discontinuous. (1) Impersonality means that an author does not express his own experience and emotion. At least, he does not voice it as his own, but describes things, invents, characters, or creates dramatic scenes, and thus embodies emotion objectively in the particulars he renders. (2) These particulars are concrete in the sense that they render sensations and actions as opposed to general ideas. (3) But in the Waste Land such concrete particulars are only fragments. The poem does not give plete descriptions, quotations, conversations, or actions, but only bits and pieces of them. (4)Such fragments are juxtaposed in unpredictable ways, and since each presents a different voice, action, emotion, and style, their sequence is at first disorienting (confusing). Gradually one finds interrelations within this discontinuity, but the interrelation is by leitmotifs (主旋律） .