【正文】 de towards life). (2) One of the major themes of his is alienation (far away from each other). Other themes: loneliness, suicidal individualism (individualism causing disaster and death), rejection and quest, confrontation of innocence and evil, doubts over the forting 19c idea of progress 4. style (1) Like Hawthorne, Melville manages to achieve the effect of ambiguity through employing the technique of multiple view of his narratives. (2) He tends to write periodic chapters. (3) His rich rhythmical prose and his poetic power have been profusely mented upon and praised. (4) His works are symbolic and metaphorical. (5) He includes many nonnarrative chapters of factual background or description of what goes on board the ship or on the route (Moby Dick) Romantic Poets I. Walt Whitman 1. life 2. work: Leaves of Grass (9 editions) (1) Song of Myself (2) There Was a Child Went Forth (3) Crossing Brooklyn Ferry (4) Democratic Vistas (5) Passage to India (6) Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking 3. themes – “Catalogue of American and European thought” He had been influenced by many American and European thoughts: enlightenment, idealism, transcendentalism, science, evolution ideas, western frontier spirits, Jefferson’s individualism, Civil War Unionism, Orientalism. Major themes in his poems (almost everything): equality of things and l beings divinity of everything l immanence of God l democracy l l evolution of cosmos multiplicity of nature l selfreliant spirit l l death, beauty of death expansion of America l brotherhood and social l solidarity (unity of nations in the world) pursuit of love and happiness l 4. style: “free verse” (1) no fixed rhyme or scheme (2) parallelism, a rhythm of thought (3) phonetic recurrence (4) the habit of using snapshots (5) the use of a certain pronoun “I” (6) a looser and more openended syntactic structure (7) use of conventional image (8) strong tendency to use oral English (9) vocabulary – powerful, colourful, rarely used words of foreign origins, some even wrong (10) sentences – catalogue technique: long list of names, long poem lines 5. influence (1) His best work has bee part of the mon property of Western culture. (2) He took over Whitman’s vision of the poetprophet and poetteacher and recast it in a more sophisticated and Europeanized mood. (3) He has been pared to a mountain in American literary history. (4) Contemporary American poetry, whatever school or form, bears witness to his great influence. II. Emily Dickenson 1. life 2. works (1) My Life Closed Twice before Its Close (2) Because I Can’t Stop for Death (3) I Heard a Fly Buzz – When I died (4) Mine – by the Right of the White Election (5) Wild Nights – Wild Nights 3. themes: based on her own experiences/joys/sorrows (1) religion – doubt and belief about religious subjects (2) death and immortality (3) love – suffering and frustration caused by love (4) physical aspect of desire (5) nature – kind and cruel (6) free will and human responsibility 4. style (1) poems without titles (2) severe economy of expression (3) directness, brevity (4) musical device to create cadence (rhythm) (5) capital letters – emphasis (6) short poems, mainly two stanzas (7) rhetoric techniques: personification – make some of abstract ideas vivid III. Comparison: Whitman vs. Dickinson 1. Similarities: (1) Thematically, they both extolled, in their different ways, an emergent America, its expansion, its individualism and its Americanness, their poetry being part of “American Renaissance”. (2) Technically, they both added to the literary independence of the new nation by breaking free of the convention of the iambic pentameter and exhibiting a freedom in form unknown before: they were pioneers in American poetry. 2. differences: (1) Whitman seems to keep his eye on society at large。 everything is determined by a plex of internal chemisms and by the forces of social pressure. 4. Sister Carrie (1) Plot (2) Analysis 5. Style (1) Without good structure (2) Deficient characterization (3) Lack in imagination (4) Journalistic method (5) Techniques in painting Chapter 5 The Modern Period Section 1 The 1920s I. Introduction The 1920s is a flowering period of American literature. It is considered “the second renaissance” of American literature. The nicknames for this period: (1) Roaring 20s – fort (2) Dollar Decade – rich (3) Jazz Age – Jazz music II. Background 1. First World War – “a war to end all wars” (1) Economically: became rich from WWI. Economic boom: new inventions. Highlyconsuming society. (2) Spiritually: dislocation, fragmentation. 2. widespread contempt for law (looking down upon law) 3. Freud’s theory III. Features of the literature Writers: three groups (1) Participants (2) Expatriates (3) Bohemian (unconventional way of life) – onlookers Two areas: (1) Failure of munication of Americans (2) Failure of the American society Imagism I. Background Imagism was influenced by French symbolism, ancient Chinese poetry and Japanese literature “haiku” II. Development: three stages 1. 1908~1909: London, Hulme 2. 1912~1914: England America, Pound 3. 1914~1917: Amy Lowell III. What is an “image”? An image is defined by Pound as that which presents an intellectual and emotional plex in an instant of time, “a vortex or cluster of fused ideas” “endowed with energy”. The exact word must bring the effect of the object before the reader as it had presented itself to the poet’s mind at the time of writing. IV. Principles 1. Direct treatment of the “thing”, whether subjective or objective。 3. As regarding rhythm, to pose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome. V. Significance 1. It was a rebellion against the traditional poetics which failed to refl