12th week Mark_Twain 英美文学赏析 教学课件.ppt

Realism In American Literature I． Historical Background The civil war: the North (industrialism) defeated the south (agrarianism) The development of industry: US headed toward capitalism People moved to the cities, population increased, property gathered by a few, John Rockfeller, Morgan, Andrew Carnegie The conflict between the two classes, European influences from Zola, Flaubert, Balzac, Dostoyesky, Tolstoy Realism II．the characteristics of realism the latter half of the 19th century It is a reaction against ‘the lie’ of Romanticism and sentimentalism. It expressed the concern for the world of experience, of the commonplace, and for the familiar and the low. (1) the truthful treatment of materials (2) they write novels or stories of local color Gamblers, outlaws, scandalous women (3) materials they seek to describe are the common, the average, the everyday. Realism can be thought as the ultimate of the middle-class art, and it finds its subject in bourgeois life and manners. (4) probe into the psychology of the characters, interested in the effect their work has on the readers and their life, feeling it to be their obligation to deal with absolute truthfulness (5) desire ‘simple, clear, direct prose’ style (6) write in an objective rather than an idealized way pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens writer and humorist Something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read. Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apples sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. He has been a doctor a year now and has had two patients, no, three, I think—yes, it was three; I attended their funerals. Surgeons and anatomists see no beautiful women in all their lives, but only a ghastly stack of bones with Latin names to them, and a network of nerves and muscles and tissues inflamed by disease. The noblest work of God? Man. Who found it out? Man. Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to. --became nationally