Lecture 19
on
Twentieth-Century American Poets (I):
Ezra Pound & Wallace Stevens & William Carlos Williams
OUTLINE
1. The historical and socio-cultural background
1.1 The two World Wars
1.2 The impact of Marxism, Freudianism on American modern literature
被侵犯的白衣2. Literary Terms
2.1 Modernism
2.2 Imagism
3. Ezra Pound
4. Wallace Stevens
5. William Carlos Williams
1. The historical and socio-cultural background
1.1 The two World Wars
The twentieth century began with a strong n of social breakdown. The two World Wars, especially the First World War (l914--l918), became the emblem of all wars in the twentieth century, which means violence, devastation, blood and death, and made a big impact on the life of the American people and their literary writings.
With the wars the whole world had undergone a dramatic social change, a transformation from order to disorder. America in this period was characterized by economic boom and material prosperity but social chaos, spiritual waste and moral decay. Economically,
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with America’s participation in World War I and the technological revolution, the United States had its booming industry and material prosperity. Socially, the world was disorderly and turbulent. There was a n of unea and restlessness underneath. Spiritually and morally, there was a decline in moral standard and the first few decades of the twentieth century was best described as a spiritual wasteland. The censor of a great civilization being destroyed or destroying itlf, social breakdown, and individual powerlessness and hopelessness became part of the American experience as a result of the First World War, with resulting feelings of fear, loss, disorientation and disillusionment.
1.2 The impact of Marxism, Freudianism on American modern literature
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Between the mid-l9th century and the first decade of the 20th century, there had been a big flush of new theories and new ideas in both social and natural sciences, as well as in the field of art in Europe, which played an indispensable role in bringing about modernism and the modernistic writings in the United States.
Apart from Darwinism, which was still a big influence over the writers of this period, the two thinkers who ideas had the greatest impact on the period were the German Karl Marx and the Austrian Sigmund Freud. Marx was a sociologist who believed that the root cau of all behavior was economic, and that the leading feature of the economic life was the division of society into antagonistic class bad on a relation to the means of production.
Freud propounded an idea of human beings themlves as grounded in the “unconscious” that controlled a great deal of overt behavior, and made the practice of the psychoanalysis which emphasizes the importance of the unconscious or the irrational in the human psyche. William James, an American psychologist famous for his theory of “stream of consciousness” and Carl Jung如何做麻婆豆腐, a Swiss psychiatrist, noted for his “collective unconscious” and “archetypal symbol” as part of modern mythology. Their theories, plus Freud’s interpretation of dreams, have infud modern American literature and made it possible for most of the writers in the modern period to probe into the inner world of human reality.
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冯继才2. Literary Terms
2.1 Modernism
It spanned the period from the last quarter of the 19th century in France and from 1890 in Great Britain and Germany to the start of the Second World War. It is assumed that modernism was the conquence of the transformation of society brought about by industrialism and technology in the cour of 19th century. It may also be viewed as a collective term for the remarkable variety of contending groups, movements, and schools in literature, art, and music throughout Europe. It included a wide range of artistic expressions such as Symbolism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Decadence（颓废派）, Fauvism（野兽派）, Cubism, Expressionism, Constructivism, Imagism, Vorticism（漩涡画派）, Futurism, Dadaism（达达派或虚无主义）, and Surrealism, and so on. The period was a time of confrontation with the public, typified by the issuing of manifestos, the proliferation of “little magazines”, and the rapid dismination of avant-garde works and ideas across national borders or linguistic barriers. During the first decade of the 20th
century, modernism became an international tendency against positivism and reprentational art in art and literature. The esnce of modernism was a break with the past, and it also fostered a belief in arts and literature as an avenue to lf-fulfillment.
For one thing, modernism dramatized discontinuity (Note: a n of disjunction) and imminent verance from the past while making determined efforts to u the past, its values and artistic forms by incorporating them in new literary production. The artists had a n that what people had written before was not good enough, becau it expresd ideas that they could no longer accept. Much of the modern temper was critical of received beliefs, usually from a position of disillusionment after World War I. Affected by the postwar disillusionment and loss of faith and disgusted at government slogans with the cheap commercial values and sham 高一议论文(syn.: fal) business ethics of the time, they thought life as diminished. Few possibilities existed for them. They had a strong feeling of alienation, of loss, and of despair. They tried to get back to the foundations of previous arts and to u them in a new way, rejecting many of past ideas and forms.
Modernists were persistently experimental in form and style. They made great efforts to remake the language of literature, and they were interested in technique and craftsmanship. The conflict between dismantling narrative and plot continuity, and the between fracture and flow produced some distinctive literary forms in pro. Stream of consciousness, the u of myth as a structural principle, and the primary status given to the poetic image, all challenged traditional reprentation. Generally speaking, this new desire in craftsmanship and skill was one of the hallmarks of the early decades of the 20th济南的夏天 century.
For another thing, modernists had a n of fragmentation in social communities and within the individual himlf. Hence fragmentation became a common theme in modernist writing. Often in prenting their literary theme, the writers ud an anti-hero. An anti-hero is the person who is the main focus of the work as a hero should be. However, he is weak, ineffective, inapt, not like the romantic hero who is strong, brave, courageous, and can rescue the fair maiden from the tower before the black knight kills her. The anti-hero achieves success through bungling (syn.: doing badly) through not being as effective as h
e would think that he could be.
