American Literature(15)

•  Sylvia Plath ( 1932 –  1963) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer.

       Plath suffered from depression for much of her adult life, and in 1963 she committed suicide.Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel.
       In 1982, she won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for The Collected Poems. She also wrote The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death.

•  Anne Sexton ( 1928 –  1974) was an American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse. 

She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die. Themes of her poetry include her long battle against depression and mania, suicidal tendencies, and various intimate details from her private life.

 On returning home she put on her mother's old fur coat, removed all her rings, poured herself a glass of vodka, locked herself in her garage, and started the engine of her car, committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.

• 推薦電影：Sylvia(2004)

American Literature(15)

• THE COLD WAR

(點入連結)

• Containment 

was a United States policy to prevent the spread of communism abroad. A component of the Cold War, this policy was a response to a series of moves by the Soviet Union to enlarge communist influence in Eastern Europe, China, Korea, Africa, and Vietnam. It represented a middle-ground position between appeasement and rollback.

The word containment is associated most strongly with the policies of U.S. President Harry Truman (1945–53), including the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a mutual defense pact. 

• Samuel Langhorne Clemens ( 1835 –  1910)

 better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885),the latter often called "the Great American Novel."


Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which provided the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. He died the day following the comet's subsequent return. He was lauded as the "greatest American humorist of his age," and William Faulkner called Twain "the father of American literature."

•  Twain was a master at rendering colloquial speech and helped to create and popularize a distinctive American literature built on American themes and language. Many of Twain's works have been suppressed at times for various reasons. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been repeatedly restricted in American high schools, not least for its frequent use of the word "nigger," which was in common usage in the pre-Civil War period in which the novel was set.

• 英語口語文學

1. 雙重否定文法(I couldn't stand it no longer I lit out.)
2. 拼錯字

• "Moon River"  (music by Henry Mancini, lyrics by Johnny Mercer)

Moon River, wider than a mile,
I'm crossing you in style some day.
Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker,
wherever you're going I'm going your way.
Two drifters off to see the world.
There's such a lot of world to see.
We're after the same rainbow's end--
waiting 'round the bend,
my huckleberry friend,
Moon River and me.

• 推薦電影：Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)

• "The Open Boat"

 is a short story by American author Stephen Crane (1871–1900). First published in 1897, it was based on Crane's experience of surviving a shipwreck off the coast of Florida earlier that year while traveling to Cuba to work as a newspaper correspondent.

American Literature(14)

• Henry James(1843–1916)

1. was an American-born British writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He is primarily known for the series of novels in which he portrays the encounter of Americans with Europe and Europeans.James contributed significantly to literary criticism, particularly in his insistence that writers be allowed the greatest possible freedom in presenting their view of the world.
2. James is noted for his "international theme" – that is, the complex relationships between naïve Americans and cosmopolitan Europeans.
3. If the main theme of Twain's work is appearance and reality, James's constant concern is perception. In James, only self-awareness and clear perception of others yields wisdom and self-sacrificing love. As James develops, his novels become more psychological and less concerned with external events. In James's later works, the most important events are all psychological – usually moments of intense illumination that show characters their previous blindness.

Read more:( http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/publication/2008/05/20080512222313eaifas0.993786.html#ixzz2oM58lYkO)

• works

The Portrait of a Lady(1881)

The Wings of the Dove(1902)

Daisy Miller(1878)
Transatlantic Sketches (travel pieces, 1875)

• Stephen Crane (1871 – 1900)

 was an American author. Prolific throughout his short life, he wrote notable works in the Realist tradition as well as early examples of American Naturalism and Impressionism. He is recognized by modern critics as one of the most innovative writers of his generation.

 Crane's first novel was the 1893 Bowery tale Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, generally considered by critics to be the first work of American literary Naturalism.
 He won international acclaim in 1895 for his Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, which he wrote without any battle experience.

• realism(literature)

Like Romanticism, naturalism first appeared in Europe. It is usually traced to the works of Honoré? de Balzac (巴爾札克)in the 1840s and seen as a French literary movement associated with Gustave Flaubert(古詩塔夫‧福樓拜),  Émile Zola(埃米爾·左拉), and Guy de Maupassant(居伊·德·莫泊桑). It daringly opened up the seamy underside of society and such topics as divorce, sex, adultery, poverty, and crime.

Naturalism flourished as Americans became urbanized and aware of the importance of large economic and social forces. By 1890, the frontier was declared officially closed. Most Americans resided in towns, and business dominated even remote farmsteads.

"You are all a "génération perdue."   

                                                                            ──  Gertrude Stein

•  "Lost Generation"

The "Lost Generation" was the generation that came of age during World War I.
The term was popularized by Ernest Hemingway, who used it as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel, The Sun Also Rises.

• Gertrude Stein(點入連結)

American Literature(13)

• Naturalism( Literature)

 was a literary movement or tendency from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. It was a mainly unorganized Literary movement that sought to depict believable everyday reality, as opposed to such movements as Romanticism or Surrealism, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic, or even supernatural treatment. 

 Naturalistic writers were influenced by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. They often believed that one's heredity and social environment largely determine one's character. 

Naturalistic works exposed the dark harshness of life, including poverty, racism, violence, prejudice, disease, corruption, prostitution, and filth. As a result, naturalistic writers were frequently criticized for focusing too much on human vice and misery.

•  Realism ( Literature)

Literary realism is the trend, beginning with mid nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors, toward depictions of contemporary life and society as it was, or is.

 In the spirit of general "realism," realist authors opted for depictions of everyday and banal activities and experiences, instead of a romanticized or similarly stylized presentation.

George Eliot's novel Middlemarch stands as a great milestone in the realist tradition.

• Vernacular

           Mark Twain

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't.

—William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I, ll. 203–206