6 Семинар Американский роман XX в.

Вопросы для обсуждения:

1. Литература потерянного поколения: Э. Хемингуэй, Ф.С.. Фитцджеральд, Р. Олдингтон, Э-М. Ремарк.

2. Дж. Д.Сэлинджер. От бунта к конформизму.

3. Роман Дж. Апдайка "Кентавр" и его проблематика

4. Научная фантастика как литературный жанр и общественное явление (А. Кларк, Р. Брэдбери).

5. Сатирик-фантаст К. Воннегут.

Рекомендованная литература

1. М.Мендельсон. Роман США сегодня. М., 1977.

2. М.Гаисмар. Американские современники. М, 1976.

3. Я.И. Засурский. Американская литература XX века, М., 1984.

4. У. Аллен. Традиция и мечта М., 1970.

Write a report on one of the following topics.

1. Вирджиния Вульф и ее рассказы: поиски новых форм.

2. Бернард Шоу - романтик, реалист и сатирик в «приятных» и «неприятных» пьесах.

Задания для выполнения в классе:

1. Read the text and answer the questions.

America’s Literary Heritage

The Reverend Sydney Smith, a British literary gentleman, early in the 19th cen­tury could ask with disdainful rhetoric: “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” For, although the United States was now independent politically, it was not in literary tradition: Americans still looked to Eu­rope for inspiration in writing and reading.

Then, in typical pioneer fashion, courageously and doggedly, a native literary tradition began to be hewn in America. Among the trail-blazing writers were some who left a legacy upon which American authors still draw. Even by the 1820s there had begun to be some grudging respect in critical circles for the storytelling abilities of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Co­oper. These authors drew their material from the immediate past of the infant nation. American Indian legends and the patriots of the American Revolution became material for the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. A pattern was being set: less imitation of Europeans, more pride ш America.

Ralph Waldo Emerson introduced a spare, epigrammatic variety of American essay and devolved an optimistic indigenous philosophy, Transcendentalism. A young New England seafarer named Herman Melville said: "I was bub­bling bubbling and Emerson brought me to a boil Melville went on to write two powerful novels, Moby Dick and Pierre: or the Ambiguities daring to examine the nature of Good and Evil. Equally serious themes were explored by Nathan­iel Hawthorne who set his novels and stories in the Puritan past of his native New England.

Unfettered, exuberant, Walt Whitman sang of himself and his young country. A century later American poets would still feel his influence. Ed­gar Allan Рое often shocked his contemporaries. Today his stature and influence are enormous; he invented the short story form and the detec­tive story as well. Henry David Thoreau lived and wrote in passionate fashion, advocating civil disobedience and expressing the hope that each young man “be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father's or his moth­er's or his neighbor's instead.” More than a century later, his philosophy is more widely espoused than perhaps Thoreau himself envisioned.

Mark Twain’s magnificently confident tales of life along the Mississippi River, comic and al­most epic, broke completely with the refined European literary traditions. As Twain, Samuel Clemens spoke clearly with a truly American voice.

The realism which would color the American fiction of the future was pioneered by Stephen Crane, Jack London and William Dean Howells.

By the dawn of the 20th century, there were many in the four quarters of the globe who would read an American book. A new tradition had been established. . . .[23]

1. How could you describe the American writers’ motto in the 19th century?

2. Name the distinctive feature of the American fiction by Jack London, Dean Howells.

2. Read the article. Write a short summary of the text. Retell it.

Ernest Hemingway

"The first and most important thing of all,” said Hem­ingway, "at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone. . . .

“The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after. Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it”

Out of upper Michigan, with its great lakes and green hills came Ernest Hemingway. He con­sidered himself a correspondent and an artist. He learned something of life in the Michigan woods and wrote crisply of the beauties and terrors of nature. His short stories of this period were terse, understated. They described the rituals of “grace under pressure” in hunting the Michigan bears, as he would later ex­plain it in terms of war—A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls—or in bullfighting—Death in the After­noon. His work displayed an overwhelming ambiva­lence—drawn to war, he described the horror of its reality, he wrote of sex boldly for his times, yet re­garded women with a chivalric awe; toughness and sensitivity vied for possession of the Hemingway hero.

He maintained that “I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.” Yet in comparison with the amorality expressed in works of the 1960s, Heming­way clung to a code of bravery and honor and individ­ual dignity. He came along at the beginning of the golden age of publicity—with mass media was coming into their own—and perhaps he exploited it, perhaps it exploited him. In any case, he was not unaware of his public image. He was not unaware that he was being widely imitated, both in his writing and his life style, and through vanity, or a pressure which would not permit grace, he parodied himself on occasion—as in Across the River and into the Trees.

It is for more than his style and the influence it had that Hemingway is remembered. It is for a way of looking at things—nature, violence, death—for a mystique, a brutal contempt for sham, a touching, some­how already old-fashioned, regard for truth. [24]

1. How could you paraphrase the underlined sentence in the text?

3. Read the text and speculate on the highlighted part. Find the Russian equivalents of the titles of Fitzgerald’s works.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Begin with an individual”, said Fitzgerald, “and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created— nothing. That is because we are all queer fish, queerer be­hind our faces and voices than we want any one to know or than we know ourselves.”

Writing about individuals, F. Scott Fitzgerald drew a portrait of a segment of American society which many took to be a graphic representation of the ways of the idle rich, rather than the product of Fitzgerald's imagination. And, ironical­ly, some young people in the eastern United States tried to live up to the “flaming youth” image of Fitz­gerald “flappers” (madcap girls of the era) and “sad young men.”

Fitzgerald openly courted financial and social suc­cess. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, written while he was still at Princeton, was hailed as a revela­tion of the philosophy of the disillusioned post-World War I generation. In the early ‘20s, flushed with ac­claim and the afterglow of a champagne breakfast, with his lovely wife Zelda at his side, he rode in an open auto down Park Avenue in New York and wept be­cause he knew he would never be this happy again. He was right. Although his finest works were to come —the trenchant The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night and the unfinished but promising Hollywood novel, The Last Tycoon—there would be tragedy in the re­mainder of his life. He documented his frightful bouts with alcohol in The Crack-Up, a disjointed but un­compromisingly honest long essay. He found his life in a state where “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning.” The extent of his literary success was not recognized by critics until after his death in the early 40s.

Critic Alfred Kazin said of him: “He commented on the world, swam in it as self-contentedly as the new rich, and understood it sagely—when he wanted to; he had no innerness. His senses always opened out­ward to the world, and the world was full of Long Island Sundays (the languid garden parties of the very rich). This is what he knew and was steeped in, the procession and glitter that he loved without the state­ment of love, and he had the touch for it—the light yet jeweled style, careless and knowing and affable; the easiness that was never facility; the holiday lights, the holiday splendor, the ‘20s in their golden bowl, whose crack he knew so well.” [25]