《美国文学课件AmericanRealism2章节》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《美国文学课件AmericanRealism2章节（17页珍藏版）》请在金锄头文库上搜索。
1、American Realism: Henry James,I. A Modernist in the realist period 1. In many ways, Henry James is a powerful example of realism. 2. In his fictive techniques, in his vision of America and in his capacity for irony and ambiguity, James is also typically modernist.,3. He is also modernist in the sens
2、e that he, like his brother William James, helped transform Americas response to the modern. 4. That Henry James is generally regarded as a realist is due to the fact that his works do not quite belong to the modernist period which literary historians quite arbitrarily claim to have begun with World
3、 War I.,II. What is “real” as defined by James,1. common denominator for the American realists: the fact they recognized and depicted the loss of American innocence. 2.They were realists in that they were less romantic or , shall we say, less naively romantic.,3. Such is the argument in this excerpt
4、 from Henry Jamess essay titled ”Hawthorne”:, one may say that the Civil War marks an era in the history of the American mind. It introduced into the national consciousness a certain sense of proportion and relation, of the world being a more complicated place than it had hitherto seemed, the future
5、 more treacherous, success more difficult. At the rate at which things are going, it is obvious that good Americans will be numerous than ever; but the good Americans, in days to come, will be a more critical person than his complacent and confident grandfather. He has eaten of the tree of knowledge
6、. He will not, I think, be a skeptic, and still less, of course, a cynic; but he will be, without discredit to his well-known capacity for action, an observer.,III. Henry Jamess uniqueness. 1. Henry James is a master of the novel as an art form. Following Flaubert, he has made irony and indeterminac
7、y required attributes of the modern novel: long sentences and ambiguity. . 2.His philosophical capacity allowed him to perceive crucial questions in life while his artistic genius guided him to locate these questions in the varying moods and emotions of human life, especially in the emotions of his
8、American characters who travel to Europe.,IV. Major and Minor themes: there are three major themes (1) the international theme (2) the emotion-of-life theme (3) the artist theme The interconnectedness of the three will become apparent after we have made a more engaged investigation of each theme.,1.
9、 the international theme: a. contemplation of the American consciousness not within the national boundaries of the United States in relation to Europe. b. observing American culture in the contact zone of the two cultures. c. His American characters come to Europe, whether they are pilgrims or victi
10、ms or both, and they meet European culture either in the form of European conventions or in the form of Europeanized Americans.,d. In Henry Jamess texts, Europe and America are two different societies and cultural forces brought into contact. e. Europe is the kind of society where the vital impulse
11、has run out and all its meanings are expressed through its conventions and refinements.,f. Juxtaposing the two societies in various dramatic situations, Jamess point is not to favor one or the other. Rather, his writings allow the contrasts to manifest themselves so that Europe and America offer cri
12、tical perspectives for each other. g. American innocence or inexperience becomes magnified in his confrontation with the European social sophistication, sense of culture and tradition, and moral relativism. The lack of vitality as found in certain European conventions is also relentlessly exposed.,2
13、. The realism in the first theme a. the contrast between Europe and America. And the real in James is more a psychological question than a social one, as Henry James is more concerned with the predicament of the sensitive mind in a special era. b. In his texts, the predicament, the feeling of not kn
14、owing what to do, occurs when the sensitive mind realizes a historical interruptionwhat James called “interregnum”between the effective dominance of the Christian-classical ideal through old European institutions and the rise to dominance of the new ideal.,3. The second theme is an intense interest
15、in the emotion of life. a. Henry James had a moral conviction that life is indestructible and, accordingly, he was outraged at society or people who were decaying and sterile while living on conventions without any force of conviction. b. To express his moral vision and his outrage, he brought such
16、people and society under his fictive microscope and showed us how the emotion underlining the conventions is about to explode. The moment before the explosion, if not the explosion itself, constitutes Henry Jamess drama.,4. The third theme is the artist theme. a. What sustains Henry Jamess view of art and artist is his fidelity to life. b. the artist, embodying the creative process and force of life, inevitable conflicts with the false values and limited imaginations of society, par
