美国文学The Lost Generation.ppt

The Lost Generation:Ernest Hemingway&F.Scott Fitzgerald The Lost GenerationMany prominent American writers of the decade following the end of World War I,disillusioned by their war experiences and alienated by what they perceived as the crassness of American culture and its“puritanical”repressions,are often tagged as the Lost Generation.A number of these writers became expatriates,moving either to London or to Paris in their quest for a richer literary and artistic milieu and a freer way of life.Ezra Pound,Gertrude Stein,and T.S.Eliot lived out their lives abroad,but most of the younger“exiles”,came back to America in the 1930s.The Lost GenerationHemingways The Sun Also Rises(1926)and Fitzgeralds Tender Is the Night(1934)are novels that represent the mood and way of life of two groups of American expatriates.Ernest Hemingway（1899-1961）In the work of Ernest Hemingway,praised by Pound as a prose“imagist”,the high modernist remedy of using a disciplined,muscular,classical style to redeem the fragmentation,loss of value,and chaos both symptomatized and produced by the war,without wasting the energy of its violence,achieved its most successful fictional realization.Hemingway learned to think of writing as a rigorous craft of producing clarity,simplicity,and strength of statement and expression while working as a young reporter for the Kansas City Star.A Farewell to Arms(1929)The story of a young American serving as ambulance driver for the Italian army,who deserts and escapes the horror of the war with a young English nurse,only to have his idyllic sanctuary destroyed by her death in childbirth.A Farewell to Arms(1929)Hemingways novel could be construed as romanticizing the war by a tragic love story.But the clean,hard prose keeps any sentimentality or idealism at bay.Hemingways anti-style.This simple declarative sentences built on a strong scaffolding of substantives(nouns)have been stripped of adverbial or descriptive excess and poetic adornment to the point where Ihab Hassan refers to Hemingways style as an anti-style.The Sun Also Rises(1926)his first,and perhaps major novel The Sun Also Rises(1926)The protagonist narrator,Jake Barnes,is a man literally castrated by the war,whose language must emblematize a mode of coping with the sterility,nihilism and corruption of the postwar modernity without self-indulgence or self-delusion.The jaded coterie of the opening Paris episodes of the novel was based on a circle of Hemingway friends that gives The Sun Also Rises the status of a roman clef.The Sun Also Rises(1926)Hemingways own straightness and purity of line,that is,his refusal to contrive inflated emotional effects or extravagant plots and ornamental prose,become the stylistic equivalent of the protoexistentialist stoicism that makes Jake Barnes able to accept an face existence as it is without the crutch of romanticism,idealism,or illusion.F.Scott Fitzgerald（1896-1940）American author of novels and short stories,whose works are evocative of the Jazz Age,a term he coined himself.He is considered a member of the Lost Generation of the Twenties.He finished four novels,This Side of Paradise,The Beautiful and Damned,Tender is the Night and his most famous,the celebrated The Great Gatsby.A fifth,unfinished,novel,The Love of the Last Tycoon was published posthumously.F.Scott Fitzgerald（1896-1940）The work of Fitzgerald,gazed over these churning classes and masses populating the American landscape.The“Jazz Age”The era of Prohibition and wild financial speculation,the jostling of Jamesian“old money”with vulgar American arrivistes.Fitzgerald vs.HemingwayHemingway and Fitzgerald seem to have been influenced differently by their literary traditions,with Hemingway choosing Huckleberry Finn as his American gospel,while Fitzgerald grounded himself in the late nineteenth-century architects of the American moral imagination,Henry James and Theodore Dreiser.Fitzgerald vs.HemingwayThis stylistic and philosophical divergence in the strategies of Hemingway and Fitzgerald was etched in their different secular“occupations”before coming to Europe:Hemingways stints as a reporter and journalist against Fitzgeralds work for an advertisement agency and as a contributor to Smart Set.Fitzgerald and ConradFitzgerald also read and admired the work of Joseph Conrad,and it is Conrads Heart of Darkness that leaves the clearest imprint on that text.The Great GatsbyThe Great Gatsby is Fitzgeralds tale of a single,hot Long Island summer in 1922,when Jay Gatsby,the fabulously wealthy and glamorous tycoon is unmasked and destroyed in his attempts to realize the American dream by recapturing his lost and now married sweetheart,Daisy Buchanan.But Fitzgerald keeps his focus on the same issue as Conrad the disastrous moral cost in hypocrisy and destructiveness that civilization at its most opulent and attractive entails.The Great Gatsby(1925)Fitzgerald keeps his focus on the disastrous moral cost in hypocrisy and destructiveness that civilization at its most opulent and attractive entails.Zelda Sayre (1900 1948)Zelda Sayre (1900 1948)The two novels Save Me the Waltz,which was published in 1932 and Tender Is the Night,published in 1934;provide contrasting portrayals of the couples failing marriage.