美国文学Unit 9.ppt

Southern Renaissance The Southern Renaissance was the reinvigoration of American southern literature that began in the 1920s and 1930s with the appearance of writers such as Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Flannery OConner, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Penn Warren and others. Thomas Wolfe; Eudora Welty The Southern Renaissance is featured in its unique feeling of guilt, failure and poverty as well. Southern Myths 　a. Chevalier heritage 　b. Agrarian virtue 　c. Plantation aristocracy 　d. Lost cause 　e. White supremacy 　f. Purity of womanhood William Cuthbert Faulkner Originally Falkner, a southerner from Mississippi, a “provincial” writer with his emphasis on the Southern subjects and consciousness, mainly in his imaginary Yoknapatawpha County—an allegory or a parable of the Old South. To reveal “the human heart in conflict with itself”, not just of the American Southern society, but of entire mankind. The Yoknapatawpha County Series The fate of a ruined homeland and dehumanized man in the mechanized, industrialized society: The Pattern of Yoknapatawpha Series Faulkner exemplified T. S. Eliot’s concept of modern society as a wasteland in a dramatic way. People were forced to cultivate false values and decrease those essential human values such as courage, fortitude, honesty and goodness. The man who adapted to the modern society had lost his natural response to life, become incapable of love, mean, money-minded, and spiritually dead. The past and the present, nature and society are always juxtaposed. The Tragic Man vs. the Primitive Man Almost all his heroes turn out to be tragic, because they are prisoners of the past, or of the society, or of some social and moral taboos, or of their own introspective personalities. The society eliminates man’s chance of responding naturally to the experiences of his existence. The primitive man is not conditioned by the civilization and social institutions, accepts the life