1．The Age of Realism (How to define the Realistic Period in American literary history?)
The period ranging from 1865 to l914 has been referred to as the Age of Realism in the 1iterary history of the United States, which is actually a movement or tendency that dominated the spirit of American literature, especia1ly American fiction, from the 1850s onwards. Realism was a reaction against Romanticism or a move away from the bias towards romance and self-creating fictions, and it paved the way to Modernism. Instead of thinking about the irrational, the imaginative, realists touched upon social and political realities and pressures in the post-Civil war society. Three dominant figures are William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James.
2.The historical and socio-cultural background of American Realism
The American society after the Civil War provided rich soil for the rise and deve1opment of Realism. This period is characterized with changes, in relation to every aspect of American life, politically, economically, culturally, and religiously. First of all, politically, the Civil War affected both the social and the value system of the country. America had transformed itse1f into an industria1ized and commercialized society. Wilderness gave way to civilization. The burgeoning economy and industry stepped up urbanization. However, economically, the changes were not all for the better. The industrialization and the urbanization were accompanied by the incalculable sufferings of the laboring people. Therefore, polarization of the wellbeing between the poor and the rich started to
show up. Thirdly, as far as the ideology was concerned, people became dubious about the human nature and the benevo1ence of God, which the Transcendentalists cared most. What Mark Twain referred to as “ the Gi1ded Age” replaced the frontier and the spirit of the frontiersman, which is the spirit of freedom and human connection. Fourthly, the literary scene after the Civi1 War proved to be quite different a picture. The harsh rea1ities of life as well as the disillusion of heroism resulting from the dark memories of the Civil War had set the nation against the romance. The Americans began to be tired of the sentimental feelings of Romanticism. Thus, started a new period in the American literary writings known as the Age of Realism, characterized by a great interest in the realities of life.
1.What is Realism?
In art and literature, Realism refers to an attempt to describe human behavior and surroundings or to represent figures exactly as they act or appear in life. Realism emerged as a literary movement in Europe in the 1850s. In reaction to Romanticism, realistic writers should set down their observations impartially and objectively. They insisted on accurate documentation, sociological insight, and avoidance of poetic diction and idealization. The subjects were to be taken from everyday life, preferably from lower-class life. Realism entered American literature after the Civil War. William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James were the pioneers of realism in the U.S.
2.The literary characteristics of the Realistic Period in American literature
Guided by the principle of adhering to the truthful treatment of 1ife, the realists touched upon various contemporary social and political issues. In their works, instead of writing about the polite, we11--dressed, grammatica1ly correct middle--class young people who moved in exotic places and remote times, they introduced industrial workers and farmers, ambitious businessmen and vagrants, prostitutes and unheroic soldiers as major characters in fiction. They approached the harsh realities and pressures in the post-Civil War society either by a comprehensive picture of modern life in its various occupations, c1ass stratifications and manners, or by a psychological exploration of man's subconsciousness.
The three dominant figures of the period are William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James. Together they brought to fulfillment native trends in the realistic portrayal of the 1andscape and social surfaces, brought to perfection the vernacular style, and explored and exploited the literary possibilities of the interior life.
The major writers in the Realistic Period
I. Mark Twain (1835--19l0) 马克·吐温
Mark Twain is a great literary giant of America, whom H.L.Mencken considered “the true father of our national literature.” With works like Adventure of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Life on the Mississippi (1883) Twain shaped the world’s view of America and made a more extensive combination of
American folk humor and serious literature than previous writers had ever done.
（一）一般识记
Mark Twain’s life and writing:
Mark Twain, Pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was born on November 30, 1835, in Missouri, and grew up in the river town of Hannibal. After his father died, he began to seek his own fortune .He once worked as a journeyman printer, a steamboat pilot, a newspaper colunist and as a deadpan lecturer. Twain's writing took the form of humorous journalism of the time, and it ennabled him to master the technique of narration.
(二) 识记
Mark Twain’s major works:1.《汤姆·索亚历险记》（The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876）这部小说通常被认为是一个儿童故事；它围绕汤姆和他的伙伴展开。夏日里汤姆与波莉姨妈生活在沉寂的密西西比河沿岸的一个村庄里。在那儿，他和小伙伴哈克以及乔进行了一系列的冒险活动。他们目睹了尹俊·乔犯下的恐怖谋杀。在揭露了乔的罪行后，汤姆回到学校，并成为穆夫·波特案的英雄。尹俊死后，他的财宝被汤姆和哈克平分，后者由寡妇道格拉斯收养。马克·吐温把汤姆变成为了美国儿童的英雄人物，该小说也像《独立宣言》一样成为学校的经典读物。在更大的程度上，马克·吐温通过讲述这个故事，实现了他和其他成人关于理想的孩童时代的梦想。童年时代的所有残酷与恐惧、好奇与喜悦都得到了淋漓尽致的体现.
2.《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》（Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884）
3. 《亚瑟王朝中的康涅狄格》（A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, 1889
In l865, he pub1ished his frontier tale “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” which brought him recognition from a wider public. But his full literary career began to blossom in 1869 with a travel book Innocents Abroad, an account of American tourists in Europe which pokes fun at the pretentious, decadent and undemocratic Old World in a satirical tone. Mark Twain’s best works were produced when he was in the prime of his life. All these masterworks drew upon the scenes and emotions of his boyhood and youth. The first among these books is Roughing It (1872), in which Twain describes a journey that works its way farther west. Life on the Mississippi tells a story of his boyhood ambition to become a riverboat pilot. Two of the best books during this period are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The former is usually regarded as a classic book written for boys about their particular horrors and joys, while the latter, being a boy’s book specially written for the adults, is Twain’s most representative work, describing a journey down the Mississippi undertaken by two fugitives, Huck and Jim. Their episodic set of encounters presents a sample of the social world from the bank of the river that runs through the heart of the country.
His social satire is The Gilded Age, written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner. The novel explored the scrupulous individualism in a world of
fantastic speculation and unstable values, and gave its name to the get-rich-quick years of the post-Civil War era. Twain’s dark view of the society became more self-evident in the works published later in his life. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), a parable of colonialization. A similar mood of despair permeates The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), which shows the disastrous effects of slavery on the victimizer and the victim alike and reveals to us a Mark Twain whose conscience as a white Southerner was tormented by fear and remorse. By the turn of the century, with the publication of The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg (l900) and The Mysterious Stranger (1916), the change in Mark Twain from an optimist to an almost despairing pessimist could be felt and his cynicism and disillusionment with what Twain referred to regularly as the “damned human race” became obvious.
(三) 领会
1.Twain as a local colorist(地方色彩)
Twain is also known as a local colorist, who preferred to present social life through portraits of the local characters of his regions, including people living in that area, the landscape, and other peculiarities like the customs, dialects, costumes and so on. Consequently, the rich material of his boyhood experience on the Mississippi became the endless resources for his fiction, and the Mississippi
valley and the West became his major theme. Unlike James and Howe1ls,
Mark Twain wrote about the lower-class people, because they were the people he knew so we1l ancl their 1ife was the one he himself had lived. Moreover he successfully used local color and historical settings to i1lustrate and shed light on the contemporary society.
2.His use of vernacular
Another fact that made Twain unique is his magic power with language, his use of vernacular. His words are col1oquial, concrete and direct in effect, and his sentence structures are simp1e, even ungrammatical, which is typical of the spoken 1anguage. And Twain skillfully used the colloquialism to cast his protagonists in their everyday life. What's more, his characters, confined to a particular region and to a particular historical moment, speak with a strong accent, which is true of his 1ocal colorism. Besides, different characters from different literary or cultural backgrounds talk differently, as is the case with Huck, Tom, and Jim. Indeed, with his great mastery and effective use of vernacular, Twain has made colloquial speech an accepted, respectable 1iterary medium in the literary history of the country. His style of language was later taken up by his descendants, Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, and influenced generations of letters.
3.His humor
Mark Twain's humor is remarkable, too. It is fun to read Twain to begin with, for most of his works tend to be funny, containing some practical jokes, comic
details, witty remarks, etc., and some of them are actually tall ta1es. By considering his experience as a newspaperman, Mark Twain shared the popu1ar image of the American funny man whose punning, facetious, irreverenl articles filled the newspapers, and a great deal of his humor is characterized by puns, straight-faced exaggeration, repetition, and anti-climax, let alone tricks of travesty and invective. However, his humor is not only of witty remarks mocking at small things or of farcical elements making people laugh, but a kind of artistic style used to criticize the social injustice and satirize the decayed romanticism.
Ⅱ. Henry James (1843-1916 )亨利·詹姆斯
Henry James was the first American writer to conceive his career in international terms. Today with the development of the modern novel and the common acceptance of the Freudian approach, his importance, as well as his wide influence as a novelist and critic, has been all the more conspicuous.
(一) 一般识记
His life and writing:
Henry James was born in New York City. His father was a theological writer and his elder brother was the distinguished philosopher and psycho1ogist Wil1iam James, who made a great contribution to the theory of the stream-of-consciousness technique. James was one of the few authors in the American literary history who was not ob1iged to work for a living. He exposed early to an
international society. In 1862, he entered Harvard Law School where he developed a lifelong friendship with William Dean Howells. There he read intensively Balzac, Merimee , George Sand, George Eliot and Hawthorne. Later, he toured Europe and met Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola and Turgenev, who exerted a great influence on him. While Mark Twain and William Dean Howells satirized European manners at times, Henry James was an admirer of ancient European civilization. The materialistic bent of American life and its lack of culture and sophistication, he believed, cou1d not provide him with enough materials for great literary works, so he settled down in London in 1876, and in 1915 he became a naturalized British citizen.
二．识记
His major works:（1）《美国人》（The American, 1877）（2）《贵妇画像》（The Portrait of a Lady, 1881）这是一个关于美国姑娘，伊莎贝尔·阿切尔的故事。她来到英国，立即吸引了老托契特先生、他体弱的儿子拉尔夫，以及他们富有的邻居沃伯顿公爵。卡斯坡·古德伍德，一个真诚而执着的美国追求者，也来到英国。老托契特死后，伊莎贝尔成了富有的继承人。在佛罗伦萨，她遇到默尔夫人，既而结识了吉伯特·奥斯蒙德，一个美国鳏夫。未能识破奥斯蒙德对她财产的企图，她嫁给了他并照料他纤弱的女儿，潘西。仍然爱着伊莎贝尔的沃伯顿经常来拜访她，试图娶潘西为妻。潘西表示她并不喜欢这桩婚事，所以伊莎贝尔回绝了沃伯顿的要求。而这又加大了她与丈夫之间的分歧，并被丈夫指责为与沃伯顿有不正当的关系。拉尔夫病危，伊莎贝尔回到英国。她不想再回意大利了，尤其是知道了潘西的母亲就是默尔夫人之后。拉尔夫去世后，她又遇到了卡斯坡，并承认了自己对他的感情。但良心和责任感使她无法抛下潘西，于是她放弃了卡斯坡而回到那个不幸的家。 这部小说可谓是詹姆斯的代表作，并将他的文学生涯推向顶峰。读完小说，
读者们或许要问为什么伊莎贝尔在可以选择第二次幸福时还毅然回到旧的不幸生活中去？事实上，她返回罗马并不是出于对奥斯蒙德的责任，而是对自我负责——这时的自我已不再是天真幼稚，纯洁单一，而是有了经历与体验，处于更高层次的纯真。现在她已经看到了世上的邪恶，并做好了勇敢面对的准备。因此，小说本身并不是悲剧；它令人信服的现实主义一部分源于它拒绝一个幸福美好的结局，甚至对 “正确的道路”能带来幸福不作任何暗示。但它带来了人性的满足与自由——自由来自于不屈服世俗的统治，来自于对服务于完美自由的爱情力量的拥抱（3）《拧紧螺丝》（The Turn of the Screw, 1898）
三．领会
1. James’s international theme:
James's fame generally rests upon his nove1s and stories with the international theme. These nove1s are always set against a large international background, usual1y between Europe and America, and centered on the confrontation of the two different cu1tures with two different groups of peop1e representing two different value systems. American personalities of naivety, innocence, enthusiasm, vulgarity, ignorance, unsophistication, freshness, eagerness to learn, freedom, individuality are in contact and contrast with European personalities of over-refinement, degeneration, artificiality, complexity, high cultivation, urbanity. James admire European cultures. The typical pattern of the conf1ict between the two cultures wou1d be that of a young American man or an American gir1 who goes to Europe and affronts his or her destiny. The unsophisticated boy or girl wou1d be beguiled, betrayed, cruelly wronged at the hands of those who pretend to stand for the highest possible civilization.
Marriage and 1ove are used by James as the focal point of the confrontation between the two value systems, and the protagonist usual1y goes through a painful process of a spiritual growth, gaining knowledge of good and evil from the conflict: However, we may misinterpret Henry James if we think he makes an antithesis, in his international novels, of American innocence versus European corruption.
2.James’s literary criticism (The theme of “The Art of Fiction”)
James's literary criticism is an indispensable part of his contribution to literature. It is both concerned with form and devoted to human values. The theme of his essay “The Art of Fiction” clearly indicates that the aim of the novel is to present life, so it is not surprising to find in his writings human experiences explored in every possible form: illusion, despair, reward, torment, inspiration, delight, etc. He also advocates the freedom of the artist to write about anything that concerns him, even the disagreeable, the ugly and the commonplace. The artist should be able to \"feel\" the life, to understand human nature, and then to record them in his own art form.''
3. James’s realism (psychological realism)
James’s realism is characterized by his psychological approach to his subject matter. His fictional world is concerned more with the inner life of human beings than with overt human actions. His best and most mature works will render the drama of individual consciousness and convey the moment-to-moment sense of
human experience as bewilderment and discovery. And we observe people and events filtering through the individual consciousness and participate in his experience. This emphasis on psychology and on the human consciousness proves to be a big breakthrough in novel writing and has great influence on the coming generations. James is generally regarded as the forerunner of the 20th century \"stream-of-consciousness\" novels and the founder of psychological realism.
4.James’s narrative point of view
One of James's literary techniques innovated to cater for this psychological emphasis is his narrative “point of view.” James avoids the authorial omniscience as much as possible and makes his characters reveal themselves with his minimal intervention. So it is often the case that in his novels we usually learn the main story by reading through one or severa1 minds and share their perspectives. This narrative method proves to be successful in bringing out his themes.
5. His language
James is not so easy to understand. He is often highly refined and insightful. With a large vocabulary, he is always accurate in word selection, trying to find the
best expression for his literary imagination .Therefore Henry James is not only one of themost important realists of the period before the First World War,
but also the most expert stylist of his time.
Ⅲ. Emily Dickinson (1830-l886) 艾米莉·狄金森
一、一般识记
Dickinson’s life and writing
Miss Emi1y Dickinson was born into a Calvinist family of Amherst, Massachusetts. She attended Amherst Academy for seven years and suffered serious religious crisis. After affected by an unhappy 1ove affair with Reverend Charles Wadsworth, she became a total recluse, 1iving a normal New England village life only with her family. Her private life was pretty much in order. She wrote poetry, and read intensively by herself. Her favorite writers were Keats, the Brontes, the Brownings, and George E1iot; classic myths, the Bible, and Shakespeare were what Emily drew commonly on for allusions and references in her poetry and letters. She also drew intellectua1 resources from her contemporary American, Thoreau and Emerson. In general, Dickinson wanted to live simply as a complete independent being, and as a spinster.
Dickinson's poetry writing began in the early 1850s. Altogether she wrote 1,775 poems, of which only seven had appeared during her 1ifetime. Most of her poems were published after her death. Her fame kept rising. She is now recognized not only as a great poetess on her own right but as a poetess of considerable influence upon American poetry of the 20th century.
二．识记
Dicksinson’s poems:
(1) Her religious poems: she wrote about her doubt and be1ief about religious subjects. While she desired salvation and immortality, she denied the orthodox view of paradise. Although she believed in God, she sometimes doubted His benevolence.
(2)Her poems concerning death and immortality: These poems are closely related to her religious poetry, ranging over the physical as well as the psychological and emotional aspects of death. She showed her ambiguous attitude towards death and immortality. She looked at death from the point of view of both the living and the dying. She even imagined her own death, the loss of her own body, and the journey of her soul to the unknown. Perhaps her greatest rendering of the moment of death is to be found in \"I heard a Fly buzz -- when I died --\
(3)Her love poems: Love is another subject Dickinson dwelt on. One group of her love poems treats the suffering and frustration love can cause. These poems are clear1y the reflection of her own unhappy experience, closely re1ated to her deepest and most private feelings. Many of them are striking and original depictions of the longing for shared moments, the pain of separation, and the futility of finding happiness. The other group of 1ove poems focuses on the physical aspect of desire, in which Dickinson dealt with, allegorically, the influence
of the male authorities over the female, emphasizing the power of physica1 attraction and expressing a mixture of fear and fascination for the mysterious magnetism between sexes. However, it is those poems dealing with marriage that have aroused critical attention first and showed Dickinson's confusion and doubt about the role of women in the 19th century America.
(4)Her nature poems: More than 500 of her poems are about nature, in which her general skepticism about the relationship between man and nature is well-expressed. On the one hand, she shared with her romantic and transcendental predecessors who believed that a mythical bond between man and nature existed, that nature revealed to man things about mankind and universe. On the other hand, she felt strongly about nature's inscrutability and indifference to the life and interests of human beings. However, Dickinson managed to write about nature in the affirmation of the sheer joy and the appreciation, unaffected by philosophical speculations. Her acute observations, her concern for precise details and her interest in nature are pervasive, from sketches of flowers, insects, birds, to the sunset, the fully detailed summer storms, the change of seasons; from keen perception to witty ana1ysis.
三．领会
The thematic concerns and the original artistic features of Dickinson's poetry:
1．Themes: Dicksinson’s poems are usually based on her own experiences, her sorrows and joys. But within her litlle lyrics Dickinson addresses those issues
that concern the whole human beings, which include religion, death, immortality, love, and nature.
2．Artistic features: Her poetry is unique and unconventional in its own way. Her poems have no titles, hence are always quoted by their first lines. In her poetry there is a particular stress pattern, in which dashes are used as a musica1 device to create cadence and capital letters as a means of emphasis. Most of her poems borrow the repeated four-line, rhymed stanzas of traditional Christian hymns, with two lines of four-beat meter alternating with two lines of three-beat meter. A master of imagery that makes the spiritual materialize in surprising ways, Dickinson managed manifold variations within her simple form: She used imperfect rhymes, subtle breaks of rhythm, and idiosyncratic syntax and punctuation to create fascinating word puzzles, which have produced greatly divergent interpretations over the years. Dickinson’s irregular or sometimes inverted sentence structure also confuses readers. However, her poetic idiom is noted for its laconic brevity, directness and plainness. Her poems are usually short, rarely more than twenty lines, and many of them are centered on a single image or symbo1 and focused on one subject matter. Due to her deliberate sec1usion, her poems tend to be very personal and meditative. She frequently uses personae to render the tone more familiar to the reader, and personification to vivify some abstract ideas. Dickinson's poetry, despite its ostensible formal simplicity, is remarkable for its variety, subtlety and richness; and her limited private world has never confined the limitless power of her creativity and imagination.
《当我死的时候，我听到苍蝇在嗡嗡叫》(“I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died”) （A）主题(Theme) 这首诗描绘了说话人临终时的景象。与很多同时代的人一样，狄金森对死亡的经历十分着迷。她问过不同的人，“人是怎么死的？”并且她想知道人们的死是否会揭示死后生活的任何信息。在诗中，她想象着自己的死亡；她所提供的死亡之前的景象十分灰暗，是她所描述过的最灰暗的场景。 在集中描写死的情景时，苍蝇的嗡嗡声由于屋中的寂静而显得格外响亮，成为说话人最后听到的声音。这种夸张十分平常，是幻觉的一种。但在此又让人觉得恐怖，因为它打碎了我们所有的期待。死亡应该是可敬畏的体验，因为，此时灵魂被上帝带走而与肉体分离。因此周围的人都在等待着上帝（或死神）的降临，而说话人也将一切所有都分给他人，只静等上帝带走她的灵魂，或死神带走她的肉体。 狄金森不是正统的基督徒，她无法相信这样的事实，即那位对邪恶不闻不问的残忍的上帝会把身边的很多人带进天堂。她也不完全相信死后的生活。她关于死亡的诗都在探索死亡与永生的本质。“当我死的时候，我听到苍蝇在嗡嗡地叫”描绘了死亡的瞬间。但具有讽刺意味的是，死者看到的不是天使，不是上帝，也不是死神，而只是一只苍蝇，一只微不足道、令人厌恶的昆虫。当眼睛合上时，什么都不存在了。这里，狄金森似乎否认任何超自然力量的存在。 （B）选篇汉语译文 (The Chinese translation of the selected poem)《我听到苍蝇的嗡嗡声——当我死时》 我听到苍蝇的嗡嗡声——当我死时 房间里，一片沉寂 就像空气突然平静下来—— 在风暴的间隙 注视我的眼睛——泪水已经流尽—— 我的呼吸正渐渐变紧 等待最后的时刻——上帝在房间里 现身的时刻——降临 我已经分掉了——关于我的 所有可以分掉的 东西——然后我就看见了 一只苍蝇—— 蓝色的——微妙起伏的嗡嗡声 在我——和光——之间 然后窗户关闭——然后 我眼前漆黑一片——
《为我不能停步等候死神》(“Because I could not stop for Death”) （A）主题 (Theme) 在这首诗中，狄金森主要关心的是死亡与永生。诗中说话的人回忆她死时的情景。死神和善而有礼貌。永生与死亡相伴，所以当她乘车走向死亡时，她也就是在迈向永
生。死亡即永生，这就是狄金森对死亡与永生之间神秘关系的看法。
翻译 因为我不能停步等候死神—— 他殷勤停车接我—— 车厢里只有我们俩—— 还有\"永生\"同座。 我们缓缓而行，他知道无需急促—— 我也抛开劳作 和闲暇，以回报 他的礼貌—— 我们经过学校，恰逢课间休息—— 孩子们正喧闹，在操场上—— 我们经过注目凝视的稻谷的田地—— 我们经过沉落的太阳—— 也许该说，是他经过我们而去—— 露水使我颤抖而且发凉—— 因为我的衣裳，只是薄纱—— 我的披肩，只是娟网—— 我们停在一幢屋前，这屋子 仿佛是隆起的地面—— 屋顶，勉强可见—— 屋檐，低于地面—— 从那时算起，已有几个世纪—— 却似乎短过那一天的光阴—— 那一天，我初次猜出 马头，朝向永恒—
Ⅳ.Theodore Dreiser (l87l-1945 ) 西奥多·德莱塞
Theodore Dreiser is generally acknowledged as one of America's literary naturalists. He possessed none of the usual aids to a writer’s career: no money, no friend in power, no formal education worthy of mention, no family tradition in letters. With every disadvantage piled upon him, Dreiser, by his strong will and his dogged persistence, eventually burst out and became one of the important American writers.
一、 一般识记
Dreiser’s life and writing:
Theodore Dreiser was born in Terre Hante, Indiana, into a poor and intensely
re1igious family. He had a very unhappy chi1dhood. Dreiser had some education at a Catholic school in Terre Hante, and later went to a public school of Warsaw, Indiana, and then spent a year at Indiana University. Dreiser read voraciously by himself. He immersed himself in Dickens and Thackeray, read widely Shakespeare, and tasted Bunyan, Fielding, Pope, Thoreau, Emerson, and Twain, but his true literary influences were from Balzac, Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. From the age of fifteen, Dreiser began to work on his own, earning a meager support by doing some odd jobs. He had longed to become a writer, so he went up to Chicago afterwards and made a beginning by placing himself with one of Chicago's newspapers, where he learned by experience. Later on, he slowly groped his way to authorship. During the last two decades of his 1ife Dreiser turned away from fiction and involved himself in political activities and debating writing. He joined the Communist Party shortly before his death in 1945.
二．识记
His major works:
Dreiser is a prolific writer. Among his works, Sister Carrie (1900) is the best-known, tracing the material rise of Carrie Meeber and the tragic decline of G. W. Hurstwood. In his ear1y period some of his best short fictions were written, among which are Nigger Jeff and Old Rogaum and His Theresa. In l9l1, Jennie Gerhardt came out, followed by two volumes of his “Trilogy of Desire,” The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914), the third, The Stoic, being published posthumously in 1947. The Genius (19l5), a c1assic story of a “misunderstood
artist,” was once condemned for “obscenity and blasphemy,”remained unpublished unti1 1923. In 1925 Dreiser's greatest work The American Tragedy appeared. But it was banned in Boston in 1927. In 1927 he accepted an invitation to visit Russia and wrote Dreiser Looks at Russia the following year.
三．领会
1.Dreiser’s literary naturalism (or American naturalism):
With the publication of Sister Carrie, Dreiser became one of the most significant American writers of literary naturalism. As a genre, naturalism emphasized heredity and environment as important deterministic forces shaping individualized characters who were presented in special and detailed circumstances. At bottom, life was shown to be ironic, even tragic. Dreiser described earthly existence as “a welter of inscrutable forces,” in which was trapped each individua1 human being. In his words, Man is a “victim of forces over which he has no control.” To him, life is \"so sad, so strange, so mysterious and so inexplicable.\" No wonder the characters in his books are often subject to the control of the natural forces -- especially those of environment and heredity.
2.The effect of Darwinist idea of \"survival of the fittest\" was shattering. It is not surprising to find in Dreiser's fiction a world of jungle, where “kill or to be killed” was the law.
3.Dreiser’s naturalism in his works:
Dreiser’s naturalism found expression in almost every book he wrote. In Sister Carrie Dreiser expressed his naturalistic pursuit by expounding the purposelessness of 1ife and attacking the conventional moral standards. After a series of incidents and coincidents, Carrie obtains fame and comfort while Hurstwood loses his wealth, social position, pride and eventually his life. In his \"Trilogy of Desire,\" Dreiser's focus shifted from the pathos of the helpless protagonists at the bottom of the society to the power of the American financial tycoons in the late 19th century. An American Tragedy proves to be his greatest work and by entit1ing this book with such a name, Dreiser intended to tell us that it is the social pressure that makes Clyde's downfal1 inevitable. Clyde's tragedy is a tragedy that depends upon the American social system which encouraged people to pursue the \"dream of success\" at all costs.
4.Dreiser’s exploration of human desire and revelation of the dark side of human nature:
From the first novel Sister Carrie on, Dreiser set himself to project the American values for what he had found them to be --materialistic to the core. Living in such a society with such a value system, the human individual is obsessed with a never-ending, yet meaningless search for satisfaction of his desires. One of the desires is for money which was a motivating purpose of life in the United States in the late l9th century. For example, in Sister Carrie, there is not one character whose status is not determined economically. Sex is another human desire that Dreiser explored to considerab1e lengths in his novels to reveal the dark side of human nature. In Sister Carrie, Carrie climbs up the social
ladder by means of her sexual appeal. Also in the “Trilogy of Desire,” the possession of sexual beauty symbolizes the acquisition of some social status of great magnitude. However, Dreiser never forgot to imply that these human desires in 1ife could hardly be defined. They are there like a powerful \"magnetism\" governing human existence and reducing human beings to nothing. So like all naturalists he was restrained from finding a solution to the social problems that appeared in his novels and accordingly almost all his works have tragic endings.
5.Dreiser's style
Dreiser's style has been a controversial aspect of his work from the beginning. For lack of concision, his writings appear more inclusive and less selective, and the readers are sometimes burdened with massive detailed descriptions of characters and events. Though the time sequence is clear and the plot straigt forward, he has been always accused of being awkward in sentence structure, inept and occasionally flat1y wrong in word selection and meaning, and mixed and disorganized in voice and tone. For him 1anguage is a means of communication rather than an art form. However, Dreiser's contribution to the American literary history cannot be ignored. He broke away from the genteel tradition of literature and dramatized the life in a very realistic way. There is no comment, no judgment but facts of life in the stories. His style is not polished but very serious and well calculated to achieve the thematic ends he sought.
四．应用
An analysis of Sister Carrie:
1. The story of Sister Carrie
Carrie Meeber is the protagonist of the story. Penniless and “full of the illusions of ignorance and youth,” she leaves her rural home to seek work in Chicago. On the train, she becomes acquainted with Charles Drouet, a salesman. In Chicago, she lives with her sister and sister-in-law, and works for a time in a shoe factory. Meager income and terrible work condition oppress her imaginative spirit. After a period of unemployment and loneliness, she accepts Drouet and becomes his mistress. During his absence, she falls in love with Drouet’s friend George Hurstwood, a middle-aged, married, comparatively intelligent and cultured saloon manager. They finally elope, first to Montreal and then to New York. They live together for more than three years. Carrie becomes mature in intellect and emotion, while Hurstwood, away from the atmosphere of success on which his life has been based, steadily declines. So their relations become strained. At last, she thinks him too great a burden and leaves him. Hurstwood sinks lower and lower. After becoming a beggar, he commits suicide, while Carrie becomes a star of musical comedies. But in spite of her success, she is lonely and dissatisfied.
2. The theme of the book:主题 (Themes) “当一个姑娘十八岁时离家出走，她会有两种遭遇：或是遇上好人相助而变得更好，或者很快地传染上大都市的恶习而堕落下去，二者必居其一。在这样的环境里，要想成为不好不坏的人是不可能的。”德莱塞在小说开篇就写下了这样富有哲理性的结论，女主人公将来的生活正是这一结论的恰如其分的扩展。
《嘉莉妹妹》不是一部道德小说，但不可否认它是部严肃的作品。按照一种不可避免的自然法则的判断，作者创造了嘉莉·米贝的成功以及赫斯特伍德的垮台。因为根据社会达尔文主义，在一个竞争激烈的、非道德的社会，只有最能适应的人才能生存
Sister Carrie best embodies Dreiser’s naturalistic belief that men are controlled and conditioned by heredity, environment and chance, but a few extraordinary and unsophisticated human beings refuse to accept their fate wordlessly and instead strive, unsuccessfully, to find meaning and purpose for their existence. Carrie, as one of such, senses that she is merely a cipher in an uncaring world yet seeks to grasp the mysteries of life and thereby satisfies her desires for social status and material comfort. In Sister Carrie, Dreiser expressed his naturalistic pursuit by expounding the purposelessness of life and impotence of men.
3.The last chapter of the novel:
After Carrie deserts Hurstwood, he is in great despair. Feeble and penniless, Hurstwood wanders in a cold winter night with nobody trying to help. Extremely hopeless and totally devastated, he turns the gas on in a cheap lodging-house and ends his life, while at the same time Carrie is rocking comfortably in her luxuriant hotel room before she boards a ship for London.
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