Part5: Americannovel of romanticism                                                              5课时

1. 教学内容：文学史导读，文学选读赏析，文学术语介绍，文学练习阐释，文学创作实践。

       (1) Washington Irving: Rip Van Winkle

       (2) James Fenimore Cooper: The Last ofthe Mohicans

       (3) Edgar Allan Poe: The Fall of theHouse of Usher

       (4) Nathaniel Hawthorne: Scarlet Letter（思政融入点：认识清教思想）

       (5) Herman Melville: Moby Dick

2. 基本要求：了解美国浪漫主义见证了美国文学逐步走向成熟，这一时期人才济济，

百家争鸣，各种思潮层出不穷：超验主义、神秘主义、心理分析、女权主义等。

3. 教学重点：通过文学阅读了解美国文学逐步摆脱模仿欧洲文学传统，并且在清教主

义和超验主义的影响下，结合美国人民西进运动的生活经验，开始具有鲜明的美国特

色和真正的原创性。

4. 教学难点：通过文学阐释认识美国小说家争取自由平等的努力，和对人物内心世界

的关注，以及美国文学给世界文坛带来的诸如侦探小说的文学体裁。

Washington Irving: Rip Van Winkle

One of the first writers to take advantage of the greater opportunities for publication that were opening up, and in the process become one of the first American writers to achieve international fame, was Washington Irving (1783–1859). Irving established his reputation with Salmagundi; or, The Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff Esq., and Others(1807–1808), a series of satirical miscellanies concerned with New York society that ran to twenty numbers. The leading essays were written by Irving, his brothers, and James Kirke Paulding (1778–1860), all members of a group known as the “Nine Worthies” or “Lads of Kilkenny” of “Cockloft Hall.” Federalist in politics, conservative in social principles, and comic in tone, they included one piece by Irving, “Of the Chronicles of the Renowned and Antient City of Gotham” that supplied New York City with its enduring nickname of Gotham. A Brief History of American Literature Richard Gray © 2011 Richard Gray. ISBN: 978-1-405-19231-6 Irving was now famous as an author, wit, and man of society, and to consolidate his reputation he published A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (1809) under the pen name of Diedrich Knickerbocker. Often regarded as the first important work of comic literature written by an American, it initiated the term “Knickerbocker School” for authors like Irving himself, Paulding, Fitz-Greene Hallek (1790–1867), and Joseph Rodman Drake (1795–1820), who wrote about “little old New York” in the years before the Civil War. Then, in 1820, he published his most enduring work, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., a collection of essays and sketches that was enormously successful in both England and the United States. The Sketch Book contains two small masterpieces that initiated the great tradition of the American short story, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Four other sketches are also set in America, but most of the other pieces are descriptive and thoughtful essays on England, where Irving was still living. Both “Rip Van Winkle” and “Sleepy Hollow” have origins in German folklore. Irving admits as much in a “Note” to the first tale. Both also owe a debt, in terms of stylistic influence, to Sir Walter Scott. Nevertheless, both exploit their specifically American settings and create American myths: they explore the social and cultural transformations occurring in America at the time in terms that are at once gently whimsical and perfectly serious. In “Rip Van Winkle,” the lazy, henpecked hero of the story ventures into the Catskill Mountains of New York State to discover there some little men in Dutch costume bowling at ninepins. Taking many draughts of some strange beverage they have brewed, he falls into a deep sleep. When he returns to his village, after waking up, he eventually realizes that twenty years have passed, the Revolution has been and gone, and that, “instead of being a subject of his Majesty George the Third, he was now a free citizen of the United States.” The news naturally takes a long time to sink in; and, at first, when he is surrounded in his homeplace by people whom he does not recognize and who do not recognize him, he begins to doubt his own identity. His dilemma is a gently comic response to traumatic change; and it offers a genial reflection in miniature of the sudden, disconcerting process of alteration – and possible reactions to it – experienced by the nation as a whole. A similar transposition of American history into American legend occurs in “Sleepy Hollow.” This story of how the superstitious hero, Ichabod Crane, was bested by the headless horseman of Brom Bones, an extrovert Dutchman and Crane’s rival in love, allows Irving to parody several forms of narrative, among them tall tales, ghost stories, and the epic. But it also permits him, once again, to reflect on change and to present a vanishing America, which is the setting for this story, as an endangered pastoral ideal. The tendency towards a more lyrical, romantic strain suggested by Irving’s evocation of the sleepy hollow where Ichabod Crane lived became a characteristic of his later work. Irving’s subsequent career was erratic, and he never recovered the wit and fluency of his early style. Nevertheless, in his best work, he was a creator of significant American myths: narratives that gave dramatic substance to the radical changes of the time, and the nervousness and nostalgia those changes often engendered. Perhaps he was so effective in fashioning those myths because the nervousness about the new America, and nostalgia for the old – and, beyond that, for Europe – were something that he himself felt intensely. He was writing himself, and the feelings he typified, into legend.

Preview questions:

1. Give a summary and an analysis of“Rip Van Winkle”.

2. What is the purpose of the author to arrange for Rip to sleep for twenty years?

3. What do you think Rip and his wife symbolize respectively?