★Part 8: Americannovel of modernism                                                                  6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) Sinclair Lewis: Babbitt

       (2) Francis Scott Fitzgerald: The GreatGatsby

         （思政融入点：拜金主义对人心灵的扭曲）

       (3) William Faulkner: The Sound and theFury

       (4) Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises

       (5) John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath （思政融入点：阶级斗争）

2. 基本要求：了解1914—1939阶段被称为美国的现代主义阶段，这一阶段是继浪漫主义之后

美国文学发展的另一个高峰，见证了美国文学家逐渐赢得世界认可和赞誉。

3. 教学重点：掌握现代主义对叙事视角的灵活运用，强调视角主义在文学创作中的应用，于

是性别、种族、阶级等边缘化的主题就纳入了文学家的视野。现代主义文学使、我们更加广

泛地认识到西方社会的面貌，人类生存的困境，人类对自身心灵的探索。

4. 教学难点：美国现代主义经历了两次世界大战、二十年代的迷惘和三十年代的大萧条，受

动荡的社会生活的影响这一时期的文学强调叙事视角，重视心理刻画，情节碎片化，结局开

放性，为表达理想的幻灭而充满了讽刺和含混，以及对文化他者的强烈兴趣。

 Sinclair Lewis: Babbitt

Lewis and Anderson are both sometimes associated with what has been called “the revolt from the village”: that reaction against smalltown values which characterized many American writers early in the twentieth century. That, however, masks many differences. Sinclair Lewis, for instance, chose the path of satire, a critique of provincial American life, and the middleclass in particular, that became the more tempered the older he grew. His first successful novel, Main Street(1920), tells the story of Carol Kennicott, the young wife of the local doctor in the small town of Gopher Prairie. For her, Gopher and its main street are the epitome of the dullness, the mediocrity of American provincialism: what another character calls “the Village Virus.” Carol revolts against the Village Virus, even fleeing to Washington for a while. But, returning to Gopher Prairie eventually, she admits the dashing of her hopes for reform. So the pattern that characterizes all Lewis’s satires of American provincialism is established: the impulse to escape the restrictions of class or routine leads to flight, but the flight meets with only partial success and is followed by a necessary compromise with convention. In the end, the critique is muted, not least because the last word is given to Carol’s husband, Will Kennicott who, for all his stolidity, is portrayed as honest, hard-working, kindly, and thrifty. In Babbitt (1922), Lewis continued his critique of the American provincial. This time, the setting is Zenith City, boasting three or four hundred thousand inhabitants and towers that “aspired above the morning mist.” But the satirical thrust remains much the same. The central character, George F. Babbitt, is a hollow man, defined by the objects that surround him, his possessions, and determined, in every detail, by the conventions of middle-class dress and behavior and the dull aim of material success. Babbitt is a typical Lewis hero: someone who can neither give himself wholly over to the business of being a businessman nor commit himself fully to the more difficult business of being a man. He has dreams of escaping, which for him are expressed in the feebly romantic visions of a “fairy child” that come to him at random moments. He even makes gestures towards escape. But, like Carol Kennicott, he is eventually absorbed back into the provincial. Defined, once again, by a world of convention and commodity, all he can hope is that his son Ted will not surrender like him. What is striking about Babbitt is that its satirical account of middle-class boosterism and provinciality hovers close to the affectionate. Lewis seems half in love with the thing he mocks. More to the point, there are no values in the book beyond those of the protagonist; and all he has to offer, by way of resistance to the normality of Zenith City, is feeble dreams, sad moments of escape. By the time Lewis came to write Dodsworth (1929), a novel about a retired automobile manufacturer traveling in Europe, the muted, compromised criticism of the middle class that characterized his earlier novels had taken a further turn. The central character, Samuel Dodsworth, is almost wholly admirable. A man who embodies all the solid, practical virtues of the provincial middle class, it is he who truly values not only American sense but European sensibility. By contrast, his wife Fran is Carol Kennicott or the “fairy child” of the earlier novels seen through a glass darkly. It is she at whom the satire is leveled because of her pretentiousness, her failure to appreciate all that is best about her husband and her homeplace. Making It New: 1900–1945 169 Lewis continued to write novels committed to the idea of social and political change: such as Asa Vickers (1933), about a Midwestern girl who becomes a social worker, and It Can’ t Happen Here (1935), a warning about the possibility of fascism in the United States. But, by now, he had returned to a reassertion of those very middle-class, middlebrow, and middle-western standards he had begun by satirizing. Lewis has been called one of the worst writers in modern American literature, yet someone without whose books that literature cannot be imagined, not least because he opened up a new world, that of the middle-class Midwest, to American literature. By contrast, Sherwood Anderson was a deliberate stylist. But he, too, focused his best work on the provincial life of the West. And without that work, too, modern American literature is difficult to imagine, because he introduced new methods of storytelling, in terms of style and narrative focus, and new ways of structuring stories into a cycle. Anderson’s finest book, Winesburg, Ohio, a linked collection of stories, was published in 1919. Set in the small town of the title, the stories in the book acquire some unity through the character of George Willard, a reporter for the local newspaper who has literary ambitions, to whom all the characters gravitate at one time or another. And they gain further unity still from the “hunger” which becomes both narrative source and subject. Winesburg, Ohio, the reader is told, is “The Book of the Grotesque.” Initially, the word grotesque appears to mean some incongruity or other that characterizes all the people the narrator has met. But then, curiously, he suggests that grotesqueness is the product of truth or truths. The different characters whose stories are told in this volume all hunger for something, some “truth” to live by and communicate. Snatching up “the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty,” they take their singular truth, their partial reading of reality as the complete text of the world. Winesburg is a town full of people who have overdeveloped one “truthful” aspect of themselves until it has achieved a disproportion that amounts to falsehood. Such people long to be and belong, to know the love that would give them identity and communality. They also long to communicate their longing, to George Willard in particular; to speak the needs that their “strained, eager” voices and strange behavior can only articulate in a distorted fashion. They are alienated, not only from others, but themselves; and it is this that distresses and disfigures them. What they want, Anderson intimates, is all that is at odds with the piety and provinciality of life in smalltown America. The style in which Anderson tells the stories of the people of Winesburg, or the story of Hugh McVey, the Midwestern protagonist of his best novel, Poor White (1920), is often described as naturalistic. It is, however, more than that. Quiet and modest in tone, idiomatic in diction, attentive to the minute surface details of gesture and behavior, Anderson’s style also makes a virtue of its own awkwardness. And, at its best, as in Winesburg, Ohio, that style enacts the problem of communication while solving it: it dramatizes the hunger to speak of what lies beneath the surface of life, in this case to the reader, and it describes a hunger satisfied. In short, it acknowledges both the difficulty and the possibility of telling the truth. It is this acknowledgment, rather than any particular stylistic traits, that was Anderson’s principal gift to writers like Hemingway and Faulkner, who were to offer, in their work, far more intense but nevertheless related explorations of both the problems and the potential of language. And as with style, so with narrative structure: what Anderson offered here, to the storytellers who followed 170 Making It New: 1900–1945 him, was a fundamental breakaway from plot into mood and meaning. Individually, the stories in Winesburg, Ohio break with the tradition of tightly plotted, linear narrative, in order to tell and retell moments glowing with possible significance. Collectively, they work as a cycle, a group of tales that, to use Anderson’s phrase, “belong together” thanks to their intimations, their latent meaning. Anderson was never to write so well again as he did in his book about Winesburg, although there were some fine collections of stories like The Triumph of the Egg (1921) and Death in the Woods(1933), and novels that made a considerable impact at the time of publication, such as Many Marriages (1923) and Dark Laughter (1925). But with that book, and many of his other tales, he made a difference to American writing: he showed both how minimalist and how meaningful a style could be, and how stories could brim with quietly revealed meaning.

Preview questions:

1.“Babbitt" has entered English vocabulary after Babbitt. What does it refer to?

2. Explain the term of modernism.