Part 9: Americannovel since 1945                                                                         2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) Jerome Salinger: The Cather in theRye

       (2) Toni Morrison: The Bluest Eye（思政融入点：美国的种族歧视）

2. 基本要求：战后的美国作家展现了美国社会的多面性，为冲破过去的束缚，后现代主义是

这一时期的主要思潮。后现代主义延续了现代主义异化的情绪和迷失的方法，放弃了在碎片

化的世界中对艺术连贯性的坚定追求。

3. 教学重点：掌握现代主义对叙事视角的灵活运用，现代主义作家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：了解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。

 Jerome Salinger: The Cather in the Rye

A writer who made the unfulfillment of that dream of success his primary subject is J. D. Salinger. Salinger began writing stories for magazines, which he did not choose to collect, before World War II. His first book, however, and his most famous, was a novel, The American Century: Literature since 1945 293 The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951. Its opening words, “If you really want to know about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born,” introduces us to Holden Caulfield. It also introduces us, in an intimate, immediate way that is characteristic of so much American writing, to the troubles and contradictions of Holden’s life. Holden is an unhappy teenager who runs away from boarding school. Lonely, quixotic, compassionate, he is plagued by the “phoniness” of his environment. And in the book, he tells the story of his flight to New York and his eventual nervous breakdown. It turns out, in the end, that he is recalling all this from a sanatorium. The title of the novel refers to his desire to preserve innocence: not his own – that, he senses, is already lost – but the innocence of those still to grow up. He has to stop them from experiencing a fall that recalls both the mythical fall of Adam and Eve into knowledge and the universal fall from innocence into experience, childhood into adulthood. Images of falling and flight pervade The Catcher in the Rye. Holden dreams of heading West or lighting out for the country; he cherishes anywhere that time seems to stand still. Equally, he fears any kind of fall, for himself and others; at one point, he even finds it difficult, frightening, to step down from the pavement on to the street. The novel is a triumph in the vernacular and confessional modes, drawing the reader into the narrator’s resistance to the world that surrounds him and, he feels, threatens to stifle him. It also offers us a hero who, in his sadly contracted way, reminds us of the many other rebels and dreamers, grotesque saints and would-be saviors that populate American fiction. In particular, Holden recalls Huckleberry Finn. Like Huck, Holden is an outsider who dislikes system and distrusts authority; like Huck, too, he has to make his way through a world of hypocrisy and deceit that seems to threaten him at every turn. The differences between the two, however, are as important as the connections; and these have to do with the simple facts that Holden is a little older, much richer than Huck and moves in an urban environment – an America where there is no longer any frontier to which the hero can flee. Huck has an innocent eye. Holden is more knowing, more judgmental and more deeply implicated – whether he likes it or not – in the “phoney” circumstances he describes. Above all, the clarity and candor that characterize Huck, who is a truthteller, are replaced by a deep unease, uncertainty. Holden is confused; and, as his apparently spontaneous recollections of a crisis in his life make clear, he is not sure what the truth about himself and his world is. That uncertainty is in turn part of the attraction of the book, and its modernity. The Catcher in the Rye draws us into a sometimes painfully close relationship with a narrator, who is simultaneously confessional and defensive, longing to reveal himself but fearful of dropping the mask – and not, perhaps, sure what that self is. So, we feel, we know Holden and we do not know him: he is an intimate and a mystery. After The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger produced several collections of stories (Nine Stories (1953), Franny and Zooey (1961), Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963)). Many of them concerned the Glass family and, in particular, the lonely, brilliant eccentric individualists, Franny, Zooey, Seymour, and Buddy Glass. In the early 1960s, however, he retired to his rural home, withdrew from the literary scene, and stopped publishing his work. Richard Brautigan did not withdraw in this way but, before committing suicide in 1984, he gradually slipped from public view. Although he continued publishing into the early 1980s, his most 294 The American Century: Literature since 1945 successful work had appeared a decade or so earlier: A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964), Trout Fishing in America (1963), In Watermelon Sugar (1968), and The Abortion: An Historical Romance (1971). Trout Fishing in America is characteristic. It describes the search of the narrator for a morning of good fishing in a crystal-clear stream. His search takes him through a variety of American landscapes: city parks in San Francisco, forests in Oregon, a Filipino laundry, a wrecking yard that sells used trout streams by the foot. Surreal and anarchic, whimsical and nostalgic, the narrative is at once a critique of a culture that has betrayed its early promise – where the dream of trout fishing has become a purchaseable commodity – and a celebration of continuing possibility, the anarchic, unbowed spirit of the individual. This is the book as fictional play: a typographical game eschewing plot or structure of any ordinary kind, using surprise and spontaneity to make its central point. The point is a simple and very American one: we can be whatever we want to be, do whatever we want to do, whatever the destructive element that surrounds us. To that extent, thanks to the liberating imagination, trout fishing in America is still possible. 

Preview questions:

1. How does the author display his gift for dialogue in the novel of The Cather in the Rye?

2. Describe the main character Holden Caulfield's fixation on childhood. Explain how he struggles through teenage life because he cannot accept the responsibilities that come with growing up.

3. What are the recurring themes in Salinger's stories ?