全屏显示专题章节

To differentiate them from the forms, modes, sensibilities, and concerns of earlier periods, many of the literary works published from 1970 through the first decade of the twenty-first century have been described with labels such as postconfessional , postfeminist , postracial , postcolonial , poststructural , Postmodernist , and even post-Postmodernist . The common prefix, however, can be misleading. Attached to feminist and racial , for example, it gives the impression that gender and racial equality have been achieved. Postcolonial , too, is misleading: although a nation may be legally independent, it may still be subordinated culturally and economically to another. The writings of many American Indians and Native Hawaiians particularly challenge the idea that colonialism has ended. Even the terms that refer to form suggest a discontinuity of style and theme that is not always helpful or accurate. Postconfessional poets, for example, employ the self-revelatory and personal mode of their predecessors, and Postmodernist and post-Postmodernist writers, like Modernists, emphasize self-consciousness, fragmentation of narrative structures, ambiguity, and dehumanized and decentered subjects. Rather than making a definitive break with the styles and concerns of the previous eras, literature of this period continues to explore themes and ideas related to identity and reality. The nature of that identity and reality have changed, however, leading writers to explore representational modes that include both traditional and innovative elements.

Works published from 1970 onward represent many styles, themes, forms, and modes of delivery. Voices from across the spectrum of American experience offer perspectives not often—or ever—heard in earlier eras of American literature. Writers of various races, ethnicities, social classes, sexual orientations, and geographic regions have reenergized and expanded American writing.

Dominant Genres and Literary Forms

The contemporary period offers such diversity in genres and forms that is difficult to identify any as “dominant”. The novel continues to be popular, with writers such as John Barth, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, and John Updike, who were working in previous decades, still making important contributions after 1970. Postmodernist novelists experiment with narrative form, challenging traditional fiction genres; Richard Brautigan’s The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western （1974）, for example, combines elements of Southern Gothic with tropes of the Western. Other novelists play with the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book （1989）, Oscar Hijuelos’s Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love （1989）, and Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life （1999） draw on the immigrant experience to depict the ways in which individuals lose, maintain, or transform their cultural identities.

The short story has enjoyed a resurgence in this period. Following a slide in status that accompanied the rising popularity of television and a decline in magazines featuring short fiction that had begun in the 1950s, short-story collections began again to appear on best-seller lists.

American poetry in this period is produced by a more diverse group of poets in terms of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality than in earlier times. Poets have protested U.S. military actions and advocated peace during the Vietnam War and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and they have expressed hope and patriotism in poems commissioned for presidential inaugurations—Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning” for Bill Clinton in 1993, Miller Williams’s “Of History and Hope” for Clinton in 1997, and Elizabeth Alexander’s“Praise Song for the Day” for Barack Obama in 2009. Several poets laureate have worked to“promote poetry”—a responsibility of the position—by making it an everyday presence and pleasure in American life.

Drama since 1970 has benefited from the birth of Off Broadway in the 1950s and Off Off Broadway and the expansion of regional theaters in the 1960s. One of the most important dramatists of the contemporary period, Sam Shepard, has premiered his experimental plays in Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway, and regional theaters. Realism has not disappeared from American drama; David Mamet’s American Buffalo （1976） and Glengarry Glen Ross （1982） employ realistic settings and mundane characters whose speech mimics everyday conversation. Since 1970 playwrights such as Reed, Frank Chin, María Irene Fornés, Tony Kushner, Marsha Norman, Ntozake Shange, Anna Deavere Smith, Paula Vogel, Wendy Wasserstein, and Lanford Wilson have expanded American theater to include representations of identities previously excluded on the basis of class, race, gender, and sexual orientation.

Truman Capote’s “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood （1965）, the “New Journalism”pioneered in the 1960s by Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson’s “Gonzo Journalism”—a term he coined in 1970—led to the development of “creative nonfiction”. Combining factual reporting with narrative techniques borrowed from fiction, creative nonfiction featuresmultiple points of view, including first-person, scene-by-scene construction; an emphasis on“color” details to draw out the character of people and places; close observation; and extensive use of dialogue. Writers who employ these techniques in their journalistic works include Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Barbara Ehrenreich, John McPhee, and Gail Sheehy, while Susan Cheever, Adam Gopnik, Andrew X. Pham, and Tobias Wolff use them to shape their memoirs.

1. Malcolm Cowley马尔科姆·考利（1898-1989），美国小说家、诗人和文学评论家。

I. Fill in the blanks according to the text.

1. The first book published in English in the New World of which a copy is known to exist is

The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre （1640）, better known as _____________________.

2. Beginning with _________________, colonists wrote histories.

3. The hundred or so novels written and published in the United States during the early Republican era can be grouped generally into three categories: ___________, __________, and _________.

4. Transcendentalism was intimately connected with ________________, a small New England village 32 kilometers west of Boston.

5. In their time, ______________ （as the patrician, Harvard-educated class came to be called） supplied the most respected and genuinely cultivated literary arbiters of the United States.

6. In the case of the novelists, the Romantic vision tended to express itself in the form Hawthorne called the ________________, a heightened, emotional, and symbolic form of the novel.

7. Women’s sentimental novels, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s _____________ , were enormously popular.

8. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, rebelled against the didacticism and formal conventions of the midcentury ________________.

II. Define the following terms.

1. the Connecticut Wits

2. the Romantic Movement

3. transcendentalism

III. Questions for discussion.

1. How did drama come to the colonies?

2. What about the poetry writing in the early American literature?

3. What are the forms of American Gothic?

4. Why did the development of the self become a major theme for Romantic writers?