安徽三联学院外语学院美国文学课件Chapter 20 Salinger and Updike.ppt

Salinger and Updike Contents I. Postwar RealismП. Representatives:Norman MailerJerome David SalingerJohn Updike 1. Features of Postwar Realism I. Postwar Realism 1) Postwar realism has been a search for vision that can relate an oppressed response to society and history. It has brought a new moral emphasis to fiction, a hunger to overcome despair, nihilism, and brutality through applying moral energy to culture. 2) Postwar realism especially concerns with human existence fighting for its selfhood in an era of modern mass society and power. 3) The prosperous literature produced by ethnic groups of Jews, blacks, immigrants, southerners, and women in the postwar era not only shows a deep disquiet hidden in contemporary American life but also reveals the sense of existential crisis and the awareness of absurdity and nihilism. 1. Norman Mailer (1923-2007) 1) Evaluation One of the most important writers of 20th century America. A multi-faceted talent: a novelist, a philosopher-metaphysician, a poet, a playwright, a filmmaker, a journalist, a politician, and a performer. П. Representatives Mailer is considered an innovator of narrative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, which superimposes the essay onto the nonfiction novel. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from The National Book Foundation. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. 2) Works The Naked and the Dead (1948) one of the best American wartime novels Barbary Shore (1951) The Deer Park (1955) The Armies of the Night (1968) the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, National Book Award, Polk Award The Executioner’s Song (1979) the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. An American Dream (1965) Genius and Lust (1976) 2. Jerome David Salinger (1919~2010) Salinger was born in New York City and educated at Valley Forge Military Academy, and at New York and Columbia universities Holden Caulfield Themes Language The Catcher in the Rye (1951